Free Sohlberg and the Gift by Jens Amundsen

couldn’t break even the first two years.”
     
     
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
     
     
    As soon as the sleek Jaguar purred away Sohlberg turned his mind to her . She had been the first thing on his mind that Saturday morning.
     
    Astrid Isaksen . . . mystery visitor.
     
    Why did she pick me from all the other homicide detectives at the Zoo?
     
    Who is she really?
     
    Who sent her?
     
    Why?
     
    Is she telling me the truth? . . . Half-lies? . . . Outright lies?
     
     
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
     
     
    Sohlberg discovered that Astrid Isaksen had at least been truthful when she had left him a voice message at work and mentioned that she lived during the week with her aunt on Tøyengata in the dangerous Grønland neighborhood which surrounds the Zoo:
     
    “I stay with my aunt until the weekend. That’s when her boyfriend Jon Næss comes to visit. He works with her at the railroad but lives in Bergen. So on weekends I stay with my grandparents. You can meet me there this weekend.”
     
    On Thursday during his lunch period Sohlberg had taken a brisk 20-minute walk to the dingy apartment building on Tøyengata. The sight of Muslim women wrapped in face-covering veils depressed him. Women trapped in full-body burkas enraged him.
     
    Why migrate to Norway and then dress and live in a backwards medieval lifestyle?
     
    Pakistani and Somali women looked utterly out of place in the frigid snow-covered streets of European Oslo. The cultural disconnect would be more visible and extreme in the summer when half-naked ethnic Norwegian women stood next to Third World Muslim women clad in what is basically a bodybag for the living.
     
    The building manager confirmed Astrid Isaksen’s story and the fact that her aunt cleaned passenger cars for Norges Statsbaner or NSB Norwegian State Railways. A visit to NSB corporate offices later that day also confirmed the aunt’s life-long employment. Sohlberg was however unable to find and interview Astrid and her aunt. Despite several attempts Sohlberg never found them at home.
     
    Petra Sivertsen’s list came handy again. Sohlberg made a call and one of Petra Sivertsen’s secretary friends at the jail took a look into criminal records to find out if Astrid Isaksen or her aunt or her grandparents had ever been charged with any crime. The inquiry’s result: clean records for the four Isaksen family members. The parents of Astrid Isaksen weren’t as clean.
     
    Both parents had multiple previous contacts with the police.
     
    The mother had multiple convictions for petty theft beginning from when she had been a teenager. She had been waiting for a trial on shoplifting charges when she died. A senile old man had accidentally killed her ten years ago when he accelerated instead of braking for pedestrians at the corner of Karl Johans gate and Kirkegata.
     
    The father was a low-level informant who should have been but had not been arrested for numerous bar fights and frequent if not habitual theft. He had been picked up during two major drug busts but released without ever being arrested for meth dealing and possession. Oddly enough his criminal résumé ended abruptly seven years ago. Jakob Gansum had suddenly gone off the crime grid. No jail or prison in Norway lodged him. He no longer worked the police as a snitch. That probably meant he was dead or imprisoned in some other country. Stone-cold rehabilitation into a law-abiding lifestyle was the least likely option.
     
    Does a leopard lose his spots?
     
    Rarely. But it happens. The ex-con becomes an evangelist. Or a baker of organic breads. Or a doting stay-at-home father.
     
    So far so good. No lies or discrepancies in what Astrid Isaksen had told him.
     
     
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
     
     
    The visit to Astrid Isaksen and her grandparents required that Sohlberg drive his Volvo sedan on the E-18 Highway north into Oslo and then northeast on the E-6 towards the East Side of Oslo and its endless stretches of newer apartment buildings. He again had the feeling he was