Fatal Headwind (21 page)

“Why would Seija Saarela have killed Merivaara?” Koivu asked dubiously.

“Maybe this was just a good old-fashioned Finnish fight over a bottle of booze. Juha Merivaara and Seija Saarela fighting over the cognac. And in the end Saarela hit him with the bottle.”

“But they didn’t find cognac in the wound . . .”

“Koivu!” Usually my dear colleague kept up with my wisecracks, but I think the long day was getting to him.

I sat staring at my stack of paperwork for a little while. The envelope from the Security Intelligence Service weighed at least four pounds. A report from Puustjärvi, another from Lähde, a memo from the county police commissioner with a title that meant nothing to me, and a message about the National Bureau of Investigation commission of inquiry. I glanced through that one. Ström’s list of transgressions had already been so long that the recommendation was to keep him on administrative leave as long as the court proceedings about the beating continued. Väätäinen was certainly going to press charges. There was also a message from Personnel. Due to a lack of appropriations, a temporary replacement for Ström was unlikely. I kicked a chair; the rest of the unit was going to have to work themselves to death for weeks.

Cramming all the papers into my backpack, I decided to walk home, since I had come by bus in the morning. Using my work car still felt weird. I crossed the highway and started winding my way through the residential streets toward the nearby fields. When I passed the last of the houses, I reached an area that had been green fields but was now torn apart and transformed into piles of dirt and mud ten feet tall. In order to get to my usual shortcut, I had to cross the construction zone. I knew I wasn’t supposed to trespass, but I didn’t care. A couple of digging machines growled a little ways off, and one of the workers waved at me, but I just continued on my way.

We had lived in our house on the other side of the fields for about three years, and in that time the surroundings had changed quickly. On many undeveloped lots, large homes had sprung up that made our little one-and-a-half-story rented slice of paradise look like a hovel. In the spring, the city had dredged nearly half a mile of the nearby canal, felling trees all along the banks. Antti had been one of the most vocal advocates for halting the work. Although the reclamation had succeeded in saving a swamp in a nearby nature reserve from drying out, the barren canal banks were a pathetic sight. Where cuckooflowers once grew along the water, now there was only gravel.

Einstein lurked outside the door, the remains of a mole proudly displayed on the front steps. I didn’t have the heart to hurt his feelings, so I just expressed my thanks for his contribution to the welfare of the family. I would dispose of the tiny corpse later. The day we returned from the hospital with Iida, Einstein ratcheted up his hunting. For a week he brought home at least two rodents a day. When he moved on to birds, we had to put a bell on his collar, which he hated.

My sisters had encouraged us to get rid of our cat before Iida was born because he would scratch her eyes out or jump in her crib and smother her. Of course we were horribly offended on Einstein’s behalf, because, especially since Iida had started crawling, Einstein kept a safe distance from her. A couple of times we had let Iida feed him cat treats, and only then he had risked coming within touching distance.

The normal early evening rumpus was in full swing. Iida was playing with the pots, and Antti was lying on the floor drinking red wine and listening to Eppu Normaali’s “Hippie Girl.” Not exactly a cheery song—the tune was catchy, but if you listened to the lyrics, it was basically a dirge for any belief in a better world.

“Is that really how you feel?” I asked, turning down the stereo.

“Did you hear about the fire? Of course you did.”

“I was there. Can’t you smell it?”

“Was it those Animal Revolution characters who started it?”

“There’s an investigation, but the SIS is handling it.”

“Bloody idiots! Don’t they know all they’re doing is hurting the environmental movement? Even things that make sense get labeled as whacko because of them!” Antti took another drink from his glass. I sat down next to him, and Iida crawled into my lap.

“I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time thinking by yourself. How about you come with me to the soccer game tomorrow? The department still has a few tickets. We’ll take Iida to your sister’s house if your mom can’t come watch her.”

Antti shook his head. He wasn’t into soccer. I was the one in our family who followed sports, mostly figure skating and track-and-field, but sometimes hockey and Premier League soccer.

“Is there any of that wine left?”

I went to pour myself a glass and make a sandwich before turning to the list from the SIS of suspected Animal Revolution members. The first version was from a year and a half ago when the organization had started gaining attention by spray-painting the windows of butcher shops and fur boutiques. I looked for Jiri Merivaara, but he wasn’t on that list yet. I did find another familiar name, though.

Harri Immonen.

11

The dark Kozel lager I was drinking tasted heavenly, although I could have done without the cigarette smoke curling into my nostrils. It felt as if half of Helsinki was jammed into the Mr. Pickwick downtown warming up for the Finland-Hungary playoff match. Our group of supporters from the department numbered about forty. Almost everyone from our unit was there, all except Puustjärvi, who was off playing Go. Taskinen was practicing waving the Finnish flag he had brought, and Puupponen had painted blue crosses on his sallow, freckled cheeks.

“Go home, Goulash! Go home, Goulash!” Puupponen chanted. Apparently in his mind that was a sufficiently derogatory appellation for the opposition.

“Finish your drinks and let’s go,” Taskinen said in his best boss voice. The match was starting in twenty minutes, and the Olympic Stadium entrances would be packed. I pulled my wool socks back up and put on my rubber boots. The rain that had been falling all day only seemed to be getting heavier, and a sweater was necessary even inside.

Having a good yell at the stadium with friends from work would be just the ticket. I looked around, trying to find Kantelinen from White-Collar Crime. The report I had been waiting for about the Merivaara Nautical corporate finances hadn’t shown up on my desk yet. Apparently Kantelinen was overworked too, because I didn’t see him.

Buoyed by a beer or two, our boisterous group didn’t much look like off-duty cops. There were leather jackets, jeans, and tracksuits, ball caps, a couple of winter hats, some disposable ponchos—no one would have worn their official blue police rain gear even by accident. Even Taskinen had left his suit and overcoat home. More than anything he looked like a marathoner, which we was. At the stadium steps someone couldn’t help hassling the guards about their careless security check, after which everyone had to open their bags despite the pouring rain. Fortunately no one bothered with Lähde’s binoculars, which were actually a flask.

We climbed halfway up section D near the midfield line. A sea of umbrellas obscured the view of the field. I placed myself between Koivu and Taskinen in hopes that their bodies would keep me warm in the rain and wind. Wang sat on Koivu’s other side. They talked about a movie, which it sounded as if they had seen together the night before. When Koivu’s hand brushed a stray hair off of Wang’s forehead, I found myself swallowing. Koivu wasn’t just a coworker; he was a good friend. Why hadn’t he told me he was going to the movies with Wang? Was he afraid I would get on his case for a workplace romance?

Despite the rain and the darkness, the stands were lively. Yliaho collected the final bets for the outcome, and I optimistically said 1–0 for Finland. I hoped the cold would slow down the Hungarians.

“Didn’t Ström have a ticket too? Does anyone know anything about him?” I asked, suddenly looking at the empty seat next to Lähde.

“He isn’t coming,” Lähde responded evasively and then started opening his binoculars.

“Is he afraid of catching a cold?” Puupponen said. His suggestion was rewarded with raucous laughs.

“Have you seen him in the past few days?” I asked Lähde.

“We had a beer yesterday at the Thirsty Camel around the corner from his place. He drank five in the time it took me to finish two,” Lähde said, grimacing as he took a shot from one side of his flask.

The previous night I had tried to call Ström, but I had been relieved again when he didn’t answer. Listening to his bitching and moaning would have been too much, especially if he had been drunk. Apparently Väätäinen had tried to cut a deal: he would drop his charge against Ström if the prosecutor dropped the charges against him for beating his wife. Of course Ström couldn’t agree to that—really no one could cut that sort of deal.

Just then the teams marched onto the field. Boos showered down on the Hungarians, and Finland’s soccer god Jari Litmanen received the biggest cheers from the home crowd. I was right there with everyone else, screaming at the top of my lungs. I was almost nervous. The World Cup was the biggest sporting event in the world after all. It would have been amazing if Finland could make it for once.

There were plenty of attempts, but no success. The Hungarians seemed sluggish enough in the cold, but we weren’t doing so well either. The rain just kept coming down. Drops streamed off the hood of my poncho onto my nose. Twenty minutes in, my suede gloves were soaked through. I was happy we had the contents of Lähde’s flask to keep us warm.

“Litti! Litti!” Puupponen yelled, trying to get everyone to join in the chant for our team’s star player.

“Litmanen is cute,” Wang said, shooting me a smile.

“He’s a hell of a player but not really my type,” I replied, and Liisa Rasilainen joined in the conversation as we pointed out the best-looking players on the field. The men were not amused.

“We all know what guys Maria is into. Where did they go, though? I haven’t seen them on the wall of your new office.” Koivu asked, referring to the poster of male pinups some girlfriends had given me at my bachelorette party.

“A lieutenant can’t get away with everything a sergeant can . . . Hell no! Stop them! Come on!” I screamed as our goalie dove, making an amazing save.

At halftime I realized I was shivering, but thankfully my legs were dry. Maybe Ström had made a good choice staying home. The whole unit could end up with pneumonia and not be able to solve any crimes for weeks. Taskinen brought me a coffee, and that kept we warm until the second half started. Finland’s game picked up, and when Antti Sumiala launched a textbook shot at the back post in the sixty-second minute to take the lead, the rain didn’t matter anymore. Screaming, we all exchanged hugs, and Taskinen’s arm remained around me as if by accident.

“I said it would be 1–0,” I said with a grin once the playing time wound down to one minute. “Stay strong, boys! Come on, ref, blow that whistle!” I yelled when the clock hit zero, but the painful Hungarian offensive just continued into stoppage time.

“Are feminists allowed to like soccer?” Koivu asked just before the catastrophe occurred.

The Finns knocked the ball into their own goal. A tie meant good-bye to the World Cup.

We slunk out of the stadium, silent and shivering. I tried to tell myself it was childish to be sad about a soccer game, but it still bothered me. I was so cold my teeth actually chattered.

“Shit. I feel like crying,” Puupponen said. The rain had smeared the Finnish flags painted on his cheeks, and his disposable poncho had failed to protect the knees of his jeans, so his wet pants clung to his skin. “Let’s go get plastered.”

“Hot rum,” I said. As a pack of boys skulked by, grumbling about what they wanted to do to the referees, I couldn’t help thinking about Ström. He should have been here.

We ended up at the Fire Dragon to warm our throats. Despite the poor final score, the postgame carousing lasted for several rounds.

Iida climbed out of her crib to come snuggle with me at eight in the morning, and I felt like the worst mother in the world for not having the energy to get out of bed and make her breakfast. When the hair pulling started, I heroically I dragged myself to the kitchen to make the porridge, because Antti had left for a long hike in the woods before dawn. It rained all day, and I read to Iida until she napped, and when she did, I tried to sleep off my hangover, but my fragmentary dreams were haunted by images of squealing pigs and Harri’s corpse. Harri had been a member of the Animal Revolution. Harri and Jiri . . . could someone have killed Harri over that? And what about Juha Merivaara? Or could it have been that Juha Merivaara was financing the AR’s activities?

I was greeted at work Monday morning by the usual weekend list of assaults, plus three missing persons: a forty-year-old economist and mother of two hadn’t returned from hunting mushrooms on Sunday afternoon, and an unemployed father from a different part of the city had failed to turn up after a Saturday night at a bar. We had already known about Arttu Altonen, a high school senior who had last been seen Friday at midnight leaving a house party. He had been threatening to commit suicide for a month. The party had been at a beach in the Westend, and the boy’s friends were afraid he had jumped off a nearby bridge. We would have to get a recovery team to drag the bay. I delegated that to Koivu.

“Three disappearances. It’s probably a serial killer,” Puupponen said between sniffles. Clearly he’d caught a cold at the game.

“Reasons?” I wasn’t in a joking mood. “We’re going to have to triage now. These assault cases will have to wait. Missing persons and homicides first. Puustjärvi, you continue interviewing the high school students about the missing boy. Lehtovuori, you and Wang take the mushroomer. And Puupponen, you get on the dad at the bar.”

I had to make some quick decisions because we simply had too many cases. I actually found myself missing Ström. Strangely enough, he was at his best with disappearances. Puupponen thought it was because during his marriage, Ström had pulled plenty of disappearing acts himself, which was one reason his wife left him.

Our staffing issues were a good excuse for me to stay on the Juha Merivaara case. After the meeting ended, I went to my office to call SIS. Jiri Merivaara had been released after the allowable forty-eight hour holding period, but his interrogations were going to continue. The SIS had discovered that the girl who had interned at the meatpacking plant a few weeks earlier was the sister of an Animal Revolution member. The fifteen-year-old had been jailed on suspicion of stealing a key to the plant and as an accessory to arson.

Not revealing too many details about my own investigation required some contortions. I didn’t want to lose the Merivaara murder case to the SIS, since any connection to Animal Revolution was just guessing at this point. I wondered if Mikke Sjöberg knew something about Harri’s Animal Revolution membership.

No one answered Mikke’s boat phone. I tried a couple of more times through the morning. Puupponen came in to say that the missing father had turned up at a friend’s house in good health, excepting a significant hangover. Apparently his wife had been so fed up with his benders that she intentionally sicced the police on him.

“OK, go ahead and move on to the first assault on the list,” I told Puupponen, whose cold had now swelled his nose to two times its normal size. “You seem pretty sick.”

“I don’t have a fever, though,” Puupponen replied. “My nose is just running like a faucet.”

Puupponen going out sick was the last thing we needed, I thought as I tried to reach Kantelinen from White Collar.

“Hi, this is Kallio from Violent Crime. So that report about the Merivaara Nautical financial situation . . .”

I heard Kantelinen groan on the other side of the line.

“I’m sorry. I just haven’t had time. We had this embezzlement case come in.”

“I need it now. Preferably this morning,” I said, trying in vain to mask the irritation in my voice. “How done is it?”

“I’m most of the way there. The only real problem is that it’s been so damn hard to get any information on this Mare Nostrum shareholding company. The financial connection between the two companies is kind of odd.”