Sohlberg and the Gift (31 page)

Sohlberg stood behind Falkanger and pushed him in the direction of the hallway and he jerked the pervert’s arm further up and then to the side so hard that Falkanger almost passed out. A long time passed. Not a noise came from the bedroom. Sohlberg called out in his best high school French which came out as:

“Pierre! Come out. I’m police. Hurry! Or I arrest you.”

A thin and dazed black boy with blood-stained underwear walked out. Sohlberg asked in barely passable French:

“Is anyone else in there or in the house?”

The boy shook his head. “Pas . . . no.”

Sohlberg stood frozen in place. After a minute of not hearing any suspicious noises he brought down Falkanger’s arm and placed the handcuffs on the right wrist.

“Pierre,” said Sohlberg in his barely intelligible French. “Come here.”

The boy obeyed.

Sohlberg brought out a long plastic wrist tie and he secured the boy to the inside door knob of a closet. He pushed Pierre inside and closed the door on the boy for the boy’s safety and to prevent him from wandering away or escaping.

“Move.” Sohlberg pushed his prisoner ahead of him as a human shield while he inspected the four bedrooms and adjoining bathrooms. He then brought Falkanger back to the living room where he pushed Falkanger onto the sofa. Sohlberg got the boy out of the closet. He looked at the boy and pointed to the floor. “Sit down on floor . . . cross your knees . . . put your hands and arms under your knees.”

Falkanger cursed.

Sohlberg turned to face the fat lawyer. “How old is Pierre?”

“I don’t know,” snarled Falkanger. “It really doesn’t matter.”

The boy spoke in rapid French but Sohlberg couldn’t make heads or tails out of his words. That’s when the thought hit Sohlberg that the boy spoke in Creole French from Haiti.

“You from Haiti?”

The boy answered with a weak smile.

“Falkanger you piece of garbage. This boy is an orphan from Haiti . . . isn’t he?”

“It really doesn’t matter. He’s mine and that’s all that counts.”

“Are you telling me you adopted him?”

“Maybe I should adopt my lover boy. And you and I could share him. Or we could share my wife . . . or her delicious daughter or both.”

“Shut up.”

“But—”

“Shut up you piece of garbage. You give a bad name to Eurotrash.”

Falkanger’s eyes fluttered. His intoxication started to recede as quickly and obviously as an extreme low tide on the beach. “So what are you going to do about all this
Chief
Inspector?”

 “Easy. In two minutes I’m going to take pictures with my cell phone of you and your boy and your drugs. Then I’ll e-mail the pictures to the tabloids first . . . then the newspapers and the television stations here in Norway and then in Sweden. I’ll send an e-mail with picture attachments to the Crown Prince himself and every other royal parasite you like to socialize with. Oh yeah. That’s going to be big news.”

“Now wait a minute you crazy cop. You can’t!”

Sohlberg pushed Falkanger down on the sofa and he took off the left handcuff and locked it into the crossbars that linked the thick steel legs of the coffee table—the perfect ball-and-chain for his prisoner. He then motioned for the boy to come over and sit next to the lawyer and SKF heir. Sohlberg kneeled about five feet in front of the table so that the camera would capture the drugs and the paraphernalia and the two individuals. The homicide detective was surprised when he belatedly noticed that Falkanger and his victim both wore heavy eye makeup and garish red lipstick.

“Oh . . . this picture will make the cover of many a tabloid.”

“Wait a minute!” shrieked Falkanger. “You can’t do this. Stop. Stop! Stop or my lawyers will make sure that you never work another day as a cop.”

“Shut up,” instructed Sohlberg. He took the picture and then four more from different angles.

“But the boy . . . he’s a minor,” shouted Baldur Falkanger.

“Since when do you worry about who you’re dragging into your bed? Besides . . . they’ve got excellent editors at the tabloids . . . and the newspapers . . . and the television news programs. They’ll hide his face with a little digital erasing or blurring.”

“Some won’t. They do anything to sell their gossip.”

“Since when do you care or worry? . . . You obviously went from swinger to pedophile without any pangs of conscience until now. So what happened? . . . Let me guess . . . you got bored with you and your so-called wife doing other adults . . . so you moved down to children.”

“No. No. Look . . . the boy and I . . . we were just playing . . . pretending. I never touched the boy.”

“So the blood in his underwear is . . . what? . . . Make-believe?”

Falkanger began weeping. Slowly and quietly at first and then in great big sobs. Eventually he settled into breathing heavily. An ugly red splotch spread over his face and neck. “No. Please. Don’t. My wife. My family. My marriage. My children.”

“What wife? What marriage? . . . What children? To have those things you have to be a husband and a father. You can’t just pretend to be one. Don’t you understand that you’re living a lie?”

“Please.”

“Falkanger . . . you’re like the man who owns a Ferrari and has everyone believing that he drives a Ferrari . . . but underneath the hood the liar actually has an old cracked junk engine from a three-cylinder Yugo.”

Mascara ran down Falkanger’s face and left behind dirty black streaks. The red splotch spread beyond Falkanger’s face down into his pale and heaving chest. Sohlberg wondered if Falkanger would die of a cocaine-induced stroke or heart attack.

“Please. I’ll do whatever it takes. This will ruin my marriage.”

“I don’t think anyone can ruin your marriage. It is a ruin. What you really mean is that your fifth wife will be able to get around the customary pre-nuptial agreement and get a big fat divorce settlement from you . . . or for a pretty penny she’ll start spinning juicy stories to the media about your deranged sex life.”

“You don’t know me . . . you don’t know what it’s like.”

“Sure I know you and all the other trust fund babies and royals . . . you’re too bored with life and living . . . so you play in bed and soon that gets boring too. I know you . . . and your type . . . . you’re always looking for more exciting thrills to fill your empty life.”

“That’s enough. Are you going to lecture me or arrest me?”

“Maybe I’ll do both.”

“Right now I’m preferring the arrest over hearing more of your dumb worn-out middle class values.”

“I want a name.”

Baldur Falkanger smiled. A thin line of red lipstick stretched over the man’s mascara-smeared face. He looked like a losing contestant at the Miss Oslo Drag Queen Beauty Contest.

“What name?”

“Your wife drove a man out here . . . to this apartment . . . from Gothenburg . . . almost four years ago. He traveled on a Dutch passport as Hans—”

“Muller. Yes I remember him. Quite the party animal. He’s got quite the equipment if you know what I mean. He had a way of livening things up when we had a little group fun with him. So . . . what about him?”

Sohlberg held out the color photograph of Jakob Gansum. “Who’s this?”

“Muller. That’s him.”

“Who sent him to you?”

“I . . . I don’t remember.”

“Of course you do.”

“Not really. Me and my wife get a couple dozen of these studs to play with every year. We sometimes meet them over the Internet . . . we bring them in to play with us or watch them play with others . . . or sometimes we get them in a trade with someone else.”

Sohlberg put his cell phone between his hands and brought up his address book. “Let’s see. Who should get this scoop first? I know. Let’s start with the British ones. They’re always interested in what all the royals and their friends are up to. . . . Let’s see . . .
News of the World
or
The Sun
? Maybe
The Daily Mirror
? . . . Or should we go first to Germany with
Bild
? . . . Or
Aftonbladet
in Sweden? Why I bet you that
Expressen
would publish this rubbish. I wonder what will happen here and in Stockholm and Gothenburg when they see a picture of you and your boy toy.”

“Wait. Wait. I remember. It was Cat’s Meow and her husband KinkyNine . . . .”

“Any last names?”

“No. I only knew them by their website nicknames.”

“So you and your wife had sex with complete strangers that you only knew by nicknames?”

“The swinger website is for discrete and anonymous swinging and swapping. It’s not a church social or chamber of commerce mixer. And no . . . we did not play with Cat’s Meow and KinkyNine. That was strange. First couple I ever met that didn’t play. But we liked them because they sent us Hans and other lovely specimens . . . including two exquisite Ukranian sisters for us to play with.”

Sohlberg nodded as he thought about how Cat’s Meow also refused to play with Jakob Gansum while she led him on all the time. “What’s the website?”

“Dulanika dot com.”

“Your account name and password?”

“StyxStud . . . Falk-sixty-nine.”

“Let’s see if you understand me perfectly . . . you realize that there will be worse . . . far worse trouble for you if you tip anyone off about what’s going on . . . or if you change the password.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“I’d think twice about that if I were you.”

“What’s next?”

“Your computer. Where is it?”

Falkanger nodded in the direction of the kitchen. Sohlberg found the tablet computer on a counter and brought it back. “Okay. Let’s log on and see if we can find Cat’s Meow and KinkyNine.”

“I doubt if you’ll find them. It’s been months . . . years . . . since I’ve heard of them or come across them.”

“Ah . . . here we go . . . where would I find them? What do I click on . . . where do I go?”

“Run her name in the box for search. See what it pulls up.”

Sohlberg pecked away at the keyboard and got the response: “NO SEARCH RESULTS UNDER THAT NAME.”

The disappointment must have shown on Sohlberg’s face because Baldur Falkanger immediately said, “See? . . . I told you. They probably don’t subscribe to the website any more. I looked for them but couldn’t find them a few months ago.”

Sohlberg dialed his personal cell phone and called Atle. “Hei. I need to find out the true identity or . . . at the very least . . . the I.P. address or addresses for two people who used pseudonyms on a members-only website for swingers. Can you get that information? I see. Well. We’ll have to give it a try. So . . . do I need to bring you a computer to see if you can download everything. What? . . . I
don’t
need to bring it over? . . .You can do that over the Internet?” Sohlberg looked up at Falkanger. “Do you have high speed Internet here in the house?”