Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery (Inspector Sohlberg Mysteries)

by Amundsen, Jens

  “True.”

  “Now as for the school building and grounds . . . I hope they were thoroughly searched. There’s a case from the nineteen-sixties where children disappeared from school . . . it turned out that a camp of homeless bums raped and killed the school children who went to play in the schools’ basement where the bums lived.”

  “Uhhh.”

  “I imagine the team carefully searched the school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every nook and cranny from roof to foundation and wall to wall . . . right?”

  “Yes,” said Constable Wangelin who nodded slowly as she came to understand the implications of what Sohlberg was saying. “This means Chief Inspector that . . . all of our suspects are the normal and lovely and well-dressed and well-educated and law-abiding citizens of the well-to-do suburb of Holmenkollen . . . home of the Holmenkollen Ski Festival and the Ski Museum.”

  “Exactly Constable Wangelin. The banality of evil.”

  “And . . . the person who took Karl Haugen is most likely found in his circle of family or friends . . . or less likely . . . it’s someone else . . . a parent . . . who went to the school that day and left with him.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But we all thought the culprit would be a known sex offender. We thought—”

  “That’s the problem Constable Wangelin. All of you thought. A detective should never ever think at the beginning of an investigation. He or she should only investigate and collect all the facts . . . the good investigator must not think . . . but rather keep an open mind as the evidence starts coming in. Once the evidence collection phase of the investigation is over then the good investigator starts thinking and following hunches or intuition or logic.”

  “I see that now. I’m glad I’m training with you.”

  “Thinking in the initial phases derails an investigation . . . bias creeps in . . . groupthink takes over . . . I’ve seen huge and horribly botched investigations eventually collapse because investigators made a few small but very wrong assumptions from the start.”

  “Rule Number One . . . work smart not hard.”

  “Right.”

  “Rule Number Two . . . don’t think at the start of an investigation. Collect all the facts. Keep an open mind.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Get ready for some difficult interviews because it’s going to be nasty and difficult finding this most depraved of criminal minds among the suburban parents who live in pretty homes and drive nice cars and dress in Ralph Lauren and . . . smell and look nice and are polite. . . .”

  “A monster,” said Constable Wangelin.

  “Which leads us to Rule Number Three. Never judge. That prevents you from understanding the criminal. Judging throws bias into the picture. No . . . it’s best to just sympathize with the criminal . . . understand what makes them tick.”

  “Disgusting . . . but I can see how effective your strategy is—”

  “Not mine! I learned it from my mentor . . . Lars Eliassen . . . an old police officer in the Romsdal valley. Now I’m passing it on to you . . . and one day you will pass it on to another generation.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyway . . . we’re dealing in this case with an upper middle class parent who has the audacity to boldly launch his or her criminal enterprise in Pilot Hill Elementary School between quarter to nine and nine in the morning on the Fourth of June.”

  “This is stunning . . . hard to believe.”

  “That . . . Constable Wangelin . . . is the audacity of evil.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Karl Haugen woke up. He wasn’t sure if he had slept for hours or just dozed off for minutes. Nothing seemed real. Sadness rose in him as he realized that his father had not looked for him for a long long time. His father felt so far away. They had been so close.

  “Daddy! Where are you?”

  He wondered why no one heard him. It had been a long time since anyone had looked for him.

  “Daddy! Where are you?”

  He missed sitting with his father on the sofa after his father came home from work and telling him everything that had happened to him at school. He had so much he wanted to tell his father.

  “Mom! Mom . . . can you hear me?”

  He missed his mother as badly as he missed his father. She had kept looking for him unlike his father. He wished that she was not living so far away. Namsos was too far away.

  Why didn’t she ask Daddy to let him live with her throughout the year?

  If she had asked then he would not be where he was.

  ~ ~ ~

  Wangelin and Sohlberg took a short break. She went to re-fill her enormous coffee mug following the Norwegian tradition of consuming huge amounts of coffee at work. Meanwhile Sohlberg called his wife.

  “Are your parents able to come?”

  “Yes! . . . My Dad said they’d need a day or so to pack up.”

  “I won’t be home for dinner.”

  “Case speeding up?”

  “Drastically. . . .”

  “I’ll leave your dinner in the frig . . . top shelf . . . if you’re coming in after midnight.”

  “I doubt it,” said Sohlberg. “I should be in by eleven. I have to go see someone at Halden Fengsel.”

  “Wake me up when you get home.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You wake me up so I know you’re home safe and sound.”

  “Alright.”

  “Love you.”

  “For time and for all eternity.”

  The Sohlbergs always said goodnight to each other with a little routine of one saying ‘Love you’ and the other one replying ‘For time and for all eternity’ or ‘Forever and ever always’. They had kept that routine during their more than 25 years of marriage because Sohlberg was permanently traumatized over the fact that he had never had the opportunity to say ‘Goodbye’ or ‘I love you’ to his first wife Karoline before and while she fell to her death. The sudden unexpected death of Sohlberg’s first wife had left him terrified of not being able to saying ‘I love you’ to those dear ones whom death steals without a warning.

  Commissioner Thorsen walked into the cubicle just as Sholberg ended the call with Fru Sohlberg. Thorsen plopped down on the chair in front of Sohlberg. “So . . . did you solve it?”

  Sohlberg stared at Thorsen with undisguised contempt. “No. Not yet . . . but we’re getting there. At least a few things were done right.”

  “Imagine that. The great detective from Interpol approves of what us bumpkins do in Norway. Well now! . . . How marvelous that you approve. . . . So tell me . . . what did we do right?”

  “Dusting everywhere possible for fingerprints in the school . . . checking out the whereabouts of known sex offenders.”

  “I pushed hard for a deep look into the S.O. population . . . I’m sure you know by now that a young pervert had previously trespassed in that same school and molested some girls.”

  “Wangelin told me. But that’s not who did it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m not telling you more.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know you’re here fishing for information that you can pass on to the higher-ups . . . who will then interfere with the investigation . . . or screw it up. But that won’t happen on my watch.”

  “Oh?”

  “I already instructed Wangelin not to leak or disclose any information on the investigation to anyone . . . including you . . . unless I tell her to do so.”

  “Breaking the chain of command so early in the investigation?”

  “Quite the opposite Thorsen. I’m following it. She reports to me and I report to you.”

  “Make sure you do a lot of that. I need to hear from you twice a day. In the morning just before noon and in the afternoon no later than three-thirty.”

  “Of course. Heaven forbid that you . . . like everyone else in Norway . . . be one minute late getting out of the office after four o’clock.�
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  “Sohlberg you’ve forgotten your own country . . . haven’t you? We’re efficient here in Norway. There’s no need for overtime.”

  “I’m sure you need to get out at four so you can hit the links during the summer.”

  “Who told you I play golf?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “Well . . . it’s outdated gossip. I no longer play golf.”

  “Oh?” said Sohlberg who enjoyed his turn to act coy.

  “I bowl.”

  “Bowling?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of it Mister International Traveler.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m taking lessons and getting quite good at it.”

  “I’m sure you are. I wonder . . . who else bowls in the department . . . or in the Ministry of Justice?”

  “None of your bee’s wax!” Ivar Thorsen jumped up and left. He almost slammed into Constable Wangelin and her giant coffee mug which offered third degree burns in any spill.

  “What’s bothering him Chief Inspector?”

  “His new hobby.”

  “Hhhmm. Weird. Shall we continue with the summary?”

  “Read on.”

  “Agnes Haugen left the school no later than nine and went about her regular day doing errands and household chores.”

  “What errands? What chores?”

  “She went back home to pick up the baby and post pictures that she took of Karl Haugen at the science fair . . . she uploaded the pictures into Facebook and other social network websites on the Internet.”

  “Wait a minute . . . did she leave the baby alone at home?”

  “No. Her husband stayed in that day.”

  “What? Wasn’t he at work?”

  “No. He called in sick. We confirmed this from Nokia. We also found out that he was logged into his company’s computers from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. There’s no doubt it was him because the work involved is highly specialized design engineering on computer chips. According to his boss at Nokia only someone with his expertise and experience could have made the entries found that day in Nokia’s design systems.”

  “But why was he working on his work computer if he called in sick that day?”

  “Nokia told us that he called in sick for himself and not because his kids or wife were sick. He was very vague when we pressed him for details on his sickness and whether he had gone to a doctor or told anyone else that he was sick.”

  “What did the team finally find out?” said Sohlberg who grew increasingly curious as to the little boy’s father.

  “Gunnar Haugen admitted that he should not have called in sick but rather . . . should’ve taken family leave because his daughter was sick and crying all night long and keeping him awake.”

  “And yet he was wide-awake enough to work for hours on complicated engineering and computer chip design.”

  “Now that you mention it . . . his statement is nonsense if he worked all day on his computer and yet claimed to be kept up the previous night.”

  “Did Nokia ever give you a minute-by-minute record on what he was doing on the computer? Is there a chance he could’ve just logged on and then walked away?”

  “Oh boy . . . we sure didn’t get any information like that from Nokia.”

  “Get it. Also . . . did he or his wife take the baby to the doctor or call a doctor?”

  “No. They did not take the baby to a doctor . . . or call a doctor for the baby.”

  Sohlberg rubbed his chin. “Strange.”

  “You’ll see just how strange Chief Inspector. The boy’s father is an odd duck. Very intelligent and yet seems oddly detached . . . almost absent-minded . . . even dumb and naive on some things.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Yes. I always remember how strange it was to hear him repeat things that his wife had previously mentioned to us . . . his eyes always got a glassy look whenever she was around . . . it was like he was a zombie robot repeating verbatim whatever his wife wanted him to say to us.”

  “Like what?”

  “I just can’t put my finger on it. He was . . . an echo chamber of his wife.”

  “And he’s a scientist type?”

  “Oh yes Chief Inspector . . . he’s definitely Mister Cold Logic . . . a science and math guy.”

  “People like that think the world is just about plugging numbers into some magical formula here or there. . . . Or is he a business type? . . . They think everything in life is profit or loss or that life is all about good management or good marketing.”

  “He’s an egghead and a businessman . . . a Pointdexter.”

  “A what?”

  “A nerd. You know . . . book smart but not street smart.”

  “Yes! This is a man whose naive or stupid enough to lie to his employer about being sick. Then he lies to us about being kept up all night by a sick baby and yet he puts in a day’s work the following day at his home computer and does not call or visit a doctor for his sick baby.”

  “Like I said Chief Inspector . . . he’s an odd duck.”

  “Did the baby’s mother Agnes call or visit a doctor for her sick baby daughter?”

  “No. She took the baby and left her husband alone for a couple of hours . . . from eleven in the morning to two o’clock in the afternoon . . . she drove around with the baby to get the baby’s medicine at a pharmacy. She then went to her workout at the gym . . . with the baby.”

  “She took the baby and left him all alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you take a sick baby in your car to go buy the baby’s medicines when one parent is already staying at home and not going to work? . . . Why would anyone take a sick baby to a gym . . . and drop off the sick baby at the gym’s daycare?”

  “I . . . well at the time no one thought it strange. Both parents made it sound so natural. Now that you mention it . . . it does sound strange indeed.”

  “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “True. We found that she did indeed drive around with the baby looking for medicines.”

  “What’s the proof?”

  “At nine-twelve in the morning we have a credit card purchase by her for candy at a SPAR neighborhood supermarket that is three miles from the school. She claims that the Apotek One pharmacy next door did not have the baby’s medicines. She says that she then drove another four miles and at ten-fifteen we have her credit card purchase for baby diapers at one of the EUROSPAR mega-supermarkets. Fifteen minutes later at ten-thirty she buys the baby’s medicine at a nearby Apotek One with the same credit card.”

  “This sounds to me like proof that she was busy establishing an alibi for herself.”

  “Exactly. There’s too much time that’s unaccounted for her and him. Except for the three credit card purchases at nine-twelve and ten-fifteen and ten-thirty we really have no idea where the stepmother was at . . . especially from noon to one-thirty. The father is even worse since we’re still unsure if he really was on his computer.”

  ”So neither the father or the stepmother can really prove exactly where they were from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon expect for some scattered drugstore purchases she made that morning . . . and whatever occasional computer entries he may have made on his computer throughout the day.”

  “Unfortunately that is the situation Chief Inspector.”

  “Nilsen should have called a press conference and asked for the public’s help that very same day and the next day . . . he or some official spokesperson from headquarters should have asked the public whether they had seen the parents anywhere that Friday or whether they had seen the white pickup or the red sports car at the stores or the school or elsewhere that Friday.”

  “We did ask the public for help . . . but that was three months later . . . when the investigation was stalling.”

  “Nilsen is such a moron! That delay made the request for the public’s help practically worthless. How stupid. People would forget such things three months
after the fact . . . and their memories would be suspect even if they said they remember seeing so and so at a certain day and time.”

  “That was a problem throughout the case. Nilsen always took the parents at their word. He thought that they were as perfect and pure as the first snowflake of winter. He never wanted us to verify or check their statements because ‘They’re good people’ according to him. He called them ‘solid simple folk’.”