The Healer (9 page)

“Yeahhh, I remember Pasi Tarkiainen. Although it was a long time ago. You don't need to worry about it.”

The last two sentences came so quickly that at first I didn't understand what she meant.

“No, no, no,” I said, when I understood. “That's not why I asked about him.”

“Then why?” she asked, surprisingly interested now, positively keen to know.

“I'm not sure yet. Do you remember when Johanna and this Pasi Tarkiainen moved to Kivinokka?”

“Vaguely.”

Why was she speaking so quickly now?

“Do you remember anything in particular about that time? Did something happen between them?”

“That's a kind of strange question.”

Again the words came quickly, strung together. I sighed.

“I know it is. But do you remember anything?”

“Well, nothing in particular comes to mind. It was a long time ago. Everything was … different then.”

“Yes, it was,” I said, speaking in a consciously slow, clear voice, trying to put the brakes on the speed of her speech. “But Johanna lived there for about a year and a half. Then she moved away.”

“This is kind of a weird conversation. Does Pasi have anything to do with your not hearing from Johanna?”

Pasi. I couldn't bring myself to refer to him by his first name. He was Pasi Tarkiainen to me.

“I don't know yet. Elina, try to remember. Was there anything unusual happening, when she moved away from Kivinokka, for instance?”

“I—” she began.

In the background, I could hear a cough coming from deep in the lungs, then two thuds on the wooden floor and an irritated mumble.

“Ahti's awake,” Elina said. She sounded positively overjoyed. “Tapani, is it all right if I try to remember and call you later?”

She hung up.

I stood looking at the enlarged image on the computer screen—the lilliputian yellow house bathed in soft spring sunlight, the lush green lawn of the yard, and a man working in the background, his back to the camera, a shovel or rake in his large hands, his shoulders broad, his hair in a ponytail.

 

11

“You could have just called.”

Harri Jaatinen walked around his desk, sat behind it, and looked at me in an uncomfortably fatherly way.

“I was going to call,” I said and sat down firmly in a chair. “But I needed to show you some photos and explain some connections between things.”

I was aware that I sounded like any number of conspiracy theorists. I held up a hand, although Jaatinen hadn't said anything.

“I'm sure this sounds peculiar. But I did what you suggested: I started with Pasi Tarkiainen.” I paused for a second, then two. “And I found my wife. Thirteen years ago.”

I explained what had happened, showed Jaatinen the photos, and put several papers in front of him on the desk. He glanced at me before he began to read. There was weariness in his eyes.

The room hummed with the sound of Jaatinen's laptop and the air-conditioning vent in the center of the ceiling. The laptop whirred at a high pitch. Jaatinen read for about five minutes, looked up from the papers, glanced at me—perhaps not as wearily now—looked at the pictures again, and typed something into his computer. Then he leaned back in his chair.

“Good work,” he said.

I looked at him in bewilderment.

“That's all?” I said. “Good work?”

“Good work,” he said, as if I hadn't understood him. “That's a lot.”

“Aren't we going to act? Do something?”

He made a gesture with his left hand that said “Be my guest.”

“OK,” I said. “What do you think about all this?”

“About all what?”

“About what I've found out.”

His voice was as dry and colorless as ever: “What exactly have you found out?”

I raised my eyebrows, sincerely surprised. Hadn't I just explained it to him?

“Pasi Tarkiainen and my wife once lived together. And that bartender was apparently their neighbor from way back. And Gromov, the photographer Johanna was working with, is dead. And all those things must be somehow connected.”

“Right,” Jaatinen said.

“You agree,” I said, leaning forward.

Jaatinen shook his head.

“Only that it all must be somehow connected.”

I sighed.

“Can you find out what happened to Gromov?”

Jaatinen glanced at his computer.

“It hasn't been reported yet.”

“Are you sure?”

He looked at the computer again, jabbed a finger at the keyboard a couple of times, and looked at me. Then he spoke, slowly and patiently: “According to this, no one with that name has come in.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. “If his employer already knows about it?”

Jaatinen looked at the computer again.

“Anything's possible these days. It could just be that they're busy and won't make a record of it for another week, or another month. But even that wouldn't guarantee anything. Even if the body had come in yesterday and a record was made of it immediately, we might not get any autopsy results until summer. That sort of thing can happen.”

I looked at him.

“That wouldn't be much help to Johanna,” I said, trying not to seem sarcastic. By the sound of it, I failed.

Jaatinen leaned as far back as possible without putting undue strain on himself or the chair.

“I don't know that it would help her any more if Gromov was on the admission records and the autopsy was under way,” he said. “Or if it's any use discussing it. As I said, Johanna Lehtinen did a great service to us—to me—on that case, and that's why I've spent time on you and on this … this…” he searched for a word for a moment, but couldn't find a suitable one, and half-spoke and half-swallowed the word he did find: “investigation.”

I decided to count to ten. I got to six.

“I don't mean to be a prick,” I said. “I understand that you're short of staff, flooded with cases, who knows what else. But if Johanna helped you once, now you can help her.”

Jaatinen seemed to consider the matter. He looked straight ahead, anyway, and from the look on his face seemed pensive, or just dead tired.

“It's difficult to imagine what I can do,” he finally said, “without any detectives.”

I looked at him and didn't say anything. He guessed what I was thinking and shook his head.

“Why not?” I said.

He thought for a moment.

“Because.”

“Because why?” I said.

“It's a bad situation. Hopeless, in fact. But it's still vaguely under control. If we start using pretend police then that's an admission of defeat on our part.”

“I'm not planning to pretend to be the police. At least not outwardly,” I said.

Jaatinen looked at me and said without blinking an eye, “OK, suggest something.”

*   *   *

I
WENT THROUGH THE
location signatures on Johanna's phone records that Jaatinen had ordered from the telephone company. I had been right about Jätkäsaari. But it hadn't been the last place Johanna's phone had been turned on.

An hour and forty-five minutes after I'd spoken with her, Johanna's phone had been near a cell phone relay station in the Kamppi area—on the corner of Fredrikinkatu and Urho Kekkosen katu, to be more precise. That was at 10:53 p.m.

I got Jaatinen to have surveillance videos sent to the police servers. The camera was on the corner of the old Sähkötalo building, about ten meters off the ground, and had a wide shot of the entire intersection, so individual people were mere dark shapes that turned pixilated when you enlarged them.

I clicked 10:50 p.m. People came and went by the hundreds. I was sure that in spite of the abundance of people I would be able to spot Johanna in the crowd. The minutes went by. The time record read 10:52, then 10:53, then 10:54. I didn't see Johanna. I clicked back to 10:50 and looked at the three minutes again. And again. I was surprised and disappointed and 100 percent sure that none of the people I saw were Johanna.

I stood up, got some coffee, and sat down in front of the computer again. Jaatinen had brought me to a workroom on the second floor, showed me a computer I could use, and wrote down the password for searching the data. The password got me into the telephone and surveillance camera records and certain identification databanks. The bar at the bottom of the screen said that Jaatinen's computer was linked to this one, and he could see where I was and what I was doing. It also promised to cut off my connections if I went astray.

I was sitting in an open room surrounded by other people tapping on computers. None of them had looked up from their screens, let alone spoken, for the entire hour I'd been sitting there. Maybe we were all doing the same thing: searching and hoping—and, of course, fearing that just one moment of inattention could mean losing that crumb of an answer forever.

I watched the surveillance footage again, focusing on each person's legs. None of them scurried along like Johanna did. She had always laughed at my lazy dawdle. Even though her legs were shorter than mine she walked twice as fast. If she was in the video, I would have seen her. I clicked to the beginning again, leaned back, and watched.

The rain played tricks with the image, soaking the streets and turning the sidewalks shiny, blurring the entire view. At 10:53 the intersection was transformed by the headlights of cars approaching from several directions, combined with the yellow light of the street lamps and the pulsing flash of the signs on the sides of the buildings, into a sparkling bouquet of light, its powerful glow coloring the millions of drops of rain falling from the sky. The result was a landscape that would have made a beautiful painting, but was pretty lousy as evidence.

I sighed and was about to give up, when I realized that I wasn't necessarily looking at the wrong video.

Johanna didn't have to be on foot.

She could just as well have been in a car.

 

12

I should be used to long spells of slim productivity, but they always seem to take me by surprise. When I'm writing I sometimes sit for hours and hours in front of the computer and only get a few new lines on the screen. Sometimes I just have to content myself with editing old text, a word here, a word there.

I spent an hour enlarging the image and examining it from all angles, writing down partial license numbers and the makes and colors of the cars and searching the drivers' registry—without any luck.

My eyes hurt.

It had been thirty-six hours since Johanna's last phone call.

I closed my eyes. My eyelids felt like stale orange peel. I rubbed them and saw shooting stars flashing from one side of the darkness to the other.

When I lowered my hands, Jaatinen was standing beside me. He looked at the maximum magnification image from the surveillance camera for a moment and then turned to look at me. I didn't say anything.

“Sometimes you don't see it until you stop looking,” he said. “You realize something you already knew.”

“I suppose.”

“I'm going downtown,” he said, scanning the screen again. “You can come along, if you want.”

I looked at the picture, looked at Jaatinen, and said yes.

Jaatinen's unmarked car was as neutral and metal-gray as the day that was dawning. The sun wasn't exactly shining, but the weather was almost clear, and round-bellied clouds hung low in the sky to remind us that the world still had something other than rain to offer.

Jaatinen's driving was unhurried. He used his turn signal even when no one was there to see it. There was something touching about that, something dignified. I couldn't help but think that he might be one of the last people on earth to obey all laws and statutes. Maybe he read my mind, because he said, “An old habit.”

Then he signaled again as we changed lanes to avoid a gap in the asphalt. We reached the Töölö Sports Hall and stopped at the light. The line for the food bank stretched hundreds of meters around the back of the building. I looked at the people in line—expressionless, resigned, their expectations ended. The security guards monitoring the line caught my attention.

There were new security companies springing up all the time, of course, but I didn't remember seeing any guards like these, with their black coveralls and the insignia on their backs. It resembled a large letter A, but not quite. Didn't I remember it from somewhere? Or was I just imagining that I did? I took a few photos of them just in case, both long shots and close-ups of the insignia.

Jaatinen looked at me curiously.

I nodded toward the security guards. He turned to look. I asked if he knew anything about them. He watched them a moment longer and shrugged, then looked at the road ahead again, as if he'd been personally invited to do so.

The light changed and we moved on.

“Sometimes it seems like there's no sense in it,” he said. “What are those guys guarding? Making sure people line up in an orderly fashion to get some food that's just going to run out eventually. Who pays them to do that, and why?”

He stopped at another light. The merest hint of a smile crept over his face, surprisingly bright in spite of its faintness and melancholy, lighting up not just his face but the entire car. He glanced at me and said in a gentler tone, “I don't suppose it does any good for me to think about it.”

The walls of the Opera House were darkened with rain and damp, its windows covered with plywood and tarps. The square around it, scattered with litter and plain old garbage, was like another world in the still-gray morning light, a world you didn't want to believe was real.

“These things occur to us,” I said.

Jaatinen didn't answer. He reached for the gearshift, quickly shifted into neutral, and let up the clutch.

“Can I ask you something?”

The question sounded sincere. I said by all means.