Death on Pilot Hill (An Inspector Harald Sohlberg Mystery)

by Jens Amundsen

  “Fascinating,” said Sohlberg as he massaged his increasingly tense neck muscles. Joint pain and muscular spasms plagued his neck whenever he was confronted with a complex case.

  “What’s fascinating Chief Inspector?”

  “The father and stepmother. They have six hours that are . . . for the most part . . . unaccounted for. . . . And the father seems to have a lot more unaccounted for time than the stepmother. He literally has a lot of explaining to do. At least the stepmother has some proof to establish some of her whereabouts when she went out on that medicine-buying trip. He on the other hand has little or nothing to show as to exactly where he was that day and exactly what he was doing those six hours.”

  “Keep in mind Chief Inspector that her medicine-buying trip itself is a mystery. Why would she go to a second store when the first store had the medicine?”

  “Ja. By the way . . . what type of baby medicine are we talking about here?”

  “I . . . well . . . here’s another strange thing that this couple made sound so natural when we first interviewed them.”

  “Together or separate?”

  “Both . . . together and separate.”

  “Not good. Interviews must always be separate.”

  “Ja . . . but in the rush to get basic information Nilsen and the first responding constables took statements from them in each other’s presence.”

  “A huge mistake in this investigation.”

  “Sorry. But as I was saying . . . the Haugens took their sweet time to finally reveal . . . four months after Karl disappeared . . . that the baby’s prescription medicine was for colic and that any over-the-counter remedy would’ve been easy to find and a far cheaper substitute.”

  “What did they say when confronted with this information?”

  “That they do not buy cheap things . . . least of all generic drugs. That they buy only the very best for their children. She even made the very arrogant statement that they don’t eat left-overs.”

  “Interesting. Unfortunately I know people like that.”

  “Wait till you hear this . . . we calculated her total mileage that Friday for her shopping expedition for the baby’s medicine . . . almost forty-five miles for a medicine that she could’ve bought for less than five dollars had she gone for the less expensive over-the-counter substitute.”

  “Whose idea was it for her to go on that crazy shopping trip?”

  “They both take responsibility for it.”

  “Not his idea?”

  “No Chief Inspector. She’s adamant about going though all the motions to establish to the world that they have money to spend. Of course the weird thing is that the father and stepmother dress like high school kids . . . they mostly wear t-shirts and blue jeans and tennis shoes . . . every time I saw him he was in long baggy shorts and sandals.”

  “By the way . . . what role did they take in the search for Karl that Friday and the weeks following?”

  “Again Chief Inspector . . . they are strange people . . . an odd family. Everyone on the force made comments about how the Haugens are the first family that did not pArcticipate in the search for their missing child.”

  “That is unusual . . . the father or the mother or both or other relatives always get involved in the search . . . they go on television and ask for the public’s help. They walk the streets and they post and hand out flyers with pictures. Matter of fact . . . I’ve always looked carefully to see who in the circle of family and friends was not pArcticipating in the search for a missing person.”

  “Ja. People don’t look if they think . . . or know . . . that the missing person is dead.”

  “What about the biological mother?”

  “Maya Engen . . . she lives in Namsos . . . north of Trondheim . . . married to Police Inspector Arvid Engen of the Sør-Trøndelag district.”

  “Really?”

  “Do you know him Chief Inspector?”

  “No. But that’s another interesting twist in this case. Did Karl’s biological mother . . . this Maya Engen . . . look for her missing son?”

  “No. Physically and mentally she could not. She was devastated. . . . She fainted at the news of his disappearance. She collapsed several times after she and her husband came down here the night of June fourth. Maya Engen suffered a great deal . . . unlike the father and the stepmother who seemed rather cool if not lackadaisical about the whole thing.”

  “You’ve personally seen the father and the stepmother after Karl disappeared . . . right?”

  “Ja.”

  “Which one of them would you say was angry or in mourning . . . or grieving over Karl?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “What?” said a surprised Sohlberg. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “I . . . I can’t describe it . . . when you’re with them you feel everything is normal but when you leave them you realize something’s not quite right in that family.”

  “That’s why I’m very interested in focusing on Karl Haugen’s family and friends. Are we done with the first page of your summary?”

  “Ja. I’m ready to start going over the second page.”

  “Good. But we’ll have to do that in the car.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Halden Fengsel. I understand Norway's newest prison is something to behold.”

  “Ja. I’ve seen it on television . . . quite luxurious . . . but I’ve never been there.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Your car or mine?”

  “Neither. We’re taking a marked car that Thorsen’s lending us for today. He already made arrangements for our visit.”

  “Who? . . . Who are we seeing?’

  “The Smiley Face Killer.”

  Chapter 8/Åtte

  AFTERNOON OF 1 YEAR AND 24 DAYS

  AFTER THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4

  Traffic was relatively light before the lunch hour. Normally Sohlberg would have taken the super-fast NSB train down to Halden. The trip would have been a quick one hour forty-five minute ride in pure comfort and a local police constable would have picked them up at the station and taken them to the fengsel. But Sohlberg needed to be free from nosy eavesdropping passengers and more important he needed to spend as much time as possible discussing the investigation and the second page of the summary with Constable Wangelin. Sohlberg had to be fully prepared before he interviewed the family and friends of Karl Haugen.

  “At least we got out before the rush hour traffic,” said Wangelin.

  She put the large Volvo crossover SUV on cruise control at 90 mph as soon as they left the Oslo suburbs behind. They shot down the E-6 highway out of Oslo which runs 352 miles south all the way down south towards the lovely twin cities of Malmö Sweden and Copenhagen Denmark. Less than ten miles separate Halden Prison from the border with Sweden.

  Sohlberg sipped his favorite Farris mineral water. He had an entire case in the backseat. “Ever hear about the Smiley Face Killer?”

  “Vaguely. . . . No. Not really Chief Inspector.”

  “He was active in the seventies and eighties . . . he began killing when he was real young . . . in the late sixties . . . kept right up until captured in eighty-nine. He was Norway’s worst. Then came the Lommemannen . . . the Pocket Man. Heard of him?”

  “Oh him? Ja. I’ve heard about the Pocket Man . . . molested an estimated four hundred boys . . . raped dozens over a thirty year period before his capture in two thousand eight. But the Smiley Face Killer . . . he doesn’t sound familiar at all. That was so long ago. I wasn’t even born in the seventies.”

  “Well . . . I wasn’t in the force until April of eighty-nine . . . the Smiley Face Killer was captured in October of that year. But I still knew about the Smiley Face Killer.”

  “Sorry Chief Inspector but that’s ancient history.”

  Sohlberg grew depressed over Constable Wangelin’s blank look and comments. He suddenly felt old and tired. He was only 20 years older than Wangelin but she made him feel like an
outdated relic of the past. Sohlberg had a hard time being told that his frame of reference belonged to ancient history.

  “Are you alright Chief Inspector?”

  “Ja. Just thinking. Interesting how time fades the public’s memory as well as that of the police force . . . at one time the Smiley Face Killer was big news . . . as big as Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer in America or the Butcher of Rostov in Russia.”

  “Who?”

  “Andrei Chikatilo . . . the Smiley Face Killer’s counterpart in Russia from seventy-eight to ninety. . . both killers would move their rape-and-kill frenzies to different and faraway locations whenever they sensed that they had stirred up a hornet’s nest of investigators with their spectacular murders. . . . They both got very good at switching back and forth from local murders to faraway atrocities. Even at the height of the repressive and all-controlling Soviet police state Chikatilo would find clever ways to travel to Moscow and distant Russian Republics on his state factory job to kill dozens of women and children whenever he got the police and public riled up in Rostov over his killing sprees.”

  “He was able to move around so freely to kill in a dictatorship like the old communist Russia?”

  “Ja. . . .”

  “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” said Constable Wangelin while shaking her head.

  “Chikatilo raped . . . killed . . . and cannibalized at least fifty-eight women and children . . . and not always in that order. He’d torture them and cut out the women’s uteruses and the boy’s parts and eat them. He always blamed his depraved conduct for what he and his family suffered as ethnic Ukrainians with Stalin and the genocidal communists in the nineteen thirties. I imagine you’ve heard about the famine that Stalin intentionally created in the Ukraine?”

  “No . . . I’m sorry . . . not really.”

  “Stalin made sure that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians died like fleas . . . many people started taking children off the streets and eating them to survive. Chikatilo was traumatized by his mother’s obsession over the possibility that he’d get kidnaped and then killed and eaten.”

  “Unbelievable what men do.”

  “Ja . . . Constable Wangelin. Men and governments.”

  “True.”

  “I mentioned Chikatilo because I’ve always thought that criminals reflect their families and country and society and the times. It’s too bad that they don’t teach more at the Academy about the criminal mind.”

  “Ja. It’s all about forensic science nowadays.”

  “The Academy doesn’t train officers properly. They just don’t want to invest the time and effort. You see Constable Wangelin . . . to know the criminal mind you have to study real-life cases. Only by truly knowing the criminal mind can you be truly effective as an investigator.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Take the Smiley Face Killer . . . Anton Rønning. We had no evidence other than some circumstantial evidence that Rønning was the killer. Of course this is before DNA analysis. Anyway . . . it took one man . . . Inspector Lars Eliassen . . . nine days of interrogation to break the Smiley Face Killer.”

  “Nine days?”

  “Inspector Eliassen was able to do that because he knew how to get inside the criminal mind thanks to his superb interview and interrogation skills. That and he was a darn good profiler.”

  “Chief Inspector . . . do you believe in profilers?”

  “Yes and no. Sometimes they’re helpful in an investigation if the police are stumped or have little or no creative thinking. Otherwise profilers are best used to help detectives prepare for interrogations that break down the suspect.”

  “I’ve not heard that before . . . the Academy instructors promised we’d be taught the best and most modern techniques.”

  “I guess I’m old-fashioned after all . . . I mean . . . if the police are not good profilers then they’re incompetent idiots no? . . . If you have a violent rape . . . do you stop and question the twenty-year old man who’s a violent ex-con? . . . Or the ninety-year old woman who’s barely walking with a cane?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Suspect profiling and interrogation techniques are what Inspector Eliassen taught me. . . . He always said that every good police officer must be a good profiler and excellent at interrogation . . . two sides of the same coin so to speak.”

  “Who’s this Eliassen?”

  “A small town police officer. He spent years and years on the trail of Anton Rønning . . . who by the way had twice been caught early in his career of crime and named as a prime suspect but released by the incompetent local police in Oslo and Trondheim.”

  “Where’s this Inspector Eliassen now?”

  “He died a few years ago. I miss him . . . he taught me a lot. Anyway he was a genius at interrogating.”

  “How did he catch Rønning?”

  “For quite some time Eliassen had Anton Rønning on his short list of suspects for sex crimes in Eliassen’s district. Then he got a lucky break. Rønning crashed into a light pole when he hurriedly left the scene of one of his molestation victims. Eliassen seized the opportunity and locked Anton Rønning up on a minor traffic charge for destruction of public property. . . . Eliassen then just kept interrogating Anton Rønning until he caught him in all these lies and inconsistencies.”

  “That’s impressive!”

  “Inspector Eliassen was known for solving impossible-to-solve cases just by interrogating and breaking the suspect down without torture or physical pressure. This Eliassen . . . he was a master at interrogation . . . out of one hundred interrogations he had only three suspects who refused to confess.”

  “That’s pretty good. Too bad the Academy doesn’t teach his techniques.”

  “Last time I looked at their curriculum I saw that the Academy . . . and the force . . . are playing around with this silly stuff about community policing . . . detectives eating ethnic food at Asian restaurants or listening to rap hip hop music with African teenagers. Seems that policing in Norway is now all about touchy-feely political correctness and feel-good public relations.”

  “Perhaps Chief Inspector. But maybe it’s because effective policing is now based on all the advances in DNA and forensic crime investigation. . . . Don’t forget those advances Chief Inspector.”

  “Forensics are important and sometimes the only thing to go on . . . but nothing beats good profiling and interrogation techniques. Too bad the Academy believes all that junk about hiring psychologists and psychiatrists as profilers when the cop on the beat or the detective on the case should be the profiler. Of course I can see the love affair with profilers . . . they are very useful in making excellent American movies and television series.”

  Wangelin chortled. “So what happened with Eliassen and the serial killer?”

  “Anton Rønning would not break down and confess . . . despite a lot of psychological pressure put on him during the nine days. But Eliassen broke him by the end of day nine. He does this by questioning and talking to Rønning every day at the little local jailhouse . . . until Rønning breaks down. Eliassen makes the pedophile killer realize that by confessing he has a chance to avoid the death penalty overseas in death penalty countries where he raped and killed children. The killer also sees that he can stay in Norway and probably not get extradited if he’s deemed insane. That way he can spend the rest of his life explaining his story to psychiatrists who might eventually cure and release him to enjoy his life and wife and adult children and grandchildren.”

  “Chief Inspector. It’s always a shock to me how even the most hardened criminals at one point or another in their life of crime always expect or demand or beg for mercy.”

  “Nine-nine percent always ask for the mercy and compassion they refused their victims. One my colleagues in America . . . Alec Mikesell the Chief Homicide Detective in Salt Lake City Utah . . . once shared with me this bit of wisdom:

  “‘Justice must always be satisfied and yet mercy is needed to balance the scales
because sometimes justice blindly delivered is an injustice by itself.’

  “That’s pretty good. . . . So what exactly made the Smiley Face Killer confess?”

  “Eliassen knows that his suspect is a physical coward and terrified of winding up in any prison here or overseas with inmates who might not be as tolerant as many judges are about child molesters or child rapists or child killers. Rønning fears the rape and the torture and the death that he so freely imparted.”

  “Typical.”