He’s like a ghost, Jaap thinks, floating through the criminal underworld leaving barely a trace.
He’s been tracking Haanstra through the system, finding possible mentions of him in cases all over the Netherlands. The database which had replaced the old HKS had taken a few years to really start paying off, but with more and more information being fed in it’s starting to yield results.
Harry had emailed him all the names Haanstra has been suspected of using and Jaap’s run searches for them all. He’s slightly dismayed at the number of hits it gives him. But he digs in, knowing that it’s sometimes the dullest work which can swing a case like this.
It seems Haanstra’s never the main subject of any investigation, he’s only tagged tangentially, but as Jaap goes through mention after mention a disturbing pattern emerges.
None more so than in the case he’s looking at now, a murder which happened just over five years ago.
The victim was a twenty-year-old woman who’d worked at a facility for the mentally ill, and who’d gone missing from her parents’ home – she’d been between flats – on the night of her death. She’d gone to bed as usual at just after ten-thirty. The next morning she wasn’t there, her father raising the alarm at just past eight.
Her body was discovered three days later by a farmer who was rotating his flock of sheep, moving them to a new field so they could feed on fresh, luscious grass. The inspector attending the scene noted no obvious cause of death, but the PM had later concluded that she’d suffocated. During the investigation a woman came forward who claimed to have seen a man leaving the field who looked, her words, ‘wild and out of breath’. Armed with a description, the investigators gradually built up a picture of a suspect, one which fitted an ex-patient from the place the victim worked.
The patient in question, Menno Helling, who’d been ordered to the facility four years previously after a violent attack on a random stranger, had been released eight months earlier, and whilst he was still on a cocktail of drugs prescribed by the psychiatrist at the facility – Jaap couldn’t help but think of what Vink had told him about LSD – had been deemed ‘low risk’.
A manhunt ensued, culminating two days later in a chase which led to a multi-storey car park in Dordrecht. The officer giving chase caught up with him on the third floor and approached, trying to keep the suspect, who was highly agitated, calm by talking to him.
Backed up against the railing, the man kept apologizing, saying over and over that he’d been made to do it. The officer, reasoning that if he kept him talking there was less chance of him jumping, asked who. It took several goes at the question but finally the man answered. A ghost, he’d said. A ghost called Haanstra.
Then he’d jumped, splattering the contents of his head all over the concrete below in front of a group of horrified shoppers.
Given the man’s problems, and that the PM showed he’d not been taking any of the drugs prescribed, his final words hadn’t been given much weight. There’d been no follow-up. The officer filing the report had put Haanstra’s name in, which nowadays would immediately raise a red flag as it was already in the database. But the old system didn’t do that. Unless the officer explicitly searched for Haanstra he’d be unaware of any other mention.
And clearly he hadn’t.
Because a crazy person is reason enough – why try and make work for yourself?
Jaap sits back in his chair, his head starting to spin.
How many others are there? he thinks.
His phone buzzes towards the edge of his desk. He grabs it just as it teeters off.
It’s Harry. ‘There’s someone we could speak to. Interested?’
‘Yeah, who?’
Jaap listens to the details and hangs up. Harry’s driving up, but it’s still going to be a while before he gets here. Jaap grabs the photo he has of Haanstra and heads down to the cells where Vink is still being held.
’Recognize him?’ Jaap asks as he hands the photo to Vink.
Vink, less cocky than yesterday – an overnighter in a cell can work wonders – takes it with a kind of alert fatalism. But when he looks at it something changes in his face.
‘What?’ Jaap asks.
Vink chews his bottom lip. ‘Yeah, that’s the guy I was telling you about, the one I saw on Vlieland.’
Back upstairs Jaap gets Frank down in Hoenderloo on the phone.
‘Frank, I’ve got a face. Need you to show it around, check if any of the park staff recognize him.’
‘Sure, get it over to me.’ Jaap hears him pause to do the snorting thing again. ‘And I may have something, I just got off the phone with one of the day staff, they said they’d heard a noise in the rough area where Kaaren was killed.’
‘What kind of noise?’
‘Well, he reckons it was a drone. One of those flying toys people have. Says he watched a video online last night which reminded him of it. Don’t know if it’s linked or important or anything, but I thought you should know.’
Jaap hangs up. The fly buzzing round and round Haase’s office. A picture’s forming.
One he doesn’t like at all.
He spends a few minutes on the internet.
The picture is clearer now.
And he really doesn’t like it.
Because it means he missed something fundamental, something which he should have been onto right from the start.
He calls the team together in the incident room.
‘I missed something,’ he says. ‘At the time of Heleen’s death a witness, Piet, a surfer on Vlieland, said he’d heard a kid flying a drone. And I’ve just had word that one of the park employees heard something similar right about the time Kaaren was killed.’
Jaap looks around, seeing if they’re getting it.
‘Haase was asking me about a trophy. As in, is the killer taking any? I said no. But he is taking a trophy.’
They know where he’s going with this now.
The room settles into a crystalline silence.
‘He’s not only forcing people to kill for him,’ Jaap says. ‘He’s filming them doing it.’