– Does this body belong to anyone now? Jennifer responded with a touch of contempt. She couldn’t endure small talk while opening a body. The trainee took the hint and kept as quiet as she could.
Over the next few hours the two women worked in intense and deep concentration on the dissection of Elijah Berger’s body. The brain was detached from the medulla oblongata and removed and the surface closely examined without anything of note being found. As expected after the external examination there were no signs of trauma, no abnormalities in the blood vessels. Jennifer decided that it should be preserved in formaldehyde for further tests.
At about ten, Korn popped in. He had just got back from a long journey that same morning, and even though he had the weekend off, he’d driven directly from the airport to the institute after he’d heard the morning news bulletin.
Jennifer briefed him: no obvious signs of damage to the inner organs, findings thus far consistent with the cause of death that had been her first assumption: an overdose of heroin.
– I’ll be here for the rest of the day, Korn assured her. – The front desk is getting so many calls from the media, someone has to deal with them.
Jennifer was more than happy to have him around. Not that she had anything against talking to journalists. The problem was that she couldn’t say anything about what she knew, or what she thought. She bent down once more over the swollen belly and followed the blood vessels leading into the liver – it was as distended and fatty as one would expect in someone who cultivated an image as a substance abuser – to the place on the underside of it where she would make her cut to detach it. Just at the point where she put the tip of the scalpel, she discovered a swelling. It was as large as a golf ball, with a lumpy surface.
She took a break at a couple of minutes past eleven. Tried to get in touch with Viken to let him have a preliminary report. He had switched to voicemail. At the same moment her own phone rang. The number was unrecognised, and she didn’t have time to take the call but did so anyway.
– This is Ragnhild Bjerke … Mailin’s mother.
Jennifer was surprised she thought it necessary to add that information just a few days after her hour-long visit to the office.
– Of course, she said.
– I’ve seen the news. Ragnhild Bjerke was silent for a moment. – Is it true what they’re saying? That he might have killed her?
Jennifer breathed out heavily. – Well of course that’s something the investigators will have to …
– Do you believe it was him?
Ragnhild Bjerke’s voice was as toneless as before, but the fear lying just beneath it was even more noticeable over the phone.
– I wish I could give you an answer, but I have no grounds for making any assumptions about that. Jennifer felt the same helplessness as when they had spoken together last time. – I am sorry, she added.
– It was a relief to see you on Tuesday, Ragnhild Bjerke continued.
– You’re welcome to come back, Jennifer said. – Any time, if you think it’ll help.
– I’ve been thinking over what you asked me about.
Jennifer did a quick scan of their conversation. – Oh? she said, but with no idea what Ragnhild Bjerke was talking about.
– I lay awake thinking about it all that night. Of course I was worried at the time, when I had to spend nights away from home. Lasse drank. Later on I realised he must have been on drugs as well. He was more unstable than I gave you the impression of. He had these really huge mood swings. But he was so fond of the girls, I could never bring myself to believe that …
Jennifer looked at her watch. She still had a lot of work left to do, but she couldn’t end the call.
– Mailin never mentioned anything. But then I never asked straight out. And when I think back, perhaps she did say something after all. Once she wanted me to put a safety lock on their doors. One like she’d seen in a film on TV. Why didn’t I react to that and get her to tell me what she meant? And every time I had to spend the night away, she would behave in a funny way, despairing, but she never said anything, never cried, never protested. Thinking back on it now, I don’t understand how I could have left them alone like that. Trusted Lasse like I did. He’d been having those nightmares for a long time.
She fell silent.
– I don’t think you should blame yourself, said Jennifer. – You’re suffering enough as it is.
– Did I tell you that he knew Berger?
Jennifer didn’t know anything about that.
– They were hanging around with the same crowd at the time I met Lasse. Those were wild parties. But then that kind of thing is exciting when you’re a teenager and you’ve met an artist with a boundless faith in his own talent.
After the call, Jennifer tried Viken again, but still no luck. She decided to call Roar. It would give him the chance to invite her round on her way home that evening.
– Stuck in traffic, he groaned, sounding annoyed. – First off I sleep in big-time, then I get caught up in an accident at the Teisen junction. Should have been at a team meeting five minutes ago.
– Then you’ll probably get a ticking-off from Dad, she teased, though she had gathered that he was in no mood for jokes.
– It’s wild, he complained. – Reminds me of the Orderud case.
– We’ve been getting it here too, she consoled him. – If we didn’t have security guards, they would probably have broken into the autopsy room.
For an instant she imagined a horde of bellowing journalists pushing her up against the wall, and photographers sticking their cameras down into the belly of the half-autopsied corpse.
She sighed and suddenly felt a powerful need to talk about something else to him. Nevertheless she said: – Want to hear something from the autopsy? Berger had pancreatic cancer.
She heard an expulsion of breath at the other end. – Well that wasn’t what killed him.
– Of course not. The first results from the blood tests confirm the theory of a heroin overdose.
– But you’re saying he had a fatal condition?
– Exactly. I contacted Ullevål Hospital, spoke to the consultant who was treating him. The tumour was discovered more than six months ago. The hospital gave him three months, and in any event no more than six.
– Did Berger know this? Roar grunted.
– They were completely open about it with him. He’d accepted it, according to the doctor I spoke to.
– So he was waiting to die all the time he made those programmes? Wasn’t he receiving treatment?
– Only painkillers. And he was also treating himself, as you know. He actually expressed a preference for heroin over morphine.
As she ended the call, there was a knock on the office door. A young woman she recognised as a technician at the trace analysis unit put her head round.
– Something here we’d like you to look at, she said, waving a document.
Jennifer took it, unfolded it and sat studying it. After a while she raised her head to the technician, who was still standing there, and peered thoughtfully at her. She had asked about something or other, but Jennifer didn’t hear what it was. She took the receiver off the cradle, and the young woman, realising she wasn’t going to get an answer, disappeared, closing the door behind her.
34
FIVE MINUTES HAD passed since Roar hung up when Jennifer called again. There was still no movement in the queue of traffic, a few hundred metres from Teisen.
– Wish there was some way I could help you, she chirruped.
– Then send a helicopter.
She laughed, sounded as if she were in a good mood.
– I just got a test result delivered to my desk.
He had tried to explain to her that she mustn’t use him as a channel of information; it had already caused him enough trouble as things were. Before he could repeat his warning, she said: – The hairs we found on Mailin Bjerke turn out to be a quite rare form of mitochondrial DNA. It belongs to just one in t
en of the population of Norway.
– Berger?
– He has the same variant.
Roar pressed his horn as a motorcyclist threading his way through the queue bumped into a side mirror with his elbow. When he’d finished swearing, he announced in an exasperated tone: – Jenny, you need to tell this to the head of the investigative team, not me.
– I’ve called Viken three times, he’s in a meeting and not answering.
The meeting I should’ve been at, Roar groaned to himself. It occurred to him he ought to hang up and make sure he heard the rest of what Jennifer had to say from Viken. But he couldn’t resist: – Of course that doesn’t make it anything like definite that the hairs come from Berger.
Jennifer confirmed this. – And one other thing, she went on.
The traffic seemed to be freeing up a little. Roar slid forward thirty metres before again coming to a halt.
– Another thing? He could hear how irritable he sounded. – Sorry, Jenny, I’m a bit stressed out here.
– That’s no wonder. You’re for the big stick when you eventually get there, Mihaly Horvath.
He didn’t like her using that name. – Let’s hear it.
– Liss Bjerke called last night.
– Again?
– She still insists she’ll only talk to me.
– Even though we got a female officer to carry out the interview, exactly as she wanted?
The inside lane began to creep forward and Roar swung over into it.
– Berger and her father were old drinking buddies, Jennifer told him.
– They were?
– Liss was at Berger’s on Wednesday. – He tried to put his arms around her and then muttered something about knowing what had happened to Mailin.
– And what was it that he knew?
– She didn’t find out. He was so stoned that she preferred to get out of the place.
Roar moved back into the outer lane. Jennifer had more news. This time about Mailin Bjerke’s mother. Something about how this poor harassed woman was most bothered about the missing wedding ring. And that they should check whether the phone lines were down in parts of Blindern on the evening Mailin went missing.
– Jenny, we don’t know that it was the evening of the eleventh she went missing, because we don’t have any witnesses who saw her that day.
Suddenly he gave a start. – What was that about the ring?
At one of the team’s first morning briefing sessions in December they had heard about a ring that had been removed from Mailin Bjerke’s finger. One of the others was supposed to have checked it out, but Roar had heard no more about it.
– If Mailin Bjerke wore a wedding ring, he said once Jenny had finished explaining, – there was presumably an engraving on it?
Just asking the question felt like casting a line into a lake in which there were hardly any fish at all. When he got the bite, he jumped:
– Your Aage, said Jennifer, and then gave him the date of the wedding.
He was through the junction at Teisen and the end of the queue was in sight when his phone rang yet again. He picked it up and read the display before tapping the answer button: – I’m stuck in a traffic jam, I slept in and haven’t eaten yet, I’m eighteen minutes late for an important meeting, I’ve got complications left, right and centre, so if this is bad news, please leave a message on my voicemail. Or preferably someone else’s voicemail.
– Nice to talk to you too, Dan-Levi replied. – You who always wanted to be where it was happening. Anybody that’s heard the news over the last twenty-four hours knows that you are in clover right now.
Finally the queue of cars started breaking up.
– I’ve given some thought to what you were asking me about at Klimt, his friend went on.
– Did I ask about something?
– About if thy eye offend thee, und so weiter. I’ve unearthed quite a bit of stuff about Berger. Baalzebub, for example. According to the Old Testament, it was the prophet Elijah who exposed that lord of the flies as an impotent god. Our Elijah, alias Berger, urges us in an interview to start worshipping these false gods again. Allow me to quote: I am not godless, but I must worship a god whom I can leave behind here, one I don’t run the risk of meeting on the other side.
– Does this story have a point, Roar groaned. Finally he was able to accelerate past the damaged car that stood pressed up against the crash barrier, its front smashed in.
– Be patient, Roar Horvath, and thou shalt see. Berger was obsessed by the idea of being a prophet. Not to preach the coming of the Messiah, but to rid us all of any belief in salvation. That is, an anti-prophet, in contrast to the Elijah he was named after. I’ve been looking at some of the lyrics he wrote when he was lead singer with his group Baalzebub. Interested?
– Cough it up.
– In the song ‘Revenge’, Berger tells a story from the Bible in which Elijah, God’s prophet, assembled the prophets of the false god Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah challenged them to show that their god could make fire. When they couldn’t do it, he got God to perform the miracle. So people saw the difference between the true and the fraudulent, and Elijah took Baal’s prophets to a river and had them killed there, four hundred of them, in God’s name. According to Berger’s lyrics, Baal’s prophets return from hell and tear out Elijah’s eyes.
Roar gave a weary grunt, but Dan-Levi had no intention of stopping yet.
– In another song, ‘The Hell of the New Age’, he describes how he journeys to hell and releases billions of criminals, killers, child abusers and blasphemers and instead fills up the place with priests, lawyers, teachers and psychologists, all those who spread lies about the world we live in. And that is just the lyric we actually hear. Remember, the songs could be filled with hidden messages, sung so fast that we only pick them up subconsciously.
Roar thought this over. – Strong stuff, Dan-Levi, but I doubt whether the Old Testament and a few punk rock lyrics from the 1980s would stand up as evidence in the Oslo district courthouse.
He let Dan-Levi carry on for a while on the subject of biblical motives for murder. It seemed to lower his stress levels a bit. His friend was a good storyteller, and in Roar’s opinion he would have gone a lot further in life as a preacher or a courtroom lawyer than as a journalist.
– Say hello to Sara, he said before he finally ended the call. He felt a quick jolt of surprise afterwards; it was a long time since he had sent a greeting to his teenage love.
The meeting room was full when Roar let himself in some forty minutes late. He had to stand with his back against the wall next to the door. In addition to Viken, the five other main investigators were there, and several people from the forensics department. Even section leader Sigge Helgarsson had decided to attend. Roar consoled himself with the thought that he had hardly ever been late for a meeting before and so could expect to be cut some slack. As his father used to say: ‘Once is nothing, twice is a habit.’
Viken was holding forth on the subject of psychological profiling. Apparently these theories stemmed from a period he had spent working in England, and on several occasions he had given Roar examples of how knowledge of a perpetrator’s psychology could prove decisive in solving complex murder cases. Not many others in the department shared his interest, Roar had realised. Viken was in frequent touch with some retired psychologist in Manchester, supposedly a leading expert in the field, though neither his bosses nor his colleagues seemed particularly impressed by the fact.
– The psychological profile of Mailin Bjerke’s killer is strikingly similar to that in the Ylva Richter case, the detective chief inspector was saying.
He stood up, picked up a felt marker pen and made some notes on the board. – It appears that Ylva Richter was killed by someone who already knew her. Someone of about her own age, with a roughly similar background. He probably didn’t plan the murder but approached her in the first instance for some other reason, perhaps hoping for sexual contact. Things got out of co
ntrol, possibly because he was rejected.
– What about the eyes?
– Punishment. Sadistic aggression. There may also be a symbolic element involved.
He glanced around the room, ignoring the new arrival. – The perpetrator will have undergone certain changes after the murder. If he was local, then he probably moved away, at least for a while. New surroundings, job, school. As for his background, it is not unlikely that he has himself been the victim of serious violence or sexual assault.
– And therein lies the motive? asked Sigge Helgarsson.
The section leader was just a few years older than Roar, a pale, thin Icelander who looked as if he suffered from chronic lack of sleep. According to Viken, he was having trouble combining the duties of leadership with family life.
The detective chief inspector nodded slowly a couple of times as though he had been waiting for the question and was glad someone had finally asked it. – The motive behind a murder such as this is always complex. Let’s recapitulate: Mailin Bjerke hides away a printout concerning the Ylva Richter case. Immediately afterwards, she is murdered. Jim Harris might have seen something that had to do with the abduction or the murder. Berger goes public in VG and implies that he knows what happened to Mailin. Before he can reveal what this is, he too has gone to the great beyond. Naturally we can’t rule out the possibility that these events are unconnected, but there is a much greater possibility that what we’re dealing with here is a person who has killed four times, possibly even more than that.
Roar struggled to control an impulse to interrupt. He had long wanted to be in a position like this, be the one who came up with the decisive bit of information, the kind of thing that could turn a case around and lead to a breakthrough. I’ve spoken to Jennifer Plåterud … He could imagine Viken’s reaction when he gave the source of his information, and for once it was enough to quell his ambition to be the smartest kid in the class. But he couldn’t resist the temptation to at least say something.
Death By Water Page 35
