But strangely enough it was as though my father’s lies only served to further convince me that America is the home of the free and the brave. Because despite all the nice things you can say about my so-called home country of Norway, it’s fantastically boring. All you need to do is compare Oslo City Hall with the city hall behind the statue of Humphrey. The city hall in Oslo is just a couple of shoeboxes standing upright. Red brick, small windows, the place could be a factory. But Minneapolis City Hall, with its spires and its ornamentations and huge blocks of stone, radiates something exalted, like a cathedral, or a castle. Or like the Disneyland castle. The original intention was that these costly granite blocks, some weighing up to twenty tons, should be used only for the foundations and the rest be built of less expensive brick. But once the people of Minneapolis saw how mighty those granite blocks were they overruled the penny-pinching bureaucrats and made sure the whole building was made of granite. Which, of course, blew the budget to pieces. Which is the way to do it, if you ask me!
I have come here to get a closer look at this building because it is going to play an important part in my book. Inside, behind the granite blocks, you’ll find not just the mayor’s office, but courtrooms, police headquarters, even prison cells. And up on the sixth floor, the Homicide Department.
With the Ghost of City Hall.
It was in the Oslo public library that I came across a true-crime pamphlet about John Moshik, and the first and last public execution to take place at the city hall, back in 1898. Moshik was sentenced for killing a man for just fourteen dollars. But the means employed — hanging by the neck until dead — didn’t go according to plan. It took eight minutes for Moshik to die. Meaning just a minute less than the amount of time Derek Chauvin held his knee against George Floyd’s neck after Floyd had been arrested on suspicion of having paid for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. According to my contact in the MPD, Moshik’s ghost still walks the floor up there in the Homicide Department. But my business here is not Moshik’s ghost, or George Floyd’s either. The ghost I’m looking for was seen passing a CCTV camera six years ago, following a shooting in Jordan. And no one knew back then that this was only the beginning. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but the thought gives me a pleasurable shiver as I stand there studying the facade of the building. The black windows reveal nothing. My job is to fill in the blank spaces, give lines to the characters and life to the scenes.
7
The Homicide Unit, October 2016
Bob Oz crossed Government Plaza. Glanced up at the Humphrey statue that always seemed to him to look more like Bob Hope and entered the city hall. His steps echoed as he passed through the venerable hall with its statue of Aquarius, through the security channel and then over to the elevators where three people stood waiting for him.
‘Hi, Bob,’ said one of them. He turned. It was a woman in a navy-blue skirt and jacket — the battledress of the legal profession. She smiled. Thirty, maybe, though he never found it easy to guess the age of Asian people.
‘Hi...’ He couldn’t recall her name. ‘The coffee good?’
She looked down in slight surprise at the paper Starbucks cup she was holding. ‘Er, it’s OK. I never heard back from you.’
Was it Ellen? Or Helen? Or a Chinese name?
‘You know what, I lost your number,’ said Bob. ‘Maybe...’
‘Maybe?’
He smiled. There was a ping and the elevator doors slid open. ‘Maybe you could send it to me.’
Helen. Yes, it was Helen. The enemy. The defence attorney. Lilac underwear.
‘How? You didn’t give me your number either.’ She entered the elevator and turned to face Bob, who was still standing outside. She raised her index finger and pointed upward quizzically.
Bob shook his head. ‘Thanks, Helen, but I’m going down.’
She gave him a big smile, flipped her hand round, and as the elevator door slid closed switched fingers and showed him the middle one. Bob brushed his hand over his tie. So, not Helen then. But he was sure he was right about the underwear.
Bob took the next elevator to the fifth floor and stepped out into the Homicide Department’s new offices. Until recently the fifth had been used to house prisoners on remand, and despite the complete refurbishment and all the glass and the light furniture, Bob couldn’t shake the feeling that the place was a prison. Maybe it was the narrow windows that let in so little daylight, maybe it was the cell-like offices flanking either side of the open-plan office landscape. He walked past the last office, still in the process of being refurbished, said to be the cell occupied by the ‘Ghost of City Hall’. The decorator working inside turned toward Bob as he passed. He looked like a ghost himself in there behind the glass wall, in his white overalls and with the white cap, gloves and face mask. All that was visible was a pair of brown eyes, and what Bob interpreted as a smile. He smiled back.
Bob headed for his workspace at the far end of the open office landscape, looking neither to right nor to left of him. He made it over almost every hurdle but of course tripped up at the last one.
‘Aaa-ss!’ Detective Olav Hanson’s pronunciation of Bob’s surname had a lot of air in it, and a descending note that made it sound like a cross between an apology and a puncture. Hanson had apparently been just one knee-tackle away from playing in the NFL, and though Bob Oz didn’t wish fame and fortune on Hanson he would have preferred that to having the giant blond jerk as part of his life. Hanson was in his fifties and had been with the Homicide squad longer than anyone. There were rumours about why Hanson had never been promoted, but for Bob there was no mystery about it: as an investigator Olav Hanson was useless. Unfortunately that wasn’t valid grounds for dismissal in the state. Nor was being an asshole. Fortunately.
‘Walker was in here looking for you,’ Hanson bellowed, loud enough to be sure everyone in the vicinity heard what he was saying. ‘You’re to go and see him asap, Aaa-ss.’
‘Thanks, Hands-On,’ said Bob without breaking his stride.
‘Asap, as in as soon...’ Hanson’s voice fell away behind him.
Bob slumped down behind his desk. From the chaos of paper piles, crime scene photographs, torn-out notebook pages, chocolate wrappers and chewed pencils in front of him you might have got the impression Bob Oz had far too much to do. The exact opposite was the truth. Since the break with Alice, Walker had been taking Bob off his involvement in active investigations one by one until now he was down to none. Walker’s grounds had been what the personnel report called ‘unstable conduct’, MPD’s psychologist referred to as a failure of anger management, and Walker called giving Bob a break until he pulled himself together again. In the meantime he was handed assignments usually given to newcomers in the unit, such as collating data for other detectives, fact-checking and interviewing witnesses in cases assigned to other investigators.
Bob checked MPD’s website to make sure the BOLO for Tomás Gomez had been sent out as he had ordered. No results so far. He pulled the note from his coat pocket and called a number on the red landline telephone. While waiting for it to be picked up he looked at the photograph of Alice that was still pinned to the privacy wall, alongside the Vikings fixture list.
‘Hi, Kari, this is Bob. Can you help me trace a doctor? Name is Jakob Egeland. He’s an MD. Thanks, Kari, you’re a... sorry, I can’t come up with a euphemism that’s sexually neutral enough. What? Me? A dinosaur? Come on.’