Harry nodded. “You’re right. Like I said, I don’t know, I’m just guessing. It’s just…” He tried to find the right word.
“Gut feeling?”
“Yes. No.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know. Do you remember the warnings we were given when we were young before we took LSD, that we could have flashbacks and start tripping again without any warning later in life?”
Kaja looked up from the camera. “I never took or was offered LSD.”
“Smart girl. I was a rather less clever boy. Some people say those flashbacks can be triggered. Stress. Heavy drinking. Trauma. And that sometimes those flashbacks are actually a new trip, that the remnants of old drugs get activated because LSD is synthetic and doesn’t get broken down in the same way as cocaine, for instance.”
“So now you’re wondering if you’re having an LSD trip?”
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “LSD is consciousness-raising. It makes the brain work in top gear, interpret information on such a detailed level that it gives you a feeling of cosmic insight. That’s the only way I can describe why I felt we had to check those green rubbish bins. I mean, you don’t just find such a tiny piece of plastic in the first rather odd place you look in, one kilometre from the crime sceneby chance, do you?”
“Maybe not,” Kaja said, still staring at the camera screen.
“OK. Well, the same cosmic insight is telling me that Roar Bohr isn’t the man we’re looking for, Kaja.”
“And what if I tell you that my cosmic insight is saying you’re wrong?”
Harry shrugged. “I’m the one who took LSD, not you.”
“But I’m the one who’s looked at the recordings from before the tenth of March, not you.”
Kaja turned the camera around and held the screen up in front of Harry.
“This is a week before the murder,” she said. “The person obviously approaches from behind the camera, so when the recording starts we only see his back. He stops right in front of the camera, but unfortunately he doesn’t turn around and show his face. Nor when he leaves two hours later.”
Harry saw a large moon hanging directly above the roof of the house. And silhouetted against the moon Harry saw all the details of the barrel of a rifle and parts of the butt sticking up over the shoulder of someone standing between the camera and the house.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” Kaja said, and Harry already knew that she wasn’t mistaken, “that’s a Colt Canada C8. Not exactly your standard rifle, to put it mildly.”
“Bohr?”
“It’s the sort of rifle Special Forces used in Afghanistan, anyway.”
—
“Are you aware of the situation you’ve put me in?” Dagny Jensen asked. She had kept her coat on and was sitting bolt upright on the chair in front of Katrine Bratt’s desk as she hugged her handbag in her arms. “Svein Finne has walked free of all charges, he doesn’t even have to hide. And now he knows that I reported him for rape.”
Outside the door, Katrine saw the muscular frame of Kari Beal. She was one of three officers who were working shifts to protect Dagny Jensen.
“Dagny—” Katrine began.
“Jensen,” the woman interrupted. “MissJensen.” Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry. “He’s free forever, and you can’t protect me for that long. Buthe…he’ll watch me like…like a farmer watching a pregnant cow!”
Her crying turned to hiccoughing sobs, and Katrine wondered what she ought to do. Should she go around her desk and try to comfort the woman, or leave her be? Do nothing. See if it blew over. If it went away.
Katrine cleared her throat. “We’re looking at the possibility of charging Finne for the rapes anyway. To get him behind bars.”
“You’ll never manage that, he’s got that lawyer. And he’s smarter than all of you, anyone can see that!”
“He may be smarter, but he’s on the wrong side.”
“And you’re on the right side? Harry Hole’s side?”
Katrine didn’t answer.
“You persuaded me not to press charges,” Dagny said.
