Death Spiral (20 page)

“Grab my phone out of my pocket and call for backup,” I gasped. The man whimpered under me, the pathetic little shit.

Although these kinds of lone degenerates received a lot of attention in the press, I reserved the depth of my hatred for the big fish—the ones who flew abroad a couple times a year and bought a child or two for a week, the ones who protected their sick indulgences through official hierarchies.

Together, Koivu and I pulled the man up out of the mud. His face wasn’t familiar. It was small and angular, strangely featureless. The picture of the dog had fallen to the ground. The mottled brown spaniel pup stared up with big, wet eyes. Was that really this man’s dog? The little girl was still standing bewildered, her pink-and-violet jacket half open, a school backpack with flowers on it lying at her feet. I asked her name and address, but she couldn’t speak. She was lucky to get away with only a scare, but how long would the scare haunt her?

The backup patrol seemed to take forever in coming, though my watch claimed only six minutes had passed. Koivu held the child molester, who looked at least as frightened as the little girl, and he whined pitifully when the uniformed officers finally showed up and roughly handcuffed him.

“Take him to the station and notify Sergeant Ström that we collared the guy he’s been looking for,” I said. Koivu and I would take Laura, who had finally managed to tell us her name, to her mother’s workplace, which was where she had been headed.

“Is that man going to jail now?” Laura asked shyly as I fastened her seat belt in the back of the Lada.

“Yes, for a long time. He’s done a lot of other bad things too,” I said reassuringly. Laura didn’t show any external signs of injury, but maybe we would still run her by the health center once we found her mother. She worked at a pharmacy five miles away in Tapiola and was horrified when she heard what had happened. The child molester had been a general topic of conversation and fear in the area, and Laura’s mother blamed herself for letting her little girl walk alone after school. We took Laura and her mother to the health center—if nothing else, the mother seemed like she might need a sedative. Ström would interview them in the next couple of days.

I understood the alarm Laura’s mother was experiencing. Letting children walk to and from school was normal in Finland, and most people only worried about busy streets. How else was a working parent supposed to handle school drop-offs and pickups anyway? Were they supposed to hire someone? With what money? Those were the questions Laura’s mother kept repeating, probably afraid she would be charged for neglecting her eight-year-old.

“Are you satisfied?” Koivu asked as we finally headed back to the station.

“Oh, because we nabbed the child molester instead of Ström? I don’t know. I just feel sort of empty.”

Koivu grinned at the metaphor, since my belly seemed anything but empty. But I didn’t feel any sense of triumph. It was pure luck that we were in the right place at the right time, not a result of our brilliant police skills. We could just as soon thank Laura’s guardian angel for catching the child molester.

We were approaching the Matinkylä exit, where the ice rink was located. “Let’s not go back to work quite yet. Let’s go back and have a look at the forest where they found Noora’s bag,” I said. “Our little tour of the neighborhood got interrupted.”

Koivu shrugged and took the exit. Just then a familiar white van passed us.
Tommy’s Gym
was printed on the side in green letters. In all the excitement of the day, I had completely forgotten about my adventure the previous night. Who was driving? Liikanen or Grigorieva? I wondered if they were they on their way to the ice rink.

“Pull up next to them,” I told Koivu when the van turned into the lane for the gas station and stopped for a red light. Elena Grigorieva sat behind the wheel, her daughter, Irina, next to her. They didn’t look down at our Lada, talking heatedly to each other, Irina shaking her head and Elena gesticulating wildly. When the light changed they turned into the service station.

“Follow them. I have something I want to ask her about those skate guards.”

We pulled into the service station, where Grigorieva was filling up the van at one of the automatic pumps. She seemed to be having a hard time with it, as if she couldn’t stand the smell.

“Hello, Mrs. Grigorieva,” I said, although I didn’t quite know how I should be addressing her. “Mrs. Grigorieva” sounded somehow belittling, as if she weren’t one of the best figure-skating trainers in the world. Hearing my voice, Grigorieva started so violently that she almost dropped the gas hose, and the reeking liquid splashed on the ground and her left shoe.

“Oh my God! You frightened me!”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to ask you a question. Were you the one who gave Noora the weight-loss pills?”

“What?” Elena Grigorieva placed the gas hose nozzle back in the pump, pulled a paper tissue out of her pocket, and used it to protect her hand as she screwed the gas cap on. Then she turned back to me with a strange expression on her face. “What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about any pills! Noora didn’t need anything like that!”

“Maybe not, but in her urine we found phentermine, which is used as an appetite suppressant. And it counts as doping.”

“Doping! I would have killed Noora if she—”

Grigorieva realized too late what had escaped her lips. A hand flew to her mouth as if to pull the words back. Was that what had happened? Had Grigorieva found out that Noora was experimenting with drugs and they’d fought about it? But I knew how easily words like that slipped out, meaning nothing.

“You would have killed Noora if you you’d known she was risking her skating career by doping?” I said probingly.

Elena Grigorieva didn’t answer, instead glancing at the van window, where her daughter was staring at us in surprise.

“But I didn’t know! I swear! I would have intervened.” Grigorieva was already lifting her hand to the door handle, but then she continued talking. “Were you the one who got caught in the gym last night?” she asked, obviously trying to change the subject.

“Yes, that was me.”

“That security system has caused problems before.” Whenever Grigorieva got mad, her Russian accent came to the fore, her
l
’s softening and her
s
’s hissing, but her Finnish was still impeccable. “Tomi should have had it fixed already, even if it meant taking out a loan! Who knows what could happen?”

Elena Grigorieva’s anxiety seemed genuine, but it was strange how worked up she was. I thought I’d looked into Tomi Liikanen’s businesses carefully enough; now I got the feeling I had missed something. But what?

Grigorieva said she had to go and jumped into the van. Once I was back in the Lada, Koivu headed for the forest, but we didn’t make it far before the phone rang.

One of my old “clients,” a low-level dealer named Tirkkonen, who had just been released from prison a couple of weeks earlier, had been picked up selling marijuana outside a school. They needed me back at the station to question him, since I had handled his first arrest as one of my first jobs after joining the Espoo PD. That time the drug deal had been accompanied by aggravated assault, but as a first-time offender, Tirkkonen had only served six months. On the inside he’d had plenty of time to build relationships with new distributors. I no longer believed prison reformed anyone. It certainly didn’t turn Tirkkonen into an upstanding member of society. It wasn’t going to do that to the pedophile either, or to whoever killed Noora.

But was there a better system? I didn’t have the energy to think about that, so I just headed off to put one more crook behind bars for a few months.

11

“Let’s go out to eat,” I suggested to Antti almost as soon as I arrived home. Einstein butted my legs expectantly—he had smelled the salmon in the grocery bag I was carrying and wanted his share. In our family, all meat and fish was subject to a cat tax of approximately ten percent of total weight. Shooing him away, I put the salmon in the freezer.

“Go out to eat? Why not. You worked all weekend. Do you have something specific in mind?”

“All I’ve had today is one bowl of lousy soup at a diner. Tex-Mex would hit the spot. I hear the Fishmaid has good enchiladas.”

“The Fishmaid? Do they even serve food there? Isn’t that more of a bar and karaoke joint?”

“Pihko says they have good food, and he’s a lot pickier than I am. Come on, let’s go. Pretty soon we won’t ever be able to go out together without a babysitter. And besides, I have a reason to celebrate. I solved one of Ström’s cases,” I said, grimacing bitterly at the memory of Ström bursting into the room in the middle of my interrogation with Tirkkonen, the drug dealer.

“You must be pretty goddamn pleased with yourself!” he had growled before the clerk even had a chance to turn off the recorder.

“Shouldn’t you be thanking me?”

“Eat shit, Kallio. Pretty soon I’m going to start believing God is a woman just like you feminazis think. There’s no other explanation for that kind of luck.”

“It
was
just luck, Ström. Like you finding those skate guards. Now beat it, I’m in the middle of something. We can talk later if you want.”

Once I had finished Tirkkonen’s interrogation, Ström had already left. The duty officer suspected he’d headed over to his usual bar to celebrate wringing a confession of sorts out of the guy we’d caught. I didn’t want to think about Ström—I knew things were going to be difficult with him for a while.

Lieutenant Taskinen was leaving work at the same time as I was. He asked about the Noora Nieminen investigation and congratulated me for nabbing the child molester.

“The most important thing is that we got him, not who actually made the collar,” he added, as if trying to convince himself.

“Tell that to Ström.”

“Oh, didn’t I hear you got trapped somewhere in a gym or something? What happened there?”

I told Taskinen about the incident and then asked a few questions about Tomi Liikanen. Taskinen didn’t know much about him, had only met him a few times in passing. According to Silja, Liikanen didn’t talk much but did plenty of looking. Taskinen’s voice contained a hint of paternal irritation.

My boss hadn’t heard about the skate guard episode, and even though I hadn’t planned to, I told him. Taskinen’s usually pale face turned red with anger. After we stepped off the elevator, he cornered me in the parking garage and asked if I wanted anything done about it.

I shrugged. “Fate handled it for us already. Let’s just see what we can get from the guards.”

Taskinen rotated his thick wedding band and seemed to think. “I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but . . . it’s looking like you and Ström won’t have any reason to compete after all. My position isn’t opening up.”

I swallowed. Taskinen was obviously trying to hide his disappointment, but his tone was still bleak and a couple of notes lower than normal. I didn’t quite know what I felt. I liked Taskinen a lot, and it would have been a shame to only see him a few times a month. On the other hand, he would have been good at the job, and of course I was hungry for a promotion myself.

“What happened?”

“A detective superintendent from Turku, an old friend of the police chief, has said he’s interested in the position. And of course they want someone who’s never going to investigate his predecessor’s mismanagement. They’re shitting their pants about that,” Taskinen said. I had never heard him swear before—he was always so restrained. “And so Ström and I are going to stay here in our old jobs while you go on maternity leave and then hopefully come back soon,” Taskinen continued.

“Why wouldn’t I come back?” I opened my car door and then slapped Taskinen on the back in farewell.

On the way home, I had realized I was starving. That often happened to me after something spiked my adrenaline, as if my metabolism had quadrupled while we were stalking the child molester.

At seven o’clock we were sitting in the Fishmaid with menus in hand. The restaurant had reopened under this name the previous fall, but the same space had previously housed a Chinese restaurant, a pizzeria, and a brewpub, at the least. The Fishmaid seemed to be a sort of Tex-Mex karaoke bar, with live music on Fridays. Vesku Teräsvuori MC’d karaoke nights here on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, from six to eleven, according to the poster.

The large dining area was mostly deserted, and nostalgic dance music was playing over the speakers. I felt like eating something spicy, even though I knew the heartburn afterward would be terrible. Before my pregnancy I hadn’t even known what heartburn was, but now it was a daily companion. Interesting to see what other new things I would learn about my own body before my baby popped.

I took the risk and ordered the vegetarian enchiladas while Antti settled for tacos. Once we had our beers in front of us, Antti a Sol and me a nonalcoholic beer, I told him what I’d heard from Taskinen about the whole promotion situation.

“Oh. That’s lame. I’m sorry. I know you really wanted it,” Antti said.

He was in an abnormally good mood because he had just finished grading the last of his exams. Once he finished working through a few late assignments, he would have several months of blissful, uninterrupted research time ahead of him. We chatted about this and that, and planned our summer vacation. I would have liked to go sailing, but that wasn’t exactly recommended for women in their third trimester.

“We could just stick close to shore near a town with a hospital. Like Tammisaari,” Antti suggested.

“I was thinking about going there anyway for the birth. Remember when we visited the Jensens there? It was so relaxed and unhospital-like. And Eva said they never got bossed around.”

“So you’re not going to let the midwives tell you what to do either? Look, there’s karaoke tonight. Isn’t that the guy from that bachelor party?”

“Yeah, you feel like singing?” I said quickly so Antti wouldn’t realize Vesku was also one of the people I was investigating. But Antti wasn’t so easily fooled.

“Wasn’t there some karaoke guy who was stalking Noora Nieminen? Is that why we came here, Maria? You didn’t want to spend time with me; you just wanted to work!”

Antti’s good mood vanished. We had had this same conversation too many times before, arguing over what the right balance should be between work and our private lives. Of course Antti brought work home sometimes too. When he was working on his dissertation, he’d spent hours sitting in front of the computer. But because I didn’t understand the mathematical category theory he was researching, we didn’t talk much about what he was doing. I didn’t tell him much about my work either, but sometimes I did vent about something that was stressing me or some stupid thing Ström had done. A police officer’s job was so different from a mathematician’s, although both were about solving complex problems. Antti had never learned to accept the element of danger in my work, which was why I’d given him redacted accounts of both the previous evening’s adventure at the gym and that day’s capture of the child molester.

“I just wanted to follow up on this guy’s alibi,” I finally admitted, a little embarrassed. “It’s a little too airtight for comfort.”

Of course Antti had every right to be hurt that I wasn’t concentrating on him alone, even though I had made it out that way.

“Actually, you could do me a favor,” I said. “Go ask the bartender when they’re going to start karaoke.”

“Ask yourself. Here comes the waiter with our food,” Antti said.

The waiter said the karaoke show would start as soon as someone wanted to sing. Perhaps we were interested . . .

Antti grimaced, and I said no, definitely not. Apparently Teräsvuori was in the back waiting for singers to show up. Theoretically his shift started at six, but what if he had managed to slip away last Wednesday night? It wasn’t impossible. He could have just said he had an upset stomach and pretended to ensconce himself in the restroom.

My enchiladas were spicy and filling, and I set a speed-eating record gobbling them down. Afterward I felt as if I were expecting triplets. I was just thinking about having a look around to see where Teräsvuori was hiding out when I noticed another familiar face at the door. Was Tomi Liikanen into karaoke?

Liikanen marched straight to the bar, asked something, and then disappeared into the kitchen. It seemed as if he knew the restaurant staff quite well. He wasn’t looking for Vesku Teräsvuori, was he? But why?

After a while Liikanen and Teräsvuori came out of the kitchen together and sat down at a corner table. I turned my chair so they wouldn’t recognize me and pulled out my makeup bag. Using the mirror in my compact, I could see at least a little of what they were up to. Although no one was paying any attention to me, I pretended to fix my mascara. Antti glanced at me in confusion but then just shrugged. Apparently he was used to coming in second place married to a police detective.

Tomi Liikanen seemed to be drinking coffee, and Teräsvuori was emptying a bottle of beer. Based on the way Teräsvuori was waving his arms around, they were having an intense conversation. Liikanen sat stiffly, just shaking his head occasionally.

How did these two know each other? It was strange that Hanna Nieminen never mentioned a friendship between Teräsvuori and Elena Grigorieva’s husband. Or hadn’t she known? Maybe the two men only met after Teräsvuori became a nightmare for the Nieminen family?

I was seriously confused. In the mirror I saw the waiter come over and say something to Teräsvuori, who then headed up to the karaoke microphone. Apparently his first victim had arrived. Liikanen stayed sitting at the table and after a moment took out his phone and started tapping at it. I was starting to think I might pee my pants. Where was the ladies’ room? Could I get there from our table without Liikanen or Teräsvuori noticing? My need to escape increased when a shrill female voice started warbling “A Million Roses.”

I slipped out into the lobby, which was where the restrooms were. Relieved, I hurried in, but getting myself into a stall required some considerable acrobatics, since the door opened inward. I felt fat and clumsy and like my brain was turning to mush. What did it mean that Teräsvuori and Liikanen knew each other?

After wriggling back out of the stall and powdering my nose, where the first freckles of spring had finally appeared, despite the lack of sun, I walked out of the restaurant, curious if there was another entrance. The Fishmaid was located in a building in the shape of an angular U. There was an accounting firm and a cleaning business in the other wing. The restaurant entrance was on the outside of the bottom of the U. I walked around to the interior courtyard, where the only light was a single lamp swaying in the wind. The wet asphalt shone and the wind blew shreds of plastic bags around and grabbed my hair and flung it in my eyes. It penetrated my thin blouse as if it had never heard that May winds were supposed to be gentle caresses. I kicked a beer can that was in such bad shape no recycling machine was ever going to accept it.

The lights from the restaurant kitchen cast a half moon on a loading dock. There had to be a door there . . . I wondered who Pihko had interviewed. I would have to check his report first thing in the morning. I had a feeling that Teräsvuori’s alibi wasn’t as solid as we had first assumed.

Hanna Nieminen had said something about Teräsvuori and blackmail. What if Teräsvuori was blackmailing Tomi Liikanen? I jumped when the door to the loading dock opened. Someone pushed out a crate of empty beer bottles and then another. I slipped behind a bush just in case it was Teräsvuori. Then I heard voices.

“What the fuck are you doing here? We agreed we wouldn’t be seen together!” The speaker was whispering angrily.

“My money is late! And I’m getting nervous with the cops sniffing around about Noora’s murder. That happened at a bad time.”

The angry voice turned playful. “So did you do it? Was the girl making trouble for you?”

“Hey, you’re the prime suspect!”

The voice, apparently Tomi Liikanen’s, was drowned out by Teräsvuori’s laughter.

“I have an alibi. I can never get away from here when I’ve got a line of idiots jonesing to make fools of themselves. But what about you and the missus? Got your stories straight? Oh, don’t get mad. I’m just kidding! I think we can both guess who killed Noora and why. Don’t you think? Don’t worry. You’ll have your money the day after tomorrow. Now get out of here. I have to get back to work!”

As Tomi Liikanen tromped by, I tried to squeeze farther back into the bushes. He wouldn’t have noticed me anyway. His eyes had an inward look to them, and his lips were moving in their own silent, indecipherable language. What money were they talking about? For a second I wished I’d never come to the Fishmaid; my head was more mixed up than ever. It would have been more logical for Teräsvuori to be demanding money from Liikanen than the other way around.