The Land of Dreams (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  Lance could hear her going out to the hall and then climbing the stairs to the second floor. He grabbed the mug from the table and took a few gulps of coffee. It was actually quite good. Then he heard a door open upstairs. After a few seconds the volume dropped. He thought about what he’d told Tammy, that she and Andy needed to look out for Chrissy. It was actually just the best excuse he was able to think of at the moment, to explain why he’d come over to talk to his brother. But now he wondered whether there might be some truth to it after all. Not that it was the reason for his visit, but they needed to be extra vigilant with Chrissy because there might be a murderer on the loose in the area. That wasn’t something he’d thought of before. Up until now he hadn’t really thought about the fact that the person who had killed the Norwegian might be a threat to other people. Not since he’d stood there in the woods, staring down at the naked corpse, the bashed-in skull. Not since he stood there in that swarm of flies. At the time, he’d had the feeling that whoever had done it presented an overriding threat to him personally. And he might be killed there and then. But a few minutes later the other Norwegian had turned up again, and Lance had taken charge of the situation. Then the sheriff had arrived with his team and taken over. And now the case was in the hands of the FBI and Inspector Eirik Nyland.

  While this whole development was under way, it had never once occurred to Lance that he or anyone else might be in danger because the killer was still on the loose. But that was what he was thinking now. Because he didn’t believe that Hauglie had killed his friend. At least, that was what he’d said when Nyland wanted to know his opinion. And if Hauglie was innocent, that meant a killer was still out there somewhere. So it would be best to keep an eye on all the kids. He decided that he needed to call Mary and ask her to be extra strict about not letting Jimmy go out alone. He was probably being overcautious, but better safe than sorry, Lance thought. And he decided to phone her later that evening.

  Suddenly the music was turned up again. It sounded even louder than a few minutes ago. He heard Tammy slam the door to Chrissy’s room and stomp down the stairs. When she came into the living room, she had calmed down a bit. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray, meticulously grinding it out with her thumb, as she shook her head and tried to smile at the episode.

  “Damn that kid!” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like. Just wait. In a few years you’ll have to go through it yourself.”

  “I know,” said Lance, trying to sound sympathetic.

  “But maybe boys aren’t as bad,” Tammy went on. She directed a scowl at the ceiling, as if she could see right through the wooden beams and into her daughter’s room.

  “It’s probably just her age,” said Lance.

  Tammy sat down on the sofa with a groan. “It’s more than her age, let me tell you,” she said. “That girl is . . . I don’t know . . . ”

  Lance thought she was going to cry. He’d actually never seen Tammy like this before. But then, he hadn’t spent much time with her over the past few years.

  She picked up the cigarette pack from under the table and lit up again. The bluish smoke curled lazily in the sunlight. In the background the game show on TV had started up after a commercial break. A middle-aged woman was ecstatically jumping up and down as she covered her face with her hands. Lance was glad that he didn’t have to listen to her. He was trying to think of something friendly to say to Tammy when they both heard the front door open.

  It took a few seconds before Andy was standing in the doorway. He looked from Lance to Tammy and then back again. “Hmm . . . ,” he said.

  Lance waited for him to say something else, but he just stood there, staring at them. He had on worn jeans and a T-shirt. On his head was an old Minnesota Twins cap. He looked exactly like what he was: a man who had just come back from working in the woods. Again his gaze shifted from Lance to Tammy and back. Lance noticed that this created some sort of connection between him and Tammy. As if it were them against Andy.

  “Lance wants to talk to you about Chrissy,” she told her husband.

  He noticed a change in his brother’s face, something that appeared and then quickly vanished. What was that? As if a wave of something had moved across his features. Tammy didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Lance knew he’d seen that happen before, but he couldn’t remember when or where.

  “Since we might have a murderer loose on the North Shore, we need to keep better watch over our kids,” he said. “That’s basically what I wanted to say. Maybe you shouldn’t be allowing her to go out in the evening right now. Not that I think there’s any reason to panic, but you can never be too careful, right?”

  Finally Andy stepped forward from the doorway and came into the living room. He sat down in the other easy chair, raised his cap, and ran his hand through his sweaty, thinning hair. Then he put his cap back on.

  “Chrissy isn’t going to be out in the evenings anymore,” he said. He suddenly seemed to become aware of the music blaring from upstairs. He tipped his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “As you can hear, we’d know if she wasn’t home.”

  Tammy was now perched on the edge of the sofa, her back straight as she fumbled nervously with her cigarette. Her eyes were fixed on the TV screen, which was showing a commercial for lawnmowers.

  “Does she have any plans for what she’s going to do after she graduates from high school?” asked Lance.

  “No. But you know how kids are.” Andy threw out his hands. “I’m sure she’ll find . . . her niche.”

  “She just needs to get a job,” said Tammy. “It would be a waste of time for her to go to college.”

  Lance took a gulp of the now lukewarm coffee. He set the mug back on the table and looked at his brother. There was an alert expression in his blue eyes. Maybe also a slight wariness. Lance didn’t look away, as he normally would have done. He felt that there was an opportunity here, in that look. An opening. Could he ask Andy what he was doing at the cross that night? What would happen if he asked the question? That much was obvious. He would deny it. Andy would deny ever being there, no matter how Lance pressed the point. If it were something Andy could have talked about, he would have already mentioned it. In any case, he wouldn’t have come over to the ranger station the way he had done, to lie in the presence of the whole staff. And since he’d already started lying, he would keep doing that here. Besides, Lance would have played his best hand the minute he asked that question. Then Andy would know his brother had seen him that night.

  “If she gets herself a job, then at least we’ll know where she is. Right?” said Tammy. “You never know with college students.”

  Andy turned to look at her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Chrissy is sharp as a tack. Of course she’s going to college.”

  Lance could see that the moment had passed. The opening that had been there between Andy and him was now gone.

  “And what do you know about it?” said Tammy.

  “About what?”

  “What it takes to get an education.”

  “Just as much as you do,” said Andy.

  Lance didn’t have the patience to sit there and listen to the two of them squabbling. He cleared his throat and managed to catch Andy’s attention. “So you came from the north when you left work, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you happen to notice a strange guy walking along the road?”

  Andy frowned.

  “My guess is that you would have run into him a little north of Silver Cliff.”

  “I don’t recall seeing anybody along the road. What do you mean by ‘strange’?”

  Tammy got up, her back rigid with annoyance, and headed for the kitchen without saying a word.

  “I don’t really know, but he looked sort of like an old-fashioned tramp,” said Lance.

  Andy shook his head. “No, I didn’t see anyone like that. I don’t think
there was anybody walking along the road at all. Is it important?”

  “No, no. I was just wondering who he was. I’ve never seen him before. No, it’s just the cop in me being curious.”

  The front door slammed again as Tammy left the house. The two brothers exchanged glances. Andy grimaced in resignation. Soon they heard her start up the car and drive off.

  “So how’s it going with the investigation?” he asked. “The homicide case, I mean. Everybody’s talking about it. Have they found out anything yet?”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with it,” said Lance. “I’m just a witness, since I was the one who . . . who found the body.” He looked his brother in the eye as he spoke these words. Andy looked away. “But as a cop, I can’t avoid hearing rumors,” he added.

  “Really?” said his brother.

  “Uh-huh. Police rumors. But of course you realize that I’m not allowed to discuss such matters.”

  “Sure, but . . . a murderer is on the loose, as you said, and a man has to think about his family.”

  “I understand that,” said Lance. “But it’s a strict rule . . . the vow of silence that I, as a police officer—”

  “Did they find the murder weapon yet?”

  “To be honest, I have no idea. But there’s one little secret that I can tell you, as long as you promise to keep it between us.”

  Andy nodded.

  “From what I understand, they now think there was a third person at the crime scene,” said Lance. “Someone saw a car in the vicinity. At the parking lot near the cross, I think. But as I said, I’ve only heard rumors, and they need to be taken with a grain of salt.”

  Andy leaned forward, propping his elbows on his thighs. “A third person? I thought it was his friend who did it.”

  “In this case, apparently we can’t be sure about anything,” said Lance.

  He noticed that his brother had that strange expression on his face again. The same one that had appeared and then vanished so quickly when Tammy said that Lance had come over to talk about their daughter. He knew he’d seen that look before, but he still couldn’t remember where or when.

  13

  EIRIK NYLAND WAS SITTING AT A WINDOW TABLE in the South of the Border café in Grand Marais, gulping down his second cup of coffee of the morning. He had a dull headache, as he always did whenever he hadn’t had enough sleep, and he’d forgotten the bottle of Excedrin in his hotel room. On the plate in front of him were the remains of an omelet. Across the street was the Grand Marais Liquor Store and Hank’s Hardware. It was seven in the morning on Tuesday, July 1.

  Just before five he’d awakened from a dream that he’d had many times before. The details weren’t always exactly the same, but the dream always followed the same general pattern. Eirik’s two daughters, Elsa and Marie, who are eleven and thirteen, respectively, are walking down the road toward the bus stop, and he’s standing in the living room, watching them. He’s home in Asker, and everything is completely normal. The two girls are headed off somewhere together. Sometimes to handball practice. Other times they’re going to visit their grandparents in Drammen. Or they’re going to a movie. This time they are going to band practice. Neither of them has ever played in the school marching band, but in his dream they do. So he is watching them walk to the bus stop, headed to band practice. As he stands there, a car slowly drives past the house, moving in the same direction as the two girls. A slow-moving car always appears in this dream. And always driving in the same direction as Elsa and Marie. Yet each time it comes as a complete surprise to him. He watches the car move slowly past. It’s so quiet that he can hear dirt and gravel crunching under the tires. The driver looks up at the man in the window. Nyland meets his eye. It doesn’t last more than a couple of seconds. Yet he knows that he has seen this man before. And just as the car has almost caught up with the two girls, he remembers where he knows the man from. He was a suspect in a homicide case, but the police never managed to find enough evidence to charge him. This murder case exists only in the dream, but in that context it is utterly real. It has to do with two girls who disappeared. Later they were found, sexually assaulted and killed. He runs out to warn his daughters. He has no shoes on. In the dream he is always standing in his stocking feet on the road outside their house in Asker, looking toward the bus stop. But the car and the two girls are gone.

  He never woke up screaming or sweating from this dream. But he had the feeling that something inside of him had been destroyed. This was the only time when Eirik Nyland had the sense that his work wasn’t good for him. Somewhere inside, it was taking its toll, as evidenced by the recurrent dream.

  On this occasion, as usual, he found it impossible to go back to sleep. He lay in bed for a while, listening to the soothing sound of Lake Superior. He was so far away from Vibeke and the girls. But then he calculated that it was already noon in Norway, so he phoned home to talk to Vibeke. She and the girls were just about to leave for the cabin. He’d forgotten that they were going to Lillesand this week. He also spoke briefly to his daughters. After hearing their voices, he immediately felt better. Once again he felt connected to the normal world.

  Then he got up, took a shower, and dressed before going down to the lobby to find out if it was possible to have breakfast. But it was still an hour until they started serving. The desk clerk suggested that he try the café in Grand Marais that opened for breakfast at 5:00 a.m., so Eirik got into his rental car, a red Subaru Forester, and drove over there.

  Now he was sitting in the café, annoyed with himself for forgetting the Excedrin back at the hotel. The headache wasn’t letting up, even though it wasn’t really bad yet. If it didn’t go away, he’d have to buy some more painkillers as soon as the drugstore opened. He thought he’d seen one on his way into town.

  There was something slightly unreal about sitting here and looking out at the street, nearly deserted at this hour of the morning, in a small town in Minnesota. Unreal, but at the same time pleasant. On the paneled walls all around him were old advertising posters and framed photographs of proud men holding up fish to show off what they’d caught. Most of the pictures must have hung there for decades. He guessed that the place had to be from the forties or fifties. He slid the palm of his hand over the worn vinyl of the booth as he thought about the steady stream of customers that must have passed through the café since it first opened. All those local residents who were now dead. A couple of generations of grouchy old men. Maybe young men had passed this way in the sixties and seventies, on their way to Canada, to hide out during the Vietnam War. He knew that many had fled to Canada for that reason, and he could easily picture this café as the place for one last American meal before they crossed the border, not knowing when they’d be able to return home. But criminals on the lam must have also passed through here, he thought. Men who had left their own lives and that of others in ruins. And that immediately got him thinking about who had killed Georg Lofthus.

  He was leaning toward the idea that Bjørn Hauglie, overcome with jealousy and despair because of his lover’s approaching marriage, had lost control and killed Lofthus. The extreme injuries that the dead man had suffered indicated that the murder had been a crime of passion. And so far they hadn’t found any evidence of a third person being at or near the crime scene.

  That was the present status of the case on this Tuesday morning, July 1, six days almost to the hour after Lance Hansen had found Georg Lofthus’s badly beaten corpse near Baraga’s Cross. They had spent much of the ensuing time obtaining information about the movements and activities of the two Norwegians. And even though Nyland’s main responsibility was to handle anything having to do with Norway, he had gone out into the field several times along with Lecuyer and Fries. They went to cafés, motels, and various stores that the two canoeing enthusiasts might have visited. Nyland had the impression that the sudden appearance of a Norwegian police officer in the North Shore area was big news. Other than the motel clerk,
Garry Yuhala, at the Whispering Pines, most of the people he’d spoken to were of Norwegian ancestry. And they were more than willing to talk to him. A few even seemed reluctant to let him go. Because of this local interest in all things Norwegian, there were a lot of people who remembered the two Norwegian tourists. But there was nothing in the information the FBI had gleaned that could move the investigation forward. At least not yet. No one had noticed anything special about the young men. Except that they were Norwegian, of course. And in good spirits. Several people had made a point of mentioning this. On the other hand, nobody could recall seeing the Norwegians with anyone else. It was always just the two of them.

  On the basis of this information, Lecuyer and Nyland had formed quite a good picture of the Norwegians’ movements. But not included were the hours after they left the Whispering Pines for the last time, and up until Georg Lofthus’s death. For that time frame they had only Hauglie’s own explanation to go on, and they didn’t trust what he’d told them. On the contrary. Hauglie was their only suspect. They had agreed to arrest him and charge him with the murder if it turned out that the samples taken from the crime scene contained DNA solely from the two Norwegians. According to Lecuyer, they could expect to receive the results of the tests sometime during the week. No matter what, Nyland would have to stay until they had a chance to interrogate Bjørn Hauglie again. So far they had interviewed him only once. Before they talked to him again, they wanted to be one hundred percent sure that it was his semen they had found in the stomach of his friend. Apparently they’d know the results of that test by tomorrow. It was a simple test that would be done in Duluth. After it was determined that the semen belonged to Hauglie, they would confront him with this news, and then he’d have to tell them the truth about the canoeing vacation. And this was regardless of whether another person’s DNA was found at the crime scene or not. No matter what, Bjørn Hauglie had withheld important information regarding the case—he hadn’t reported the fact that the two men were lovers. Provided, of course, that it wasn’t another man’s semen that had been found in Lofthus’s body. But they considered this possibility to be purely theoretical. So once this issue was resolved, Nyland had to see to it that Hauglie told the truth.