Death Spiral (15 page)

In the bag there was also a calendar, a couple of schoolbooks, and then on the bottom what I’d most been hoping to see: Noora’s sixteenth diary, this one covered in blue fabric with an oriental pattern. Opening it at random, I came across blank pages—Noora had only filled it halfway. I flipped back toward the beginning until a string of capital letters on one page caught my eye.

I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT HAVING SOMEONE TO LOVE ME!

Reading on through the normal-sized text, I learned of Noora’s pain that Janne didn’t think of her as anything more than a skating partner. Noora felt alone everywhere except when she was skating with Janne. Skating kept her alive. Skating and Janne gave her life meaning. But Noora would have been ready to give up skating if only Janne . . . but no, it was not to be. Even so, Noora loved Janne and proclaimed it over and over in capital letters.

It is so easy to dismiss overwrought teenagers, to belittle their concerns, which seem so small from an adult perspective: low test scores, acne, unrequited infatuations.
These problems will pass,
we adults say,
forgotten in a matter of weeks.
I had spent a lot of time learning not to dismiss my own emotions as a teenager—the feeling of strangeness in my own body and with my family and my hometown, my unrequited first love, my distress over my inability to act like a typical girl. Now I could read my old diaries without any shame, and sometimes I wished I could pull the fourteen-year-old who scribbled them into my arms and assure her that life would be good someday. I had probably written just like Noora, in almost identical words:

If only there were someone who accepted me for who I am. Who would let me cry when I want to cry and laugh when I want to laugh, instead of criticizing my clothes and hair like Mom and Dad, and nagging me about a few extra points like Rami, that stupid bastard. I can’t stand listening to the girls at school. All they ever talk about is makeup. Maybe they should, you know, read a book someday. I feel so DIFFERENT everywhere I go. If only I had some kindred spirit I could confide in. Back when Mom and Dad were maybe getting divorced I thought Janne could be that for me, but I was wrong. He’s so handsome and so nice when he wants to be, but he doesn’t care about me.

IF ONLY SOMEBODY LOVED ME!

The narrow lines written in black felt-tipped pen began trembling and tangling together. The words turned unrecognizable as tears blurred my eyes. It was so damn unfair that Noora was never given the opportunity to live out that dream. I didn’t even try not to cry, although I felt I’d done little else the past few days. I was glad I was hidden in my office behind that red light. I didn’t want any more comments about the “delicate condition” all the men in the department thought I was in.

Once I had cried myself out, I picked up the plastic bag containing the skates. Near the toe picks the boot leather was splattered with blood, which reminded me of Snow White’s mother pricking her finger at the windowsill. The skates obviously hadn’t been used much yet, because the uppers of the boots were still smooth without any spots worn from rubbing. The blades were black with blood, even though the forensic lab technicians had tried to scrape off most of it.

According to the report, they had also found hair, skin, pieces of bone, mud, and grass on the blades. The last two, along with the dirt and chips of rock found embedded in her skull, indicated that the crime had occurred somewhere outdoors. I continued reading the report. The fibers and dust vacuumed from the clothes were still being analyzed, and we would have those results in a few days. In one of the lace hooks of her boots, the technicians had found a scrap of black plastic, the kind used for garbage bags. If she was transported wrapped in plastic, tracking down the vehicle might be difficult. But why hadn’t the murderer left Noora in the garbage bag? Why had they gone to the trouble of ripping it off when they shoved Noora in the trunk of Kati Järvenperä’s car? Could there have been some sort of symbol on the garbage bag that would have revealed the murderer’s identity?

And that dark-red fingernail . . . I wanted Ulrika Weissenberg at the station pronto. I wasn’t going to settle for playing the uninvited guest at her posh house again. Now I would be the one with the home court advantage.

“Hi. This is Sergeant Maria Kallio from the Espoo Police. I’d like to meet with you at the main police station as soon as possible.”

“And why is that?” Weissenberg asked. “I assume it has something to do with Noora’s murder.”

“Exactly. Would two o’clock work?”

I was surprised when Ulrika Weissenberg agreed. I considered the fingernail. Asking for a sample for comparison would require strong evidence. I also wanted Ulrika Weissenberg’s fingerprints. In my mind I listed all the people who could have touched Noora’s new skates. In addition to the salesperson and Janne, there were both of the coaches, Rami and Elena; Silja; Noora’s family; and maybe Ulrika. We would have to get prints from all of them. Pihko could work with Forensics on that, since he probably had the most tact of all of us. Although surely Koivu would want to go along to collect Silja Taskinen’s fingerprints.

I was just going to give Pihko a buzz when my phone rang.

“Hello, this is Kauko Nieminen. How is my daughter’s murder investigation progressing?”

“It’s progressing. The forensic laboratory is currently analyzing material found on the body,” I said stiffly. The word “body” felt strange, but what else could I have said? Deceased?

“My wife is extremely upset you set Teräsvuori free. She’s afraid he’ll do something to our son, Sami, next.”

“Teräsvuori happens to have an extremely good alibi for the time of the murder.”

“You don’t know that man! He’s a snake who can get people to say anything for him!”

What did Kauko Nieminen really think about Vesku Teräsvuori and his wife’s affair? Did he still blame Hanna, and did he actually think she was indirectly responsible for Noora’s death?

“Has Teräsvuori been in contact with you over the past few days?” I asked.

“He had the nerve to send flowers, a really pricy bouquet of carnations. I don’t understand where he gets money for things like that. He’s always sending Hanna expensive jewelry and things too. He can’t be making very much doing his karaoke thing.”

“What was the message with the flowers?”

“Just your usual sappy condolences. ‘My dearest Hanna and her family.’” There was genuine loathing in Kauko Nieminen’s voice, which was justified. First Teräsvuori had seduced his wife and then stolen his family’s peace of mind. Maybe Nieminen loved his wife deeply. How were any of us to know? Maybe Hanna’s romance with Teräsvuori had been a real tragedy for Kauko.

“So if it’s not Teräsvuori, you still don’t know who killed our Noora? What about her funeral? Ulrika wanted to reserve the Espoo Cathedral, but we have to know when because I guess the summer wedding season is about to start.”

“The autopsy and other tests are already complete. We can probably release the body to you immediately. I also have Noora’s things she had with her that night. Clothes, wallet, and such. Do you want them back? We’ll have to keep the skates, though.”

“I never want to see those again!” Nieminen spat, sorrow welling up under his facade of self-control.

“I can have someone bring over the rest of her belongings,” I said quickly, then explained I also needed the family’s fingerprints.

“Were you the one who interrogated Teräsvuori?” Nieminen asked as I was ending the call. When I confirmed that I was, he said pointedly, “He’s quite the Casanova, isn’t he? Maybe you should put a man on the job.”

Nieminen could not have said more clearly that he didn’t trust my abilities as a police investigator. The beginnings of sympathy I had momentarily felt were instantly snuffed out, and I barely managed to keep myself from slamming the phone down in his ear. People said all kinds of things when they were mourning. If the officer investigating Noora’s death had been a man, Kauko Nieminen would have just found some other fault in him. But it still riled me, this surprisingly ingrained assumption that women didn’t have any business in this line of work, other than as secretaries and social workers. My own group of friends was mostly made up of people for whom gender was not a person’s defining characteristic, so prejudice surprised and irritated me.

What kind of world would my little Creature live in when it was my age? I didn’t know what the baby’s sex was, and I didn’t want to know. I had been a disappointment because I was a girl—something repeated to me many times as a child—and my parents’ disappointment only multiplied as their following children were also the wrong sex. In a way, my childhood had become more real for me over the course of this pregnancy. No longer was it like a translucent veil of memory but instead more like a mole or scar I carried with me throughout my life. That was precisely what made having a baby so frightening, the knowledge that there were so many thousands of mistakes I could make. In thirty years this child would be lying on a psychiatrist’s couch blubbering about all the neuroses I had heaped on him or her. Or drinking them away at a local bar.

Shaking off these unpleasant thoughts, I headed for lunch. The sausage soup was tasteless stomach filler, and I wanted some rye bread with it, but I’d left my heartburn medication at home.

Pihko happened to be lunching at the same time, so I was able to delegate the fingerprinting to him. He would start with Ulrika Weissenberg, who we both expected to resist.

“When you talk to Janne Kivi, tell him his car is free too. And check into the trash bag thing.”

Pihko’s eyes went wide, but as a well-bred person he emptied his mouth before asking why.

“The shopping center garbage will have been emptied ages ago, and that’s where we would have hunted for the bloody trash bag, but maybe there’s still a way to connect the piece of plastic Forensics found on Noora to a certain store or company. Oh, and by the way . . . the gold BMW might not be Weissenberg’s only car. Maybe they have a Renault Clio too. Will you check that?”

I knew these were disjointed ideas, but we had to branch out in more directions with this investigation.

Just then Puupponen came by to ask me about another case, and ended up dragging me to his office to thrash it out. He was a talkative kid from Savo, and at two, the time of my interview with Ulrika Weissenberg, I had my work cut out tearing myself away from him.

By then Pihko was able to report that Weissenberg did have another car, a black Volvo station wagon. Unfortunately that would have melted into the mass of traffic much more easily than the BMW. Pihko promised to do a quick review of the eyewitness reports.

The piece of fingernail I had requested had come over from Forensics. It was maybe an eighth of an inch long, and the tip had broken unevenly. The polish looked the same color as Weissenberg’s, but you couldn’t base an investigation simply on a visual evaluation.

Weissenberg arrived two minutes early. She had obviously come straight from the hairdresser, her black hair piled in a curly beehive. Her makeup was in purple hues, nicely matching the dark violet of her skirt suit and silk sweater. How long did she spend every morning doing herself up? I glanced at Weissenberg’s nails. They were long and painted flawlessly in crimson. None of them was any shorter than the others, although I was sure I had seen one of them broken during our previous meetings.

Pihko began with the fingerprinting. Weissenberg was surprisingly accommodating once we told her why we needed them, although she did demand to visit the ladies’ room to wash her hands afterward. I led her to the end of the hall and waited. She took an amazingly long time just to wash her hands. When she came out of the bathroom, her cheeks were more purple than before, and the color had spread nearly to the tips of her large ear lobes. One more brush of the rouge and she would have looked more like someone who had just received a beat down than a woman with too much makeup.

“I hear you’ve taken over arrangements for Noora’s funeral,” I said, shooting for a conversational tone. I knew it didn’t sound natural, though.

“Yes. Poor Hanna isn’t up to it, and Kauko has enough on his hands with his business. When will the body be released?”

Saying the word “body” in connection to Noora seemed significantly easier for Weissenberg than for me. No doubt she would arrange a marvelous funeral for Noora, but hopefully no saber arch of ice skates for the casket. I told Weissenberg that Noora could be released immediately.

“I understand you happened along just as some reporters were interrupting practice,” Weissenberg said in an almost friendly tone as I opened my office door for her.

Pihko was still gone taking the fingerprint package downstairs, so I tried to keep the conversation going. “I’m actually surprised they’ve done such a good job leaving the skating team alone. Noora’s death is a hard enough experience for Janne and Silja without being interviewed about it on TV. But we need the public’s help solving this case, which is why we announced that Noora had been killed. How many requests have you gotten from the press?”

“Many. But couldn’t we write some sort of remembrance about Noora now, or do you still have something against that?”

“Of course not. Please just avoid sharing any details we haven’t released about the case.” Then, as Pihko returned to the room, I moved back into interrogation mode. “Has anything new occurred to you about last Wednesday evening?

“Is that all this is about?” Ulrika said. “Harping on the same things over and over?”

“You said you had a fight with Noora. Where in the ice arena did this fight occur?”

“In the dressing room hallway.”

“Was anyone else there?”

“No. Silja and Noora came out of the dressing room at the same time, but she didn’t stay to listen to our conversation. Although I imagine everyone could hear us.”

“How was Noora’s hair during your conversation? Was it in a bun, a ponytail, or down?”

Confusion spread across Weissenberg’s face, followed by misgiving. She was clearly trying to figure out where my questions were aiming. When she was found, Noora’s shoulder-length hair was down, but when she was skating she probably had it pulled back with something. How easy was it for a nail covered in several layers of polish to split? I had never learned to wear my nails long, because the few times I had tried, they were constantly breaking.