Death on Pilot Hill (An Inspector Harald Sohlberg Mystery)

by Jens Amundsen

  “Ja. That’s how it is nowadays . . . not unusual,” said Constable Wangelin. She again gave Sohlberg a look that made him feel like some old-fashioned prude.

  “What else?”

  “After the divorce Maya Engen the mother has primary custody of Karl and the father Gunnar has visitation rights. He always pays the child support on time and in full. Gunnar and his live-in woman Agnes pressure Maya Engen to let Karl spend more time with them.

  “Maya Engen doesn’t want Karl to have an absentee father and she has to work and needs someone to watch the baby in the afternoons after daycare. So Maya and Gunnar reach an agreement. Karl stays nights with his mother Maya after he spends two to three hours every afternoon with Gunnar and Agnes . . . and Thor who is Agnes’s nine-year-old son by another marriage.”

  “What a cozy family. The father . . . the mistress . . . and the son of the mistress. I don’t see Karl fitting easily into that cozy family.”

  “Karl had to fit in because a year later his mother Maya gets very sick with liver disease . . . hepatitis B . . . she is forced to go to Sweden for life-saving treatment.”

  “What? I’ve seen her on television and the newspapers and she looks like a picture of perfect health!”

  “The fact is that she had to go to Sweden for treatment.”

  “Sweden? . . . Don’t we have good doctors in Norway?”

  “I—”

  “What’s wrong with Norwegian medical care?” shouted Sohlberg. He was extremely sensitive about Norway’s humiliating subjugation until 1905 to Denmark and Sweden which had respectively ruled over Norway since 1536 and 1814.

  “Chief Inspector . . . we checked and her doctors confirm that only Sweden offered her an innovative drug treatment that attacked the virus.”

  “I don’t see why she couldn’t have gotten just as good care in Norway.”

  “Maybe it’s because Norway sometimes doesn’t have everything we need.”

  “Norway has everything Norwegians need.”

  From her pitying looks Sohlberg could tell that Wanglein found his patriotism touching if not quaint and old-fashioned.

  In high school Sohlberg had joined Ny Norge. The nationalist group advocated eliminating Norway’s monarchy because the king came from a line of Danish royalty that had served as puppets for Denmark. Sohlberg like most other Norwegians felt that Denmark had ruthlessly ruled Norway as a colony to be exploited. Ny Norge also advocated moving the capital out of Oslo and back north to Trondheim the old Viking capital. And Sohlberg like most other Norwegians was perfectly aware of the fact that Denmark and then Sweden had kept Oslo as the capital in southern Norway in order to control and keep tabs on Norwegians. The Ny Norge group also pushed hard for nynorsk or “New Norwegian” to be the only official Norwegian language to the exclusion of bokmål or "book language" which is a Danish bastardization of the Norwegian language.

  “Chief Inspector . . . regardless of how you feel about Sweden . . . the fact remains that Karl’s mother went to Sweden . . . where she got the medical treatment that successfully controlled her hepatitis. She was forced to let Karl live with his father and Agnes the stepmother when her Swedish doctors informed her that she would not be able to care for the child while she got the debilitating treatments.”

  “So just like that she left Karl with the father and stepmother?”

  “Ja. . . . Maya Engen came back a year later and she was still too weak to care for Karl. The father made it clear that Maya should spend her time and energies on recovering and not on Karl since he and Agnes were already raising him. Because of her illness Maya reluctantly agreed.”

  “I can see why Maya Engen has a guilty conscience. First she brings her son into a broken marriage. Then she dropped the boy off with those two odd ducks because she was sick . . . and then she was maybe too lazy to care for the boy during her recovery.”

  “Could be . . . but who knows what she was really going through during her recovery period. Regardless . . . time passes and the father and stepmother kept finding excuses to keep Karl away from Maya. Three years later they flat out refused to return Karl to her because . . . according to them . . . Karl had already bonded with Agnes the stepmother . . . apparently Karl was already calling her ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’.

  “The father and stepmother insisted that the proposed change in living arrangements would be too disruptive for little Karl and that any judge or social worker or psychologist would see it their way.”

  “Did they actually state that or is the birth mother making that up?”

  “I’ve look at e-mails and they actually did say that.”

  “How convenient for the father. He has no more child support to pay now that the boy lives with him . . . and his live-in sex partner serves as a free nanny for the boy. How very convenient eh?”

  “Ja.”

  “Constable Wangelin . . . we need to look more closely at the father . . . he’s a piece of work. Interesting how he arranges people like pieces on a chessboard . . . to be moved around for his pleasure and convenience.”

  “He’s big into ‘people management’ as he calls it . . . he gave me a long boring lecture on that topic when I asked him what he does at work. Nokia is apparently thinking of sending him to finish his business school education at Harvard or Yale in America. His library is filled with tons of books on that topic.”

  “How can Gunnar Haugen work as a people manager at a big corporation when he can’t even manage the location or safety of his own son?”

  “I guess . . . Chief Inspector . . . that big corporations have their own version of reality that is the opposite of reality.”

  “Ja! That’s why absolute idiots thrive in big corporations. Anything else on the biological mother?”

  “She eventually gave up on getting custody of Karl. She worked for a time as a secretary here in Oslo . . . then two years after she returned from Sweden she went to Trondheim to visit relatives. That’s where she met Police Inspector Arvid Engen of the Sør-Trøndelag district. They married and live in Namsos. Karl visited them every two weeks for the weekend during the school year . . . and he spent most of his summer vacations with them.”

  “Do the birth mother and her husband Arvid Engen have alibis for June fourth?”

  “Airtight. She was at work at the courthouse in Trondheim. Arvid was also at work . . . chasing down and arresting a gang of burglars all during that Friday with four other officers.”

  “Has the Engen house been checked and searched in Namsos?”

  “Ja. Nothing.”

  “Could Karl have been taken by a friend or relative of Maya or Arvid?”

  “I doubt it . . . not after the commotion in the media over the boy. Anyone would have to be pretty stupid to keep little Karl Haugen after all that publicity . . . and the massive five-hundred-thousand kroner reward that Karl’s father posted for Karl’s return or clues leading to his whereabouts.”

  “Constable Wangelin . . . another thing I’ve been thinking about . . . was Karl supposed to be seeing his mother Maya Engen on the weekend after the Friday when he disappeared?”

  “No . . . the next weekend. . . . Now that I think of it . . . the Engens and Haugens had some rather strange arrangements for those weekend visits.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Every other weekend Inspector Arvid Engen or Maya Engen drove down from Trondheim on the E-Six and they picked Karl up at a gas station in the small town of Otta . . . which is about the halfway point between Oslo and Trondheim and Volda.”

  “Why Volda? . . . Isn’t Volda a little town on the coast . . . about two hundred miles south of Trondheim?”

  “Ja. Volda is where Maya Engen’s first husband lives with her first son. The man owns a goat farm that sells goat milk for a cheese factory. So . . . every two weeks . . . on the same day that Maya and Inspector Arvid Engen drove south to Otta . . . the goat farmer drove east from Volda with his son on Highway Fifteen to Otta. . . . They all met at the same gas station . .
. at the same time . . . with Karl and his father Gunnar Haugen and his stepmother Agnes.”

  “So every two weeks this woman . . . Maya Engen . . . reunites for the weekend with the two sons that she abandoned to their fathers? How cozy.”

  “It gets better. Karl doesn’t come alone on the hand-off trips with his father and stepmother Agnes. Oh no. He comes along with Thor Jenssen . . . who is the first son of Agnes from her third marriage . . . actually her second marriage . . . but she got the dumb and wealthier third husband to adopt Thor as his own child.”

  “Agnes Haugen . . . has been married four times before she’s forty? . . .”

  “Ja. We found out quite a lot about her from her ex-husbands. Her first husband she married right after graduating from high school . . . she married him so she could get out of her parents’ house and away from their control. Her own friends and family agree that she pursued him hard in high school and did her best to bed him down.”

  “I know the type,” said Sohlberg as he thought of Margerete Frederisksen his old high school vixen on Ulvøya Island.

  “You do?”

  “Ja. . . . Constable Wangelin . . . believe it or not I was young once upon a time.”

  “Well . . . anyway . . . Agnes Haugen’s friends and family all agree that the young man wouldn’t spend much time with her because his parents were wealthy real estate developers who were adamant about Agnes not hanging around their son or their house. They hated her . . . still do with a passion.”

  “So how did she get around the young man’s parents?”

  “Agnes’s own friends told us that she lied to him about being pregnant . . . and how she might even press rape charges against him. So he was forced to marry her. Then . . . when no baby bump showed up on her belly she claimed that she had a miscarriage. That’s when his parents swooped in and paid her off handsomely to get a divorce.”

  “This belongs in some Hollywood tabloid.”

  “Happens all the time Chief Inspector.”

  “Not when I was growing up. That would’ve been extremely unusual. A young woman sleeping around like that to get a monied husband. Huh!” Sohlberg immediately noticed that Wangelin gave him a pity look as if saying, “Boy did you lead a sheltered life. You need to get on with modern times and not be an old-fashioned prude.”

  “Now Chief we have Agnes’s husband Number Two . . . a good-looking hunk but not too smart. She used the divorce pay-off and her parents’ money to try to get him set up in several businesses . . . but they all failed. He’s broke . . . a ne’er-do-well who’s failed in too many business ventures . . . but he does succeed in impregnating her.”

  “Don’t they always.”

  “They have a son Thor . . . but by then the marriage is an unhappy disaster . . . each spouse accusing the other of infidelity . . . seems they each had lots of casual sexual liaisons. Then she marries husband Number Three. He seems to know the most about her . . . he has quite a lot of dirt on her . . . on account of him being in contact with all of the husbands . . . including the current Number Four . . . who is of course . . . Karl’s father.”

  Sohlberg nodded in glum silence as Constable Wangelin proceeded to tell him about the many lies that Agnes had used to ensnare Gunnar Haugen into an unhappy marriage. Sohlberg wondered if someone — an ex-husband or her current husband — was trying to frame Agnes Haugen the stepmother with a salacious if not controversial past. Solhlberg sighed and said:

  “I’m not surprised about her lies to get this man Gunnar Haugen since . . . as you can imagine . . . I’ve come across far worse marriages in my more than twenty years of investigations . . . but my head is still spinning from all these crazy family relationships.”

  “They are complicated.”

  “What bothers me the most Constable Wangelin . . . is that these adults meet twice a month to trade kids as if they were collectors who meet to trade Pokémon or baseball cards or some other collectible. So . . . who picks up Agnes Haugen’s son Thor?”

  “Her third husband’s parents . . . the paternal grandfather is retired Navy . . . they live near Trondheim.”

  “Alright. Do this today . . . since I doubt Nilsen ordered this. I want to find out what happened at the gas station where the parents met to trade the children. Call whoever’s in charge of policing Otta . . . get whatever constables are necessary out there today or tomorrow at the latest . . . have them find any witness who may’ve come into contact with this sad bunch of parents. Also . . . have them check out all of the closed circuit cameras at or near the gasoline station . . . maybe a camera filmed something interesting on the Friday of Karl Haugen’s disappearance . . . or the Saturday after.”

  “But it’s more than a year later.”

  “I know . . . I doubt if they’ll find anything . . . but it’s worth the long shot that someone saw something suspicious . . . or that some camera captured a picture of someone else with Karl Haugen. At least see if they can get any video. Look for bank ATMs nearby. They usually keep their video much longer. We need to focus on the parents before we look at anyone else.”

  “Ja Chief Inspector . . . it’s not good that we turned a blind eye on these parents . . . and grandparents. You should have heard Nilsen praising Maya and Arvid Engen as solid members of the courts and the police. He heaped even more praise on Maya’s first husband the goat farmer for raising their son alone while making great cheese.

  “I almost puked when Nilsen about got on his knees to worship the two retired university professors in Stavanger who are the parents of Agnes Haugen. As you can imagine . . . Nilsen couldn’t say enough nice things about Thor’s paternal grandparents as honorable citizens and a Navy captain.”

  “We’ll see how honorable all these citizens are in reality. Also . . . did the team bother checking out the activities and whereabouts of Maya Engen’s first husband the goat farmer on June four?”

  “No.”

  “What about the paternal grandparents of the stepmother’s first son Thor . . . who live up in Trondheim?”

  “No.”

  “What about the stepmother’s parents . . . the retired university professors in Stavanger?”

  “No.”

  “I want their homes searched top to bottom and their whereabouts for Friday June fourth and Saturday June fifth thoroughly examined. Call headquarters right now and let them know that we need this done immediately.”

  “Ja. Chief Inspector.”

  While Constable Wangelin placed the call to Oslo on her cell phone Sohlberg thought about the infinite possibilities that existed for mischief — and murder — as a result of the messy relationships of the adults around little Karl Haugen.

  The minutes passed by slowly as Wangelin made several more phone calls to launch the re-invigorated investigation. When the calls finally ended Sohlberg let out another exasperated sigh. He shook his head and said:

  “Did the team check the phone and computer records of Maya and Inspector Arvid Engen?”

  “I don’t think so . . . let me think. . . . Actually no.”

  “What? That’s outrageous.”

  “Nilsen said it was ridiculous to even think that a police officer or a goat farmer or a retired Navy captain or retired university professors would kidnap Karl or help someone do that.”

  “Get the records for all of them . . . six months before June fourth and six months after. . . .”

  “Ja.”

  “Did Nilsen get the phone and computer records for Karl’s father and the stepmother?”

  “No. Again Nilsen said it was a waste of time to think that the mother or father or stepmother would take or harm the child. According to Nilsen, ‘These are good people. Not the criminal element.’”

  “Get me the phone and computer records for the father and the stepmother . . . six months before and after June fourth.”

  “Not that I mind Chief Inspector but . . . that’s a lot of stuff for me to look into. . . .”

  “Just look for frequently called phon
e numbers . . . or e-mail addresses that show up a lot. I’m sure that KRIPOS has some software to do that in minutes. If they don’t then just go on the Internet. I’m sure you’ll find some company somewhere selling that software.”

  “Of course. I’ll call or go to a company called Alta Soft . . . I think they’re still up on Adolph Tidemandsgt in Lillestrøm . . . about twenty minutes northeast of downtown Oslo. They have very good stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Steen and Strøm sells software next to linens and housewares. Everything is available nowadays on the Internet . . . especially software.”