by Gard Sveen
He had no time to think further before the car stopped outside the building entrance on Frognerveien. Two patrol cars and an ambulance were blocking the street. The flickering blue lights from the three cars flashed on the wall of the apartment building. A uniformed officer stood by the door, his ears red from the cold; the temperature had gone down considerably during the night.
Monsen’s voice rang in his ears on his way up the stairs: “It’s ghastly down here, Tommy.”
Bergmann kept his eyes on the deep-red carpet that ran like a snake up and over the steps and tried not to imagine what he would encounter in the apartment.
The metallic smell of blood wafted out the open door. Another uniformed officer stood out on the landing, looking like he was about to throw up at any moment.
Leif Monsen walked over to Bergmann as soon as he stepped inside the apartment. It looked like any old apartment on the West Side—three contiguous rooms, walls painted white, a maid’s room behind the kitchen. He guessed that in reality it was a transitional apartment for high-end whores.
“She’s still alive,” Monsen whispered. He repeated it, his voice sounding almost eager: “She’s still alive.”
Monsen was subdued. That was unusual.
“Who called it in?”
“We don’t know. Unregistered prepaid card. A man simply called in and said that a woman, or girl, had been found killed in this apartment. He thought she was dead. Damn, the caller may have seen the bastard who did this.”
Damned technology, thought Bergmann, only now looking at the clock. It was four thirty in the morning. He heard footsteps out on the landing. It was yet another EMT team. They ran through the hallway, almost knocking Bergmann and Monsen down as they headed into the bedroom. They were followed by Georg Abrahamsen with a colleague from Forensics in tow, and finally Fredrik Reuter, who appeared to be on the verge of a heart attack after the trip up the stairs.
Abrahamsen forced his way into the bedroom with his camera. Bergmann, Monsen, Reuter, and Abrahamsen’s colleague from Forensics—Bergmann could never remember his name—all remained standing silently in the dark hallway. A minute later, Abrahamsen reappeared. He’d been thrown out of the bedroom, and a brief quarrel arose. Reuter intervened to stop it.
“I have to know what position she’s in,” said Abrahamsen as he was pushed across the hall by a massive EMT.
“They’re trying to save her life, if that means anything at all to you, Georg.” Reuter appeared to have gotten his resting pulse back. Abrahamsen loosened his grip on the camera.
Reuter went back into the room with the two of them and evidently worked out an amicable arrangement; or at least so it seemed, as Abrahamsen remained in the bedroom.
After putting on shoe protectors and a hairnet, Bergmann spent the next five minutes walking around the apartment. He started in the kitchen, which appeared to be completely new. The modest contents of the cupboards appeared to confirm his initial impression that the apartment was used for quite different purposes than a residence. A few plates and long-stem glasses, wineglasses, champagne in the refrigerator. Nothing edible. The countertops were bare; the perpetrator might have taken anything that could lead them to him, but that seemed unlikely. He cast a glance out the kitchen window toward the back courtyard. A lamp shone down by the entryway into a couple of windows. The curtains in the bedroom had probably been drawn, and there was almost certainly a lightproof blind or something like it as well. For a couple of seconds everything seemed completely hopeless. As if this winter would be the last one, that there would never be another summer.
He shook his head as Reuter came into the room with two patrol officers and Halgeir Sørvaag. Reuter had a bundle of forms in his hands.
“Neighborhood canvass,” he said.
There were sounds in the hall, and a stretcher came into view. Bergmann went to have a look at the slight woman—no, the young girl—with the oxygen mask over her mouth. The blanket they had placed over her was already drenched with blood. Remnants of duct tape were visible on her wrists, and her eyes stared stiffly up at the ceiling, as if she were already dead. Four or five EMTs and a doctor followed the stretcher, one of whom held a bag of blood, another securing the cannula that was inserted in her forearm. God only knew what she looked like under the blanket.
Bergmann felt a shiver down his spine, and his whole body shook uncontrollably for a moment. The sight of the girl made him feel that all this was his fault—that he was to blame for everything that had happened to her.
Everyone in the apartment paused while the ambulance personnel left the apartment, listening until there were no more sounds in the stairwell and the curt commands to and from the ambulance service had died away.
The quiet did not last long.
One of the neighbors started screaming frantically on one of the floors below. She had probably seen the stretcher being carried down the stairs, the blood transfusion, the young white doll face.
Just like Kristiane, thought Bergmann.
“I need to take a look at your pictures,” he said to Abrahamsen, who handed him the camera. He clicked over to the display screen. How young could she be? She had to be one of the youngest prostitutes in the city. Bergmann felt an almost uncontrollable fury rise inside him. If—no, when—he got hold of the man who had done this, and the men who had brought this young girl into the country (because he was quite sure she wasn’t Norwegian), he would pound the life out of them with his own hands.
She must have been tied up by her wrists against the headboard on the bed; at least that’s what it looked like. The tape over her mouth had been pulled off and hung slackly from her cheek. It would take him many weeks to forget what the rest of her looked like.
“Fucking bastard,” he said to himself. He had to walk around the room a few times and catch his breath. He was on the verge of pounding his fist into the wall, splintering the double doors with his skull, and kicking down everything that was in the white-painted room—chairs, dining room table, a TV, a bookcase.
He went into the bedroom last, after all the others had already gone in, as if the situation were more dangerous for him than for them.
A large double bed occupied the middle of the room. Sure enough, remnants of gray tape hung from the wrought iron posts at both the head and foot of the bed.
“It was me and the first uniformed officer who cut off the tape,” said Monsen. His eyes looked sad under his white hairnet.
Halgeir Sørvaag never asked anything of anyone, which was perhaps why he was the one they all turned to. Without a moment’s hesitation, he went down on all fours and began minutely examining the room. Bergmann scanned the room for an overview. He sensed that the perpetrator had been taken by surprise. He didn’t know how, but that must have been what happened. Monsen must be right, the perpetrator had been interrupted before he could finish his work.
“What did the caller say?” He sought Monsen’s gaze.
“You can listen to the log, but he didn’t say much.”
“I think he was surprised,” said Bergmann. “Someone who shouldn’t have been here entered the apartment. The caller may even have seen the killer.”
“She’s still alive,” said Reuter. “And I’ll be damned if that girl doesn’t survive. Then we’ll get him. She can probably identify him.”
“Amen,” said Monsen. His eyes shone a moment, as if he was having the same thought as Bergmann: only the Old Testament could deliver justice in this case.
Bergmann left the room to Abrahamsen and Sørvaag. He couldn’t stand to be there a moment longer. If there was anything to find there, they would find it.
He took Reuter with him out into the adjoining room.
“It’s the same man,” Bergmann told him. “He must have been triggered by all the recent news about the Kristiane case. Wasn’t that the way the girls were killed? Isn’t that what you’ve always told me? You were part of the investigation.”
“But that man should be Anders Rask,” sai
d Reuter. “And he’s locked up at Ringvoll.”
2
The traffic appeared to be blocked for good on Majorstukrysset. An endless row of cars sat in both directions on Kirkeveien. The Route 20 bus tried to nudge its way into the massive line, but didn’t even make it out of the bus stop in front of McDonald’s.
Although November had barely begun, a fine layer of snow was settling over the city. Bergmann sensed it was going to be a long winter.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if I told you there was something to blame it on?” said the voice behind him.
Bergmann didn’t answer. He just sat silently on the windowsill. He had done a lot of talking over the past few months. Today he couldn’t bear to. The past twenty-four hours had been bad enough as it was.
“On a father you’ve never met, who theoretically may have been violent? On a mother who systematically made you feel guilty and punished you for showing any emotion?” Viggo Osvold was trying to focus his gaze, though he was shaking rather severely. “The causes are one thing. You can’t do anything about them. The question is: How can you live with them? And then, how can another person live with you living with them?”
“Hege never saw me cry. Have I said that? Not really.”
“You just wanted one more chance? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why should she have given that to you? Would you really want to be with a person who’d given you chance after chance? After ten years?”
“Eleven. But no. The answer is no.”
Osvold breathed heavily through his nose. He took off his glasses and shook his head almost imperceptibly, as though to suggest that Bergmann hadn’t made an iota of progress over the last few months. He might have been thinking deep down that little other than medication would help.
Bergmann had still not managed to give him a proper answer to his question: “What do you feel along with the aggression? Do you feel small, afraid, rejected, wounded, alone, proud, sad?”
“All of that,” he’d answered. “A child. I’m just a child again.”
Osvold always followed up with the abuse, the eternal abuse. Beatings, rape, incest, and homicide were all basically the same. “All abuse of women is about power. Did you feel powerful when you hit her? Or impotent?”
“I don’t know.” Bergmann had no better answer. Osvold had nodded, raised his eyebrows, and made a kind of grimace, the start of a sympathetic smile. He had been reluctant to give Bergmann a tentative diagnosis, even in response to direct and repeated questions. A diagnosis would tell Bergmann that he was sick, which he could use as a crutch: I’m sick, therefore I hit.
“You’re functional,” Osvold always said. “For that reason I don’t want to give you a diagnosis. Maybe later, we’ll see.”
Bergmann peeled off five two-hundred-kroner bills.
Osvold picked up his gold pocket watch, which lay on the coffee table in front of him, between a box of Kleenex and an orchid that had seen better days.
“I have to go,” said Bergmann, picking up the Aftenposten from the desk. He showed the front page to Osvold.
The psychiatrist put away his folder. His life, his messiness. In fifteen minutes it would be another crazy person’s turn—someone else whose life was so out of whack that it would be nearly impossible to straighten it out in the course of a single lifetime.
Bergmann should have been down at police headquarters with everyone else, but Reuter thought the therapy sessions were more important. Besides, there wasn’t anything more he could do right now. So he’d been subjected to forty-five minutes on the couch with Osvold. The first act belonged to the technicians, as Reuter liked to say. It was the opposite of the theater. The killing first, followed by the technicians. Then the second act could begin. The final act was merely the undramatic joining of separate tragedies tangled up in each other.
Much like his own life.
Hege had reported him for domestic violence early in the fall. Her new husband had gotten her to do that. The penalty range was three to six years.
Surprisingly, it had been something of a relief. He didn’t for the life of him want to go to prison—and he certainly didn’t want others to find out what he’d done—but when the report appeared on the table, it was like coming out of the closet. Something inside him wanted her to show her strength. He wanted Hege to say, I’ll crush you if I want to.
Osvold thought this was positive. Very positive, he had even ventured to say. The problem was the trigger points. Bergmann had trouble putting those into words. Explaining his actions. They hadn’t yet gotten to his feelings, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. He didn’t know if he still had any.
Hege had dropped the charges when he said he was willing to go into therapy. At headquarters only Reuter and the head of Human Resources knew about it. But he was sure it had leaked out anyway. Not to the entire staff, but to a couple of important decision-makers. Which would effectively prevent any career advancement if he didn’t start brown-nosing. He was on the waiting list for Alternatives to Violence, where men like himself surely belonged, a fellowship of men who beat women. Maybe he would continue with Osvold too. In a strange way he liked the cross-eyed guy fairly well.
“One slip-up, and you’re out on your ass,” Reuter had said to him. “You can’t even be a rent-a-cop with a gas pistol on your hip. And if Hege gets you convicted, you’ll get three years. You’ve admitted you’re guilty. We could have filed a case against you. We should have filed a case against you. If you end up in prison, you’re dead, you know that? They’re going to beat the living shit out of you in there, Tommy. Break every bone in your body. I should have done it myself now that I think about it.”
3
He walked all the way down to the victim’s apartment on Frognerveien. The long line of exhaust-spewing cars eventually faded away.
A semblance of normalcy returned as he approached the entry doors. The events of the night before flickered in his mind’s eye for a few seconds—the flashing blue lights, the uniformed officers, the knowing looks of the ones who’d seen the badly injured girl.
The ambulances, the patrol cars, and the police tape by the entry doors were all gone by now. Only two crime scene technicians were still at work inside the apartment.
He pounded on the door and put on a pair of shoe protectors. In the bedroom the bed had turned black. How much blood had she lost? How many times had he stabbed her with the knife? Struck her with the hammer that still lay on the floor? But there was not a single fingerprint; the man must have worn gloves, probably latex. Though the knife was gone, they deduced that it was a medium-sized weapon with a four- to five-inch blade. He felt physically ill at the mere thought of having a blade like that stuck in his body. The girl had been stabbed in such a way that she wouldn’t die of the stab wounds themselves, but from the loss of blood. Even so, the perpetrator had struck enough of her vital organs. It couldn’t be avoided on such a small body.
He moved his eyes to the remnants of duct tape on the headboard. She’d been taped to the bed—with tape over her mouth as well—when Monsen and the first patrol arrived.
But it was the same method, he thought. Most of it added up. Reuter, who’d worked in the eighties as a rank-and-file investigator, had grudgingly acknowledged that this murder attempt was more or less identical to the six homicides Anders Rask had been convicted of in the nineties. The hospital reports indicated that the prostitute had the same methodical knife and hammer injuries as the six other girls. It was likely that the only reason he hadn’t begun the trophy collecting—the removal of body parts, as if he were a self-appointed Aztec priest—was because he had been interrupted. If he’d had time to finish, there would have been no doubt.
The first girl, in Tønsberg in 1978, had lost the little finger on her left hand; the other girls had each lost one of the other fingers; and the sixth and last one had lost the thumb on her right hand. After that Rask set about removing their female organs in a way that Bergmann tried to
think about as little as possible.
The only thing that was certain was that Anders Rask could not be behind this homicide attempt. He was confined to the Ringvoll Psychiatric Hospital and had recently been trying to get his case reopened. It was equally certain that whoever had tried to murder this young girl knew about the methods Rask had employed in his six homicides. Although every detective and crime reporter in Oslo knew perfectly well how the murders had been committed, the verdict—including all the specifics of the murders—had never been published, out of consideration for the victims’ survivors. Either they were facing a copycat—a Rask admirer who was among the few who knew all the details of the old murders—or perhaps Rask was wrongly convicted and another man had committed the murders and was at it again. Or else the Oslo police were facing an even greater nightmare: there was a connection between Anders Rask and an unknown perpetrator on the outside, a perpetrator who operated just the way Rask had.
Bergmann couldn’t take any more. The only thing that kept him going was that the defenseless young girl might have seen the face of the man who’d tried to kill her.
4
Bergmann went back to the front door of the apartment, which had been open when they arrived the night before.
He stood on the landing and tried to reconstruct the night for himself. The perpetrator had probably rung the bell outside the building. He may have met the girl at the strip club Porte des Senses, but more likely he’d responded to an ad on the Internet. If they could only identify who the girl was, they could launch a legitimate investigation. But there was no computer or phone in the apartment, no address book, not so much as a single scrap of paper anywhere.
He walked slowly down the steps to the two big wooden entry doors, painted white, that led out onto Frognerveien. The doorbell was unmarked. The apartment was owned by a Norwegian company, which in turn was owned by an Estonian company. The CEO of the Norwegian company was a Norwegian businessman by the name of Jon H. Magnussen. He spent 183 days a year in Cyprus and could only be reached through his attorney, who supposedly had no knowledge of the apartment.
