Blessed Are Those Who Thirst

by Anne Holt

  * * *

  He knew who it was going to be this Saturday. Today he had made up his mind. She claimed to be from Afghanistan, but he knew for certain she was lying. Pakistani, he was sure, but prettier than they usually were.

  He was in bed. Not at one side of the large double bed, but right in the middle so he could feel the join in the mattress hard against his spine. The quilts were on the floor, and he was naked. In his hands he held dumbbells, slowly and regularly pulling them as far apart as possible, and then letting them crash together on outstretched arms above his perspiring rib cage.

  “Ninety-one, puff. Ninety-two, puff.”

  He felt happier than he had in a long time. At ease, free, full of strength.

  He knew exactly whom he was going to lay his hands on. He knew exactly where he was going to do it. He also knew precisely what he was going to do.

  Reaching one hundred, he heaved himself up into a sitting position. The massive wall mirror opposite showed him what he wanted to see. Then he headed for the shower.

  * * *

  For some reason, the idea of going home was not appealing. Hanne Wilhelmsen sat on a bench outside the police station at Grønlandsleiret 44, pondering life. She was exhausted, but not sleepy. Earlier it had been so clear to her there was some kind of connection between the Saturday night massacres and the rape of the sweet young medical student. But nothing was clear any longer.

  She felt powerless to move from the spot. Their work of plotting and directing, sending troops here and there, in many ways felt effective. However, very little had come of it. The investigation was so technical. They were searching for hairs, fibers, and other specific clues. Every last drop of spittle was examined, and they received incomprehensible results from experts about DNA structures and blood types. Naturally, all that was necessary, but it was miles from being adequate. The Saturday man was not normal. In some ways there was intelligence behind his actions, a kind of absurd logic. He kept to a particular day of the week. If the hypothesis was true, that there were another three foreign women buried somewhere out there, then he was also rather smart. At the same time, he had chosen to put them on his trail by obliquely telling them whom he had mutilated.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had—in sharp contrast to the majority of her colleagues—some sort of respect for psychologists. She agreed that they spoke a lot of nonsense, but some of it made sense. It was obviously a branch of science, if not so terribly exact. On several occasions, she had ridden roughshod over opposition to procure psychological profiles of unidentified criminals. She didn’t need that this time. As she leaned back on the bench, observing that it was now almost completely dark, it struck her that the harsh reality out there, in Europe, in the world, had long impacted criminality in Norway. They just didn’t want to acknowledge it. It was too frightening. Twenty years earlier, serial murderers belonged in America. For the past decade, people had been able to read about similar cases in England.

  There were not many mass murderers in Norwegian legal history. The few who existed had crazy and sad histories. Colleagues in Halden had recently arrested one of them. Chance murders presumably committed by the same man, over a long period of time, apparently without any motive other than cash. Some years before, a young man had killed three people he lived with in a commune in Slemdal, because they had reminded him about thirty thousand kroner he owed in rent. The expert forensic psychiatrist had concluded that he was definitely not insane.

  What was the Saturday man’s motive? She could only guess at that. From the textbooks she knew that criminals could possess a more or less subconscious desire to be caught.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen knew this was not the case here.

  “He’s enjoying poking fun at us,” she whispered.

  “Are you sitting here talking to yourself, now?”

  She jumped out of her skin where she sat.

  Billy T. stood facing her.

  She stared at him momentarily in alarm and then laughed out loud.

  “I must be getting old.”

  “I’ll leave you in peace to grow old,” Billy T. said, mounting his motorcycle, an enormous Honda Goldwing.

  “I can’t understand how you can be bothered driving around on that big bus of yours.” She grinned before he managed to put on his helmet.

  Looking derisively at her, he did not take the trouble to reply.

  Suddenly she stood up and rushed to him as he was starting the engine. He couldn’t hear what she was saying and had to remove his helmet.

  “Are you going home?” she asked with no further thought.

  “Yes, don’t have too many alternatives at this time of night,” he said, glancing at his watch.

  “Shall we go for a ride?”

  “Can your Harley bear to be seen in the company of a Japanese?”

  They drove around in the summer night for more than an hour. Hanne in front, making a deafening racket, and Billy T. following with a silky-soft, deep rumbling noise between his legs. They drove along the old Mossevei to Tyrigrava, and back again. Cruising along the city streets, they raised their hands in an obligatory wave to all the cowboys in leather gear beside the Tanum bookstore on Karl Johans gate, where the motorbikes were parked side by side, like horses tethered outside an old saloon.

  They finished up right beside Tryvann Lake, at a huge parking lot without a single car, where they halted and parked their bikes.

  “You can say many strange things about this spring weather of ours,” Billy T. said, “but you can’t say it’s not good for biking!”

  Oslo lay spread out before them. Dirty and dusty, with a lid of pollution clearly visible even though night had fallen. The sky wasn’t completely dark and would probably not be so until the end of August. Here and there a faint star was twinkling. The others had tumbled down to earth. The entire city was a carpet with little lights springing up, from Gjelleråsen in the east to Bærum in the west. The sea lay black as pitch on the horizon.

  At the edge of the parking lot there was a red-and-white road barrier, where it sloped down to a thicket of trees. Billy T. sauntered across and sat there, legs sprawling, and called her over.

  “Come here now,” he said, pulling her toward him.

  She stood between his legs with her back leaning against his rib cage.

  Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be held. He was so tall that their heads were side by side, though he was almost sitting and she was standing practically upright. He embraced her with his gigantic arms and moved his head closer to hers. With a certain feeling of surprise, she felt herself relax.

  “Do you sometimes get fed up being a police officer, Hanne?” he asked quietly.

  She nodded. They all became tired of it now and again. More and more frequently, to tell the truth.

  “Look at that city there,” he continued. “How many crimes do you think are taking place now? Right at this moment?”

  Neither of them uttered a word.

  “And here we stand, unable to do a thing,” he added after a lengthy pause.

  “It’s amazing people don’t protest,” Hanne said.

  “But they do,” Billy T. replied. “They protest all the bloody time. We’re hung out to dry every fucking day, in the newspapers, at lunch breaks all over the place, at parties. We’re not held in very high regard, I can tell you that. I know them well. It’s scary when they aren’t satisfied with just complaining.”

  It really was pleasant, standing like this. He had a scent of maleness and leather, and his beard tickled her cheek. Taking hold of his arms, she tucked them more comfortably around her.

  “Why do you keep up this show of secrecy, Hanne?” he said softly, almost whispering.

  When he felt her freeze instantaneously and prepare to pull away, he was ready and held her tight.

  “Don’t mess about, listen to me now. Everybody knows you’re a fantastic policewoman. Shit, there’s hardly a damn policeman with your reputation. What’s more, everyone likes you. They say good things abo
ut you everywhere.”

  She was still trying to shake herself free. Then she realized that she at least avoided having eye contact by standing like this. And so she tolerated it, though it was far from comfortable.

  “I’ve often wondered whether you know about the rumors circulating. Because they do circulate, you know. Maybe not as frequently as before, but people speculate, you can understand that. A lovely lady like you and never any gentleman friends.”

  She could sense he was smiling, though her gaze was firmly fixed on a point far off on the slopes of Ekebergåsen.

  “It must be a drag, Hanne. A damnable drag.”

  His mouth was so close to her ear she could feel his lips move.

  “All I wanted to say to you was, people are not as crazy as you think. There’s a bit of tittle-tattle, and then it passes. When something is confirmed, it’s not so interesting anymore. You’re a great girl. Nothing changes that. I think you should put an end to all this show of secrecy.”

  Then he released her, but she didn’t dare to move. Rooted to the spot, she remained standing there, absolutely terrified he might see her face. She was burning like embers and hardly dared to breathe.

  Since she made no move to leave, he embraced her again and began to rock her slowly from side to side. They stood like that for the eternity of a few seconds, while one light after another was extinguished in the city below.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 8

  No one was drinking coffee any longer; they were all drinking cola. Just the thought of letting a hot drink run down their dry throats was repellent. A beer stall in the foyer would have been a gold mine. The little refrigerator in the lunchroom emitted unhappy moans and sighs at all the plastic bottles stacked inside, unable even to chill before being taken out again.

  That morning, Hanne Wilhelmsen had introduced iced tea to the staff of Section A 2.11. At seven o’clock, without a single hour’s sleep, she went around scouring out all the ingrained dirt on the coffee machines. She then made fourteen liters in total of extremely strong tea, mixing it with heaps of sugar and two whole bottles of lemon essence, in an enormous steel home brew container “borrowed” from the room where confiscated items were stored. Finally, she filled the pot to the brim with crushed ice begged from the canteen. It was a great success. For the rest of the day, they all walked about with canteen tumblers brimful, slurping down iced tea, amazed no one had thought of this before.

  “Thank God I’ve checked all these out.” Erik Henriksen sighed in relief as he handed Hanne Wilhelmsen a bundle containing twelve tips about the Kristine Håverstad case.

  It was the group containing lawyers and police. The one they had laughed at. The one she thank God had asked him to take care of. It took a quarter of an hour to read them all.

  One tip-off stood out from the others and was repeated twice: “The artist’s impression in Dagbladet on June first has a certain resemblance to Cato Iversen. His face is slightly thinner, but on the other hand he has been behaving oddly for a while now. As I work beside him, I’d prefer to remain anonymous. We both work in the Immigration Directorate, where he can be reached during normal office hours.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” Hanne Wilhelmsen mumbled, grabbing the other sheet of paper Erik expectantly handed her.

  “I was struck by how much the sketch looked like my neighbor Cato Iversen,” the tip said. “He lives at Ulveveien 3, Kolsås, and works in the Immigration Directorate, as far as I know. He has been away from home at various times. He is unmarried.”

  The letter was signed, accompanied by a robust request to allow the name anonymity.

  Thirty seconds later, Hanne Wilhelmsen was standing in Håkon Sand’s office.

  “I need a blue sheet.”

  “For which case?”

  “This case. Look here.”

  She gave him both reports, but his reaction was quite different from what she expected. Calmly, he read them through a couple of times before returning them.

  “Now you must listen to my theory,” she began, slightly confused by the attorney’s devastating composure. “Have you heard about signature crimes?”

  Of course he had, he read the textbooks as well.

  “The murderer leaves behind some kind of trademark, doesn’t he? The mark becomes known, through the newspapers or as the subject of gossip. Then there’s somebody who wants to get rid of somebody else, and who therefore disguises ‘his’ . . .”

  She waved her fingers in the air.

  “. . . ‘his’ murder as one of the original series.”

  “But it never goes well,” Håkon Sand muttered.

  “No, exactly. As a rule it goes awry because the police, naturally, have not released all the details of the trademark. But here, Håkon, here we have precisely the opposite situation.”

  “The opposite situation. Oh, yes. Of what, then?”

  “Of the murder that’s sneaked in, disguised as one of a series.”

  Håkon Sand coughed discreetly into his clenched fist, hoping she would provide a further explanation without needing too much encouragement.

  “Here we have a signature killer making a slip! He’s going to commit another murder in the series, but then something goes wrong. No, let me be quite specific.”

  Drawing the chair over to his desk, she grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and quickly outlined a miniature copy of the time line on the flip chart in the operations room.

  “On May twenty-ninth, he goes out to rape and murder an asylum seeker. This asylum seeker.”

  She slapped a case folder onto the desk. Håkon didn’t touch it but inclined his head to see the name on the cover. It was the woman on the floor below. The one they had tried to contact the previous evening.

  “Look here,” Hanne said, almost too eagerly, leafing through the documents. “She’s absolutely perfect. Came to Norway on her own. To meet her father, she thought, but he died a few days before her arrival. Then she inherited the apartment and some money, and has been living quietly in the expectation they’ll get the finger out at the Immigration Directorate. A perfect victim. Doesn’t even live at a reception center.”

  “But why didn’t he take her, then, if she was so perfect?”

  “We don’t know that, of course. But my hypothesis is that she was away. Out, gone, whatever. She told me she’d been sleeping and hadn’t heard anything, but she looked terrified of the police, the way these people do, so it might just as well have been a lie. But then he’s standing there, until Kristine Håverstad turns up. Snazzy girl. Very attractive. Then he simply makes a swap.”

  Håkon Sand had to admit that something about her theory did hold water.

  “But why didn’t he kill her then?”

  “That’s obvious,” Hanne Wilhelmsen responded, getting to her feet. She appeared stiff and tired, despite her enthusiasm. Arms akimbo, her upper body swaying several times from side to side.

  “How many cases of rape do we drop, Håkon?”

  He flung his arms out wide. “No idea. But it’s a helluva lot. Far too many.”

  Returning to her seat, she leaned toward him. The scar above her eye looked more prominent now, he noticed. Had she lost weight?

  “We drop more than a hundred rape cases every year, Håkon. More than a hundred! How many of them do you think we’ve investigated thoroughly?”

  “Not so many,” he mumbled, rather conscience stricken. He instinctively glanced in the direction of a bundle containing three cases ready and waiting for the “dismissed” stamp. Rapes. All of them slim files. Virtually zero investigation.

  “How many murder cases do we drop every year?” she asked rhetorically.

  “We hardly ever drop murder cases!”

  “Exactly! He could not kill Kristine Håverstad. It would have been discovered a few hours later, and we would have been like wasps buzzing around the city. This guy is smart.”

  She hit the desktop with her fist.

  “Damn smart!”

  “But he hasn’t been
so bloody smart, you know. He let Kristine see his face, didn’t he?”

  “Only just, yes. And look at what kind of drawing that gave us. Not very specific.”

  They were interrupted by a female assistant police attorney entering to hand him a remand-in-custody file.

  “There’s another five of those coming from Larceny,” she said sympathetically before disappearing out the door.

  “All the same, there’s one thing I can’t get to add up,” Håkon said reflectively. “If he’s got this perfect arrangement, why doesn’t he stick to it? He surely can’t have been so sexually pumped up he just had to have someone?”

  Of course he might have been. Hanne Wilhelmsen and Håkon Sand both thought of it in the same split second. The previous spring, Oslo had seen a string of rapes; in fact, those too were mostly in the Homansbyen area. The rapist had finally been caught, by sheer chance. The explanation for why he had done it struck them both simultaneously.

  “Roids,” Håkon Sand exclaimed, looking at his colleague, almost afraid. “Anabolic steroids!”

  “We’re looking for a muscleman,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said drily. “Still more clues. And right now, as I said, I’d like a blue sheet for this guy here. He looks perfect.”

  She thumped her fingers down on the two reports she had brought and placed a blue form before him. He let them lie.

  “You’re exhausted now,” he said.

  “Exhausted? Yes, of course I’m exhausted.”

  “You’re so exhausted you’re not thinking clearly.”

  “Thinking clearly? What on earth do you mean by that?”

  Obviously she was tired. They all were. But it didn’t help matters that Håkon Sand was trying to delay an extremely welcome arrest.

  “There’s not enough there to warrant an arrest,” he declared, folding his arms across his chest. “You know that very well.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen did not quite know what to believe. It had been many years since a police lawyer had denied her an arrest decision. She had never, not once in the four years they had been working together, been refused one by Håkon Sand. Her surprise was so great it almost displaced her rapidly escalating anger.