Wolves and Angels (3 page)

A white taxi
coming
from downtown arrived at the intersection at the same moment as the motorcycle. Sopanen and Saari didn’t hear the sound of the collision in their cr
uiser
, but both saw how the motorcyclist catapulted spread-eagle over the Mercedes, high into the air. They didn’t see the fall. Saari’s eyes squeezed shut of their own accord. Sopanen turned his gaze away and lifted his foot off the gas.

2.

Koskinen heard the crash half a mile away. He had already been jogging for fifty minutes, and his runner’s high was peaking. His feet were moving by themselves, and even the continually intensifying rain wasn’t slowing him down. On the contrary, it was like the sweet icing on his masochism cake.

He had noticed how the
cruiser
driving past had slowed down. Its crew obviously thought he was barking mad. Who cares! It wasn’t anyone’s business what time he went running. A moment later the car had passed him again going the other direction. It had been chasing a motorcycle that was speeding with insane recklessness. Both vehicles had shot to the end of the street in a matter of seconds, and the ghostly blue flashing had still been visible around the corner. At least the police car hadn’t been blasting its siren—they would’ve been crazy to wake up the entire neighborhood over something like that.

Koskinen turned onto Opiskelija Street and saw the Ford, its emergency lights still flashing, at the other end of the street, but he couldn’t see anything else from this distance. He felt like running to see what had happened. But over-eagerness for the job was the most common subject of ridicule among police officers, so he veered off to the left at the next corner. He sped up a little and
decided to continue on around the water tower.

A late-night dog walker glanced at the lone runner nervously from the shadows of a nearby park. Koskinen knew full well how sick his jogging around the neighborhood at night in the rain looked. But he had a 10K run marked on his training schedule for Monday, and there was no way he’d skip it. His sea navigation course at the adult education center had happened to fall on the same night, and so he had to push his jog later than he had planned.

Koskinen made a final sprint. He was passing the skateboard ramps at the
park
when he heard the yelp of a siren. The sound of the ambulance quickly receded toward the site of the accident. Apparently it was a matter of life and death; he doubted the
ambulance
driver would have made a racket like that in the middle of the night for anything less urgent.

The apartment building Koskinen lived in at Kemianraitti 8 was six-stories tall. The Monday Night Movie had ended hours ago, and every window in the place was dark. Koskinen didn’t want to disturb the quiet of the building with the droning of the elevator, so he climbed the stairs two at a time up to the fifth floor. Lactic acid was squeezing into his thighs, and he had to pant for a minute before opening the door.

He stripped down right in the entryway, stepped out onto the balcony naked, and hung up his jogging clothes to dry. In the bathroom he turned the faucet with exaggerated slowness, as if he could somehow muffle the gurgling of the water. He grimaced at the wall and stepped under the shower. He was sure someone in the building would be complaining again about someone showering in the middle of the night. In the old days he could bathe in his own sauna until dawn if he wanted.
Not that
he h
ad hardly ever done that; he n
ever jog
ged
back then.

A message had appeared on his voicemail during the shower. Koskinen put the phone to his ear and walked with a towel around his waist in the darkness of his
one
-bedroom apartment.

It was a familiar, husky voice. “Ev
e
nin’, Pekki here. You must be out for a midnight run again, since you aren’t picking up. I’m calling because somebody found a body in Peltolammi an hour and a half ago, at twenty minutes to twelve to be more precise. You said yourself we could call at any time whatsoever if something even a little bit shady goes down. And this is definitely that. We don’t have a clue about the guy’s identity—he didn’t have any ID in his pockets. But we can chat about it in the morning if you’re back from your nightly jaunt by then.”

The phone call ended there. Pekki hadn’t said anything about whether it was an accident or a possible homicide. Koskinen was torn for a moment about whether to call him back. His throat was dry from his run, so he went to the fridge. He’d have plenty of time to hear the details in the morning.

3.

Koskinen liked the dry, biting mornings of September,
and his bicycle was moving easi
er
than normal. His leg muscles pumped away, relaxed, and he wasn’t feeling the previous night’s jog even on the uphills.

He changed his route every day. Today’s trek started with a stretch of gravel road that cut through an uninhabited patch of forest. The noise of traffic soon fell behind, and he could hear the happy twittering of the titmice from the fir trees. As his journey continued toward downtown, he rode along the streets of a sleepy neighborhood of single-family homes admiring the fall colors—the rust-colored hedges, the blood
-
red clusters of berries on the
mountain ash
trees in the yards.

His brain rolled along nicely with his pedaling—the half-hour commute was plenty of time to plan out the whole day.
He would
flip through the crime reports from the last twenty-four hours right after the
ir
morning meeting. Then he could tackle his backlog of preliminary investigation
reports. I
f th
ose turned out not to be
too convoluted,
he might still have time before lunch to flip
through
some of the
obligatory committee memoranda, working group reports, directives, and
various
queries that streamed in from the National Police Board
at the Interior Ministry
every day.

This wasn’t the first time Koskinen would have to forget his schedule.

He was about two miles from the office when the
phone in the
pocket of his windbreaker started ringing. He held on to the handlebar with his left hand and fumbled the phone out with his right. It
was difficult to talk on a cell
phone while riding in city traffic. There was a busy intersection ahead, and a long, accordion bus was turning in front of him. He almost dropped the phone
,
juggl
ing
like a circus
acrobat
to get his bike over the stone curb onto the sidewalk.

“Hello!” he yelled. “Is anyone still there?”

He heard Pekki’s voice, feigning petulance: “Barely… I was just about to go make some more coffee. My old cup got cold while I was waiting.”

“What d’you want!”

“Now, you don’t need to yell… I’m not deaf.”

“Get to the point! I’m
on my bike here
in the middle of the sidewalk
.”

“Okay, okay,” Pekki answered quickly. “Tanse ordered us to push the morning meeting up. No rush, just so long as you’re in conference room
numero dos
in fifteen minutes.”

The call ended. Koskinen shoved the cell phone in his pocket and got back in the saddle. Fifteen minutes! He set off pedaling furiously, blaming his ruined morning ride on Sergeant Pekki. His
speaking
style irritated Koskinen even more than usual; just
Pekki’s
numero dos
had annoyed him to no end. Was it really that hard to just say “conference room two?” You would have thought he could have learned more than how to count on that trip to Majorca.

He realized how childish his grumpiness was and started pushing even harder. He ran two red lights, although the lights had just barely turned, and for several blocks he cut in and out of traffic, even though there was a bike path right next to the road. The last part, a steep uphill on Sorin
Street
, he rode standing up with his butt off the bike seat. It was exactly eight o’clock when he locked his bicycle next to the wall of the police station.

A crowd had already gathered in the lobby. All sorts of property had disappeared during the night, from cars and bicycles all the way to outboard motors and satellite
dishes. Almost every night someone
had
lost
their
spouse, and
other,
more routine cases included vandalism—broken windows, slashed tires
, etc.
Walking past,
Koskinen glanced
to see if Sergeant Tiikko was taking reports. Usually he could calm even the most hysterical crime victim down just with his empathetic presence. However, there was no sign of Tiikko, but instead a young, nervous-seeming officer was standing behind the counter. Koskinen guessed that the man’s morning was going to be long and sweaty. But he had chosen his profession himself.

Koskinen didn’t wait for the elevator, but loped up the staircase to the third floor and slipped into his office. Usually he started his workday with a shower in the gym locker
-
room, but today he
didn’t have time. D
ark gray cotton trousers, a small-checked button-down shirt, and a black, three-button spor
t coat were waiting on hangers in his closet.

On the top shelf was a stack of paper towels taken from the restroom. Koskinen dried his armpits
quickly and started dressing. Then he stopped in front of the mirror to comb his hair. Sweaty, it looked
even thinner, and the pink crown of his head shone through.

Conference room two was located one floor down. The buzz of conversation through the open door was audible all the way at the other end of the hall. Koskinen slowed his pace and leisurely stepped into the room, as if he had never been in a hurry in his life. He did a quick survey of the room. Four detectives had arrived so far: Sergeant Risto Pekki and his whole core group, Markku Kaatio, Ulla Lundelin and Antti Eskola. The fifth policeman was Risto P. Jalonen from Forensics.

No one had made the mistake of sitting in the chair at the end of the oblong table—by virtue of his office it
belonged
ex officio
to the head of the Violent Crimes Unit, Tauno “Tanse” Niiranen.

Koskinen sat down next to Ulla. “Where’s Tanse?”

Pekki answered for the others: “We’ve just been batting that around. Usually Tanse is the first one here staring at his watch. It’s already ten past now.”

“What do we have up first?”

“The body
from
Peltolammi,” Ulla managed to say before Pekki. “We still don’t know anything about it, not even the cause of death.”

Pekki raised his voice: “We don’t have time to spend the whole morning waiting for one man. Eskola, go get the old man. Get in his face a little, and tell him what we think about dawdlers around here. As a former military man, that should come naturally.”

Eskola was on the far end of the table, a little apart from the others. He looked at Pekki hesitantly, trying to decide whether the sergeant was serious.

But then Pekki turned to Koskinen and smirked. “You got yourself all sweaty for nothing. Looks like there
’s
no
rush after all.”

“Sakari’s our fitness freak.” Ulla poked Koskinen in the side. “Galloping around the pasture like a young colt.”

Koskinen felt uncomfortable. His forehead was starting to sweat again, even though he wasn’t hot anymore. The attention of the whole group around the table was directed at him, and that made the perspiration practically gush from his forehead onto his temples. Even Jalonen from Forensics was grinning and rubbing his large nose.

Pekki slumped down in his chair as if emphasizing his words with his slovenliness. “Exerting yourself like that is just sick. You’d think you’d have better things to do these days.”

Koskinen was already opening his mouth to ask Pekki whether by “these days” he meant the independence of a divorced man or the freedom afforded by his lieutenant position. However, he didn’t have time to say anything before Kaatio broke in.

“At your age, you should start exercising a little more carefully.”

Koskinen looked at Kaatio, dumbfounded. Kaatio was stretching his shoulder blades with his elbows bent at the level of his ears, and Pekki, sitting next to him, had to crouch off to the side. It was the final drop that made Koskinen’s sweaty cup overflow.

“What the hell are you doing dragging age into it! We both have the same number of miles on the odometer and—”

Pekki interrupted him in a heartfelt tone. “Kaatio just means that you shouldn’t start so aggressively, working up such a sweat right off. For example, you could have begun with a few light air squats. Two squats a day, and later add some weights, maybe a brewskie in your left back pocket and another in your right then when you
start getting fit.
”