Death Spiral (12 page)

But when I tried to move back to Weissenberg’s movements the night of Noora’s murder, I hit a brick wall. She flatly denied ever leaving home.

“I decided it was best to wait until the next day when Noora would have had time to calm down and think things over,” Weissenberg said.

And that was where I had to leave it. No one had really seen a gold BMW near the scene of the crime.

I called Antti to tell him I was finished and walked to a gas station to wait for him. The wind bit at me through my jacket. I was definitely going to have a sauna before bed so I could finally get warm. I had assumed I’d be too hot as my body grew, but in fact I had spent most of the pregnancy feeling cold.

I asked Antti to drive to the industrial park where Noora’s father’s business was located. I wanted to test how long it took to drive from there to Noora’s house. The trucking company office was easy to find with showy gold letters placed prominently atop the service building. I thought it was strange how Ulrika Weissenberg called Kauko Nieminen “vulgar” but also seemed to admire him. Apparently in Weissenberg’s mind, a person’s value correlated with their tax bracket.

Even though the drive required winding along surface streets to get under the freeway, the trip still barely took ten minutes. Had there been anyone at the trucking company office the night of the murder who could confirm Kauko Nieminen’s alibi?

Antti didn’t ask why I wanted to drive this route in particular. When I asked him to stop in the parking lot next to the forest where Noora was murdered, he frowned.

“Are you expecting me to play chauffeur for the rest of the day?”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about how to get a dead body out of those woods and into a car without anyone noticing.”

“You’re always thinking about the cheeriest things,” Antti said with a snort. He was less interested in my work than its effects on me and our relationship. We had both accepted that there would be times when competing with the other’s work obligations was pointless. But Antti wasn’t my coworker. I shouldn’t make him participate in an investigation.

After our sauna, I collapsed in front of the TV and turned on
Sports Update
. They were covering a rally car race, which I couldn’t have cared less about, and I was about to change the channel to look for a cop show when the reporter’s expression turned grave.

“Figure skater Noora Nieminen died on Wednesday of this week. Police are investigating the incident as a homicide. Noora Nieminen and her partner, Janne Kivi, placed tenth at this year’s European Championships and ninth at the World Championships. To end the show and in memory of Noora, we’re going to watch a clip of the two skating.”

Noora’s face appeared on the screen. Her expression before her double Lutz was determined, her eyes focused. A smile flashed on Janne’s lips when they landed the jump, but Noora’s expression didn’t change, keeping the mood of the program’s serious music. Then the music changed to the exuberance of “Hair,” and Noora began to sparkle. Her performance would have been a credit to any professional actor. The final freeze frame zoomed in on Noora’s face, her deep round eyes laughing as Janne lifted her toward the sky. I watched those eyes on my television screen and vowed I would find the person who took her life.

7

Sunday morning I opened my office door, wishing I were anywhere else. The thought of interviewing Jaana Markkanen gave me no joy, but I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. Minni had visited my dreams during the night: I had dreamed I was giving birth, and the baby girl who squeezed out between my legs wasn’t breathing. In the dream I knew the child was Minni, and someone had beaten her to death with a figure skate. Antti woke up to my screaming and shook me awake, and it had taken me a long time to get back to sleep again.

Koivu was going to help me with the interview because both Puupponen and Pihko were off duty. Besides, I intended to spend the afternoon at the skating rink where Rami and Elena would be training with Silja. Of course Koivu wanted to come along. I felt like an old auntie with nothing to do but meddle at matchmaking.

When we’d met four years before, Koivu had tried to hit on me, but then he fell in love with a bossy nurse who in the end left him for a neo-Nazi. That had been followed by a couple of short-term romances that were doomed from the start, first a lady who was almost forty and was using Koivu to get revenge on her husband for an affair, and then an economist, who had disappeared to Brussels a month ago. I had watched all this, simultaneously concerned and amused, and hoping that my adopted little brother would finally find a good woman.

I was prepared for a tough interrogation, but Jaana Markkanen was in even worse shape than I had expected. According to the duty officer, after recovering from her stupor sometime early that morning she had just howled, refusing any sleeping aids or sedatives. Now, as she sat in the interrogation room across from me, her eyes looked as if they had dozens of sleepless nights behind them.

Markkanen was easy to interview in the sense that she admitted to smothering her child, although she didn’t remember the chain of events terribly clearly. She had spent the night at the Fishmaid, the same restaurant where Vesku Teräsvuori led karaoke. Over the course of the evening she had thrown back at least seven
salmiakki
vodkas and a few highballs. Jaana didn’t quite remember how she got home, and her memory of smothering the baby was fuzzy. Her internal clock had woken her up in the morning expecting Minni to demand her morning milk. But the girl just lay there, and when Jaana bent down to listen to her breathing, she realized Minni was dead.

“She was all blue and wasn’t breathing. I didn’t know what to do. But on the phone there was this sticker that said to dial one-one-two,” Jaana said, stuttering. “Do you get that I’ve done the worst thing anyone can do? I killed my own baby! I want to die! Why wouldn’t you let me jump off the balcony?”

Jaana Markkanen desperately needed to talk, to explain to the police and to herself why she had killed her daughter. She was only twenty. Minni’s father had been a one-night stand, but Jaana had wanted to keep the baby anyway. Because she was pregnant, she’d received an apartment from the city and could move out of her expensive studio apartment. But motherhood hadn’t been the sweet symbiosis she’d hoped for.

“For the first few months she was on my tits all the time. I could barely go to the bathroom without her screaming for more. But when she was asleep she was so cute. Just like a little angel. I got her weaned when she was five months, and I could finally get out again sometimes. I couldn’t just sit in that gerbil cage all the time, and the old lady next door liked watching her.”

Koivu and I mostly listened in silence. The case was simple. All we had to do was have Jaana sign an affidavit of her confession and ask the court to remand her for trial. We would probably have that back within a day, and then Jaana would be sent to the women’s prison in Hämeenlinna to wait for her sentencing hearing. Hopefully Jaana’s court-appointed attorney would be competent enough to call attention to the details embedded in the flood of words she was spewing: the childhood in an alcoholic family, the unemployment, the lack of education, the untreated postpartum depression. Jaana’s story was abysmally common, perfectly foreshadowing the tragedy that was to come. There was nothing I could do to stop it from getting even worse. Jaana had drunk heavily since she was a teenager, and in prison she was almost guaranteed to get hooked on pills and who knew what else. I almost hoped some religious group would get to her first.

“What will happen to me now?” Jaana asked when I began to wrap up the interview. I advised her to get a lawyer and explained she’d be remanded to prison to await sentencing. When she finally realized she was going to be locked up in prison for a long time, she started to wail again. I didn’t want to order her back to her cell, but what else could I do? I was just a police officer conducting an interview, not a social worker.

“Do you want to talk to a psychologist?” I asked clumsily.

“Why, do you think I’m crazy? Do you think that’s why I killed Minni?” Jaana screamed, her slender body convulsing as if in pain. Jaana was no longer listening to me. She had killed her child and she was going to prison. She would have preferred to die, which was what she repeated over and over as she was led back to her holding cell.

“Poor kid,” Koivu sighed once Jaana’s cries had stopped echoing from the hallway. “How does that happen? For a split second you do something stupid and then the rest of your life is ruined. People don’t recover from that, do they, from killing their own child?”

“It’s hard enough when a kid dies from cancer or an accident,” I said. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it. Like what if my baby dies during the birth or is so disabled that it can’t survive? Just the thought of it hurts, even though it isn’t even born yet.”

The Creature had become real for me when it started to kick. When I’d first felt it, it had been so strange I wasn’t sure whether I was imagining it or not. Like a little fish cautiously wiggling its tail in a pool of water I didn’t know existed inside of me. I had slowly become used to the movements, and gradually they grew stronger. Now I worried if the Creature dozed too long.

“Skating practice is at two,” I said to Koivu to get my mind off my own fears. “Before that let’s check the reports of cars people saw near the park and skating rink on Wednesday night. Maybe we’ll find a gold BMW.”

But it was in vain. I still didn’t have any evidence that Ulrika Weissenberg had gone back to meet Noora that night. Still, some strange sense told me she had. I tried to visualize the area—Matinkylä—with its boxy redbrick apartment buildings in the center of the neighborhood and the trees that softened the otherwise bleak urban landscape. A gold BMW would have stood out there. Maybe we should have a chat with the boys who hung around in the yards playing soccer.

Before going to the skating rink, Koivu dragged me to a nearby pizza joint. After perusing the nutritional information, I ordered a small vegetarian pie. Koivu got an anchovy-salami pizza but couldn’t seem to get it down.

“Isn’t it a bit dumb going and interrupting their practice?” he finally said, visibly agitated. “Silja is a top athlete, so I’m sure every practice is important . . .”

“I don’t want to interrupt either, but I think it will be better to interview Rami and Elena somewhere they feel comfortable rather than the police station. They aren’t even really suspects at this point.”

Koivu muttered something else—he clearly didn’t want Silja thinking he was a jerk.

“Eat your pizza and let’s go,” I said in a sisterly tone. But Koivu just pushed pieces of anchovy around with his fork and barely managed to finish his milk. All that was left of my pizza were some crusts, and I felt stuffed and sweaty. I found a piece of gum in my pocket, which got rid of the worst of the greasy flavor in my mouth.

When I pulled the car into the parking lot of the ice rink, I noticed some sort of fuss around the front doors. A gaggle of little girls were bustling out to meet parents waiting in their cars, but it seemed as though the custodian was also trying to drive someone out. Koivu and I jogged over to the door and, closer up, I saw that the men trying to barge their way in were carrying microphones and cameras. Reporters.

The news that had broken the night before about Noora’s homicide had apparently set off the tabloids. The identity of the girl found dead at the shopping center had not been publicized, but the reporters had put two and two together. The parents of the young figure skaters seemed alarmed by the incident, and even from a distance I could hear two voices trying to shout down the reporters’ questions.

It was hard to tell who was more furious, Elena or Janne.

“You have a lot of nerve to barge in here and interrupt our practice!” Elena bellowed. “We don’t know anything about Noora’s death other than that it happened after she left here! Go away!”

“It must be horrible for you, Janne,” one of the reporters said, feigning empathy. “You’re still here, though. Do you intend to keep skating?”

“Go to hell!” There was nothing fake about Janne’s rage, and for a second I thought he might attack the reporter. Then he noticed me and Koivu. “There are the police officers investigating Noora’s death. Go bother them!”

It was too late to retreat. Janne grinned maliciously as the wave of questions turned toward us. I felt like sticking my tongue out at him.

“Is it true that Noora Nieminen’s body was found in the trunk of a car just like the drug dealer Jack Daniel Morre last year? Whose car was it? Is the owner a suspect? No? Who is, then?”

I didn’t have authority to be handing out information to the press, but I also didn’t want to call Taskinen on a Sunday afternoon. Some of the parents had turned around when they heard the word “police,” and they gathered around me in a wall of demands.

I told them that Noora Nieminen had indeed been found dead in the trunk of a car in a nearby parking garage and that the police were investigating the incident as a homicide. I could not give any further details because the investigation was still ongoing. I didn’t reveal the identity of the car’s owner, and fortunately Kati Järvenperä wasn’t the kind of woman to go looking for cheap publicity. Taking advantage of the opportunity to talk to the press, I appealed to anyone who had been in the area that night, especially around the parking garage:

“Please contact the Espoo Police if you remember seeing anything suspicious. Every clue is important.”

One of the little figure skaters had started to cry—Noora had been an important role model for all of them.

“But you’re here to interview Noora’s coaches and her partner, aren’t you?” asked the reporter from the local radio station. I’m sure he thought he was very clever.

“Noora Nieminen was killed on her way home from this ice rink. We’re just trying to get the lay of the land,” I said as patiently as I could. “That’s all we can say at this stage in the investigation.”

It was so easy to say “we” or “the police,” as if I didn’t have any personal responsibility in how the investigation was going. Surprisingly, the reporters moved aside politely when I started marching toward the door with Koivu on my heels. Ten-year-old girls were still tumbling out after what was obviously a group lesson. Elena Grigorieva was talking to one of the little girls, but when she saw me she immediately abandoned the girl and strode my way.

“You drove those reporters off? Good! They came right in the middle of beginners’ level practice! And of course Ulrika wasn’t here, even though we needed her for once!”

Since my first interaction with her, I’d been surprised by how well Elena spoke Finnish. The words came without her having to pause and search, her conjugation and declension were nearly perfect, and even though her
l
’s were a little too singsong and her
s
’s too hissing, her accent in no way prevented understanding what she meant. I knew she had only lived in the country for a couple of years, so she must have been gifted with languages.

“And what do the police need here?” she asked. “Is it your turn to torment us now? We’re still practicing.”

“I know. But in your description of your movements Wednesday night—”

Suddenly a little girl as delicate as a bird interrupted and rushed into Elena’s arms.

“Mama, mamochka! Gde Tomi? Ya hazu
. . 
.”

“Irina, speak Finnish! We aren’t in Russia anymore.”

“Mama, where is Tomi? I want to go home. There’s a movie on TV . . .”

“Tomi can’t come get you now, dear. He’s busy. You’ll need to wait with me until Silja is finished.”

“Mama . . .”

“No whining! Fetch your homework and go to the dressing room.”

Irina muttered something but then took off down the hallway, her nonexistent rear end sashaying angrily. The graceful self-assertiveness in the girl’s movements was unusual for a child. Rami came down the hall to meet Irina, and the girl said something to him as he passed, dramatically spreading her arms wide. Rami patted her on the shoulder. Irina Grigorieva was probably doomed to be a top figure skater. Maybe in five years she would be the one scooping up world championships. By then the Grigorievas would have earned Finnish citizenship too.

Rami Luoto looked harassed. It almost looked as if there were more gray in his sideburns than a few days before.