Darling (3 page)

“This is
the building custodian,” Partio said. “He unlocked the door for us.”

“Sergeant Joutsamo from Helsinki PD Violent Crimes,” Joutsamo said. “And you are?”

“Jorma Korpivaara,” the man said, extending his hand.

Joutsamo noticed a bandage wrapped around the man’s left
index finger. Korpivaara had short hair, a stubbly beard, and a couple of scars on his face. The man’s soft handshake didn’t match his gruff exterior. Joutsamo also sensed something vulnerable about him.

“So you’re
the custodian?”

“Sort of. The city takes care of
most things here, but I’ve agreed to be on call in case a drunk forgets their keys…or if the police need help.”

The next question would’ve b
een better addressed to the guy’s wife, but since there wasn’t one, he had to do.

“Do you know this Laura Vatanen?”

“Laura… Yeah, I know her. A nice girl, though she didn’t always play with a full deck of cards.”

“
What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m no doctor, but I think she was handicapped somehow. Not like the ones in a wheelchair,
but sometimes she sounded weird when she talked, and she had some involuntary movements. Just a bit off. I don’t understand much about those things, though.”

“How did you know?”

“She told me once. But I could see it for myself.”

“Did you see anyone going in
to the apartment today? Anyone other than the police,” Joutsamo asked.

“No, I didn’t. Today’s my day off, so I had a beer in the morning and was watch
ing a movie when the phone rang.”

“So you have no idea who could’ve killed Laura?” Joutsamo asked, fixing her eye on the man. She didn’t detect any signs of nervousness.

“No,” he replied, shaking his head.

“Where’d you hurt your hand, by the way?”

Korpivaara glanced at his hand, embarrassed.

“I was drunk, tried to cut a loaf of stale bread, and missed. It’s not too bad.”

“Okay. We’ll talk more later,” Joutsamo said and turned to Partio.

“Can I go now?” the
custodian asked.

“Go ahead,” Joutsamo replied.

He stepped into the waiting elevator.

“S
trange creep. Doesn’t seem to have all the Indians in the canoe,” Kulta remarked.

Joutsamo glanced at her colleague.

“Funny, that’s what they say about you. And probably about me too,” she smirked.

Partio pulled out his
notepad and went over his notes: the times of day, his observations of the body’s position in the middle of the living room floor, and how the victim’s throat was slashed from ear to ear. Joutsamo asked him to write up a report.

“Who called the police?”

Partio pointed to the apartment across the hall.

“A woman in her seventies li
ves there. Name’s Iina Ridanpӓӓ. When I talked with her she told me she heard noise from the neighbor’s apartment around ten o’clock this morning, but didn’t think much of it. She said all sorts of people came and went there.”

“All sorts? At ten in the morning?”

“That’s what I thought, too. She called them creeps and hooligans, who don’t own a watch.”

“But this Ridanp
ӓӓ didn’t call the police at that time?”

“No. She
’s physically handicapped, and can’t really get around, and I’d say it’s probably due to alcoholism. Anyway, Laura Vatanen did the shopping for Ridanpӓӓ at the Kannelmӓki Prisma, half a mile away. Today at eleven o’clock, Laura was supposed to run to the grocery store and the liquor store, and I got the idea that liquor was the higher priority.”

Joutsamo let Partio continue after he glanced at his notes.

“The woman said Laura never skipped the errands. Ridanpӓӓ paid her well and Laura was allowed to get a few things for herself, too. When Laura didn’t show up, Ridanpӓӓ went over and rang the doorbell. As there was no answer, she called the police.”

Kulta
interrupted, “And they claim that folks in Helsinki don’t care about their neighbors.”

“Go on,” Joutsamo urged
Partio, ignoring Kulta’s comment.

“Well, we got the call from Dispatch
for a wellness check. We called the custodian, and Korpivaara was waiting at the door when we arrived. We went inside.”

“Just you two, not
him?”

“Just us two. What caught my attention was that nothing implied a struggle.”

“No overturned chairs, magazines on the floor, or broken bottles?”

“Nothing. Oddly, the coffeemaker was on.”

“Did the cups have coffee in them?” Joutsamo asked.

Partio
shook his head. “No. I checked; they were empty. But we only did a preliminary investigation. We saw the body and looked around to see if the perpetrator was still in the apartment.”

“Did Vatanen live alone?”

“I think so,” Partio said and looked at Nieminen for confirmation.

“Esa, did you get the impression that someone else was bunking here?”

Nieminen was still guarding the door at a wide stance.

“My impression was that she lived alone,” he
said. “The apartment looked clean, not like a drug nest or anything.”

“R
emember seeing a weapon?”

“Nope, didn’t see
one. I didn’t get close to the body because I could tell right away that she was dead. But go see for yourselves,” Partio suggested.

Joutsamo had
brought along white paper coveralls and blue plastic shoe covers. But based on what Partio said, she figured they would let Forensics go in first.

“We’ll let Forensics take care of the apartment and we
can come back later. We’ll chat up the neighbors first. Mikko, you start with Ridanpӓӓ, and I’ll talk to the others on this floor. Then I’ll head down and you go up.”

Joutsamo glanced at Partio,
“You guys guard the door until Forensics gets here.”

While Joutsamo gave orders, Kulta went to Ridanp
ӓӓ’s door and rang the bell. The woman took a while to answer. Joutsamo could only hear some mumbled rasps; then, with gusto, the woman slammed the door in Kulta’s face.

“What now?” Joutsamo asked.

“If I understood correctly, Mrs. Ridanpӓӓ won’t talk to me until I get her two bottles of red wine,” Kulta replied.

“Good grief,” Joutsamo sighed. “She’s a witness and under
legal obligation to answer your questions. Tell her if she doesn’t cooperate, we’ll take her to the station for questioning.”

Kulta glanced at the door and shrugged.

“Think I’ll make a quick run to the liquor store. It won’t take long, and we’ll get more out of her that way.”

CHAPTER 2

WEDNESDAY, 2:55 P.M.

HELSINKI
POLICE HEADQUARTERS, PASILA

Kulta was sipping his coffee in the VCU meeting room. It was strong enough this time, because he made it himself. “Not all the Indians in the canoe…,” he mused.

The meeting was to start at three o’clock, which was in a few minutes. Joutsamo and
Takamäki weren’t there yet. Kulta was joined by Undercover Officer Suhonen and a petite redhead, Kirsi Kohonen, both long-time detectives on Detective Lieutenant Takamӓki’s team. The fourth person in the room was Leif Nyström, who had recently joined the team from the East Uusimaa Police Department.

Several veteran detectives
from the Violent Crimes Unit had recently retired, and VCU had been able to fill the positions with qualified applicants like Nyström. He was a forty-year-old veteran cop, with plenty of experience investigating various violent crimes in the eastern Helsinki metropolitan area.

“Not all the Indians in the canoe,”
Nyström said in a squeaky voice. “That’s such a worn-out phrase. Kind of like ‘dumber than a box of rocks.’ Try ‘slow on the
uptake’ or something.”

Kohonen, who
se hobbies included horses, added, “Didn’t have all their horses shoed.”

Kulta joined in. “You’re not using your
imagination. How about, ‘not all the Nazis in the bunker’ or ‘all the idiots in the village’…”

Suhonen,
wearing his usual leather jacket, his black hair pulled into a ponytail, chuckled and said, “Fitting for this case, ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer.’”

Takamäki
walked in just as Suhonen was making his comment.

“What about a knife?” the thin-faced
lieutenant in a gray cardigan asked. His short, dark hair showed a hint of silver.

Suhonen explained the pun and
Takamäki chuckled. “I’m glad my detectives have an imagination. I’ll throw one out, too.”

“What?” Kulta asked.

“Well,” Takamäki began, molding the idea. “This one is the other way around, but I’m confident you esteemed sleuths will get it. In this case, the guy actually ‘has all the administrators in the building.’”

Suhonen
laughed and the others joined in. The newly-restructured police administration had increased bureaucracy, and Takamäki wasn’t a fan.

“But let’s get down to business. Anna, please brief us.”

“Okay, enough with the jokes,” said the detective in a black sweater and jeans. “We’re investigating a brutal homicide.”

Everyone settled down.

“So the victim is Laura Janina Vatanen. She was born in Tampere, February 1985, which made her twenty-six years old. She lived alone in her apartment, where she was found with her throat slashed. She has no criminal background. Based on our preliminary findings, Laura Vatanen was diagnosed with a slight mental disability as a young child. She had trouble learning to read and write, and some of her movements were impaired. She retired on disability at the age of twenty.”

Joutsamo glanced at the others. Nobody was smiling or making jokes now.
Society should’ve been able to protect her, and now this had happened.

“According to city records, Vatanen lived on
Nӓyttelijӓ Street for two years. She had been in therapy since she was a kid, and had been deemed capable of living on her own. She had a trainee-type job at a local grocery store, but the owner fired her because she required too much help to perform her duties.”

“C
old capitalism,” Kulta said. This time Takamäki didn’t give Kulta his usual reprimand for an unnecessary comment, but nodded in agreement.

Joutsamo continued, “
She was on the waiting list for other trainee-type jobs.”

“Anyone
from Social Services check on her?”

Joutsamo shook her head. “No.
The mother was the designated caregiver and was getting paid for it.”

“Has the mother been told?”

“No,” Joutsamo said, looking at Taka
m
äk
i
. “You and I will take care of that tonight. Well, that’s the short version of Laura Vatanen’s sad story. If anyone wants to take a closer look into her thoughts, I have a notebook where she scribbled her dreams in what I would call fourth-grade handwriting. I also have a friendship book, but the only notes in it are from her three teddy bears on the couch.”

Joutsamo paused. Kulta wasn’t sure if she was wiping the corners of her eyes or just brushing her dark hair aside.

Joutsamo continued in a normal voice. “I read through all of them, but couldn’t find any clues as to the killer. However, I can say that despite her physical age of twenty-six, mentally Laura Vatanen was at the level of a pre-teen. She was actually just a child.”

“But why in the world was she allowed to live alone?” Leif
Nyström asked.

“Apparently there are many ways
to evaluate someone’s mental age,” Joutsamo said. “And those tests don’t include friendship books. Anyway, that’s the scoop: what the victim was like and what kind of a situation we’re dealing with here.”

E
veryone knew that they’d do whatever was necessary to solve the case, especially since the victim was basically a child. Not that the Helsinki PD didn’t do their best to solve every homicide, but after hearing Joutsamo’s briefing nobody was going to be counting their hours.

“Then the report from F
orensics. Laura Vatanen’s throat was slashed deep, almost into the vertebrae. We don’t have the full report from the medical examiner, but there was no question as to the cause of death. We didn’t find a weapon in the apartment, and don’t know yet if Laura was drugged. We do know she wasn’t raped, and we found no signs of violence or struggle before her death.”

“Did she have wounds on her hands?”
Nyström asked. It was common to see wounds on knifing victims’ hands from attempts to block the attack.