“Is Ingrid dead?” she asked.
“Yes, she is.”
“How—”
“Murdered. In Rome last Monday. Didn’t you know that? It’s been in the newspapers and on the Internet.”
She shook her head, and he could see the tears running down her cheeks.
“I almost never read Norwegian newspapers. And I haven’t had time to be on the Internet lately.”
By the window he heard Sørensen take a breath as if he was about to say something, but Milo waved him away.
“I was afraid that something had happened. But she told me not to call her. She was going to call me when she got back. How … was she killed?”
“She was strangled.”
The girl leaned over the table, put her head on her arms and her entire slender body was shaking. Milo set some paper napkins beside her.
“We’re investigating the killing. And as you understand, we got on your trail by way of Ingrid’s cell phone. We know she called you last Monday. You are probably one of the last people she talked with before she was killed,” Milo explained.
The girl was still crying.
“So you must realize that we have a lot of questions, and we think you have a lot of answers. Will you help us find out who killed Ingrid?”
The girl sat up again, dried her tears and blew her nose on the napkins.
“Can I get a little water?”
Milo went out and came back with a glass, which she emptied in one gulp.
“Thanks,” she said.
Then she told her story.
* * *
Her name was Oriana; she was from Chechnya and was studying chemistry at the university in Oslo. She lived in a small rented room in Kolbotn, near Ingieråsen School, and had met Ingrid on the same gravel track where her little brother had been killed. She had seen Ingrid there several times after the killing, and when she realized she was the sister of one of the victims, she told Ingrid what she had experienced on the evening of the shooting.
She had fallen asleep on the couch that evening, but was wakened by the sound of a car engine revving up. When she went over to the window, she saw several persons on the gravel track. She thought no more about it, assumed it was some boys who lived in the area, and sat down with her books again.
But then she heard the shots.
“You didn’t see anyone shooting? Just heard? How did you know they were shots and not a car backfiring or some other sharp sound?” Sørensen interrupted.
“Because I know what a shot sounds like. It’s not the first time,” she answered.
Quiet, but convincing.
The sound of the shots made her leave her room, and when she went over to the track, she found Asgeir Henriksen, the dead teacher, and Tormod Tollefsen. The boy was barely moving, and she had leaned over him.
Milo recalled the witnesses who said that one of the killers had stayed behind and leaned down to assure himself that the two were dead. Most likely it was Oriana they had seen.
“He died in my arms,” she said.
“I don’t remember you from when we worked on the case. Were you questioned?” asked Sørensen.
She ignored him and continued telling what she had also told Ingrid Tollefsen. Right before Tormod died he looked at her and whispered, “The Unitor building.”
“The Unitor building?”
Milo made a note.
“Yes, the Unitor building,” she repeated.
He had also been holding something in his hand. An ampoule labeled Crescitan, which he’d slipped into Oriana’s hand.
“He talked to you and gave you an ampoule?”
Sørensen slammed his palms on the table so that her water glass turned over and she jumped back in her chair.
“None of the witnesses said this when we investigated the case! Why the hell didn’t you make a report?” he shouted at her.
“Because … you arrested them!”
“What happened then? Did you leave? Did you take the ampoule with you?” Milo asked.
He caught her gaze, tried to calm down the situation.
“I ran inside to call the police, but when I came into the room I heard sirens. Someone else had already done it.”
For that reason she stayed away.
“Did you take the ampoule?” Sørensen was plainly irritated. “This is obstructing the work of the police,” he continued while he rubbed his bald head.
“I was going to turn it in, I thought, but … but then I met Ingrid.”
“And so you gave it to her?” Milo suggested.
Oriana nodded, biting her lip.
“She said she would take care of it.”
“But you still should have gone to the police,” Milo said calmly.
They looked at each other. She did not say anything, but he understood. And she realized that he understood.
“But why didn’t you come to us?” asked Sørensen.
Not angry this time. More resigned.
But it was Milo who answered.
“Because she doesn’t have a residence permit.”
“Oh, shit!” the chief inspector replied.
“And your parents? Where are they?” asked Milo.
“My father’s in Chechnya. My mother is dead. They were deported. Mama died six months later. She was sick … and she didn’t get any treatment. I don’t know exactly where Papa is now. I heard from others that he’d been arrested again.”
“That sounds awful. But what made you stay behind?” Milo asked as gently as he could.
“I was allowed to finish high school. I had only a few months left, and they would send me home when I turned eighteen.”
She didn’t say anything else.
“But now you’re done with high school and studying at the university. What happened?” asked Milo.
“I went underground,” she said quietly.
Right after her last exam at high school she went into hiding with a family, and then moved on to new hiding places. Until she finally got help with false papers and found the rented room in Kolbotn.
“Who got you those papers?” asked Milo.
She shrugged her skinny shoulders, but Milo held her gaze.
“I don’t really know. I wasn’t the one who arranged it,” she answered at last.
“Okay. We can take that detail later. But what else happened? After you became acquainted with Ingrid?”
“She helped me. She took care of me,” said Oriana.
“In what way?” asked Milo.
“She helped me with money for the rent when I didn’t get paid what I should for cleaning jobs. Got me textbooks. Pressured my lawyer not to give up the process with the residence permit. Gave me her old phone, and paid for minutes and gave me access to her user account to download apps and music on it. She helped me with everything. Big and small.”
“Why did she help you, do you think?” Milo wanted to know.
Oriana drew patterns with her index finger on the tabletop.
“She had a very bad conscience, I think. She was not doing well. She and her brother had a close relationship, but the past few years she had been studying and working. I don’t know, but maybe helping me was a way to try to make up for that. As a kind of penance. She even took leave from her job for a while.”
Milo thought about what the research director at Forum Healthcare had told them about the unpaid two-month leave. So she had helped a young asylum seeker, who was the last person to see her brother alive. But what else had she used that time for?
“I wish you had made a report when we were investigating the case,” Sørensen said.
Oriana looked at him dejectedly.
“Don’t you understand? I have no rights here in Norway. You would have used me and thrown me in the trash when you were finished. I can’t risk—”
She bit off her own sentence.
“What is it you can’t risk?” asked Milo.
No reply.
“Is there someone you fear if you had come for
ward as a witness?” he continued.
“My life is constantly made up of choices. Just like yours. But where your choices don’t have major consequences one way or another, I’m almost always at a crossroads. Perhaps I made the wrong choice that time, but…”
Once again these incomplete sentences. Milo was convinced that she was not telling all she knew, but he did not want to pressure her.
“You’re studying chemistry, you say?”
“Mmm.”
“This ampoule. Crescitan. What is it?”
“You can just look it up.”
“I know that, but I’m guessing you already have.”
“It’s an anabolic steroid. A derivative of testosterone,” she answered.
Sørensen’s eyes opened wide.
“So that’s what he got himself involved in. At the gym where he started hanging out. Poor kid,” he said.
“Tormod Tollefsen got mixed up with bad company, and started using steroids. And for one reason or other he was shot. But why?” Milo asked, turning toward Sørensen, who was sitting behind the desk turning on his computer.
“I don’t know. Money? Talked back? No idea.”
Milo turned toward Oriana, who was staring silently down at the tabletop.
“How did Ingrid Tollefsen react to the fact that her brother was using steroids?”
“She took the whole thing very hard. As I said, I think she blamed herself that she hadn’t been there more for him,” Oriana answered.
Her finger drew a figure-eight pattern on the table while she sniffled.
“What did you talk about when she called on Monday?”
“She said she was in Rome. That she would be there a few more days, and then she wondered how things were going for me. She said she wanted to see me soon.”
“She wanted to see you? Did she say why? Was there anything special she wanted to talk with you about?”
“No.”
Oriana hesitated a little with the answer.
“But did you get the impression that she wanted to see you soon? Or was it more the case that it had been a long time since you’d seen each other and that it was time to get together?”
“She didn’t say anything in particular. Just that we must meet.”
“Must? She used that word? ‘We must meet.’”
Oriana nodded barely visibly, and Milo thought about Ada Hauge, who’d said that Ingrid had something she wanted to talk about with her. So Ingrid Tollefsen had been sitting in Rome, and thought that when she came back she had to meet both Ada and Oriana.
“Do you know anything else about what she was doing in Rome?”
“No, but I think it had something to do with work. A seminar, or something like that.”
“Did she say anything about who she was with?”
“No. But she seemed a little … I don’t know the right word … fired up, maybe.”
“Fired up?”
“Yes, it seemed like she was in a good mood. Said something about it being exciting.”
The word remained hanging in the air. Exciting could mean any number of things. An interesting conference with capable, inspiring people. Or else it wasn’t about the conference at all. But a meeting with a person. Who had been more exciting than she could have foreseen.
Milo stood up and gathered his notebook and pen.
“Come, I’ll drive you home.”
Sørensen looked up from the keyboard.
“And don’t you run off! Stay in the vicinity and answer if we call!” he ordered her.
She nodded seriously and put on her sweatshirt.
While she was doing that and pulling the hood protectively over her head, Milo took out his phone and googled Crescitan.
The answer came quickly, and he got a feeling of having taken a small step in the right direction.
He held out the cell phone for Sørensen.
“Look who manufactures Crescitan,” he said.
Sørensen squinted at the screen.
“Forum Healthcare,” he read.
19
Milo drove Oriana home, letting her sit in silence during the drive. Between shifting gears his thoughts wandered. It was obvious that he had to follow the steroid track. He had to talk with Forum again and find out more about Crescitan and why the hell they produced steroids.
And then we have to visit the gym where Tormod Tollefsen hung out, thought Milo.
He was willing to bet that Ingrid Tollefsen had started playing detective on her own. The fact that she had not gone to the police with the information about the ampoule of steroids supported that theory.
He stopped the car outside the house where Oriana rented a room.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded silently, but he saw the tears just below the surface, ready to pour out as soon as he had left.
“Do you have anyone to talk to?”
A curt shake of the head in response.
“You have my number on your phone. Put it in the contact list and call me if there’s anything.”
“Pretty soon I won’t have any minutes left on the calling card,” she answered.
“Do you have a job?”
“That’s not so easy when you’re here without a permit. I have cleaning jobs, but they don’t pay very well. And sometimes nothing. They still owe me for two months.”
“What about your rent? Is that paid?”
“I’ll think of something.”
He looked at her and decided.
“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
She looked inquisitively at him.
He drove down to the shopping center and got there right before it closed. Ten minutes later he was knocking on the door to the rented room. She let him into a small entry porch. Inside he glimpsed a simply furnished room and a small sleeping alcove. On the made bed were two teddy bears, a big dark brown one and a smaller light brown one.
She’s just a child, it struck him.
“Here. Take this,” he said, handing her four receipts.
“What’s this?”
“Refill cards for your cell phone. You just enter the code that’s on the receipt.”
“I know how to do that, but—”
“And then take this,” he interrupted her, giving her a bundle of bills.
She looked at him, and then at the bills. Slowly she counted the ten thousand kroner.
“But I can’t take this,” she said.
But Milo had already turned his back and was on his way out the door. This was not something he would tell Sørensen, who would certainly react to him giving money to a person who had withheld information. And who perhaps was still holding something back. But, in any event, that was a chance Milo himself was willing to take.
“I don’t want to hear that,” he said.
Outside he turned around.
“We’ll call you later.”
He saw her struggling to hold the tears back, and heard a quiet “thanks” before he went toward the car.
* * *
It was almost nine thirty, and it was too late to think about exercise. But he had to eat something. If he was lucky he had some mozzarella and tomatoes at home, so that he could fix himself a caprese.
He was driving in the direction of E18 Mosseveien when he happened to think of what Oriana had said about Tormod Tollefsen’s last words.
“The Unitor building.”
He stayed at sixty kilometers an hour while he googled Unitor on his phone. He found a Web site connected to a large shipping company, with an address in Lysaker. On the other side of the Oslo Fjord. Unitor appeared to have been a company that manufactured ship parts, but had changed owners and moved long ago.
He passed the Mastemyr area and got a sudden impulse. Quickly he googled “Unitor + Mastemyr.” The first result that came up was an article in Østlandets Blad. It was several years old, but nevertheless was just what he needed. The headline was BREAK-IN IN UNITOR BUILDING, and the case described problem
s in “the large storage building at Mastemyr by Kolbotn.”
He was already on the expressway toward central Oslo, and accelerated to the exit to Holmlia. Over the bridge, and out on Mosseveien again, back toward Kolbotn and Mastemyr.
He had to check that building.
Four minutes later he turned toward Mastemyr and slowed down to thirty kilometers an hour. He came to a crossroads. The road to the left appeared to lead toward a residential area, while the road to the right led toward a hotel. He continued straight ahead, and after a few hundred meters he saw the building. He recognized it from the picture in the newspaper article.
He glanced to the side. The building was big and brown, and looked like it was designed by an architect who had studied in the former East Berlin. Brown metal plates, dark windows, gray concrete.
He let the car roll along the edge of the road and turned right to follow the building’s façade. A large row of signs with company names showed that the once stately headquarters for a company listed on the stock exchange now housed a motley collection of small companies. It was impossible to tell from the company names what they actually did, except for two: The Gym spoke for itself, and Milo could glimpse the illuminated entry and rows of machines. The sign for Quick Storage was also self-explanatory. He continued past the entry to the gym, and came to a freight door with entry to Quick Storage.
It was closed, and Milo could see the panel where you entered a code to get in.
He passed and stopped by the side of the road a little farther ahead while he kept an eye on the door in the side mirror. After a few minutes a car with a trailer stopped outside. A man who looked to be in his sixties got out, entered the code and got back in the car again. Milo could glimpse a young woman in the passenger seat. As soon as they disappeared through the entry, Milo left the car and walked quickly after them before it closed.
Inside the door he came into a large indoor parking area. In the past there would have been freight trucks loading ship parts. Now a few cars were parked there, and by the wall a row of blue-and-red four-wheel trailers.
The older man with the trailer turned the car while the young woman directed him. It appeared to be father and daughter. A little farther away was a dark blue Audi A4 sedan, with tinted windows and the frame lowered a little.
Pathetic, thought Milo.
What had formerly been one big storage hall now consisted of hundreds of small storage spaces divided on two levels. Small cubes arranged in different sizes and available to rent so that people could store the things they didn’t really need, yet couldn’t bear to part with.
The Oslo Conspiracy Page 12