Lucifer’s Tears
Lucifer’s Tears
James Thompson
His previous case left Kari Vaara with a scarred face, chronic insomnia and a full body count's worth of ghosts. A year later, in Helsinki, and Kari is working the graveyard shift in the homicide unit.Kari is drawn into the murder-by-torture case of Isa Filippov, the philandering wife of a Russian businessman. Her lover is clearly being framed and while Ivan Filippov's arrogance is highly suspicious, he's got friends in high places. Kari is sucked ever deeper and soon the past and present collide in ways no one could have anticipated…Discover the hottest new voice in Scandinavian crime-writing – if you love Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson you’ll love James Thompson.
JAMES THOMPSON
Lucifer’s Tears
Dedication
For Nat Sobel and Judith Weber
And, as always, for Annukka
Contents
Cover
Title Page (#u1e396fa3-1bcf-54e0-bd94-a21967136883)
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Acknowledgments
Read on for an exclusive interview with James Thompson.
Also by James Thompson
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1
The baby kicks against my hand and rouses me from my nap. Kate and I sleep spooned up. Her head in the crook of my shoulder, my head buried in her long red hair. Her tall, pale body pressed against mine. My hand draped over her, resting on her pregnant belly. Kate doesn’t stir. As she’s gotten further into her pregnancy, she sleeps deeper, and I sleep lighter. Now that she’s eight and a half months along, I barely sleep at all, just doze under the surface of waking consciousness. The sonogram said we’re having a girl.
I pull on a robe, wool socks and slippers, light a cigarette and go out to the balcony of our Helsinki apartment. Illuminated by streetlights, snow pours through the dark in wet, blinding sheets. Fierce wind buffets me, blows up under my robe, freezes my nuts, takes my breath and makes me laugh. I hang on to the rail to keep from being blown off to the sidewalk below. It’s minus twenty Celsius.
My home, Finland. The ninth and innermost circle of hell. A frozen lake of blood and guilt formed from Lucifer’s tears, turned to ice by the flapping of his leathery wings. I limp back inside. This kind of cold makes my bad knee go so stiff that I drag my left leg more than walk on it.
My head is splitting. I hobble to the bathroom, shake a couple paracetamol out of a bottle, chew them up to make them work faster, stick my mouth under the spigot and chase them with water. I don’t know why I bother. They don’t help anymore. The migraines started not long after Kate miscarried the twins a little over a year ago, and have gotten worse over time. I’ve had the same headache without a break for almost three weeks now. It’s starting to make me crazy.
I sit in a rocking chair by the bed and watch Kate sleep. As Dante’s Beatrice was his object of unconditional love, Kate is mine. Kate: my cinnamon-haired, fair-skinned snow queen. Kate: my beautiful American. Since I met her, Kate has been my beginning and my end. For me, there is only Kate.
Pregnancy has made Kate more radiant than ever. I feel a pang of guilt for our dead twins, and wonder again if I caused her to lose them. I wonder if she thinks about them as often as I do, and if she blames me for their loss. Kate begged me to give up the Sufia Elmi case. She said the stress was too much for both of us. I refused.
I managed to solve the murder, but the attrition rate was high. Five dead bodies piled up before the case was over, including my friend and sergeant Valtteri and my ex-wife. Two women were widowed and seven children left fatherless.
And I was shot in the face. The bullet left an ugly scar, which could have been corrected with minor plastic surgery, but I refused. I wear it as a symbol of my guilt for failing to solve the case sooner. I could have spared all those people so much death and misery. In my mind, I see Valtteri pull the trigger. His blood and brains spray across the ice. The shot echoes around the lake. He looks at me with dead eyes and falls. His blood stains the pearl-gray ice and looks black in the murky light. I still refuse to talk about it. Kate believes I suffer from traumatic shock.
I pursued the Sufia Elmi case to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Even Kate. She miscarried two days later, the day after Christmas, and lost the babies. I blame myself. I believe the stress I caused her sparked the miscarriage. I’ve never told Kate about my guilt, can’t make myself vocalize it.
Kate was unhappy in the Arctic Circle, in my hometown of Kittilä. She wanted to move to Helsinki and start over. As a reward for solving the Sufia Elmi murder, I was decorated for bravery and offered the job of my choice. I lived in Helsinki years ago, but left for a reason. My memories of this place are bad. Still, I owed Kate this, so we moved here and I took a slot in Helsinki homicide.
Kate’s brother and sister, John and Mary, are arriving from the States tomorrow evening. She hasn’t seen them for a few years, and I’m glad she has the opportunity, but they’re going to stay for weeks, to see Kate through the final days of her pregnancy and help out after the baby is born. Who the hell does that? I never heard of a family doing such a thing. I can’t say it to Kate, but I don’t want them here. It will change the dynamic of our household. And besides, I want Kate all to myself during this intimate time. I don’t need any help taking care of my wife and child.
After a while, I go back to bed. I slide my arm under her head and she turns toward me, gives a sleepy little snort, then wakes up enough to look at me and grins. ‘Want to make love to me?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I do.’
Pregnancy and the attendant hormonal changes have lent a sharp edge to her libido, and despite the migraines, I’m happy to accommodate. I suffer an irrational fear that sex will hurt our child, and take her more gently than she might prefer. Afterward, she lays her head on my shoulder, continues her nap.
I wait until I’m sure she’s asleep again, before I move. She likes it if I stay awake in bed until she’s asleep. It makes her feel safe. I have the night shift, check the clock. It’s seven p.m. I have to be at work in an hour. I take a shower and dress. Kate is still asleep. I pull back the blanket, kiss her belly and cover her up again on my way out.
As I drive to Pasila police station, the streets are almost empty. I use my Saab for a winter play toy in the snow, cut the wheel hard to make the car slip sideways, accelerate to straighten it out again. Reckless endangerment.
Chapter 2
It’s Sunday night, ten p.m. I’m working the graveyard shift, usually the province of rookies. I may have only been in homicide for a little while, but counting my time spent as a military policeman while doing my mandatory service in the armed forces at nineteen, I have twenty-two years in law enforcement. The slight of being assigned these bullshit shifts isn’t lost on me. I’m working with Milo Nieminen, the other new guy, recently promoted to detective sergeant. My status in Helsinki homicide is further reinforced.
Rauha Anttila, age seventy-eight. Found dead in her sauna by her son. Said son couldn’t take it and left. A lone uniformed officer watches over the house, waiting for us to arrive. I dismiss him. Milo and I are alone in her apartment. We don latex gloves, walk through the bathroom and open the sauna door. I’m not sure if Milo can take it either. He makes gagging sounds, is on the edge of vomiting.
Milo and I haven’t really gotten to know each other yet. He’s in his mid-twenties, on the short side and thin. His hair is shaved down to stubble. Under piercing dark eyes, he has shadowy circles that look permanent.
‘You could try a face mask,’ I say. ‘Some cops use them in these situations.’
‘Does it help?’
‘No.’
I estimate that Rauha has been dead for about ten days. Her sauna is electric and has a timer on it with a max of four hours, so she didn’t cook too long, but the heat set the process of decomposition into action faster than normal. Her body has passed through the bloating period and is toward the end of the black putrefaction stage. She’s taken on a darkish green hue. Her body cavities have ruptured and gases are escaping. It must have been worse a couple days ago, but the smell of decay is overwhelming.
Milo looks a little better, must be getting used to it. ‘Jesus, why didn’t a neighbor call this in days ago?’ he asks.
‘The sauna door was closed, and so was the bathroom door. Most of the stench passed through the sauna stovepipe and out the roof. They probably smelled something, but just thought it was a dead mouse or something in the ventilation.’
The formation of gases in her abdomen has driven fluid and feces out of her body. The gases moved up into her face and neck and caused swelling of her mouth, lips and tongue. Her face is disfigured, almost unidentifiable. Water blisters have formed on her skin. Milo screws up his courage and moves in for a closer look.
‘Watch out,’ I say.
‘For what?’
‘Vermin. They’ve been laying eggs in her for days.’
Rauha is slumped over, lying on her side. Milo makes an effort to examine her. He moves Rauha, tries to look under her for possible signs of violence. Water blisters burst and run. Rauha’s skin is stuck to the sauna’s wooden seat, slips through his fingers and comes off. Maggots wriggle out of her ass and drop squirming onto the bench.
I watch him try to be tough. He shudders but keeps going. He moves her head. Scalp slides off her skull. He jerks his hands away in disgust. I suppose because he can’t think of anything else to investigate, he uses a tongue depressor to look in her mouth for an obstruction of her airway, a sign of intentional suffocation. When he opens it, little newborn wasps fly out from between her teeth into his face. He loses it, starts to flail and bat at them.
‘Warned you,’ I say.
He glances at me and turns away fast. If we stay here in the sauna with the body, he might break down. I spare him the humiliation. ‘Let’s do the legwork,’ I say.
We search Rauha’s house for medicines, prescriptions, hospital documents, anything that might clue us in as to why she died. Nothing stands out. When we finish, I call Mononen, the company that transports bodies for us. The dispatcher says we have about forty-five minutes to wait.
We sit in the kitchen, at opposite sides of Rauha’s table, bowls of stale cookies and rotten fruit in between us.
‘Want a cigarette?’ I ask.
‘I don’t smoke.’
Milo stares at the bowl full of moldy oranges and black bananas.
‘I take it this is your first bad one,’ I say.
He nods without looking up.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell him. ‘It gets easier.’
He makes eye contact. ‘Does it?’
I lie to make him feel better. It doesn’t get easier, it’s just that people get used to anything over time. ‘Yeah.’
‘We haven’t examined her,’ he says.
‘Sure we have, as best we’re able. They’ll have to shovel her out of there, and if she’s a crime victim, the autopsy will turn it up.’
I take a coffee cup from Rauha’s cupboard and run a little water in it so I can use it for an ashtray, then sit back down and light a cigarette.
‘The other homicide members don’t like me,’ Milo says, ‘and now I investigate a routine death and act like a pussy.’
I dislike the sharing of emotion from strangers. It’s a sign of weakness and makes me uncomfortable. But he needs to talk and I don’t think we’ll be strangers for long, so I give him what he needs and let him open up. ‘You just got your homicide cherry busted,’ I say. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’
He only stares at the rotten fruit again, so I prod him. ‘What makes you think the team dislikes you?’
He sits back in his chair, taps out a cigarette from the pack I set on the table and lights it.
‘I thought you don’t smoke,’ I say.
‘I quit. I guess I just un-quit.’ He takes a couple drags, and I see him hit by the rush of satisfaction that only un-quitting smoking can give.
‘They had a “welcome to the new guy” party for me a couple days ago. Bowling and then drinking. They think I’m an oddball geek brainiac, not a detective.’
I was on duty, couldn’t attend the party. I know a little about Milo from the newspapers. He was promoted over others with long-standing careers marked by accomplishment, so it’s easy to understand resentment toward him. Milo is smart, a member of Mensa. He got his job on the homicide unit because as a patrol officer, he solved one case of serial arson and two cases of serial rape. They weren’t his investigations. He did it for fun, as a hobby, by triangulating the likely areas of residence of the criminals. Once within a third of a mile, once within two hundred yards, once to the exact building.
‘What makes you say that?’ I ask.
The dark circles under his eyes look like charcoal smudges. He smirks. ‘Because I’m a people person, and my extreme powers of empathy allow me to look into the hearts and minds of others.’ This makes me laugh, and he laughs a little, too. ‘Believe me,’ he says, ‘I could tell they don’t like me.’
‘How did you solve those cases that got you promoted?’ I ask.
‘A couple psychologists-slash-criminal-profilers developed a computer triangulation program. Police departments are reticent to use it because it’s expensive, and because a lot of cops are convinced that their brilliant crime-solving techniques, also known as hunches, are superior to scientific method.’
‘If it’s so expensive, how did you get it, and how come I didn’t hear how you did it?’
‘I pirated the software, and since I stole it, I lied about it.’
I laugh again. He’s odd, but I have to admit, he’s an entertaining little fucker. ‘You’re one up on me,’ I say. ‘I didn’t even get a “welcome to the new guy” party.’
‘They don’t like you either,’ he says.
‘Is this more of your people-person intuition?’
‘After they got drunk, they bitched about you. The team doesn’t trust you because you got a job in an elite unit for political reasons. That’s not supposed to happen. You shot one man and have been shot twice yourself. That speaks of carelessness. You got medals for both those fuckups. That pisses them off. As an inspector, your pay grade is higher than the rest of us detective-sergeants. You make more money than we do. That pisses them off even more. They don’t want to work with you. I remember hearing the phrase “dangerous Lapland redneck reindeer-fucker.” ’
I thought they were just standoffish because I’m new and haven’t proven myself yet, that it will pass when I do prove myself. Maybe I was wrong.
‘Actually,’ Milo says, ‘Saska Lindgren said some good things about you. He told the others he thought they should give you a chance.’
Saska is half Gypsy. An outsider by race. It stands to reason he would be more receptive to someone like me. According to many, including my boss, he’s one of Finland’s best homicide cops. He’s served as a UN peacekeeper in Palestine, worked for the ICTY – the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – investigating war crimes, executions and mass graves in Bosnia, and identified bodies in Thailand after the tsunami of 2004 that devastated the region. The numerous certificates of achievement lining the walls of his office attest to the many educational police conferences he’s attended worldwide. He’s also one of Finland’s leading experts in bloodstain-pattern analysis. Additionally, he’s involved in many works that benefit the community. He’s such a do-gooder that, up to now, I found him annoying. Maybe I’ll try to readjust my opinion.
‘Since we’re the black sheep,’ Milo says, ‘by default, we may find ourselves working together a lot.’
The guys from Mononen show up for Rauha Anttila’s body. We watch them scrape up her corpse – then we move on.
Chapter 3
We drive back to the Pasila station through a torrent of snow, get there at eleven thirty p.m.
Milo and I walk down the long corridor. I open the door to my office. The national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, is sitting at my desk, in my chair. Milo gives me a look of quizzical respect and meanders down the hall toward his own office.
Jyri and I have spoken on the phone several times, but I haven’t seen him in person since 1996, when he decorated and promoted me for bravery after I was shot in the line of duty.
I was a beat cop in Helsinki and answered an armed robbery call at Tillander, the most expensive jewelry store in the city, on Aleksanterinkatu, in the heart of the downtown shopping district, in the middle of June. My partner and I arrived as two thieves exited the store carrying backpacks weighted down with jewelry. They pulled guns. One of them fired a shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased the shooter down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists. The thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand, but he surprised me. I was running when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I fell hard to the pavement. The thief decided to kill me, but I got a shot off first and the bullet hit him in the side. He went down, but raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his arm. He didn’t. I blew his head off.
Jyri looks snazzy in a tuxedo, holds an open flask in his hand. He’s mid-fiftyish and handsome, maybe a bit drunk. Judging by the scent, he’s sipping cognac. ‘Inspector Vaara,’ he says. ‘Please come in.’
‘How kind of you,’ I say and enter.
‘How’s your lovely American wife?’ he asks. ‘I understand she’s pregnant.’
I know Jyri well enough to doubt he gives a damn, and I don’t want his false pleasantries. ‘Kate is fine. What brings you here?’
‘We have business.’ He looks around. ‘Your office furnishings are nonstandard. I’m not sure they comply with regulations. What did Arto say about it?’
He means my boss, Arto Tikkanen. The atmosphere of standard-issue office junk suffocates me. I decorated with my own stuff, most of it from my office in Kittilä, up in Lapland, from when I headed the police department there. A polished oak desk. A Persian rug. A reproduction of the painting December Day, by the nineteenth-century Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt. A photo I took myself, of an ahma, an Arctic wolverine facing extinction, on the back of a reindeer, trying to get at its throat.
‘I didn’t ask Arto,’ I say, ‘so he didn’t have a chance to say no.’
Jyri doesn’t give a damn about office furniture. He’s just playing big dog/little dog, establishing his authority. He lets it go. ‘Go easy on Arto,’ he says. ‘You and he share the same rank. Technically, that’s not supposed to happen. He may find it disconcerting.’
‘Arto is a good guy. I don’t think my position here is a problem for him.’ I’m less than certain about that.
He takes a sip from his flask. ‘I promised you this job in homicide. How’s it treating you?’
His tone implies I should thank him. He promised me this job a year ago, so Kate and I moved to Helsinki last March, and I expected to start in homicide right away. He stuck me in personnel and I pushed papers for all that time because, he said, I needed to wait until a position opened up. That was a lie. The Helsinki homicide team – murharyhmä – was undermanned, they could have used me. ‘You fucked me on that deal,’ I say. ‘You made me sit on my ass for eleven months.’
‘I had reasons, some of them for your benefit. That’s an ugly scar on your jaw, by the way. Why didn’t you get it fixed?’
My sergeant in Kittilä accidentally shot me before blowing his own brains out. I was trying to talk him down. When his pistol went off, the bullet passed through my open mouth, took out two back teeth, and went out through my right cheek. Bad luck. The exit wound left a ragged, puckered scar. ‘Like you,’ I say, ‘I had my reasons.’
‘Probably good for business. I bet it intimidates the hell out of bad guys.’
I sit down in the chair for visitors beside my desk and say nothing.
‘What you went through was traumatizing,’ he says. ‘I wanted you to have a chance to decompress, and I thought a healthy dose of therapy would be good for you before beginning a new and stressful position.’
He pulls out a cigarette. I take an ashtray from a desk drawer. We both light up. Smoking is forbidden in the station. Except for the prisoners. They can smoke in their cells.
‘In the future,’ I say, ‘trust me to look after my own emotional well-being.’
‘I had the good of the team to consider, and that’s a little more important to me than hurting your feelings. Helsinki homicide employs some of the most efficient police in the world. Maybe as a group, the world’s best. A murder hasn’t gone unsolved in Helsinki since 1993. A perfect track record for going on two decades. That’s a lot of pressure. Nobody in the unit wants that perfect track record ruined, and I wasn’t about to let you come in here and fuck it up because you’re fucked up. And besides, Helsinki’s murharyhmä is my pride and joy.’
Jyri has a way of getting under my skin. I change the subject. ‘What’s with the tux?’
He leans back in the chair and props patent-leather oxfords up on my desk. He must know it pisses me off. Big dog/little dog again. ‘I attended a black-tie affair,’ he says. ‘The interior minister was there. He asked me to come here this evening and have a chat with you.’
I assume this has something to do with the way the Finnish police marketed me to the public as a hero cop after the Sufia Elmi case. ‘I didn’t know the higher echelons have an interest in me.’
‘They don’t. You came to their attention because of your grandfather.’
Now I’m baffled. ‘Nice intro. Why don’t you tell me about it after you take your feet off my desk.’
He smiles at me and does it. ‘Bear with me. It’s a bit of a long story. You know much about Finnish-German relations in the Second World War?’ Jyri asks.
‘I read history books,’ I say.
‘Until a short time ago, this wasn’t in any history books. In September 2008, a historian named Pasi Tervomaa published his Ph.D. dissertation, “Einsatzkommando Finnland and Stalag 309: Secret Finnish and German Security Police Collusion in the Second World War.”
‘He claims that in 1941, our security police, Valpo, and their Gestapo set up a special unit, Einsatzkommando Finnland, to destroy ideological and racial enemies on the far north of the German Eastern Front.’
‘So what? Finns volunteering to fight for Germany on the Eastern Front is well-documented. The SS Freewill Nordic Battalion. SS Viking. Others. It made sense. For Finland and Germany, Soviet Russia was a common enemy. And it wasn’t just Finland. The SS took in soldiers from all over the Nordic area.’
‘This is different,’ Jyri says. ‘Germany opened a prisoner-of-war camp – Stalag 309 – in Salla. It’s in Russia now, but at the time it was part of northern Finland. Tervomaa claims Valpo and Einsatzkommando Finnland collaborated in the liquidation of Communists and Jews. Lined them up and shot them and buried them in mass graves. If his accusations are true, Finnish actions constitute war crimes.’
‘What does this have to do with my grandfather?’
‘Apparently, your mother’s father worked in Stalag 309.’
‘How would you know if a guy who worked in a stalag was my grandfather?’
Jyri sighs. ‘Me. The interior minister. We’re plugged into the intelligence community. We learn things. We know things.’
‘Even if he was, again, so what? He’s dead.’
‘As are all the other Finns who worked in it, except for one. Arvid Lahtinen, age ninety. Eyewitness testimony states that he, among other Finns, personally took part in executions. The Simon Wiesenthal Center sent a formal request that Finland investigate the matter, which we haven’t done to their satisfaction, and now Germany has requested extradition. They want to charge Lahtinen with accessory to murder.’
‘How the fuck can Germany charge him with anything? The claim is that he worked for them.’
‘Ah. But you see, therein lies the rub. Germany granted general amnesty for war crimes to its own citizens in 1969, so it has to expiate its sins by punishing others. They recently filed similar charges against another old man, accused him of being a guard at Sobibor and involved in the killing of twenty-nine thousand Jews. They extradited him from the U.S.’
‘How can the world not have realized that Finland had a stalag on its soil until sixty-five years after the war ended?’
‘Potential Finnish culpability has been largely ignored because of language lockout. We don’t want to talk about it, and very few people in this world besides us can read our documentation. It seems someone at the Wiesenthal Center learned to read Finnish and noticed Tervomaa’s book.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me.’
‘Finland and Germany have an extradition treaty. The Interior Ministry has to at least investigate the matter. The minister wants you to interview Arvid Lahtinen.’
Now it all becomes clear. ‘Because if I find the old man took part in the Holocaust, it means my grandfather did, too. I’ll give you credit, that’s conniving.’
‘I liked it. Lahtinen is notoriously irascible and has a habit of telling people to fuck off. We need him to cooperate. You charm him, tell him your grandfather served with him, get him to talk to you. Either come back with proof that he’s not guilty, or the two of you concoct a convincing enough lie to get the Germans off Finland’s back.’
‘If he’s guilty, why lie?’
‘Arvid Lahtinen is a Finnish hero. Every December sixth, on Independence Day, he’s invited to the gala at the Presidential Palace. The president shakes his hand and thanks him for his service to his country. Lahtinen was in the Winter War in 1939 and 1940. He took out six Soviet tanks, charged them and destroyed them with Molotov cocktails. He fought in almost minus-fifty-degree weather and personally shot and killed hundreds of Russians. He slaughtered Communists at the Battle of Raate Road and helped save this country. Finland needs its heroes. Pay the man a visit, and keep that in mind while you interview him.’
Jyri sucks down a last sip from his flask, stands up, takes a sheet of notepaper from his pocket and lays it on my desk. ‘Here’s his contact information. I’ll report to the interior minister that you promise full cooperation. Keep me informed. I’m going back to the party. Some grade-A pussy was there, and I’m dying to stick my dick in it. Welcome to murharyhmä.’
He gives me a grin and a wink on his way out the door.
Chapter 4
As if I don’t have enough to think about, Jyri, never the bearer of glad tidings, has forced me to consider the possibility that my ukki – grandpa – was a mass murderer. I loved him dearly. Before he retired, he was a blacksmith. He gave me ice cream when we visited in the summers, and always let me sit on his lap. He used to put salt in his beer. He never mentioned the war. I remember somebody asking him about it once – I guess hoping Ukki would share some heroic tales – but Ukki kept mum.
I don’t give a damn about political agendas, but Jyri did a good job of manipulating me. Desire for the truth about Ukki will force me to talk to Arvid Lahtinen.
No doubt there are corpses to be examined. I turned my phone off while talking to Jyri. I wander down the hall to Milo’s office to see if the dispatcher has called, but can’t stop thinking about Ukki. The throb of the migraine renews itself. I open Milo’s door. He’s got a look on his face like I caught him jerking off.
‘You could knock,’ he says.
I have no idea why I just walked in on him. It’s unlike me. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘My mind was somewhere else.’
His service pistol, a 9mm Glock, is fieldstripped, in pieces on his desk. Beside it are a Dremel tool and a box of ammo. A few loose semi-jacketed soft-point rounds are lined up in a row beside a little jar. A desk drawer is open. I get the impression he left it that way so if someone knocked, he could scoop the stuff into it and hide it quick.
Milo’s scowl is justifiable. ‘Well, get your head out of your fucking ass,’ he says.
Milo’s shirtsleeves are rolled up, and I see that despite his small stature, he’s built out of ropey muscle.
‘What are you working on?’ I ask.
‘None of your business.’
Whatever he’s doing must be at least against police procedure, maybe against the law. His discomfiture amuses me. I suppress a grin and wait for him to tell me. We stare at each other for a while.
‘I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to install a three-round-burst selector switch into a Glock Model 19,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Because, as every soldier knows, three-round 9mm bursts take men down, single shots usually don’t.’
‘Three-round bursts often kill, not part of our mandate.’
He gets a cocky look on his face. ‘Show me where it says that in the police handbook.’
There is no police handbook or detailed set of rules and codes. He’s fucking with me. ‘Don’t be a jackass,’ I say.
He says nothing.
‘Well, can you?’ I ask.
‘Can I what?’
‘Install the selector switch.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you shoot someone, they might examine your weapon. If they see the selector switch, you’ll lose your job, maybe get prosecuted.’
‘The switch can be removed and the drill tap filled with a small screw, which no one will ever notice.’
I can’t hide my amusement any longer. I shake my head and laugh. ‘And what about the bullets?’
He grimaces. This must be even worse than modifying his weapon. ‘I’m drilling cavities in the lead tips and filling them with glycerin. When a bullet collides with flesh, it slows down. The liquid inside retains its inertia and releases excess energy by ripping through the front of the bullet. It leaves a jagged slug, and lead fragments continue to tear up tissue. It creates a larger wound than a normal round and causes severe hydrostatic shock.’
I’ve heard of this somewhere before. It comes to me and I tease him. ‘In a thriller called The Day of the Jackal, an assassin fills his bullets with mercury. Why not do the same? That way, when you shoot crooks, you can poison them, too.’
He doesn’t see the humor. ‘Obviously because when they autopsied the body, I’d get caught.’
This kid has a few screws loose. ‘Why not just shoot hollow-point rounds?’ I ask.
‘They expand on penetration but tend to remain intact. Glycerin is more effective.’
‘I see. Let me show you something. Give me a bullet.’
He tosses one to me and I catch it. I take out a pocket knife, notch a cross in the soft lead tip and show it to him. ‘It’s called cross-hatching,’ I say. ‘Some people call them dum-dum rounds. On impact, the bullet deforms and breaks into chunks along the cut lines. You get your big wound channels, multiple exit points, severe blood loss and trauma, and someone would have to look for it in order to detect it.’
He looks both impressed and disappointed. ‘My way is more fun,’ he says, ‘but I have to admit, yours is more practical. Where did you learn it?’
‘My grandpa showed it to me while he taught me to shoot.’
My own words take me by surprise. My ukki, now an accused mass murderer, taught a child how to dum-dum bullets. I suppose a man from his generation – born just after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, and then later a combat veteran of the Second World War – must have thought the generation to come should be prepared for wars of its own.
‘Your grandpa must have been a cool guy.’
‘Yeah, he was.’
I fold up the knife and put it back in my pocket. I think about where I got it, and whatever amusement I feel at Milo’s expense disappears. Valtteri’s son used it to butcher Sufia Elmi. Valtteri said he hid the murder weapon by keeping it in his pocket, because no one would ever look for it there, and so he would have a constant reminder of his failures. After the inquest, I stole the knife from the evidence locker, and like Valtteri, I keep it in my pocket so I won’t forget my own failures.
‘Are you going to tell anyone about my hobbies?’ Milo asks.
‘You realize that, even if you remain a policeman until retirement age, the odds of you having to fire your pistol in the line of duty are about a thousand to one.’
‘You did,’ he says.
Point taken. ‘Just stop doing it,’ I say.
He nods.
With agile fingers, Milo reassembles the Glock in under a minute. He practises field-stripping it. ‘What did the head honcho want?’ he asks.
‘Too much,’ I say.
The visit from the chief intrigues him. I can see he wants to press the issue, but restrains himself.
‘Any dead bodies to look at?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Some.’
Helsinki homicide is a body factory. I check out three to four corpses during a normal shift. Always understaffed, the three teams in murharyhmä, the homicide division, a total of around twenty-five detectives, look into about thirteen hundred deaths a year. Most of them, as homicide cops call them, are grandmas and grandpas, the natural deaths of the elderly. A fair share of the remaining deaths are accidental. About a dozen of those twelve hundred will be ruled homicides and investigated, down from about three dozen murders only a decade ago, due to improved on-site trauma care and response time. It’s saved a lot of lives. Also, I figure because of the massive volume of death investigations, some of the more subtle premeditated murders go undetected.
We also look into an average of a hundred and twenty-five suicides each year. Helsinki has a higher rate than the rest of Finland, partly because of sexual minorities. They come from all over the country to the nation’s largest city, seeking the acceptance and promise of happiness that they lacked in smaller communities. Since they have higher rates of depression and mental illness than the city’s norm, and hence a greater propensity toward self-destruction, I presume many of them don’t find what they’re looking for. In the couple of weeks that I’ve been working in homicide, I’ve looked at twenty-seven dead bodies, but I’ve yet to investigate one as a possible murder.
Over the next hours, Milo and I examine an overdosed junkie, a middle-aged man who died of a heart attack while watching television, and a teenage girl who got drunk, passed out in the snow and froze to death. It’s eight thirty a.m. We should have gotten off work a half hour ago. My phone rings. It’s Arto, my boss. ‘I know your shifts are over,’ he says, ‘but we’re shorthanded. I’ve got a murder for you if you want to take it.’
This takes me aback. I didn’t think he was prepared to trust either me or Milo with a murder and risk the precious murharyhmä winning streak and reputation, unless we stumbled upon one in a normal death investigation and he couldn’t take it away from us.
‘Do tell,’ I say.
‘A woman was beaten to death in Töölö. The responding officers say it’s bad.’
I ask Milo. He’s about to jump up and down from excitement. If I take it, it means I won’t get a chance to sleep tonight, but solving a murder might go a long way toward quelling the misgivings the other homicide unit members have about me. What the hell. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it.’
Arto gives me the address and says, ‘A forensics team is already on the way. Get over there now.’
Chapter 5
Milo and I take the car we signed out from the police garage earlier. The department is big on economy. We get a Ford Fiesta. Milo wants to drive, and given the icy road conditions, he does so faster than necessary. The murder scene is only a few minutes away. A time and temperature sign on the side of a building reads eight forty-four a.m. and minus twenty-four degrees. Snow cascades through the darkness.
Europe is experiencing its worst winter in thirty years. Even Helsinki, eminently well-prepared for cold-weather conditions, is in chaos. Hoarfrost coats everything. Constant plowing has created mountains of snow and buried cars. The central railway station is out of commission. Trains still running have to be frequently deiced, and it’s wreaking havoc on their timetables. Water mains have burst and flooded the streets. The water has turned into vast sheets of ice and brought the tram lines to a standstill. Traffic accidents abound.
This is the antithesis of the normal Helsinki winters I experienced living here years ago. Usually, in January, the temperature hovers around zero. Helsinki is like that most of the winter, although sometimes the temperature dips down to as much as minus twenty or thirty. We get some snow and it melts. Snow melt snow melt snow melt. Makes it like walking around in icy gray mud for most of the winter. Still, at a certain point some snow piles up. Then the spring thaw exposes a winter’s accumulation of dog shit, and the city is overwhelmed by the stench for a week or two. I missed Arctic winter during my seven years here, the meter or two of snow reflecting moon and starlight. The beauty of snow-laden forests. This year, we get to experience real winter in Helsinki, and it brings joy to my heart.
Töölö is a fashionable district. It’s not tremendously expensive, but has a reputation for a better class of resident. We pull up behind a police van, next to a snowbank in front of a pretty yellow apartment building at the address Arto gave me. My phone rings. The forensics team’s pathologist tells me their vehicle was involved in a minor collision with another car. One of the crime-scene technicians wasn’t wearing a seat belt and his head hit the windshield. He needs stitches. They have to take him to the hospital, and we have to wait until he’s patched up.
‘Fuck that,’ I say.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The investigation starts now, without you.’
‘That’s against procedure.’
‘Time is wasting. We’re setting a new procedural precedent.’
Pause. ‘Do you have the right gear to wear?’
‘Yep.’
‘Okay, we’ll be there as soon as we can.’
Milo and I enter the building and take the elevator to the fourth floor. A uniformed officer stands in the hall. ‘You the detectives?’ he asks.
‘That’s us,’ I say.
‘Where are the crime-scene techs?’
‘Late. They had a car wreck. Fill us in.’
‘This apartment belongs to Rein Saar, an Estonian citizen. He called in the murder himself. He claims an unknown assailant struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. When he woke up, he was in his bed beside his lover, Iisa Filippov. She was beaten to death, and he was covered in her blood.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the back of our van.’
Something is amiss here. ‘Where’s your partner?’ I ask.
‘He went to get us coffee.’
So much for police procedure. ‘You left an injured suspect, alone and unsupervised, in the back of your vehicle?’
He reddens. I let it go.
‘What’s your impression of the situation?’ I ask.
‘Rein Saar has a bad cut on his head from a blunt instrument. It looks to me like a lovers’ quarrel ended badly. She hit him with something, he killed her and hasn’t been able to think of a better lie.
‘Does he need stitches?’
‘At least not immediately. The bleeding stopped. He might be concussed.’
Milo and I don surgical gloves and paper suits, complete with head and foot coverings, to prevent our fingerprints, hair and clothing fibers from contaminating the crime scene, walk into the apartment and take a look around. The home is neat and clean, in large part decorated with inexpensive furniture from Ikea. The kitchen is off the living room.
I go back out into the hall and hand the patrol officer the keys to the Ford Fiesta. ‘There are more gloves and paper suits in the trunk of our car. Get some for yourself and the suspect, put them on and sit in the kitchen. Just don’t touch anything.’
‘That’s not going by the book,’ he says.
I use Milo’s line. ‘Show me where it says that in the police handbook.’
The uniform doesn’t know how to respond.
‘It’s fucking freezing outside,’ I say, ‘our suspect is injured, and I’ll want to talk to him before he’s processed and treated for his injuries. I would prefer he not be angry, miserable and traumatized while I do it.’
The uniform shrugs. ‘It’s your case.’ He goes downstairs to fetch Rein Saar from the van.
Milo and I examine the kitchen, to make sure the victim can sit in it without contaminating evidence when he comes back inside. I see Rein Saar in the hall while he and the uniform put on paper suits. He looks like he took a shower in blood.
Milo and I walk over to him. ‘I’m Inspector Vaara. This is Detective Sergeant Nieminen. Do you feel that you require immediate medical attention, or can you stay here for a while so I can talk to you?’
He nods. He can wait. I instruct him and the uniform to sit at the kitchen table.
I turn to Milo. ‘Let’s go look at Iisa Filippov.’
‘The bedroom is a fucking mess,’ the uniform says. ‘Have fun.’
We go to the bedroom. The uniform wasn’t exaggerating. Blood soaks the bed around the corpse. Fine mists of blood feather the walls and ceiling. Her murder speaks of both method and rage. The smell of fresh blood and scorched flesh, menthol cigarettes, as well as urine and feces, is strong.
We need duplicate documentation so there’s no chance of evidence from our initial investigation being lost. I take a digital audio recorder and notepad out of my coat pocket. ‘Which one do you want?’ I ask Milo.
‘I’ll write,’ he says.
I start recording. ‘The victim, identified as Iisa Filippov, is located in the bedroom of a man identified as Rein Saar. The bedroom itself is about a hundred and thirty square feet and unexceptional. It contains a standard queen-size bed in a corner, headboard and left side of the bed against walls. The victim’s body lies on the right side of the bed. Other furnishings include a dresser, a single wooden chair, and a nightstand with a reading lamp and a woman’s purse on it. There’s one closet, not yet inspected. About halfway up, the closet door has an approx two-inch hole bored through it. The room shows no damage to indicate struggle.’
I open her purse and rifle through it. ‘The purse contains a Finnish passport issued to Iisa Filippov. From the photo, I believe the victim is indeed Filippov. It also contains a wallet, makeup and related cosmetic accessories, a pack of Belmont cigarettes and orange Bic lighter, a cell phone and a compact Samsung camcorder.’ I unfold a sheet of paper. ‘And a copy of Rein Saar’s work schedule.’
I give Milo a moment to write and catch up, then continue.
‘Filippov appears to be a woman approx age thirty, five foot five inches tall, athletic build, about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.’
I’m careful about what I say, because the recording may be entered into evidence, but before being beaten to a pulp, she must have been damned good-looking. Tanned. Long black hair cut in bangs. One eye is burned through, I guess by a cigarette, but the other is open and also nearly black in color. Great figure, something like 36-23-36.
‘She’s nude and lying face-up on the bed. Her feet are bound tight with several wraps of duct tape. Her hands are behind her back, underneath her.’ I kneel down and look. ‘They’re bound in the same manner. The remainder of the roll of tape is on the nightstand. Her mouth is stuffed with women’s socks. Her clothes – jeans, sweater, panties and bra – are wadded up in a pile on the chair, but I don’t see her socks there, so I think the ones in her mouth belong to her.’
‘Care to add anything?’ I ask Milo.
He shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
Although this murder scene is gruesome, Milo doesn’t seem fazed by it, shows no sign of coming unglued, like he did last night when we investigated Rauha Anttila’s death.
‘Filippov has been struck multiple times with a blunt instrument. Her forehead is split open. Her left arm is broken just above the elbow. Bone protrudes through the skin. Her chest, on the right side, is flattened, suggesting that multiple ribs are caved in. Nothing in the room seems heavy or hard enough to have inflicted this kind of damage.’
Milo takes a look around. The place hasn’t been dusted for fingerprints yet, so with one gloved finger, he opens the closet door. We look in. I see only men’s clothing and shoes on the floor. A stool is inside; a closet seems a strange place for it. ‘Nothing here either,’ he says.
Then I notice equestrian clothing on the shelf on top of the clothes rack: shirts, breeches, a jacket and helmet. Interesting.
We go back to Iisa’s body. ‘Filippov has in the neighborhood of fifty burn marks on her body. Most are located on her abdomen, her genital area, her nipples, her face, and one through her left eye. The diameter and circular shape of the burns indicate she was burned with lit cigarettes. The wounds could have been inflicted after death, but I think they were probably used as a method of meting out pain. She voided her bowels either while being murdered, from fear or pain or both, or maybe upon death. Feces and urine are on the sheets between her legs.’
‘It’s enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon,’ Milo says.
I point at the audio recorder, press a warning finger to my lips and continue. ‘The blood pool pattern around the victim indicates that another body lay next to her while she bled. The outline of a head, arm and torso are clear. The resident of the apartment, Rein Saar, claims to have woken up next to the victim and found her dead. This lends some credence to his story. Most unusual is that Iisa Filippov has been struck dozens, perhaps more than a hundred times, with a light instrument at high velocity. It’s notable that her face around the lips was beaten with particular severity.’
The tone of my description is neutral, but the scene reeks of torture, horror and agony. Iisa’s face is nearly destroyed by cigarette burns, whipped to pieces, scored by marks and welts. Deep and wide-open wounds that ooze.
‘She was struck on the same surface areas, mostly on the face and torso, multiple times. It appears that the first lash abraded flesh, and that subsequent strikes deepened the wounds. This resulted in significant blood spatter. The walls and ceiling are misted with patterns of thousands of blood droplets that I estimate are an average of two millimeters in size.’
I hear the front door open, then voices. The forensics team is here.
Milo points. ‘Look at this little spot on the wall,’ Milo says. ‘Whatever the killer used to hit her smacked it and left a small tongue-shaped bloodstain. Given the clothes in his closet, I’d say Rein Saar beat her to death with a riding crop.’
‘A good guess,’ I say.
I go to the closet, get down on my knees and look at the floor. A bloody crop is propped up against the inside wall. I don’t touch it, leave it in place for the forensics team to photograph it. ‘Found it.’
Milo comes over and takes a look.
I speak into the tape recorder. ‘In the bedroom closet, we discovered the probable weapon used in the lashing attack. A riding crop, a little over three feet in length, with a leather tongue on the end. It appears to be made of fiberglass, has a leather-wrapped handle, and a loop on the end to secure grip.’
We return to the bedside. Both of us stare down at her for a moment. Milo asks me, ‘What do you think was the cause of death?’
‘She took a terrible beating, but there’s no arterial spurting. I doubt if it was blood loss. She’s got those socks stuffed in her mouth. I think he beat her with the horse whip until he got bored with it, then maybe just held her nose until she suffocated and died.’
‘I tend to agree,’ Milo says.
‘Maybe we should call Saska Lindgren and have him come take a look,’ I say. ‘He’s the bloodstain-pattern expert.’
Milo shakes his head. ‘No fucking way.’
‘Why not?’
‘This is my first big homicide case and I’m not sharing it with anybody.’
I raise my eyebrows.
He flushes, embarrassed at his gaffe. ‘Except you, of course. Listen, I’m going to tell you something personal.’
Not again. I wish he wouldn’t. I wait.
‘You’ve probably heard that I have a high IQ. People make a big deal about my being in Mensa.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘I have advanced development of spatial relations and mathematics. The forensics guys are going to come in here, make detailed measurements and photographs, then enter it all into a computer program that will more or less re-create the attack. I don’t need the computer program. I can do it in my head.’
I don’t quite believe him. ‘Then do it.’
Somebody knocks on the bedroom door frame. I look. A member of the forensics team says, ‘Sorry we’re late. You guys want to let us in there?’
‘Give us a couple more minutes,’ Milo says. ‘Can you loan me a viewing loupe magnifier and a measuring tape?’
She brings them.
Milo looks close up at blood droplets at various points on the walls, measures distances. He stands on the chair and examines the ceiling. This feels silly, like I’m Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.
My phone rings. It’s Kate. ‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘At a murder scene.’
‘The weather is so bad, I was worried.’
I made a mistake taking this case. I want to be at home with Kate right now and I could be. A fuckup. ‘I’m fine. I should have called, but I got caught up in this.’
‘John and Mary will be here this evening. How are you going to be able to spend time with them if you haven’t slept?’
She sounds peeved, doesn’t realize I seldom sleep. I haven’t told her. While she sleeps, I lie in bed beside her and think. ‘I’ll be fine. We’ll have a nice evening, and I’ll get home as soon as I can.’
‘Please try. I miss you.’
I ring off. Milo is waiting, smiling and expectant. I guess I’m supposed to share his joy.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I got it.’
‘I’m bursting with anticipation.’
‘Trajectories are three-dimensional and so have three angles of impact. I calculated gamma, the easiest angle, which is the angle of the blood path measured from the vertical surface and extended angle. Then I calculated alpha, the angle of blood spatter moving out from the surface. Then finally beta, the angle of blood pivoting around the vertical. The three angles are connected through trigonomic equations that determine the major and minor axes and angle of impact.’
I interrupt. ‘Please get to the point.’
‘The tangential flight path of blood droplets is determined with the angle of impact and the offset angle of the blood spatter. They converge at the intersection of two blood-spatter paths, and the stains come from opposite sides of the impact pattern. The area of convergence is formed by the intersection of stains from opposite sides of the impact pattern.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘I’m trying to. The area of origin is the area in three-dimensional space where the blood source was located at the time of the attack . . .’
The dark circles around his eyes seem to have taken on a dull shine. I’ve noticed this happens when he gets excited. ‘Milo, please. The goddamned fucking point.’
He purses his lips, frustrated. I’ve ruined his fun. ‘The killer didn’t beat her at random. He chose small points on her body, hit the target areas repeatedly to cause maximum pain and damage, resulting in the great number of blood-spatter patterns, then chose a new area of flesh to whip.’
I sigh. ‘Thank you.’
He’s miffed. ‘And in case you didn’t know, most of the blood spatter isn’t the result of the riding crop striking her. When the whip recoils away from the body at the bottom of the striking arc but still at high velocity, that’s when the blood really flies.’
I did know, but I’m still not certain if I believe he can work it all out without a computer. I’ll talk to Saska Lindgren after we get photos and data from forensics, and see if he confirms Milo’s version of events.
‘He hit her with the riding crop a hundred and twenty-six times,’ Milo says.
I’m curious about the extent of his capabilities. ‘What’s your IQ?’ I ask.
He’s embarrassed, flushes again. ‘A hundred seventy-two.’
‘Let’s go talk to Rein Saar,’ I say.
We turn the crime scene over to the forensics team. We didn’t inspect the other side of Iisa Filippov’s body, because the front of it hasn’t been photographed yet. I ask them to let us have a look when they flip her over.
Rein Saar’s elbows rest on the kitchen table, his chin on his hands. I sit across from him, start the audio recorder and lay it between us. Milo remains standing. ‘Mr Saar, how are you holding up?’ I ask.
‘My head hurts,’ he says. ‘You can call me Rein.’
‘All right, Rein. You can call me Inspector Vaara.’ He blinks, nonplussed by my cold manner, which was my intention. ‘Tell me what happened,’ I say.
I see a handsome man beneath his bloody face. Athletic medium build. Swarthy and dark-headed. On the tall side.
‘Iisa agreed to meet me at seven thirty this morning. When I walked in, I was attacked from behind. I blacked out and don’t know anything else. Somebody hit me on the head. When I woke up beside her, she was already dead.’
‘Where were you this morning, prior to coming home?’
‘I spent the weekend in Estonia, in Tallinn, at my sister’s wedding. I came home on a ferry with some friends and family. We partied the whole way, and kept the party going all night in Helsinki.’
‘So you haven’t slept and you came home drunk.’
He nods. ‘I’m still drunk. Thank God.’ He points at a cabinet. ‘There’s a whiskey bottle in there. Can I have it?’
His hangover will kick in soon and it might make it harder to interview him. Besides, some truth serum might not hurt. I nod to Milo. He gives Saar the bottle and a glass. Saar pours a healthy drink and slurps. A pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights is on the table in front of him. He lights one. I note that there’s a carton of them in the cabinet where Saar keeps his whiskey. The killer had to go through at least a few cigarettes to inflict that many burns. I get up and check the kitchen and bathroom trash cans. No cigarette butts. The killer took them with him.
I sit down again. ‘And the purpose of meeting Iisa Filippov was what?’ I ask.
He lifts his face from his hands. He folds them in front of him on the table, looks into my eyes and sighs.
‘You may think it’s a stupid question,’ I say, ‘but all information pertinent to this case must be directly stated.’
‘We were meeting for the purpose of engaging in sex,’ he says.
The Finnish and Estonian languages are closely related. So much so that even if he spoke Estonian, I could understand some of what he said. His Finnish is good, but his Estonian accent makes him sound silly, like a child in the process of learning how to speak.
‘Tell me about your relationship.’
‘I met Iisa about two years ago at the Equestrian Academy. I was her teacher. She is – was – married. We started an affair almost right away. You should be questioning her husband, not me. He’s the only one who would want to do something like this.’
‘Trust me, I’ll speak with him, but that’s not your concern. Right now, I want to give you my undivided attention. You should know that it looks bad. She’s dead, in your bed, and she was beaten with a riding crop I found in your closet.’
According to the nonexistent police handbook, I shouldn’t have related this nugget of information, but I wanted to see the look on his face when I said it.
He’s on the verge of panic, starts to twitch. ‘With my riding crop?’
‘Yep.’
‘Somebody broke in and attacked us both. I can’t help it if the person used something that belonged to me.’
‘Who has keys to your apartment?’ I ask.
‘Just me and Iisa.’
I tell Milo to check the front door for signs of forced entry. He leaves the room. We still haven’t found the blunt instrument used in the murder. I stand up and look around the kitchen. It’s immaculate. Saar is a good housekeeper. An iron skillet is on the stove. It’s weighty, a good weapon of opportunity. I try to pick it up, it’s stuck to the burner it rests on. I tug, it comes free. I feel its heft, then turn it over and look at the bottom. It’s smeared with blood that has hair stuck in it. I show it to Saar. ‘Looks like this is what you and Iisa got whacked with.’
Milo comes back in. ‘No forced entry,’ he says.
I show the pan to Milo and sit down with Saar again. ‘Your story doesn’t hold water. It looks to me like you two fought, she hit you on the head with a frying pan, then you lost it and killed her – with gusto,’ I add.
He shakes his head hard, his eyes turn wild. ‘That’s not what happened. Iisa and I got along great. We never fought. I had no reason to hurt her.’
‘A married woman and her riding instructor. This reads like a romance novel. I can picture about fifty scenarios that would cause you to fight, maybe even get angry enough to murder her. Make me believe you.’
‘We had no differences. Our relationship was open and simple. We met a couple times a week and had sex. And we weren’t in love, we never used the word. It was just sex. We had fun together.’
I admit, as bad as it looks for him, it’s convincing, as explanations go. ‘Who was her husband?’ I ask.
‘Ivan Filippov. He’s originally from Russian Karelia. He owns a construction business that specializes in asbestos removal and industrial waste disposal.’
When the borders were redrawn at the end of the war, Russia annexed a part of Karelia that was previously Finnish territory. Stalag 309, where my grandpa supposedly collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, is also in that region.
‘Was Iisa born Finnish or Russian?’ I ask.
‘She was a Finn, from Helsinki. She took her husband’s name when they got married.’
‘Did Filippov know about you and Iisa?’
‘I didn’t think so, until today. She said he didn’t.’
‘If your version of events is true and Filippov is the killer, why are you alive? Why didn’t he murder you along with Iisa? Killing you as well would have been more expedient.’
He chugs whiskey, frightened. ‘Obviously, he wanted to frame me. If I go to jail for the murder, he gets off scot-free.’
A member of the forensics team comes in. ‘We turned the body over. Want to take a look?’
I thank Saar for his cooperation and tell the uniforms to take him first to the Pasila station for processing, then to the hospital for examination.
Milo and I go back to the bedroom. A digital Nikon D200 and a Sony video camera are on tripods. Fingerprint dust covers surfaces. Scales and tape measures are scattered about. I check Iisa’s phone and find a text message Saar sent her yesterday morning, asking her to meet him here at seven thirty a.m. this morning. Her sent messages confirm the tryst. I’ll reserve judgment about Saar’s guilt or innocence. So far, I’ve found no evidence that he’s been less than forthright.
The victim is on her stomach. Her reverse shows no signs of violence. I ask Milo, ‘See anything noteworthy?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. We’re done here.’
‘Then let’s go talk to Ivan Filippov,’ I say.
Chapter 6
A Lutheran past or, Henri Oksanen, often accompanies police to give the bad news to family members of the departed. I give him a call, he agrees to join us. Milo and I pick him up. We start out at just after noon and drive through heavy snow to Filippov Construction, in an industrial park in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa.
The business is in a large, corrugated-metal building. We walk in. Construction tools and materials line shelves and lie on the floor: everything from jackhammers to face masks and other protective clothing necessary for asbestos removal and industrial waste disposal. A gorgeous secretary greets us from behind a battered metal desk. She’s a dead ringer for the 1950s soft-porn and pinup star Bettie Page. Tanned. Longish black hair cut in bangs. Black eyes. Curvy figure. Girl-next-door smile. A dark angel. She reminds me of someone else, too, but I can’t put my finger on who it is. Sleep deprivation is screwing with my memory.
We ask to speak to Ivan Filippov. She buzzes an intercom and announces our arrival. He tells her to send us in.
The office is nothing fancy. Concrete floors. Basic white walls and filing cabinets. A computer sits on a worktable. Filippov sits behind it. He stands to greet us. He’s maybe six-three, age fifty-something, high-cheekboned and clean-shaven. His suit, shoes and haircut are expensive. His attire doesn’t mesh with the practical atmosphere of his business and speaks of vanity. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks.
We introduce ourselves. Pastor Oksanen takes the lead. He practices this on a regular basis and is better at it than we are. ‘Mr Filippov, perhaps you should sit down. We have sad news.’
Filippov’s expression turns quizzical and concerned. He regains his seat behind the desk, motions for us to sit. There are only two chairs on the other side of his desk. Pastor Oksanen gestures for Milo and me to take them.
‘It’s about Iisa, your wife,’ Oksanen says.
Two detectives and a pastor have come to bring bad news. Filippov must suspect the worst, but his voice is controlled. ‘What about Iisa?’
‘I regret to inform you that she is no longer with us.’
He cocks his head to the side. ‘Then, pray tell, who is she with? I’m not a child, spell it out.’
‘She has passed on. Her body was discovered earlier today.’
Filippov makes eye contact with Oksanen. His face registers nothing. ‘How did she die?’
The pastor goes around the desk and places a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘She was murdered. She’s with God now.’
Filippov ignores the hand. ‘I’m an atheist.’
Odd first words to utter upon being informed that his wife was slain. He looks at Milo and me. ‘Who killed my wife?’
It’s always difficult to inform someone about the murder of a family member, but because she was planning to commit adultery when she died, this is even harder than usual. ‘Brace yourself,’ I say. ‘This is unpleasant.’
‘You come in here and tell me that Iisa was murdered, then warn me about unpleasantness. Quit fucking around and get on with it.’
His abrasiveness takes me aback. I give him his way and tell it straight. ‘She was having a long-standing affair with her riding instructor, a man named Rein Saar. They planned a tryst. She was found dead in his bed, beaten with an iron skillet and a riding crop, and burned with cigarettes.’
‘Did this Rein Saar kill her?’ His accent betrays his youth spent in Russian Karelia. It sounds like Donald Duck speaking Finnish.
‘We don’t know yet. Saar claims she had a key to the apartment and was waiting for him to arrive. He maintains that he came home, was struck from behind and rendered unconscious. When he came to, he was in bed beside her and she was already dead. He says he never saw the assailant.’
Filippov has yet to demonstrate sorrow, only impatience. ‘Do you believe him?’
‘Certain facts contradict his story, others support it.’
Filippov leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘I want Iisa’s killer found and punished.’
‘I realize this is a shock and painful for you. Are you able to answer a few questions?’
‘Of course.’
‘Were you aware of your wife’s affair?’
‘No.’
‘It had been going on for two years. You had no clue?’
He shakes his head. ‘None.’
‘They met a couple times a week. You never inquired about her comings and goings?’
‘Iisa maintained an active schedule. She participated in various organizations and had many hobbies, riding among them. She was – or at least I thought she was – a good and faithful wife. I had no reason to invade her privacy or interrogate her.’
‘Did she work?’
‘She had no need. I earn a comfortable living.’
Filippov is a cold fish, but businesslike and seems candid. ‘Forgive me,’ I say, ‘but I need to ask you about your whereabouts last night and today. Please understand that this is in no way an accusation, but a part of standard procedure.’
He waves his hand, gestures for me to get on with it. I’m senior officer here, but Milo is a new detective and needs experience. I don’t want to disregard him. Also, there’s something to be said for the good cop/bad cop routine. I nod, signal for him to take over.
‘Where were you last night?’ Milo asks.
‘At a party. In fact, the national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, was in attendance. He can serve as my alibi.’
Filippov was drinking with Jyri while he and the interior minister discussed me, and here I sit. Interesting.
‘And you left the party and arrived home when?’ Milo asks.
‘I left at around one and was home in bed asleep by two a.m.’
‘Were you drunk?’
‘No. I’m not given to excess.’
‘Tell me about your morning,’ Milo says.
‘It was like every other workday. I arrived here at nine and haven’t left since.’
‘Not even for lunch?’
He takes a receipt from a file on the tabletop and hands it to Milo. ‘Lunch was delivered pizza.’
Milo pauses, looks thoughtful. ‘What time did your secretary arrive?’
‘Also at nine.’
‘Can you verify your times of arrival?’
Filippov sighs. ‘What sort of verification are you looking for?’
‘Do you have a security camera and video record?’
Filippov offers a wry grin. ‘Detective, you’re playing games. A camera is mounted over the entrance and you saw it when you came in. You doubtless also saw the video recorder in the outer office.’ He pushes a button on his intercom. ‘Linda, would you please eject today’s video surveillance tape and bring it in here.’
We wait. Linda enters. My memory kicks in. She reminds me of Filippov’s dead wife. She looks much as I picture Iisa Filippov did before the cigarette burns and riding crop disfigured her face. Ivan Filippov has precise taste in women. He asks her to give the tape to Milo. She hands it over and departs.
‘Inspector Vaara was being euphemistic when he said your wife was beaten with a riding crop,’ Milo says. ‘It would be more accurate to say that first, the killer used her for a human ashtray, then whipped her, focusing on her face, until she was nearly unrecognizable. She was systematically tortured, and for the coup de grâce, we suspect smothered to death.’
That was way too harsh. I feel an inward cringe, but Filippov doesn’t flinch. ‘I see,’ he says.
The dark circles around Milo’s eyes take on the dull gleam that says he’s enjoying himself. ‘Who might have a reason to do such a thing to her?’ Milo asks.
‘No one,’ Filippov says. ‘Iisa was a gregarious and pleasant person. She enjoyed other people and they enjoyed her. I would say her priority in this world was simple. She liked to have fun.’
Simple and fun. This fits in with Rein Saar’s assessment of their relationship.
‘I would consider a two-year sexual relationship with her riding instructor having fun at your expense,’ Milo says.
We have to ask questions, but we just informed Filippov of his wife’s death. His detached demeanor makes me dislike him more with every passing moment, but still, Milo is pushing too hard. He doesn’t relent.
‘So you have no alibi to account for your whereabouts between the hours of one and nine this morning.’
‘No,’ Filippov says, ‘most people don’t.’
‘When did you last see your wife?’
‘Yesterday morning at about eight thirty, before I came to work.’
Milo smiles and raises his eyebrows. ‘Iisa wasn’t home when you got back from the party?’
‘No.’
‘And you found nothing unusual about that?’
‘I repeat. Iisa liked to have fun. And I might add that, unlike myself, she was somewhat given toward excess. So no, I found nothing unusual about it.’
Milo and Filippov stare at each other, adversaries, for a long moment.
‘I’ve heard about both of you,’ Filippov says, ‘and I’m honored to have two such distinguished detectives investigating my wife’s death. Your reputations precede you.’ He looks at me. ‘You for your tenacity and bravery,’ and then at Milo, ‘and you for your intellectual investigative achievements.’
He looks at me again. ‘In fact, your name was mentioned at the dinner party last night.’
And then Arto hands me the high-profile murder of Filippov’s wife, which I thought he would be reticent to do, only hours later. This strikes me as less than coincidental.
‘No doubt my wife’s murder will be swiftly solved,’ Filippov says. ‘I assume you want me to identify Iisa’s body. Isn’t that the procedure? I can do it this afternoon.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ I say. ‘Your wife’s identity has been established. However, I would like to come to your house and examine her belongings. Something among them might provide evidence of who killed Iisa and why.’
‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘I won’t dishonor her memory by having her intimate possessions pawed at.’
‘I can get a subpoena if necessary.’
‘You can try. I’ll have it quashed. That’s within my power. Let’s compromise. I’ll go through Iisa’s belongings. If I find something I believe helpful to you, I’ll deliver it to you myself.’
What an arrogant prick. ‘You’re not a detective. You might overlook something crucial.’
‘You’ll find that thoroughness is among my better attributes.’
He smiles at me. Given the circumstances, it’s disconcerting. ‘I read in the newspaper,’ he says, ‘that your wife is the general manager of Hotel Kämp. Their restaurant is my favorite.’
This bewilders me. I say too much. ‘We just informed you that your wife was murdered, and you’re thinking about food?’
‘I mourn the loss of my wife, but we must all grieve in our own way. Mine is to carry on with life as usual.’
I stand. Milo and the pastor follow my lead. I find Filippov repulsive, can’t bring myself to offer my hand or parting condolences.
When we get outside, I ask Milo, ‘What do you think?’
‘Motherfucker butchered his wife and framed her lover,’ he says, ‘and he’s so goddamned haughty that he doesn’t even try to hide it.’
Pastor Oksanen pretends he hears nothing.
I’m less certain than Milo – being a bastard doesn’t make him a murderer – but I’m inclined to agree. ‘If he framed Rein Saar,’ I say, ‘he did a good job. It’ll be difficult to prove.’
‘I . . .’ – he realizes his fuckup – ‘we will.’
Likable as he is, in his own way, Milo has a fundamental character flaw that he’ll have to pay for eventually. Arrogance.
On the drive back to Helsinki from Vantaa, Jyri Ivalo calls. ‘I understand you’re investigating the murder of Iisa Filippov,’ he says.
‘That’s right.’
‘I further understand that she was found dead beside her lover, some Estonian fuck.’
I haven’t filed a report yet, so Filippov must have called Jyri as soon as we left and filled him in. ‘Also correct.’
‘Ivan Filippov is a good acquaintance of mine, and he’s well connected in the business world. This sounds open-and-shut, but you’re given to leaps of imagination. Close the case fast. And defer to Filippov whenever possible.’
I say nothing.
‘I’ve got a vicious hangover and I’m not in the mood to be nice. Let me make this clear. You solved the Sufia Elmi case, but it dragged on too long and turned into a fiasco. Not this time.’
Fuck Jyri. ‘Filippov cites you as his alibi. Care to confirm it?’
‘Confirmed. He left the party around one. I see no need to relate his whereabouts of last night to the press. I and some others would prefer to be distanced from the investigation. Somehow, the media would invent a conspiracy theory and create a scandal.’
Yes, they would. ‘I don’t intend to handle the media at all. I’ll leave it to Arto and the police PR folks.’
‘Good thinking. Media relations isn’t your strong suit. And the discussion we had last night about Arvid Lahtinen. You on that yet?’
‘I’ve been working for twenty hours straight. Of course I’m not on it yet.’
‘You can sleep when you’re dead. Get on it.’ He rings off.
I’ve always felt that Jyri is excellent at his job but a real fuckwad as a human being. Every interaction I have with him confirms it. I’ll handle both the investigation and Arvid as I see fit.
We drop Pastor Oksanen off at his house and drive back to the police garage. I tell Milo I want him to get some sleep, ask him to look at the tape Filippov gave him, check out evidence from forensics and write the initial report in the morning.
Chapter 7
It’s two thirty p.m. I don’t have much time, but want to check on Kate. We thought her pregnancy was going well, but found out a couple weeks ago that she’s suffering from hypertension and preeclampsia. Placental abruption is a danger, and with it, a risk of maternal mortality. I could lose not only another child but Kate along with her. It scares the shit out of me.
I find a parking space a couple blocks from our apartment on Vaasankatu and walk the rest of the distance home. The snow has stopped, the wind died down. The street is quiet. A white snow-scape, lovely and hushed.
Vaasankatu, here in the district of Kallio, is nicknamed Puukkobulevardi – Hunting Knife Boulevard. Years ago, this was a dangerous place, and it still has a bad reputation, although largely undeserved these days. The area has its bars and drunks, some Thai massage parlors, but many of them were recently shut down. Prostitution in itself isn’t a crime, but various moralistic lobbies raised a stink, so the police cited illegal residency by workers, pimping – which is a crime – whatever they could come up with, to get rid of the parlors and stop the debate. The street is fairly gentrified now, many residents are upscale professionals.
Kate had misgivings about moving to Kallio, but it’s the only area in Helsinki that, to my mind, has a feeling of genuine community. And besides, even in this modest area, our nine-hundred-and-ninety-square-foot apartment, which I have to admit is gorgeous, cost us a cool three hundred and fifty thousand euros. A similar place in another part of town could run a million and a half. As general manager of Kämp, Helsinki’s only five-star hotel, Kate earns good money, and for a cop, I make a fair wage as an inspector, but not enough for a seven-figure apartment. In the north, a million and a half would buy us a palace. Helsinki is one of the most expensive cities on the planet.
I find Kate lying on the couch, reading a book about child-rearing. I give her a kiss hello. She sits up, rubs her back. At this late stage of her pregnancy, she’s having a hard time staying comfortable. ‘I can’t wait to get this child out of me,’ she says.
I sit beside her, put an arm around her. She looks at me, scrutinizing. ‘I don’t know how you can function without sleep.’
It’s not like I have a choice. ‘It doesn’t bother me much.’
‘How is your headache?’ she asks.
‘It’s been worse.’
‘Your eyes wander when it’s bad,’ she says, ‘and they’re doing it now. You need to go to the doctor again.’
‘There’s no point. The stuff she gave me makes me too dopey. I won’t take it.’
‘Then go see your brother. He’ll help you.’
Jari is a neurologist here in Helsinki. I haven’t seen him since we moved. I guess it’s about time to pay him a visit, and anyway, Kate isn’t going to let me wriggle out of it. I hate doctors. They’ll put me through a series of tests. I don’t want to take them, just to find out they don’t know what’s wrong with me. ‘I’ll call Jari,’ I say. ‘Have you given any more thought to staying home with the baby?’
She snuggles up close, I think trying to soften her answer. ‘I’ve been on maternity leave for two weeks already, and I just don’t think it’s for me. And besides, I don’t think it’s fair to my employer.’
This is a source of contention between us. ‘Kate, I’m sorry to put it this way, but fuck your employer. Nine months of leave after the baby is born is your right as a mother in Finland.’
‘When Hotel Kämp hired me, they entrusted me with a great deal of responsibility. If I stay home for nine months, I’ll feel like I’m betraying a trust.’
It’s true that employers get pissed off when they lose workers to pregnancy, and sometimes don’t want to give young women jobs, because they’re considered investment risks. Pregnant women receive full salaries from employers for the first three months of leave.
‘You should realize,’ I say, ‘that in this country, a lot of people feel that not spending that time at home is betraying a child’s trust.’
I could dig deeper, explain the unwritten societal rules about what good mothers are expected to do. Good mothers breast-feed, or their competency as mothers will be called into question. Good mothers stay at home for two or three years, that time subsidized by the government. If they don’t do these things, whispers and innuendo about whether they deserve the gift of a child will come from other mothers, whose lives revolve around living up to these conventions. It’s ridiculous and unfair.
She’s getting pissed off. ‘You want me to sit at home because of what people might think? Kari, I thought you had more substance than that.’
‘I don’t care what people think, but it pays to be aware of cultural perceptions. They also affect your career. I want you to stay home with our daughter because I believe it’s the best thing for her.’
‘So now I’m a bad mother.’
I came home to spend some time with Kate and I’m wrecking it. Sometimes it’s hard to think, because of the headache, and it causes me to make blunders. I’ve hurt her feelings. It shows on her face. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.’
She goes quiet for a moment. I wonder if she’s thinking about our dead twins right now. ‘Maybe you should take fatherhood leave and stay home with the baby yourself. You have all of the same so-called rights as me. And I don’t think you like your job anyway.’
She’s said this before, and she’s right, I’m less than enamored with my job at the moment. The truth is that I would like to stay home with our child, but my migraines have gotten so bad that I’m afraid I’m not capable of being her full-time caregiver. I don’t want Kate to know this. It would only worry her. I change the subject. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your brother and sister tonight.’
This is a half-truth. I don’t want to be saddled with them for weeks. I’d like to meet them, but under different circumstances. Maybe for dinner and a chat, and then we go our separate ways. But Kate needs this. She and her siblings had it rough growing up. It made them closer than most brothers and sisters, and they’ve been apart for too long.
What began for Kate as a normal middle-class upbringing in Aspen, Colorado, came to a halt in 1993, when she was thirteen, when her mother, Diane, was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, her brother, John, was seven. Her sister, Mary, was eight. Her father, Randy, was unable to cope. Faced with the death of his wife, he went into a depression that left him increasingly incapable of functioning as a husband and father. As Kate’s mother grew sicker from chemo and radiation treatments, Kate was forced to become de facto head of the household and to grow up almost overnight.
Kate cared for her mother while she watched her die slow. She spoon-fed her, changed her sheets, cleaned up her vomit – and at the same time cared for her two younger siblings. When Diane finally died, her death broke Randy and he became an alcoholic. He managed to hold down his job, but was blitzed every minute he wasn’t working. He paid the rent and basic bills, then spent most of the remainder of his paycheck in bars. He gave the pittance left over to Kate, to clothe and feed herself, John and Mary.
Randy was a mechanic, maintained the lifts at a ski resort, and he got Kate free skiing lessons and lift passes. She has never said it, but I think seeing her mother’s helplessness while she battled cancer turned Kate into a control freak. She excelled at everything, got perfect grades at school. She let go of her pent-up anger and frustration on the slopes and became a fantastic downhill skier.
By age fifteen, Kate was winning all of the junior events she entered. She began competing as an adult at age sixteen. She kept winning. She made up her mind that she would compete in the Olympics. When she was seventeen, she was in a race and going nearly a hundred miles an hour. She took a fall, broke her hip, and spent her eighteenth birthday in traction. End of dream. She still walks with a limp because of it.
Kate told me that during her weeks in the hospital, she took stock of her life. She had no close friends – had never had a boyfriend – had devoted her teenage years to raising John and Mary, to her studies and to skiing. It had never entered her mind that she might not become a world-class ski champion. For her, falling had been a mistake, a kind of failure. Kate didn’t allow herself failure. She swore to herself that she would rebuild her life and never fail again.
When Kate completed high school, her perfect grades, high scores on aptitude tests and dismal financial situation guaranteed her college scholarships. She first studied at the Aspen community college extension of Colorado Mountain College, where she earned an associate’s degree in ski-area operations. Then she worked at a ski resort for two years, where she gained lower-level management experience.
By that time, in 2002, Kate was twenty-two, Mary seventeen and John sixteen. Kate wanted to continue her education. Randy was still a useless drunk, but Mary agreed to look after John until he graduated from high school. Kate got a scholarship from Princeton University. Randy died of liver failure about the time she completed her bachelor’s degree in economics. I think his death was a relief to Kate in a way, and that relief brought her guilt.
When Randy died, Kate had been in a steady relationship for two years and engaged for six months. She broke it off. She said something about her father’s death made her unable to commit. Kate graduated from Princeton with her master’s in economics. She returned to Aspen, this time as upper management at a ski resort, and after a year and a half was running the place. Profits doubled.
In spring 2007, Levi Center, Finland’s largest ski resort, located a hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle, asked Kate to interview for the position of general manager. John had moved to New York to attend New York University. Mary had dropped out of college to marry a doctor and settled in Elkins, West Virginia. Kate had no reason to stay in Aspen and decided it was time for a change.
In June of 2007, Kate traveled to Finland. The owners wanted Kate’s help in expanding the resort into a massive operation. The Arctic seemed exotic. They offered her a six-figure income. She took the job. She met me at a midsummer barbecue party. We were married nine months later. She got pregnant a few months after that, discovered she was carrying twins, but miscarried. I believe, for Kate, losing the twins was another kind of failure, something unacceptable to her. She wanted a clean start, to put all the sorrow and misery behind us, so we moved here to Helsinki.
But I had left Helsinki years ago for a reason. I was never happy when I lived here as a younger man. Helsinki reminds me of my failed first marriage and of a man I killed in the line of duty. Helsinki isn’t a clean start for me. Just old bad blood.
I don’t like big-city life. I don’t like the memories. I don’t like the so-called international atmosphere. Kaamos, the dark time, is short-lived. The light coming and going so fast depresses me. I miss the long Arctic darkness. Already now, in January, we have daylight from around nine a.m. until four p.m. This winter is nice, but most years it’s not cold enough in Helsinki, the snow doesn’t stick. Makes it like sloshing around in a bucket of shit all winter. I’m homesick for the North.
Kate’s eyes meet mine for a moment. She understands I’m trying to stop the argument and lets me. ‘I’m a little nervous about seeing them because it’s been so long,’ she says. ‘The last time I saw John was in 2006. The last time I saw Mary was 2005. They’re grown up now, and I wonder how they’ve changed. Still, who would have thought that three poor kids like us would have done so well. I’m running the best hotel in the city and John is becoming a university history teacher. Mary is a doctor’s wife. I more or less raised them. It makes me proud.’
‘You have a right to be proud,’ I say, ‘and I’m proud of you.’ I check the time, it’s a little after three. My therapy session begins at four. I’ve been attending counseling for eight months now, and dread it more and more as time goes by.
I hesitate. Apologies are difficult for me. ‘Kate, I meant what I said. You’re going to be a great mother. I was out of line and didn’t mean to imply otherwise. It just came out wrong.’
She squeezes my hand. ‘I know.’
Chapter 8
I limp through the snow toward my Saab. It’s parked near the taxi stand on Helsinginkatu. The street is nicknamed Raate Road, after the scene of a decisive and bloody battle in the Winter War, for the same reason that Vaasankatu is called Hunting Knife Boulevard. It has a bad reputation from bygone days, but not much real wickedness goes on here anymore. It’s true that Kallio has its fair share of the permanently unemployed that live on welfare and spend their days in räkälät – snot bars, as they’re called – drinking cheap beer, but most towns in Finland have their welfare drunks and dives for them to booze in.
I hear shouting down the street. As I close in, I see a man in front of Ebeneser School, a special-needs place for kids with dysphasia. The students there have speech disorders of one kind or another, difficulties with language comprehension or production, most often the result of varying degrees of brain damage. Some can speak but not write, others write but don’t speak. Very occasionally, a child will be able to sing but not speak.
The school is a beautiful off-peach Art Nouveau building constructed around the turn of the twentieth century, fronted by a chain-link fence interlaced with a growth of decades-old ivy, now wreathed in frost. I get closer and see that the screaming comes from a young man waving a half-empty bottle of Finlandia vodka. His rant is biblical and apocryphal in nature, and he has a bad speech impediment.
‘Thpawns of Thatan, damned at biddth, you have fawen fwom da Towew of Babel. Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!’
I get up close to him and look through the fence. Four little bundled-up children stand on the other side of it, terror-stricken but fascinated. I see no supervising adult. It pisses me off. ‘Listen kids,’ I say to them, ‘I’m a policeman. Would you please go inside.’
The guy bellows an incoherent howl and screams again. ‘Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!’
They don’t move. I make shooing motions with my hands. ‘Run along now,’ I say.
They scramble toward the front door. The guy isn’t making any noise now, but he flails his arms, makes frantic gestures, waves the bottle and claws at his face.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.
‘My name is Weejun. Away fwom me, thpawn of hell.’
‘Well, Mr Legion, why were you scaring those kids?’
He gulps a drink from the bottle, wraps his arms around himself, rolls his head back and forth and shakes. He’s coming apart at the seams. He shrieks like a hurt animal, then manages a shrill, understandable utterance. ‘To save deir souws! Dey awe damned unwess I thave dem!’
I’m tempted to ask him why, if his name is Legion, aka Satan, he wants to save the children rather than see them spend eternity in hell. Then I decide I’m not interested in the logic of the insane. My head throbs – hate boils up in me.
I grab Legion by the neck, smack his face against the snow-covered fence. It gives me a modicum of satisfaction, so I do it again. He’s a skinny little bastard, maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds. I’ve been working out hard for most of the past year, since we moved to Helsinki. It takes my mind off the headaches. I bench-press more than twice his weight. He starts to cry, his knees start to give way. I grab him by the neck with one hand, hold him up by his head so that his feet barely graze the ground and look close at him. He’s in his mid-twenties and has a bad, close-cropped haircut that looks like a home job. His longish beard is unkempt. His coat, pants and shoes are neat and clean though. I’m guessing his parents take care of him.
His left eyebrow is cut, blood runs into his eye. His nose bleeds. My satisfaction from banging his face off the fence dissipates. He’s crazy as a shithouse rat. I ask myself what to do with him. A final lesson and punishment for his treatment of defenseless children seems appropriate. ‘You like vodka,’ I say. ‘Enjoy yourself to the max.’
He doesn’t get it. His eyes radiate alarm and bewilderment.
‘Bottle to lips, drink until empty,’ I say.
He’s done screaming now. Frightening learning-disabled children comes easier to him than dealing with able-bodied adults. He gets the point. ‘I don’t want to. Don’t make me. It’th too much.’
I pull out an old Finnish proverb that teaches the virtue of patience. ‘Kärsi kärsi, kirkkaamman kruunun saat’ – ‘Suffering suffering, makes the crown glow brighter.’
He shakes his head no.
I let go of his neck. ‘Did I offer you a fucking choice?’
He understands now. Drink, or I’ll keep beating him. He’s in a bad situation. The booze is his best chance for escape. He lifts the bottle, sucks it down as fast as he can. I wait thirty seconds. Alcohol poisoning starts to hit. The bottle drops from his hand and shatters on the icy sidewalk. Another ninety seconds pass. He drops to his knees and looks at me with uncertain eyes. Another minute goes by, he falls backward. Head hits frozen pavement. Scalp splits. Blood runs in a thin trickle onto the ice.
I reach under him, into his back pocket, and find his wallet. His ID reads Vesa Korhonen, age twenty-three. I put the ID card back into his wallet and throw it onto his chest, then call for a police van to cart him off to the drunk tank. I leave him there on the sidewalk, don’t wait for them to arrive. Good afternoon and good night, Vesa Korhonen, alias Legion.
Chapter 9
I’m seeing a psychiatrist named Torsten Holmqvist. I didn’t choose him. The police department assigned me to him. His office is in his home, in the fashionable district of Eira, near embassy row. The house, which he told me he inherited, looks out over the sea and must be worth at least a couple million euros. We sit in big leather chairs, on opposite sides of a glass coffee table. I’ve eschewed his couch.
Torsten is a wealthy Swedish-speaking Finn, and certain mannerisms betray his roots. A casual yet confident way of sitting, an affable comportment and easy laugh that I think feigned. A yellow pullover sweater is draped over his shoulders and loosely knotted in front of his pink button-down shirt. He’s in his fifties, his thick hair combed up and back and hair-sprayed, politician-style, a dignified gray at the temples. He smokes a briar pipe. His aromatic tobacco is apple-scented.
His manner and appearance irritate me, or maybe he’s good at his job and knows how to push my buttons, and that’s why he puts me off. Either way, I’ve been in therapy before, and I didn’t like it then either, but it helped me, so I try and work with him. Besides, I promised Kate I would do this. I’m further agitated because I have a murder to investigate, need to speak to a Finnish hero – now an accused war criminal – and I can’t do either of those things while I’m sitting here.
‘So,’ Torsten says, ‘you assaulted a mentally ill person. Do you consider that a reasonable and responsible action?’
‘He terrified defenseless children – disabled children – it seems entirely reasonable and responsible.’
‘You beat him up and poisoned him.’
‘He’ll get over it.’
‘As a police officer, you know that you can’t rationally defend appointing yourself judge and jury, no matter how reprehensible you found his actions.’
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘If it was a situation involving adults, I would agree with you. But no fucking way I’m letting him get away with ranting a frightening, insane tirade at kids. They might be traumatized. Mentally ill or not, he needed to understand that his actions have consequences.’
‘You don’t seem to have considered the possibility that the young man may have screamed at the children in order to seek punishment.’
He’s right. I hadn’t considered it. ‘I did nothing that, under the circumstances, most men wouldn’t have done.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ he says. ‘Do you think that reflects on my manhood?’
I sigh. I have no interest in his holier-than-thou attitude.
Torsten lets the question about his manhood go and offers me coffee, makes himself a cup of herbal mint tea. He lights his pipe. I light a Marlboro Red. ‘Would you consider your protective feelings toward children excessive?’ he asks.
‘Is such a thing possible?’ He hates it when I answer his questions with questions.
‘Your answer is an answer in itself. Could we discuss why that might be?’
I look out his bay window at the sea. The harbor isn’t quite frozen solid yet. Chunks of ice float in it. Beyond them, I watch the whitecaps break for a moment. ‘If you like.’
‘Your sister, Suvi, froze and drowned when you were skating on a lake together and the ice broke under her. Your father had placed her under your protection. Do you still think of it often?’
‘Daily.’
‘Yet, your father was on the scene. He was drunk and failed to come to her aid. He was the adult, the caregiver. The blame resides with him.’
I light another cigarette. ‘I blame him, too.’
‘He let your sister die and he beat you as a child. You’ve never expressed hatred for him. Not even anger.’
‘I used to be angry,’ I say, ‘but at a certain point, I grew up and recognized my parents’ humanity. My father is emotionally damaged. His parents beat him far worse than he ever did me.’
‘How do you know? Has he told you?’
Dad’s parents were the antithesis of Mom’s folks – Ukki and Mummo – whom I loved so much. ‘He didn’t have to, some things you don’t have to be told. When we visited them, which wasn’t often, his father – my grandfather – hurt me, too. The atmosphere in the house was morbid. My father’s parents were Lutheran religious fanatics. Laughter was forbidden, and they kicked – literally – us children out of the house for laughing. I can only imagine what they did to him.’
He makes some notes on a pad. ‘Perhaps you’re making excuses for him.’
I look out at the sea again. It comforts me. I say nothing.
‘How is your wife’s pregnancy going?’ he asks.
I’m glad to change the subject. ‘She has preeclampsia, but she has no headaches, visual disturbances or epigastric pain – symptoms that suggest imminent danger – so given the circumstances, it’s going okay.’
‘Could we discuss her miscarriage? You’ve been reticent to do so in the past.’
No, we can’t. I thought I had made that clear to him. ‘I thought we were here to talk about a duty-related incident.’
‘I’m sorry, Kari, but indirectly, we are.’
‘How so?’
‘You’re here because of severe trauma. You pursued the Sufia Elmi investigation – forgive me for imposing my opinion – and it was beyond your emotional ability. You told me that you believe your errors in judgment led to deaths that could have been prevented.’
He’s right. It was beyond my emotional ability. The case taught me several things about myself and life that I don’t like. I found out I’m obsessive and reckless. I discovered that justice doesn’t exist. I solved the crime, but failed all the people involved, including myself. I thought I had escaped my past, but found out that a part of me remained a beaten child who believed he killed his sister.
I picture my ex-wife’s little scorched body. Hairless. Faceless. ‘Facts are facts,’ I say. ‘I fucked up. We’ve covered this ground before.’
‘Yes, but we haven’t covered other related ground. Your wife begged you to recuse yourself from the investigation, but you refused. I’d like you to consider the possibility that you blame yourself for her miscarriage, and that this, more than what you consider your failures during the investigation, is causing you extreme guilt.’
He makes more notes.
For reasons I don’t understand, he’s pissing me off even more than usual. ‘You think you know something about me,’ I say. ‘You think you can manipulate me into some kind of self-revelation, but you don’t and you can’t.’
He looks at me, appraising, and rubs the top of his pen against the side of his head. Another tiny action that seems feigned. He’s careful not to muss his suave politician hair. ‘Why not?’
‘We’re in the same business,’ I say. ‘We look beneath surfaces for the truth. If you’re going to do that with me, you’re going to have to work just a little bit harder, because I see through you.’
He takes a second and sits back in his glossy leather chair, puffs his pipe, sips his mint tea. ‘Please explain.’
‘People are easy to decipher,’ I say. ‘Listen to what’s said on the surface. Ask yourself why they said it. Ask yourself what they didn’t say, then ask yourself why they didn’t say it. When all those questions are answered, the truth becomes evident.’
‘Simplistic perhaps, but nicely put,’ Torsten says.
I feel like reversing our roles and watching his reaction. ‘Let me give you a little lesson about people,’ I say. ‘Look at them as well as listen to them. Check out their hands and their feet. Hands tell a life story. Muscle and scars speak of hard work and usually outdoor life or the lack thereof. The condition of fingernails, whether they’re clean or dirty or well-kept or maybe bitten goes toward self-esteem. The shoes people wear give away their taste, hence self-perception, and usually reveal their socioeconomic status.’
I got him. He tries not to, but he glances at his Gucci loafers, then his thin, lily-white hands and manicured nails. Then he looks at my boots and stubby hands, almost as thick as they are long, and I’m certain he pictures those hands bouncing Vesa Legion Korhonen’s face off the fence in front of Ebeneser School.
A gift box of Fazer chocolates and a bowl of chestnuts with a nutcracker sitting in it, left over from the holidays, rest on the coffee table. I take a nut from the bowl but leave the nutcracker, give it a one-handed squeeze and break it open. He winces. I’m not sure why I intimidated him. I munch the nut, place the shells in a neat pile on the table.
He’s left speechless for a moment, then says, ‘Well done.’
I made him feel like an effeminate fop and a fraud. I feel awful and find myself apologizing twice in the same day. A rarity for me. ‘Shit,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. You didn’t deserve it.’
He nods acknowledgment of my regret.
‘The truth is you’re right,’ I say. ‘I feel terrible guilt because I’m afraid I traumatized my wife to the point that it caused her miscarriage, and I’m terrified that she’ll lose this child, too. I’m scared that she’ll die.’
‘Kate is medicated for the hypertension associated with preeclampsia, the odds of her losing the child are slim. Your child is safe inside her.’
‘The odds aren’t slim enough. The statistics don’t make me less petrified.’
He leans forward and locks eyes with me. For the first time I view him as someone trying to help me instead of as an adversary. ‘Kari,’ he says, ‘I think we’ve made a breakthrough. Our first one. What do you say we start again, and now really begin your treatment.’
I nod.
‘How are your headaches?’ he asks.
‘Bad. A migraine is killing me right now. It hasn’t stopped for weeks.’
‘Describe the symptoms.’
‘They vary. Sometimes my temples pulse and throb. Sometimes it feels like I’m being stabbed deep in the head with a hot knife and an artery is about to explode. Most often though, I feel like my head is being squeezed, like a weight is on me, pushing me to the ground.’
‘This feeling of being stabbed deep in the head is medically impossible, because there are no nerves in that area. If you were about to have an aneurysm, you would never know it.’
I hadn’t thought of that.
‘It’s possible that your migraines are caused by the gunshot wound to your head or another physical problem, but I would like you to consider the possibility that they’re psychosomatic, and that what you’re really experiencing are sublimated panic attacks generated by guilt over your wife’s miscarriage, and consequently, current fear for your wife and unborn child. That might be why the nearer she comes to term, the worse the headaches get.’
‘My headaches are panic attacks that last for weeks?’
‘Possibly. Still, I think you should have tests run to rule out physical problems.’
‘I already promised Kate I would.’
‘Good. Our time is up, and anyway, I think we should call it a day now.’
‘Me too.’
For the first time since our initial meeting, we shake hands.
Chapter 10
Kate will have picked up her brother and sister from the airport by now. I agreed to meet them at five thirty, at a bar in our neighborhood, for a drink before dinner. I’m running late.
I find a parking space on Vaasankatu and walk into Hilpeä Hauki – The Happy Pike – a little bar Kate and I enjoy and consider our local. Most of its sales are from imported designer beers. Its prices are higher than most of the other bars in the neighborhood, but because of it, Hilpeä Hauki has a better clientele, a low-key and less than roaring drunk atmosphere. Kate also likes it because the bartenders are a well-educated bunch, and she can speak English with them. It’s a nice place for us to get out of the house and chat.
Kate, John and Mary are sitting at a corner table. The family resemblance is apparent. All three are tall, thin and rangy, have pale complexions and cinnamon-red hair – Kate’s in a chignon, Mary’s long and pulled back into a ponytail, John’s shoulder-length and also pulled back. Mary is twenty-four but looks older, except for young, dancing eyes. John is twenty-three, but looks younger, except for old, unwavering eyes.
I lean over, give Kate a peck on the lips and introduce myself to the others. John stands, shakes my hand and grins. He’s got a rebel style with a pricey slant to it. He wears a leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots, but the leather jacket is soft, expensive and Italian, the jeans Diesels, the boots Sedona West full-quill ostrich. Fancy garb for an academic. I take it he pictures himself a ladies’ man. He’s a little unsteady, appears to have had a few drinks on the plane. Mary shoots John a disapproving glance because of his wobbling, but her smile toward me is warm. She stands, too, leans across the table and hugs me.
Mary is more understated than her brother. She has on a long, dark dress and no makeup, but her excited smile says she’s thrilled to be here. Her plain wool coat hangs on a wall hook beside a Ralph Lauren overcoat, which I assume is John’s. ‘So you’re the man who stole my sister’s heart,’ Mary says.
She seems pleasant. Maybe my misgivings about having them here for an extended stay were misplaced. ‘I think it was the other way around,’ I say.
Kate has her hands folded on her pregnant belly. Her chair can’t quite fit at the table because of it. She’s resplendent in a green dinner dress. She worked hard at finding clothes she likes while she’s pregnant. She smiles. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
They must have just arrived, they don’t have drinks in front of them yet. ‘What can I get everyone?’ I ask.
‘A Jaffa for me,’ Kate says.
‘What’s that?’ Mary asks.
‘Orange soda,’ I say. ‘It’s Finland’s most popular soft drink.’
‘I’ll try one,’ she says.
I hang my coat up beside Mary’s. ‘And for you, John?’
‘What are you having?’ he asks me.
‘A lager and a Koskenkorva, Finnish vodka affectionately known to most of us as kossu.’
‘I’ll have the same,’ he says.
Now Mary’s disapproving look is for me. ‘You order two portions of alcohol at the same time?’
‘It’s a Finnish habit, particularly of middle-aged rednecks like me. Why?’
‘I don’t agree with the use of alcohol in general.’
What I drink isn’t her business. I shrug and smile. ‘Mary, you may have come to the wrong country.’
Her half smile at my half joke is only a politeness.
I make two trips to the bar and bring our drinks. I ask how their trip went. We chat about Kate’s pregnancy. We make the small talk of strangers.
Mary sips Jaffa. ‘This is good. And Kate, you look ravishing. Motherhood agrees with you.’
‘The baby is kicking now,’ Kate says.
‘Can I feel it?’
Kate nods. Mary lays a hand on her belly. Mary smiles, and tears come to her eyes. ‘I adore children,’ she says. ‘You and Kari are truly blessed.’
I’m sipping my kossu, but John knocks his back in one gulp. He’s also chugging his beer. ‘This place is a tad on the drab side,’ he says.
It’s not extravagant by any means, but simple and pleasant, furnished with dark wood. The beer taps and bar fixtures are polished brass. ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask.
‘There isn’t even any music.’
‘The customers here prefer it that way,’ I say. ‘We can hold conversations without shouting.’
He knocks off the rest of his pint of beer. ‘Whatever. The vodka is good. Let’s have another round.’
Kate and I exchange a fleeting look. ‘I’ll get it,’ I say.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Kate says. ‘I haven’t said hi to Mike yet.’
I offer Kate my hand to help her up, and we go to the bar together. She’s graceful, having learned to move in a way that makes her limp almost invisible, but pregnancy has changed her balance, and she lurches a bit when she walks.
The bartender, Mike Davis, has a Finnish mother and a British father. He grew up in the U.K., but has lived here since his late teens. He’s a big, outgoing guy in his mid-twenties. He’s heavily tattooed, is taller than me and runs a little better than two hundred pounds. Despite his good nature, he doesn’t look like the kind of guy you want to fuck with. ‘Hi, guys,’ he says. ‘How are things?’
‘Pretty good,’ I say. ‘Long day at the office.’
An older man has had too much to drink. Mike shuts him off. The man yells, ‘Minä olen asiakas, minä olen asiakas’ – ‘I’m a customer, I’m a customer’ – the standard bitch of drunks when refused service. Mike pretends he’s not there, the standard Finnish-bartender method of dealing with such situations.
‘Yeah,’ Mike says, ‘I’m having a long day at the office, too. And you, Kate?’ Mike asks. ‘You feeling well?’
‘Things are great, couldn’t be better,’ she says. ‘My brother and sister just arrived from the States. That’s them sitting at the table with us.’
‘I’ll make sure to take good care of them,’ he says.
Mike gets John’s beer and kossu. The drunk leans on the bar and sulks.
Kate and I sit back down. The bar is about half full, the murmur of conversation low. The drunk screams, ‘Vittu saatana perkele jumalauta!’ The anthem of angry Finns announcing aggressive intentions. Kate’s eyes open wide. She’s been in Finland long enough to understand the gravity of the situation. Conversation ceases. Everyone stares. Mike puts his hands on the bar, raises up to his full height but keeps his face expressionless.
‘What did he yell?’ John asks.
‘It’s untranslatable,’ I say, ‘but something like “Cunt devil devil goddamn.” ’
John laughs. Mary winces.
The drunk yells some more. Mike’s answer is calm. Around the bar, jaws drop. The drunk realizes he’s gone too far, turns and walks out the door without another word.
The exchange was beyond Kate’s Finnish language abilities, even though they’ve improved over time. ‘What was that about?’ she asks.
I explain in such a way that Mary and John can understand as well. ‘Mike’s mother tongue is English, so like yours, his accent is soft when he speaks Finnish. When Russians speak Finnish they also have a soft accent. Most Finns have never heard a person with English as a mother tongue speak Finnish, so the drunk made a natural assumption and called Mike a goddamned fucking Russian. A bad mistake. Mike, not a Russian and displeased to be called one, got pissed off and said, “Yeah, I’m a goddamned fucking Russian, and I hope my grandfather killed your grandfather during the Winter War.” That’s the point when the drunk knew he was in serious trouble and left while he could.’
‘Isn’t Finland somehow related to Russia?’ Mary asks.
Now I wince. ‘No, it’s not.’
John sighs, drinks his second kossu in one go. ‘Mary, Finland is neither part of Russia, nor is it part of Scandinavia proper. It’s classified as a Nordic country and is an entity of its own.’
‘I take it Finns don’t care for Russians,’ Mary says.
‘No,’ I say, ‘in general, we don’t.’
‘Why?’
Kate has told me John is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a graduate teaching assistant. An educated man. He explains. ‘Finland was a long-standing Swedish possession, but twice during the eighteenth century, Russia invaded. Thousands of Finns were killed or forced into slavery. In 1809, Sweden ceded Finland to the Russian Empire. In 1899, the Czar embarked on a policy called the Russification of Finland. Russian was made the official language, Finnish legislative bodies were rendered powerless, its army was incorporated into Russia’s. The Czar tried to destroy their culture and Finland resisted.’
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James Thompson
His previous case left Kari Vaara with a scarred face, chronic insomnia and a full body count's worth of ghosts. A year later, in Helsinki, and Kari is working the graveyard shift in the homicide unit.Kari is drawn into the murder-by-torture case of Isa Filippov, the philandering wife of a Russian businessman. Her lover is clearly being framed and while Ivan Filippov's arrogance is highly suspicious, he's got friends in high places. Kari is sucked ever deeper and soon the past and present collide in ways no one could have anticipated…Discover the hottest new voice in Scandinavian crime-writing – if you love Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson you’ll love James Thompson.
JAMES THOMPSON
Lucifer’s Tears
Dedication
For Nat Sobel and Judith Weber
And, as always, for Annukka
Contents
Cover
Title Page (#u1e396fa3-1bcf-54e0-bd94-a21967136883)
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Acknowledgments
Read on for an exclusive interview with James Thompson.
Also by James Thompson
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1
The baby kicks against my hand and rouses me from my nap. Kate and I sleep spooned up. Her head in the crook of my shoulder, my head buried in her long red hair. Her tall, pale body pressed against mine. My hand draped over her, resting on her pregnant belly. Kate doesn’t stir. As she’s gotten further into her pregnancy, she sleeps deeper, and I sleep lighter. Now that she’s eight and a half months along, I barely sleep at all, just doze under the surface of waking consciousness. The sonogram said we’re having a girl.
I pull on a robe, wool socks and slippers, light a cigarette and go out to the balcony of our Helsinki apartment. Illuminated by streetlights, snow pours through the dark in wet, blinding sheets. Fierce wind buffets me, blows up under my robe, freezes my nuts, takes my breath and makes me laugh. I hang on to the rail to keep from being blown off to the sidewalk below. It’s minus twenty Celsius.
My home, Finland. The ninth and innermost circle of hell. A frozen lake of blood and guilt formed from Lucifer’s tears, turned to ice by the flapping of his leathery wings. I limp back inside. This kind of cold makes my bad knee go so stiff that I drag my left leg more than walk on it.
My head is splitting. I hobble to the bathroom, shake a couple paracetamol out of a bottle, chew them up to make them work faster, stick my mouth under the spigot and chase them with water. I don’t know why I bother. They don’t help anymore. The migraines started not long after Kate miscarried the twins a little over a year ago, and have gotten worse over time. I’ve had the same headache without a break for almost three weeks now. It’s starting to make me crazy.
I sit in a rocking chair by the bed and watch Kate sleep. As Dante’s Beatrice was his object of unconditional love, Kate is mine. Kate: my cinnamon-haired, fair-skinned snow queen. Kate: my beautiful American. Since I met her, Kate has been my beginning and my end. For me, there is only Kate.
Pregnancy has made Kate more radiant than ever. I feel a pang of guilt for our dead twins, and wonder again if I caused her to lose them. I wonder if she thinks about them as often as I do, and if she blames me for their loss. Kate begged me to give up the Sufia Elmi case. She said the stress was too much for both of us. I refused.
I managed to solve the murder, but the attrition rate was high. Five dead bodies piled up before the case was over, including my friend and sergeant Valtteri and my ex-wife. Two women were widowed and seven children left fatherless.
And I was shot in the face. The bullet left an ugly scar, which could have been corrected with minor plastic surgery, but I refused. I wear it as a symbol of my guilt for failing to solve the case sooner. I could have spared all those people so much death and misery. In my mind, I see Valtteri pull the trigger. His blood and brains spray across the ice. The shot echoes around the lake. He looks at me with dead eyes and falls. His blood stains the pearl-gray ice and looks black in the murky light. I still refuse to talk about it. Kate believes I suffer from traumatic shock.
I pursued the Sufia Elmi case to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Even Kate. She miscarried two days later, the day after Christmas, and lost the babies. I blame myself. I believe the stress I caused her sparked the miscarriage. I’ve never told Kate about my guilt, can’t make myself vocalize it.
Kate was unhappy in the Arctic Circle, in my hometown of Kittilä. She wanted to move to Helsinki and start over. As a reward for solving the Sufia Elmi murder, I was decorated for bravery and offered the job of my choice. I lived in Helsinki years ago, but left for a reason. My memories of this place are bad. Still, I owed Kate this, so we moved here and I took a slot in Helsinki homicide.
Kate’s brother and sister, John and Mary, are arriving from the States tomorrow evening. She hasn’t seen them for a few years, and I’m glad she has the opportunity, but they’re going to stay for weeks, to see Kate through the final days of her pregnancy and help out after the baby is born. Who the hell does that? I never heard of a family doing such a thing. I can’t say it to Kate, but I don’t want them here. It will change the dynamic of our household. And besides, I want Kate all to myself during this intimate time. I don’t need any help taking care of my wife and child.
After a while, I go back to bed. I slide my arm under her head and she turns toward me, gives a sleepy little snort, then wakes up enough to look at me and grins. ‘Want to make love to me?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I do.’
Pregnancy and the attendant hormonal changes have lent a sharp edge to her libido, and despite the migraines, I’m happy to accommodate. I suffer an irrational fear that sex will hurt our child, and take her more gently than she might prefer. Afterward, she lays her head on my shoulder, continues her nap.
I wait until I’m sure she’s asleep again, before I move. She likes it if I stay awake in bed until she’s asleep. It makes her feel safe. I have the night shift, check the clock. It’s seven p.m. I have to be at work in an hour. I take a shower and dress. Kate is still asleep. I pull back the blanket, kiss her belly and cover her up again on my way out.
As I drive to Pasila police station, the streets are almost empty. I use my Saab for a winter play toy in the snow, cut the wheel hard to make the car slip sideways, accelerate to straighten it out again. Reckless endangerment.
Chapter 2
It’s Sunday night, ten p.m. I’m working the graveyard shift, usually the province of rookies. I may have only been in homicide for a little while, but counting my time spent as a military policeman while doing my mandatory service in the armed forces at nineteen, I have twenty-two years in law enforcement. The slight of being assigned these bullshit shifts isn’t lost on me. I’m working with Milo Nieminen, the other new guy, recently promoted to detective sergeant. My status in Helsinki homicide is further reinforced.
Rauha Anttila, age seventy-eight. Found dead in her sauna by her son. Said son couldn’t take it and left. A lone uniformed officer watches over the house, waiting for us to arrive. I dismiss him. Milo and I are alone in her apartment. We don latex gloves, walk through the bathroom and open the sauna door. I’m not sure if Milo can take it either. He makes gagging sounds, is on the edge of vomiting.
Milo and I haven’t really gotten to know each other yet. He’s in his mid-twenties, on the short side and thin. His hair is shaved down to stubble. Under piercing dark eyes, he has shadowy circles that look permanent.
‘You could try a face mask,’ I say. ‘Some cops use them in these situations.’
‘Does it help?’
‘No.’
I estimate that Rauha has been dead for about ten days. Her sauna is electric and has a timer on it with a max of four hours, so she didn’t cook too long, but the heat set the process of decomposition into action faster than normal. Her body has passed through the bloating period and is toward the end of the black putrefaction stage. She’s taken on a darkish green hue. Her body cavities have ruptured and gases are escaping. It must have been worse a couple days ago, but the smell of decay is overwhelming.
Milo looks a little better, must be getting used to it. ‘Jesus, why didn’t a neighbor call this in days ago?’ he asks.
‘The sauna door was closed, and so was the bathroom door. Most of the stench passed through the sauna stovepipe and out the roof. They probably smelled something, but just thought it was a dead mouse or something in the ventilation.’
The formation of gases in her abdomen has driven fluid and feces out of her body. The gases moved up into her face and neck and caused swelling of her mouth, lips and tongue. Her face is disfigured, almost unidentifiable. Water blisters have formed on her skin. Milo screws up his courage and moves in for a closer look.
‘Watch out,’ I say.
‘For what?’
‘Vermin. They’ve been laying eggs in her for days.’
Rauha is slumped over, lying on her side. Milo makes an effort to examine her. He moves Rauha, tries to look under her for possible signs of violence. Water blisters burst and run. Rauha’s skin is stuck to the sauna’s wooden seat, slips through his fingers and comes off. Maggots wriggle out of her ass and drop squirming onto the bench.
I watch him try to be tough. He shudders but keeps going. He moves her head. Scalp slides off her skull. He jerks his hands away in disgust. I suppose because he can’t think of anything else to investigate, he uses a tongue depressor to look in her mouth for an obstruction of her airway, a sign of intentional suffocation. When he opens it, little newborn wasps fly out from between her teeth into his face. He loses it, starts to flail and bat at them.
‘Warned you,’ I say.
He glances at me and turns away fast. If we stay here in the sauna with the body, he might break down. I spare him the humiliation. ‘Let’s do the legwork,’ I say.
We search Rauha’s house for medicines, prescriptions, hospital documents, anything that might clue us in as to why she died. Nothing stands out. When we finish, I call Mononen, the company that transports bodies for us. The dispatcher says we have about forty-five minutes to wait.
We sit in the kitchen, at opposite sides of Rauha’s table, bowls of stale cookies and rotten fruit in between us.
‘Want a cigarette?’ I ask.
‘I don’t smoke.’
Milo stares at the bowl full of moldy oranges and black bananas.
‘I take it this is your first bad one,’ I say.
He nods without looking up.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell him. ‘It gets easier.’
He makes eye contact. ‘Does it?’
I lie to make him feel better. It doesn’t get easier, it’s just that people get used to anything over time. ‘Yeah.’
‘We haven’t examined her,’ he says.
‘Sure we have, as best we’re able. They’ll have to shovel her out of there, and if she’s a crime victim, the autopsy will turn it up.’
I take a coffee cup from Rauha’s cupboard and run a little water in it so I can use it for an ashtray, then sit back down and light a cigarette.
‘The other homicide members don’t like me,’ Milo says, ‘and now I investigate a routine death and act like a pussy.’
I dislike the sharing of emotion from strangers. It’s a sign of weakness and makes me uncomfortable. But he needs to talk and I don’t think we’ll be strangers for long, so I give him what he needs and let him open up. ‘You just got your homicide cherry busted,’ I say. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’
He only stares at the rotten fruit again, so I prod him. ‘What makes you think the team dislikes you?’
He sits back in his chair, taps out a cigarette from the pack I set on the table and lights it.
‘I thought you don’t smoke,’ I say.
‘I quit. I guess I just un-quit.’ He takes a couple drags, and I see him hit by the rush of satisfaction that only un-quitting smoking can give.
‘They had a “welcome to the new guy” party for me a couple days ago. Bowling and then drinking. They think I’m an oddball geek brainiac, not a detective.’
I was on duty, couldn’t attend the party. I know a little about Milo from the newspapers. He was promoted over others with long-standing careers marked by accomplishment, so it’s easy to understand resentment toward him. Milo is smart, a member of Mensa. He got his job on the homicide unit because as a patrol officer, he solved one case of serial arson and two cases of serial rape. They weren’t his investigations. He did it for fun, as a hobby, by triangulating the likely areas of residence of the criminals. Once within a third of a mile, once within two hundred yards, once to the exact building.
‘What makes you say that?’ I ask.
The dark circles under his eyes look like charcoal smudges. He smirks. ‘Because I’m a people person, and my extreme powers of empathy allow me to look into the hearts and minds of others.’ This makes me laugh, and he laughs a little, too. ‘Believe me,’ he says, ‘I could tell they don’t like me.’
‘How did you solve those cases that got you promoted?’ I ask.
‘A couple psychologists-slash-criminal-profilers developed a computer triangulation program. Police departments are reticent to use it because it’s expensive, and because a lot of cops are convinced that their brilliant crime-solving techniques, also known as hunches, are superior to scientific method.’
‘If it’s so expensive, how did you get it, and how come I didn’t hear how you did it?’
‘I pirated the software, and since I stole it, I lied about it.’
I laugh again. He’s odd, but I have to admit, he’s an entertaining little fucker. ‘You’re one up on me,’ I say. ‘I didn’t even get a “welcome to the new guy” party.’
‘They don’t like you either,’ he says.
‘Is this more of your people-person intuition?’
‘After they got drunk, they bitched about you. The team doesn’t trust you because you got a job in an elite unit for political reasons. That’s not supposed to happen. You shot one man and have been shot twice yourself. That speaks of carelessness. You got medals for both those fuckups. That pisses them off. As an inspector, your pay grade is higher than the rest of us detective-sergeants. You make more money than we do. That pisses them off even more. They don’t want to work with you. I remember hearing the phrase “dangerous Lapland redneck reindeer-fucker.” ’
I thought they were just standoffish because I’m new and haven’t proven myself yet, that it will pass when I do prove myself. Maybe I was wrong.
‘Actually,’ Milo says, ‘Saska Lindgren said some good things about you. He told the others he thought they should give you a chance.’
Saska is half Gypsy. An outsider by race. It stands to reason he would be more receptive to someone like me. According to many, including my boss, he’s one of Finland’s best homicide cops. He’s served as a UN peacekeeper in Palestine, worked for the ICTY – the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – investigating war crimes, executions and mass graves in Bosnia, and identified bodies in Thailand after the tsunami of 2004 that devastated the region. The numerous certificates of achievement lining the walls of his office attest to the many educational police conferences he’s attended worldwide. He’s also one of Finland’s leading experts in bloodstain-pattern analysis. Additionally, he’s involved in many works that benefit the community. He’s such a do-gooder that, up to now, I found him annoying. Maybe I’ll try to readjust my opinion.
‘Since we’re the black sheep,’ Milo says, ‘by default, we may find ourselves working together a lot.’
The guys from Mononen show up for Rauha Anttila’s body. We watch them scrape up her corpse – then we move on.
Chapter 3
We drive back to the Pasila station through a torrent of snow, get there at eleven thirty p.m.
Milo and I walk down the long corridor. I open the door to my office. The national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, is sitting at my desk, in my chair. Milo gives me a look of quizzical respect and meanders down the hall toward his own office.
Jyri and I have spoken on the phone several times, but I haven’t seen him in person since 1996, when he decorated and promoted me for bravery after I was shot in the line of duty.
I was a beat cop in Helsinki and answered an armed robbery call at Tillander, the most expensive jewelry store in the city, on Aleksanterinkatu, in the heart of the downtown shopping district, in the middle of June. My partner and I arrived as two thieves exited the store carrying backpacks weighted down with jewelry. They pulled guns. One of them fired a shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased the shooter down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists. The thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand, but he surprised me. I was running when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I fell hard to the pavement. The thief decided to kill me, but I got a shot off first and the bullet hit him in the side. He went down, but raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his arm. He didn’t. I blew his head off.
Jyri looks snazzy in a tuxedo, holds an open flask in his hand. He’s mid-fiftyish and handsome, maybe a bit drunk. Judging by the scent, he’s sipping cognac. ‘Inspector Vaara,’ he says. ‘Please come in.’
‘How kind of you,’ I say and enter.
‘How’s your lovely American wife?’ he asks. ‘I understand she’s pregnant.’
I know Jyri well enough to doubt he gives a damn, and I don’t want his false pleasantries. ‘Kate is fine. What brings you here?’
‘We have business.’ He looks around. ‘Your office furnishings are nonstandard. I’m not sure they comply with regulations. What did Arto say about it?’
He means my boss, Arto Tikkanen. The atmosphere of standard-issue office junk suffocates me. I decorated with my own stuff, most of it from my office in Kittilä, up in Lapland, from when I headed the police department there. A polished oak desk. A Persian rug. A reproduction of the painting December Day, by the nineteenth-century Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt. A photo I took myself, of an ahma, an Arctic wolverine facing extinction, on the back of a reindeer, trying to get at its throat.
‘I didn’t ask Arto,’ I say, ‘so he didn’t have a chance to say no.’
Jyri doesn’t give a damn about office furniture. He’s just playing big dog/little dog, establishing his authority. He lets it go. ‘Go easy on Arto,’ he says. ‘You and he share the same rank. Technically, that’s not supposed to happen. He may find it disconcerting.’
‘Arto is a good guy. I don’t think my position here is a problem for him.’ I’m less than certain about that.
He takes a sip from his flask. ‘I promised you this job in homicide. How’s it treating you?’
His tone implies I should thank him. He promised me this job a year ago, so Kate and I moved to Helsinki last March, and I expected to start in homicide right away. He stuck me in personnel and I pushed papers for all that time because, he said, I needed to wait until a position opened up. That was a lie. The Helsinki homicide team – murharyhmä – was undermanned, they could have used me. ‘You fucked me on that deal,’ I say. ‘You made me sit on my ass for eleven months.’
‘I had reasons, some of them for your benefit. That’s an ugly scar on your jaw, by the way. Why didn’t you get it fixed?’
My sergeant in Kittilä accidentally shot me before blowing his own brains out. I was trying to talk him down. When his pistol went off, the bullet passed through my open mouth, took out two back teeth, and went out through my right cheek. Bad luck. The exit wound left a ragged, puckered scar. ‘Like you,’ I say, ‘I had my reasons.’
‘Probably good for business. I bet it intimidates the hell out of bad guys.’
I sit down in the chair for visitors beside my desk and say nothing.
‘What you went through was traumatizing,’ he says. ‘I wanted you to have a chance to decompress, and I thought a healthy dose of therapy would be good for you before beginning a new and stressful position.’
He pulls out a cigarette. I take an ashtray from a desk drawer. We both light up. Smoking is forbidden in the station. Except for the prisoners. They can smoke in their cells.
‘In the future,’ I say, ‘trust me to look after my own emotional well-being.’
‘I had the good of the team to consider, and that’s a little more important to me than hurting your feelings. Helsinki homicide employs some of the most efficient police in the world. Maybe as a group, the world’s best. A murder hasn’t gone unsolved in Helsinki since 1993. A perfect track record for going on two decades. That’s a lot of pressure. Nobody in the unit wants that perfect track record ruined, and I wasn’t about to let you come in here and fuck it up because you’re fucked up. And besides, Helsinki’s murharyhmä is my pride and joy.’
Jyri has a way of getting under my skin. I change the subject. ‘What’s with the tux?’
He leans back in the chair and props patent-leather oxfords up on my desk. He must know it pisses me off. Big dog/little dog again. ‘I attended a black-tie affair,’ he says. ‘The interior minister was there. He asked me to come here this evening and have a chat with you.’
I assume this has something to do with the way the Finnish police marketed me to the public as a hero cop after the Sufia Elmi case. ‘I didn’t know the higher echelons have an interest in me.’
‘They don’t. You came to their attention because of your grandfather.’
Now I’m baffled. ‘Nice intro. Why don’t you tell me about it after you take your feet off my desk.’
He smiles at me and does it. ‘Bear with me. It’s a bit of a long story. You know much about Finnish-German relations in the Second World War?’ Jyri asks.
‘I read history books,’ I say.
‘Until a short time ago, this wasn’t in any history books. In September 2008, a historian named Pasi Tervomaa published his Ph.D. dissertation, “Einsatzkommando Finnland and Stalag 309: Secret Finnish and German Security Police Collusion in the Second World War.”
‘He claims that in 1941, our security police, Valpo, and their Gestapo set up a special unit, Einsatzkommando Finnland, to destroy ideological and racial enemies on the far north of the German Eastern Front.’
‘So what? Finns volunteering to fight for Germany on the Eastern Front is well-documented. The SS Freewill Nordic Battalion. SS Viking. Others. It made sense. For Finland and Germany, Soviet Russia was a common enemy. And it wasn’t just Finland. The SS took in soldiers from all over the Nordic area.’
‘This is different,’ Jyri says. ‘Germany opened a prisoner-of-war camp – Stalag 309 – in Salla. It’s in Russia now, but at the time it was part of northern Finland. Tervomaa claims Valpo and Einsatzkommando Finnland collaborated in the liquidation of Communists and Jews. Lined them up and shot them and buried them in mass graves. If his accusations are true, Finnish actions constitute war crimes.’
‘What does this have to do with my grandfather?’
‘Apparently, your mother’s father worked in Stalag 309.’
‘How would you know if a guy who worked in a stalag was my grandfather?’
Jyri sighs. ‘Me. The interior minister. We’re plugged into the intelligence community. We learn things. We know things.’
‘Even if he was, again, so what? He’s dead.’
‘As are all the other Finns who worked in it, except for one. Arvid Lahtinen, age ninety. Eyewitness testimony states that he, among other Finns, personally took part in executions. The Simon Wiesenthal Center sent a formal request that Finland investigate the matter, which we haven’t done to their satisfaction, and now Germany has requested extradition. They want to charge Lahtinen with accessory to murder.’
‘How the fuck can Germany charge him with anything? The claim is that he worked for them.’
‘Ah. But you see, therein lies the rub. Germany granted general amnesty for war crimes to its own citizens in 1969, so it has to expiate its sins by punishing others. They recently filed similar charges against another old man, accused him of being a guard at Sobibor and involved in the killing of twenty-nine thousand Jews. They extradited him from the U.S.’
‘How can the world not have realized that Finland had a stalag on its soil until sixty-five years after the war ended?’
‘Potential Finnish culpability has been largely ignored because of language lockout. We don’t want to talk about it, and very few people in this world besides us can read our documentation. It seems someone at the Wiesenthal Center learned to read Finnish and noticed Tervomaa’s book.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me.’
‘Finland and Germany have an extradition treaty. The Interior Ministry has to at least investigate the matter. The minister wants you to interview Arvid Lahtinen.’
Now it all becomes clear. ‘Because if I find the old man took part in the Holocaust, it means my grandfather did, too. I’ll give you credit, that’s conniving.’
‘I liked it. Lahtinen is notoriously irascible and has a habit of telling people to fuck off. We need him to cooperate. You charm him, tell him your grandfather served with him, get him to talk to you. Either come back with proof that he’s not guilty, or the two of you concoct a convincing enough lie to get the Germans off Finland’s back.’
‘If he’s guilty, why lie?’
‘Arvid Lahtinen is a Finnish hero. Every December sixth, on Independence Day, he’s invited to the gala at the Presidential Palace. The president shakes his hand and thanks him for his service to his country. Lahtinen was in the Winter War in 1939 and 1940. He took out six Soviet tanks, charged them and destroyed them with Molotov cocktails. He fought in almost minus-fifty-degree weather and personally shot and killed hundreds of Russians. He slaughtered Communists at the Battle of Raate Road and helped save this country. Finland needs its heroes. Pay the man a visit, and keep that in mind while you interview him.’
Jyri sucks down a last sip from his flask, stands up, takes a sheet of notepaper from his pocket and lays it on my desk. ‘Here’s his contact information. I’ll report to the interior minister that you promise full cooperation. Keep me informed. I’m going back to the party. Some grade-A pussy was there, and I’m dying to stick my dick in it. Welcome to murharyhmä.’
He gives me a grin and a wink on his way out the door.
Chapter 4
As if I don’t have enough to think about, Jyri, never the bearer of glad tidings, has forced me to consider the possibility that my ukki – grandpa – was a mass murderer. I loved him dearly. Before he retired, he was a blacksmith. He gave me ice cream when we visited in the summers, and always let me sit on his lap. He used to put salt in his beer. He never mentioned the war. I remember somebody asking him about it once – I guess hoping Ukki would share some heroic tales – but Ukki kept mum.
I don’t give a damn about political agendas, but Jyri did a good job of manipulating me. Desire for the truth about Ukki will force me to talk to Arvid Lahtinen.
No doubt there are corpses to be examined. I turned my phone off while talking to Jyri. I wander down the hall to Milo’s office to see if the dispatcher has called, but can’t stop thinking about Ukki. The throb of the migraine renews itself. I open Milo’s door. He’s got a look on his face like I caught him jerking off.
‘You could knock,’ he says.
I have no idea why I just walked in on him. It’s unlike me. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘My mind was somewhere else.’
His service pistol, a 9mm Glock, is fieldstripped, in pieces on his desk. Beside it are a Dremel tool and a box of ammo. A few loose semi-jacketed soft-point rounds are lined up in a row beside a little jar. A desk drawer is open. I get the impression he left it that way so if someone knocked, he could scoop the stuff into it and hide it quick.
Milo’s scowl is justifiable. ‘Well, get your head out of your fucking ass,’ he says.
Milo’s shirtsleeves are rolled up, and I see that despite his small stature, he’s built out of ropey muscle.
‘What are you working on?’ I ask.
‘None of your business.’
Whatever he’s doing must be at least against police procedure, maybe against the law. His discomfiture amuses me. I suppress a grin and wait for him to tell me. We stare at each other for a while.
‘I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to install a three-round-burst selector switch into a Glock Model 19,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Because, as every soldier knows, three-round 9mm bursts take men down, single shots usually don’t.’
‘Three-round bursts often kill, not part of our mandate.’
He gets a cocky look on his face. ‘Show me where it says that in the police handbook.’
There is no police handbook or detailed set of rules and codes. He’s fucking with me. ‘Don’t be a jackass,’ I say.
He says nothing.
‘Well, can you?’ I ask.
‘Can I what?’
‘Install the selector switch.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you shoot someone, they might examine your weapon. If they see the selector switch, you’ll lose your job, maybe get prosecuted.’
‘The switch can be removed and the drill tap filled with a small screw, which no one will ever notice.’
I can’t hide my amusement any longer. I shake my head and laugh. ‘And what about the bullets?’
He grimaces. This must be even worse than modifying his weapon. ‘I’m drilling cavities in the lead tips and filling them with glycerin. When a bullet collides with flesh, it slows down. The liquid inside retains its inertia and releases excess energy by ripping through the front of the bullet. It leaves a jagged slug, and lead fragments continue to tear up tissue. It creates a larger wound than a normal round and causes severe hydrostatic shock.’
I’ve heard of this somewhere before. It comes to me and I tease him. ‘In a thriller called The Day of the Jackal, an assassin fills his bullets with mercury. Why not do the same? That way, when you shoot crooks, you can poison them, too.’
He doesn’t see the humor. ‘Obviously because when they autopsied the body, I’d get caught.’
This kid has a few screws loose. ‘Why not just shoot hollow-point rounds?’ I ask.
‘They expand on penetration but tend to remain intact. Glycerin is more effective.’
‘I see. Let me show you something. Give me a bullet.’
He tosses one to me and I catch it. I take out a pocket knife, notch a cross in the soft lead tip and show it to him. ‘It’s called cross-hatching,’ I say. ‘Some people call them dum-dum rounds. On impact, the bullet deforms and breaks into chunks along the cut lines. You get your big wound channels, multiple exit points, severe blood loss and trauma, and someone would have to look for it in order to detect it.’
He looks both impressed and disappointed. ‘My way is more fun,’ he says, ‘but I have to admit, yours is more practical. Where did you learn it?’
‘My grandpa showed it to me while he taught me to shoot.’
My own words take me by surprise. My ukki, now an accused mass murderer, taught a child how to dum-dum bullets. I suppose a man from his generation – born just after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, and then later a combat veteran of the Second World War – must have thought the generation to come should be prepared for wars of its own.
‘Your grandpa must have been a cool guy.’
‘Yeah, he was.’
I fold up the knife and put it back in my pocket. I think about where I got it, and whatever amusement I feel at Milo’s expense disappears. Valtteri’s son used it to butcher Sufia Elmi. Valtteri said he hid the murder weapon by keeping it in his pocket, because no one would ever look for it there, and so he would have a constant reminder of his failures. After the inquest, I stole the knife from the evidence locker, and like Valtteri, I keep it in my pocket so I won’t forget my own failures.
‘Are you going to tell anyone about my hobbies?’ Milo asks.
‘You realize that, even if you remain a policeman until retirement age, the odds of you having to fire your pistol in the line of duty are about a thousand to one.’
‘You did,’ he says.
Point taken. ‘Just stop doing it,’ I say.
He nods.
With agile fingers, Milo reassembles the Glock in under a minute. He practises field-stripping it. ‘What did the head honcho want?’ he asks.
‘Too much,’ I say.
The visit from the chief intrigues him. I can see he wants to press the issue, but restrains himself.
‘Any dead bodies to look at?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Some.’
Helsinki homicide is a body factory. I check out three to four corpses during a normal shift. Always understaffed, the three teams in murharyhmä, the homicide division, a total of around twenty-five detectives, look into about thirteen hundred deaths a year. Most of them, as homicide cops call them, are grandmas and grandpas, the natural deaths of the elderly. A fair share of the remaining deaths are accidental. About a dozen of those twelve hundred will be ruled homicides and investigated, down from about three dozen murders only a decade ago, due to improved on-site trauma care and response time. It’s saved a lot of lives. Also, I figure because of the massive volume of death investigations, some of the more subtle premeditated murders go undetected.
We also look into an average of a hundred and twenty-five suicides each year. Helsinki has a higher rate than the rest of Finland, partly because of sexual minorities. They come from all over the country to the nation’s largest city, seeking the acceptance and promise of happiness that they lacked in smaller communities. Since they have higher rates of depression and mental illness than the city’s norm, and hence a greater propensity toward self-destruction, I presume many of them don’t find what they’re looking for. In the couple of weeks that I’ve been working in homicide, I’ve looked at twenty-seven dead bodies, but I’ve yet to investigate one as a possible murder.
Over the next hours, Milo and I examine an overdosed junkie, a middle-aged man who died of a heart attack while watching television, and a teenage girl who got drunk, passed out in the snow and froze to death. It’s eight thirty a.m. We should have gotten off work a half hour ago. My phone rings. It’s Arto, my boss. ‘I know your shifts are over,’ he says, ‘but we’re shorthanded. I’ve got a murder for you if you want to take it.’
This takes me aback. I didn’t think he was prepared to trust either me or Milo with a murder and risk the precious murharyhmä winning streak and reputation, unless we stumbled upon one in a normal death investigation and he couldn’t take it away from us.
‘Do tell,’ I say.
‘A woman was beaten to death in Töölö. The responding officers say it’s bad.’
I ask Milo. He’s about to jump up and down from excitement. If I take it, it means I won’t get a chance to sleep tonight, but solving a murder might go a long way toward quelling the misgivings the other homicide unit members have about me. What the hell. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it.’
Arto gives me the address and says, ‘A forensics team is already on the way. Get over there now.’
Chapter 5
Milo and I take the car we signed out from the police garage earlier. The department is big on economy. We get a Ford Fiesta. Milo wants to drive, and given the icy road conditions, he does so faster than necessary. The murder scene is only a few minutes away. A time and temperature sign on the side of a building reads eight forty-four a.m. and minus twenty-four degrees. Snow cascades through the darkness.
Europe is experiencing its worst winter in thirty years. Even Helsinki, eminently well-prepared for cold-weather conditions, is in chaos. Hoarfrost coats everything. Constant plowing has created mountains of snow and buried cars. The central railway station is out of commission. Trains still running have to be frequently deiced, and it’s wreaking havoc on their timetables. Water mains have burst and flooded the streets. The water has turned into vast sheets of ice and brought the tram lines to a standstill. Traffic accidents abound.
This is the antithesis of the normal Helsinki winters I experienced living here years ago. Usually, in January, the temperature hovers around zero. Helsinki is like that most of the winter, although sometimes the temperature dips down to as much as minus twenty or thirty. We get some snow and it melts. Snow melt snow melt snow melt. Makes it like walking around in icy gray mud for most of the winter. Still, at a certain point some snow piles up. Then the spring thaw exposes a winter’s accumulation of dog shit, and the city is overwhelmed by the stench for a week or two. I missed Arctic winter during my seven years here, the meter or two of snow reflecting moon and starlight. The beauty of snow-laden forests. This year, we get to experience real winter in Helsinki, and it brings joy to my heart.
Töölö is a fashionable district. It’s not tremendously expensive, but has a reputation for a better class of resident. We pull up behind a police van, next to a snowbank in front of a pretty yellow apartment building at the address Arto gave me. My phone rings. The forensics team’s pathologist tells me their vehicle was involved in a minor collision with another car. One of the crime-scene technicians wasn’t wearing a seat belt and his head hit the windshield. He needs stitches. They have to take him to the hospital, and we have to wait until he’s patched up.
‘Fuck that,’ I say.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The investigation starts now, without you.’
‘That’s against procedure.’
‘Time is wasting. We’re setting a new procedural precedent.’
Pause. ‘Do you have the right gear to wear?’
‘Yep.’
‘Okay, we’ll be there as soon as we can.’
Milo and I enter the building and take the elevator to the fourth floor. A uniformed officer stands in the hall. ‘You the detectives?’ he asks.
‘That’s us,’ I say.
‘Where are the crime-scene techs?’
‘Late. They had a car wreck. Fill us in.’
‘This apartment belongs to Rein Saar, an Estonian citizen. He called in the murder himself. He claims an unknown assailant struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. When he woke up, he was in his bed beside his lover, Iisa Filippov. She was beaten to death, and he was covered in her blood.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the back of our van.’
Something is amiss here. ‘Where’s your partner?’ I ask.
‘He went to get us coffee.’
So much for police procedure. ‘You left an injured suspect, alone and unsupervised, in the back of your vehicle?’
He reddens. I let it go.
‘What’s your impression of the situation?’ I ask.
‘Rein Saar has a bad cut on his head from a blunt instrument. It looks to me like a lovers’ quarrel ended badly. She hit him with something, he killed her and hasn’t been able to think of a better lie.
‘Does he need stitches?’
‘At least not immediately. The bleeding stopped. He might be concussed.’
Milo and I don surgical gloves and paper suits, complete with head and foot coverings, to prevent our fingerprints, hair and clothing fibers from contaminating the crime scene, walk into the apartment and take a look around. The home is neat and clean, in large part decorated with inexpensive furniture from Ikea. The kitchen is off the living room.
I go back out into the hall and hand the patrol officer the keys to the Ford Fiesta. ‘There are more gloves and paper suits in the trunk of our car. Get some for yourself and the suspect, put them on and sit in the kitchen. Just don’t touch anything.’
‘That’s not going by the book,’ he says.
I use Milo’s line. ‘Show me where it says that in the police handbook.’
The uniform doesn’t know how to respond.
‘It’s fucking freezing outside,’ I say, ‘our suspect is injured, and I’ll want to talk to him before he’s processed and treated for his injuries. I would prefer he not be angry, miserable and traumatized while I do it.’
The uniform shrugs. ‘It’s your case.’ He goes downstairs to fetch Rein Saar from the van.
Milo and I examine the kitchen, to make sure the victim can sit in it without contaminating evidence when he comes back inside. I see Rein Saar in the hall while he and the uniform put on paper suits. He looks like he took a shower in blood.
Milo and I walk over to him. ‘I’m Inspector Vaara. This is Detective Sergeant Nieminen. Do you feel that you require immediate medical attention, or can you stay here for a while so I can talk to you?’
He nods. He can wait. I instruct him and the uniform to sit at the kitchen table.
I turn to Milo. ‘Let’s go look at Iisa Filippov.’
‘The bedroom is a fucking mess,’ the uniform says. ‘Have fun.’
We go to the bedroom. The uniform wasn’t exaggerating. Blood soaks the bed around the corpse. Fine mists of blood feather the walls and ceiling. Her murder speaks of both method and rage. The smell of fresh blood and scorched flesh, menthol cigarettes, as well as urine and feces, is strong.
We need duplicate documentation so there’s no chance of evidence from our initial investigation being lost. I take a digital audio recorder and notepad out of my coat pocket. ‘Which one do you want?’ I ask Milo.
‘I’ll write,’ he says.
I start recording. ‘The victim, identified as Iisa Filippov, is located in the bedroom of a man identified as Rein Saar. The bedroom itself is about a hundred and thirty square feet and unexceptional. It contains a standard queen-size bed in a corner, headboard and left side of the bed against walls. The victim’s body lies on the right side of the bed. Other furnishings include a dresser, a single wooden chair, and a nightstand with a reading lamp and a woman’s purse on it. There’s one closet, not yet inspected. About halfway up, the closet door has an approx two-inch hole bored through it. The room shows no damage to indicate struggle.’
I open her purse and rifle through it. ‘The purse contains a Finnish passport issued to Iisa Filippov. From the photo, I believe the victim is indeed Filippov. It also contains a wallet, makeup and related cosmetic accessories, a pack of Belmont cigarettes and orange Bic lighter, a cell phone and a compact Samsung camcorder.’ I unfold a sheet of paper. ‘And a copy of Rein Saar’s work schedule.’
I give Milo a moment to write and catch up, then continue.
‘Filippov appears to be a woman approx age thirty, five foot five inches tall, athletic build, about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.’
I’m careful about what I say, because the recording may be entered into evidence, but before being beaten to a pulp, she must have been damned good-looking. Tanned. Long black hair cut in bangs. One eye is burned through, I guess by a cigarette, but the other is open and also nearly black in color. Great figure, something like 36-23-36.
‘She’s nude and lying face-up on the bed. Her feet are bound tight with several wraps of duct tape. Her hands are behind her back, underneath her.’ I kneel down and look. ‘They’re bound in the same manner. The remainder of the roll of tape is on the nightstand. Her mouth is stuffed with women’s socks. Her clothes – jeans, sweater, panties and bra – are wadded up in a pile on the chair, but I don’t see her socks there, so I think the ones in her mouth belong to her.’
‘Care to add anything?’ I ask Milo.
He shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
Although this murder scene is gruesome, Milo doesn’t seem fazed by it, shows no sign of coming unglued, like he did last night when we investigated Rauha Anttila’s death.
‘Filippov has been struck multiple times with a blunt instrument. Her forehead is split open. Her left arm is broken just above the elbow. Bone protrudes through the skin. Her chest, on the right side, is flattened, suggesting that multiple ribs are caved in. Nothing in the room seems heavy or hard enough to have inflicted this kind of damage.’
Milo takes a look around. The place hasn’t been dusted for fingerprints yet, so with one gloved finger, he opens the closet door. We look in. I see only men’s clothing and shoes on the floor. A stool is inside; a closet seems a strange place for it. ‘Nothing here either,’ he says.
Then I notice equestrian clothing on the shelf on top of the clothes rack: shirts, breeches, a jacket and helmet. Interesting.
We go back to Iisa’s body. ‘Filippov has in the neighborhood of fifty burn marks on her body. Most are located on her abdomen, her genital area, her nipples, her face, and one through her left eye. The diameter and circular shape of the burns indicate she was burned with lit cigarettes. The wounds could have been inflicted after death, but I think they were probably used as a method of meting out pain. She voided her bowels either while being murdered, from fear or pain or both, or maybe upon death. Feces and urine are on the sheets between her legs.’
‘It’s enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon,’ Milo says.
I point at the audio recorder, press a warning finger to my lips and continue. ‘The blood pool pattern around the victim indicates that another body lay next to her while she bled. The outline of a head, arm and torso are clear. The resident of the apartment, Rein Saar, claims to have woken up next to the victim and found her dead. This lends some credence to his story. Most unusual is that Iisa Filippov has been struck dozens, perhaps more than a hundred times, with a light instrument at high velocity. It’s notable that her face around the lips was beaten with particular severity.’
The tone of my description is neutral, but the scene reeks of torture, horror and agony. Iisa’s face is nearly destroyed by cigarette burns, whipped to pieces, scored by marks and welts. Deep and wide-open wounds that ooze.
‘She was struck on the same surface areas, mostly on the face and torso, multiple times. It appears that the first lash abraded flesh, and that subsequent strikes deepened the wounds. This resulted in significant blood spatter. The walls and ceiling are misted with patterns of thousands of blood droplets that I estimate are an average of two millimeters in size.’
I hear the front door open, then voices. The forensics team is here.
Milo points. ‘Look at this little spot on the wall,’ Milo says. ‘Whatever the killer used to hit her smacked it and left a small tongue-shaped bloodstain. Given the clothes in his closet, I’d say Rein Saar beat her to death with a riding crop.’
‘A good guess,’ I say.
I go to the closet, get down on my knees and look at the floor. A bloody crop is propped up against the inside wall. I don’t touch it, leave it in place for the forensics team to photograph it. ‘Found it.’
Milo comes over and takes a look.
I speak into the tape recorder. ‘In the bedroom closet, we discovered the probable weapon used in the lashing attack. A riding crop, a little over three feet in length, with a leather tongue on the end. It appears to be made of fiberglass, has a leather-wrapped handle, and a loop on the end to secure grip.’
We return to the bedside. Both of us stare down at her for a moment. Milo asks me, ‘What do you think was the cause of death?’
‘She took a terrible beating, but there’s no arterial spurting. I doubt if it was blood loss. She’s got those socks stuffed in her mouth. I think he beat her with the horse whip until he got bored with it, then maybe just held her nose until she suffocated and died.’
‘I tend to agree,’ Milo says.
‘Maybe we should call Saska Lindgren and have him come take a look,’ I say. ‘He’s the bloodstain-pattern expert.’
Milo shakes his head. ‘No fucking way.’
‘Why not?’
‘This is my first big homicide case and I’m not sharing it with anybody.’
I raise my eyebrows.
He flushes, embarrassed at his gaffe. ‘Except you, of course. Listen, I’m going to tell you something personal.’
Not again. I wish he wouldn’t. I wait.
‘You’ve probably heard that I have a high IQ. People make a big deal about my being in Mensa.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘I have advanced development of spatial relations and mathematics. The forensics guys are going to come in here, make detailed measurements and photographs, then enter it all into a computer program that will more or less re-create the attack. I don’t need the computer program. I can do it in my head.’
I don’t quite believe him. ‘Then do it.’
Somebody knocks on the bedroom door frame. I look. A member of the forensics team says, ‘Sorry we’re late. You guys want to let us in there?’
‘Give us a couple more minutes,’ Milo says. ‘Can you loan me a viewing loupe magnifier and a measuring tape?’
She brings them.
Milo looks close up at blood droplets at various points on the walls, measures distances. He stands on the chair and examines the ceiling. This feels silly, like I’m Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.
My phone rings. It’s Kate. ‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘At a murder scene.’
‘The weather is so bad, I was worried.’
I made a mistake taking this case. I want to be at home with Kate right now and I could be. A fuckup. ‘I’m fine. I should have called, but I got caught up in this.’
‘John and Mary will be here this evening. How are you going to be able to spend time with them if you haven’t slept?’
She sounds peeved, doesn’t realize I seldom sleep. I haven’t told her. While she sleeps, I lie in bed beside her and think. ‘I’ll be fine. We’ll have a nice evening, and I’ll get home as soon as I can.’
‘Please try. I miss you.’
I ring off. Milo is waiting, smiling and expectant. I guess I’m supposed to share his joy.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I got it.’
‘I’m bursting with anticipation.’
‘Trajectories are three-dimensional and so have three angles of impact. I calculated gamma, the easiest angle, which is the angle of the blood path measured from the vertical surface and extended angle. Then I calculated alpha, the angle of blood spatter moving out from the surface. Then finally beta, the angle of blood pivoting around the vertical. The three angles are connected through trigonomic equations that determine the major and minor axes and angle of impact.’
I interrupt. ‘Please get to the point.’
‘The tangential flight path of blood droplets is determined with the angle of impact and the offset angle of the blood spatter. They converge at the intersection of two blood-spatter paths, and the stains come from opposite sides of the impact pattern. The area of convergence is formed by the intersection of stains from opposite sides of the impact pattern.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘I’m trying to. The area of origin is the area in three-dimensional space where the blood source was located at the time of the attack . . .’
The dark circles around his eyes seem to have taken on a dull shine. I’ve noticed this happens when he gets excited. ‘Milo, please. The goddamned fucking point.’
He purses his lips, frustrated. I’ve ruined his fun. ‘The killer didn’t beat her at random. He chose small points on her body, hit the target areas repeatedly to cause maximum pain and damage, resulting in the great number of blood-spatter patterns, then chose a new area of flesh to whip.’
I sigh. ‘Thank you.’
He’s miffed. ‘And in case you didn’t know, most of the blood spatter isn’t the result of the riding crop striking her. When the whip recoils away from the body at the bottom of the striking arc but still at high velocity, that’s when the blood really flies.’
I did know, but I’m still not certain if I believe he can work it all out without a computer. I’ll talk to Saska Lindgren after we get photos and data from forensics, and see if he confirms Milo’s version of events.
‘He hit her with the riding crop a hundred and twenty-six times,’ Milo says.
I’m curious about the extent of his capabilities. ‘What’s your IQ?’ I ask.
He’s embarrassed, flushes again. ‘A hundred seventy-two.’
‘Let’s go talk to Rein Saar,’ I say.
We turn the crime scene over to the forensics team. We didn’t inspect the other side of Iisa Filippov’s body, because the front of it hasn’t been photographed yet. I ask them to let us have a look when they flip her over.
Rein Saar’s elbows rest on the kitchen table, his chin on his hands. I sit across from him, start the audio recorder and lay it between us. Milo remains standing. ‘Mr Saar, how are you holding up?’ I ask.
‘My head hurts,’ he says. ‘You can call me Rein.’
‘All right, Rein. You can call me Inspector Vaara.’ He blinks, nonplussed by my cold manner, which was my intention. ‘Tell me what happened,’ I say.
I see a handsome man beneath his bloody face. Athletic medium build. Swarthy and dark-headed. On the tall side.
‘Iisa agreed to meet me at seven thirty this morning. When I walked in, I was attacked from behind. I blacked out and don’t know anything else. Somebody hit me on the head. When I woke up beside her, she was already dead.’
‘Where were you this morning, prior to coming home?’
‘I spent the weekend in Estonia, in Tallinn, at my sister’s wedding. I came home on a ferry with some friends and family. We partied the whole way, and kept the party going all night in Helsinki.’
‘So you haven’t slept and you came home drunk.’
He nods. ‘I’m still drunk. Thank God.’ He points at a cabinet. ‘There’s a whiskey bottle in there. Can I have it?’
His hangover will kick in soon and it might make it harder to interview him. Besides, some truth serum might not hurt. I nod to Milo. He gives Saar the bottle and a glass. Saar pours a healthy drink and slurps. A pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights is on the table in front of him. He lights one. I note that there’s a carton of them in the cabinet where Saar keeps his whiskey. The killer had to go through at least a few cigarettes to inflict that many burns. I get up and check the kitchen and bathroom trash cans. No cigarette butts. The killer took them with him.
I sit down again. ‘And the purpose of meeting Iisa Filippov was what?’ I ask.
He lifts his face from his hands. He folds them in front of him on the table, looks into my eyes and sighs.
‘You may think it’s a stupid question,’ I say, ‘but all information pertinent to this case must be directly stated.’
‘We were meeting for the purpose of engaging in sex,’ he says.
The Finnish and Estonian languages are closely related. So much so that even if he spoke Estonian, I could understand some of what he said. His Finnish is good, but his Estonian accent makes him sound silly, like a child in the process of learning how to speak.
‘Tell me about your relationship.’
‘I met Iisa about two years ago at the Equestrian Academy. I was her teacher. She is – was – married. We started an affair almost right away. You should be questioning her husband, not me. He’s the only one who would want to do something like this.’
‘Trust me, I’ll speak with him, but that’s not your concern. Right now, I want to give you my undivided attention. You should know that it looks bad. She’s dead, in your bed, and she was beaten with a riding crop I found in your closet.’
According to the nonexistent police handbook, I shouldn’t have related this nugget of information, but I wanted to see the look on his face when I said it.
He’s on the verge of panic, starts to twitch. ‘With my riding crop?’
‘Yep.’
‘Somebody broke in and attacked us both. I can’t help it if the person used something that belonged to me.’
‘Who has keys to your apartment?’ I ask.
‘Just me and Iisa.’
I tell Milo to check the front door for signs of forced entry. He leaves the room. We still haven’t found the blunt instrument used in the murder. I stand up and look around the kitchen. It’s immaculate. Saar is a good housekeeper. An iron skillet is on the stove. It’s weighty, a good weapon of opportunity. I try to pick it up, it’s stuck to the burner it rests on. I tug, it comes free. I feel its heft, then turn it over and look at the bottom. It’s smeared with blood that has hair stuck in it. I show it to Saar. ‘Looks like this is what you and Iisa got whacked with.’
Milo comes back in. ‘No forced entry,’ he says.
I show the pan to Milo and sit down with Saar again. ‘Your story doesn’t hold water. It looks to me like you two fought, she hit you on the head with a frying pan, then you lost it and killed her – with gusto,’ I add.
He shakes his head hard, his eyes turn wild. ‘That’s not what happened. Iisa and I got along great. We never fought. I had no reason to hurt her.’
‘A married woman and her riding instructor. This reads like a romance novel. I can picture about fifty scenarios that would cause you to fight, maybe even get angry enough to murder her. Make me believe you.’
‘We had no differences. Our relationship was open and simple. We met a couple times a week and had sex. And we weren’t in love, we never used the word. It was just sex. We had fun together.’
I admit, as bad as it looks for him, it’s convincing, as explanations go. ‘Who was her husband?’ I ask.
‘Ivan Filippov. He’s originally from Russian Karelia. He owns a construction business that specializes in asbestos removal and industrial waste disposal.’
When the borders were redrawn at the end of the war, Russia annexed a part of Karelia that was previously Finnish territory. Stalag 309, where my grandpa supposedly collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, is also in that region.
‘Was Iisa born Finnish or Russian?’ I ask.
‘She was a Finn, from Helsinki. She took her husband’s name when they got married.’
‘Did Filippov know about you and Iisa?’
‘I didn’t think so, until today. She said he didn’t.’
‘If your version of events is true and Filippov is the killer, why are you alive? Why didn’t he murder you along with Iisa? Killing you as well would have been more expedient.’
He chugs whiskey, frightened. ‘Obviously, he wanted to frame me. If I go to jail for the murder, he gets off scot-free.’
A member of the forensics team comes in. ‘We turned the body over. Want to take a look?’
I thank Saar for his cooperation and tell the uniforms to take him first to the Pasila station for processing, then to the hospital for examination.
Milo and I go back to the bedroom. A digital Nikon D200 and a Sony video camera are on tripods. Fingerprint dust covers surfaces. Scales and tape measures are scattered about. I check Iisa’s phone and find a text message Saar sent her yesterday morning, asking her to meet him here at seven thirty a.m. this morning. Her sent messages confirm the tryst. I’ll reserve judgment about Saar’s guilt or innocence. So far, I’ve found no evidence that he’s been less than forthright.
The victim is on her stomach. Her reverse shows no signs of violence. I ask Milo, ‘See anything noteworthy?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. We’re done here.’
‘Then let’s go talk to Ivan Filippov,’ I say.
Chapter 6
A Lutheran past or, Henri Oksanen, often accompanies police to give the bad news to family members of the departed. I give him a call, he agrees to join us. Milo and I pick him up. We start out at just after noon and drive through heavy snow to Filippov Construction, in an industrial park in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa.
The business is in a large, corrugated-metal building. We walk in. Construction tools and materials line shelves and lie on the floor: everything from jackhammers to face masks and other protective clothing necessary for asbestos removal and industrial waste disposal. A gorgeous secretary greets us from behind a battered metal desk. She’s a dead ringer for the 1950s soft-porn and pinup star Bettie Page. Tanned. Longish black hair cut in bangs. Black eyes. Curvy figure. Girl-next-door smile. A dark angel. She reminds me of someone else, too, but I can’t put my finger on who it is. Sleep deprivation is screwing with my memory.
We ask to speak to Ivan Filippov. She buzzes an intercom and announces our arrival. He tells her to send us in.
The office is nothing fancy. Concrete floors. Basic white walls and filing cabinets. A computer sits on a worktable. Filippov sits behind it. He stands to greet us. He’s maybe six-three, age fifty-something, high-cheekboned and clean-shaven. His suit, shoes and haircut are expensive. His attire doesn’t mesh with the practical atmosphere of his business and speaks of vanity. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks.
We introduce ourselves. Pastor Oksanen takes the lead. He practices this on a regular basis and is better at it than we are. ‘Mr Filippov, perhaps you should sit down. We have sad news.’
Filippov’s expression turns quizzical and concerned. He regains his seat behind the desk, motions for us to sit. There are only two chairs on the other side of his desk. Pastor Oksanen gestures for Milo and me to take them.
‘It’s about Iisa, your wife,’ Oksanen says.
Two detectives and a pastor have come to bring bad news. Filippov must suspect the worst, but his voice is controlled. ‘What about Iisa?’
‘I regret to inform you that she is no longer with us.’
He cocks his head to the side. ‘Then, pray tell, who is she with? I’m not a child, spell it out.’
‘She has passed on. Her body was discovered earlier today.’
Filippov makes eye contact with Oksanen. His face registers nothing. ‘How did she die?’
The pastor goes around the desk and places a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘She was murdered. She’s with God now.’
Filippov ignores the hand. ‘I’m an atheist.’
Odd first words to utter upon being informed that his wife was slain. He looks at Milo and me. ‘Who killed my wife?’
It’s always difficult to inform someone about the murder of a family member, but because she was planning to commit adultery when she died, this is even harder than usual. ‘Brace yourself,’ I say. ‘This is unpleasant.’
‘You come in here and tell me that Iisa was murdered, then warn me about unpleasantness. Quit fucking around and get on with it.’
His abrasiveness takes me aback. I give him his way and tell it straight. ‘She was having a long-standing affair with her riding instructor, a man named Rein Saar. They planned a tryst. She was found dead in his bed, beaten with an iron skillet and a riding crop, and burned with cigarettes.’
‘Did this Rein Saar kill her?’ His accent betrays his youth spent in Russian Karelia. It sounds like Donald Duck speaking Finnish.
‘We don’t know yet. Saar claims she had a key to the apartment and was waiting for him to arrive. He maintains that he came home, was struck from behind and rendered unconscious. When he came to, he was in bed beside her and she was already dead. He says he never saw the assailant.’
Filippov has yet to demonstrate sorrow, only impatience. ‘Do you believe him?’
‘Certain facts contradict his story, others support it.’
Filippov leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘I want Iisa’s killer found and punished.’
‘I realize this is a shock and painful for you. Are you able to answer a few questions?’
‘Of course.’
‘Were you aware of your wife’s affair?’
‘No.’
‘It had been going on for two years. You had no clue?’
He shakes his head. ‘None.’
‘They met a couple times a week. You never inquired about her comings and goings?’
‘Iisa maintained an active schedule. She participated in various organizations and had many hobbies, riding among them. She was – or at least I thought she was – a good and faithful wife. I had no reason to invade her privacy or interrogate her.’
‘Did she work?’
‘She had no need. I earn a comfortable living.’
Filippov is a cold fish, but businesslike and seems candid. ‘Forgive me,’ I say, ‘but I need to ask you about your whereabouts last night and today. Please understand that this is in no way an accusation, but a part of standard procedure.’
He waves his hand, gestures for me to get on with it. I’m senior officer here, but Milo is a new detective and needs experience. I don’t want to disregard him. Also, there’s something to be said for the good cop/bad cop routine. I nod, signal for him to take over.
‘Where were you last night?’ Milo asks.
‘At a party. In fact, the national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, was in attendance. He can serve as my alibi.’
Filippov was drinking with Jyri while he and the interior minister discussed me, and here I sit. Interesting.
‘And you left the party and arrived home when?’ Milo asks.
‘I left at around one and was home in bed asleep by two a.m.’
‘Were you drunk?’
‘No. I’m not given to excess.’
‘Tell me about your morning,’ Milo says.
‘It was like every other workday. I arrived here at nine and haven’t left since.’
‘Not even for lunch?’
He takes a receipt from a file on the tabletop and hands it to Milo. ‘Lunch was delivered pizza.’
Milo pauses, looks thoughtful. ‘What time did your secretary arrive?’
‘Also at nine.’
‘Can you verify your times of arrival?’
Filippov sighs. ‘What sort of verification are you looking for?’
‘Do you have a security camera and video record?’
Filippov offers a wry grin. ‘Detective, you’re playing games. A camera is mounted over the entrance and you saw it when you came in. You doubtless also saw the video recorder in the outer office.’ He pushes a button on his intercom. ‘Linda, would you please eject today’s video surveillance tape and bring it in here.’
We wait. Linda enters. My memory kicks in. She reminds me of Filippov’s dead wife. She looks much as I picture Iisa Filippov did before the cigarette burns and riding crop disfigured her face. Ivan Filippov has precise taste in women. He asks her to give the tape to Milo. She hands it over and departs.
‘Inspector Vaara was being euphemistic when he said your wife was beaten with a riding crop,’ Milo says. ‘It would be more accurate to say that first, the killer used her for a human ashtray, then whipped her, focusing on her face, until she was nearly unrecognizable. She was systematically tortured, and for the coup de grâce, we suspect smothered to death.’
That was way too harsh. I feel an inward cringe, but Filippov doesn’t flinch. ‘I see,’ he says.
The dark circles around Milo’s eyes take on the dull gleam that says he’s enjoying himself. ‘Who might have a reason to do such a thing to her?’ Milo asks.
‘No one,’ Filippov says. ‘Iisa was a gregarious and pleasant person. She enjoyed other people and they enjoyed her. I would say her priority in this world was simple. She liked to have fun.’
Simple and fun. This fits in with Rein Saar’s assessment of their relationship.
‘I would consider a two-year sexual relationship with her riding instructor having fun at your expense,’ Milo says.
We have to ask questions, but we just informed Filippov of his wife’s death. His detached demeanor makes me dislike him more with every passing moment, but still, Milo is pushing too hard. He doesn’t relent.
‘So you have no alibi to account for your whereabouts between the hours of one and nine this morning.’
‘No,’ Filippov says, ‘most people don’t.’
‘When did you last see your wife?’
‘Yesterday morning at about eight thirty, before I came to work.’
Milo smiles and raises his eyebrows. ‘Iisa wasn’t home when you got back from the party?’
‘No.’
‘And you found nothing unusual about that?’
‘I repeat. Iisa liked to have fun. And I might add that, unlike myself, she was somewhat given toward excess. So no, I found nothing unusual about it.’
Milo and Filippov stare at each other, adversaries, for a long moment.
‘I’ve heard about both of you,’ Filippov says, ‘and I’m honored to have two such distinguished detectives investigating my wife’s death. Your reputations precede you.’ He looks at me. ‘You for your tenacity and bravery,’ and then at Milo, ‘and you for your intellectual investigative achievements.’
He looks at me again. ‘In fact, your name was mentioned at the dinner party last night.’
And then Arto hands me the high-profile murder of Filippov’s wife, which I thought he would be reticent to do, only hours later. This strikes me as less than coincidental.
‘No doubt my wife’s murder will be swiftly solved,’ Filippov says. ‘I assume you want me to identify Iisa’s body. Isn’t that the procedure? I can do it this afternoon.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ I say. ‘Your wife’s identity has been established. However, I would like to come to your house and examine her belongings. Something among them might provide evidence of who killed Iisa and why.’
‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘I won’t dishonor her memory by having her intimate possessions pawed at.’
‘I can get a subpoena if necessary.’
‘You can try. I’ll have it quashed. That’s within my power. Let’s compromise. I’ll go through Iisa’s belongings. If I find something I believe helpful to you, I’ll deliver it to you myself.’
What an arrogant prick. ‘You’re not a detective. You might overlook something crucial.’
‘You’ll find that thoroughness is among my better attributes.’
He smiles at me. Given the circumstances, it’s disconcerting. ‘I read in the newspaper,’ he says, ‘that your wife is the general manager of Hotel Kämp. Their restaurant is my favorite.’
This bewilders me. I say too much. ‘We just informed you that your wife was murdered, and you’re thinking about food?’
‘I mourn the loss of my wife, but we must all grieve in our own way. Mine is to carry on with life as usual.’
I stand. Milo and the pastor follow my lead. I find Filippov repulsive, can’t bring myself to offer my hand or parting condolences.
When we get outside, I ask Milo, ‘What do you think?’
‘Motherfucker butchered his wife and framed her lover,’ he says, ‘and he’s so goddamned haughty that he doesn’t even try to hide it.’
Pastor Oksanen pretends he hears nothing.
I’m less certain than Milo – being a bastard doesn’t make him a murderer – but I’m inclined to agree. ‘If he framed Rein Saar,’ I say, ‘he did a good job. It’ll be difficult to prove.’
‘I . . .’ – he realizes his fuckup – ‘we will.’
Likable as he is, in his own way, Milo has a fundamental character flaw that he’ll have to pay for eventually. Arrogance.
On the drive back to Helsinki from Vantaa, Jyri Ivalo calls. ‘I understand you’re investigating the murder of Iisa Filippov,’ he says.
‘That’s right.’
‘I further understand that she was found dead beside her lover, some Estonian fuck.’
I haven’t filed a report yet, so Filippov must have called Jyri as soon as we left and filled him in. ‘Also correct.’
‘Ivan Filippov is a good acquaintance of mine, and he’s well connected in the business world. This sounds open-and-shut, but you’re given to leaps of imagination. Close the case fast. And defer to Filippov whenever possible.’
I say nothing.
‘I’ve got a vicious hangover and I’m not in the mood to be nice. Let me make this clear. You solved the Sufia Elmi case, but it dragged on too long and turned into a fiasco. Not this time.’
Fuck Jyri. ‘Filippov cites you as his alibi. Care to confirm it?’
‘Confirmed. He left the party around one. I see no need to relate his whereabouts of last night to the press. I and some others would prefer to be distanced from the investigation. Somehow, the media would invent a conspiracy theory and create a scandal.’
Yes, they would. ‘I don’t intend to handle the media at all. I’ll leave it to Arto and the police PR folks.’
‘Good thinking. Media relations isn’t your strong suit. And the discussion we had last night about Arvid Lahtinen. You on that yet?’
‘I’ve been working for twenty hours straight. Of course I’m not on it yet.’
‘You can sleep when you’re dead. Get on it.’ He rings off.
I’ve always felt that Jyri is excellent at his job but a real fuckwad as a human being. Every interaction I have with him confirms it. I’ll handle both the investigation and Arvid as I see fit.
We drop Pastor Oksanen off at his house and drive back to the police garage. I tell Milo I want him to get some sleep, ask him to look at the tape Filippov gave him, check out evidence from forensics and write the initial report in the morning.
Chapter 7
It’s two thirty p.m. I don’t have much time, but want to check on Kate. We thought her pregnancy was going well, but found out a couple weeks ago that she’s suffering from hypertension and preeclampsia. Placental abruption is a danger, and with it, a risk of maternal mortality. I could lose not only another child but Kate along with her. It scares the shit out of me.
I find a parking space a couple blocks from our apartment on Vaasankatu and walk the rest of the distance home. The snow has stopped, the wind died down. The street is quiet. A white snow-scape, lovely and hushed.
Vaasankatu, here in the district of Kallio, is nicknamed Puukkobulevardi – Hunting Knife Boulevard. Years ago, this was a dangerous place, and it still has a bad reputation, although largely undeserved these days. The area has its bars and drunks, some Thai massage parlors, but many of them were recently shut down. Prostitution in itself isn’t a crime, but various moralistic lobbies raised a stink, so the police cited illegal residency by workers, pimping – which is a crime – whatever they could come up with, to get rid of the parlors and stop the debate. The street is fairly gentrified now, many residents are upscale professionals.
Kate had misgivings about moving to Kallio, but it’s the only area in Helsinki that, to my mind, has a feeling of genuine community. And besides, even in this modest area, our nine-hundred-and-ninety-square-foot apartment, which I have to admit is gorgeous, cost us a cool three hundred and fifty thousand euros. A similar place in another part of town could run a million and a half. As general manager of Kämp, Helsinki’s only five-star hotel, Kate earns good money, and for a cop, I make a fair wage as an inspector, but not enough for a seven-figure apartment. In the north, a million and a half would buy us a palace. Helsinki is one of the most expensive cities on the planet.
I find Kate lying on the couch, reading a book about child-rearing. I give her a kiss hello. She sits up, rubs her back. At this late stage of her pregnancy, she’s having a hard time staying comfortable. ‘I can’t wait to get this child out of me,’ she says.
I sit beside her, put an arm around her. She looks at me, scrutinizing. ‘I don’t know how you can function without sleep.’
It’s not like I have a choice. ‘It doesn’t bother me much.’
‘How is your headache?’ she asks.
‘It’s been worse.’
‘Your eyes wander when it’s bad,’ she says, ‘and they’re doing it now. You need to go to the doctor again.’
‘There’s no point. The stuff she gave me makes me too dopey. I won’t take it.’
‘Then go see your brother. He’ll help you.’
Jari is a neurologist here in Helsinki. I haven’t seen him since we moved. I guess it’s about time to pay him a visit, and anyway, Kate isn’t going to let me wriggle out of it. I hate doctors. They’ll put me through a series of tests. I don’t want to take them, just to find out they don’t know what’s wrong with me. ‘I’ll call Jari,’ I say. ‘Have you given any more thought to staying home with the baby?’
She snuggles up close, I think trying to soften her answer. ‘I’ve been on maternity leave for two weeks already, and I just don’t think it’s for me. And besides, I don’t think it’s fair to my employer.’
This is a source of contention between us. ‘Kate, I’m sorry to put it this way, but fuck your employer. Nine months of leave after the baby is born is your right as a mother in Finland.’
‘When Hotel Kämp hired me, they entrusted me with a great deal of responsibility. If I stay home for nine months, I’ll feel like I’m betraying a trust.’
It’s true that employers get pissed off when they lose workers to pregnancy, and sometimes don’t want to give young women jobs, because they’re considered investment risks. Pregnant women receive full salaries from employers for the first three months of leave.
‘You should realize,’ I say, ‘that in this country, a lot of people feel that not spending that time at home is betraying a child’s trust.’
I could dig deeper, explain the unwritten societal rules about what good mothers are expected to do. Good mothers breast-feed, or their competency as mothers will be called into question. Good mothers stay at home for two or three years, that time subsidized by the government. If they don’t do these things, whispers and innuendo about whether they deserve the gift of a child will come from other mothers, whose lives revolve around living up to these conventions. It’s ridiculous and unfair.
She’s getting pissed off. ‘You want me to sit at home because of what people might think? Kari, I thought you had more substance than that.’
‘I don’t care what people think, but it pays to be aware of cultural perceptions. They also affect your career. I want you to stay home with our daughter because I believe it’s the best thing for her.’
‘So now I’m a bad mother.’
I came home to spend some time with Kate and I’m wrecking it. Sometimes it’s hard to think, because of the headache, and it causes me to make blunders. I’ve hurt her feelings. It shows on her face. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.’
She goes quiet for a moment. I wonder if she’s thinking about our dead twins right now. ‘Maybe you should take fatherhood leave and stay home with the baby yourself. You have all of the same so-called rights as me. And I don’t think you like your job anyway.’
She’s said this before, and she’s right, I’m less than enamored with my job at the moment. The truth is that I would like to stay home with our child, but my migraines have gotten so bad that I’m afraid I’m not capable of being her full-time caregiver. I don’t want Kate to know this. It would only worry her. I change the subject. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your brother and sister tonight.’
This is a half-truth. I don’t want to be saddled with them for weeks. I’d like to meet them, but under different circumstances. Maybe for dinner and a chat, and then we go our separate ways. But Kate needs this. She and her siblings had it rough growing up. It made them closer than most brothers and sisters, and they’ve been apart for too long.
What began for Kate as a normal middle-class upbringing in Aspen, Colorado, came to a halt in 1993, when she was thirteen, when her mother, Diane, was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, her brother, John, was seven. Her sister, Mary, was eight. Her father, Randy, was unable to cope. Faced with the death of his wife, he went into a depression that left him increasingly incapable of functioning as a husband and father. As Kate’s mother grew sicker from chemo and radiation treatments, Kate was forced to become de facto head of the household and to grow up almost overnight.
Kate cared for her mother while she watched her die slow. She spoon-fed her, changed her sheets, cleaned up her vomit – and at the same time cared for her two younger siblings. When Diane finally died, her death broke Randy and he became an alcoholic. He managed to hold down his job, but was blitzed every minute he wasn’t working. He paid the rent and basic bills, then spent most of the remainder of his paycheck in bars. He gave the pittance left over to Kate, to clothe and feed herself, John and Mary.
Randy was a mechanic, maintained the lifts at a ski resort, and he got Kate free skiing lessons and lift passes. She has never said it, but I think seeing her mother’s helplessness while she battled cancer turned Kate into a control freak. She excelled at everything, got perfect grades at school. She let go of her pent-up anger and frustration on the slopes and became a fantastic downhill skier.
By age fifteen, Kate was winning all of the junior events she entered. She began competing as an adult at age sixteen. She kept winning. She made up her mind that she would compete in the Olympics. When she was seventeen, she was in a race and going nearly a hundred miles an hour. She took a fall, broke her hip, and spent her eighteenth birthday in traction. End of dream. She still walks with a limp because of it.
Kate told me that during her weeks in the hospital, she took stock of her life. She had no close friends – had never had a boyfriend – had devoted her teenage years to raising John and Mary, to her studies and to skiing. It had never entered her mind that she might not become a world-class ski champion. For her, falling had been a mistake, a kind of failure. Kate didn’t allow herself failure. She swore to herself that she would rebuild her life and never fail again.
When Kate completed high school, her perfect grades, high scores on aptitude tests and dismal financial situation guaranteed her college scholarships. She first studied at the Aspen community college extension of Colorado Mountain College, where she earned an associate’s degree in ski-area operations. Then she worked at a ski resort for two years, where she gained lower-level management experience.
By that time, in 2002, Kate was twenty-two, Mary seventeen and John sixteen. Kate wanted to continue her education. Randy was still a useless drunk, but Mary agreed to look after John until he graduated from high school. Kate got a scholarship from Princeton University. Randy died of liver failure about the time she completed her bachelor’s degree in economics. I think his death was a relief to Kate in a way, and that relief brought her guilt.
When Randy died, Kate had been in a steady relationship for two years and engaged for six months. She broke it off. She said something about her father’s death made her unable to commit. Kate graduated from Princeton with her master’s in economics. She returned to Aspen, this time as upper management at a ski resort, and after a year and a half was running the place. Profits doubled.
In spring 2007, Levi Center, Finland’s largest ski resort, located a hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle, asked Kate to interview for the position of general manager. John had moved to New York to attend New York University. Mary had dropped out of college to marry a doctor and settled in Elkins, West Virginia. Kate had no reason to stay in Aspen and decided it was time for a change.
In June of 2007, Kate traveled to Finland. The owners wanted Kate’s help in expanding the resort into a massive operation. The Arctic seemed exotic. They offered her a six-figure income. She took the job. She met me at a midsummer barbecue party. We were married nine months later. She got pregnant a few months after that, discovered she was carrying twins, but miscarried. I believe, for Kate, losing the twins was another kind of failure, something unacceptable to her. She wanted a clean start, to put all the sorrow and misery behind us, so we moved here to Helsinki.
But I had left Helsinki years ago for a reason. I was never happy when I lived here as a younger man. Helsinki reminds me of my failed first marriage and of a man I killed in the line of duty. Helsinki isn’t a clean start for me. Just old bad blood.
I don’t like big-city life. I don’t like the memories. I don’t like the so-called international atmosphere. Kaamos, the dark time, is short-lived. The light coming and going so fast depresses me. I miss the long Arctic darkness. Already now, in January, we have daylight from around nine a.m. until four p.m. This winter is nice, but most years it’s not cold enough in Helsinki, the snow doesn’t stick. Makes it like sloshing around in a bucket of shit all winter. I’m homesick for the North.
Kate’s eyes meet mine for a moment. She understands I’m trying to stop the argument and lets me. ‘I’m a little nervous about seeing them because it’s been so long,’ she says. ‘The last time I saw John was in 2006. The last time I saw Mary was 2005. They’re grown up now, and I wonder how they’ve changed. Still, who would have thought that three poor kids like us would have done so well. I’m running the best hotel in the city and John is becoming a university history teacher. Mary is a doctor’s wife. I more or less raised them. It makes me proud.’
‘You have a right to be proud,’ I say, ‘and I’m proud of you.’ I check the time, it’s a little after three. My therapy session begins at four. I’ve been attending counseling for eight months now, and dread it more and more as time goes by.
I hesitate. Apologies are difficult for me. ‘Kate, I meant what I said. You’re going to be a great mother. I was out of line and didn’t mean to imply otherwise. It just came out wrong.’
She squeezes my hand. ‘I know.’
Chapter 8
I limp through the snow toward my Saab. It’s parked near the taxi stand on Helsinginkatu. The street is nicknamed Raate Road, after the scene of a decisive and bloody battle in the Winter War, for the same reason that Vaasankatu is called Hunting Knife Boulevard. It has a bad reputation from bygone days, but not much real wickedness goes on here anymore. It’s true that Kallio has its fair share of the permanently unemployed that live on welfare and spend their days in räkälät – snot bars, as they’re called – drinking cheap beer, but most towns in Finland have their welfare drunks and dives for them to booze in.
I hear shouting down the street. As I close in, I see a man in front of Ebeneser School, a special-needs place for kids with dysphasia. The students there have speech disorders of one kind or another, difficulties with language comprehension or production, most often the result of varying degrees of brain damage. Some can speak but not write, others write but don’t speak. Very occasionally, a child will be able to sing but not speak.
The school is a beautiful off-peach Art Nouveau building constructed around the turn of the twentieth century, fronted by a chain-link fence interlaced with a growth of decades-old ivy, now wreathed in frost. I get closer and see that the screaming comes from a young man waving a half-empty bottle of Finlandia vodka. His rant is biblical and apocryphal in nature, and he has a bad speech impediment.
‘Thpawns of Thatan, damned at biddth, you have fawen fwom da Towew of Babel. Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!’
I get up close to him and look through the fence. Four little bundled-up children stand on the other side of it, terror-stricken but fascinated. I see no supervising adult. It pisses me off. ‘Listen kids,’ I say to them, ‘I’m a policeman. Would you please go inside.’
The guy bellows an incoherent howl and screams again. ‘Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!’
They don’t move. I make shooing motions with my hands. ‘Run along now,’ I say.
They scramble toward the front door. The guy isn’t making any noise now, but he flails his arms, makes frantic gestures, waves the bottle and claws at his face.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.
‘My name is Weejun. Away fwom me, thpawn of hell.’
‘Well, Mr Legion, why were you scaring those kids?’
He gulps a drink from the bottle, wraps his arms around himself, rolls his head back and forth and shakes. He’s coming apart at the seams. He shrieks like a hurt animal, then manages a shrill, understandable utterance. ‘To save deir souws! Dey awe damned unwess I thave dem!’
I’m tempted to ask him why, if his name is Legion, aka Satan, he wants to save the children rather than see them spend eternity in hell. Then I decide I’m not interested in the logic of the insane. My head throbs – hate boils up in me.
I grab Legion by the neck, smack his face against the snow-covered fence. It gives me a modicum of satisfaction, so I do it again. He’s a skinny little bastard, maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds. I’ve been working out hard for most of the past year, since we moved to Helsinki. It takes my mind off the headaches. I bench-press more than twice his weight. He starts to cry, his knees start to give way. I grab him by the neck with one hand, hold him up by his head so that his feet barely graze the ground and look close at him. He’s in his mid-twenties and has a bad, close-cropped haircut that looks like a home job. His longish beard is unkempt. His coat, pants and shoes are neat and clean though. I’m guessing his parents take care of him.
His left eyebrow is cut, blood runs into his eye. His nose bleeds. My satisfaction from banging his face off the fence dissipates. He’s crazy as a shithouse rat. I ask myself what to do with him. A final lesson and punishment for his treatment of defenseless children seems appropriate. ‘You like vodka,’ I say. ‘Enjoy yourself to the max.’
He doesn’t get it. His eyes radiate alarm and bewilderment.
‘Bottle to lips, drink until empty,’ I say.
He’s done screaming now. Frightening learning-disabled children comes easier to him than dealing with able-bodied adults. He gets the point. ‘I don’t want to. Don’t make me. It’th too much.’
I pull out an old Finnish proverb that teaches the virtue of patience. ‘Kärsi kärsi, kirkkaamman kruunun saat’ – ‘Suffering suffering, makes the crown glow brighter.’
He shakes his head no.
I let go of his neck. ‘Did I offer you a fucking choice?’
He understands now. Drink, or I’ll keep beating him. He’s in a bad situation. The booze is his best chance for escape. He lifts the bottle, sucks it down as fast as he can. I wait thirty seconds. Alcohol poisoning starts to hit. The bottle drops from his hand and shatters on the icy sidewalk. Another ninety seconds pass. He drops to his knees and looks at me with uncertain eyes. Another minute goes by, he falls backward. Head hits frozen pavement. Scalp splits. Blood runs in a thin trickle onto the ice.
I reach under him, into his back pocket, and find his wallet. His ID reads Vesa Korhonen, age twenty-three. I put the ID card back into his wallet and throw it onto his chest, then call for a police van to cart him off to the drunk tank. I leave him there on the sidewalk, don’t wait for them to arrive. Good afternoon and good night, Vesa Korhonen, alias Legion.
Chapter 9
I’m seeing a psychiatrist named Torsten Holmqvist. I didn’t choose him. The police department assigned me to him. His office is in his home, in the fashionable district of Eira, near embassy row. The house, which he told me he inherited, looks out over the sea and must be worth at least a couple million euros. We sit in big leather chairs, on opposite sides of a glass coffee table. I’ve eschewed his couch.
Torsten is a wealthy Swedish-speaking Finn, and certain mannerisms betray his roots. A casual yet confident way of sitting, an affable comportment and easy laugh that I think feigned. A yellow pullover sweater is draped over his shoulders and loosely knotted in front of his pink button-down shirt. He’s in his fifties, his thick hair combed up and back and hair-sprayed, politician-style, a dignified gray at the temples. He smokes a briar pipe. His aromatic tobacco is apple-scented.
His manner and appearance irritate me, or maybe he’s good at his job and knows how to push my buttons, and that’s why he puts me off. Either way, I’ve been in therapy before, and I didn’t like it then either, but it helped me, so I try and work with him. Besides, I promised Kate I would do this. I’m further agitated because I have a murder to investigate, need to speak to a Finnish hero – now an accused war criminal – and I can’t do either of those things while I’m sitting here.
‘So,’ Torsten says, ‘you assaulted a mentally ill person. Do you consider that a reasonable and responsible action?’
‘He terrified defenseless children – disabled children – it seems entirely reasonable and responsible.’
‘You beat him up and poisoned him.’
‘He’ll get over it.’
‘As a police officer, you know that you can’t rationally defend appointing yourself judge and jury, no matter how reprehensible you found his actions.’
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘If it was a situation involving adults, I would agree with you. But no fucking way I’m letting him get away with ranting a frightening, insane tirade at kids. They might be traumatized. Mentally ill or not, he needed to understand that his actions have consequences.’
‘You don’t seem to have considered the possibility that the young man may have screamed at the children in order to seek punishment.’
He’s right. I hadn’t considered it. ‘I did nothing that, under the circumstances, most men wouldn’t have done.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ he says. ‘Do you think that reflects on my manhood?’
I sigh. I have no interest in his holier-than-thou attitude.
Torsten lets the question about his manhood go and offers me coffee, makes himself a cup of herbal mint tea. He lights his pipe. I light a Marlboro Red. ‘Would you consider your protective feelings toward children excessive?’ he asks.
‘Is such a thing possible?’ He hates it when I answer his questions with questions.
‘Your answer is an answer in itself. Could we discuss why that might be?’
I look out his bay window at the sea. The harbor isn’t quite frozen solid yet. Chunks of ice float in it. Beyond them, I watch the whitecaps break for a moment. ‘If you like.’
‘Your sister, Suvi, froze and drowned when you were skating on a lake together and the ice broke under her. Your father had placed her under your protection. Do you still think of it often?’
‘Daily.’
‘Yet, your father was on the scene. He was drunk and failed to come to her aid. He was the adult, the caregiver. The blame resides with him.’
I light another cigarette. ‘I blame him, too.’
‘He let your sister die and he beat you as a child. You’ve never expressed hatred for him. Not even anger.’
‘I used to be angry,’ I say, ‘but at a certain point, I grew up and recognized my parents’ humanity. My father is emotionally damaged. His parents beat him far worse than he ever did me.’
‘How do you know? Has he told you?’
Dad’s parents were the antithesis of Mom’s folks – Ukki and Mummo – whom I loved so much. ‘He didn’t have to, some things you don’t have to be told. When we visited them, which wasn’t often, his father – my grandfather – hurt me, too. The atmosphere in the house was morbid. My father’s parents were Lutheran religious fanatics. Laughter was forbidden, and they kicked – literally – us children out of the house for laughing. I can only imagine what they did to him.’
He makes some notes on a pad. ‘Perhaps you’re making excuses for him.’
I look out at the sea again. It comforts me. I say nothing.
‘How is your wife’s pregnancy going?’ he asks.
I’m glad to change the subject. ‘She has preeclampsia, but she has no headaches, visual disturbances or epigastric pain – symptoms that suggest imminent danger – so given the circumstances, it’s going okay.’
‘Could we discuss her miscarriage? You’ve been reticent to do so in the past.’
No, we can’t. I thought I had made that clear to him. ‘I thought we were here to talk about a duty-related incident.’
‘I’m sorry, Kari, but indirectly, we are.’
‘How so?’
‘You’re here because of severe trauma. You pursued the Sufia Elmi investigation – forgive me for imposing my opinion – and it was beyond your emotional ability. You told me that you believe your errors in judgment led to deaths that could have been prevented.’
He’s right. It was beyond my emotional ability. The case taught me several things about myself and life that I don’t like. I found out I’m obsessive and reckless. I discovered that justice doesn’t exist. I solved the crime, but failed all the people involved, including myself. I thought I had escaped my past, but found out that a part of me remained a beaten child who believed he killed his sister.
I picture my ex-wife’s little scorched body. Hairless. Faceless. ‘Facts are facts,’ I say. ‘I fucked up. We’ve covered this ground before.’
‘Yes, but we haven’t covered other related ground. Your wife begged you to recuse yourself from the investigation, but you refused. I’d like you to consider the possibility that you blame yourself for her miscarriage, and that this, more than what you consider your failures during the investigation, is causing you extreme guilt.’
He makes more notes.
For reasons I don’t understand, he’s pissing me off even more than usual. ‘You think you know something about me,’ I say. ‘You think you can manipulate me into some kind of self-revelation, but you don’t and you can’t.’
He looks at me, appraising, and rubs the top of his pen against the side of his head. Another tiny action that seems feigned. He’s careful not to muss his suave politician hair. ‘Why not?’
‘We’re in the same business,’ I say. ‘We look beneath surfaces for the truth. If you’re going to do that with me, you’re going to have to work just a little bit harder, because I see through you.’
He takes a second and sits back in his glossy leather chair, puffs his pipe, sips his mint tea. ‘Please explain.’
‘People are easy to decipher,’ I say. ‘Listen to what’s said on the surface. Ask yourself why they said it. Ask yourself what they didn’t say, then ask yourself why they didn’t say it. When all those questions are answered, the truth becomes evident.’
‘Simplistic perhaps, but nicely put,’ Torsten says.
I feel like reversing our roles and watching his reaction. ‘Let me give you a little lesson about people,’ I say. ‘Look at them as well as listen to them. Check out their hands and their feet. Hands tell a life story. Muscle and scars speak of hard work and usually outdoor life or the lack thereof. The condition of fingernails, whether they’re clean or dirty or well-kept or maybe bitten goes toward self-esteem. The shoes people wear give away their taste, hence self-perception, and usually reveal their socioeconomic status.’
I got him. He tries not to, but he glances at his Gucci loafers, then his thin, lily-white hands and manicured nails. Then he looks at my boots and stubby hands, almost as thick as they are long, and I’m certain he pictures those hands bouncing Vesa Legion Korhonen’s face off the fence in front of Ebeneser School.
A gift box of Fazer chocolates and a bowl of chestnuts with a nutcracker sitting in it, left over from the holidays, rest on the coffee table. I take a nut from the bowl but leave the nutcracker, give it a one-handed squeeze and break it open. He winces. I’m not sure why I intimidated him. I munch the nut, place the shells in a neat pile on the table.
He’s left speechless for a moment, then says, ‘Well done.’
I made him feel like an effeminate fop and a fraud. I feel awful and find myself apologizing twice in the same day. A rarity for me. ‘Shit,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. You didn’t deserve it.’
He nods acknowledgment of my regret.
‘The truth is you’re right,’ I say. ‘I feel terrible guilt because I’m afraid I traumatized my wife to the point that it caused her miscarriage, and I’m terrified that she’ll lose this child, too. I’m scared that she’ll die.’
‘Kate is medicated for the hypertension associated with preeclampsia, the odds of her losing the child are slim. Your child is safe inside her.’
‘The odds aren’t slim enough. The statistics don’t make me less petrified.’
He leans forward and locks eyes with me. For the first time I view him as someone trying to help me instead of as an adversary. ‘Kari,’ he says, ‘I think we’ve made a breakthrough. Our first one. What do you say we start again, and now really begin your treatment.’
I nod.
‘How are your headaches?’ he asks.
‘Bad. A migraine is killing me right now. It hasn’t stopped for weeks.’
‘Describe the symptoms.’
‘They vary. Sometimes my temples pulse and throb. Sometimes it feels like I’m being stabbed deep in the head with a hot knife and an artery is about to explode. Most often though, I feel like my head is being squeezed, like a weight is on me, pushing me to the ground.’
‘This feeling of being stabbed deep in the head is medically impossible, because there are no nerves in that area. If you were about to have an aneurysm, you would never know it.’
I hadn’t thought of that.
‘It’s possible that your migraines are caused by the gunshot wound to your head or another physical problem, but I would like you to consider the possibility that they’re psychosomatic, and that what you’re really experiencing are sublimated panic attacks generated by guilt over your wife’s miscarriage, and consequently, current fear for your wife and unborn child. That might be why the nearer she comes to term, the worse the headaches get.’
‘My headaches are panic attacks that last for weeks?’
‘Possibly. Still, I think you should have tests run to rule out physical problems.’
‘I already promised Kate I would.’
‘Good. Our time is up, and anyway, I think we should call it a day now.’
‘Me too.’
For the first time since our initial meeting, we shake hands.
Chapter 10
Kate will have picked up her brother and sister from the airport by now. I agreed to meet them at five thirty, at a bar in our neighborhood, for a drink before dinner. I’m running late.
I find a parking space on Vaasankatu and walk into Hilpeä Hauki – The Happy Pike – a little bar Kate and I enjoy and consider our local. Most of its sales are from imported designer beers. Its prices are higher than most of the other bars in the neighborhood, but because of it, Hilpeä Hauki has a better clientele, a low-key and less than roaring drunk atmosphere. Kate also likes it because the bartenders are a well-educated bunch, and she can speak English with them. It’s a nice place for us to get out of the house and chat.
Kate, John and Mary are sitting at a corner table. The family resemblance is apparent. All three are tall, thin and rangy, have pale complexions and cinnamon-red hair – Kate’s in a chignon, Mary’s long and pulled back into a ponytail, John’s shoulder-length and also pulled back. Mary is twenty-four but looks older, except for young, dancing eyes. John is twenty-three, but looks younger, except for old, unwavering eyes.
I lean over, give Kate a peck on the lips and introduce myself to the others. John stands, shakes my hand and grins. He’s got a rebel style with a pricey slant to it. He wears a leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots, but the leather jacket is soft, expensive and Italian, the jeans Diesels, the boots Sedona West full-quill ostrich. Fancy garb for an academic. I take it he pictures himself a ladies’ man. He’s a little unsteady, appears to have had a few drinks on the plane. Mary shoots John a disapproving glance because of his wobbling, but her smile toward me is warm. She stands, too, leans across the table and hugs me.
Mary is more understated than her brother. She has on a long, dark dress and no makeup, but her excited smile says she’s thrilled to be here. Her plain wool coat hangs on a wall hook beside a Ralph Lauren overcoat, which I assume is John’s. ‘So you’re the man who stole my sister’s heart,’ Mary says.
She seems pleasant. Maybe my misgivings about having them here for an extended stay were misplaced. ‘I think it was the other way around,’ I say.
Kate has her hands folded on her pregnant belly. Her chair can’t quite fit at the table because of it. She’s resplendent in a green dinner dress. She worked hard at finding clothes she likes while she’s pregnant. She smiles. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
They must have just arrived, they don’t have drinks in front of them yet. ‘What can I get everyone?’ I ask.
‘A Jaffa for me,’ Kate says.
‘What’s that?’ Mary asks.
‘Orange soda,’ I say. ‘It’s Finland’s most popular soft drink.’
‘I’ll try one,’ she says.
I hang my coat up beside Mary’s. ‘And for you, John?’
‘What are you having?’ he asks me.
‘A lager and a Koskenkorva, Finnish vodka affectionately known to most of us as kossu.’
‘I’ll have the same,’ he says.
Now Mary’s disapproving look is for me. ‘You order two portions of alcohol at the same time?’
‘It’s a Finnish habit, particularly of middle-aged rednecks like me. Why?’
‘I don’t agree with the use of alcohol in general.’
What I drink isn’t her business. I shrug and smile. ‘Mary, you may have come to the wrong country.’
Her half smile at my half joke is only a politeness.
I make two trips to the bar and bring our drinks. I ask how their trip went. We chat about Kate’s pregnancy. We make the small talk of strangers.
Mary sips Jaffa. ‘This is good. And Kate, you look ravishing. Motherhood agrees with you.’
‘The baby is kicking now,’ Kate says.
‘Can I feel it?’
Kate nods. Mary lays a hand on her belly. Mary smiles, and tears come to her eyes. ‘I adore children,’ she says. ‘You and Kari are truly blessed.’
I’m sipping my kossu, but John knocks his back in one gulp. He’s also chugging his beer. ‘This place is a tad on the drab side,’ he says.
It’s not extravagant by any means, but simple and pleasant, furnished with dark wood. The beer taps and bar fixtures are polished brass. ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask.
‘There isn’t even any music.’
‘The customers here prefer it that way,’ I say. ‘We can hold conversations without shouting.’
He knocks off the rest of his pint of beer. ‘Whatever. The vodka is good. Let’s have another round.’
Kate and I exchange a fleeting look. ‘I’ll get it,’ I say.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Kate says. ‘I haven’t said hi to Mike yet.’
I offer Kate my hand to help her up, and we go to the bar together. She’s graceful, having learned to move in a way that makes her limp almost invisible, but pregnancy has changed her balance, and she lurches a bit when she walks.
The bartender, Mike Davis, has a Finnish mother and a British father. He grew up in the U.K., but has lived here since his late teens. He’s a big, outgoing guy in his mid-twenties. He’s heavily tattooed, is taller than me and runs a little better than two hundred pounds. Despite his good nature, he doesn’t look like the kind of guy you want to fuck with. ‘Hi, guys,’ he says. ‘How are things?’
‘Pretty good,’ I say. ‘Long day at the office.’
An older man has had too much to drink. Mike shuts him off. The man yells, ‘Minä olen asiakas, minä olen asiakas’ – ‘I’m a customer, I’m a customer’ – the standard bitch of drunks when refused service. Mike pretends he’s not there, the standard Finnish-bartender method of dealing with such situations.
‘Yeah,’ Mike says, ‘I’m having a long day at the office, too. And you, Kate?’ Mike asks. ‘You feeling well?’
‘Things are great, couldn’t be better,’ she says. ‘My brother and sister just arrived from the States. That’s them sitting at the table with us.’
‘I’ll make sure to take good care of them,’ he says.
Mike gets John’s beer and kossu. The drunk leans on the bar and sulks.
Kate and I sit back down. The bar is about half full, the murmur of conversation low. The drunk screams, ‘Vittu saatana perkele jumalauta!’ The anthem of angry Finns announcing aggressive intentions. Kate’s eyes open wide. She’s been in Finland long enough to understand the gravity of the situation. Conversation ceases. Everyone stares. Mike puts his hands on the bar, raises up to his full height but keeps his face expressionless.
‘What did he yell?’ John asks.
‘It’s untranslatable,’ I say, ‘but something like “Cunt devil devil goddamn.” ’
John laughs. Mary winces.
The drunk yells some more. Mike’s answer is calm. Around the bar, jaws drop. The drunk realizes he’s gone too far, turns and walks out the door without another word.
The exchange was beyond Kate’s Finnish language abilities, even though they’ve improved over time. ‘What was that about?’ she asks.
I explain in such a way that Mary and John can understand as well. ‘Mike’s mother tongue is English, so like yours, his accent is soft when he speaks Finnish. When Russians speak Finnish they also have a soft accent. Most Finns have never heard a person with English as a mother tongue speak Finnish, so the drunk made a natural assumption and called Mike a goddamned fucking Russian. A bad mistake. Mike, not a Russian and displeased to be called one, got pissed off and said, “Yeah, I’m a goddamned fucking Russian, and I hope my grandfather killed your grandfather during the Winter War.” That’s the point when the drunk knew he was in serious trouble and left while he could.’
‘Isn’t Finland somehow related to Russia?’ Mary asks.
Now I wince. ‘No, it’s not.’
John sighs, drinks his second kossu in one go. ‘Mary, Finland is neither part of Russia, nor is it part of Scandinavia proper. It’s classified as a Nordic country and is an entity of its own.’
‘I take it Finns don’t care for Russians,’ Mary says.
‘No,’ I say, ‘in general, we don’t.’
‘Why?’
Kate has told me John is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a graduate teaching assistant. An educated man. He explains. ‘Finland was a long-standing Swedish possession, but twice during the eighteenth century, Russia invaded. Thousands of Finns were killed or forced into slavery. In 1809, Sweden ceded Finland to the Russian Empire. In 1899, the Czar embarked on a policy called the Russification of Finland. Russian was made the official language, Finnish legislative bodies were rendered powerless, its army was incorporated into Russia’s. The Czar tried to destroy their culture and Finland resisted.’
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James Thompson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: His previous case left Kari Vaara with a scarred face, chronic insomnia and a full body count′s worth of ghosts. A year later, in Helsinki, and Kari is working the graveyard shift in the homicide unit.Kari is drawn into the murder-by-torture case of Isa Filippov, the philandering wife of a Russian businessman. Her lover is clearly being framed and while Ivan Filippov′s arrogance is highly suspicious, he′s got friends in high places. Kari is sucked ever deeper and soon the past and present collide in ways no one could have anticipated…Discover the hottest new voice in Scandinavian crime-writing – if you love Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson you’ll love James Thompson.