“They’ve found him already then?”
“He was never abducted. He was suffocated in his carriage during his afternoon nap.”
The dog had flopped down in the corner by the stove. It was lying on its side. Johanne tried to focus on the small rib cage, rising and falling, rising and falling. The ribs stood out under the soft, short fur. His eyes were half closed and his tongue was wet and pink in the middle of all that shitty brown.
“Then it’s not him,” she said quickly in a flat voice, struggling for air. “He doesn’t suffocate them. He… he abducts them and then kills them in a way we can’t… we can’t work out. He doesn’t suffocate small babies while they’re asleep. It can’t be the same man. In Tromsø, you said? Did you say in Tromsø?”
She hit the table with her fist, as if the geographical distance was the proof she needed: what they were looking at was a tragic but natural death. A cot death, awful, of course, but still bearable. At least for her. For everyone else apart from the family. The mother. The father.
“Tromsø! That doesn’t make sense!”
She leaned forward over the table and tried to look him in the eye. He turned toward the coffee maker. Slowly he got up, seemingly robbed of energy. Opened the cabinet and took out two mugs. For a moment he stood studying them. One of them had a Ferrari on the side, faded to a pale pink by the dishwasher. The other was shaped like a tame dragon, with a broken wing and the tail as a handle. He filled them both and gave the car mug to Johanne. The steam from the coffee clung to her face. She gripped the mug with both hands and wanted Adam to agree with her. Tromsø was too far away. It didn’t fit the pattern. The killer had not claimed his fourth victim. It couldn’t be true. The dog whimpered in its sleep.
“The message,” he said in a tired voice, and sipped the hot liquid. “He left the same message. Now you’ve got what you deserved.”
“But…”
“We haven’t released any details about the message yet. There hasn’t been a word about it in the papers. We’ve actually managed to keep it secret until now. It has to be him.”
Johanne looked at the clock.
“Right. Twenty-five past one,” she said. “We’ve got four hours and thirty-five minutes exactly until the alarm clock in there goes off. So let’s get started. I’m guessing that you’ve got something in your flight bag. Go get it. We’ve only got four and half hours.”
“So the only common feature is the message?”
She leaned back in the chair, frustrated, and folded her hands around her neck. There were yellow Post-its everywhere. A big sheet of paper was stuck to the fridge; as it had been rolled up, they’d had to use masking tape to stop it from falling down. The children’s names were written at the top of each column with information about everything from their favorite food to their medical history underneath. The column for Glenn Hugo was almost empty. The only information they had about the little boy who was not yet more than twenty-four hours dead was a preliminary cause of death: suffocation. Age and weight. A normal, healthy, eleven-month-old boy.
A piece of paper over the stove showed that his parents were named May Berit and Frode Benonisen and they were twenty-five and twenty-eight years old respectively and lived in her wealthy mother’s house. Both were employed by the local council. He worked as a trash collector and she was a secretary in the mayor’s office. Frode had nine years’ elementary education and a relatively successful career as a soccer player for TIL behind him. May Berit had studied the history of religion and Spanish at Oslo University. They’d been married for two years, almost to the day.
“The message. And the fact that they’re all children. And they’re all dead.”
“No. Not necessarily Emilie. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to her.”
“Correct.”
He massaged his scalp with his knuckles.
“The paper that the messages are written on comes from two different sources. Or piles, to be more precise. Ordinary copy paper of the type used by everyone with a computer. No fingerprints. Well…”
He rubbed his head again, and a very thin puff of dandruff caught the light from the powerful lamp she had taken in from the living room.
“It’s too early to say anything definite about the last message, of course. It’s still being tested. But I don’t think we should get our hopes up. The man is careful. Extremely careful. The handwriting in each message looks different, at least at first glance. That might be on purpose. An expert is going to compare them.”
“But this witness… this…”
Johanne got up and ran her finger over a series of yellow Post-its on the cabinet door nearest the window.
“Here. The man in Soltunveien 1. What did he actually see?”
“A retired professor. Very reliable witness, by the way. The problem is that he…”
Adam poured himself coffee cup number six. He tried to suppress an acid burp and held his fist to his mouth.
“His eyesight isn’t that good. He wears pretty strong glasses. But in any case… he was repairing his terrace. He had a good view from there down to the road, here.”
Adam used a wooden ladle as a pointer and marked out the rough map that was taped to the window.
“He said that he noticed three people during the critical period. A middle-age woman in a red coat, who he thinks he recognized. A young boy on a bike, who we can basically rule out immediately. Both of them were walking down the road, in other words toward the house in question. But then he saw a man, who he reckoned was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, walking in the opposite direction…”
The ladle handle moved across the paper again.
“… out toward Langnesbakken. It was just past three. The witness is sure about that because his wife came out shortly afterward to ask when they should eat. He looked at his watch and reckoned that he would be finished with the new railings by five.”
“And there was something about the way he was walking…”
Johanne squinted at the map.
“Yes. The professor described it as…”
Adam rummaged around in the papers.
“… someone who’s in a rush but doesn’t want to show it.”
Johanne looked at the memo with a degree of skepticism.
“And how do you see that?”
“He felt that the man was walking more slowly than he wanted to, almost as if he wanted to run, but didn’t dare. Sharp observation, in fact, if it’s right. I tried to do something similar on the way here and there could be something in it. Your movements become quite staccato and there’s something tense and involuntary about it.”
“Can he give any more details?”
“Unfortunately not.”
The last wing had been broken from the dragon mug in the course of the night and it stood there, more pathetic than ever, like a tame, clipped cockerel. Adam put a bit of milk in his coffee.
“Nothing more than his age, approximately. And that he was dressed in gray or blue clothes. Or both. Very neutral.”
“Sensible of him. If it really was our man…”
“Oh, and that he had hair. Thick, well-cut hair. The professor couldn’t be sure of anything else. Of course, we’ll make an announcement, asking anyone who was in the area at the time to contact us. So we’ll see.”
Johanne rubbed her lower back and closed her eyes. She seemed to be lost in thought. The early morning light had just started to creep into the sky. Suddenly she started to collect all the notes, take down the posters, and fold away the map and columns. She put everything together in a meticulously thought out system. The Post-its in envelopes. The large sheets of paper folded and piled on top of each other. And finally she put it all back in the old flight bag and then took a can of Coke from the fridge. She looked questioningly at Adam, who shook his head.
“I’ll go,” he assured her. “Of course.”