Death Spiral (25 page)

“What happened when they ended their amateur careers?”

“Actually we skated in the same ice show for a while, ‘The Magic Skate.’ It wasn’t nearly as well known as ‘Holiday on Ice,’ but we still got to travel and make some money. But then Elena got pregnant and they went back to Moscow.”

“You mean pregnant with Irina?”

“No, this was earlier. That was when I landed my first big role in the program. I’d never quite mastered a triple Lutz but was good at making the audience laugh, so I became an entertainer . . .” Melancholy crept over Luoto’s face. Maybe the tepid success of his competition career still ate at him, even twenty years later. “But we weren’t supposed to be talking about me. Elena had a miscarriage and then a serious infection. Hospital hygiene was never one of the Soviets’ strong suits. That was the end of their skating. Luckily, Anton was able to get a job in the Sports Ministry.”

“And a few years later Elena got pregnant again?”

“Exactly. And as I understand it, having a baby completely revitalized her. Elena had never studied anything because she’d been skating professionally since she was ten. What else could she do than start coaching? And they started Irina skating before she could walk properly. And that girl is going to be the first Finnish world champion in more than sixty years now that . . . now that Noora and Janne won’t.”

Rami stood and walked to the window, which rain covered like drops of tears. A couple of minutes passed before he could talk again.

“That was a possibility, you know. Noora had all the right psychological traits. She was brave, open, evocative, musical, creative. Everything! Her low center of gravity wouldn’t have ruined the overall package. All Janne had to do was land his jumps and follow her lead.”

Had Rami felt that Noora and Janne’s success would make up for his own disappointment? That probably wasn’t a terribly good basis for coaching.

“Which one of you lured Elena to Finland, you or Tomi Liikanen?”

“Tomi started it, but I finished the job.” Stepping away from the window, Rami put on some music. The strains of a harpsichord trickled through the room. The music was distantly familiar, maybe Vivaldi.

“I met Elena again years later at a juniors world championship in Bulgaria. We had a very promising boy in the club at the time. He unfortunately quit later because he was getting teased too much. But that doesn’t have anything to do with this. Back then most top coaches stayed in the Soviet Union. When we met, Elena had the feeling she wasn’t going to make it any higher in her coaching career than she had as a skater, always coming in third behind Moskvin, Tarasov, and the like. But here in Finland, we lack international-level coaches. I suggested she move here back then, but it wouldn’t have been very easy. Anton had a good job in the Ministry, and he had even voluntarily joined the Communist Party. Elena didn’t talk about their personal business, but I had the impression their marriage was fairly broken.”

“Have you ever been married?” I asked.

“Me? No! Do you mean I’m not the right person to evaluate other people’s marriages? I’m probably not. But anyone could have seen it: Elena and Anton were married almost out of necessity, far too young.”

“And then Anton died . . .”

“Anton was hit by a car. The whole thing was strange, and they never found the driver. You already know all that. I was at the funeral as part of the delegation from the Finnish Figure-Skating Federation.”

According to Rami, the mood at the funeral had been strange. No one had cried. Elena had been the only next-of-kin because Anton’s parents had died the previous spring and his only sister was on assignment somewhere in Uzbekistan. Irina wasn’t there. The memorial was held in a building in the center of a construction site and the speeches were barely audible over the sound of drilling outside.

“Tomi was there too, which was the first time I met him. I immediately thought he was interested in Elena.”

“Tomi Liikanen was in love?”

Rami looked uncomfortable. “Not in love. Interested.”

“Sexually?”

“I can’t explain it! Interested in having Elena for himself, I guess. Tomi was the one who really started the idea of Elena coming to Finland. I just coaxed it along.”

I thought for a second. What benefit could Elena Grigorieva’s move to Finland have been for Tomi Liikanen? Or had he thought Elena was in danger too if she stayed in Moscow? I would probably have to ask him. According to Rami, it took almost no convincing for Ulrika to hire Elena, and once she was involved, arranging a work permit and visa was easy. Elena and Tomi married the same week Elena started working in Finland. Now both mother and daughter were waiting for Finnish citizenship so Irina could represent Finland at the Olympics.

“They’re shooting for 2002 in Salt Lake City when Irina will be seventeen, which is the perfect age. Next year she’ll go to the World Juniors.”

I wanted to move away from the Russian angle for a while, so I turned the conversation to Janne’s adventures.

“You and Janne seem to be good friends. Why do you think he’s acting the way he is?” I asked as Rami poured me another glass of mineral water.

“What do you mean?”

I told him about that morning’s high-speed chase. The laugh lines around Rami’s eyes deepened in concern, and his slender fingers ran through his hair.

“It’s normal he’s messed up. And he’s done that before when something was hard to deal with. Jumping in his car and speeding off, I mean.”

“Athletes at this level usually have access to a sports psychologist. Does your team? Would that help Janne?”

Rami nodded, seeming to file this away to think about later.

“I think Janne’s behavior is an expression of guilt,” I continued, and when Rami’s face tensed even more, I hurried to add, “I don’t mean he’s necessarily guilty of Noora’s murder. He might just be blaming himself for fighting with her before she died. He could be thinking that if he hadn’t been angry and let Noora walk home alone instead of driving her, she would still be alive.”

The melancholy bowing of a viola da gamba had replaced the tinkling of the harpsichord. Rami looked out the window at the sky, which was the color of a wool sock and barely visible through the downpour. He opened his mouth as if to say something but then closed it again.

“I’ve read Noora’s diaries,” I said. “According to them, she was head over heels for Janne, but he didn’t return her feelings. Why was that? Is Janne more interested in men than women?”

To my surprise, Rami burst out laughing.

“How did you get that in your head? Yes, I know male figure skaters are generally assumed to be gay, but Janne is a perfectly normal, boring hetero.” Rami’s laughing ended in a sigh.

That was all he needed to say. Apparently Janne Kivi had broken the heart of a third member of the Espoo Figure-Skating team. So I continued on that theme.

“Janne seems to be Ulrika Weissenberg’s special favorite. Do you think Ulrika could have been jealous of Noora?”

“About Janne? Hardly. Janne wasn’t interested in Noora, and to tell the truth it was better that way. Skating together is easier if there aren’t any serious personal involvements. Noora would have got over her teenage infatuation once she grew up a little. In a lot of ways Noora was mature for her age, but not when it came to Janne.”

“Did she have any boyfriends?” I asked, remembering the pathologist’s statement that Noora probably wasn’t a virgin. That could have just been the result of a one-night stand, though. Strange that in the diaries I’d read so far, she hadn’t written about losing her virginity.

“Not to my knowledge. But Noora didn’t tell me everything about her life, even though I always tried to be a friend as well as a coach.”

Ultimately it was hard for a coach to be a friend, though, especially when their gender and almost thirty years separated them. I seemed to be wasting my time with Rami Luoto, who hadn’t been able to tell me anything decisive about the Grigorievs. I still tried asking about Teräsvuori. Rami’s reaction to my claim that Vesku and Tomi knew each other was shock.

“That can’t be right! Teräsvuori has been like a biblical plague. I’m sure that if Tomi knew him, he would have tried to straighten Teräsvuori out.” Luoto clapped shut the rulebook, which was quite like a bible in thickness and appearance.

I didn’t bother explaining that Liikanen and Teräsvuori had been seen together several times. Rami seemed genuinely anxious to help solve Noora’s murder but a touch naive. Maybe he thought people were really what they seemed on the surface. It was hard to believe he could have survived years as a competitive athlete and entertainer with that kind of credulity. Maybe it was just an act.

Thinking about Teräsvuori, I realized I hadn’t heard from Koivu since before lunch. Was he still on the stakeout? He might have followed Teräsvuori somewhere without cell service. I was just about to get up to leave when Rami asked, “You mentioned you’d read Noora’s diaries. Have they been any help solving the case?”

I didn’t know how to answer. The few passages in the diaries that talked about Rami were rather bitter, although I didn’t know why Noora felt that way. Of course Noora had thrived on drama and conflict, and in her world, Rami had been the bad coach and Elena the good.

“I think that’s all for now,” I said and heaved myself off the couch.

“Getting around with a big belly like that must be hard,” Rami said. The comment was clearly intended to be sympathetic, but it made me feel like a lumbering tank. The more I showed, the more people’s view of me seemed to change. Coworkers irritatingly patted my belly, and on crowded buses people avoided me, looking concerned I might go into labor at any second. People were constantly asking me how I felt. My youngest sister Helena, who had been sick and anemic through her whole pregnancy, seemed practically disappointed when I said I was feeling fine.

I muttered a vague response and decided not to ask to use Rami’s bathroom, even though I needed to. Starting my car, I backed out of the parking spot so fast I almost ran into a Renault spattered with mud. The dark-haired woman driving scowled angrily. The shock of such a near miss made me sick to my stomach, and my heart was still pounding as I drove past the ice rink and under the West Highway. Usually I was a confident driver. I spent a lot of time sitting behind the wheel for work. The close call reminded me once again that nothing in life was sure. Even if I followed every single traffic law for decades on end, a drunk driver could still broadside me at any second and turn my car and everyone in it to mashed potatoes.

As I turned onto our street, I realized that somewhere deep inside I was starting to believe pretty strongly that Noora’s death had been random too, unpremeditated and maybe even an accident. The drugs and Russian mafia scenario was just me reading too much into a bunch of coincidences. Noora couldn’t have known anything about anything like that. She had probably been beaten to death by a complete stranger, maybe because she didn’t have a smoke to share or had said the wrong thing. Maybe it had been an attempted rape. But how could we even start searching for a rapist without a witness?

The lab promised more results by tomorrow. Maybe that would be more help than talking to people. I was probably fooling myself, expecting Noora’s skate guards to have some registered criminal’s fingerprints on them, but you never knew. It wouldn’t be the first time I had caught a crook based only on forensic evidence. It had happened several times with robberies.

The lights from our house twinkled through the rain, creating a feeling of security. The yellowish-brown paint on the wood siding was flaking a bit, and the yard looked tired after the winter, only patches of grass had started turning green, but I liked our house. This was our first real home. We still had three years left on our lease, and so far it seemed as if we’d be here at least that long. Neither of us was particularly thrilled about the idea of taking on a mortgage. We felt like that would limit our options too much.

“Has your cell phone been off? Koivu’s called here at least three times because he couldn’t get hold of you,” Antti yelled from the living room where he was playing the piano.

I crammed down half a banana before I even looked at my phone. My stomach had started rumbling loudly on the way home. No big surprise that the battery was dead again; I always forgot to charge it.

“Finally!” said Koivu.

“What’s new?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m sitting here in the parking lot of the Fishmaid. It’s cold as hell and I have to pee.” Koivu sounded irritated. Apparently he had expected that after the early revelation about Teräsvuori and Liikanen meeting at the apartment on Lauttasaari Island, something exciting would start happening.

“Teräsvuori went to work?”

“Yeah. And don’t say I have to go in there and sing karaoke.”

“It would be warmer at least. And you could practice serenading Silja,” I said as I shoved the rest of the banana in my mouth.

“Eat—”

“Where did Teräsvuori go after Lauttasaari?” I interrupted him.

“The guy driving the van from Tommy’s Gym dropped him off back at home. Then he just stayed there while I sat in the car. Ström called every hour swearing at me because I couldn’t do any interviews for him.”

“Ignore Ström. Just go home.”

“I was pissed enough that I called Koskinen. The guy from the Mattinen gang who lives in the apartment in Lauttasaari. I asked him if Vesku was still there.”

“What the hell? Who did you say you were?”

“Well, Pekka, of course,” replied Koivu, whose first name was about as generic as they came. “He didn’t ask anything else. He just said Vesku had left ten minutes ago. So we know where they went. And don’t say the three of them are just old school friends.”

I didn’t; instead I heaped enough praise on Koivu that he agreed to continue the stakeout the next morning. I was going to have words with Tomi Liikanen.

In order to get work out of my mind, I returned to the living room where Antti was improvising a C blues scale. About three years before, when we were first living together, he’d decided that the classical piano he’d been studying for twenty-five years wasn’t enough. The move from sheet music to free composition and improvisation hadn’t been easy, but now his blues sounded unforced. And with the blues, I could play along.