“Yes. Does it really matter what I call you? If I call you a professor, it means nothing more than that I know you do research and teach at the university. Which is true, isn’t it? That’s exactly what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s not right to call yourself…”
“To make more of yourself than you are? To be a bit sloppy with formalities? Is that what you mean?”
Johanne blinked and took off her glasses. She slowly polished the left lens with the corner of her shirt. She was buying time. The man on the other side of the desk had been reduced to a gray fuzz, an indistinct figure without any distinguishing features.
“Precision is my subject,” she heard the shapeless face continue. “In every detail. Good police work means placing one stone on top of another with the utmost precision. If I’m sloppy… if any of my men overlook a single hair, miss by a minute, take the smallest shortcut because we believe we know something that strictly speaking we can’t be sure of yet, then…”
Bang.
He clapped his hands together and Johanne put her glasses on again.
“So we’re not doing too well,” he added quietly. “And to be honest, I’m getting a bit sick of it.”
This had nothing to do with her. It was none of her business if a middle-age detective from the NCIS was sick of his job. The man was obviously having an existential crisis and it had absolutely nothing to do with her.
“Not of the job, per se,” he suddenly added, and offered her a candy. “Not at all. Here, have one. Does it smell of cigar smoke in here? Should I open a window?”
She shook her head and smiled faintly.
“No, it smells nice.”
He smiled back. He was good-looking. Good-looking in a nearly extreme way; his nose was too straight, too big. His eyes were too deep, too blue. His mouth was too sharp, too well formed. Adam Stubo was too old to have such a white smile.
“You must be wondering why I wanted to talk to you,” he said cheerfully. “When you corrected me earlier… corrected the essence of
“I don’t understand…”
“Just wait.”
He turned to the photograph of the horse.
“Sabra here,” he said, clasping his hands behind his head, “is a good, old-fashioned riding horse. You can put a five-year-old on her and she trots off with a careful step. But when I ride her… wow! I raced with her for years. Mostly for fun, of course; I was never particularly good. The point is…”
Suddenly he leaned toward her; she could smell a hint of candy on his breath. Johanne was not entirely certain whether this sudden intimacy was comfortable or repulsive. She moved back.
“I’ve heard people say that horses don’t see color,” he continued. “They may well be right. But no matter what they say, Sabra hates everything that is blue. And she doesn’t like the rain, she loves wild mares, is allergic to cats, and is far too easily distracted by cars with big engines.”
He hesitated a moment, tilted his head a touch before continuing.
“The point is that I could always
He looked up at the picture.
“I could see it in her eyes. Her soul, if you like. In her character. Based on how I know she is.”
Johanne wanted to say something. She should make some comment or another.
“That’s not the way we work here,” he said before she could think of anything. “We go the other way.”
“I’ve still got no idea what this has to do with me.”
Adam Stubo folded his hands again, this time as if in prayer, and then lowered them slowly onto the blotter.
“Two abducted children and two devastated families. My people have already sent over forty different tests to the laboratories. We have several hundred photographs of crime scenes. We’ve gathered so many witness statements that you’d get a headache just hearing the number. Nearly sixty men are working on the case, or to be more precise,
“You need a profiler,” she said slowly.
“Exactly. I need you.”
“No,” she said a bit too loudly. “It’s not me that you need.”
In a row house in B?rum, a woman looked at her watch. Time was out of synch. Seconds no longer followed seconds. One minute did not lead to another. The hours were stacking up. They were eternal and then suddenly very short. They came back when they were finally over; she recognized them, like old enemies that would not leave her in peace.
The fear that first morning was at least something real, for both of them. Something they could channel into a round of telephone calls, to the police, to their parents. To work. To the fire department, who came on a wild- goose chase and were of no help at all in finding the little five-year-old boy with brown curly hair who had disappeared during the night. Lasse rang everyone he could think of: the hospital, which sent an ambulance but found no one they could take away. She rang all the neighbors, who were skeptical and stopped at the gate when they saw uniformed police in the front garden.
The fear could be used. Since then, things had just got worse.
She stumbled on the cellar stairs.
The training wheels had fallen down from the wall. Lasse had just taken them off Kim’s bike. He had been so proud. Rode off with his blue helmet. Fallen, got up again. Rode on. Without training wheels. They hung them by the cellar steps, just inside the door, like a trophy.
“So that I can see how clever I am,” Kim said to his father, jiggling his loose front tooth. “It’s going to fall out soon. How much will I get from the tooth fairy?”
They needed jam.
The twins needed jam. And the jam was in the cellar. She made it last year. Kim had helped to pick the berries. Kim. Kim. Kim.
The twins were only two years old and needed jam.
There was something lying in front of the storeroom. She couldn’t think what it might be. An oblong package, a roll of something?
It wasn’t big. Just over a yard, maybe. Something wrapped up in gray plastic, with a piece of paper on the top. It was taped on. Red felt-tip pen on a big white sheet of paper. Brown tape. Gray plastic. A head was sticking out of the bundle, the top of a head, a child’s head with brown curly hair.
“A note,” she said lamely. “There’s a note there.”
Kim was smiling. He was dead and he was smiling. There was a slight red hole in his upper gum where he had lost a tooth. She sat down on the floor. Time ran in circles and she knew that this was the start of something that would never end. When Lasse came down to look for her, she had no idea where she was. She did not let go of her boy until someone gave her an injection and she was taken to the hospital. A policeman opened the boy’s closed right hand.
Inside was a tooth, a white tooth with a small, bloody root.
Even though the office was relatively big, the air was already stuffy. Her thesis was still lying on the edge of the desk. Adam Stubo ran his index finger over the pale winter landscape before pointing at her.
“You are a psychologist and a lawyer,” he insisted.
“That’s not true. Not entirely. I’ve got a college degree in psychology. From the U.S. Not a graduate degree. Lawyer, on the other hand-that’s correct.”
She was sweating and asked for a glass of water. It struck her that she had been forced to come here, more or less commandeered against her will, by a policeman who she wanted nothing to do with. He was talking about a case that had nothing to do with her. It was well beyond the scope of her expertise.
“I would like to go now,” she said politely. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you. You obviously know people in the FBI. Ask them. They use profilers. As far as I know.”
