Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

“Henry, these are the people from the homicide squad. Excuse me, I’ve forgotten your names.”

Henry recognized the opossum standing next to Jenssen. She had plucked her eyebrows since he’d last seen her; the unibrow had been erased. He didn’t know the dark-haired man with the fine-hewn face. The officer introduced himself. “Awner Blum,” he said drily. “I’m leading the investigations.” Henry couldn’t gauge whether that was good or bad news. He shook hands with everyone and again felt the power of Jenssen’s grip.

“Are there any — how should I put it — breakthroughs yet?” Henry asked, looking around at the assembled company.

“We’re still in the process of evaluating,” replied Jenssen matter-of-factly. “The perpetrator or perpetrators set fire to the car to destroy any evidence. We’re most interested in whether this was an accident or a premeditated crime.”

“Who could possibly have planned it?” Henry adopted a puzzled expression. “Betty got lost. Not even she knew where she’d ended up. No one knew.”

“That’s just the question, Mr. Hayden,” said Blum, butting in. Jenssen was silent.

“You mean whether anyone was in the car with her?”

“For instance. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Whoever could it have been?”

The door opened quietly. Honor Eisendraht entered the room behind Henry. He noticed that the opossum was sniffing around again.

“If you’ve no objections, Mr. Hayden, we’d like to continue the questioning with you.” Jenssen looked at Moreany. “Do you have another free room for us?”

Before Moreany could reply, Henry raised his hand. “I’d like to say something that concerns all of us here. A little time ago I lost my wife.” Henry paused to collect himself. “As you may already know, the manuscript of the novel I’ve been working on for a long time disappeared along with Betty.”

Henry glanced at Moreany, who nodded. “I just told the police that.”

“A few days ago,” Henry continued, “I met Betty in the Four Seasons. She was distraught and scared, not herself. She was afraid.”

Jenssen whipped out a device. “Would you mind if I recorded this?”

“Not at all. Well then, we sat in the Oyster Bar and discussed the novel. I talked about the difficulties I was having getting anything written after Martha’s death. She hardly listened. I asked her what was wrong with her and then it burst out of her. She told me she was pregnant.”

Honor leaned against the office wall. She felt a little dizzy.

“Did she name anyone?” asked Jenssen, who clearly felt awkward conducting this conversation in front of the other witnesses.

“No. She spoke of the disastrous mistake she’d made. It was already too late for an abortion.”

“Do you think she was raped?” asked the opossum.

“I wouldn’t want to rule it out. At any rate she spoke of a man she was afraid of. She said he was dangerous and unpredictable. She’d ended the relationship with him and now she was afraid he might try to get his own back. It seems he was always ringing her up and threatening to send the ultrasound images of the baby to Moreany’s office. She said he’d stolen the car.”

“Along with the keys?” asked Jenssen in disbelief.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Shaking his head, Jenssen started to take notes.

“I advised Betty to go to the police and offered to have her stay for a few days, but she refused. Then she felt sick and had to go to the restroom, but she didn’t come back and I drove home to work on the novel. That was the last I saw of her. Now I blame myself for not going straight to the police. She was in trouble, in danger. I shouldn’t have left her alone.”

“I can confirm that,” Honor said in a quiet voice. She was slumped into a heap against the wall. “I also happened to be in the Four Seasons lobby that day. It was the Tuesday before last. I saw Betty go to the restroom. She vomited and she was crying. Crying a lot. Mr. Hayden came out of the Oyster Bar and left the hotel. He didn’t see me.”

Moreany got up out of his chair with difficulty and let Honor have it. He seated himself behind his desk, his face screwed up in pain.

“We interrupted you, Henry.”

“I only want to say one more thing,” Henry declared. “If Betty is dead and it was, as Mr. Jenssen puts it, not an accident, but murder, then you must look for the father of her child.”

Moreany’s office was as silent as a concert hall. Only a solitary cougher could be heard.

Chief Investigator Awner Blum was in charge of three separate homicide squads. He was reputed to be a genius of case analysis, which in film and on television is generally known as “profiling.” His officers had indeed a number of times drawn up such accurate criminal profiles that convicted murderers had congratulated him from prison. Blum didn’t know the first thing about psychology, but he had a superhuman instinct for managing people. He might have been born to run a murder squad. He had headhunted the most skilled detectives to join his squads and had attained a solved crimes rate of one hundred percent. He’d done that for three years in a row. Blum was a womanizer and liked the sound of his own voice. His lectures on criminal profiles, larded with quotations, could drag on forever. Jenssen was of the opinion that just listening to him ought to count as overtime. In the most successful investigations the movement patterns of victim and perpetrator were compared. The method worked well. You drew up the most comprehensive biographies possible of the victim and then looked for areas of overlap with the profiles of potential offenders.

The data crunchers established that Betty Hansen had indeed made regular phone calls to an unknown person over the course of the last six months. His or her identity, however, remained a mystery. The SIM card from the prepaid phone had been registered under a made-up name and a false address. Betty’s phone also remained missing, as did her notebook computer, where her emails were stored. Neither her leather-bound diary nor her private or business correspondence yielded a name.

Jenssen went to see the gynecologist who had carried out the scan. Betty Hansen hadn’t mentioned the father’s name to this woman either. Without a sample of tissue from the amniotic sac, it wasn’t possible to determine the father’s DNA. Members of Betty’s family were questioned, along with her friends, her neighbors, and her work colleagues, but no one knew anything. Just three sets of prints were found in her apartment: Betty’s, Jenssen’s, and those of a neighbor. The only evidence of any use was the scattered movement profile of the caller. A great deal of effort went into following up this evidence.

It is widely believed that telephone companies store data as to who telephones whom, where, and for how long for no more than six months. Far too short a period for thorough police work, in Awner Blum’s opinion. Universal data mining for the purposes of criminal prosecution would be far more effective if there were no time limit, inasmuch as every caller is a potential offender who ought to be subject to preventative scrutiny. Only the National Security Agency knows everything forever, and the Americans are famous for being extremely tightfisted when it comes to handing over their valuable knowledge.

Jenssen didn’t find the telephone data particularly helpful. He stuck a large transparency of the mystery caller’s movement profile on the map on his office wall and ordered a jumbo tuna pizza with extra capers. Place, time, and length of call were marked on the transparency in the form of clouds of scattered dots. Joining the dots up yielded an abstract pattern that was aesthetically demanding but an investigative nightmare. Each call came from a different place. Some were made in town, not far in fact from Betty Hansen’s apartment. Most of them, however, were made in sparsely populated areas, from remote forests and nature reserves, for instance, within a radius of two hundred miles. That meant that it was extremely difficult to locate the telephone with any accuracy. What is more, the caller only ever switched the phone on immediately before making the call and then switched it off again immediately after hanging up. There was no movement along roads, no lines —only dots.