Death Spiral (14 page)

“Good-looking fellow,” Rami said
sotto voce.

“Good guy too,” I replied. We had switched from the roles of suspect and police investigator to friends again. There was something about Rami Luoto that invited me to confide in him. That was probably why he did so well with teenagers—he never gave the impression that he was trying to show off or boss the skaters around.

Once I finally managed to drag Koivu out of the ice arena, we drove back to the station. I picked up Noora’s diaries to take home. Maybe I’d find some sort of hint about what had really happened the night of her death.

Koivu dropped me off at home, and on the way he asked shyly, “Maria, do you think I could ask Silja out after this case is over?”

“I guess it’s nice there are two of us who want to wrap this thing up quickly,” I said and laughed. “But she’s only seventeen. If I remember right, she doesn’t turn eighteen until sometime in July.”

“Oh, so you’re saying she’ll think I’m hopelessly old?”

“Well, maybe not hopelessly . . . It’s always a complete mystery what attracts people to each other, so there’s no point trying to predict it,” I said in my best advice-columnist voice. Koivu blushed disarmingly again and then didn’t say another word the rest of the way to my house.

That night I skimmed Noora’s diaries. The first six were the notes of a little girl about school and skating practice, with nothing significant about them other than the handwriting, which was incredibly meticulous for a girl under ten. She had carefully recorded her test scores, as well as tracking her practice time and her scores in her first figure-skating competitions. The tone of the diaries also conveyed that Noora hadn’t had very many friends. The pages even recorded a few adolescent girl dramas. Noora thought her heart would break when someone name Tinja didn’t want to be her BFF anymore. Tinja said Noora thought too much about skating and not enough about horses.

I think horses are totally stupid. I don’t get what Tinja and all the others see in sitting on some big nag like a sack of potatoes. You only get to do jumps after like a year of riding. I can already do double jumps on my skates.

The next two diaries were devoted entirely to skating and a few schoolgirl crushes, which Noora had taken to with a passion.

In the ninth diary, Noora turned twelve, and the entries took on a more contemplative and searching tone. Noora questioned why she went to school, why she skated, why she was in love again, now with a boy one grade older than her. Rami had returned from Canada and taken over as Noora’s coach, and Noora felt as if she had learned more from him in a month than from every trainer up to that point. Other familiar characters also appeared on the pages of the diary.

Ulrika Weissenberg is totally disgusting. She’s always bossing all the skaters around, even though she’s probably never even tied on a pair. Mom thinks Ulrika is sooo beautiful and sophisticated, but I think she looks like an old witch with too much makeup. Like the stepmother in
Snow White
.

The adolescent angst grew worse with Noora criticizing her parents more and more rudely. It was like looking at my own journals. In them my parents almost appeared like monsters during the teenage sections. Was that how it had to be? In ten or so years would the Creature, who was currently playing soccer inside my uterus, hate me and Antti for being fossil dictators?

Mom and Dad had this stupid work party here. Mom was all nervous for like three days cleaning and cooking and trying to lose weight so her ass would fit in some old dress. Dad doesn’t care how he looks, though. All he ever does is sit on the couch drinking beer and eating chips and watching car racing. He usually doesn’t even notice Mom or what she’s wearing, except sometimes when he touches her boobs or ass even in the grocery store like she is some piece of meat or something. They’re both totally gross.

At the party Dad got drunk and Mom was screaming at him for ruining the whole party. I don’t know what happened, though, because I was in my room all night watching tape from Albertville. Viktor Petrenko is amazing. Nancy Kerrigan smiles like a monster. Susanna and Petri were really awesome. Sixth place was good, but they deserved better. There’s only a year until Lillehammer. In five years the Olympics are in Nagano, Japan. I’m going to skate there.

I closed Noora’s tenth diary, since I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open. The Creature was still in the second half of its soccer match, and my pubic symphysis shuddered as it practiced heading the ball. Had Noora’s parents read her diaries, or did they have the self-control to leave them alone? I remembered my attempts to conceal my scribblings from my two curious little sisters. During junior high, one of my precautionary measures had been indecipherable handwriting. Noora’s letters were clear, though, the lines flowing evenly. The first arch of her
m
was much higher than the next; I had read that indicated self-centeredness. The density of the handwriting varied, and the gradual shift from the rounded lettering of a little girl to the intense script of a teenager was apparent in a few of the diaries.

Something bothered me, though. How had Noora reacted to the suggestion she move into pairs skating? Maybe the eleventh diary would have the answer. Skimming rapidly, I soon found a page dated to November two-and-a-half years earlier. The crosses on the
t
’s plunged furiously downward.

Today Rami said I don’t know how to jump. Or he didn’t say exactly that, but he said I might be a better pairs skater than a single. Supposedly my expressiveness and fluidity would be expressed best skating with some boy, and I wouldn’t have to stress about triple jumps anymore because in pairs all you need are toe loops and Salchows.

He said he already found me a good partner and asked how I like Janne Kivi. That pompous hack! I can’t stand how he thinks he’s sooo handsome! I know all the girls drool over his green eyes, but he can’t skate. That’s for sure.

The irritation was short lived, though; by January Noora had changed her mind.

Janne is so nice! Becoming partners was the best thing that ever happened to me. Maybe Rami wanted to sort of make things up to me. The girls are all so jealous, since I get to skate with Janne and we have our very own training sessions and programs. Of course we have problems with timing, and Janne is slow sometimes, but he’s really strong. I was superafraid the first time he lifted me. I weigh way too much these days, almost a hundred pounds. I should probably lose some weight so Janne doesn’t think I’m a fat cow.

After that the entries were more about Janne than anything else. Janne and skating intertwined, with Noora interpreting the hugs after their first successful competition as something more than a friendly gesture. The five-year age gap didn’t seem to bother her one bit, but who was interested in their own classmates at fourteen anyway? I thought of my own first love, Johnny, the dashing guitarist, and could relate perfectly to Noora’s infatuation.

Janne was also important during the period when Hanna announced she was moving out.

I can’t understand it! Mom says she’s found some new guy and she’s going to divorce Dad and move in with him. She says she’s sick of working for free at Dad’s company and as a servant for me and Sami. The guy is some sort of karaoke singer, so what does he see in my ancient, fat, boring mom?

Janne dropped me off at school and asked why I’d been so down at practice, and I told him. He said he knew what it was like because his parents got a divorce when he was twelve and they’re both married again now. No one understands me like Janne does. Rami tried to say something, but what right does he have to talk to me about anything?

“What are you reading?” Antti asked standing in the doorway of our bedroom holding Einstein. “Is it time for the Creature’s evening riot? I thought the cat might want to listen.”

Antti gently set the cat on my belly where the Creature was still in high gear. Now it seemed to have moved on to basketball, because it was bouncing and pushing as if it were trying to shove a ball through my abdominal wall. Einstein tracked the movements curiously for a couple of minutes but then decided he preferred my feet. He knew from experience it would be calmer down there. Curling up in Antti’s arms, I had an odd sensation of closeness with these three beings—the man, the cat, and the gradually quieting child—and quickly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

8

The next morning my first order of business was a trip over to the morgue to see Noora’s body and have a talk with the pathologist who performed the autopsy. Kervinen was an old acquaintance, close to me in age, who changed aftershave brands once a month at a minimum. Maybe it was a way of keeping away the smells of death that dominated the morgue despite the cold.

I didn’t particularly like looking at bodies, but I had become used to it. I rarely knew the victims when they were alive, and even seeing them as corpses somehow made them feel more real. Bodies couldn’t talk, but they still told a lot about how these people had died. Ideally we got to see the scene of the crime because it usually provided indications of what had really happened. In Noora’s case we didn’t know where that was.

“The report is ready. I just faxed it over,” Kervinen said casually when I met him in the hall. Today’s aftershave smelled of sandalwood and leather, and for an artificial scent, it was relatively pleasant. Kervinen enjoyed trying to guess at criminals’ MOs, although his reports themselves were always direct and matter of fact. Once in court I had heard him testify at length about how the scrapes on a victim’s back and dents in her ankles indicated that she had been dragged unconscious through a forest. Once the presentation had gone on for fifteen minutes, the judge lost his temper. But in the end, the judgment came down based significantly on Kervinen’s testimony.

“Noora Nieminen is here. I’ve never heard of anyone being beaten to death with ice skates, even though I guess they are pretty sharp. Wasn’t there a hockey match where a skate hit a player in the neck and opened up his jugular and he almost bled out? Stupid sport. I prefer watching golf.”

“These were figure skates.”

“Yeah, the ones that have spikes. Now those leave a mark. Come and see.”

Noora’s body lay naked on the stainless-steel table. She was covered with bruises and cuts from the blades of the skates and the pathologist’s scalpel. She had been hit with a skate so hard on the eyebrow that her left eyeball had popped partially out of the socket. There were also nasty gashes on her neck and wrists. Clothing had mostly protected her breasts and thighs, but apparently the points of the skates had torn parts of her clothes, so there were also some slashes on her chest. Noora looked so young and fragile lying there on the examination table, I felt as if I should pull a blanket over her to warm her up.

“Those gashes would have bled quite a bit, but they weren’t enough to kill her by themselves. The hit to the back of the head was what did it. I’d say our attacker first hit her on the top of the head with a skate and then slammed her against something hard, probably a rock, which broke her skull.”

“Was she conscious up until then?”

“Probably, unless the blow to her forehead knocked her out momentarily.”

“Can you say anything about the attacker from the victim’s wounds?”

“Just that the attacker was taller than her, but that isn’t much, since she was only five foot one. Strong little thing, though, very developed musculature for a sixteen-year-old. She was some sort of star skater, right? The only sports I watch are golf and soccer. Aren’t they supposed to try to stay skinny? That would explain the phentermine in her urine, since she wasn’t overweight.”

“What is phentermine?”

“An appetite suppressant you find in weight-loss drugs like Mirapront. It’s a close relative of amphetamine. Judging from the phentermine content in her urine, I’d say she took it at most twenty-four hours before her death.”

“Is it on the doping list?”

“I’ll have to check. Hang on . . .” Kervinen took a thick tome from a shelf and flipped through it. “Yes.”

I looked at Noora. The muscles at her torso were slack in death, and she wasn’t bony but also wasn’t pudgy by any means. Her pert round breasts would probably have sagged more if she weren’t such an athlete, but heavy training had removed all the extra fat. No doctor would have prescribed weight-loss medication for a normal-weight sixteen-year-old girl, would they? And why on earth would Noora endanger her career by doping? Maybe she didn’t know what she was being fed. Had one of her coaches given her the phentermine?

“Anything else strange?”

“Not really. She probably wasn’t a virgin, but you know kids these days . . .” Kervinen blushed. I had noticed before that anything having to do with sexuality was somehow foreign to him. That seemed odd, given that he studied bodies for a living.

“I imagine you already knew there weren’t any signs of sexual assault. The only obvious clue we found about the attacker was the piece of fingernail caught in her hair, and that indicates a female.”

Instantly my mouth went dry, and it took me a few seconds before I could get any sound out.

“A fingernail? What? I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

“It was in the report. But of course you haven’t read that yet. Anyway, in the girl’s hair on the left side, we found a piece of fingernail with dark-red nail polish. The color was close to the same as dried blood, which is why we didn’t notice it immediately. The nail is at the lab,” Kervinen continued.

He probably realized from my expression that I had already identified its owner. Ulrika Weissenberg would have some explaining to do.

“The girl’s own nails were unfortunately short, so we didn’t get much from under them,” Kervinen complained. “It was almost like she didn’t get a real chance to defend herself. But everyone responds instinctively if someone starts hitting them.”

I thought of the rage that must have been behind the blows directed at Noora, and fury flared in my own mind too. What right did this killer have to shatter the dreams of Noora and so many others? My eyes began to water from the sheer anger. Kervinen noticed.

“This isn’t nice to look at,” he said, embarrassed. “And you’re in a tender state anyway.”

“Pregnancy is a good excuse for acting like a human for once,” I said testily. “Otherwise cops aren’t allowed to cry, right?”

“Come on. We’d never get anywhere if we started bawling over every carcass.”

“Carcass? Is that what you have to call them to stand what you do? Just be careful not to end up as dead inside as those carcasses of yours, you bastard!” I yelled. Kervinen’s distressed expression told me I was venting something at him that wasn’t his fault. I needed to get out of there.

I looked at Noora one more time, her skin the color of raw bread dough, sliced by dry wounds; her whole eye; and her calves and their short, black stubble. Gently I brushed her leg as if in farewell and then I left without a word.

Somehow I made it back to work. Of course Kervinen was right. No one could survive half a lifetime in a morgue if they let emotion take over. I too had developed my own self-defense mechanisms over the years that helped me deal with my job and all the pain and violence it involved. Usually I just barreled forward without thinking about what I was doing. Last winter an escaped convict had abducted one of my colleagues, Palo, and they had both died in the siege. I could have just as easily ended up being the one kidnapped, since it had been Palo and I who had sent the kidnapper to prison. That case had made me consider my chances of survival in this job. Because I was also a lawyer, I could just as easily have gone looking for something to do that involved reading books and shuffling paper instead of dodging psychopaths. But that wasn’t me. Maternity leave would be enough of a break from police work. I was sure that after a few months, I would be raring to get back to work. I guess I was even a little afraid of stopping. In a way, it was good that I didn’t have any experience with babies. This would thrust me into a new world where hopefully there wouldn’t be too much extra time to brood on past sorrows.

The sun showed part of its face through a break in the clouds but took fright at what it saw and went back into hiding. Making a call down to the evidence room, I learned that Noora’s bag and clothes had come back from the lab, as had Janne’s car. I went to have a look at the bag and the skates, which apparently had five different sets of fingerprints on them. Someone would have to return Janne’s car, so I thought about doing it myself.

At the door to the evidence room, I ran into Ström, whose acne-scarred face was redder than normal. I guessed he must have spent the previous night hunched over a glass somewhere. I didn’t have the impression that alcohol was a problem for Ström. He got good and drunk maybe once a month, but otherwise he just had the occasional beer. I asked whether something had happened over the weekend that I hadn’t heard about, and Ström grunted before replying.

“Another attack on a little girl. This time farther west. Tried to make her perform oral sex on him, but a passerby caught him in the act. He got away again. There’s a big headline in one of the tabloids about how useless we are.”

“This molester has gotten awfully active. Any description?”

“The sketch artist is going to be doing a picture this afternoon based on what the passerby saw. The girl was in shock and can’t remember anything. The bastard dropped a glove, but I went and looked and it’s worthless.”

Ström was clearly irritated. This molester had become an obsession for him. Maybe he thought that catching him would guarantee him the promotion.

Playing magnanimous, I said, “If you get a good drawing, you could have it printed in the local papers and maybe have it shown on
Police TV
. Since he’s been so active lately, maybe he’s getting cocky and will make a slip. Was the MO the same as before?”

The molester had asked the little girls whether they had seen his missing puppy and described the dog in detail, sometimes even showing a picture of a cute little collie. When the girl got excited about the dog, the man attacked her.

“We haven’t been able to interview the girl yet. Koivu can handle it, though. We’ll just have to line up a social worker again. I can’t deal with these blubbering little girls any more,” Ström said irritably. He had a ten-year-old daughter, Jenna, who lived with her mother. The Ströms had divorced a few years earlier. I was certain he thought of his own daughter every time he interviewed one of these victims. I didn’t say that out loud, though. Ström would just deny it anyway. He thought cops were better off feeling nothing, and if you did have any inklings of human emotion, it was best to keep them to yourself.

I was happy when Ström moved on and I could get back to work. Even though he constantly complained about how busy he was, he seemed to have a surprising amount of time to meddle in my cases or just come and stand in my door making wisecracks, usually under the guise of inquiring after the expecting mother’s health. I generally got rid of him by complaining about having to go to the bathroom every ten minutes, which wasn’t even true.

“Can I take this upstairs? It’s easier to take notes in my office,” I asked the officer covering the evidence room, who was so engrossed in his betting tip sheets that he barely noticed me enter. When no answer came, I took the bag of clothing and the big sack that had Noora’s equipment bag inside and headed for my office. I wanted to be alone with Noora’s belongings, so I turned on the red light outside my door, grinned at the photo of Hugh Grant in the collage on my wall, and started inspecting Noora’s clothes.

The underwear was gray heathered cotton. The pants were undamaged but smeared with dirt, the bra torn and bloody. The blow that hit between her breasts must have been a hard one. Noora had been wearing a violet cotton pullover and an orange anorak, which were now tattered. I found it odd that there weren’t any rips in the backs of the arms. If Noora had lifted her hands to defend herself, that was where the blows would have landed.

The anorak was the same style you saw on every third kid these days. I had an olive-green version myself, but I hadn’t been wearing it this spring because pulling it over my belly was nearly impossible. The back of the orange coat was smeared with dirt and stiff with dried blood. Blood had also spread onto the faded purple jeans and thick-soled ankle boots. Noora’s clothes were typical for a girl her age. Around her neck she had been wearing a silver Kalevala Jewelry confirmation cross.

The contents of the sports bag still smelled of blood and dried sweat. I opened the report from the forensic expert who had inspected the bag. The bloody skates had been on top; under them was a wet towel, which was also smeared with blood. The towel also had Noora’s hair on it, as if the killer had tried to wipe the blood off her.

The rest of the bag was full of more training equipment: a sweater, thick tights, thin cotton socks and sports bra, all carefully folded and ready for the washing machine. The contents of the makeup bag included shower gel and moisturizer, both organic cosmetics not tested on animals. I remembered what Ström had been saying about his child molester who enticed little girls with pictures of a puppy. Although in many ways Noora handled her life like an adult, she still could have fallen for that trick. Maybe I shouldn’t completely rule out the child molester theory.

Noora’s wallet contained a debit card, sixty marks in cash, a health insurance card with a picture from a couple of years ago showing a very thin-faced and somber-eyed version of her, a library card, a bus pass, and various photographs. The only familiar people in the pictures were Silja and Janne. If this hadn’t been official evidence, I might have nicked the picture of Silja and given it to Koivu. The picture was taken in half profile, her clean features and brilliant smile like a movie star. Janne looked straight at the camera as in a passport picture, his expression serious. But in another, a crumpled newspaper image shoved in a plastic protector, Janne smiled a smile I had never seen on him even after a successful skating performance. Who had that smile been directed at? Janne sort of looked to the side, past the camera. He was the only person with two pictures in Noora’s wallet. She didn’t carry her parents’ photos with her.