Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Had Noor’s father and brothers threatened her?”

  “Not just her father and brothers, but all of the male members of the extended family. Her grandfather, her uncle, and her two male cousins live in Espoo. They’re a very tight-knit bunch. Noor wouldn’t even have gone to high school if Sylvia hadn’t given those men a talking-to. They seemed to listen to Sylvia, but Noor still ended up dead. This is a nightmare! What am I going to say to the girls?”

  “You can help by telling us as much as possible about Noor. The police have a professional obligation to maintain confidentiality, as you know. Nothing from our conversation will leak to the tabloids.”

  I promised myself I would pass on everything I learned to Ruuskanen’s unit. And besides, Heini Korhonen really needed someone to talk to.

  “Our purpose here at the Girls Club isn’t to alienate anyone from their native culture. We encourage cultures to meet,” Heini rattled off, as if by rote. “And we help the girls defend themselves. Noor asked for advice about clothing. What else could we say other than she should be able to wear whatever she wanted? Now this happened.”

  “Had Noor stopped wearing a headscarf?”

  “Partially, at least at school and here. She still wore it when she was with her family.”

  “Do you know about anyone she might have been dating? Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “You police are so quick to stereotype. Why couldn’t she have had a girlfriend? But yes, Noor had a boyfriend, a Finnish boy. It was because of him that Noor wanted to dress like Western girls. Someone is coming now. Hey, Nelli! Have you heard? Sorry, I have to go!” Heini said, then suddenly hung up.

  Every police officer knew to start looking for the perpetrator in the victim’s close circle, and that honor killings were usually carried out by one of the victim’s male family members, typically a brother or father. Ursula Honkanen and company would start their interviews with the close relatives. Even if they had nothing to do with her death, they would know Noor the best.

  The newspapers hadn’t reported Noor’s time of death, so I logged in to the intranet again. It took an eternity for the page to load. There were probably a lot of other people looking at the same thing. I stared out the window as I waited.

  Outside, the sun was dazzlingly bright, and the temperature was climbing above freezing for the first time in months. I realized that the roads must be slick when I saw some of the cars slowing down on the Turku Highway. A red Corolla narrowly avoided rear-ending a Škoda as it braked. It looked like spring, but I shivered from the draft coming in around the window frame.

  Noor’s precise time of death wasn’t known, but she’d probably been lying in the forest, in the cold, for several hours, perhaps overnight. Surely the family would have been concerned if Noor hadn’t come home for the night? The pattern of events seemed depressingly obvious, which put a damper on my enthusiasm about getting the investigation turned over to our cell. Noor had rebelled and consorted with an infidel, so she had been killed. That wrecked the serial killer theory, at least in Noor’s case.

  I called Iida around three o’clock.

  “Hey, it’s Mom. I’m sorry to have to tell you that the text message you got was right. Noor Ezfahani is dead.”

  “I know. We had computer class, and the boys looked it up online,” Iida replied, her voice shaking. She was planning to meet Anni and a couple of other girls from the club right after school. They were going to take flowers and candles to the scene of Noor’s murder.

  “That may not be possible right now. The area is probably still roped off, and outsiders crowding around might hamper the criminal investigation.”

  “Mom! Don’t start talking like a cop! We’re not strangers. We were Noor’s friends.”

  “An even better reason for you to not interfere with the investigation. What if you go home after school instead, and we’ll go there later tonight? I can take you, and the others too if they want to come.”

  “I want to go with my friends.”

  “Then I’ll come pick you up there. What time?” I didn’t want to leave my thirteen-year-old to face the scene of a violent death alone. Though solving these kinds of crimes had been a part of my work for years, even I wasn’t numb to it.

  “Are you investigating it?”

  “In a way. Do you know if Noor had a boyfriend?”

  Iida sighed. The situation was strange to both of us. Iida hadn’t ever really said much about my profession, other than opining that the name of our police band, the Flatfeet, was “mortifying.” We agreed that I would come get her. It was only half a mile’s walk from the police station to our house. I’d have plenty of time to get the car and drive to meet her by four thirty.

  I knew that I was partially deceiving myself: I wanted to see where Noor’s body had been found, and picking up my daughter at the site would be a halfway legal way to do so.

  I was soaked by the time I got home, since the melting snow had formed huge puddles along the road, and the passing cars splashed slush on the pedestrians. It was impossible to get across the crosswalk without stepping in a pond. Taneli had gone to a friend’s house, so only the cats were home. I grabbed the car keys from the entryway and started driving toward Olari. The windows of the car fogged up, and I had to turn the heat on full blast in order to see at all.

  I left the car in the school parking lot. There was a path trodden in the snow to where Noor’s body had been found. The area was still roped off, so the forensic investigation was still underway. The pair of patrol officers standing guard were new to me. There were a couple dozen teens standing around, most of them Noor’s schoolmates judging by their ages, including some boys. Was one of them Noor’s boyfriend? Candles and flowers had been placed in a little pile at the base of a pine tree as an unofficial altar. Nelli Vesterinen stood next to Iida and Anni. Besides the flowers, her dreadlocks and multicolored coat were the only splashes of color in the starkly bright early March afternoon.

  I walked over and hugged both Iida and Anni. Nelli Vesterinen didn’t pay me any mind, and I suddenly felt like it would be tactless to start questioning her. No one in the group was sobbing audibly, but sorrow pushed the young people together, and many huddled with their arms around each other.

  When Iida finally turned to leave, she took my hand like a little girl. After we were out of earshot, she asked in a small, scared voice, “Mom, are you going to solve this? Will the police catch Noor’s killer?”

  “Yes, absolutely.” I had never made any promise with so much of my heart.

  6

  “Of course, we’ll take any extra help we can get. With so many people to question, you are welcome to come join the party!” The expression around Detective Markku Ruuskanen’s mouth was genial, but there was irritation in his eyes. I was sitting with him and Captain Jyrki Taskinen in the command officers’ conference room on the top floor of the Espoo police station. On Wednesday night I’d called Taskinen and reported my suspicion that Noor Ezfahani’s murder was connected to the disappearances of the other three immigrant girls. Ruuskanen’s unit was working on a few battery cases, and they were also finishing up an investigation into the death of a married couple. For weeks the police had been trying to decide who had started the game of knife tag and who had died first. So, there was plenty of work to go around, and for the time being, Noor’s killing was a dead-end case without a prime suspect. The combined investigatory resources of Violent Crime and Patrol had been sorting out the girl’s movements during her final night, with little success. The family said Noor had come home from school a little before three p.m., as usual, and eaten with the family around six p.m. Then, according to her father, she’d gone out for a walk and hadn’t been seen since, until her body was discovered.

  “We know from experience that we can’t trust Muslim families, because they don’t trust the police. They decide together what to say and then stick to the story because they think they have Allah’s permission to lie to infidels,” Ruuskanen ranted
. He’d come to Espoo from the Itäkeskus precinct in Helsinki, where, according to rumors Koivu had heard, they’d wanted to get rid of him. I didn’t completely believe the gossip, because I knew what kind of wild stories were floating around about my own job changes. Supposedly, the reason for my departure from the Espoo police was either a nervous breakdown or an affair with Taskinen, and my return to Espoo had apparently given new life to the latter theory. I didn’t bother with them as long as Jyrki’s wife and my Antti knew they weren’t true.

  Ruuskanen had purportedly neglected to investigate a couple crimes in which there were clearly interracial tensions between different ethnic populations, but he’d always immediately taken up cases involving native Finns assaulting immigrants. Some colleagues complained that Ruuskanen was too lax when it came to immigrant criminals. Because of this he was accused of being a “raghead ass-licker” and a communist. What he was now saying about Muslims seemed to discredit these accusations.

  “So, you think the Ezfahani family members are all fundamentally unreliable witnesses?” Taskinen asked, wrinkling his brow.

  “Of course not, but their family culture is so different than ours—they stick together. There are cases of Finnish-born children protecting their parents too, of course.”

  “The perp could just as easily be an outsider.” I poured more water into my teacup. Before, I’d knocked back at least ten cups of coffee a day, but while I’d been away from the police department I had slowly transitioned to tea.

  “Kallio’s cell seems to have latched onto the idea of a serial killer. Get Honkanen started on profiling, since she went through that FBI training program in Washington. It doesn’t take an all-expenses paid vacation to America, though, to notice that the three other girls disappeared without a trace while Noor Ezfahani’s body was left in the snow near a walking path, out in the open for anyone to find. And don’t say the perp was interrupted. You can get these cases to match up if you force it, but that may not be the best thing for the investigation,” Ruuskanen said with a snort. He’d obviously been good-looking when he was young, with an athletic body and a head full of curls, but now his hairline had receded, forming a shiny surface that extended almost to the top of his head, and flesh hung loosely beneath both his eyes and his jaw. His sideburns were cropped close, and he obviously had to work to keep them trimmed so neatly. He wore muted-brown cotton slacks and a sport coat. The top buttons of his light-blue dress shirt were open, revealing thick, curly chest hair.

  “The immediate family, Noor’s parents and two brothers, have been called in here for questioning at noon. According to Honkanen, you’re excited about investigating the homes of suspects. The Ezfahanis’ home was a regular Arabian rug store, in case you were wondering. I’d planned to have Honkanen interview Mrs. Ezfahani, but you can too if you want. Apparently, she can’t speak to strange men without her husband or some other woman present, but that’s how it usually is with these people.”

  I didn’t ask what Ruuskanen meant by “these people.” As if the word “Muslim” were so politically incorrect that he didn’t dare use it. The phrase “these people” tied all immigrants together in a single, vague bundle that could just as easily include a refugee from Afghanistan and a top lawyer from Moscow who had gone through a protracted selection process before coming to work in Finland. Ruuskanen’s reputation as an immigrant coddler must have been someone’s idea of a joke.

  Taskinen cleared his throat dryly. He’d complained to me about an odd cough that didn’t seem to want to go away, though he didn’t have any other flu symptoms. “Do you mean, Markku, that you want Maria’s cell to take over the Noor Ezfahani case?”

  “No, just to collaborate. Kallio and her gang can help us figure out if there’s a link between the Ezfahani affair and these three others—I can’t keep their Goddamn names straight in my head!”

  “Just say ASA.” In our morning meeting, Puupponen had become tired of listing the girls’ names in a row and had abbreviated Ayan, Sara, and Aziza to ASA.

  Ruuskanen was trying to find a compromise that would give us both what we wanted. I didn’t have any reason to complain. During our little tête-à-tête I’d remembered again how intensely I despised meetings, especially the kind that turned into power struggles. Swedish colleagues said that I wouldn’t last two days with them because even their junior field officers spent more time in meetings than chasing bad guys or making traffic stops.

  “The other men in the Ezfahani family, the grandfather and the uncle and his children, Noor’s two male cousins, are coming at two. Noor and her mother are the only women in the family. Men are more likely to survive.” Ruuskanen rolled his eyes to show what he thought about the issue. The whites around his pupils were bloodshot, and there seemed to be a hematoma in the right one.

  “The reports from Forensics are on the intranet. The password is ‘Persia.’ You can tell your team. I decided to put passwords on all incomplete investigations because of the leaks you’ve had here before. This place bleeds information like a stuck pig. And don’t start griping, Taskinen. It’s perfectly legal.”

  In the past I’d suspected that Ursula Honkanen financed her wardrobe by selling confidential information to the tabloids. I’d never found any evidence of it, but apparently the rumors had reached Ruuskanen too. Honkanen would certainly get the password just like the others, but the number of people who knew it was limited, so there wouldn’t be any room for malfeasance. Of course, “Persia” was simple enough for someone to guess it after a few failed attempts to access information about a murdered Iranian girl.

  “With this case we’re going to have the vultures, jackals, and hyenas at our necks in record time. I’ve promised to issue a statement at four. Until then I’m not taking any calls from the media.” Ruuskanen’s face brightened. “But hey, you could take responsibility for PR. Your serial killer theory is much more interesting than my assumption that Noor’s killer is a member of the family—or the boyfriend. In any case I’ve reserved two interrogation rooms downstairs, and Maria, you can take the wife to your offices. She’ll be less afraid up there with you. Yesterday she was as skittish as a baby rabbit. She just sat there, perched on the corner of the sofa and not saying a word.”

  “Does she speak Finnish, or will we need an interpreter?”

  “She’s had two years of language training. I imagine she’s learned something in that time, unless she’s a complete ignoramus.”

  The screen of my phone, which was set on silent, lit up. My father was trying to reach me. He was coming to stay with us for a few nights, for his fiftieth college class reunion that weekend. Dad had said he would take a bus from the train station to our house, but maybe he’d run into trouble. There was no way he’d “waste” money on a taxi. I sent him a text suggesting he call Antti as I replied to Ruuskanen.

  “It’s difficult to give updates about a case we don’t know much about. But let’s put together whatever we know by four. Agreed? Is there anything of note in the forensics report? When is the autopsy?”

  “They’re going to open her up tomorrow. Read the rest yourself. You and the other interrogators will meet the Ezfahanis at noon downstairs, and the three of us will meet back here at 3:45.” Ruuskanen stood up, clearly in a hurry to get somewhere. He left the door open behind him, and I saw him disappear into the nearest men’s room. There were still more of those than women’s restrooms; at the time of the building’s completion in 1996, the force had been significantly more male than it was now, a decade and a half later.

  Taskinen poured more milk into his coffee. I needed to go back to work, but it seemed like he had something he wanted to talk about. I let him stir his coffee in peace. Outside it was sleeting again, and the pine trees swayed in the wind, their branches wet. The sleet melted as soon as it touched any surface. They didn’t, of course, put pictures of this kind of thing in Finnish travel brochures. At least the days were growing longer, and spring would shake winter off its feet as we moved further into
March. It was a spring Noor Ezfahani would never see.

  “Let’s do our best to solve this case,” Taskinen said finally. “It’s good that Ruuskanen is so cooperative. His unit has too many cases and can’t seem to finish a preliminary investigation of a simple stabbing, even when the suspect has confessed. Hopefully Ms. Ezfahani’s murder is a straightforward affair. Was she one of Iida’s friends?”

  “Just an acquaintance, from the Girls Club. They’re holding a memorial for Noor there today. I promised to take Iida.”

  “Without any ulterior motives, right?” Taskinen smiled.

  “You know me. I never have ulterior motives.”

  Taskinen finished his coffee in one gulp, and we stood up at the same time. I walked down the stairs to our case room. Puupponen had pinned two pictures of Noor up next to the missing girls. In one she was a smiling, dark-eyed beauty. In the other she was a lifeless corpse. Her face was dark blue and swollen. Her distended tongue hung out of her mouth, and there were frozen lumps of snow in her hair. The same violet, gold-trimmed scarf that had veiled the girl’s hair in the previous picture was wrapped tightly around her neck.

  Rage flooded through me. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. To cut short a young life, to take another person’s existence in your hands and wrench it away! The logical, experienced police officer in me knew that my job wasn’t to hate, but to solve the crime. I would have to turn my anger into a whip that would drive me to find the culprit. A few months earlier I’d been forced to look on as my friend died, a victim of a roadside bomb, and I hadn’t been able to do anything to bring her killers to justice. The same thing would not happen with Noor’s murder.

  My computer was already on. First, I logged in to the intranet, then in to the Western Uusimaa Police District page, and finally in to the folder Ruuskanen had created. The password, “Persia,” worked once I thought to type all the letters in uppercase. The report on the location of the body was still in process. Some of the things found at the scene, such as a single dark-gray wool mitten and an empty beer bottle, were still being processed. The report was also not able to say definitively whether the location of the body was also the scene of the crime. It was clear that Noor had been lying there since at least early morning because snow had fallen on her, and according to weather bureau records, it had snowed in the Olari area between 5:00 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. When she was found, the temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit, so the snow hadn’t had a chance to thaw. The temperature of Noor’s body had been 86.4 degrees, but even that wasn’t enough to deduce a precise time of death. The contents of her stomach, which would be revealed during the autopsy, would help answer this question.