Free The Hunting Dogs by Jørn Lier Horst Page B

to skim. Her father, participating in the daily press conferences,
     dismissed the idea that extortion was involved.
    A longer story concerned Cecilia in personal terms. The newspaper had spoken to her
     friends, a former teacher, neighbours. The daughter of one of the country’s most prosperous
     businessmen, she worked in his fashion empire in the design department, but was also
     a model.
    The most clear-cut clue the police possessed was a white Opel Rekord that had been
     parked at a crossroads Cecilia had, in all probability, run past. The driver, around
     thirty years of age, had been wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, had thick, black
     hair, a broad face, strong chin and close-set eyes. He was asked to turn himself in,
     but did not appear to have made contact.
    One of the headlines at the end of the first week aroused her curiosity. Desperate search for Cecilia . The article described how police patrols throughout the whole of the Østland region
     visited farms and smallholdings and that even members of the Emergency Squad were
     called in. They had searched within a radius of up to seventy kilometres from the
     location of her last sighting. The picture accompanying the report showed police checking
     a smallholding at Rønholt in Bamble. Her father’s name was mentioned in one of the
     final paragraphs. He would not give the reason for the large-scale search.
    In an article two days later, the background was explained. Dagbladet broke the story. VG quoted them, but had obtained additional comments from a police lawyer. Cecilia Linde
     had somehow smuggled out a tape which described what had happened. Line recollected
     this as she read, not from the time when it occurred, but from conversations around
     the table in the Stopp Pressen café-bar when her older colleagues chatted about historical news items. Cecilia Linde,
     having taken a Walkman with her when she was out running, had recorded descriptions
     of the perpetrator and where she was held captive.
    Line jumped back and re-read her father’s dismissive comments about what was described
     as a race against time, realising what had made him so taciturn. He had not wanted
     the information about the Walkman out. That would have been like telling the kidnapper
     they had a clue about where he was keeping the victim. If that went into print, they
     risked him attempting to move her, or worse. The papers had got wind of it anyway.
    She navigated her way forward through the chronological overview. Two days later,
     Cecilia had been found dead.
    The ancient newspaper articles had eaten up a lot of her time. Glancing at the clock,
     she realised she would manage neither hotel breakfast nor the purchase of sunglasses
     before the press conference. She closed her laptop. So much for seventeen years ago.
     She would spend the rest of the day hunting for details of what had happened last
     night.

20
    Wisting concentrated on the document dealing with the cigarette end found at the Gumserød
     intersection and its analysis at the establishment, then called the Forensics Institute,
     now renamed the Institute of Public Health, Forensics Division.
    Chief Inspector Finn Haber had led the investigations at the discovery site. Wisting
     had collaborated with him on several major cases before his retirement on full pension
     eight years earlier. Responsibility for the inspection of a crime scene was a critical
     task, involving an overview of all the material collected and the subsequent technical
     examinations. It required a meticulous person with a particular aptitude for organisation,
     exactly like Finn Haber.
    The reports of the forensic tests were just as Wisting recalled Haber’s work: thorough
     and precise. The cigarettes in question had been documented in a photograph of the
     crossroads with a close up image of each of the three cigarette butts, all of them
     rollups without filters. One of them had been trampled into the gravel, but the other
     two appeared to