If Hamid got away today and realized that he was in hot water, he would destroy all the evidence and lay low for the next year. Months of investigations would be wasted, and the Downtown Gang would take even more precautions and be even more difficult to nail.
Milo stopped twenty meters outside the courtyard to Hamid’s building, on the other side of the street, and quickly looked around. Not a task force member in sight, but that was also the point.
With his eyes fixed on the building, he suddenly became aware of something moving on the roof. He had a brief glimpse of a dark figure on a balcony, and Milo noticed that a roof window was open. A passerby bumped him without stopping and therefore did not hear the little “scusa” that automatically came out of Milo.
He moved closer to the building, making a rapid zigzag between young people with backpacks and shopping bags. He looked up toward the building again and had a better view now. This time there was no doubt. A man was in the process of creeping from a loft balcony over toward the roof terrace on the neighboring building.
And it was not a policeman.
Milo did not want to lose sight of him and called Guttormsen. It rang only once before going to voice mail.
Damn!
Guttormsen had declined the call.
“This is Milo, I’ve just seen a male on the roof in the vicinity of Hamid’s apartment, and I doubt that it was one of your people. I’ll follow him,” an irritated Milo spoke into the phone and hung up.
He remained standing next to the building façade and followed the figure with his eyes. He had worked his way over onto the roof terrace, after which he disappeared from sight. Milo fixed his gaze on the entry, and a minute later Reeza Hamid walked out onto Hegdehaugsveien from the exit door in a building fifteen meters from his own entry.
He started walking toward the city center, and Milo did the same. Between them the trolley, scooters and taxis were racing. Milo had still not made contact with Guttormsen on the cell phone, and when he saw Hamid starting to cross the street at Parkveien, he decided.
Milo was on the other side of the street, and remained standing at the crosswalk with the phone against his ear, pretending he was talking. He looked like the perfect financial analyst, not a detective doing surveillance.
Hamid approached and looked around a little nervously, but his gait was determined. He looked strong and fit, and Milo knew that he would have to surprise him to have any chance at all of holding him until the task force arrived. He waited until Hamid was a couple of meters away.
“I’ll ask a guy here, wait a moment,” said Milo loudly and artificially into the phone and took a step toward Hamid, who automatically slowed down.
“Do you know if Industrigata is farther up this way?” he asked with his eyes directed at Hamid, but still with the phone to his ear.
Hamid stopped a moment.
“Uh, I think you have to go farther—”
While he spoke, Milo raised the elbow on the arm he was holding the phone with, and swung it with all his force at Hamid. His elbow struck him in the temple and pushed him off balance, but not enough to knock him to the ground. Quickly Milo threw himself against him, pulling his torso with him so that the muscled man lost his balance with his weight on only one foot. Milo made a quick leg takedown, Hamid fell to the asphalt and Milo crouched down by his side and put a control hold on his arm and wrist.
Reeza Hamid moaned in pain, but not nearly as much as Milo had expected. He realized that this body must have taken in a few ampoules of steroids, and Milo sat on his back while he maintained the control hold. He was about to fish his cell phone out again when he felt himself being seized under the arms and raised backward, ending up on his back on the asphalt. Suddenly a man was straddling him, holding his wrists while another tried to hold his legs.
In the corner of his eye he saw Hamid get up and rush off like a sprinter from the starting block.
“You don’t attack people on the street like that!” the man sitting on him shouted.
He was in his thirties, dressed like a student, and Milo smelled alcohol on his breath.
“I’m a police officer!” he hissed, but instead of letting go, that seemed to irritate the other man even more.
“Fucking racist pig!” he shouted.
Milo felt the aggression explode and kicked at him, pushed him away and got on his feet. Hamid now had a head start of at least a hundred meters.
Milo caught sight of a community bike that had fallen down on the sidewalk.
“Is this yours?” he asked the man who had been sitting on him.
He got a nod in response and jumped onto the bike. Far up the street he saw Hamid round the corner and disappear down Pilestredet. Milo pedaled as fast as he could, closing the gap.
On Pilestredet he saw Hamid hail a taxi, which quickly started moving. Milo was only thirty meters behind, but the distance was increasing now. He pedaled like crazy.
The taxi drove toward Ring 1. Milo crossed the trolley tracks and sidewalk, cutting through students on their way to and from the high school. For a moment he considered stopping and calling Guttormsen, but then the taxi would be gone for good. He had one more hope left: the roadwork that was always going on in central Oslo.
And sure enough, on his way across Ring 1, after the turnoff to the Sentrum parking building, he saw how the traffic suddenly started moving more slowly, down to a snail’s pace through the Vaterland Tunnel that ended up at Oslo Plaza.
He tossed aside the bike and jogged alongside the cars. There he caught sight of the taxi.
The phone vibrated.
“Milo, what the hell—”
“Entrance to Vaterland Tunnel in the direction of Plaza. I’ll have him in a minute,” he said and hung up.
An oncoming truck honked at him, but he paid no attention to it and crouched down while he moved toward the taxi.
He tore open the door on the left side and took hold of a perplexed Reeza Hamid. With an exertion of strength he pulled him out of the car, but then Hamid landed a kick that sent Milo over into the other lane. He heard tires squeal, and then a truck approaching too fast to be able to stop. With his left leg he kicked and tried to jump away, and avoided getting hit head-on. But he wasn’t able to get clear of the side mirror. It struck him on the shoulder, and it felt like someone had hit him with a baseball bat. The collision sent him right to the pavement.
He cursed in pain and got on his feet. Ahead of him, in the tunnel opening, he saw the outline of a limping Hamid. The adrenaline that pumped through his body kept Milo from feeling the pain he should have felt after the collision and fall, and in a leap he was after the Pakistani. The traffic had stopped, it was safer to run now and, after a few seconds, he threw himself over Hamid with all his weight. He moaned, and Milo quickly put a choke hold on him while making sure that no one approached to try to pull him off again. One of the drivers had summoned courage and got out of the taxi. Now he approached slowly.
“Don’t come closer! I’m a plainclothes policeman! Call one-one-two now!” Milo shouted authoritatively, holding Hamid’s neck as if in a vise.
But the words were superfluous. Suddenly he heard sirens, and shortly thereafter, two unmarked police cars stopped by the tunnel opening. Guttormsen got out of one of the cars, and three of the men from the task force picked up Hamid as Milo released his hold.
He stood there panting heavily while he tried to straighten his dirty, torn suit. His shoulder ached.
“Good, Cavalli! Someone on the inside must have tipped him off. He slipped out just in time.”
“I told you he was dangerous, but forgot to emphasize that he’s smart too,” said Milo, trying in vain to massage his shoulder as he stood in the middle of the road.
Guttormsen stared up at him with a grin.
“Smart and dangerous. I’ll be damned! Didn’t matter, though. So are you.”
SATURDAY
2
Milo woke up with a start, pain shooting through his shoulder,
arms and torso. He rolled up into a sitting position on the bed, and looked at the blue and red marks on his body.
Eight o’clock was too early to get up on a Saturday morning, but he needed a shower. He padded toward the bathroom while he stretched his arms and carefully tried to warm up his muscles a little.
Twenty minutes later he went downstairs to the kitchen and made a rejuvenating espresso.
Outside the Briskeby trolley clunked past. Oslo was, little by little, coming to life. The wind blew leaves and raindrops against the window. He went over to the thermostat and turned the heat up a few more degrees in the kitchen, living room and library. The loft level with the bedrooms, office and guestroom that he used for exercise he left alone. He liked it a little cooler there.
He turned on his cell phone and sat and browsed the weekend edition of Dagens Næringsliv while he had a bowl of cereal. He had no plans other than resting after several months of intense work. Maybe dinner with some friends, but he had accepted with a clear reservation in case something unforeseen turned up.
The cell phone let out a beep. There was a new message in voice mail. It was from Sørensen, chief inspector at the Oslo police agency.
“Milo, it’s Sørensen. Call me,” was all he said.
The message had been left just before eight o’clock that morning. Milo returned his call.
“Hi, Milo, thanks for calling me back. Am I disturbing your weekend?” Sørensen asked.
“No, I’m up. Having a coffee and skimming through the newspaper.”
“Probably one of those teeny-tiny finger bowls, that you finish in one gulp. Lasts long enough to read one headline before your cup is empty.”
“Quality ahead of quantity,” Milo countered and could hear Sørensen coughing out a cloud of smoke on the other end.
They had not seen each other for a few months, and Milo had missed the bald, blustering chief inspector.
“Nice, Milo. Enjoy your quality. But what are you doing later?”
“No plans.”
“Fine, I need your help. Come down to the police station when you’re done with breakfast, please.”
“All right,” Milo replied.
It would not occur to him not to show up when the man who had saved his life six months earlier asked him to.
* * *
The black Abarth model of the popular Fiat 500 series purred out of the garage. The quiet Saturday streets meant that he could park outside the police station on Grønland seven minutes later.
Shortly after the guard let him in, Sørensen came tottering toward him. The suit was the same worn one, the tie poorly knotted and his head just as shiny.
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” he said.
“No problem. What’s going on?”
“Come on up. I’ll explain.”
They walked toward the elevator, where Sørensen fished out his snuffbox and shoved two pouches under his upper lip. On the sixth floor they got off and made their way to Sørensen’s office. A desk was pushed in against an overfilled bookcase in front of which were two chairs. Sørensen pointed toward one of them and sat down behind the desk. The desktop was covered with papers and coffee cups, and on the surrounding workstations the screensavers on the PCs were the only signs of life. Saturday morning was not exactly the busiest time at the police station.
Sørensen ran one hand over his head and tilted his chair back a little.
“Damned touchy case, Milo. Damned touchy.”
He had dark rings under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept the past few nights. There was a touch of sadness in his eyes as he twirled a snuffbox in his hand.
“Tell me.”
“You can read this quickly,” Sørensen answered, giving him a file folder.
Milo leaned back in the chair and suppressed a moan as it pressed against his battered back muscles. The content of the folder was sparse. Four sheets with two pictures on each of them, a report from the homicide section at the Oslo police department only a page and a half long and a letter from what must be the corresponding department at the Rome police.
Milo held up the sheet with Polizia di Stato at the top of the letterhead and the signature of a Commissario A. Benedetti at the bottom, and aimed an inquisitive glance at Sørensen.
“Read the report first. Look at the pictures. I’ll explain later,” the chief inspector said, brushing him aside.
Milo looked at the pictures. They showed a woman lying on a made-up double bed. Her arms were lying limply at her sides, while one leg was extended over the edge of the bed. The tip of her foot pointed down toward the light gray carpet. He estimated her age at about thirty. The light hair was spread in a semicircle around her head, as if she was drifting in calm water.
The woman was dead, and the red marks around her throat revealed that it had probably happened from someone putting both hands around it and squeezing with all their strength until her windpipe was crushed.
He looked at the report. Ingrid Tollefsen. Thirty-one years old, originally from Kolbotn, now residing in Majorstua. Employed at the Oslo office of the American pharmaceutical company Forum Healthcare. Educated at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, in Trondheim.
Sørensen cleared his throat and rocked back and forth in the chair.
“Norwegian girl killed in Rome this week,” he said.
“I see that. What was she doing there?”
“Attending some conference or other. Something in pharmaceuticals.”
“What happened?” asked Milo while he skimmed the rest of the report. It did not provide many answers.
“We don’t know that much yet. We’ve had some … linguistic challenges, you might say.”
“So now you want me to step in and translate?”
“Well, not just that, Milo. But hold on a little. I have to explain. This is damned touchy.”
“Yes, you said that.”
Sørensen spit the snuff pouches into a coffee cup and rolled over to the window. He opened it, fired up a cigarette, and blew the smoke in the direction of Grønland. But the wind blew it back, and Milo smelled the odor of tobacco as it seeped into the room.
“Ingrid Tollefsen was killed on Monday evening. Sometime between eight and midnight. There is no sign of a break-in. There is a lot that suggests she knew the killer.”
“Or that she had just gotten acquainted with him?”
“You’re thinking about a one-night stand?”
Milo nodded while he looked at the pictures.
“Nice-looking woman. I bet she couldn’t walk a block in Rome without getting looks and comments.”
“I’m sure that’s right. But, based on the e-mails we’ve received from the Italian police, the killer has not left behind a single trace. No sign of sexual intercourse either. There is nothing whatsoever that indicates panic, rape or robbery. On the contrary, there’s something calculated about the whole thing,” said Sørensen.
Milo glanced at the pictures again.
“You’ll assess that better than me. I’m still just a lousy Financial Crimes investigator, and I don’t really know—”
“Does her surname ring any bells? Tollefsen?” Sørensen interrupted him.
“No. Should it?”
“Probably not. It’s not exactly an unusual name.”
The chief inspector plucked the cigarette butt in an arc out the window before rolling back into position behind his desk. He put his elbows on the desktop and fixed his eyes on Milo.
“But you do remember the Ingieråsen case?”
Milo nodded.
“Obviously. There isn’t anyone in all of Norway who doesn’t,” he answered.
3
It was right before summer vacation two years earlier that the two homicides—or executions, as the press put it—at Ingieråsen Middle School in Oppegård municipality were carried out.
Even if what really happened was not a hundred-percent clear, technical findings and witness statements had drawn a picture of a gruesome i
ncident: two killed, multiple perpetrators, but so far no one convicted.
Two murders that shocked an entire nation and which, for lack of a conviction, lay there like an infected abscess.
It was assumed that the young teacher was shot first. After that, the perpetrators killed the fifteen-year-old student. The boy had obviously gotten in over his head, and the police had no doubt that it was a group of Pakistani boys and young men who were behind it. Probably heavily involved in narcotics and other organized crime.
The boy had reportedly been an increasing source of worry at the school, without belonging to a gang, and in the past year had been a regular at a gym. It was not ruled out that he had started taking steroids, and that the killing could be connected to that environment. Either as a reprisal or simply a manifestation of blind, uncontrolled violence. A manifestation of an aggressiveness and hatred that was oiled on the steroid-laden bodies of the young second-generation immigrants who found no sense of belonging other than in the gang.
The teacher had been working late, and must have arrived just as the situation came to a head. At risk to his own life, he tried to intervene. Tried to convince. Tried to plead. The result was that he was shot in the head. Executed on the school grounds where he worked and tried to create a safe, problem-free school day for those who found themselves in the transitional stage between childhood and youth.
The student had turned around and started running, but was struck by three shots in the back.
Witnesses who heard the shots and approached the school described a gang of seven to ten individuals who calmly walked toward their cars and then disappeared. One witness did, in fact, tell that one of them stayed behind a few minutes and coldly and calmly took the time to assure himself that both were dead—he had leaned over the young boy—before leaving.
“I was the investigation leader on the case, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since,” said Sørensen with his gaze directed at Milo.
The odor of tobacco was still hanging in the room, and something reminiscent of bitter insufficiency marked the voice of the experienced and controversial policeman.
“I remember the story about the teacher. He was popular. Hailed as a hero. Because he intervened, because he wasn’t passive. Henriksen, wasn’t that his name?” asked Milo.
The Oslo Conspiracy Page 2
