The Fifth Element

by Jorgen Brekke

  The Music Box case was still in the news a week after it was resolved. A young girl had disappeared, and it took a long time to identify the perpetrator. Odd had taken the whole thing personally. He couldn’t sleep at night. He was driven by everything that always drives a homicide detective: a sense of justice, a desire for confirmation and insight, fear, revulsion, and the hope of re-establishing some sense of order in a world that was falling apart. Odd was always fighting a battle against his own failing memory, a battle he might one day lose. All of this had consumed him completely. Felicia was fully aware of what was going on with him. She knew what she was getting into when she married a police detective. After all, she was one herself.

  But what she hadn’t realized was how much she had missed her own work. And that might be the reason she had wanted to run away. The thought gave her hope. If it was a problem that specific, they could work it out. Couldn’t they? It was just a childish, primitive sense of envy.

  It wasn’t the fact that Odd hadn’t told her about sleeping with Siri. That had happened before Felicia met him. It was a trivial matter, just casual sex. Right? No one could have known back then that she and Odd would become lovers, or that she would become good friends with Siri. They should have told her, but it wasn’t important enough to have evoked such a strong reaction from her. Other things, other emotions had gotten mixed in.

  Felicia realized that now.

  She missed her job, she missed having meaningful work, being important to other people, the hunt for criminals, all of it. She saw Odd on the job and how he got caught up in his work, how it tormented him, but also how it made him feel alive in a way that few things other than police work could do. And that was what had made her jealous. Wasn’t it? Yes. It definitely was not just that stupid affair with Siri Holm.

  How egotistical could she be? Why had she made him suffer for something that really was all about herself?

  She took out her phone.

  She sat there holding it in her hand for a long time as she drove. She hadn’t turned it back on since she phoned Odd at the hospital. Now she looked at her face reflected in the dead glass surface, casting a quick glance at the faint outline before she turned her gaze back to the road. It’ll probably ding for at least ten minutes if I switch it on, she thought, with all the text messages and missed calls.

  That phone had stories to tell. Stories about longing and confusion. Stories created by her, told by others.

  How fucking selfish can I be?

  It had been her decision to move to Norway. And now she was punishing Odd for it.

  Do I love him? Maybe I don’t.

  She turned on her phone, wrote a text, keeping one eye on the road, and was just about to tap the SEND button.

  But before she could do it, she hit a man.

  He suddenly appeared around a curve in the road. Something that looked like a short rifle was pointing at her. She braked hard, making the car spin around on the road. The rear of the car struck the man, and he was thrown into the air, flailing like a gymnast who’d lost his grip on the horizontal bar. To Felicia, whose car skidded at breakneck speed, rotating away from him, he looked almost as light as a feather as his body sketched an arc in the air, hovered at the top, and then plummeted abruptly to the ground, landing on his back.

  The car continued on, out of control, for several yards before it finally came to a stop, settling with a faint thud against the side of the snowbank, as if it were the finale of a carefully rehearsed stunt.

  The headlights shone on the man as he lay on the ground, a lifeless shadow, a dead circus performer in the steady glow of the beams. Snowflakes fell on him like applause.

  She tried to gather her thoughts, to think rationally, do the right things. First she took the key out of the ignition and put it in her pocket. Then she looked for her cell, which she found under the passenger seat. Her heart pounding, she got out of the car and rushed over to the man. She noticed a car half-buried in the snowbank nearby. The trunk of the car was open. A sawed-off shotgun lay next to the man. He was tall. Almost six foot six, she estimated. His eyes were closed, and his hair dark, close cropped, and well groomed. He looked as if he were smiling as he lay there on his back with his nose pointing up at the sky. The snow falling on his jacket looked like dust.

  “My God!” she gasped. “Are you okay? Are you alive?”

  She leaned down, pressed two fingers to his neck. No, no, no! She couldn’t find a pulse.

  All of a sudden he reached up and grabbed her by the ankle, his hand gripping hard, desperately. At first she was relieved. Then his eyes opened, and she saw his expression. Those blue-gray eyes were staring into the beam of the headlights.

  Then her feeling of relief changed. A sudden gut reflex made her straighten up and kick.

  He didn’t loosen his grip on her ankle. Instead, he yanked it toward him so she lost her footing. She fell backward onto the hard crust of ice under the newly fallen snow. Her head struck the ground. A trembling, icy pain spread from the back of her head to her forehead. The cold from the ground found its way inside of her. But she didn’t lose consciousness.

  He let go of her ankle and got up.

  Up to this point she had acted out of instinct, an innate suspicion, police reflexes. Now that she saw him standing over her, she was no longer in doubt. His gaze did not waver. His eyes hardly moved at all, assessing the situation, taking their bearings like sensors. They looked totally white, like chunks of ice covered with frost.

  Her life hung in the balance.

  Two quick strides took him over to the shotgun. He picked it up and turned toward her.

  She rolled back onto her shoulders, did a back somersault, and landed on her feet.

  By the time the gun fired, she had thrown herself sideways toward the car stuck in the snowbank. She jumped up on the lid of the trunk, closing it with the weight of her body. Buckshot from the gun sketched black patterns on the snow at the spot where she had been standing. They looked like markings from some rare and deadly disease.

  He came toward her, racking the gun. He moved with confidence, his footsteps soundless. She could hardly even hear him breathing. He was aiming as he walked. She curled up. Automatically she conjured up images, instructions, movements practiced in the gym back at the police station in Richmond, punching and kicking, straight-arming her colleague Reynolds, the wall of the gym, gathering all those ingrained motor skills into a single smoldering point inside her.

  Then she leaped.

  Both boots struck him in the forehead before the gun went off. She landed behind him.

  Now he lay on the ground again. But this time his eyes were open. A faint gust of icy vapor issued from his lips. His hands, white and unreal in the beam of the headlights. He fumbled for the gun lying next to him. She dashed forward to grab it first, but she was too late. Holding the shotgun raised, he swiftly rolled onto his side. Felicia again sprang up onto the trunk of the car. This time she pushed off and made it over the snowbank. On the other side she slid down the slope in the deep, powdery snow and into a tree. She got up and brushed the snow off her face, aware of the cold. She was even colder inside.

  A shot rang out above the snowbank.

  She headed into the woods, moving as fast as she could.

  She wasn’t dressed for this. Her boots had been a gift from Odd. They had high heels, something she wouldn’t have bought for herself. The heels acted like awls in the snow, making her sink deeper than she would have otherwise. But she couldn’t take them off. Her jacket was one she’d brought from Virginia. A leather jacket intended for chilly winter evenings, not the sort of cold that winter nights in Østerdalen offered. Luckily she’d put on a woolen sweater underneath. That sweater might be her salvation right now.

  She waded through the snow as fast as she could. Every once in a while she paused to listen. She heard nothing but the wind rustling the trees. Yet she was sure he wasn’t far behind.

  Who was he? Why had he tried to kill her?r />
  All her experience told her that such a desperate attempt to kill could only come from a desire to conceal something even worse. No one would attack a complete stranger like that unless he had everything to lose. But he’d been so calm. There was something terrifyingly methodical about the way he had acted. As if he’d been trained to kill.

  She headed deeper into the woods. Tried to maintain a good pace, both to keep him at bay and to stay warm. But she knew he was better equipped than she was. He was stronger, faster, and had a sense of calm that she didn’t possess. Then there were her footprints. All he needed to do was follow her tracks in the snow.

  She turned around. Stopped, but didn’t hear a sound. Then she saw it. The beam from a flashlight down the hill, not far away, maybe two hundred yards, four hundred, six hundred. It was hard to tell.

  She came to a steep slope and followed the ridge, still climbing higher and deeper into the forest. A large birch tree had toppled halfway over in a winter storm. Its trunk hung over the slope, its roots partially pulled free. She continued past it for maybe fifty yards and then turned around once she was covered by a clump of spruce trees. From there she moved as fast she could back to the birch tree. She was careful to step in her own footprints so she wouldn’t leave a new trail behind.

  When she reached the leaning tree, she grabbed the roots sticking out of the ground and pulled herself up onto the trunk. She balanced along the trunk until she was standing at a place where the tree hovered in mid-air.

  Again she looked for the flashlight beam. At first she didn’t see it, but then spied it between the trees, flickering, searching. He was getting closer but still had a ways to go. Not hurrying, making steady progress, precise and cold.

  The tree trunk dipped some under her weight, but the roots that were still in the ground refused to let go. She looked down and couldn’t make out anything but darkness below. She couldn’t hear him, yet soon he would be standing near the roots of the tree. So she took a deep breath and jumped.

  One foot struck a big round rock. The other disappeared into the snow and got wedged into a hollow between two other rocks with sharper edges. She fell forward and had to twist and yank the foot that was stuck before it pulled free.

  After that, she rolled down the slope.

  Her body struck more rocks under the snow, and her back slammed against a fallen tree, bringing her to a halt. She was way down at the bottom of a ravine. She stifled a scream and couldn’t help gasping for breath for several moments.

  Then she lay very still, aware of the throbbing pain in her body. She’d suffered so many blows that she couldn’t pinpoint all the cuts and bruises. But the worst was her foot, the one she had twisted between the rocks.

  She looked up. A beam of light moved past in the night far above her.

  Had he heard her over the wind and the rustling in the trees when she fell? Were all her efforts in vain? Or had she really managed to throw him off her trail?

  The beam from his flashlight didn’t stop. It never turned down toward her but continued to bob ominously along the edge of the ravine, and then it vanished from sight.

  The snow had stopped falling temporarily. The moon suddenly appeared from between the drifting clouds, glittering faintly on the powdery snow. A slightly moldy odor came from the tree trunk she was lying on. Somewhere overhead she heard branches snapping. He was moving away from her.

  Felicia Stone took several deep breaths and then stood up.

  He’d fallen for her ruse. But soon he’d come searching for her again. Had she camouflaged her tracks well enough? Would he see instantly what she’d done, or would he end up wasting as much time as she hoped?

  I need to call Odd, she thought. I’m going to call him right now. He’d be able to do things faster than if she called the emergency number. She was convinced of that. That was something he was good at; her husband could make things happen. Her husband. She savored the words. They didn’t feel meaningless. There was at least some hope in them.

  Please let there be cell phone coverage out here in the woods! She wasn’t that far from the road. She pressed her thumb on the ice-cold button and waited for the familiar morning-blue glow, but the screen was cracked. Her phone was dead.

  She felt a harsh, stabbing pain in her chest. Slowly, feeling resigned, her whole body aching, she stood up. She set her injured foot in the snow. Put as much weight on it as she could, testing it. Was it just badly bruised? Or was it sprained? Or even broken? It felt like an invisible knife was sticking into the flesh and jabbing at the bone. She considered pulling up her pants leg and icing her calf and ankle with snow. But that would be madness. She realized that. The cold was a worse threat than any physical injury.

  She began climbing as fast as her footwear and injury allowed, out of the ravine and up the other side. Soon she reached level ground again. The snow was deeper here, reaching above her knees. The trees stood closer together, looking like an enormous flock of slumbering animals trying to keep warm in the night. The gray spaces between the tree trunks stretched on forever. A void filling up with snowflakes, a silent realm. Human beings very rarely set foot in a place like this, yet it was people she was seeking. After a few hundred yards she came to a ski trail. A snowmobile had traveled along it fairly recently, so there was a hard crust, and she was able to walk on it. In the meantime, powder snow had settled on top, acting almost like a blank sketch pad for her feet.

  Felicia broke off a few branches from a fir tree next to the trail. She began walking backward as she swept away her footprints. Her track was far from invisible. But if she was lucky, the snowfall and wind would do the rest of the job so that by the time he got here, it would be impossible to tell which way she had gone.

  And he will definitely find his way here, she told herself. You can be sure of that.

  She headed in the direction of the highway, where she had come from. She hoped to get back to the car before he did. She still had the car key in her pocket.

  When she came to a spot where the trail turned and headed back into the woods, she rolled out of it to leave the smallest possible track. Once among the trees, she stood up and headed in what she thought was the right direction. It was still the middle of the night, and she didn’t hear any traffic. But she was able to move faster than she’d thought.

  When she finally got down from the snowbank and out onto the road, she stopped to get her bearings. The road was straight in both directions. But off in the distance she was sure she could glimpse the beginning of the curve where she’d skidded into him.

  Do I dare go over to the cars? she wondered. He might have come back.

  That would be the natural thing to do after he lost track of her. Try to cut her off at the place where she was most likely to return.

  I’ll wait here. Sooner or later a car has to come along. Someone will stop for me. Someone will have a cell phone I can use.

  So she decided to stay where she was, standing there and breathing heavily, feeling the pain in her leg, the numb feeling in her whole body, all the strangely contradictory emotions—nausea, resignation, defiance, anger, sorrow, regret—everything actually merging into one vast, nameless feeling, something that was all her, a bigger version of the person she had been in Trondheim, a more dangerous version, a smarter version, a more frightened version.

  What if I go over to the cars? What if I sneak up on him and hit him from behind, take the shotgun, use his cell to call the police? She and Odd would have a lot to talk about afterward. In a strange way, she felt as if something like this might establish a sense of balance between them, fill an empty space in their relationship. Then she wouldn’t be afraid of telling him what she’d done. And maybe she’d be able to ask for his forgiveness. Was she crazy to be thinking like this, when she needed to focus on saving herself, getting out of this situation in one piece? If she failed, then there wouldn’t be anything to talk about anyway.

  But maybe she was onto something. Overpowering him might actually be the
best strategy for survival. She started heading for the curve in the distance.

  That was when she became aware of the light shining from behind, and she turned around. At first it looked like the glow of a cold dawn, flickering beyond the snowbank. Then a headlight appeared, followed by another.

  Felicia took up position in the opposite lane. Close enough to the center line that the driver would see her soon enough not to run into her, provided he was paying attention. Then she began jumping up and down and waving her arms. She needed the people in the car to realize this was important, that she needed help, and that she intended no harm.

  The car gradually materialized behind the headlights, slowed down, and stopped only ten yards from where she was standing. She ran toward it. She was halfway there when the back door opened. A tall figure got out. Stood still over a few seconds. The man ran a hand through his hair and bent down to the car.

  “That’s her. Thanks a lot. No need to stop. We can manage on our own.”

  He slammed the back door. The tires spun a few times in the powdery snow before getting traction. Then the car drove off. Someone waved from inside, and they were gone. Felicia didn’t bother to turn to look at the disappearing car. Instead, she looked at the man, who quickly opened his jacket and took out the sawed-off shotgun.

  He didn’t say a word. Just breathed calmly as he took aim.

  Felicia threw herself full length onto the ground and felt the shot whiz past her head. Some buckshot grazed her back, but the only damage was to her jacket. In a flash she was on her feet while he reloaded. Then she rushed toward him at top speed. She leaped and hit him with both feet to the chest, which toppled him backward. Yet he still managed to keep hold of the gun. He rolled onto his side, and got onto his knees, pointing the shotgun at Felicia, who was standing over him, furious and shaking. He pulled the trigger.

  The gun clicked.

  Felicia didn’t know whether he’d failed to rack the gun properly, or whether he was out of ammunition. There was no time to think about that. She spun around and for the second time that night, she plunged over the side of the snowbank. Then she began wading through the snow, back into the woods.