by Geir Tangen
Viljar looked out the window. What he was looking at she didn’t know, but she assumed it was the police cars below. He turned around and looked at Ranveig.
“What the hell is really happening out there?” His gaze was defiant. She didn’t move an inch.
“Strictly speaking, I should probably ask you that, shouldn’t I? You’re shirking work, don’t answer the phone, don’t open the door for the police, lock your son out … Need I say more?”
Viljar sighed and sank down into the brown leather three-seater. He rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead and stared vacantly ahead. In the background, Ranveig saw that Alexander had come in the door, and then went into what must be his room.
“I have no idea, Ranveig. I woke up early today with dark clouds in my head. Tried to get up, go to the bathroom, and get ready, but I had to give up. I couldn’t bear work today. An hour later, Øveraas called and left a hysterical message on my voice mail.”
“I know all this, Viljar. Forget about it! Why didn’t you get dressed, and why don’t you open up for the police? You don’t need a master’s degree in psychology to suspect that you have something to hide when you behave like that.”
Viljar regained his defiant gaze. Looked sternly at her. Didn’t say anything, but after a moment fished out a cigarette butt, which he meticulously lit. Blew out the smoke before he looked back at her.
“Anxiety!”
“Anxiety … What do you mean?”
“I have anxiety, Ranveig. I go to a psychologist, but it doesn’t go away. Dark, hellish, shameful, paralyzing, creeping anxiety. It’s so simple, and so damned difficult. Hiding under the covers like a little kid…”
Ranveig looked at him. Studied his face. This explained a lot.
She stood up and went over to him.
“Don’t touch me, please.…”
She took her hand away from Viljar’s shoulder, but stood there. “Listen, about Alexander. Does he live here full-time now?”
Viljar shook his head and explained to her that he still lived with his mother, but that he was here for an occasional overnight.
“You can’t let it look like this.…”
He waved her away with a stifled expression. Clearly not something he wanted to discuss now. She would have to bring it up again later. This no longer worked. After a little while, Ranveig went over to the window and raised the blinds. Without asking Viljar, she waved the police up.
“Tell the police the same thing you told me,” Ranveig said.
That was an order, not a suggestion. Viljar simply nodded in response. Put out the cigarette meticulously in the overfull ashtray, fished out a snus pouch, and waited obediently to be picked up. Ranveig found a bucket and some rags in the closet. Someone had to do something here, and that wasn’t going to be Viljar for a while.
Rommetveit, Stord
Wednesday midmorning, October 15, 2014
The autumn air was raw and chilly. At Rommetveit, some of the trees had a streak of yellow. Lotte had noticed it before, that trees were just as individual as people. Autumn came to all of them, but not at the same time. Lotte observed Johannes Fredriksen with interest. He looked back with a disinterested gaze. Not so strange, because he was dead. The bullet that had penetrated his skull was embedded in the wall. On the way out of the back of his head, it had taken a lot of blood and brain mass with it that stuck to the white wood wall.
She opened her notepad and paged up to the green tab. Notes for crime scene investigations. A new, clean page awaited her. Quickly she noted the most obvious. The perpetrator was a good marksman. The place where the body was found was undoubtedly the same as the crime scene. Based on the fact that rigor mortis had already started to set in, the killing must have taken place early that morning. Lotte Skeisvoll also noted a number of details that might give rise to speculation. The car key in Johannes Fredriksen’s hand indicated that he was either on his way out to the car or had just come home. He was supposed to be at work in Leirvik at seven o’clock, which hadn’t happened. He was dressed in a nice gray suit of the Riccovero label. Becoming blue tie of the same brand. Tiepin with the logo of the car dealership where he worked as a salesman. Shiny polished shoes.
“He was on his way to work, and then we can conclude a probable time of death between six thirty and six fifty,” she said out loud. No one heard her. She was completely alone inside this barricade. Olav Scheldrup Hansen was standing a short distance away, talking with Beate Fredriksen, Johannes Fredriksen’s eldest daughter.
Rommetveit was bathed in sun this morning, but down here in the woods, the sun had not yet taken hold. Chilly fall air bit into her cheeks. The house was isolated down in a hollow with birch forest at both ends. A narrow gravel road led down to the house and was a shortcut from the hiking path a few hundred meters farther up.
Lotte had brought her team with her to Stord as soon as she got the news. Johannes Fredriksen had been on their very long list of possible victims. Lars Stople came up to the barricade tape while she crouched and studied the exit wound.
“You have to do something, Lotte.”
“What do you mean?” She looked inquisitively up at the old fox. He nodded toward the area outside the barricades, where Olav was standing.
“That guy from Oslo is taking over all control here.”
“I know that,” Lotte replied with a sigh.
She leaned a little closer to Lars and whispered, “He’s a handful, but he does have a little weight in cases like this. Besides, he’s only been here a few hours. Let him have at it.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s always right. He asks the witnesses leading questions, and he commandeers the rest of us as if he’s the one leading the investigation. I don’t even bother to ask if he clears these things with you first.”
Lotte’s eyes narrowed. She’d had a suspicion about this all morning, because constables disappeared left and right before she had talked with them about what they should do. It wasn’t exactly uncommon that Kripos took control when they were going to support local police, but what Scheldrup Hansen was doing approached mutiny. She decided to have a serious talk with him when they got back to Haugesund later in the day.
It was a good two hundred meters to the nearest neighbor, which was a small farm. Lotte had already checked whether anyone had seen or heard anything this morning, but no one had. This was despite the fact that the farmwife had been out working in the cow barn at the time the shot must have been fired.
The Stord sheriff’s office had called Haugesund very quickly after they learned of the victim’s shabby record. What triggered that wasn’t what Johannes Fredriksen had been convicted of in his youth, but rather what he’d been acquitted of in 2006. The year before, he had been accused of rape by a seventeen-year-old girl aboard a pleasure boat during the Sildajazz in Haugesund. Originally the rape accusations also concerned the girl’s female friend, who had been at the same party on Fredriksen’s boat, but she retracted her testimony before the case came to court. Without the friend’s testimony, the case was hard to win for the offended girl. Word against word seldom leads to a conviction when there is no other evidence.
Lotte stood there a long time, looking into a vacuum in which none of the others were present. Lars took care not to disturb her. After a while she nodded three times, as if she were having a conversation with someone inside the vacuum. She stood parallel to the doorway, looking up into the woods where she thought the shot must have come from. Gave a sign to Lars that he should follow her and went up toward the slope about a hundred meters from the house. She looked carefully ahead of her while she walked, to assure herself that there were no tracks in the area, but she doubted that the murderer had taken the risk it would involve to go down to check that the job was completed. This shooter knew when he hit the mark. Besides, the ammunition was a safeguard. The hole in the forehead was not very large, while the exit hole was a crater. “Expanding ammunition,” Åse Fruholm had determined as soon as she looked at Fred
riksen.
It wasn’t difficult to find the place where the killer had been positioned. He hadn’t bothered to remove traces. Here it was almost as if the man was simply out on a walk and took a quick pee break. A blue backpack was tossed into a thicket. A paper plate and plastic utensils were left by the side of the pack. A partly hidden lean-to contained a green sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, and a half-empty bottle of Coke. A Nesbø book was found by an inflatable pillow. A little Mag-Lite flashlight had evidently served as a reading light.
“He spent the night here,” Lars Stople said behind her.
That was obvious, but she refrained from commenting on that.
“Hmm … and he’s not at all afraid of being caught. If this goes to court, we’re going to have so much biological evidence that the case will practically prosecute itself.”
“And what is he telling us by doing that?”
Lotte turned around and looked at Lars Stople with curiosity in her eyes. The old policeman was sharper than many believed.
“Tell me.…”
Lars stood in thought for a moment. “I think there are two possibilities, Lotte. Either he’s indifferent to what he leaves behind because he thinks we’ll never find him. That is, he intends to keep himself completely above suspicion. Regardless, he won’t be found in the conviction register.”
Lars stopped and studied the area around them a moment before he continued.
“The other possibility is that he’s not afraid of being caught. He knows we’ll find him at last, and he has no plans to deny the criminal acts. It may actually be that he wants to be caught and get credit for what he’s done. Then we’re dealing with someone who has lost contact with himself and his surroundings.”
“We know one more thing.” Lotte challenged the older police constable with her gaze.
“Yes?”
“We know that Olav Scheldrup Hansen is on the wrong track when he wants to tail Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson. If it had been him, he wouldn’t have put himself in the center of the investigation while leaving behind hundreds of clues, true?”
Lars Stople smiled wryly and nodded. “Have you ever doubted that, Lotte? Hansen may have solved however many cases, but he’s a loose cannon on deck. Any idiot hits the mark now and then if he shoots wildly in all directions.”
Lotte chuckled. She appreciated the old constable more and more. They moved quickly down the terrain and waved Åse Fruholm over to them.
Four years earlier …
Room 306, Rica Maritim Hotel, Haugesund
Thursday morning, August 19, 2010
Blood was dripping from the broken bottle Jonas was holding. Dark drops were soaked up by the wall-to-wall carpet. Broken shards of glass crunched as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Jonas did not notice the pain. He kept his gaze locked on the man in front of him. The man shielded his face with his hands. An irrational reflex, as his throat and chest were both far more vulnerable points. Jonas swiped a sharp edge of the broken bottle across the man’s left nipple. A piece stayed stuck like a barb. The man whimpered.
A thin stream of blood ran from his chest down onto the white sheet. Jonas didn’t say anything. Everything was said. There were no more words that could wound him.
The room at Rica Maritim Hotel was sterile and bare. Stripped of soul. Cold colors. Blue bedspread, white bed linens, gray curtains, lemon-yellow walls. Jonas was cold. Naked, he had goose bumps from the draft from the window. His hands held tight around the broken bottle. Pressed it carefully in toward the man’s throat.
The man moaned and tried to push himself back in the bed. Jonas took hold of his hair and pulled him brutally back. The man screamed as he collided with the headboard. Jonas pressed the bottle against his throat again, and this time a piece of glass slid into the soft tissue on his throat. The man lay there without moving a muscle.
“Shut up and lie still!”
Panic shone in the man’s face. His chest was rising and falling faster now.
The adrenaline rush gave Jonas tunnel vision. His heart was galloping in his chest, and he noticed that he was hyperventilating. His eyes were swimming.
He tried to get back to the volcano that raged in him when he realized that Minister of Transport and Communications Hermann Eliassen had tricked him. He felt nausea building up at the thought. The transition between blind fury and a paralyzing contempt for everything he’d been forced to go through. Thought back on all the times he’d forced himself to pretend as if desire and admiration had driven him into the arms of this man. All the times he had cried, vomited, and injured himself. A whole year of broken promises about participation in the trainee program for New Voices. A whole year of lies. A whole year of disgusting sexual services.
“It will be too close to take the two of you into the program, too personal.…”
The words still resounded in the room long after they were said. Jonas noticed that most of all, he wanted to drive the bottle farther into Hermann Eliassen’s throat with full force, but something stopped him from doing that. There was something pitiful and sickly about the politician. Killing a naked, defenseless man he’d been kissing and caressing half an hour earlier no longer seemed tempting. He took a deep breath; it felt as if his lungs were about to burst. He decided at the same moment, and acted.
He threw the bottle with full force at the wall so it exploded. Couldn’t care less that the racket would make those in the adjacent room pound on the door or call the front desk. It would be over then regardless, and Jonas did not intend to remain at the scene, even if it definitely was Eliassen who had the most to lose by being found bloody and naked in a hotel room with a seventeen-year-old boy on top of him.
When Jonas met a security guard in the elevator five minutes later, he was dressed and calm. Moved politely to the side as the guard ran out. Jonas entered the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. Knew that it would take time for the guard to make his way into Eliassen’s room, and that the only one who could expose his involvement in what had happened was the Minister of Transport and Communications himself. But he was, and would remain, as silent as the grave.
Haugesund Police Station
Wednesday afternoon, October 15, 2014
Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson felt every single nerve ending and muscle fiber in his body protesting. He’d been waiting for hours in a small office. The room seemed airtight. Since the policemen picked him up at the apartment three hours earlier, little had happened. He knew he should call Øveraas, but his job was probably history regardless. Ranveig had mentioned that the police thought he was suspiciously very involved in what had happened. This was actually dead serious. Viljar was about to leave the room for a smoke break when Lotte Skeisvoll suddenly appeared, along with a world-weary gray suit in his fifties with sad and mournful eyes.
The two police investigators pointed to tell him to turn around and go back into the room. Viljar sat down in the same chair in which he’d spent the last few hours. The man with the Saint Bernard eyes quickly took control, which surprised Viljar a little. He thought Lotte would ask the questions.
“Why weren’t you at work today, and why didn’t you answer the door when the police came to get you?” The man talked quickly and rationally in a monotone, robotic voice. From East Norway, Viljar decided.
“I was sick and didn’t feel like talking with anyone. I didn’t have any unsettled business with the police either.”
“Have you ever heard of obstructing an investigation?”
Viljar snorted and shook his head. “Yes, you can report me then.”
“Where were you between six o’clock and eight o’clock this morning?”
“I was at home in my apartment sleeping. Or that is, I tried to get up at seven o’clock, but gave up. I was too sick to go to work.”
“What illness?”
This was an unpleasant question. He didn’t want to tell about his anxiety.
“Stomach flu. Diarrhea. The runs. Call it whatever the hell you
want.…” The corners of Lotte’s mouth quivered a little, but the man from East Norway didn’t seem to be affected.
“Maybe it’s time that you start taking this seriously, Gudmundsson. There’s been another homicide. Can anyone verify that you really were at home between six and eight today?”
Viljar took in the new information. Felt how the anxiety came creeping back … Forced it away. He had the world’s best alibi, and they ought to know it. Communication within the force was clearly very poor here.
“I don’t know the name of the police constable, who by the way should probably take a course in how you stay unseen during surveillance, but you sent a man after me when I left the police station last night. I assume that your log will show who was on duty last night, and who can thereby document that I was in my apartment the whole time from when I came home at one thirty until you picked me up.”
Lotte stopped Olav’s series of questions with a brief hand gesture. She leaned forward and looked Viljar in the eyes.
“A detective, Viljar? Why do you think we put surveillance on you?”
“I don’t know,” Viljar replied. “I just saw that there was a man following me from the police station all the way home. I figured it was you who’d sent the guy after me.…”
Who the hell would have followed me if it wasn’t the police?
“We had a police constable follow you. That’s true, but it was only to make sure that you didn’t go out on new adventures. He turned around as soon as you went inside.” Lotte looked extremely serious, while the little gray suit was very amused.