Fru Sohlberg shook her head. Her eyes welled up. “How sad. . if that turns out to be the case then at least he’s in a far better place. . that little eternal soul of his.”
Sohlberg’s throat hardened.
Did Ivar Thorsen know that they had lost their two-year-old son to leukemia shortly after moving to Lyon France?
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
1 YEAR AND 23 DAYS AFTER
THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4
Sohlberg reaches into the shelf and takes out Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — the doomed lovers.
“Huh!”
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 opens the case and studies 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 Furtwangler.
The prelude overwhelms Sohlberg with its intensity.
He takes Wagner’s masterpiece off the CD player and decides to hear the opera at another time. Wagner’s music hits too close to home. The music literally brings to his heart and mind and soul the overpowering nature of love and death and how those two mixed together can easily lead to insanity itself.
The sickening shisssh of the rope going through the carabiner on Karoline’s harness. Her eyes wide and filled with love and acceptance of her fate.
The last soft breath of Harald Junior before the leukemia killed him. His dreamy eyes slowly dimming away until the light is extinguished and gone.
The grief. The insanity.
A month after Karoline’s death Sohlberg takes a trip to a country house at Asgardstrand. A partner at Sohlberg’s law firm offers him indefinite use of the house for Sohlberg to have all the time and space to decompress. Sohlberg has always wanted to visit the popular summer vacation spot and pretty fishing village in Vestfold County about 65 miles south of Oslo. He spends days just watching the sailboats and the fishing boats from the lovely southwest side of the mouth of the Oslofjord. At night he watches panoramic lightning from immense thunderstorms that roll in from the North Sea over the Strait of Skagerrak.
His grief worsens. A guilty conscience consumes him for not having asked Karoline to check her ropes and knots. On the third night he takes his uncle’s double-barrel shotgun out of the car and loads 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,” yells 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 remain inactive until his son dies. A guilty conscience again. This time for not having spent enough time with his son or for that matter with his wife. Again a loaded gun and 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.
Fru Sohlberg calls her husband out of his painful reverie: “Sohlberg where are you?”
Sohlberg takes the stairs up to his wife and says, “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?”
“Ja. 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 surprises him any more. After eight years she has exhausted any surprise left in him. He certainly won’t be surprised if she doesn’t 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. Ja that’s all she can expect. And that’s all she deserves.
“What a waste,” he says softly to himself as he mows the lawn with a manual or push reel mower which she forced him to use because she’s very worried about climate change and carbon emissions.
The grass clippings fly off the sharp blades just like the many illusions that he 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 keeps getting stronger. She is unfathomable. She is unknowable.
He almost laughs when he thinks 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 is specially designed to hold acids and it is marked ‘CORROSIVE” and he shivers 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 giggles when he thinks of her tombstone — a barrel marked CORROSIVE.
He starts laughing and laughing when he realizes that finally something in her miserable and toxic life of lies is true: CORROSIVE.
Ja that’s her!
His shoulders shake as he laughs and laughs and thinks of her winding up as a acidic gob of pink nothingness. Ja. 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 notices since they literally use thousands of gallons of acid every week. When a man plans the end and when a man works on the end phase 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 laughs at his hilarious observation.
An hour later he is raking the dead grass clippings off the lawn and she is watching him from their deck in the backyard. She is tanning topless. He waves at her and blows her a kiss. She barely smiles 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 searches the earliest memories that he has of her. He goes over these memories and he’s sickened by the realization that he’s been played like a violin by a virtuoso.