Sohlberg and the Gift (29 page)

“Excellent. Did you find out our victim’s name?”

“Benazir Mahar. Daughter of Zulema Mahar and Ali Mohammed Mahar.”

Sohlberg sighed with relief. Two years ago the Oslo Police had—despite massive efforts—never been able to discover the name of a young woman butchered in another Pakistani honor killing. “What else?”

“A cousin . . . Asifa Mahar called me yesterday morning and then came by the station in the afternoon. She’s very western and modern and married to a Norwegian engineer and she was extremely angry and upset over her cousin’s murder and she’s pretty sure that the vic’s oldest brother killed her because he found out from his father that his sister had a cell phone that a Norwegian boy in school had given her. The father didn’t tell him anything else since he and his wife are afraid of their son.”

“Who’s the son and why are the parents afraid of him?”

“Naveed Mahar. Age twenty. Unemployed and on the dole. They’re afraid of him because he’s become a religious fanatic . . . joined an extremist Islamic group that hates Norwegians and the West at the King Abdullah mosque.”

“The usual . . . no?”

“What do you mean Chief Inspector?”

“The immigrant parents are grateful to leave their hellhole of a country . . . they come here and now Junior is an angry alienated religious nut who’s unemployed and unemployable and on the warpath against the adopted country of his parents.”

“You sound like that racist Guttorm Nordø.”

“Racist? . . . I doubt it. His son is married to a Japanese lady that Nordø holds in the highest regard. So . . . regardless of who or what I sound like . . . you can’t deny the truth of what I just said.”

The constable shrugged. “While the father was at work Naveed Mahar got the vic’s cell phone out of his parents’ bedroom . . . that’s when he saw that his sister was sexting the Norwegian boy . . . trading nude pictures of themselves. The cousin says he went berserk and killed his sister in front of their mother.”

“Has he been brought in for questioning?”

Constable Hanna Høiness winced and said, “No.”

“Why?”

“He took off for Hamburg just minutes after he dumped his sister’s body on the top floor. He was going to hide her in the rooftop but some noise scared him. So he left her in the hallway where we found her.”

“Have you contacted the Germans? And Interpol?”

“Yes.”

“Keep me posted. And keep checking the father.”

“The father?”

“He may have killed her. The son may just be a red herring. Did you find the knife or weapon?”

“No. But Nordø is in the building . . . taking it apart. He’s looking at all the drain pipes.”

“Good! . . . That’s my Nordø.”

“So you don’t think the girl’s brother did it?”

“I think nothing. I just find the facts at the start of an investigation. That’s the problem Constable Hanna Høiness with detectives who are
thinking
instead of
finding facts
at the beginning stages of an investigation. First get the all the facts. Or as many as you can. Then do the thinking.”

Constable Høiness blushed. “I understand.”

“Very good. Look . . . this cousin Asifa may after all just be spinning us a lie to throw suspicion away from the father or another family member. Or she may have an axe to grind.”

“But isn’t it obvious that the brother killed the girl?”

“Nothing is ever obvious in a homicide. Get all the facts. Then we’ll narrow down our list of suspects. I also want you to check out Benazir’s Norwegian boyfriend or any spurned or jealous friends or suitors. Who knows? . . . Maybe some acquaintance or school friend killed her for other reasons. By the way . . . what turned up in the autopsy?”

“No signs of rape. Just the stabbing and slashing. She bled to death.”

“I see. Let’s not eliminate the neighbors or any other suspects. Interview everyone in the building as well as all of her schoolmates and teachers to get a feel for what kind of a life she had. . . . Get all police reports in the area for any similar crimes the past two years. And . . . get every police report . . . even parking or speeding tickets . . . covering a ten block area for any crimes or suspicious activity for the day of the murder and two weeks before.”

“Everything? Even parking tickets?”

“Yes. You never know what or who will turn up. Also . . . check up on alibis for all convicted felons who live or work within a mile of her building. Then e-mail me a list of all sex offenders and men convicted of violent assaults on women who live or work within a two-mile radius of the Mahar residence . . . make a note on whether they have an alibi or not. Make sure you verify that each alibi is true.”

“That’s a lot of work.”

“That’s just the start of a good homicide investigation . . . hard work then smart thinking.”

“I don’t know if I can do all of this today.”

“You won’t do all today but you can get the ball rolling on all fronts. I’ll help you as much as I can since we’re short of people.”

~ ~ ~

The endless minutiae of the Mahar investigation threw Sohlberg into
The Zone
—that timeless and effortless zone which athletes report when they are performing at the top of their sport. He literally lost track of time. The work day flashed by at lightning speed. His only break came during lunch time at noon when he walked over to Fru Sivertsen’s desk.

“Fru Sivertsen . . . I need some research done on the Mahar case.”

“What do you need?”

“Høiness found two ex-cons that look interesting. One raped a teenage girl a couple of years ago. But he got off on a technicality. The other one killed his neighbor’s daughter thirty years ago and did his twenty years. I need you to please find out who investigated those cases. I’d like to talk with them if they’re still around. Here are the case numbers.”

Fru Sivertsen reached for the documents that Sohlberg handed her. He stuck a small post-it note to the top page and it read:

Please get ASAP a copy of a Netherlands passport for HANS MULLER (in his 40s) and all its travel data the past 5 years incld trips to/from Cyprus, London, USA, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Underneath the first note was another note that simply read:

URGENT: please have one of your friends do a driver’s license record search and get me a picture of a Jakob Gansum. Also please find out from Hovdestøylen Hotel and Lodge in Hovden who is paying for the rooms for Gjertrud Isaksen and her boyfriend.

As soon as she read the notes Fru Sivertsen smiled and peeled them off and slipped them into her sweater pocket. She then handed Sohlberg a thick packet of mail that had come in for him during his absence.

“Thank you,” he said as he hurried off to his desk where he rummaged through the packet before finding Sivertsen’s note in an unmarked envelope. He looked forward to reading what she had discovered about the surveillance thrown around him.

A page listed the names of the car owners of the two vehicles that shadowed him. The names meant nothing. But they shared the same address in the northern Oslo neighborhood of Nydalen and that address he knew as belonging to private investigator Leif Noer. The former Oslo politiinspektor had left the force in disgrace after he was suspected of blackmailing the rich and the famous—and various political figures—through a devious campaign of illegal wiretapping and surveillance.

Fru Sivertsen also wrote down that current rumors in the Zoo had Leif Noer or his company working as a “consultant” on an exclusive basis for Kroll and its Ibas subsidiary in Norway. Ibas was a hi-tech “information management” and “data recovery” company located in Kongsvinger. The remote town was far from prying eyes—75 miles northeast of Oslo near the border with Sweden.

Kroll?

That’s spendy for whoever hired them to spy on me.

So someone is spending big bucks to watch me.

Who?

Why?

How does this tie in to Astrid Isaksen and her father . . . or the Janne Eide case?

Only the very wealthy or the biggest corporations and government
agencies hired Kroll. The giant American company specialized in
investigative
consulting
and
business intelligence
and
risk consulting
. In other words Kroll spied on anyone and everything for a hefty price. Sohlberg had come across Kroll and its lackey Leif Noer a few years back when Sohlberg had investigated the homicide of a shadowy Pakistani businessman who later turned out to be selling nuclear secrets to various governments—the CIA and North Korean intelligence among others.

~ ~ ~

Shortly after 2 P.M. Fru Sivertsen walked by Sohlberg’s desk. She handed him a color picture of Jakob Gansum from driver’s license records. The face matched the one for Patient # 1022 at the Dove Center. Sivertsen included a sticky post-it note in which she wrote:

Hotel in Hovden says that a tourism promotional company (Norge Tourist Now!) is paying for all costs of room+meals+lift tickets for Gjertrud Isaksen and her boyfriend.

A quick search of news reports and public records on the Internet revealed that
Norge Tourist Now SA
was indeed a company promoting tourism. An Internet search of the executives and board of directors of the company failed to turn up any interesting names or unusual connections to any suspicious persons or entities.

“Well,” said Sohlberg under his breath. He had walked into yet another dead end in the investigation. The company might or might not be legitimate. The company might or might not be fronting for someone who wanted—or needed—to remain hidden.

I wish I had the time to get to the bottom of this Norge Tourist Now! mystery.

Sohlberg reluctantly understood that he was
not
going to have the time to follow up on the Norge Tourist Now! lead because he had to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Patient # 1022 was Jakob Gansum.

Sohlberg shot off a quick e-mail to Constable Hanna Høiness to inform her that he was going to spend the afternoon following up on leads in the Mahar case. He didn’t. Instead he hopped on two different tram lines to shake off anyone following him before he boarded the # 12 line to the ritzy Aker Brygge neighborhood by the waterfront.

A cold blast stung the detective’s face as he hurried down Stranden all the way to the corner with Fjordalléen. Few pedestrians braved the frigid wind that always felt worse by the seaboard. It was almost as if the humidity empowered the cold wind with supernatural powers that allowed the wind to penetrate past clothes and flesh all the way into the bone marrow.

To distract himself from the miserable weather Sohlberg looked around at the buildings. He still could not get used to the area’s new-found wealth and fame. The detective still remembered that as a child and teenager he saw the Aker Brygge as a menacing if not downright dangerous pit to be avoided. Those memories clung to Sohlberg’s mind long after the former shipyards had been transformed and redeveloped in the 1980s from rusting blight to elegant stores and business offices and luxury condos.

The Jacob Aall restaurant appeared forlorn if not abandoned. Few patrons peopled the pricey brasserie. He looked around to see if one or both of the Falkangers were in the restaurant since his early morning Internet research into the Falkangers had struck gold. An
Aftenposten
article had mentioned that the Falkangers and other wealthy socialites frequently ate at “the favorite restaurant of Oslo’s rich and famous.”