Death on Pilot Hill (An Inspector Harald Sohlberg Mystery)

by Jens Amundsen

  Constant feelings of abandonment always left him torn between having to commit to a permanent relationship with a woman versus the convenience of a temporary disposable relationship. Somehow he always wound up with the convenient and disposable relationships because that was after all the relationship that his precious birth mother had inflicted on him and his brother. He also noticed that he always became enraged whenever he thought about his birth mother and her decision which had enormous consequences including the molestation.

  Do unto others as you have had done unto you the abandoned.

  Does she think the same thoughts I have?

  In hindsight he realized that she did indeed feel abandoned. She later admitted that much one day when a few drinks loosened her tongue. And yet she would never admit that she had an unsatiable need to be accepted by someone who would love her and want her and only her. Nor would she admit that she was angry or bitter over the abandonment. Unlike him she never said anything about her anger and bitterness over being abandoned. Not even when he plied her with alcohol to get her talking. She always fell into a silent dark brooding that at first charmed him and later scared him.

  When he tortured her would she feel abandoned?

  When he snuffed the life out of her would she feel abandoned?

  He couldn’t wait to see her reaction to her torture and her own death. Finally she’d get a taste of her own medicine.

  ~ ~ ~

  The third big lie. For that lie he slowly saws off her middle finger.

  “I love teaching elementary school. I’ve always wanted to be an elementary school teacher since I was nine years old.”

  Was that her third hook into him?

  Did she know that this statement would win him over as a single father?

  Of course she did. An elementary school teacher is the ultimate example of a kind and nurturing role model who exercises a positive influence over children especially those living in a single parent household. He’s angry and disgusted by how easily he fell for that lie.

  After they got married her mother dropped another bombshell on him when she said:

  “Did my daughter really tell you that she wanted to be an elementary school teacher since she was nine years old? Oh no. Absolutely not. She always wanted to be a beauty queen . . . and an actress when she got older . . . oh yes she definitely wanted to be a movie star when she got older. But she really didn’t have the looks did she?”

  He almost told the mother: “But she does have a talent for acting!”

  Her talent for acting never failed to impress him. The problem was that almost no one ever saw it was acting until long after the performance was delivered and the desired outcome was accomplished and her gullible audience left ready for more after having swallowed her lies hook line and sinker.

  He once met her former mother-in-law (per husband Number Two) who said:

  “She always put on a big production. Everything she did was only to impress people. I mean . . . goodness me . . . well her productions were extravagant. She was after my son and trying to get him to marry her and so she used to bring me and my husband all these flowers and candy and gifts and poems and cards and that all stopped after she got married to my son. She had what she wanted and didn’t need us no more.

  “Then she started again with the gifts and cards and phony friendship when she tried to get us to loan her money. She used to make these pretty cards with top ten lists of why we were good parents or friends or whatever and it was incredible how totally accurate she was about us. That was surprising. She knew us very well . . . a lot more than we ever knew her."

  “Did she get the loan from you?”

  “No and you can imagine what happened when she did not get the loan . . . no more gifts or telephone calls or cards or visits for us.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The fourth big lie. Her finger comes off after he beats it to a pulp with a hammer.

  “I was good at swimming. My parents were swimming champions in high school and the university. I even got to national finals in my senior year of high school. I love swimming and competing in sports.”

  She told him the lie about her loving swimming after he made the mistake of showing her his high school swimming trophies and medals. That’s when she instantly became little Miss Frøken Swimming Champion who loved swimming and competing.

  At a high school reunion the swim coach quickly corrected the false information:

  “Loved swimming? No. She hated swimming. Her father forced her to do it. She lost her first competition on purpose. She never made it to national finals. That’s a big fat lie! She wouldn’t even jump into the water at the starting line of her first competition. After that she dropped out of the team and never swam or competed again. I never understood how even after she did that her parents kept showering her with money and clothes. They even bought her a brand new Volvo while she was in high school. Can you believe that?”

  ~ ~ ~

  The fifth big lie. For that he makes her eat her own right pinkie finger which he severs with a cleaver.

  “I’m kind of a shy bookworm . . . a homebody really.”

  Was that another hook into him the introvert who preferred reading for hours in silence at home?

  He was soon dissuaded of this wrong impression at a booze-fueled party by one of her friends who was a teacher at the school where the monster briefly taught part-time:

  “Book worm? Other than being forced to read books at school for homework I don’t think she’s even read one comic book or magazine in her life. No books. Just partying and spending money. She’s a party girl alright. Did you know that she always dated two or more boys at the same time in high school and college?”

  “No.”

  “Oh yeah. Done the same thing when she was married those three times. I guess I’ve told you too much. But you guys ain’t married . . . are you?”

  “No. But we’ve talked about it.”

  “Keep it at the talk level honey.”

  “Why?”

  “She once told me she couldn’t wait to get married so she could start dating again.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “It sure wasn’t funny for her first or second or third husband. See . . . she married Husband Number One because he was a rich Daddy’s Boy who partied hard and could get her away from her parent’s control without her having to leave home and get a job. The problem was that his parents absolutely hated her. They had to pay her off when her husband decided to get a divorce after his parents showed him that she had lied about having to get married to him because she was pregnant when it of course turned out that she wasn’t knocked up.

  “Then before she’s divorced from Husband Number One she jumps into bed with future Husband Number Two who’s as smart as a drunk donkey. She gets him started in business with her parents’ money in a business that eventually failed. She soon gets pregnant and after she has their baby Thor she goes nuts and starts dating other high school flames and generally sleeping with anything in pants. I remember one week when she bragged about sleeping with nine men during a long weekend in addition to her future Husband Number Two.”

  “She told me she was divorced when she met her second husband.”

  “No. No. She was still married to the Rich Daddy’s Boy. Later on she was dating several men while that dumb donkey of Husband Number Two was out busy busting his tail trying to make her parents’ business work.”

  “And the baby?”

  “She couldn’t stand the baby after a couple of weeks. Couldn’t stand being tied down to a kid. The Mommy thing got boring for her real fast. She dumped the baby with her parents since she wasn’t working. When they got tired she dumped the kid on her husband’s parents.”

  He now realizes he was blind blind blind to her pattern of getting bored and frustrated with a child. He’s angry and disgusted at how he never caught on to how she always abandoned anything and anyone after she got bored and frustrated with anything or anyone she could no
t perfectly control. Like her first swimming competition. Like her teaching career. Like her bodybuilding. Like her husbands. Like her son.

  ~ ~ ~

  The sixth big lie. That means he burns off her left thumb with a blowtorch.

  “I’ve always worked. No welfare for me. I always worked to put food on the table for me and my son. When I couldn’t get permanent full-time employment at any of the schools I swallowed my pride and went to work in restaurants.”

  Was that another hook into him who always feared getting stuck with a parasitic woman who’d latch unto him just for his incredible income?

  Of course it was. One summer she had a bad cold and asked him to take her son Thor to spend the weekend visiting Husband Number Three the boy’s adoptive father. By that time he was wising up to her. He decided to have a talk with the boy’s father because one of his friends a manager at Genentech gave him what turned out to be priceless advice:

  “The best way to get a handle on your wife is to talk to and be friendly with your wife’s ex-husband or ex-husbands.”

  At the drop-off point he invited the boy’s father for lunch while the boy played at a park next to the restaurant. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out even before the waitress served them the traditional open-faced sandwiches.

  Thor’s father looked straight at him as if reading his mind and said, “Ah. The joys of fatherhood.”

  “Ja. That is true.”

  “Problem is that sometimes the joy gets forced on you.”

  “That’s true too.”

  “Look at me. Three years after we got married I finally fell for the daddy trap that she had carefully prepared and laid out for me months if not years before. I should’ve seen it coming from the first year of our marriage when she released her second husband from financial maintenance for their son.

  “My mother warned me over and over to be careful. She told me over and over that it was a trap . . . a set-up.

  “I stupidly thought she had released her second husband from his financial obligations because the man was a deadbeat who spent most of his time unemployed and drinking after she left him. I should have seen it coming when she got the ex-husband to release all of his parental rights to the boy in exchange for being released from the child support.”

  “What could you do?”

  “Leave her. Kick her lazy lying cheating butt out of the house. Instead I stayed and she worked up a big production for me every day about the boy growing up all alone in the world without a father. Then at night she would love my brains out. She knows how to work a man. I stupidly caved in and adopted the boy. The loving stopped of course.

  “I adopted the boy despite the fact that my parents warned me a million times not to do it. They begged me. They showed me how much of my income would disappear into child support if she was to ever divorce me down the road.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That she’d never divorce me. Ja . . . I knew that she loved me working and bringing her money while she did nothing at home other than sleeping with other men and partying with her girlfriends. Two months after I adopt the boy she divorces me and tells the court that I’m ‘controlling and abusive’. Ain’t that something?”

  “The pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Ja. Ain’t that something? She dumps the kid on me during the divorce . . . I think that’s when she started dating you. Then after she moves in with you she takes the kid back . . . which means that I had to start paying her child support again.”

  “I’m sorry. This is all so much to think about. I didn’t know about this situation with her. We should talk more from now on.”

  “Ja ja. By the way . . . it kills me that she always brings him back here to me with no change of clothes. I now have to buy him clothes for the weekend. Just what the heck do you guys do with all the money that I have to pay every month now that she has custody and I only have visitation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the big fat check I send your wife every month for my son’s support!”

  “That’s her department. I don’t see any of it,” he said. “How much do you pay her?”

  When he heard the enormous sum his rage almost exploded that day at the restaurant and the drive back home. But to his credit he did not say anything at all to her about how he had discovered that she was hiding and secretly pocketing all that child support money while she made him buy all of the boy’s clothes and toys and food and you name it.

  “So,” said the ex-husband, “do you see why I’m angry that she sent the boy here today with no extra clothes for the weekend? Not even pyjamas . . . now I have to buy him more clothes.”

  “Ja. I see your point.”

  “Do you? You know . . . I once went to see her . . . and begged her to please lower the child support payments because I had to help my widowed sister in New York City who had cancer. My sick sister had five children to care for . . . and I desperately needed to send her and the five children money.

  “What does your wife do?

  “She smiles and says yes . . .that she’ll gladly go to her lawyer and ask him to lower the monthly payment . . . then . . . an hour later the police are at my office asking about me ‘harassing and threatening’ her.”

  “Not good.”

  “There’s more. Much more. A year after we got married she went back to school to get her undergraduate degree. She had me pay her tuition. I never got to go to the university and get my degree because I paid for her schooling. She always told me she’d pay me back once she got to teach but the crazy broad could never get full-time work at teaching because all of the teachers and principals and staff soon got to hate the Bossy Queen Bee.”

  “She told me that getting a full-time teaching job at an elementary school is not easy . . . but rather difficult.”

  “Oh really? I don’t think it’s that difficult since I later found out that she finally got a full-time job offer to teach.”

  “She never told me.”

  “Why should she? That’s when you proposed to her. She turned down the job offer as soon as you slipped that big fat engagement ring on her finger. The meal-ticket of her newest Prince Charming had arrived to rescue her from working at McDonald’s and at a school . . . and so . . . she traded me the old beat-up model for the higher income model you offered and now provide her.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The seventh big lie. For that he slowly electrocutes and burns off her left thumb with a live electric wire wrapped like a ring around the base of her thumb.

  “I’m not big into material things. I don’t like showing-off. Hate it. My family is my life. That’s all I care about.”

  Was that another well-placed hook into him who was so careful with his hard-earned money?

  She said she wasn’t big into material things and yet she made it abundantly clear that she wanted a big fat diamond from him for the engagement ring and the wedding ring. He remembers how she spent a small fortune on clothes at H & M shortly after claiming that she had ‘lost’ the engagement ring.

  She doesn’t like showing-off but she forced him into an expensive wedding on a private island in Greece. She then pushed him into buying her the red Audi TT sports car as a wedding gift with the car title in her name only.

  She says she hates showing off and loves family above everything else and yet she abandoned him and everyone else so she could spend 8 to 10 hours a day every day of the week at the gym training for bodybuilding championships. During that time he had to cook and care for her son from another marriage and for his son from a previous marriage because she simply refused to do any other work other than working on the sculpting of her body.

  Is that when her anger started getting out of control?

  Did she take steroids? After all they are well-known for causing uncontrollable rage as a side-effect.

  Probably. For sure she took those fat-burning pills that acted like amphetamines and left her paranoid and wide awake nigh
t after night. That’s also when she started hanging around all these female muscle-building freaks at the gym. They were such disgusting repulsive freaks. The sight of women ogling each other was sickening to him especially when the women lathered themselves in oil and then slowly flexed different muscles groups such as their stomach muscles or butts. Their rippling muscles looked like oiled snakes moving under their skin.

  She hates showing off but she made him pay for her giant breast implants after she quit bodybuilding.

  Her family is her life but she dumped their children at the gym’s daycare so she could spend most of the day doing whatever she wanted with whomever she wanted.