Darling (24 page)

“No, he was here the whole time.”

Lind kept her eyes on the girl, who stared back at her.

“Jorma
’s fingerprints were found on the power button of Laura Vatanen’s coffeemaker, which was left on. Laura’s mother had been there to clean the apartment before Laura was killed. How is that possible if Jorma was here the whole time?”

“On Laura’s coffeemaker? Ha, that’s simple.”

“What do you mean? Lind asked.

“Laura had CP or something, right?”

“Yeah,” Lind said.

“I’d go there sometimes for some wine, and she always wanted to make sure nobody turned the coffeemaker on or off by the switch. It had to be plugged in and then unplugged, for fire safety. Same thing with the
dishwasher. She was so scared she might burn to death in her own apartment.”

“So nobody used the switch on the coffeemaker?”

“Right,” Sini said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “Everyone who went there knew they had to use the plug.”

“Jorma
knew it, too?”

“Well, he’d go there to have sex with her, so he
absolutely knew,” Sini said in a huff.

It crossed the attorney’s mind that the girl might be the killer. She had an obvious motive.

“How did you take it?”

“I didn’t plan my life around
Jorma. He brought me gifts and that extra stuff. I didn’t care about him.”

“One more th
ing,” Lind added. “You said Jorma was here. Is there anything here that would prove it?”

“You mean like a camera?”

“Yeah, or something.”

“I dunno. Guess his fingerprints would be here. And he made himself a sandwich and cut his finger. I cleaned up the blood, but I’ve seen on CSI how they can find prints even if the place has been cleaned spotless. I gave him a towel that I borrowed from Laura one time.”

CHAPTER 23

SATURDAY
, 8:15 P.M.

KANNELM
ÄKI, HELSINKI

A dark-haired guitarist in a hoodie with eagles on it played a three-chord blues piece in the corner of the bar. From the skinny-faced singer’s raspy voice, Suhonen could make out the words “full moon…déjà vu…what would it be.”

The acoustic guitar resonated through the loudspeakers, and a few patrons danced to the melancholy songs. It was as if the Saturday night crowd longed to bring back the good old days of lost dreams and better times with swigs of beer and
ciders. The objective was to make everything seem better.

Suhonen didn’t recognize the s
ong; it sounded like it might’ve been an original, or maybe something from Crosby, Stills & Nash. The place was bigger than a bar, but smaller than a restaurant. The menu on the chalkboard promised microwaved herring casserole for eight euros.

Opposite th
e bar was a window that would’ve looked out into the mall parking lot, if it hadn’t been covered with ad posters. The musician sat in the back corner.

Th
e song ended, and the singer started another. Suhonen recognized the tune and the harmonica; it was Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” but he couldn’t make out the whiny, mumbled words. Suhonen glanced at the singer just to be sure, and it wasn’t Keith Richards.

Suhonen walked straight to the bar, his eyes
nonchalantly sweeping the place. He saw that his entrance had been noticed, which was exactly what Suikkanen, his alias, wanted. Suikkanen never came into the bar for his own pleasure, but only to clear things up or maybe mess them up even more.

Suhonen saw four empty seats
at the bar and picked one on the end—the one Suikkanen would’ve chosen. He paid for his coffee with a two-euro coin, and the bartender told him the price included milk and a refill.

Clo
sest to him were two bloated women in their forties—a blonde and a brunette—with beer mugs in front of them. They reminded Suhonen of two girls in his high school in Lahti: Tuija and Elle. This is what they’d look like now, he imagined, though at the time all the boys had crushes on them and the other girls envied them. With a chuckle, Suhonen reminisced about his crush on Tuija. He sipped his coffee, which tasted as bitter as the memory, and that was not unlike the present.

The crooner began a new number, which Suhonen recognized immediately by the intro and words he could even understand: The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It, too, brought back days of his youth in Lahti, and memories of Salmela. Eero had been better on the guitar, so Suhonen was stuck singing
for their garage band. It hadn’t sounded great, but they tried, and dreamed of singing at the Tavastia Bar in downtown Helsinki, and even at a packed Wembley.

Suhonen wiped his face with his hand and let his eyes wander.
The place was gloomy. The man on the barstool in a leather jacket wasn’t looking for anyone anymore. Maybe I do belong here, after all, Suhonen thought. While his work was different from the people around him, he really didn’t have any more of a past or a future. He hung around the likes of Salmela, Rautis, and Saarnikangas, buddies he tried to take care of, and wondered if they even were friends. He was sure of Salmela, but to the others he was just a nice cop who looked the other way occasionally. He wouldn’t play whack-a-mole on them. And there were the Elle and Tuija types; Suhonen had no qualms using them, if it meant solving a serious crime. He wasn’t interested in their backgrounds, their present, or their future, only in knowing if they could be useful to him as a police officer.

Be useful to him as a police officer… Suhonen mulled over the phrase that seemed to describe his whole life.
Not long after Takamäki had lost his wife, Kaarina, in a car accident, he and Suhonen sat in Takamӓki’s sauna and talked long about what it meant to be a cop.

Takamäki had a garbage collector
theory—how some people had to clean up after others. Garbage collectors picked up people’s trash and policemen picked up trashy people. It was a fine theory, but Suhonen wanted to know why it had to be him and Takamäki who picked up the trashy people.

“Why us?” he had asked. He wanted to know why he couldn’t be a salesman driving a Nissan, selling stuff to people whether they needed it or not. Why the hell was he the one who drove a piece of junk with license plates smashed beyond recognition,
seeking, nursing, and snatching up crooks?

Takamäki had wondered why Suhonen had chosen the police academy in the first place.

“I didn’t have anything better to do,” Suhonen had replied lazily and turned the same question around to his boss. Takamäki didn’t take the bait, but kept pressing Suhonen, bolstered by half a dozen beers.

“Why the police academy?”

“I dunno,” Suhonen said.

“You don’t know? You must have had a reason.”

“Maybe I wanted to help people.”

“But you’re not helping them—you’re sending them to prison. Accident victims go to
the hospital where doctors, not the police, help them. And the ones who end up in the cemetery don’t care.”

“Then I make criminals pay for
their actions,” Suhonen had said.

“The hell you do,” Takamäki grunted. “What do you mean, pay? Let’s take manslaughter for example. A person kills someone and they s
it in prison for five years—just five—for taking away the rest of someone’s life. And part of the sentence is spent in a low security facility or on parole. I think it’s horrifying.”

“So I couldn’t have gone into the academy wanting to help people or just because?” Suhonen had asked
, cracking open another can of beer. “And wanting to hurt people isn’t a good enough reason, either?”

“Nope, it isn’t,” Takamäki had said. “In t
hat case you would’ve gone into the military.”

“I had to pay my bills?” Suhonen tried.

“On this salary?” Takamäki had pointed out with a laugh. “And it couldn’t have been the women because there weren’t any in the academy at the time.”

Suhonen had given up. “So tell me why.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Takamäki had said, rubbing his face with both hands.

After a minute’s silence Suhonen had asked, “Did you and your friends ever play cops and robbers?”

“Of course, all kids play that.”

“Who were the cops and who were the robbers?” Suhonen had asked.

“Jape and Eki were usually robbers,” Takamäki recalled. “Pauli and Pete were cops. There were others, but those four are the ones I remember.”

“Why was that?”

“Jape and Eki could run the fastest. It wouldn’t have been that fun to have the fastest kids be the cops—they would’ve caught everyone right away.”

“There’s your answer to why we’re cops,” Suhonen had said with a smirk.

Suhonen’s thoughts jumped back to the present when a familiar face walked into the bar. The bar singer crooned Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” He only sang two-minute pieces, either because that’s all he knew or because it was the attention span of the audience.

The familiar face was that of Sergei Makarov. His blond hair looked neither like a hockey player’s long mane nor the crew cut of
a Spetnaz officer from St. Petersburg. It had an odd-looking part in the middle and didn’t quite reach his ears. The man was of medium height and well-proportioned—skinnier than the average Finn.

Makarov wasn’t likely to remember Suhonen, and probably hadn’t met Suikkanen. Suhonen had seen plenty of action, but he always av
oided situations where people could recognize him as a cop. Over the years the Corner Pub, his old hangout, had turned into a place where he was starting to get recognized, and for an undercover detective that was a bad idea.

Makarov slid between tables back to the musician’s corner where two men were sitting. Suhonen didn’t recogniz
e the man facing him. The other man looked familiar from the back, but Suhonen didn’t know why.

Suhonen’s thoughts returned to the sauna night discussion at Takamӓki’s house. Takamäki
’s questions were clumsy, but he was relentless. These days the persistent detective lieutenant could definitely outrun Suhonen in any distance over four hundred yards.

Takamäki
had accepted Suhonen’s cops and robbers explanation, but Suhonen wasn’t satisfied with it himself—he had always been the robber in the game. He was the fastest kid in the complex; a friend’s father had once clocked him running sixty meters in less than nine seconds. Salmela had run it in eleven. Why, then, was Suhonen the cop in real life, and Salmela the robber? But Suhonen decided he really didn’t care; he was a police officer and his job was to enforce the law. In any case, he was pleased he had solved Takamӓki’s conundrum.

The singer belted a Guns N’ Roses ballad from twenty years ago. Suhonen thought all of Axl Rose’s self-absorbed songs sounded the same, and he couldn’t make out
enough of the lyrics to figure out which one it was.

S
uhonen finished his cold coffee and the bartender glanced at him to see if he wanted a refill. Shaking his head, he got up, still wondering why he had chosen this career.

Then he dove into the role he’d prepared for from the minute he stepped into the bar. He was Suikkanen from Lahti, a gangster void of a conscience. Not an old-time romantic, nor a modern maniac, but something in between. He was here to
take care of things for a buddy in trouble.

Suhonen kept an eye on the three men talking in the corner. It was obvious they weren’t here for a Kannel
mӓki Neighborhood Association meeting. Makarov was a hardened criminal, and the others had the same look.

He had several options for approaching the table. The best one would’ve
been to walk up carrying a pump-action shotgun, but that wasn’t feasible now. Apologetic wouldn’t work either, so he decided to take the middle road.

Suhonen
was ten feet away when Makarov noticed him and looked up. The men immediately stopped talking, and the other two turned to stare at Suhonen. He recognized the third guy as Jaakko Niskala, and saw that Niskala recognized him as Suikkanen. At least Suhonen hoped so. He had left the scene in the Alamo Bar well before the police had showed up to arrest Korpivaara, Niskala, and two others.

Makarov had a quizzical look on his face.

“Hey,” Suhonen said with a nod. “Can I join you?”

“Do I know you?” Makarov asked, suspiciously.

“I know this guy. His name is Suikkanen,” Niskala said, in an attempt to gain credibility, as he was clearly the lowest-ranked in the group.

Suhonen smiled at Niskala. It was extremely
helpful to be recognized as one of the criminals and not have to convince the group.

“Good memory. You still have some brain cells left.”

The wisecrack startled Niskala but he didn’t say anything. Suhonen quickly estimated the level of threat. He wouldn’t be in immediate danger from Makarov and Niskala, but he wasn’t sure about the older guy wearing a parka.