“By the way. . what role did they take in the search for Karl that Friday and the weeks following?”
“Again Chief Inspector. . they are strange people. . an odd family. Everyone on the force made comments about how the Haugens are the first family that did not pArcticipate in the search for their missing child.”
“That is unusual. . the father or the mother or both or other relatives always get involved in the search. . they go on television and ask for the public’s help. They walk the streets and they post and hand out flyers with pictures. Matter of fact. . I’ve always looked carefully to see who in the circle of family and friends was not pArcticipating in the search for a missing person.”
“Ja. People don’t look if they think. . or know. . that the missing person is dead.”
“What about the biological mother?”
“Maya Engen. . she lives in Namsos. . north of Trondheim. . married to Police Inspector Arvid Engen of the Sor-Trondelag district.”
“Really?”
“Do you know him Chief Inspector?”
“No. But that’s another interesting twist in this case. Did Karl’s biological mother. . this Maya Engen. . look for her missing son?”
“No. Physically and mentally she could not. She was devastated. . She fainted at the news of his disappearance. She collapsed several times after she and her husband came down here the night of June fourth. Maya Engen suffered a great deal. . unlike the father and the stepmother who seemed rather cool if not lackadaisical about the whole thing.”
“You’ve personally seen the father and the stepmother after Karl disappeared. . right?”
“Ja.”
“Which one of them would you say was angry or in mourning. . or grieving over Karl?”
“Hard to tell.”
“What?” said a surprised Sohlberg. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“I. . I can’t describe it. . when you’re with them you feel everything is normal but when you leave them you realize something’s not quite right in that family.”
“That’s why I’m very interested in focusing on Karl Haugen’s family and friends. Are we done with the first page of your summary?”
“Ja. I’m ready to start going over the second page.”
“Good. But we’ll have to do that in the car.”
“Where are we going?”
“Halden Fengsel. I understand Norway's newest prison is something to behold.”
“Ja. I’ve seen it on television. . quite luxurious. . but I’ve never been there.”
“Let’s go.”
“Your car or mine?”
“Neither. We’re taking a marked car that Thorsen’s lending us for today. He already made arrangements for our visit.”
“Who?. . Who are we seeing?’
“The Smiley Face Killer.”
Chapter 8
AFTERNOON OF 1 YEAR AND 24 DAYS
AFTER THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4
Traffic was relatively light before the lunch hour. Normally Sohlberg would have taken the super-fast NSB train down to Halden. The trip would have been a quick one hour forty-five minute ride in pure comfort and a local police constable would have picked them up at the station and taken them to the fengsel. But Sohlberg needed to be free from nosy eavesdropping passengers and more important he needed to spend as much time as possible discussing the investigation and the second page of the summary with Constable Wangelin. Sohlberg had to be fully prepared before he interviewed the family and friends of Karl Haugen.
“At least we got out before the rush hour traffic,” said Wangelin.
She put the large Volvo crossover SUV on cruise control at 90 mph as soon as they left the Oslo suburbs behind. They shot down the E-6 highway out of Oslo which runs 352 miles south all the way down south towards the lovely twin cities of Malmo Sweden and Copenhagen Denmark. Less than ten miles separate Halden Prison from the border with Sweden.
Sohlberg sipped his favorite Farris mineral water. He had an entire case in the backseat. “Ever hear about the Smiley Face Killer?”
“Vaguely. . No. Not really Chief Inspector.”
“He was active in the seventies and eighties. . he began killing when he was real young. . in the late sixties. . kept right up until captured in eighty-nine. He was Norway’s worst. Then came the Lommemannen. . the Pocket Man. Heard of him?”
“Oh him? Ja. I’ve heard about the Pocket Man. . molested an estimated four hundred boys. . raped dozens over a thirty year period before his capture in two thousand eight. But the Smiley Face Killer. . he doesn’t sound familiar at all. That was so long ago. I wasn’t even born in the seventies.”
“Well. . I wasn’t in the force until April of eighty-nine. . the Smiley Face Killer was captured in October of that year. But I still knew about the Smiley Face Killer.”
“Sorry Chief Inspector but that’s ancient history.”
Sohlberg grew depressed over Constable Wangelin’s blank look and comments. He suddenly felt old and tired. He was only 20 years older than Wangelin but she made him feel like an outdated relic of the past. Sohlberg had a hard time being told that his frame of reference belonged to ancient history.
“Are you alright Chief Inspector?”
“Ja. Just thinking. Interesting how time fades the public’s memory as well as that of the police force. . at one time the Smiley Face Killer was big news. . as big as Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer in America or the Butcher of Rostov in Russia.”
“Who?”
“Andrei Chikatilo. . the Smiley Face Killer’s counterpart in Russia from seventy-eight to ninety. . both killers would move their rape-and-kill frenzies to different and faraway locations whenever they sensed that they had stirred up a hornet’s nest of investigators with their spectacular murders. . They both got very good at switching back and forth from local murders to faraway atrocities. Even at the height of the repressive and all-controlling Soviet police state Chikatilo would find clever ways to travel to Moscow and distant Russian Republics on his state factory job to kill dozens of women and children whenever he got the police and public riled up in Rostov over his killing sprees.”
“He was able to move around so freely to kill in a dictatorship like the old communist Russia?”
“Ja. . ”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” said Constable Wangelin while shaking her head.
“Chikatilo raped. . killed. . and cannibalized at least fifty-eight women and children. . and not always in that order. He’d torture them and cut out the women’s uteruses and the boy’s parts and eat them. He always blamed his depraved conduct for what he and his family suffered as ethnic Ukrainians with Stalin and the genocidal communists in the nineteen thirties. I imagine you’ve heard about the famine that Stalin intentionally created in the Ukraine?”
“No. . I’m sorry. . not really.”
“Stalin made sure that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians died like fleas. . many people started taking children off the streets and eating them to survive. Chikatilo was traumatized by his mother’s obsession over the possibility that he’d get kidnaped and then killed and eaten.”
“Unbelievable what men do.”
“Ja. . Constable Wangelin. Men and governments.”
“True.”
“I mentioned Chikatilo because I’ve always thought that criminals reflect their families and country and society and the times. It’s too bad that they don’t teach more at the Academy about the criminal mind.”
“Ja. It’s all about forensic science nowadays.”
“The Academy doesn’t train officers properly. They just don’t want to invest the time and effort. You see Constable Wangelin. . to know the criminal mind you have to study real-life cases. Only by truly knowing the criminal mind can you be truly effective as an investigator.”