CONNIE PUT HER hands on Schäfer’s shoulders and massaged his sore neck muscles in long, firm strokes. It had been a half hour since he had come home from seeing the Bjerre family and he was sitting at his little black lacquered desk in the living room reviewing the case details one more time.
He let his head loll back and closed his eyes.
“How can a person need a vacation only a few days after coming home from one?” He sighed.
“It’s the winter darkness here in Scandinavia,” Connie said and kissed him on the forehead. “It sucks the life out of you, babe.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled. “Let’s go back.”
“We could go back in October. And maybe a short trip over Easter?”
“No.” He turned in his desk chair and put his hands on her hips. “I mean, let’s move there! Let’s sell the house here, say to hell with it, and go.”
Connie sat down in his lap and took his face in her hands. His stubble scratched loudly against her soft skin. She smiled and ran a finger over his lower lip.
She smelled like eucalyptus and vanilla, Schäfer thought. Deep, delicate notes of safety. And warmth.
She kissed him fleetingly. “Is it that time of the year?”
“What do you mean?”
“Christmas is over, winter vacation is done, and now there will be at least two months where you mope around hating everything.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“I don’t hate you either.”
“And then they lived happily ever after.” Schäfer smiled.
Connie leaned against him. “We can’t go, and you know that perfectly well, babe.”
“Why not?”
She nodded at the case file and all the papers on the desk in front of Schäfer. “Because right now you might think that you want to leave all this behind, but … you don’t. At least not yet.”
Schäfer rubbed his eyes and yawned. She didn’t need to say anything else. They both knew she was right.
“What’s that?” Connie put her hand on the stack of photo albums on the desk.
“That’s the Bjerre family’s photo albums from the last five years.”
“Did you get them from the boy’s parents?”
Schäfer nodded. “Borrowed them, yeah.”
“Are they nice?”
“Who?”
“The boy’s parents.”
Schäfer shrugged. “I suppose so. It’s hard to get a proper impression of people who are going through a crisis, but the father is a little full of himself in terms of how he looks at the world, I think.”
“In what sense?”
“He’s a professional do-gooder. He thinks he has the right view of the world, you know. The one right view.” He said the last sentence with a sneer. “The kind who doesn’t want to admit that sometimes the world is black and white and that there are certain conflicts that can’t be solved by sitting in a circle and singing ‘Imagine.’ He said that he thinks our soldiers are tax-financed murderers.”
Connie raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Well, maybe not in those exact words, but it was pretty clear that that’s what he meant.”
She folded her hands behind Schäfer’s head. “What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a doctor,” Schäfer replied. “He works with Doctors Without Borders.”
She didn’t make any effort to hide her smile. “A hero, in other words? You’re annoyed at a hero.”
“A self-righteous academic type, who—admittedly—saves lives, and thank you very much for that, but that doesn’t give him the right to put down our soldiers. They’re risking their lives for this country.”
“Okay, okay.” Connie smiled. “What about the mother. What’s she like?”
“The mother drinks. And you know how that automatically throws up a red flag for me.” He gave Connie a knowing look.
She ran her fingers through her hair, hesitating before answering. Then she said, “That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person, you know.”
Schäfer didn’t reply. He didn’t want to get into that, not tonight.
“Are you coming to bed?” Connie asked, getting up.
“I’ll be in a little later. We just sent a picture of a suspect to the media, and the phones have started ringing, so …”
“Is it paying off?”
“Not yet. We’ve only heard from the usual crazies so far, so there hasn’t been anything useful yet, but … a guy can hope.”
Connie kissed him good night and walked down the hall to their bedroom, her hips swaying.
Schäfer turned back around in his desk chair and looked at his notes. Nothing fit together on its own, so he spent the next hour trying to force the pieces to add up. He sat holding the picture of the barn door in his hand and flipped through all the family’s photo albums, comparing the surroundings in the picture with what he saw in the albums, trying to find a match.
Then he opened his computer and googled “pareidolia.” He clicked on the first hit that showed up and read:
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which random elements appear to have significance. It’s a form of optical illusion: The eye recognizes a pattern, where there isn’t actually one, and draws hasty conclusions.
Schäfer set the photo albums on the table and rested his forehead on his knuckles as he thought.
Was that what was going on now?
Was he trying to find a pattern where there wasn’t one?
Was he so eager to see a connection that he was looking in the wrong places?
He reached for the case file and started over again.