The Devil's Star

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Book: Read The Devil's Star for Free Online
Authors: Jo Nesbø
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, Crime
the scene of the crime by the Akerselva pointed to Sverre Olsen, an old neo-Nazi the police knew well. Unfortunately they never got to hear his explanation as he was shot through the head when he was alleged to have fired at Tom Waaler during his arrest. Regardless of this, Harry was convinced that the real man behind the murder was Prince, and he had persuaded Møller to let him conduct his own investigation. It was personal, so it went against all the principles they worked by in Crime Squad, but Møller had given him permission, short-term, as a kind of reward for the results that Harry had achieved on other cases. The breakthrough had finally come last winter. Someone had seen Sverre Olsen sitting in a red car in Grünerløkka with another person on the night of the murder, just a few hundred metres away from the scene of the crime. The witness was a Roy Kvinsvik, a convicted former neo-Nazi, now a recent Pentecostal convert to the Philadelphian sect. Kvinsvik was not exactly what you would call a model witness, but he had taken a long, hard look at the photograph Harry had shown him and said, Yes, this was the person he had seen in the car with Sverre. The man in the photograph was Tom Waaler.
    Even though he had suspected Waaler for a long time, it came as a shock to receive confirmation. Not least because it meant that there had to be more moles working with him in the department. Prince could not have operated with such a wide network as he had done without help. That in turn meant that Harry could not trust anyone. So he kept his mouth shut about what Roy Kvinsvik had told him because he knew he would only get one chance, and the whole sordid truth would have to come out in one go. And he would have to be absolutely sure that the root came with it; if it didn’t he was done for.
    That was why Harry had secretly begun to work on assembling a watertight case against Waaler. However, since he didn’t know who it was safe to talk to, this turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined. He began to trawl through the archives after the others had gone home for the day, to tap into the internal computer network, to print out e-mails and lists of incoming and outgoing telephone calls from people he knew Waaler associated with. In the afternoons he sat in a car near Youngstorget and kept an eye on Herbert’s Pizza. Harry’s theory was that the neo-Nazis frequenting the pizzeria were also smuggling arms. When this theory did not produce any leads he began to shadow Waaler and a number of his colleagues. He concentrated on those he knew spent a lot of time with guns at the firing range in Økern. He followed them from a safe distance, sat outside their homes, shivering in his car while they slept indoors, and returned home to Rakel early in the morning, totally exhausted. He slept for a couple of hours and then went to work again. After a while she asked him to sleep in his own flat on the nights when he had double shifts. He hadn’t told her that his night work was off the record, off the time sheets, off the awareness of his superiors, off almost everything.
    Then he started doing a turn off Broadway too.
    First of all, he dropped by Herbert’s Pizza one evening, then another, chatting with the guys, buying rounds of beer. Of course they knew who he was, but free beer was free beer and they drank it, grinned and kept their mouths shut. He gradually realised that they didn’t know anything, but he still continued to go there, he wasn’t quite sure why, perhaps because it gave him the feeling that he was close to something, the dragon’s lair. All he had to do was be patient, he only had to wait and the dragon would emerge. But neither Waaler nor any of his acquaintances ever turned up. So he went back to watching the block where Waaler lived.
    One night, at 20 degrees below freezing point, the streets completely deserted, a man wearing a short, thin jacket came walking towards his car with the rolling gait that

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