Sohlberg and the White Death (2 page)

Chapter 1/Én

HEYRIEUX AND LYON, FRANCE:

MORNING AND NIGHT OF THE

DAY, APRIL 12

One hundred. Chief Inspector Harald Sohlberg could not believe that he had finally reached the centenary mark. It was not a number to be proud of. But at one o’clock in the morning the number astonished the detective—a man who was rarely surprised about anything.

One hundred homicides. And that did not include all of the beatings and rapes and assorted other horrific crimes that he had investigated.

Sohlberg kneeled by the body. He examined the woman’s 9-mm bullet wounds. A clean dime-size hole on her left temple belied the messy and massive exit wound in the back of her skull. The second bullet had perforated her heart with a small entry hole in her sweater. Sohlberg could only imagine the damage to her back.

A bulldog in uniform watched Sohlberg. The senior gendarme in charge—Gendarmerie Colonel Jacques Daudet—stood behind Sohlberg with his short and thick legs slightly apart. Daudet swayed to the right and then to the left. Sohlberg wondered if the human bulldog was struggling under the weight of his low-slung and thick-set body.

“Time of death?”

“Less than three hours ago,” said Col. Daudet.

Sohlberg stood up and observed that Daudet was closely watching him. Daudet’s intelligent eyes studied every move and reaction of the Norwegian detective. Daudet was all about observation. He was known for looking over a crime scene for hours if not days. His colleagues even joked that God had built him to observe because he was so slow on foot thanks to his stubby legs.

Col. Daudet studied Sohlberg’s somber pale face and said:

“She was first shot in the head. She fell right there where the blood pooled around her head. She never moved. I lifted her shoulders . . . she was shot a second time where she fell . . . there’s a bullet that’s stuck in the floor . . . it went right through her chest.”

“Awful,” said Sohlberg. “I knew her . . . she immigrated from Turkey and worked for Interpol as a translator.” Sohlberg wondered how her life could have ended so brutally. She seemed happy at work and with her boyfriend. She often joked about “
Living in paradise
” in a cozy stone cottage at the outskirts of Heyrieux. The little French town was about 10 miles southeast of Lyon and the worst crimes in Heyrieux were stolen hens and the occasional prank gone awry. But not tonight.

A low moan emanated from the kitchen. Sohlberg looked up. The woman’s Portugese boyfriend sat by a table in the kitchen muttering something with his head hung low.

“How’s he taking it?” said Sohlberg in his atrocious French.

“Intravenously. . . .”

“What?”

“Heroin. We found a half-kilo stash under their bed . . . along with plenty of syringes and needles. I expect that we’ll find more. He’s in a comfy White Daze.”

“Was he here . . . was he also shot?”

“He was here. And no . . . he wasn’t shot.”

“Oh? . . .”

“The neighbors called. They heard three shots. I came in . . . saw him sprawled on the floor near her. I smelled both of his hands . . . they reeked of gunpowder . . . we tested him. I’m sure that he will come up positive for residue.”

“Where’s the third bullet? . . . Did he try to kill himself?”

“Bullet number three is up there in the wall. . . . As for a murder and an attempted suicide . . . who knows? . . . The bullet in the wall may be from him trying to shoot himself in the head and missing the shot. But we haven’t found the gun.”

“What? . . . The gun is missing?”

“Gone. Nowhere to be found. . . .”

Sohlberg took a deep breath. This was an unexpected complication.

Daudet cleared his throat and said, “As soon as we find where he hid the gun I’m sure that his prints will be all over the weapon.”

“Maybe.”

“Chief Inspector . . . do you want to take a look around and see if she brought anything from work?”

“Yes. That’s a good idea. By the way . . . why did you call me?”

“She had your business card in her purse. So I called you.”

“Why not call Interpol itself? . . . They’ve got a main number.”

“I did . . . Chief Inspector. But I got the run-around after I reached the main switchboard . . . they sent me from one operator to another . . . after an hour I finally had a name . . . but all I got was that person’s voicemail greeting.”

“Typical.”

“I apologize for getting you out here this late on a Saturday night. But I figured someone from Interpol needed to be here. It’s not just any day that an Interpol employee gets shot to death in a house with a stash of heroin.”

Sohlberg nodded. He wanted to say that it also wasn’t just any day that an Interpol employee met a violent death while working on the agency’s top secret Operation Locust. He walked around the three small rooms inside the stone cottage and found nothing of interest in the tiny living-dining room, the miniature kitchen, the little bedroom, and the closet of a bathroom.

“Can I look in their car?”

“Yes . . . but don’t take anything.”

“Of course not.”

The cold damp of the darkness outside reminded Sohlberg that Death is almost always the unexpected and unwelcome thief. Shivers crept up and down Sohlberg’s spine as if a dozen poisonous spiders had been let loose under his shirt. He put on his gloves and opened the door of the old Fiat which creaked when he got inside.

He felt around under the seats.

To his surprise the carpet under the passenger seat covered a laptop computer. He got an even bigger surprise when he pulled the computer out and saw that a thumb drive was still attached to the computer. He instantly recognized the color and manufacturer of the 32 GB flash drive. It was the exact same brand and make that Interpol used to copy large files.

The Norwegian detective hailed a crime scene technician who placed the computer and its little external drive in a plastic bag for evidence. After showing the technician where he had found the two items Sohlberg walked a discrete distance down the driveway and he took out his cell phone.

“Laprade . . . give me a call. It’s urgent.”

His hands shook with rage over the murder of his young and charming translator.

Did Otelo Carvalho the boyfriend really kill her?

If not him then who?

Why?

Sohlberg got lost in a jumble of memories of the vivacious Azra Korbal. He waited fifteen minutes for a return call from Bruno de Laprade—a
commissaire de police
with the
Police Judiciaire
or French National Police.

Where’s Laprade?

Bruno Laprade should answer the call. It was his duty as a senior officer in the Major Case squad at OCRTIS or the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Trafficking in Drugs. The head of OCRTIS himself had picked the commissaire to handle Operation Locust inside France because Laprade was known as a ruthless ex-military man who got things done. He was a rising star in the Sub-Directorate for Organized Crime and Financial Crimes (SDLCODF) and he was always on call 24-by-7 when it came to Operation Locust. It was not like him to
not
pick up the phone.

Sohlberg dialed again and said:

“Laprade. Call me.”

Where was Laprade?

Sohlberg remembered that the commissaire sometimes spent weekends with a female friend—a widow whom Laprade rarely mentioned.

A gendarme poked his head out of the cottage doorway and said:

“The medical examiner is about to take the body out. Want to see her again?”

Sohlberg did. He walked back to the cottage.

What was he going to tell her family in Turkey?

Azra Korbal had visited Sohlberg and his wife several times for dinner and they tremendously liked her. The boyfriend less so. The Sohlbergs’ dislike had now been confirmed. The man was a junkie and maybe even involved in her death.

Sohlberg stood in solemn attention by her corpse. The coroner had already placed it inside the body bag. Azra Korbal’s face had a peaceful look. Sohlberg felt her presence quite strongly as he often did with the recently deceased. He slipped a soothing Ricola lozenge into his mouth to erase the sour taste that he got when he saw a murdered victim’s body.

~ ~ ~

Murder always made Harald Sohlberg think about the mysterious ways that the lives of men and women intersect. He thought about how those intersections were sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Some for good. Some for evil. Some quite deadly. He also thought about how those intersections
used
to be so local most of the time.

A careless teen would plow his car into another and kill a mother and son who lived less than a mile away.

The old alcoholic in Apartment 3-B would fall asleep smoking a cigarette and burn down the building and leave everyone homeless except for the young couple in 4-B who wound up in pine box residences six feet under.

A jealous boyfriend would strangle his lover when she called off their affair or told him she was pregnant from another man.

Today the intersection of lives spans the globe. Sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Sometimes deadly.

A Chinese pig farmer breeds the next strain of influenza virus that kills 3 million elderly in Europe and the USA.

A farmer plants coca bushes in Bolivia. Another poor farmer plants opium poppies in Afghanistan. The deadly crops are harvested and processed for the overdoses that kill the Stanford University sophomore from Florida and the software executive in Oslo.

Nineteen hijackers get on four airplanes and on September 11 they intersect their lives with those of hundreds of millions of other lives. Trillions of war dollars are spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers are killed and maimed.

~ ~ ~

Sohlberg looked at the murdered young woman and her bruised angelic face and he wondered what would be next in the globalization of crime.

Why would anyone want to murder Azra Korbal?

Was the Portugese boyfriend her killer?

Sohlberg doubted if Otelo Carvalho even knew how to shoot a gun. Sohlberg had his doubts because the boyfriend was a clumsy young fool. Extreme milquetoast. A trust fund baby. The ultimate weakling. The kind of rich boy who’d pee in his pants if he heard a gun blast. Guns were far beyond Otelo Carvalho’s homicidal skills which were close to zero. The guy couldn’t even figure out how to open the front door lock at the Sohlbergs’ apartment when the young couple had visited for dinner last week.

Sohlberg hovered around the crime scene for another half hour. But there was nothing more to be found or said or done for his part at the stone cottage. So at two o’clock in the morning he drove off to Lyon and his office at Interpol.

Where is Laprade?

It was very strange of him not to answer his phone.

Why was a computer hidden in Azra’s car?

Why did it have a thumb drive stuck to it?

The computer could be planted or staged. But even planted or staged evidence has great value for the false story that it’s trying to tell.

~ ~ ~

Sohlberg drove off. He turned up the heat in the car. He shook uncontrollably and retched not once but six times. The sight of Death had frozen his insides.

Homicide is never pretty.

He thought of the cold blue skin of Azra Korbal and the purple smudges around her sunken lifeless eyes.

“Azra,” he whispered. “Why?”

An ugly glacier slowly moved down his body as it pushed aside his heart and soul—they cracked under the brutal weight of Death’s crushing reality. The devastating and absolute finality of her death brought to mind the ugly corruption that disfigures all human bodies subjected to homicide. Death’s merciless wall of ice grabbed, twisted, and ground his innards into a messy rubble, a moraine of grief.

Sohlberg accelerated the Volvo sedan to 90 mph on the empty roads back to Interpol headquarters. He wasn’t worried about getting stopped by a French policeman for speeding. He had a greater worry—the evidence. Sohlberg was preoccupied if not obsessed with gathering all of the evidence as soon as possible.

A set of headlights in the rear view mirror. They caught Sohlberg’s attention. He slowed down. The car behind also slowed down. He accelerated and the driver did the same. Sohlberg got off the A43 Highway at the cloverleaf intersection with the A46. He dropped his speed down to 15 mph. The car passed him in a blur. He wondered if the driver and passenger were tailing him.

Am I getting too paranoid?

Ominous feelings. Sohlberg was sure that he had been under surveillance ever since the start of Operation Locust.

~ ~ ~

 The Norwegian detective arrived at Interpol less than 20 minutes after leaving the crime scene at Heyrieux. He parked on the third floor basement and took the elevator down to the tenth floor basement. After swiping his badge through several doors he walked past the overnight staff guarding the central archives.