deceased. He slipped a soothing Ricola lozenge into his mouth to erase the sour taste that he got when he saw a murdered victim’s body.
~ ~ ~
Murder always made Harald Sohlberg think about the mysterious ways that the lives of men and women intersect. He thought about how those intersections were sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Some for good. Some for evil. Some quite deadly. He also thought about how those intersections used to be so local most of the time.
A careless teen would plow his car into another and kill a mother and son who lived less than a mile away.
The old alcoholic in Apartment 3-B would fall asleep smoking a cigarette and burn down the building and leave everyone homeless except for the young couple in 4-B who wound up in pine box residences six feet under.
A jealous boyfriend would strangle his lover when she called off their affair or told him she was pregnant from another man.
Today the intersection of lives spans the globe. Sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Sometimes deadly.
A Chinese pig farmer breeds the next strain of influenza virus that kills 3 million elderly in Europe and the USA.
A farmer plants coca bushes in Bolivia. Another poor farmer plants opium poppies in Afghanistan. The deadly crops are harvested and processed for the overdoses that kill the Stanford University sophomore from Florida and the software executive in Oslo.
Nineteen hijackers get on four airplanes and on September 11 they intersect their lives with those of hundreds of millions of other lives. Trillions of war dollars are spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers are killed and maimed.
~ ~ ~
Sohlberg looked at the murdered young woman and her bruised angelic face and he wondered what would be next in the globalization of crime.
Why would anyone want to murder Azra Korbal?
Was the Portugese boyfriend her killer?
Sohlberg doubted if Otelo Carvalho even knew how to shoot a gun. Sohlberg had his doubts because the boyfriend was a clumsy young fool. Extreme milquetoast. A trust fund baby. The ultimate weakling. The kind of rich boy who’d pee in his pants if he heard a gun blast. Guns were far beyond Otelo Carvalho’s homicidal skills which were close to zero. The guy couldn’t even figure out how to open the front door lock at the Sohlbergs’ apartment when the young couple had visited for dinner last week.
Sohlberg hovered around the crime scene for another half hour. But there was nothing more to be found or said or done for his part at the stone cottage. So at two o’clock in the morning he drove off to Lyon and his office at Interpol.
Where is Laprade?
It was very strange of him not to answer his phone.
Why was a computer hidden in Azra’s car?
Why did it have a thumb drive stuck to it?
The computer could be planted or staged. But even planted or staged evidence has great value for the false story that it’s trying to tell.
~ ~ ~
Sohlberg drove off. He turned up the heat in the car. He shook uncontrollably and retched not once but six times. The sight of Death had frozen his insides.
Homicide is never pretty.
He thought of the cold blue skin of Azra Korbal and the purple smudges around her sunken lifeless eyes.
“Azra,” he whispered. “Why?”
An ugly glacier slowly moved down his body as it pushed aside his heart and soul—they cracked under the brutal weight of Death’s crushing reality. The devastating and absolute finality of her death brought to mind the ugly corruption that disfigures all human bodies subjected to homicide. Death’s merciless wall of ice grabbed, twisted, and ground his innards into a messy rubble, a moraine of grief.
Sohlberg accelerated the Volvo sedan to 90 mph on the empty roads back to Interpol headquarters. He wasn’t worried about getting stopped by a French policeman for speeding. He had a greater worry—the evidence. Sohlberg was preoccupied if not obsessed with gathering all of the evidence as soon as
~ ~ ~
Murder always made Harald Sohlberg think about the mysterious ways that the lives of men and women intersect. He thought about how those intersections were sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Some for good. Some for evil. Some quite deadly. He also thought about how those intersections used to be so local most of the time.
A careless teen would plow his car into another and kill a mother and son who lived less than a mile away.
The old alcoholic in Apartment 3-B would fall asleep smoking a cigarette and burn down the building and leave everyone homeless except for the young couple in 4-B who wound up in pine box residences six feet under.
A jealous boyfriend would strangle his lover when she called off their affair or told him she was pregnant from another man.
Today the intersection of lives spans the globe. Sometimes random. Sometimes intentional. Sometimes deadly.
A Chinese pig farmer breeds the next strain of influenza virus that kills 3 million elderly in Europe and the USA.
A farmer plants coca bushes in Bolivia. Another poor farmer plants opium poppies in Afghanistan. The deadly crops are harvested and processed for the overdoses that kill the Stanford University sophomore from Florida and the software executive in Oslo.
Nineteen hijackers get on four airplanes and on September 11 they intersect their lives with those of hundreds of millions of other lives. Trillions of war dollars are spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers are killed and maimed.
~ ~ ~
Sohlberg looked at the murdered young woman and her bruised angelic face and he wondered what would be next in the globalization of crime.
Why would anyone want to murder Azra Korbal?
Was the Portugese boyfriend her killer?
Sohlberg doubted if Otelo Carvalho even knew how to shoot a gun. Sohlberg had his doubts because the boyfriend was a clumsy young fool. Extreme milquetoast. A trust fund baby. The ultimate weakling. The kind of rich boy who’d pee in his pants if he heard a gun blast. Guns were far beyond Otelo Carvalho’s homicidal skills which were close to zero. The guy couldn’t even figure out how to open the front door lock at the Sohlbergs’ apartment when the young couple had visited for dinner last week.
Sohlberg hovered around the crime scene for another half hour. But there was nothing more to be found or said or done for his part at the stone cottage. So at two o’clock in the morning he drove off to Lyon and his office at Interpol.
Where is Laprade?
It was very strange of him not to answer his phone.
Why was a computer hidden in Azra’s car?
Why did it have a thumb drive stuck to it?
The computer could be planted or staged. But even planted or staged evidence has great value for the false story that it’s trying to tell.
~ ~ ~
Sohlberg drove off. He turned up the heat in the car. He shook uncontrollably and retched not once but six times. The sight of Death had frozen his insides.
Homicide is never pretty.
He thought of the cold blue skin of Azra Korbal and the purple smudges around her sunken lifeless eyes.
“Azra,” he whispered. “Why?”
An ugly glacier slowly moved down his body as it pushed aside his heart and soul—they cracked under the brutal weight of Death’s crushing reality. The devastating and absolute finality of her death brought to mind the ugly corruption that disfigures all human bodies subjected to homicide. Death’s merciless wall of ice grabbed, twisted, and ground his innards into a messy rubble, a moraine of grief.
Sohlberg accelerated the Volvo sedan to 90 mph on the empty roads back to Interpol headquarters. He wasn’t worried about getting stopped by a French policeman for speeding. He had a greater worry—the evidence. Sohlberg was preoccupied if not obsessed with gathering all of the evidence as soon as
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