Outside, a swarm of children played on a snow pile. There were about a dozen of them, all preschool age, with skin tones ranging from fair to very dark. Their mothers stood chatting near the wall. I approached, introduced myself, and asked if they knew anything about Ayan’s disappearance.
“Is she missing?” one of the light-skinned mothers asked. “I thought it’d been a while since I’d seen her. She babysits for us sometimes when my sister can’t. Has something happened to her?”
“We don’t know. Have any of you heard fighting coming from Ayan’s apartment?”
Silence fell over the group. Then one of the dark-skinned young women wearing a headscarf asked another dressed like her something in a language that I guessed was Somali. She answered in what sounded like the same language. The women’s animated conversation ended in head shaking.
“Amina does not know Finnish very well and did not know what the word ‘fighting’ meant,” one of the Somali women said. “She is Ayan’s neighbor. No fights. Very peaceful family. Keep to selves, yes. Not many visitors. Feel a little sorry for them.”
The other Somali woman nodded, confirming the first one’s words. The woman who had used Ayan as a babysitter asked about her disappearance and wondered why nothing about her had appeared in the newspapers or on the Internet.
“It would be awful if she was found dead around here! Like, in a trash bin. Or if the children found her. She couldn’t be under that snow pile, could she?” the woman asked, almost hysterically.
“Doubtful. But get in touch with the Espoo police if you hear or see anything out of the ordinary. The switchboard will know who to contact.”
Puupponen had been watching the children’s snow castle construction, while Koivu stood to the side, typing on his phone. Puupponen didn’t have children of his own, and he had never expressed a desire to have a family, at least not to me. He got all sorts of ribbing about his single status around the department, including insinuations about his sexual orientation, but Puupponen took it like he did most things in life: with humor. Now he was smiling at a little girl with black curls spilling out from under her pink winter hat. The girl struggled to stay on her feet, plopping down in the snow every so often, but always stubbornly getting back up.
“Police material,” Puupponen observed. “Falling on her ass over and over but not giving up.”
“Maria!” Koivu called to me. “Let’s go see if anyone’s home at Sara’s place, since it’s over there, across the courtyard. I tried calling her father, but he isn’t answering.”
Sara Amir was the youngest of the missing girls, at just fourteen years old. Koivu told us that she had four brothers, two older and two younger. The smaller boys went to a nearby elementary school, while the younger of the bigger boys was in tenth grade trying to learn the language well enough to start vocational school.
“Sara’s father is a taxi driver, and her mother is training to be a florist. They’ve been here since ’96. The younger children were born in Finland. The father was a teacher in Bosnia, but his education didn’t transfer over here. The mother might be home.”
“And the older son?” I asked, but Koivu didn’t answer, instead tromping off briskly toward the next building. I followed him and soon heard Puupponen’s steps behind me.
“Nice kid,” he said as he opened the door for me. The lobby of this building was dirtier than the last. Someone had spray-painted “Niggers Get the Fuck Out” on the bulletin board, apparently very recently. Underneath somebody else had scratched an answer in pencil in another script I couldn’t read.
The Amirs’ apartment was on the second floor of the building. There were dents in the white paint of the hallway’s concrete walls, as if someone had tried to move a piece of furniture that was too big to fit. On the Amirs’ door was a wreath made of pink artificial roses and gold ribbon. The family was Bosnian Muslim, but many families in that particular population were religiously indifferent. Perhaps the Amirs had started celebrating Christmas in the Finnish style too, and the wreath was left over from that. Though it had been two months since the holidays, there seemed to be a Christmassy fragrance of cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger hanging in the hallway.
Koivu rang the doorbell. The sound was surprisingly loud, louder than a normal doorbell. When nothing happened, he pressed the button again. After the echo of the bell faded, we heard a strange howling coming from the apartment.
“Is there a dog in there?” Koivu said and then lifted the mail flap. The howling became clearer, but it wasn’t coming from the entryway. It was coming from somewhere farther back in the apartment, and it didn’t sound like something a human would make. But it wasn’t like an animal noise either. Whoever or whatever was making the noise was clearly in distress.
“Open up! Police!” Koivu yelled through the mail slot, but his yell only made the howling intensify. At that moment the door to the next apartment opened, hitting Puupponen squarely in the back and crushing him between the door and the wall.
“Who’s out here making all that racket?”
When Koivu saw the speaker, his face registered mild shock, and I think my own jaw probably dropped too. The woman was small and round, and her housecoat, her slippers, and the curlers under her babushka were like a costume from a black-and-white World War II movie. To top it all off, she had a rolling pin in her hand, which she brandished menacingly.
“Is someone behind the door? It’s your own fault. You should be more careful,” she said as Puupponen scrambled out, his nose red but, luckily, not bleeding.
“Espoo police. Good afternoon. We’re trying to find the Amir family.”
“Oh, so it’s the police, is it? I’ll need to see your badges.”
We each presented our police credentials, which the woman turned this way and that to inspect. The nameplate on her door said Kämäräinen. She was standing with her feet firmly planted in the doorway, looking like she had no intention of allowing us into her apartment.
“They seem to be real, although you never can tell nowadays with all those fake doctors and all. You can never be too careful. My father was a policeman in Ruovesi, and he taught me that you shouldn’t trust people too much. The ones who look the nicest are usually the biggest crooks. None of the Amirs are home except their crazy son, Samir. What do you want with them? Nothing bad has happened, has it?”
“Why is Samir making that sound?” If Kämäräinen didn’t know about Sara’s disappearance, I didn’t intend to tell her about it. “Is he in trouble?”
“He was just born like that, or at least he’s been strange since he was a child. Sometimes he’s afraid of the doorbell. Do you want to speak with him? I have the Amirs’ spare key. I sometimes go over to calm him down when he has these fits.”
According to Finnish law, in missing person cases we were authorized to enter the missing individual’s apartment without a search warrant. Weeks had passed since Sara’s disappearance, so the family would have had plenty of time to hide anything that might indicate that Sara hadn’t left of her own free will. And because we were being handed the keys on a silver platter, I said, “Yes, thank you.” Kämäräinen closed her door while she went to retrieve the Amirs’ keys.
“When did you last see Sara Amir, Ms. Kämäräinen?” I asked when she returned with the Abloy key. The keychain had an artificial rose attached, identical to the ones on the Amirs’ door.
“I haven’t seen her since she left on that trip more than a month ago. Strange she hasn’t come back yet. You can’t stay away from school like that, even with the winter break.”
“What have Sara’s parents said about her trip?”
“That she was seeing relatives in Bosnia and going to school there. That it’s perfectly safe there nowadays. I do miss her, though. She’s very helpful. She sometimes runs little errands for me and helps me take my rugs out. A nice girl, even though she does chase after the boys a lot. But then they all do at that age.”
I inserted the key in the lock, but Koivu con
tinued questioning Kämäräinen.
“How would you describe her interest in boys?”
“Giggling and flirting, wearing a lot of makeup. She curls her hair and doesn’t wear a headscarf, which is probably not such a big sin in that family, unlike the other neighbors. Some of the men in those families don’t dare look at me if I’m out without a scarf, and look at me: I’m just a wrinkled old woman!” Kämäräinen chuckled to herself.
When I turned the key in the lock, the howling began again. The smell of Christmas grew stronger, and when I peeked into the kitchen, I saw a spice cake on the table.
“Is anyone here?” I hollered. Puupponen followed after me. The howling had stopped. The entryway opened up into the living room, which had a door on the other side that led to the rest of the apartment. The decorations and furniture in the living room were the same as any Finnish home, where practicality and price were the most important considerations. The room was dominated by a dark-blue sofa set and a flat-screen TV. There weren’t many books on the bookshelves, but there were plenty of knickknacks and artificial flower arrangements. The bouquet of roses on the coffee table looked real, but when I sniffed it, I discovered the flowers were silk.
I heard a scream behind me. I turned to see Puupponen standing in the door of the bedroom trying to fend off a young man. Puupponen was half a foot taller than his opponent, but the boy had armed himself with a bread knife and was waving it around blindly. Now and then he would let out a low roar or a screech that sounded like the cry of a bird.
Hearing the screams, Koivu charged into the apartment from the hallway, and we both rushed to Puupponen’s aid. Puupponen backed into the living room, allowing Koivu to circle behind the attacker. I threw myself on the floor and grabbed the young man’s legs. They were bare, and there weren’t any toenails on the last two toes of his right foot. I was able to throw him off-balance by locking his ankles together, after which it was easy for Puupponen to grab his knife hand and disarm him. Koivu pulled the boy’s arms behind him and pushed his head down, at which point Samir went limp, and Koivu had to work to keep him upright.
“Don’t hurt him!” yelled Kämäräinen, who had come into the room behind Koivu. Puupponen was fishing for a pair of handcuffs in his briefcase, but I shook my head. The boy looked like he was calming down. He was very slender; his body looked more like a teenager’s than a twentysomething’s, but the black stubble on his jaw said otherwise. When Koivu let him lift his head, I saw large brown eyes surrounded by eyelashes that would have been long enough for a mascara ad. The eyes were filled with terror.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” I said gently, as if speaking to a shy cat. “We’re from the Espoo police, and we’re looking for your sister, Sara.”
Tears started to run from Samir’s eyes. Koivu led him over to the sofa to sit. Kämäräinen sat down next to the boy and wrapped her arm around his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Samir. Auntie Aune won’t let anything bad happen to you.” Kämäräinen pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her housecoat and gave it to the boy, who clutched it in his fist but didn’t use it. I guessed that a policewoman would probably be much less scary to Samir than two large men.
“Which room is Sara’s? My colleagues could take a look at her things.” I addressed my question to Aune Kämäräinen, because Samir was still sobbing.
“She slept in the little room with her mother. That door across from the kitchen. They called it the women’s room.”
Puupponen and Koivu didn’t need any instructions; they knew what to do. After they left the room, Samir gradually began to calm down. Though Aune Kämäräinen was an outsider, she seemed to know the Amir family and Sara’s business well enough, and so I let her stick around.
“You said that Sara is still in Bosnia. Have—”
I didn’t have time to finish my sentence because at the word “Bosnia,” Samir started shaking again and screamed, “Not back there! Not Samir!”
Kämäräinen had to press the boy down to keep him in place, and Koivu poked his head out of the women’s room, ready to intervene.
“No one is taking you anywhere,” Kämäräinen and I both said at the same time in an attempt to calm him down.
From what we could piece together, Samir had been born in the fall of 1989, so he had been a small child when the Bosnian War began. His father had been on the Serbs’ hit list, but the family, only three people at the time, had managed to stay one step ahead by moving from one refugee camp to the next. The family’s second-oldest child, Alen, was born in 1993 amid the chaos of the camps, and Sara had been less than a year old when the family escaped the Srebrenica bloodbath by the skin of their teeth. Samir had been six then and old enough to understand terror and to fear pain and death.
“Sara didn’t want to go back there either,” Samir suddenly said, clearly and sensibly. “But Father said she had to go, that Sara was learning the wrong ways here. She was with the wrong boys. Uncle Emir came to take Sara to her real home in Bosnia, even though Sara didn’t want to go. Father will be angry that I told you. He said that I would follow Sara if I wasn’t quiet.”
“Why would it be better for Sara in Bosnia?”
“There the old ways are respected. No infidel boys. It’s better for girls there; boys fine in Finland. My younger brothers were born in Finland. They don’t remember anything about Bosnia. They want to play hockey like Finns.”
Koivu had returned to the door of the women’s room.
“Maria, we need your expertise in here. Will you come take a look?” Koivu walked into the living room with the deliberately gentle expression on his face that he often used with his own children. Even so, Samir retreated toward the back of the couch as Koivu approached. I stood up and went into the women’s room, leaving Koivu to keep an eye on Samir. It was the same size as Ali Jussuf’s family’s smallest room, but the Amirs had solved the space problem with bunk beds. Next to the window was a writing desk with a hulking desktop computer that looked ten years old and a pile of books about flowers.
“There aren’t any sheets on the upper bunk, so it must be Sara’s. There are sheets on the bottom,” Puupponen observed. “As a woman, can you tell which things are Sara’s and which are her mother’s? I don’t understand anything about women, and Koivu’s daughter is still too small to be using makeup and wearing trendy clothes, so he’s no help either.”
I opened the closet doors. One side was full of linens, and another section had mostly long skirts and demure, high-necked tunics that didn’t look like something a normal fourteen-year-old would wear. The third section had only a few pieces of clothing, mostly the latest looks from the fast fashion chains, but also strappy tank tops, belly shirts, and miniskirts that had already gone out of style. The pink checkered leggings were a style that Iida had worn a couple of years ago before her black phase set in.
“This must be Sara’s part of the closet, with the clothes she left behind in Finland.”
“Yep. But if she doesn’t intend to come back, why are the clothes still here? Why haven’t they been thrown away?” Puupponen asked. “And what about these?” He opened the desk drawer, which was full of jewelry, and pulled out a package of contraceptive pills. “There’s no name on them. Sara’s mother is forty-seven, so she could still need the pill too.”
“Give them here.” I took the round pill dispenser. Four tablets had been taken from it. I tried to recall Sara’s picture. She’d had some pimples, but not enough acne to warrant a prescription for birth control pills. I remembered the talk I had heard at the Girls Club about a boyfriend named Tommi.
“See a prescription anywhere?” I asked. When Puupponen answered in the negative, I told him to keep searching. “We’ll have to ask Sara’s mother about these when we get ahold of her. Sometimes the pill is prescribed for teens for reasons other than contraception, but fourteen years old is pretty young to be taking hormones.”
“Better to take them than get pregnant, I guess,” said Puuppo
nen. “All of Sara’s schoolbooks are here, since there probably wouldn’t be any use for Finnish books in Bosnia.”
“I’ll look through Sara’s side of the closet more carefully.” All of the winter clothes and shoes were missing. On the upper shelf there was a worn-out pair of size five and a half figure skates, the cheapest brand from the department store sporting goods section. They had probably been bought used. A small cloth bag behind the skates was full of girls’ underwear. There wasn’t any more jewelry or makeup in her closet; that was all in the desk drawer.
On the wall above Sara’s bed was a poster of a half-dressed Shakira. It spoke to the Amir family’s lenient religious views. But the fact that they’d left the poster in place indicated that Sara would be coming home someday, contrary to what Samir claimed. How much could we trust the confused young man?
I thumbed through Sara’s schoolbooks. There were a lot of drawings in them; apparently, Sara had been bored during lectures, because she had either touched up the pictures in the books or added her own in the margins. The drawing style was the same in all the books, so I felt safe assuming the pictures were Sara’s work, even though textbooks rotated from one middle school student to another, and drawing in them was strictly forbidden. The history book had hearts in it. I noticed that at the center of almost all of them was written S + T. Hearts had begun to appear in her English workbook as well, just before Christmas, which I could tell because Sara had dated each homework assignment. Finally, in the math book, I found a large heart, pierced with an arrow and dripping blood, inside of which Sara had written T’s name out in full next to her own: Sara + Tommi.
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