Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery (Inspector Sohlberg Mysteries) (11 page)

Was that another reason for putting him on the Karl Haugen case?

Did Ivar Thorsen or the higher-ups know that a child abduction was likely to bring back painful memories of the death of their own son?

Harald Junior’s death almost destroyed Sohlberg and his wife. He could not help wondering whether Thorsen had dragged him into the case as the result of a diabolical plan to cause him and his wife severe if not permanent emotional distress.

Was the Karl Haugen assignment another form of payback for Sohlberg exposing corruption by the Supreme Court justices?

Chapter 6/Seks

1 YEAR AND 23 DAYS AFTER

THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4

Sohlberg reached into the shelf and took out Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
—the doomed lovers.

“Well . . . well.”

He’s amazed that his parents still have all of the compact discs that he bought them over the decades for their birthdays and for Christmas and for Mother’s Day and for Father’s Day. He opened the case and studied the libretto for the divine and unsurpassed 1953 classic EMI recording with Kirsten Flagstad (Soprano) and Blanche Thebom (Mezzo Soprano) and Ludwig Suthaus (Tenor) and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Baritone) and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra directed by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

The prelude overwhelmed Sohlberg with its intensity.

He pressed the STOP button and slipped Wagner’s masterpiece off the CD player because Wagner’s music hits too close to home. The music reminded Sohlberg of the overpowering nature of love and death and how those two mixed together can easily lead to insanity itself.

The music evoked remembrances of the past. Memories crashed into Sohlberg’s mind like the winter storms that hurl overwhelming waves into Norway’s fjords.

Sohlberg remembered the details of the death of loved ones.

He remembered the sickening
shisssh
of the rope going through the carabiner on Karoline’s harness. He remembered her eyes wide open and filled with love and acceptance of her fate.

He remembered the last soft breath of Harald Junior before the leukemia killed him.

He remembered the boy’s dreamy eyes slowly dimming away until the light was extinguished and gone.

Grief.

Insanity.

He remembers how—a month after Karoline’s death—he took a trip to a country house at Åsgårdstrand. A partner at Sohlberg’s law firm offered him indefinite use of the house for Sohlberg to have all the time and space to decompress. Sohlberg had always wanted to visit the popular summer vacation spot and pretty fishing village in Vestfold County about 65 miles south of Oslo. He spent days just watching the sailboats and the fishing boats from the lovely southwest side of the mouth of the Oslofjord. At night he watched panoramic lightning from immense thunderstorms that roll in from the North Sea over the Strait of Skagerrak.

His grief worsened. A guilty conscience consumed him for not having asked Karoline to check her ropes and knots. On the third night he grabbed his uncle’s double-barrel shotgun out of the car trunk and loaded the shells.

His plan: walk down to the dock with the loaded shotgun when no one is around and end his pain and reunite with Karoline.

Unfortunately a knock on the door at midnight. Then more loud pounding.

“Hello,” yelled Matthias Otterstad. “Wake up Sohlberg . . . I know you’re in there. I’m here to keep you company. Open up will you! . . . I brought a ton of food with me.”

Sohlberg’s plans remained inactive until his son died.

A guilty conscience hounded him again. This time for not having spent enough time with his son or for that matter with his wife. Again a loaded gun and again plans interrupted by an unexpected visitor—Chief Homicide Detective Alec Mikesell of the combined Salt Lake City Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff Task Force in Utah.

Sohlberg’s memories fled when he heard Fru Sohlberg call him out of his painful reverie:

“Sohlberg where are you?”

Sohlberg bounded up the stairs to his wife and said, “Just checking out stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Oh . . . just looking at some of the operas that I bought my parents many years ago.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Actually yes. Wagner. Tristan and Isolde.”

“Why that one?”

“I don’t know . . . I picked it at random but it seems appropriate.”

“How so?”

“How love sometimes leads to insanity.”

“Are you thinking of the missing boy . . . Karl Haugen?”

“Of course . . . what else?”

“You need to rest for this investigation. Please come to sleep.”

“I can’t with this midnight sun. I have a lot to think about.”

~ ~ ~

Nothing. Absolutely nothing surprised him any more. After eight years she had exhausted any surprise left in him. He knew that he certainly wouldn’t be surprised if she did
not
break down in a torture session and tell him what he wants and needs to hear. The only surprise will be how she reacts to the torture and how she reacts when she realizes that he will exterminate her.

Will she scream?

Will she cry?

Will she beg for mercy?

If she begs for mercy he will remind her that she gave him none. Therefore all that she can expect is justice.

Yes. That’s all she can expect. And that’s all she deserves.

“She deserves a long and horrible death,” he said softly to himself as he mowed the lawn with a manual grass mower that she forced him to use because she’s very worried about climate change and carbon emissions.

The grass clippings flew off the sharp blades just like the many illusions that he had had about her and their love and their marriage. Together eight years and married half that time. And the mystery of her true nature only kept getting stronger.

She is unfathomable.

She is unknowable.

He almost laughed when he thought of how much he will enjoy shoving her lifeless body into a special barrel that he brought from his workplace a few months ago. The barrel was specially designed to hold acids and it is marked ‘CORROSIVE” and he shivered with ecstasy at the thought of how greatly he will enjoy pouring acid on her lifeless body and how after 6 hours in an acid bath she will become nothing but a pink fluid to be taken to a chemical recycling plant. He giggled when he thought of her tombstone—a barrel marked CORROSIVE.

He started laughing and laughing when he realized that finally
something
in her miserable and toxic life of lies was true: CORROSIVE.

Yes . . . that’s her!

His shoulders shook as he laughed and thought of her winding up as an acidic gob of pink nothingness. Yes. She will be truly unfathomable
and
unknowable at the chemical waste management plant that will receive the barrel with her remains.

The barrel. He’s glad to have snuck one out of his employer’s factory during a long holiday weekend when no one was looking or paying close attention. He’s already begun stealing two bottles of acid at the time from the factory’s nearby warehouse. No one noticed because they literally use thousands of gallons of acid every week.

When a man plans the end of a project then everything else falls into place all the way back to the beginning of the project.

Is her acid grave a case of the end justifying the means?

He laughed at his hilarious observation.

An hour later he began to rake the dead grass clippings off the lawn and she watched him from the deck in their backyard. She tanned topless—as usual. He waved at her and blew her a kiss. She barely smiled as if she’s a stunning celebrity bored by her beauty and the fawning idiots who worship her.

How did she first trick me?

What was her hook and bait?

What lies did she use to catch me?

His mind searched the earliest memories that he has of her. He went over these memories and he’s sickened by the realization that he’s been played like a violin by a virtuoso.

He decided that when he tortures her he will cut off one of her fingers for every big lie she ever told him. That means he’ll have to start lopping off her toes soon after he finishes the ten amputations on her hands.

He realized that with all of her many many lies he’ll quickly run out of fingers and toes to chop and slice off.

Should I instead cut each finger and toe one little piece at a time?

That would certainly increase my quality time with her.

~ ~ ~

The first big lie. For that whopper he has to cut off her right thumb.

“You’re adopted? So am I.”

Was that her first hook into me?

“I was born in the Østlandet the East Country. My mother came from a wealthy family. She was forced by her family to give me up for adoption.”

Her coming from a wealthy family background lowered his natural resistance to sleeping with someone who was vulgar and tacky and worked as an assistant manager at the McDonald’s where he went once a week for a milkshake. Everyone at his company especially the senior managers and their wives would have been embarrassed to see him with a woman who wore garish makeup that startled and gaudy-colored polyester clothes that revealed too much of her spectacular breasts. She chewed bubble gum loudly and all day long even while eating a meal or making love or sitting on the toilet.

Her mother later corrected her daughter’s misinformation:

“Born to a wealthy family? No. The social worker told us her mother turned tricks just to get a bottle of vodka. Sometimes just for a smoke and a beer. Wealthy family? Nonsense. She’s making things up . . . as always. Oh well. I should’ve put a stop to that when I caught her telling her teachers and friends that she was one of the King’s illegitimate children.”

“Why didn’t you stop her from lying?”

“I just didn’t want to affect her self-esteem. You know what psychologists say about parents ruining a child’s self-esteem. . . .”

He said nothing although he wanted to say, “What do these dumb psychologists say about you pathologically spoiling a child and letting them get away with bald-faced lies?”

The two university professors had gone overboard in spoiling her as their only child. She always got whatever she wanted from them as a child and it was just as bad after she turned 20.

There was
one
thing that she had not lied to him about and that was when she told him:

“My parents are idiots. They’ll do anything and everything for me. I snap my fingers and they ask me how high they need to jump.”