Fatal Headwind (5 page)

The McDonald’s shift manager had called the police when members of Animal Revolution surrounded the restaurant and covered the windows with their antihamburger signs. It was a Sunday afternoon: Mickey D’s was packed with families who wanted an easy lunch, and there was a birthday party for a five-year-old with twenty tiny guests scheduled for four o’clock.

“This isn’t my area,” I said evasively. The law said that an illegal protest should be broken up if it was bothering bystanders. I didn’t know how I felt, though. I certainly had the occasional hamburger. But dragging Antti into a McDonald’s was impossible. As bad as the food was, he found the ideology it represented even more repulsive.

“The staff is pretty hot under the collar,” said Akkila, the department kickboxing expert, who never minded mixing work with pleasure.

An energetic-looking young man in a uniform shirt and tie came out of the restaurant. The protesters’ reaction was immediate: no one made a sound, but they all turned as a united front to stare at the man, and the drumbeat intensified. The McDonald’s employee hesitated for at least ten seconds before he started walking toward us again.

“Can you please tell these idiots to get out of here? They’re bothering our customers,” huffed the young man. His badge said “Jimi, Shift Manager.”

“Our colleagues are negotiating with them. We’re going to try to handle this as civilly as possible,” Yliaho said calmly.

“Civilly? They aren’t acting civilly!”

“I doubt it would be in the restaurant’s best interests for the police to use force,” Yliaho continued.

“But there’s no talking sense to these people! I tried, but they just started swearing at me,” Jimi said, increasingly exasperated.

The negotiation seemed to end, and the other two officers walked toward us. I knew both of them. One was Liisa Rasilainen, one of the longest-serving women on the force.

“Well?” Yliaho asked.

Rasilainen shook her head.

“They won’t leave voluntarily. I think they want us to attack them. We’ll probably have to call for backup. Then take it carefully.”

“I say we just give them what they want!” Akkila said, patting his nightstick.

I looked at the protesters in their anoraks, blue jeans, batik dresses, and dyed hair. They looked more or less like me and my friends at the peace rallies we used to attend. We thought we could change the world too. We would have thought it was great if the pigs had arrested us, because it would have proven how dangerous our ideas were.

“Who’s in charge of this operation?” I asked Rasilainen.

“Sergeant Hannula. He’s inbound.”

Hannula was a calm type, so maybe he would be able to keep the situation from getting out of hand. I should probably be on my way. Looking across the street, I expected to see Antti, but he was gone. He had probably realized that I had shifted from citizen to police officer, so he took Iida home.

The situation felt unreal. The protesters didn’t shout or wave their signs. They simply stood surrounding the restaurant windows and let their signs do the talking as the drum continued its menacing beat. People arriving for a hamburger didn’t know what to do. No one was preventing them from entering, but the sight of the aggressive crowd was enough to turn most people away.

Backup arrived, and Sergeant Hannula climbed out of one of the patrol cars.

“Take down everybody’s names, but no arrests if they stay calm,” he said. Then he took out a megaphone and urged the protesters to disband. I headed off, relieved that things seemed peaceful and that I didn’t have to get involved. I was already at the service station when the sound of shattering glass made me turn back. Someone had thrown a rock through the window of the restaurant.

Until then most of the protesters had seemed like they might be eventually willing to leave. But when the police grabbed the girl who had thrown the rock, the crowd came alive. They started screaming objections and swinging their signs at the officers. A green-haired boy started dragging Yliaho and Rasilainen off the girl, which prompted Akkila to grab him by the neck. There were four times as many protesters as police. I had to go back. I cursed under my breath as I ran. As Akkila violently dragged the green-haired boy away, the kid bit him in the arm. Akkila kicked the boy straight in the stomach, and he collapsed to the asphalt. That was when I connected the green hair to Jiri Merivaara. To my relief he was still able to get up off the ground. He lunged at Akkila again, but the handcuffs were already out. Jiri tried to grab them, but there was no hope against a taller opponent trained in martial arts.

Two officers continued taking the names of the peaceful protesters. I hung my badge around my neck and joined the party, allowing one of the officers to join the fray. Rasilainen and Yliaho had managed to get the rock-thrower into a van, and now it was time to get the others loaded up. Jiri was dragged to the next van despite struggling with all his might and screaming that Akkila was a fascist thug. The rest of the crowd members gave their names and addresses and then slipped away, the drummer still defiantly drumming. The youngest protesters were maybe thirteen, and they looked tiny and harmless next to the brawny police officers.

“Effing kids,” Hannula said with a sigh as he climbed into the same van Jiri was in. “Four arrests, and we’re just lucky none of the restaurant patrons was hit by that glass. Do you need a ride?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got my bike.”

Halfway home I caught up to Antti and Iida and reported what had kept me.

“Ah, so it was a jackboots-and-billy-clubs day, was it?” said Antti, who was clearly on the protesters’ side.

“Throwing that rock was really stupid! Glass flew everywhere. Just think if someone Iida’s size had been sitting under it!”

“No, things like that don’t help the cause,” Antti admitted. We tried to imagine how the media was going to react, and by that evening all of the television channels had indeed interviewed the shift manager and one of the protesters. Neither said anything revolutionary. Their worldviews were so far removed from each other that it was pointless for the reporters to try to help them reconcile. Of course the restaurant demanded compensation for the broken window and loss of business.

And I wasn’t done with the McDonald’s incident either. On Monday a message was waiting on my desk, saying that Jiri Merivaara had filed a complaint against Officer Akkila for excessive use of force. Which meant it was now my unit’s problem.

3

“There aren’t going to be any charges filed against Officer Akkila,” I told Jiri Merivaara. Anne Merivaara was present at the interview to support her son. I almost didn’t recognize her when she walked in the room. The fragile, tanned woman I had met on Rödskär had disappeared, and instead there was a businesswoman in a stern gray suit with expensive gold-rimmed glasses and a no-nonsense gaze to match.

“And why not? He kicked me so hard it left a bruise. Look!” Jiri lifted his loose black T-shirt.

His ribs on one side were nasty shades of blue and green, but I made a point of appearing neutral.

“You are going to be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. The prosecutor will probably see Officer Akkila’s behavior as a result of your provocation,” I explained. I knew the prosecutor assigned to the case, and I was sure he wouldn’t charge Akkila. Whether he was right was a different matter. I knew from experience that Akkila’s use of force was frequently over the top. If he had been my subordinate, I would have sent him home without pay for a few days to think.

“So the police don’t decide whether to press charges?” Anne Merivaara asked.

“No, of course not.”

It would have been easier if the investigation into the McDonald’s incident had gone to the National Bureau of Investigation, but the complaint Jiri had filed was considered insignificant enough that the powers that be had decided to handle the matter in house. But yesterday, Anne Merivaara had called me directly, as if I were her personal police officer. I didn’t like that setup. Patrol Division had interviewed Jiri after his arrest and then released him that same night. Jiri’s father had objected to filing the complaint. Juha thought Jiri should be ashamed, that the son of an entrepreneur should understand that interfering with other people’s livelihoods and violently resisting the police weren’t acceptable.

“Juha thinks that if Jiri wants to change fast-food culture, he should start from the opposite side by getting a job at McDonald’s and trying to rise to a leadership position. That would be the best way to influence the company’s practices. Of course that would take decades, but Juha thinks that changing internal business structures is the only good way to change the world for the better. That’s what he did,” she had said on the phone.

Even though I had better things to do than listen to the Merivaara family’s ideological arguments, Anne worried that the charges against Jiri would hurt the reputation of the family business. A company that sold eco-friendly boat paint might not gain much favor with the Sunday boating set when it came out that one of the heirs to the business was a promising young environmental terrorist.

I had agreed I would meet Jiri and Anne. Although I had decided to handle the preliminary investigation myself, Anu Wang was serving as my witness in Interrogation Room 2.

“As far as I’m concerned, we can wrap up this conversation,” I said once we had spent a while belaboring the point of who made the first move, Jiri or Officer Akkila. Each blamed the other, and I was ready to believe them both. Jiri Merivaara seemed like just the kind of kid who would try to be a hero by attacking a cop. “I’ll send the record of these proceedings for your signature in a couple of days, and then they’ll go to the prosecutor.”

“So you and the other pigs don’t have any say over whether that shit who kicked me gets charged? Ha, ha, ha! We know how it is. Cops protect their own. Including you, you fucking pâté-eating bitch . . .” Jiri grumbled.

I couldn’t help laughing at such an odd epithet. In the hall, Anne Merivaara and I had a moment alone while Jiri disappeared into the restroom.

“Someone needs to talk sense into that boy. Riikka and I have tried, but it’s no use. He doesn’t have any real contact with his father, and he just calls Tapio an opera clown. Mikke is the only one Jiri might listen too, but he’s in Estonia sailing.”

“Is Mikke Sjöberg related to you?”

“He’s Juha’s half brother, but he has his mother’s name.”

Just then Jiri marched past me without a word. Anne Merivaara ran after him, waving a rushed good-bye. As I quickly assembled the pretrial report, I hoped this would be the last time I was mixed up in the Merivaara family’s affairs.

No charges were filed against Officer Akkila. Jiri Merivaara received a fine of seven hundred marks for resisting arrest, and the girl who threw the rock through the McDonald’s window was sentenced to fines totaling ten thousand marks plus damages, which she refused to pay.

Autumn appeared in Espoo suddenly, and it was like a crisp-smelling blackout curtain had been drawn. I settled into my work routines and got to know my new colleagues in the unit, Anu Wang and Petri Puustjärvi. Puustjärvi had transferred from Kirkkonummi, the next police district west. He was a solidly built blond of about forty who played Go and tied flies. Gradually I got used to organizing investigations and making assignments, and I found that I could shorten management meetings by a third if I stepped in and interrupted the other unit commanders’ hunting stories and asked them to get to business.

I missing working with my old boss, Jyrki Taskinen. We made a habit of having lunch together on Mondays and Fridays, and by the end of September, there were already rumors floating around whose sources weren’t difficult to guess. Ström claimed that I had made it into this new job by way of our boss’s loins. And it was true there was a certain electricity between Taskinen and me, but it was almost entirely unexpressed: only the occasional straightening of a tie or the brushing of a dried leaf from the hair. Although there could be plenty of energy in that too.

Antti had also developed a regular daily routine. Iida was now taking only one three-hour nap, during which time Antti threw himself into his research or reading his favorite poetry. Apparently playing the piano was a favorite activity when Iida was awake, and once a week they went to the library for music hour. Antti seemed content.

“Iida never puts on an act, unlike everyone at the university. It’s refreshing to be with someone who is always so direct.”

October 4 was a Saturday. In the morning I wondered why the date sounded so familiar, and then I realized. A year had passed since Harri’s death.

The whole day I was on edge because I was the on-call lieutenant for the Criminal Division, which meant approving arrest warrants and going to the station if necessary to handle any problems. In the evening the telephone started ringing with the usual wino fights and barroom brawls, so I slept downstairs with my cell so I wouldn’t wake up Antti and Iida. I had stopped breast-feeding in the mornings a couple of weeks earlier, because I had known that on any of these on-call nights, I might have to leave without knowing when I’d be back. Ending nursing made me sad, but Iida wasn’t an infant anymore. She was walking and even speaking a few words now, the usual “mamas” and “dadas.”

The morning of October 5 was gray and drizzly, and the phone woke me up at seven thirty. I could hear from Puustjärvi’s voice that he had been up all night.

“A body just turned up on Rödskär Island.”

Was I still asleep and dreaming of Harri death a year ago? No, this was real. The sleep disappeared from my eyes like willow pollen in the wind.

“Do we know the identity of the victim yet?”

“Yes. Juha Merivaara, born 1951.”

It took a moment for this to register.

“Has anyone been out there yet?”

“I’m waiting with Koivu and a photographer for the helicopter pilot. The rest of the forensic team is going by boat.”

“Don’t let that helicopter leave without me! I’ll be there in fifteen.” I hung up and rushed to put the coffee on. Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds later I was at the station, and in that time I had managed to wash up, dress, drink two cups of coffee, speed three miles, park, and climb up to the helicopter pad.

I had only ever flown in a helicopter during drills at the academy. Even though I wasn’t afraid of flying, my stomach lurched when the chopper lifted off the roof and turned south toward the Baltic Sea. I couldn’t see the water properly through the rain, and my ear protection didn’t completely drown out the noise. I took a few deep breaths, then asked Puustjärvi to tell me what exactly had come in from Rödskär.

“Not much. Just that someone found a male body on the shore but it doesn’t look like a drowning!” Puustjärvi yelled into his headset microphone, causing a horrible burst of static in my headphones.

“Who called it in?”

“Guy by the name of Tapio Holma.”

Tapio Holma, eh? The whole Merivaara clan would probably be on the island, including Mikke Sjöberg. My stomach clenched when the helicopter banked and dropped in altitude.

I looked through the fog at the increasingly sparse archipelago and the gray-blue sea dotted with whitecaps. Five minutes later I spotted a light on the horizon. The Rödskär lighthouse called to us through the fog. Once we descended to about three hundred feet, I could see that the same two boats were in the harbor as in August: Juha Merivaara’s sleek motorboat and Mikke Sjöberg’s wooden sailboat.

The alder trees bowed in the west wind, and the helicopter was barely able to land on the small patch of grass. The noise had called a group of people to the base of the lighthouse.

Riikka Merivaara and Tapio Holma. Jiri. Mikke Sjöberg, who was trying to light his pipe in the helicopter’s rotor wash. A plump woman in her fifties with dark hair whom I hadn’t met before. The wind whipped her violet jacket like a witch’s cape.

We climbed out of the helicopter. Mikke was the first to greet us.

“Hello,” he said in a tense voice. “You certainly got here fast.” He didn’t offer his hand.

“Hello, everyone.” I surveyed the group in front of the lighthouse. “My name is Lieutenant Maria Kallio from the Espoo Police Department. These are my colleagues Officers Pekka Koivu and Petri Puutsjärvi, and our forensic photographer Erkki Myller.”

The woman in the violet jacket stepped forward to shake hands and introduced herself as Seija Saarela, after which Holma also came to say hello. But Riikka and Jiri just stared at us, huddled in their coats.

“Petri, could you find a place indoors where we can conduct preliminary interviews?” I asked Puustjärvi. “Take down everyone’s information. Could whoever found the deceased please show us the way to him?”