“Chief Inspector . . . will you be here if I have questions?”
“No. But feel free to call me any time. I’ll be home. I have a lot to explain to my wife about this unexpected assignment. She thought we’d be leaving for Bergen to visit her parents.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“So am I. But isn’t it interesting . . . when my wife saw the news on television about the one year anniversary of Karl Haugen’s disappearance . . . she said she hoped that somehow I’d be able to help the investigation.”
“I’m glad you’re here Chief Inspector. It was about time. You see . . . some of us do take the case very seriously . . . we feel bad for the boy. We’re worried about him.”
“Everyone should think like that. I certainly do.”
Sohlberg left the building. His mind worked better in the fresh air and under sunny skies. A thought hit him. He immediately called Ivar Thorsen on his cell phone and said:
“Do not tell the press that I’m working on the Haugen case. Make sure that no one leaks anything to the media about me working on the case!”
“Alright. Alright. Calm down Sohlberg.”
“I’m serious about this. The person or persons who took the boy must not be warned that we’re reactivating the investigation. We must have the element of surprise. Understand?”
“Well—”
“No! The most you can tell anyone on the outside is that you have assigned the case for review. Understand? You say anything more to your buddies in the press and I will tell everyone that you sabotaged the investigation from the start.”
“Alright!”
“Also . . . I’m not going to wear a uniform at all . . . nor will Constable Wangelin. And we’re not coming to work at the office from eight to four like everyone else. Is that understood?”
“Ja.”
“Also . . . I need an unmarked car that doesn’t yell police to everyone who looks at the car. Matter of fact I prefer that you rent us two inconspicious subcompacts. Ja?”
“Here we go again with your demands and conditions.”
“Ja . . . just like the good old days that you seem to remember so fondly.”
Feeling calmer Sohlberg decided to walk all the way to the Oslo Central Station to take advantage of the pleasant sunny weather. He had more than enough time to get to his tram. The walk also gave him time to think about how he would break the news to Fru Sohlberg.
Would she be pleased or angry?
Just how disruptive and difficult would this new assignment become?
~ ~ ~
Fru Sohlberg was already waiting for him in his parent’s Volvo at the Kastellet station of the Oslotrikken tram line Number 18. His parents had begged them to use their car to prevent the battery from dying.
“How did the conference go?”
He explained and included all the details.
“Unbelievable!” she exclaimed. “What a turn of events.”
“Are you angry? . . . I doubt if I’ll be able to go with you to Bergen to see your parents.”
“That’s alright. Maybe they’ll come and stay with us for a week.”
“That’s a great idea . . . it would be very good. We have more than enough room.”
“I’ll call them tonight and see if and when they can come.”
“So you’re not angry or disappointed?”
“No at all. Why should I be? I knew this would be our life with you in the police.”
“Thank you Emma.”
“No need to thank me.”
“But I do.”
“Actually . . . I’m glad you took the assignment. I’ve thought a lot about that little boy.”
“It doesn’t look good . . . he’s been missing for more than a year and there’s no sign of him. I have to warn you so you don’t get your hopes crushed . . . he’s probably dead.”
Fru Sohlberg shook her head. Her eyes welled up. “How sad . . . if that turns out to be the case then at least he’s in a far better place . . . that little eternal soul of his.”
Sohlberg’s throat hardened.
Did Ivar Thorsen know that they had lost their two-year-old son to leukemia shortly after moving to Lyon France?
Was that another reason for putting him on the Karl Haugen case?
Did Ivar Thorsen or the higher-ups know that a child abduction was likely to bring back painful memories of the death of their own son?
Harald Junior’s death almost destroyed Sohlberg and his wife. He could not help wondering whether Thorsen had dragged him into the case as the result of a diabolical plan to cause him and his wife severe if not permanent emotional distress.
Was the Karl Haugen assignment another form of payback for Sohlberg exposing corruption by the Supreme Court justices?
Chapter 6/Seks
1 YEAR AND 23 DAYS AFTER
THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4
Sohlberg reaches into the shelf and takes out Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — the doomed lovers.
“Huh!”
He’s amazed that his parents still have all of the compact discs that he bought them over the decades for their birthdays and for Christmas and for Mother’s Day and for Father’s Day. He opens the case and studies the libretto for the divine and unsurpassed 1953 classic EMI recording with Kirsten Flagstad (Soprano) and Blanche Thebom (Mezzo Soprano) and Ludwig Suthaus (Tenor) and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Baritone) and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra directed by Wilhelm Furtwängler.
The prelude overwhelms Sohlberg with its intensity.
He takes Wagner’s masterpiece off the CD player and decides to hear the opera at another time. Wagner’s music hits too close to home. The music literally brings to his heart and mind and soul the overpowering nature of love and death and how those two mixed together can easily lead to insanity itself.
The sickening shisssh of the rope going through the carabiner on Karoline’s harness. Her eyes wide and filled with love and acceptance of her fate.
The last soft breath of Harald Junior before the leukemia killed him. His dreamy eyes slowly dimming away until the light is extinguished and gone.
The grief. The insanity.
A month after Karoline’s death Sohlberg takes a trip to a country house at Åsgårdstrand. A partner at Sohlberg’s law firm offers him indefinite use of the house for Sohlberg to have all the time and space to decompress. Sohlberg has always wanted to visit the popular summer vacation spot and pretty fishing village in Vestfold County about 65 miles south of Oslo. He spends days just watching the sailboats and the fishing boats from the lovely southwest side of the mouth of the Oslofjord. At night he watches panoramic lightning from immense thunderstorms that roll in from the North Sea over the Strait of Skagerrak.
His grief worsens. A guilty conscience consumes him for not having asked Karoline to check her ropes and knots. On the third night he takes his uncle’s double-barrel shotgun out of the car and loads the shells. His plan: walk down to the dock with the loaded shotgun when no one is around and end his pain and reunite with Karoline.
Unfortunately a knock on the door at midnight. Then more loud pounding.
“Hello,” yells Matthias Otterstad. “Wake up Sohlberg . . . I know you’re in there. I’m here to keep you company. Open up will you! I brought a ton of food with me.”
Sohlberg’s plans remain inactive until his son dies. A guilty conscience again. This time for not having spent enough time with his son or for that matter with his wife. Again a loaded gun and plans interrupted by an unexpected visitor — Chief Homicide Detective Alec Mikesell of the combined Salt Lake City Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff Task Force in Utah.
Fru Sohlberg calls her husband out of his painful reverie: “Sohlberg where are you?”
Sohlberg takes the stairs up to his wife and says, “Just checking out stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Oh . . . just looking at some of the operas that I bought my parents many years ago.”
“Anything interestin
g?”
“Actually yes. Wagner. Tristan and Isolde.”
“Why that one?”
“I don’t know . . . I picked it at random but it seems appropriate.”
“How so?”
“How love sometimes leads to insanity.”
“Are you thinking of the missing boy . . . Karl Haugen?”
“Ja. Of course . . . what else?”
“You need to rest for this investigation. Please come to sleep.”
“I can’t with this midnight sun. I have a lot to think about.”
~ ~ ~
Nothing. Absolutely nothing surprises him any more. After eight years she has exhausted any surprise left in him. He certainly won’t be surprised if she doesn’t break down in a torture session and tell him what he wants and needs to hear. The only surprise will be how she reacts to the torture and how she reacts when she realizes that he will exterminate her.
Will she scream?
Will she cry?
Will she beg for mercy?
If she begs for mercy he will remind her that she gave him none. Therefore all that she can expect is justice. Ja that’s all she can expect. And that’s all she deserves.
“What a waste,” he says softly to himself as he mows the lawn with a manual or push reel mower which she forced him to use because she’s very worried about climate change and carbon emissions.
The grass clippings fly off the sharp blades just like the many illusions that he had about her and their love and their marriage. Together eight years and married half that time. And the mystery of her true nature only keeps getting stronger. She is unfathomable. She is unknowable.
He almost laughs when he thinks of how much he will enjoy shoving her lifeless body into a special barrel that he brought from his workplace a few months ago. The barrel is specially designed to hold acids and it is marked ‘CORROSIVE” and he shivers with ecstasy at the thought of how greatly he will enjoy pouring acid on her lifeless body and how after 6 hours in an acid bath she will become nothing but a pink fluid to be taken to a chemical recycling plant. He giggles when he thinks of her tombstone — a barrel marked CORROSIVE.
He starts laughing and laughing when he realizes that finally something in her miserable and toxic life of lies is true: CORROSIVE.
Ja that’s her!
His shoulders shake as he laughs and laughs and thinks of her winding up as a acidic gob of pink nothingness. Ja. She will be truly unfathomable and unknowable at the chemical waste management plant that will receive the barrel with her remains.
The barrel. He’s glad to have snuck one out of his employer’s factory during a long holiday weekend when no one was looking or paying close attention. He’s already begun stealing two bottles of acid at the time from the factory’s nearby warehouse. No one notices since they literally use thousands of gallons of acid every week. When a man plans the end and when a man works on the end phase of a project then everything else falls into place all the way back to the beginning of the project.
Is her acid grave a case of the end justifying the means?
He laughs at his hilarious observation.
An hour later he is raking the dead grass clippings off the lawn and she is watching him from their deck in the backyard. She is tanning topless. He waves at her and blows her a kiss. She barely smiles as if she’s a stunning celebrity bored by her beauty and the fawning idiots who worship her.
How did she first trick me?
What was her hook and bait?
What lies did she use to catch me?
His mind searches the earliest memories that he has of her. He goes over these memories and he’s sickened by the realization that he’s been played like a violin by a virtuoso.
He decides that when he tortures her he will cut off one of her fingers for every big lie she ever told him. That means he’ll have to start lopping off her toes soon after finishing the ten amputations on her hands.
He realizes that with all of her many many lies he’ll quickly run out of fingers and toes to chop and slice off.
Should I instead cut each finger and toe one little piece at a time at the different joints?
That would certainly increase his quality time with her.
~ ~ ~
The first big lie. For that whopper he has to cut off her right thumb.
“You’re adopted? So am I.”
Was that also her first hook into him?
“I was born in the Østlandet the East Country. My mother came from a wealthy family. She was forced by her family to give me up for adoption.”
Her coming from a wealthy family background lowered his natural resistance to sleeping with someone who was vulgar and tacky and worked as an assistant manager at the McDonald’s where he went once a week for a milkshake. Everyone at his company especially the senior managers and their wives would have been embarrassed to see him with a woman who wore garish makeup that startled and gaudy-colored polyester clothes that revealed too much. She chewed bubble gum loudly and all day long even while eating a meal or making love or sitting on the toilet.
Her mother later corrected her daughter’s misinformation:
“Born to a wealthy family? No. The social worker told us her mother turned tricks just to get a bottle of vodka. Sometimes just for a smoke and a beer. Wealthy family? Nonsense. She’s making things up . . . as always. Oh well. I should’ve put a stop to that when I caught her telling her teachers and friends that she was one of the King’s illegitimate children.”
“Why didn’t you stop her from lying?”
“I just didn’t want to affect her self-esteem. You know what psychologists say about parents ruining a child’s self-esteem. . . .”
He said nothing although he wanted to say, “What do these dumb psychologists say about you pathologically spoiling a child and letting them get away with bald-faced lies?”
The two university professors had gone overboard in spoiling her as their only child. She always got whatever she wanted from them as a child and it was just as bad after she turned 20.
There was one thing that she had not lied to him about and that was when she told him:
“My parents are idiots. They’ll do anything and everything for me. I snap my fingers and they ask me how high they need to jump.”
Her parents always believed whatever she told them at face value even when they should have suspected some of her behavior as an adult. For example: after she got a drunk driving conviction they believed her lie that she had not been drunk but rather driving impaired because she was sleepy and exhausted from taking care of him and his and her children at home.
“Our poor daughter. She works so hard. That judge was so mean. He simply wouldn’t listen!”
Of course she never told her parents that she had also received a suspended conviction for child endangerment because her son had been in the car with her when she drove plastered with double the legal blood alcohol limit. But to her credit she did milk the drunk driving crash for all it was worth. She stopped doing chores at home and never cared for her son because she had “migraines” and “back pain” from the “accident.”
~ ~ ~
The second big lie. For that lie her right index finger comes flying off the chopping block.
“Did you know I came from old money on my mother’s side?”
“No,” he said without realizing that she used this lie to make her vulgarity and failed career as a teacher more palatable. He would never have brought a McDonald’s worker into his home as a sex partner let alone a live-in companion. The lie about old money tricked him.
“My poor mother . . . she was forced to give me up because her family and my father’s family opposed their union. His family is blue blood if you know what I mean and they couldn’t tolerate her being a commoner even if her family had money.”
He wondered if her endless lying perhaps came from an adopted child never getting over feelings of abandonment. He never had. Nor his brother. Sure they were grateful for the love a
nd care of their adoptive parents. But deep down he always wondered why his mother had tossed him and his brother aside to another set of parents.
Death on Pilot Hill (An Inspector Harald Sohlberg Mystery) Page 7