Snow Woman (25 page)

Niina didn’t seem to like that the conversation was shifting from astrology back to what happened to Aira.

“No one called me,” she said irritably and then added in a softer voice, “But I called Kari about that horoscope at around eleven thirty.”

“And you’re claiming you made that call from home?”

In reply, she stood up and motioned for us to follow her.

If Milla Marttila’s bedroom resembled a bordello, then Niina’s office was like a magician’s cave. Constellation-patterned fabric covered the walls and windows, and behind the desk hung a huge round diagram that Niina said was her own astrological chart. The shelves were crammed with astrology books, mostly in French and English.

Niina turned on her desktop computer and loaded an astrology program. I didn’t know anything about astrology, so I couldn’t follow her when she began explaining how it worked, but Niina’s intent wasn’t to give a demonstration. She said she just wanted to show us that she couldn’t do her charts anywhere but in her office. From what little I could understand, I had to believe her.

“How long did you live in France?” I asked as she switched off the computer and led us back into the hall.

“From when I was born until I turned eighteen. Mom and I moved here after I passed the matriculation exams. I thought the Sibelius Academy seemed like an interesting place to go to school, and Mom wanted to come back to Finland, as i
f . . .
as if she knew she didn’t have much time left.” Tears appeared in her almond eyes. When Pihko noticed them, he opened the front door as if to escape.

I was more callous. “Why did you stay in Finland after her death?”

“I was still in school. And anywa
y . . .
I get along better here than in France.”

“Even though your dad spends most of his time there?” I asked.

“Maybe because of that,” Niina snapped, but then instantly realized she had revealed too much. “Dad drinks a lot,” she said more softly. “It’s a typical reaction for a Cancer to the death of a spouse. I understand, but I can’t stand to look at him.”

Outside, the roads were still deadly slick. I was driving again. I drove a lot for work, rain or shine, and I usually had no trouble handling a car, but the Lada was like an ice skate. Even my Fiat was safer.

“And these are supposed to be designed for Siberia,” I muttered as I tried to take off from an intersection and the tires just spun. I was so soaked with sweat by the time we made it back to the station that I had to towel off in the ladies room. Thankfully I always kept an extra shirt and bra in my office. As I changed, I noticed my nipples looked strangely dark. I remembered reading somewhere that this was part of pregnancy too.

At two thirty the hospital called. Aira Rosberg was conscious and doing well given the circumstances. There was only one problem: she couldn’t remember a single thing since Christmas Eve.

14

According to Dr. Wirtanen, short-term memory loss resulting from a head injury was nothing out of the ordinary, especially given that the events she had forgotten were so traumatic. He thought it was likely her memory would return with time, at least partially.

“Pressuring her won’t help,” he said to me on the phone. “I’d prefer you didn’t question Ms. Rosberg until next week at the earliest. The officer you sent is guarding her, but we aren’t telling her that.”

“Good. Supervision could be necessary if any of the following people come to visit.” I reeled off the names of Milla Marttila, Niina Kuusinen, Tarja Kivimäki, Joona Kirstilä, and Johanna Säntti.

“Mrs. Säntti? She’s here right now. Do you really think she could be a danger to Ms. Rosberg?”

I sighed. I didn’t know how to answer. The Hawaii 5-0 was giving me heartburn, and I had a strange craving for buttermilk.

Finally I said, “Please ask the guard to just keep an eye on Ms. Rosberg and any visitors. It’s an unusual situation.”

After I hung up I sat in my office thinking about the case. I wanted to bug Aira’s room, but there was no way I’d get permission. Too bad the guard couldn’t actually sit in her room and listen in. Maybe we could recruit a few of the department’s young female officers to dress up as doctors and nurses? I could pretend to be an orderl
y . . .

Ström barged in to remind me that we had an interrogation in five minutes, interrupting my increasingly crazy train of thought. The new case was just a drunken brawl, depressingly familiar and mostly harmless—no one had died. Plus it was obvious that the guy who had whacked his buddy over the head with a bottle already had a huge hangover, and even with a few stitches in his head, the victim was still riding his buzz, as were most of the witnesses gathered for questioning.

Keeping Ström from losing his temper was almost harder than figuring out the sequence of events leading up to the attack. When we finally managed to get all of them out of the station around three, we found the rest of our unit besides Taskinen gathered in the break room. The mood was dejected. Pihko was collecting money for a wreath for Palo’s funeral. He asked me to write the card.

“Ask the boss,” I said. “I’m no good at that kind of thing. By the way, can anyone pull some overtime tonight? It’ll be after eight.”

Instantly everyone looked mutinous. The Espoo Blues were playing the Jokers that night, and the match would be televised. Ice hockey was always a point of contention here at the station. In addition to fans of those teams, our unit had followers of HIFK, the Tampere Axes, and even KalPa from up north. When asked, I always said I just cheered for the best-looking team but that watching hockey was boring because the men wore too many clothes.

“What’s the job?” asked Puupponen, a KalPa fan from Kuopio.

“I need a couple of guys to go with me to Fanny Hill. It’s a strip club in Kallio. We need to interview one of the dancers.”

In an instant a shouting match replaced the funereal mood, and suddenly I had my pick of volunteers. Eventually they were winnowed down to Ström and Puupponen, the latter because he was nowhere near his overtime limit and the former because even though I didn’t really want to take Ström along, he was less likely than the younger guys to go gaga at the sight of bare breasts.

I had completely neglected exercise for the past few weeks, so after work I headed to the rec center in Tapiola. My abs and back muscles would be stressed by pregnancy over the next several months, and lifting weights or running usually helped clear my head. Sometimes exercising even seemed to allow questions to answer themselves. But even though I did a double dose of crunches, worked my biceps and triceps, and spent ten minutes on the abductor machine, this time it didn’t work. My head was empty of ideas. My certainty that Elina’s death was murder was fading. Maybe the person who hit Aira was just a thief who thought Rosberga was empty? Or maybe Aira staged it. Wasn’t there a novel with a plot along those lines?

“Hey, Maria.” Just as I was thinking this, my old friend Makke showed up on the machine next to me and tried to convince me to go out for a beer after the gym. I managed to sidestep the invitation by saying I had to work. This wasn’t really a lie, but it made me realize that I wasn’t going to be able to conceal my pregnancy for long. No one was going to believe I had made a New Year’s resolution to give up drinking, and my first trip to the OB/GYN was next week. This was really happening.

But at least pumping iron did put me in a better mood. When I arrived home from the gym and found Antti not there, I suddenly remembered the antifreeway meeting. I would have had time to go after all. I shook my head as I thought of him. Was there any windmill one of us wasn’t willing to take a tilt at? Give it a year and I would probably be protesting about day-care subsidies with my baby strapped to my chest.

For the evening I dressed as unattractively as possible in black jeans and a nondescript gray blouse. I left my hair down and only wore a little makeup, some mascara and powder to conceal the paleness of my face. Looking in the mirror, I was hoping to see a tough police officer staring back, but as usual there was just the same nervous girl. I never understood why people wanted to look younger than they were. In my profession, girlishness was just about the worst thing for your credibility.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled about going to a strip club, especially not with Ström and Puupponen. Puupponen was nice enough, a redheaded, freckled kid from Savo, like me. He got along with Ström even worse than I did. The fact that he had volunteered to go out on a job with Ström was a little surprising. Maybe the draw of Fanny Hill was too overpowering.

When Ström picked me up at a bus stop near my house, I saw that Puupponen was already sitting in the backseat. As we drove, I gave them more details about what we were going to do: ask Milla Marttila about her movements the night before last and confirm her alibi, if she had one. We’d probably have to get permission from the manager to interview his employees during work hours, but I wasn’t particularly worried about that. Usually the owners of strip clubs wanted to stay in good with the cops.

“Now don’t go lecturing the customers about feminism in the middle of their night out,” Ström warned me once I’d finished outlining my plan of attack.

“Crap. I forgot my crochet hooks. I’ll have to remember next time,” I replied, my voice dripping acid. Ström snorted as he pulled our Saab cruiser onto the sidewalk in front of the club, muttering something about how he wasn’t going to go scavenging for a parking spot. The bouncer at the door stared at us, especially me, but let us in when Ström showed his badge and asked for the manager. The bouncer told us to wait at the bar for a minute.

I had been to a strip show at a bar in my home town once, also on duty, but that had mostly been comical. What I was seeing now was bewildering. It was early, but there were already numerous groups of men apparently unwinding after business meetings. Most of them wore suits while the cocktail waitresses serving them were topless. The only women who were fully dressed besides me were the shift manager and a woman sitting with a group of men speaking Russian and looking very lost. I tried to spot Milla in the gaggle of topless girls wearing fishnet stockings but couldn’t find her. Maybe she was stripping for someone.

The bouncer returned and motioned us to follow him up a stairwell hung with red velvet and large mirrors. Our images were reflected dozens of times as we passed. The same decor continued in the hallway upstairs, with doors punctuating the red velvet walls. It looked like a hallway in a brothel, but the doors probably just led to the private strip show rooms. Music came from a couple of them.

I almost burst out laughing when I saw the owner of the club, Rami Salovaara. For once someone fit the stereotype in my head. He was short, obese, and very red-faced. He was bald on top, and his long comb-over wasn’t quite able to cover the shine. His mustache, on the other hand, was in full bloom. Under a wide nose, it bristled across his entire lip.

“So what do the Espoo Police want at my club?” Salovaara asked, making no move to stand up to shake our hands. Not that it bothered me. I didn’t really want his grubby mitts touching me.

“We’re here about one of your employees, Milla Marttila. We need to verify her whereabouts a couple of days ago,” I replied.

“So it’s Milla, is it? What kind of trouble takes three cops to come pick her up?” Salovaara glanced at a monitor sitting on his desk, which showed what was going on downstairs. Were there cameras in the strip booths that Salovaara used to monitor his employees’ activities?

“We just want to confirm that she was here working and not out trying to commit a homicide,” I said. “We’d like your permission to interview some of your employees during the evening. Do you have shift logs for the night before last?”

“The club manager’ll have them. She’s the slightly more dressed, wrinkly woman downstairs. Do you really suspect Milla of murder?”

“That actually isn’t any of your business,” I said coldly, remembering how this man had treated Milla when she was raped. “Puupponen, will you check those rosters and make sure Milla was at work?”

“I’m not obligated to allow you to harass my staff during working hours,” said Salovaara. “If the police need to interview my employees, they should do it when they’re off the clock.”

“For that we’d need a list of your employees, their addresses, and their telephone numbers,” I shot back.

I didn’t know exactly how the private stripping side of Fanny Hill worked, but more than once I’d heard rumors about other strip clubs skirting the pimping laws by setting the girls up on what they called intermittent work schedules. Because selling themselves wasn’t a crime, the girls’ official work ended when a customer watching a perfectly legal private stripping session decided to pay for more. What the girls did in their free time outside of the club wasn’t the owner’s business. After tending to her client, usually in an employer-provided apartment nearby, the girl returned to the club to continue her official work day. The only way anyone could intervene would be by appealing to the Working Hours Restriction Act, but so far there wasn’t any precedent for that. But a bunch of the girls living in the same apartment owned by the club would be an obvious sign of a brothel operation. I also had serious doubts that all of the Russian dancers at Fanny Hill had their papers in order.

Puupponen returned with the shift roster before Salovaara could even respond. According to the list, Milla had been at work on Tuesday night, although given how close she lived to the club, she could easily have said she was taking a client back to her apartment and then slipped away to Rosberga.

“So what’s it going to be? Should we interview the staff who worked Tuesday night now, or are you going to give us those addresses?” I said, turning the screws.

Salovaara weighed his options carefully.

“If you give us permission, we’ll get all the interviews done tonight,” Ström said. Up to this point he had been strangely quiet. “It’ll be painless. We won’t even need everyone’s full contact information.”

I knew Ström was negotiating, but his willingness to side with Salovaara’s circumvention of the law infuriated me.

“If Marttila is guilty—let’s say of attempted murder—aiding and abetting could lead to jail time, especially if the person in question has a police record already,” I snapped.

I hadn’t checked Salovaara’s record, so I was taking a risk, but it worked. He grunted something I couldn’t quite make out, but then he gave us permission to question the staff just so long as we didn’t mess with his business. As we headed to the door, Salovaara suddenly addressed me.

“By the way, Sergeant Kallio, if you ever get tired of police work, come see me about a job. We have a shortage of curvy redheads. Your breasts are about the right size too and probably don’t sag much yet. Our customers like a woman who knows how to take charge. A black leather corset and a whip would be just the thing for you.”

Ström caught his breath and started moving toward the club owner, but I managed to reply before he got his hands on him. “Thanks, but no thanks. I prefer to choose who sees me naked. Let’s take you for example: Bald is beautiful, tubby, so what exactly are you trying to hide with that comb-over? And that mustache. Is it compensating for something else you lack? Are you having trouble getting it up even with a pro now? Sorry, pal, but it shows just looking at you. Thanks for the help though!” I closed the door after us with exaggerated care, catching one last glimpse of the man’s face, which looked something like a tomato now.

“You’re just making friends left and right these days,” Ström said to me in the hall. “You might want to watch it with that one though.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chief spends a fair amount of time here. We came here after the Christmas party, and he knew all the waitresses by name. And I’m sure you noticed they don’t have shirts to wear name tags on.”

I shrugged. “The chief and I are on a collision course anyway. I really don’t have the energy to care. I’m going to look for Milla. You two find the women who were working with her that night!”