Sohlberg and the White Death

by Jens Amundsen

  “Who’s there?” Giske narrowed his eyes and searched the murky alley between two buildings. Someone had opened a side door and thrown glass bottles out on the alley.

  No one answered. The door screeched and slammed shut. The sky dimmed. The surrounding mountains furtively concealed the dying light of a distant midnight sun that floated low over the horizon. A malignant full moon blanched the buildings and the street. Every baleful dark corner and shadow promised a dire surprise.

  He looked for but could not see any blue building as he approached the corner with Strandskillet. If not for the ugly brown door the exhausted detective would have missed the ramshackle building that had been painted blue many decades ago. He opened the door and left the moonlight behind.

  Giske took one step into an eerie murkiness and gently closed the door behind him. He was trapped in a moldy claustrophobic mud room with a padlocked door on the left and a downward flight of stairs in front of him. Giske sensed a presence lurking in a closet to the right where the closet door had been ripped off the hinges.

  Two hostile and yellow eyes zeroed in on Giske. The dangerous eyes instantly categorized him as a foe to be thrown out into the street or worse.

  Giske quickly showed his badge and said:

  “Police. Just here to get some information . . . nothing more.”

  An animal grunt signaled that he could proceed.

  The creaking stairs brought him to a cave of ruined souls and wasted lives and loud thumping music. A middle-aged man stared morosely at the duo of naked Thai women pole-dancing on the stage. In a darker corner the third nude dancer ground her fanny into a patron’s groin as part of a lap dance.

  Giske’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and he was grateful that at least the man’s pants were still on him. Otherwise he would have made an arrest. He was still going to come back to investigate whether the Thai women had been bought—that he would not tolerate. Giske accepted the fact that he might not have the highest ethical standards but he drew the line at involuntary servitude in the sex industry.

  Before Giske sat down by a table Anniken Lønseth began shuffling slowly and deliberately towards him from a cash register next to a desultory bar. She brushed her red wig with a dainty gesture. Her desolate sightless eyes drowned in a sea of mascara.

  Anniken Lønseth’s bloated face was set hard in a grotesque kumadori mask of black, red, and white makeup that made it hard to tell whether she was young or old, healthy or sick, or alive or dead in her own Norwegian version of Japanese kabuki theater.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want nothing. You on the other hand desperately want to avoid getting this dump shut down tonight. You want to avoid spending the night in jail after I arrest you and your clients and your dancers . . . and your bouncer. Right?”

  “Sure. Why not? . . . What’s up?” She pouted her saucy red lips.

  “I’m looking for someone who hires out his or her boat or airplane for illegal ventures.”

  Giske barely had time to whip out his notebook to write down the list of names that rolled off her rolodex of crime.

  Chapter 17/Sytten

  TROMSØ, NORWAY: JULY 29,

  OR THREE MONTHS AND 17

  DAYS AFTER THE DAY

  A fresh-faced Kristina Skrautvol walked into her office at the same time that a haggard Giske arrived to collapse from exhaustion at his home. She heard his voicemail message:

  “Sorry but I can’t attend the meeting this morning. I went home to sleep for a few hours and now I’m off chasing down a couple of promising leads that I picked up from my bar hopping.”

  The Chief Inspector buzzed her assistant Jon Kirkvaag. “Jon . . . could you please bring me the videotapes that the gasoline stations sent us?”

  “Sure. They’re on a couple of discs . . . I’ll get them.”

  “Thanks. I already watched about half of the discs this week. But I’m still far behind. I need to finish reviewing them soon. Maybe you could help me watch some of them today . . . although I know that I’m sharing you with another C.I.”

  “Yes. Mads Haavardsholm. You met him yesterday.”

  “I remember. But could you help me watch the videotapes all day today? . . . There’s just too many hours of videotape for me to watch alone.”

  “Sure thing Chief Inspector . . . just keep in mind that . . . unless there’s some emergency . . . I spend mornings working on your stuff and afternoons for C.I. Haavardsholm. I’ll have to check with him.”

  “That sounds good. Thank you.”

  “Chief Inspector . . . I don’t want to sound as if I don’t want to help you . . . but I thought you were going with Constable Rasch up to Hansnes.”

  “Change of plans,” she said without going into the details. Rasch had approached her after their meeting and straight out asked her to not go up with him because she was a stranger and that would make it harder for him to talk to people. He reminded her that he knew the people out there very well because he had worked on Land-and-Sea Traffic Patrol in the area around Hansnes when he first joined the force.

  Fifteen minutes later Jon Kirkvaag lugged a plastic container box into the office. The discs almost spilled out when he opened the box on her desk. “I’ll be back.” He carried in a laptop computer which he set on the conference table. “Do you want to watch them here with this computer . . . or do you want to stay there and watch the discs on your desktop P.C.?”

  “I might as well stay at my desk.”

  “Any preference on which gas station you’d like to look at?”

  “No. Just hand me half of them and you watch the other half.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Any one of the nine individuals who are in this picture sheet. I included the two men with the hacked-off faces because you might be able to recognize the shapes of their heads and ears or the hair color and length.”

  Skrautvol grabbed a photo sheet with pictures that the medical examiner had taken of the faces and upper torsos of the murdered victims. She walked over to deliver the page to Kirkvaag. She couldn’t help but noticing that his clean and silky shoulder-length blonde hair was in far better condition than her own hair. Jon Kirkvaag looked more like a college professor with his long hair, tweed jacket, corduroy pants, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses.

  “Chief Inspector . . . I imagine that I can fastforward the videotape to speed things up?”

  “Of course. I’m going to do the same.”

  Skrautvol and Kirkvaag spent the next four hours glued to their computer screens. The boring work oppressed them. Skrautvol however was used to the mind-numbing detailed work of a criminal investigation.

  Kirkvaag bravely spent an extra hour watching the videos while he ate his lunch. At one in the afternoon he excused himself to go work for Haavardsholm.

  “I’m back,” said Kirkvaag a few minutes later.

  “What happened?”

  “He wants me to spend the next couple of afternoons with you . . . and help you when you’re in the office since he knows you’ve got a lot on your plate with this case.”

  “Wow,” said a genuinely surprised Skrautvol. “That’s very kind of him.”

  At 4:30 PM Jon Kirkvaag yelled out:

  “Hey! . . . I think I found her . . . the Asian woman . . . buying something off the shelf. Yep! . . . There’s the Asian man walking up to her with another guy. Whoa . . . there’s another clip of them getting out of two Range Rovers.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The drive out to Skibotn on the eastbound E-8 Highway reminded Skrautvol that she was now in another planet—the extreme remoteness of Troms County. She drove through a depopulated land of wide fjords and broad valleys and odd-shaped mountains that accentuated the enormity of the wild Arctic terrain and the smallness of the humans upon it.

  Stark mountains lunged three and four thousand feet up into the sky. Their unnatural shapes formed as if by unknown giants who had labored to build pyramids to terrible and long-forgotten Nordic gods. The mount
ains had no pointy peaks because the summits had been capped off by the mile-thick glaciers of the last great Ice Age. The mountains began with a series of gently sloping ramparts of soil and grass that ended in straight walls of dark and foreboding stone. From a distance the upper rock walls undulated like pennants forever frozen by some prehistoric wind.

  “Ah . . . here we are.”

  The manager of the Statoil gasoline station on the eastern outskirts of Skibotn had been extremely cooperative. C.I. Skrautvol had called her right after Kirkvaag saw the victims on the video. The manager had agreed to show the picture sheet of the dead victims to all of her employees and to retrieve all of the sales receipts for the day and time in question.

  Chief Inspector Skrautvol drove past the gas station. She first wanted to see the village of 632 souls on the southeast shores of Lyngen Fjord. The southern end of the fjord was best known for harboring an unusual microclimate that gave rise to a small forest of lush pine trees and green grass. The greenery in the summer belied the extreme weather that froze the village during winter. The average January temperature in Skibotn was 7 degrees Fahrenheit or -13.6 degrees Centigrade.

  Skrautvol drove slowly into the neat and clean village which was graced by a small Lutheran church from the 1920s. The town also had a modern grocery store and a Shell gasoline station next to a convenience store from the national Joker chain. Skibotn also boasted an RV park and a marina.

  Yes, she thought, this is the place. Our victims came through here.

  The detective stopped and got out of the car as soon as she saw the docking facility on the water. She explored the marina. With her binoculars she studied the fjord and realized that the much smaller town of Furuflaten on the other side of the fjord also had a marina. Skrautvol visualized some or all of her nine dead victims driving through Skibotn and maybe even meeting with someone in the town. Even more intriguing was the idea that a boat could easily have picked up some or all of the victims at the Skibotn marina or elsewhere along the southern shores of the fjord before transporting them to their death up north in Ringvassøy Island.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Oh yes,” said the Statoil clerk. “I remember them. These seven came inside the station. The tough-looking guy with the broken nose and small ears had strange teeth. The teeth looked like they were made of aluminum or stainless steel. I think he spoke Russian.”

  Skrautvol eyed the beautiful 40-something female clerk with stunning blue eyes and high cheekbones. Without a doubt the detective was moving deeper inside the Sami Nation. She had started noticing unusual if not exotic faces as soon as she had arrived in Tromsø. The Sami were definitely very different from her Viking ancestors. The Sami People reminded her of her many trips to the USA where she had always been amazed by the distinctive facial features of the indigenous Native American tribes. Skrautvol also observed the clerk’s face and demeanor to gauge her for reliability and honesty. The woman passed the test.

  “Can you please point out which of them you remember seeing inside the station?”

  She pointed to seven victims with faces. “I saw all of these people. I don’t recognize the two men with the mutilated faces. All I saw was seven people . . . they all got out of two cars.”

  “You only saw a total of seven people?”

  “Yes. Only seven people came in the two cars.”

  The detective’s mind struggled to grasp the implications of the head count. Seven people in the two Range Rovers. So where did the extra two dead bodies come from?

  “And you saw no one else stay behind inside the cars?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you,” said Skrautvol. “I appreciate your help. Now . . . these two men with the mutilated faces . . . I know that they’re not recognizable. But if you look at their ears and haircuts and . . . their hair color and skin color . . . and their necks and upper chest . . . could they have been with the group?”

  “I don’t think so. It was just the seven strangers . . . they all got out of the two cars which also got my attention because they were old British jeeps.”

  “Range Rovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they say or do anything that was unusual?”

  “They were in a rush. . . .”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes . . . two of the men stood by the bathroom doors when the Asians used the facilities . . . same thing happened when the older man went inside the bathroom. . . .”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m pretty sure that the license plates on the jeeps were from Finland.”

  Goosebumps ran down Skrautvol’s arms. “Did you see the numbers?”

  “No.”

  The detective recovered instantly from her disappointment—an inevitable component of a murder investigation. “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Here’s my business card. Please . . . please call or e-mail me if you remember anything else.”

  After shaking hands with the clerk Skrautvol met with the manager in a closet of an office in the back.

  “I got bad news . . . those people you’re interested in . . . they paid cash.”

  “For the gasoline and the snacks and drinks they bought inside?”

  “Yes. Cash. No credit cards. Nothing else.”

  Skrautvol again recovered from her disappointment. She briefly thought about calling in a forensic team to collect fingerprints and other evidence from the bathrooms. But she dismissed the thought. Too much time had passed. The manager confirmed that the bathrooms had been thoroughly cleaned on a daily basis.

  ~ ~ ~

  Skrautvol drove to the edge of town. She took the E-8 Highway which headed southeast to Finland. After a 10-minute drive she pulled off the road and parked on a grassy knoll.

  A somber wind rushed through the void of the Skibotnelva River Valley. The valley was known for its dry micro-climate and alkaline chalky topsoil which gave rise to trees and plants with long and thin and waxy leaves. The detective scanned the harsh landscape and marveled at how the Sami People had survived and thrived in such a difficult world. The Sami reminded Kristina Skrautvol of her own history—surviving and thriving despite a toxic family environment and hostile workplace.

  Skrautvol called her new boss in Tromsø.

  “Hello?”

  Skrautvol said nothing. She was shocked. The head of the Troms police district caught her completely off guard when he answered his own phone at headquarters. The obnoxious Ivar Thorsen never answered his own phone or e-mails as the Commissioner of the Oslo Police District.

  “Hello?” said Troms Police Superintendent Tor Einar Eilertsen.

  “It’s me . . . Skrautvol. . . . I’m out here in Skibotn. . . . I’m following some promising leads that I found at the Statoil gas station. . . . The clerk saw seven of our victims arrive in two cars with Finnish license plates. . . .Yes . . . it seems that our victims came from Finland. . . . I’m going to need three or four constables to come out to Skibotn and Furuflaten and thoroughly canvass the area. . . . I also want them to ask the locals if they saw any of our nine victims board a ship at either town’s marina. . . . It’ll maybe take two days.”

  “I can’t spare three or four . . . but you’ll get two constables for two or three days. Okay?”

  “Thank you!” Skrautvol meant it. She was used to her incompetent old boss denying every single request she ever made for any assistance. Troms looked much more inviting without Ivar Thorsen.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Time to go sightseeing,” said Skrautvol as soon as she ended the call with her new boss. “Let’s see what’s down there in Finland.”

  The rented Volvo station wagon handled well even after she reached 80 mph. The Troms Police department had no unmarked vehicles for her that day. But she didn’t mind because she wanted to sneak a peek over the border. She dressed in plainclothes so that she could snoop around in the panhandle of northwest Finland as a tourist.

  Snooping. That’s my favorite part of police
work.

  Snooping almost always produced results for Chief Inspector Skrautvol. She usually got closer to the truth whenever she knew a lot about her murder victims and suspects. Unfortunately the need to work on other homicides always reduced the amount of time available for snooping.

  Her snooping destination was the little town of Kilpisjärvi—population 111.

  Skrautvol entered an expanse of broad swelling hills. She sped past a lonely rock cairn that marked the border with Finland. No border guards or buildings or checkpoints stood at the spot. Skrautvol was surprised at how easy it would have been for any one of her nine victims to have crossed the border.

  Where are the two Range Rovers? Are they in Norway . . . or Finland? Who owns them? . . . Is someone hiding them? . . . Or did someone junk them . . . in a lake . . . or a fjord . . . or at a scrap metal yard?

  The undercover detective arrived less than 40 minutes later at the town of Kilpisjärvi by the shores of an immense lake with the same name. The most northwestern town of Finland was—incredibly enough—a tourist town with three hotels, several restaurants, an RV park, ski facilities, and rental cabins for the summer and winter. Tourists came to hike in the wilderness of the nearby Malla National Park Reserve in the summer and to ski and watch the Northern Lights during winter. The town also housed a research station of the University of Helsinki.

  “Where should I go?”

  Skrautvol had a hard time deciding between the Haltinmaa Guesthouse Cottages, the Tundrea Holiday Resort, and the Lapland Hotel Kilpis. She went to all three hotels and spent time at the front desks asking a ton of questions about the area and the type of tourists who passed through Kilpisjärvi. Most of the hotel staff spoke decent Norwegian and excellent English and for those who didn’t Skrautvol understood them thanks to her grasp of the rudimentary basics of the grotesquely complex Finnish language.