As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) (7 page)

“What do you remember about the night of the party?”

“Not much. Or, I mean, I remember lots of things, but I’m having a hard time connecting any of them.”

“Tell me from the very beginning, in as much detail as possible, what you remember about the party and how you ended up with the money,” Lumikki suggested. “Then we can think about the best course of action.”

She hated the didactic tone in her voice, but right now she had to talk to Elisa like a child. The girl’s hands were shaking, even though she was squeezing her cup tightly to make them stop.

Slowly, Elisa began telling her story, which was so full of digressions that it was almost incoherent. After learning that her parents would be out of town Sunday night, she’d decided to throw a party. Her mother was leaving on Saturday for a week-long business trip, and her father would be gone overnight, also for work. Elisa droned on for a while about all the thought she’d put into who to invite and what food and drinks to get.
Get to the point,
Lumikki thought. This wasn’t exactly what she meant by detail. If she wanted to gossip, Elisa could find another listener.

“I wanted my party to have a little more sparkle. So I asked Kasper to get some pills for me and Tuukka. We’ve
taken them together before sometimes. You get a way better buzz than from alcohol. And too many drinks always make me want to puke.”

Elisa’s sullen expression amused Lumikki. Who didn’t have to puke after drinking too much? Wasn’t that kind of one of the basic features of alcohol?

“Where did Kasper score them?” she asked.

“I don’t know. And I don’t wanna know. Sometimes he runs with a sketchy crowd that it’s best to avoid.”

A sudden virtuous tone. Elisa seemed to be remembering that she was the daughter of a police officer.

“Did anyone else take them?”

“Not that I know of. Kasper is pretty careful about who he deals to. He doesn’t want to get caught.”

Of course he doesn’t. Lumikki could have told Elisa that at least the perfume mafia seemed to know perfectly well that people had been partying with more than alcohol.

“Most people started going home sometime around midnight,” Elisa laughed. “Good little kiddies don’t want to be too hungover at school the next day.”

When Lumikki didn’t join in the laughter, Elisa turned serious too.

“Okay, now that I look back on it, I should have stopped then too. Everybody who stuck around was pretty drunk by that point. I know I was super messed up, and that’s when my memory gets fuzzy. Some people were puking in the corners. Someone broke a crystal vase and got cut on the glass. The whole house was a wreck. I think I asked Tuukka to throw a couple of idiots out.”

Elisa had lowered her coffee cup to her desk. She started picking at her cuticles. Her bright pink nail polish was worn off at the tips. Her hands still trembled slightly. Lumikki didn’t say anything. Better to let Elisa tell her story without any leading questions. Memories were more reliable without someone else prompting them.

“By two, everyone had left except Tuukka and Kasper. We were mostly up here in my room hanging out. We didn’t have to pretend anymore that we were just drinking. Then . . . it was around three o’clock.”

Elisa suddenly fell silent. She swallowed, then frowned.

“I think I went out on the balcony to smoke,” she continued. “Yeah, that’s right. And then I saw this weird plastic trash bag down in the garden. It had been there, like, max half an hour, because I kept going out to smoke and that’s the first time I saw it. I don’t usually smoke, but at parties, I always just, like, really want a couple cigarettes.”

Again, the same virtuous tone and role-playing mask. Lumikki would have admired the performance if it hadn’t irritated her so much.

“What did you do then?” she asked, unable to restrain herself.

Elisa started fiddling with the gold heart dangling from the zipper of her pink tracksuit. She pulled it down a couple of inches and then jerked it up again. Open and shut. Open and shut. Lumikki took a sip of coffee. It was painfully weak.

“For some reason, I guess I started laughing hysterically because the bag just looked so weird sitting there in the snow. I can’t explain it. I guess I was really messed up. I left the
boys upstairs and went to get the bag. When I came inside, I opened it down in the hall.”

Elisa swallowed again.

“At first, I didn’t understand what it was. I thought it was just trash. Then I pulled out one of the pieces of paper and realized it was money. Covered in blood. The whole bag was full of bloody five-hundred-euro bills. I dug around to check, and my hands got all covered in the blood. Thinking about it makes me sick. But when it was happening, I just kept laughing. Somehow it was just so ridiculously funny.”

Elisa stared at the pink rug on the black floor. The emotions on her face ran from nausea to disgust and from shame to fear.

“I didn’t think at all about why the money was . . . like that. I yelled for the boys to come and look. They started laughing too and saying over and over, ‘We’re all fucking rich now.’ We didn’t count it then, but the bag had thirty thousand euros in it. We weren’t actually thinking at all. Yeah, you know, except that we had to clean the money somehow.”

They had reasoned that they couldn’t wash it at anyone’s house since they wouldn’t be able to let it dry without someone noticing. Then Tuukka came up with the darkroom idea because he took photography. And he had a copy of his dad’s key to the school he had made a long time ago. And he knew the code to the building alarm.

“It felt like the smartest idea in the world at the time,” Elisa explained, looking at Lumikki with pleading eyes. “Can you understand?”

No,
Lumikki thought, but she didn’t say so out loud.

“And in the morning, Tuukka had to hurry to get the money out of there,” she said instead.

“As far as I’m concerned, we should have left it there. I never wanted to touch it again. I can’t stop thinking about where all that blood came from. Was it from a person? And why was the bag in my yard? Who put it there? I’m never taking any fucking pills ever again. If I would have been sober, I might have seen who brought the bag.”

Elisa stood up and started pacing back and forth nervously.

Lumikki stood up as well, going to the balcony door and opening it. Cold air immediately assaulted her, but she didn’t care. She went out on the balcony and looked down into the yard.

“Was the gate down there locked that night?” she asked.

“Yes,” Elisa replied. “I checked it around two, I think.”

Lumikki estimated the distance from the road to the yard. With a nice strong throw, it would be easy enough to toss a trash bag over the stone fence.

“Is there a security camera on the street?”

Elisa shook her head.

“There’s one at the gate and at the door, but not on the street.”

Lumikki thought. She let the sharp air nibble at her fingers. It kept her mind alert.

Someone had thrown a bag full of blood-soaked money over Elisa’s garden wall in the middle of the night. The money pointed to a payment. The blood pointed to a warning.
So was the money a threat or a thank-you? And who was it for? Had they thrown the bag into the right yard?

Viewed from the street, the house to the right looked very different, and the yard extended farther out. The road made a small turn at Elisa’s house, which was set farther back, in a corner where the street split into two.

“Who lives there?” Lumikki asked, indicating the house to the right.

“Two families with little kids. I think both moms are lawyers or something. One of the dads is some kind of artist, and the other one works for the city. Their kids aren’t in school yet.”

Lumikki sized up the duplex and yard. Confusing it with Elisa’s house seemed unlikely. However, the house to the left, although clearly newer, was similar in size, shape, and color. Even the wall was an identical continuation of the one in front of Elisa’s family’s. Someone could easily have mixed them up in the middle of the night.

“What about that one?”

Elisa was standing next to her on the balcony now, shivering.

“Oh, him? He’s a total weirdo. He’s like forty or something, but he tries to look younger. It’s like he’s trying to live some personal version of
Twilight
because he dresses in these long leather coats. He must think he looks like some kind of prince of the vampires or something. Really, he just looks pathetic. I don’t have a clue what he does. He must work somewhere though, because every morning he goes out and then comes back at night. He lives alone in that big house, and I’ve never seen anyone visiting. He doesn’t even say
hi
on the street.”

Lumikki looked at Elisa, whose eyes went wide.

“The money must have been meant for him! It just ended up in the wrong yard! He’s totally the type to be mixed up in some shady deals or animal sacrifices or something.”

Elisa almost sounded pleased.

“That’s one possibility,” Lumikki said, “but not the only one.”

If the money
had
been thrown into the right yard, then the intended recipient was Elisa, her father, or her mother.

Lumikki glanced at Elisa, whose teeth were beginning to chatter. She was like a stuffed animal that had lost most of its stuffing, shivering in the cold. Hard to believe she could be involved in anything that would result in a thirty-thousand-euro payoff. Of course, you never knew. Lumikki considered herself better than average at spotting liars. Elisa didn’t seem like a liar. At least, not a good enough one to be able to fool her. Lumikki had been lied to so many times in her life that she could pick out the changes in tone and expression that exposed most mediocre liars.

“Still, I have a bad feeling someone out there wants that money back. Right now,” Elisa whispered.

Lumikki had nothing comforting to say.

She agreed completely.

Viivo Tamm shivered. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so cold. He tried to bounce in place to keep warm, but his stiff leg muscles wouldn’t cooperate.

He’d only been standing at his post along the Pyynikki Hill running path for an hour, but he already felt like he was running up against the limits of what he could tolerate. He had on a thick parka with a tightly woven sweater underneath and a Thinsulate cap pulled down over his ears, but the cold was still finding a way though the layers. It attacked through the smallest needle holes, mercilessly gnawing at his body, which was struggling desperately to maintain a safe core temperature. Viivo Tamm gave in and made the call.

Stiff fingers poked clumsily at the equally stiff buttons of the cell phone. Removing his lined leather gloves wasn’t an
option. Extracting the correct name from the contact list and pressing the green “call” icon took five minutes.

“Well?” came the expectant reply.

“No sign. And I can’t stay out here much longer. I’m freezing to death.”

“Suck it up,” Boris Sokolov snapped and hung up.

Viivo stared at the phone for a second, clenching his teeth. Sokolov and Linnart Kask were sitting in a plumbing company van at the far end of the street. It was all well and good for them to be issuing orders while sitting there all nice and toasty warm.

What if the girl didn’t come out at all today? Or even just not very soon. All three of them knew they couldn’t keep up the stakeout for hours on end. Someone would notice the van and get suspicious. They’d realize that no one around here needed a plumber right now. Switching out the vehicle’s license plate and logos would cost time and money, and none of them wanted to do that any more than they had to.

Fucking hell. They had been sure that seeing the blood would be enough. But this guy had steadier nerves than they’d thought. Now he was trying to play for higher stakes than he could afford, though. Really, he couldn’t afford anything. None of them could. Not even Sokolov, even though he was happy to play the role of big boss man. But really, he was on just as tight a leash as the rest of them. A noose around the neck was still a noose even if it was encrusted with diamonds.

Maybe the Finn hadn’t cared as much about the woman as they had thought after all. Maybe it had all been an act.
Regardless, kidnapping his daughter was sure to snap him out of his delusions of grandeur.

Lumikki stared at the noodles in her bowl, which were a shade somewhere between gray and beige. Elisa had been telling the truth when she said she couldn’t cook. Apparently, the freezer held a supply of meals her mother had premade for her, but warming them up was “such a hassle” that Elisa preferred to eat instant ramen. Lumikki sampled the limp strands floating in salty broth and decided to power through. Or actually, the low, steady growling of her stomach decided for her.

She was insanely hungry. Morning had turned to afternoon, and Lumikki’s only thought was starting to be when she was going to get home. Whenever she tried to start leaving, Elisa came up with some excuse why she had to stay. She really was afraid of being alone.

Their conversation was going nowhere. They had gone over everything related to the money. They had debated whether it was meant for the man in the leather coat next door. Elisa was convinced it must be.