Fatal Headwind (29 page)

Then I scheduled the cleaners to empty Ström’s belongings from the office he had shared with Lähde. I talked to Ström’s brother about the funeral arrangements and tried to convince him that Pertti wouldn’t have wanted an honor guard of uniformed officers at the church. During the grief seminar, I sat with the department psychologist. He took the lead, and I mostly just listened to the others. When he asked about my own feelings, I said I was confused and sad.

At home I played with Iida as if nothing had happened. Antti tried to bring up Ström, but I said I wasn’t ready to talk about him. In the evening darkness we went out for a walk, and I picked a large bunch of fallen multicolored maple leaves, using them to decorate Iida’s bedroom walls when we got home.

After she fell asleep, I turned on the television and started surfing channels. I came upon Jorma Hynninen singing Schubert’s
Winterreise
. Antti sat down next to me to listen, and he put an arm around me as if testing the waters. The warm, melancholy baritone sang the cotton-ball soft yet anguished intervals as Ralf Gothóni’s piano conveyed what the words could not express. The music coursed through me like medicine. In the twentieth song of the cycle, named “The Signpost,” a man whose hopes of love have been dashed realizes that he must soon travel a road from which no one has ever returned. That was when I started to cry, and it seemed the tears would never end.

15

On Friday morning the Lithuanian police sent word that Vitalis Ramanauskas and Imants Peders had moved out of the country a couple of years earlier. Both had given a forwarding address in Nice, France, but the address was no longer current. Ramanauskas and Peders were former officers in the Soviet navy who had been in charge of maintenance for battleships, aircraft carriers, and missile frigates. After Lithuanian independence, the men had been forced to choose between the Unbreakable Union’s army and their own country, and apparently they hadn’t wanted to belong to either.

I numbly stared at the fax from Lithuania. Had Juha Merivaara been selling eco-friendly boat paint to the Soviet navy? Not likely. What was Mare Nostrum really up to? Though I was sure I wouldn’t get much by way of reply, I faxed a request to the Lithuanian police for more information on Peders’s and Ramanauskas’s duties in the Soviet navy. I also sent information requests to the Nice police and Interpol. I was becoming increasingly certain that something shady had been going on behind the benign façade of Merivaara Nautical. What if Harri had discovered it and that was what got him killed? What had Seija Saarela said about the dead duck Harri had been taking in for tests? And to where, the Helsinki University Biology Department?

If Harri’s and Juha’s deaths were connected somehow, then someone knew what Juha had been up to. Jiri or Anne? And was it even true that the same person had killed Harri and Juha Merivaara? What if Juha killed Harri?

Turning on my computer, I navigated to the Merivaara Nautical homepage. The company had applied for an EU Ecolabel, and to get that distinction, products had to go through a multiyear series of stringent tests. If there really was something illegal going on with the shareholding company Mare Nostrum, there was no way Juha Merivaara would have risked letting it come out. Or had he trusted that because the Mare Nostrum trail ended on Guernsey, no one would bother digging any deeper? That was hard to believe.

I rested my face in my hands. My eyes were heavy. Even though I was trained as a lawyer, white-collar crime had never been one of my specialties. I felt more comfortable dealing with human relationships and seemed to have a knack for unraveling complicated familial entanglements, wino hierarchies, and youth-gang power structures. Money was cold and expressionless. It had no past and no feelings like humans did, even though it did arouse human emotions. Money only had one goal: to grow.

So I started thinking about Juha Merivaara as a person, not as one of the pieces in the tax-evasion game Merivaara Nautical or Mare Nostrum was playing. If that was the game. What kind of a person had Juha Merivaara been? A boy who at age eight lost his mother to a slow-wasting disease. A young man who had been condemned early on to skipper the family company. A man who cheated on his wife, hit on his secretary, and wanted to raise his son to be just like him. What had been most important to Juha Merivaara? Family? Nature? Business reputation? Money?

But I couldn’t even trace the outlines of Juha Merivaara because the whole time another man kept encroaching on the picture. Just as tall and strong but gruffer and less polished. He had troubled my dreams the previous night, keeping me awake for hours. My colleagues had wondered at my rush to get Ström’s office emptied out. Even Koivu hadn’t thought how much it might hurt seeing the familiar name on the door and the excessively neat desk inside.

Most of the time I had detested Ström. His racism and misogyny. His distrust of anything new and his way of treating people. I remembered too many clashes and obscene outbursts.

But I also remembered the sporadic displays of friendship, the clumsy attempts at asking me about my pregnancy and Iida’s development, the random calls under odd pretenses while I was on maternity leave, the temper tantrums whenever I put myself in danger through my own recklessness. At least then Ström had been right.

In a way it was a relief that I didn’t need to work with him anymore. The environment around the unit would probably improve. But beneath that relief was a stabbing guilt. Of course it had been the right choice to name me unit commander instead of Ström. I did better work. But luring Ström into standing in while I was on maternity leave had been stupid. That should have been handled differently.

And the alcohol problem—why hadn’t I intervened more aggressively? Why had I imagined that it would handle itself after he got used to me being back? Why didn’t I go visit him when he wouldn’t answer his phone?

But who did I think I was, playing God now? Would I have been able to prevent Ström from killing himself?

I forced myself to turn back to Juha Merivaara. Ström’s personality had been ragged around the edges, and Merivaara wasn’t flawless either. Why couldn’t he be greedy and love nature at the same time? Why couldn’t he value his marriage and take business partners to sex bars too? Mare Nostrum could just have been a mistake, an investor taken on out of desperation during a time of distress. Maybe Merivaara had put it in dry dock when he realized it didn’t fit with the main company’s profile.

A buzzing interrupted my thoughts. Even though the office door had fancy lights to indicate when I was unavailable, I rarely used them. Colleagues who had worked with me back when I was a sergeant just knocked, although Ström had usually just barged in without warning. I pressed the button for the green light, and Anu Wang entered.

“Hi, Maria. Do you have a moment?” When I said I did, she continued. “I didn’t bring this up in the morning meeting, but . . .”

Wang trailed off. Her dark round face wrinkled in worry, and her raven-black braid swung from her shoulder to her back. Wang was tall for a woman of Asian descent, almost five foot six, and her hands were so graceful that they made mine look like shovels.

“Yes?” I asked, wanting to seem like the kind of boss you could talk to about anything. Hopefully this wasn’t about the stupid things I had said about Koivu’s past troubles with women.

“I’d like to be transferred off the El Haj Assad case,” Wang said reluctantly. “I’ve thought and thought about it, and I don’t want to give up, but I don’t think I can do anything more.”

Saudi Arabian–born businessman Ismael El Haj Assad had tried to strangle his teenage daughter Amal in early August. The girl had snuck away to a beach party wearing a sleeveless shirt and jeans instead of a long skirt and veil, which the father considered unforgivable. Amal bit her father’s hand and ran to call the police. Now she was living in foster care with one of her schoolmates. Ström had assigned Wang to the case because he thought the cop with the nonstandard ethnic background should investigate all crimes involving minorities, whether they were perpetrators or victims.

“Why?” I had to ask. “The case is a simple assault and battery, and you’ve handled it wonderfully.”

“But I . . . I don’t feel like I’m getting anything out of the suspect. He belittles me, I guess because in his country police officers are so far below oil company bosses. And he considers having a female interrogator to be a huge insult. Pekka came with me once, and that time El Haj Assad only talked to him. I interviewed him again yesterday, and all I could get out of him were slurs.”

She stared at me, half ashamed, half challenging. I didn’t have time to reply before she launched back into it.

“‘When in Rome’ was what Ström said when he assigned me to the case and I said I had doubts that I was the right person for the job. As if he had to explain something like that to me! That’s what my whole family and I have been doing for decades, first in North Vietnam where my dad’s family fled the Chinese revolution and the Maoists and then here in Finland. I even changed my first name, and you heard who I was cheering for at the soccer game last Saturday. But what if other people don’t use the same rules I do?”

Wang had graduated from the police academy a year and a half earlier, and she was only twenty-three. In her I could almost see myself ten years ago, the young, eager police officer who believed she could bring justice to the world. Part of me still probably held on to that belief, even though over the years I had seen too many times how courts freed the guilty. Sometimes I still thought about going back to practicing law so I could have some influence over the sentences criminals received, but lawyering increasingly seemed to be more a game of manipulating the law than seeking justice.

“I understand your situation. What do you propose?”

“That Pekka and I switch cases. I could finish up the rape case he has, and he could take El Haj Assad. I’ve already talked to him about it.”

I nodded. My only familiarity with the case was from the reports I’d reviewed, and it seemed to have several difficult aspects. Ismael El Haj Assad was a liaison for Shell Finland and the Saudi Arabian Musoil Corporation, a prominent international business leader for whom Finnish police involvement in his family life was a terrible affront. He followed a fundamentalist version of Islam that considered a woman’s place to be at home behind a veil. Espoo school officials had been forced to apply mild pressure just so Amal could attend the legally mandated ninth grade.

I wondered whether I should be irritated that Koivu and Wang had arranged to swap cases behind my back, but that would have been stupid. El Haj Assad deserved to be charged with child abuse, although that was unlikely to improve Amal’s life. But contemplating consequences was not the job of the police.

“Do you think I’m a loser if I drop this case?” Wang asked.

I shook my head and briefly told her about a case from my early years as a cop, back when no one took me seriously.

“Stupid question, but what made you apply to the police academy?” I asked.

Anu grinned. “The same thing that made other kids go out tagging and do drugs. I wanted to rebel. I wanted to be different from my parents’ culture, and what would be more Finnish than a female cop? My best friend and I both applied. It also didn’t hurt that the academy is in Tampere, so it meant getting away from home. I got in, but Nina didn’t.”

It was amusing that Anu’s choice of profession had been motivated by defiance toward her parents, just like my own.

“What would your parents have preferred?”

“A doctor or an architect. I aced four of my college entrance exams. I did try to explain that, as a police officer, I could have an impact on how people like us are treated. Most of the time people think I’m a Thai masseuse or a Filipino mail-order bride. Sometimes I almost regret leaving Patrol—at least there the uniform validated my position of authority.”

Wang glanced at her watch and then thanked me for letting her and Koivu switch cases. The door had almost closed behind her when she turned around.

“And about Pekka. Don’t worry. I really do like him.”

“I like Pekka too,” I said awkwardly, since I never thought of Koivu by his first name these days. “He’s like a brother to me. And you know, I wouldn’t mind having you as a sister-in-law.”

“We’ll have to see about that.” Anu’s smile revealed a line of glittering white teeth, and then she pulled the door closed, leaving me alone with my thoughts once more.

If, if, if.
If I had tried to talk to Ström . . .

In order to get some relief from the vicious cycle of those thoughts, I called BirdLife Finland, the central organization for all the local bird-watching organizations, to ask where Harri might have taken the dead duck he found on Rödskär.

The man who answered was friendly. He had also known Harri. His best guess was the National Veterinary and Food Research Institute. I assigned Puustjärvi to look into this, although he grumbled a little, saying he never thought he would have to search for duck corpses when he signed up to be a detective. I looked through the file of random information Koivu had collected on Harri, which included the membership list of Harri’s birding association.

Tapio Holma was a member of the same club.

What if Holma had lied about not knowing Harri? And what if they had known each other and Holma had insinuated himself into the Merivaara family not out of love for Riikka but to investigate Harri’s death? That seemed a bit far-fetched but not completely impossible.

I looked through Harri’s file again. I probably wasn’t ever going to be able to prove that Harri was murdered, especially since his body had been cremated, making it impossible to examine it again. People just died without any reason or anyone to blame. A feeling of helplessness washed over me. And to top it all off, in half an hour I had to go to one more of the department’s endless planning meetings.

This time we were talking about efforts to combat graffiti. I had tried to avoid it by saying that it didn’t have anything to do with violent crime, but apparently the city government had demanded representatives from each police unit attend the lunch meeting. I wondered whether the City of Espoo really didn’t have any more serious environmental problems than kids doodling on walls. And besides, the antivandalism workgroup the city had organized a while back, which included youth representatives, was sure to handle the problem better than a bunch of suits having official meetings.