Death Spiral

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “I don’t know anything about cars. And at the store with both kids, I was only thinking about survival.”

  “And you opened the trunk before going in the store?”

  “Yes, I took out an empty-bottle crate and Jussi’s stroller. I remember leaving the trunk unlocked. I’ve never had anything taken from it.”

  “Did anything remarkable happen in the store?”

  “No. We bought milk, cat food, and chocolate pudding, and some gum so the boys would keep quiet on the way home.”

  “And then when you came back out of the store? What did you see?”

  “I was just feeling relieved to be heading home. If I remember right, the van was gone and another car had come, but none of them were in my way, so I didn’t pay much attention. Our car’s such a pain, so that’s the first thing I look for. When we got to the car, I put the boys in their car seats and buckled them in. Then . . .” Kati’s expression contorted, but she continued bravely. “Then I opened the trunk. At first I didn’t realize what had happened, what the girl was doing in there. My next thought was that I couldn’t let the boys know. I slammed the trunk and locked it.”

  Järvenperä told her sons that the car was broken and went to call the police. According to her, there was no one else in the parking garage. She didn’t have her cell phone with her, so she’d had to go back to the store to call the police.

  “I guess I was in some sort of shock. I don’t remember much about what happened after I found her. But I’ve been thinking a lot about something my son Jussi said. He’s almost five and has an active imagination. Yesterday he asked me if it was the Sneaky Rascal who broke our car at the store. It’s sort of a game we have. Whenever someone litters in the woods or throws gravel on a good sledding hill, we say the Sneaky Rascal did it. I asked Jussi if he saw the Sneaky Rascal in the parking garage. He said yes, he’d seen him looking in the back of his car for tools to break things.”

  6

  I couldn’t sleep that night because the Creature was kicking and the terrible wind blowing outside had me expecting one of the pine trees outside to snap and crash in on our heads. I thought about the Sneaky Rascal four-year-old Jussi Järvenperä had seen and then about our afternoon meeting, which had been pretty depressing. Officers had gone door to door around the presumed site of the murder, and we had interviewed hundreds of people at the shopping center, but the result was little more than disjointed scraps of information, dubious tips, and only two reliable eye-witness reports, both of which pointed to Janne Kivi. Pihko had failed to find even a needle-eye-sized hole in Vesku Teräsvuori’s alibi.

  The entire unit had gathered in the conference room, along with the officers on loan from a neighboring unit who had conducted the interviews around the murder scene. Taskinen let me do the talking. He clearly wanted to show everyone what meetings would be like if I became unit commander. But his own promotion was anything but certain—apparently the police chief had found a candidate from Turku with a better “background” than Taskinen. Which probably meant he was a Mason and a member of the chief’s political party.

  “I think we should continue canvassing,” Ström said as soon as I started talking about next steps. “There are all kinds of creeps who skulk around that park, and even if you don’t believe it, I still think this could be the same child molester from before.”

  “But Noora Nieminen wasn’t attacked sexually.”

  “Maybe he forced her to have oral sex,” Ström suggested. One of the young officers tittered but instantly stifled it.

  “The pathologist didn’t find sperm or abrasions in her throat,” I responded coldly. “Koivu, do we have any results from Janne Kivi’s car?”

  “No, they need the weekend. We got fingerprints from the trunk of Järvenperä’s Mercedes, though, which are being run through the database. We’ll get the family’s fingerprints on Monday so we can eliminate them.”

  I had asked Kati Järvenperä to try to talk with Jussi about the Sneaky Rascal. The word of a four-year-old wouldn’t hold up in court, but if he could provide some sort of description, that might spark other ideas. Jussi had said something about a big bag, which might have been Noora’s equipment bag. I still hadn’t seen it.

  Despite my trying to play the efficient police sergeant with the investigation easily in the bag, no one left the meeting with any ambiguity about how open the case still was, particularly not Ström, who had taken every opportunity to draw attention to himself.

  When I finally drifted off, my sleep was jerky and restless, with Noora’s eyes constantly appearing in my dreams.

  The phone woke me up at eight thirty, and the morning began drearily. Ström’s tired voice was on the other end of the line.

  “Have a job for you, Kallio. Apparently they need your famous feminine empathy.”

  “Oh. What and where?”

  “Dead kid. Pihko and Puupponen are there, but they need backup.”

  “Dead kid? Can you tell me anything more? Are we talking SIDS?” I asked. I had just been reading about that in a parenting book.

  “They didn’t say. I’ve been up all night dealing with a stabbing, so this one’s on you!”

  Ström gave the address, and I reluctantly started dressing. Antti was already downstairs making coffee. We’d planned to take a hike in Nuuksio National Park that morning, but it would have to wait now.

  After cramming down a relatively good breakfast, I headed out. The morning was gray, and my wool sweater and denim jacket were barely enough. Wagtails darted around above the car, and the fields around our house were empty. I tried not to think about the tiny body waiting for me, but there was a nasty shrieking in my head just beyond the edge of consciousness. I was lucky I’d only run into a couple of dead kids during my career. The first, a crib death, had happened right out of the police academy. I’d been on the responding patrol. I still remembered the desperate sobbing of the baby’s parents. It had been their first child.

  The second case had been the previous summer. A six-year-old boy had fallen off a rock at his family’s summer cabin, hit his head, and drowned. The prosecutor considered neglect charges because the parents had left the child unsupervised, but eventually he decided the parents had already received their punishment. The family had a couple of younger children, who certainly wouldn’t have benefited from their parents being dragged through the legal process.

  I wasn’t in the habit of dwelling on old deaths, but not every memory could be tamped down. Especially during my pregnancy, experiences with kids and things from my own childhood had tended to rise to the surface. Even for professionals like cops, doctors, and nurses who dealt with death all the time, child deaths were hard. It was perfectly natural that I was agitated. Ström could have at least told me what to expect.

  Two police cruisers and an ambulance were parked in front of the eight-story apartment building. Neighbors were gathered in the yard and stairwell to gawk, and I had to wait for a long time for the elevator to take me to the sixth floor. The name on the door said “Markkanen.”

  “Maria?” Pihko said in surprise when he opened the door. “Wasn’t Ström supposed to come?”

  “He has some other case. What’s going on here?” I asked as I walked into the one-bedroom apartment, which was full of people in uniform.

  “Jaana Markkanen is in the living room. The child, Minni, nine months old, was found dead in her bed in the morning.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Markkanen, a little after seven. She called the ambulance immediately, but it was already too late. The ambulance crew called us.”

  “Why?”

  “Come look at the kid,” Pihko said uncomfortably.

  The bedroom was cramped and sparsely decorated, with just a narrow mattress on the floor and against the other wall a white crib with peeling paint. In it lay the dead child. Her mouth was open, her eyes bulging, her small body convulsed in a silent scream.

  “Suffocated,” said one of the paramedics.

/>   “By a pillow in her sleep?” I asked, because that was the first possibility that came to mind.

  “Babies that age don’t use pillows,” the paramedic said. “And we haven’t seen one anyway. Do you see those bruises? An adult hand suffocated her.”

  The apartment was hot, and the smells of aftershave, old booze, and vomit intermingled in the air. The child’s teddy bear pajamas had a rip in one knee, and there were porridge stains on their faded front. The baby girl had delicate blond curls, and the fingers of one pudgy hand extended between two of the crib slats. The bed started swaying in front of me like a rocking horse. I had to lean against the wall for support and close my eyes for a few seconds.

  The doorbell rang again. It was the forensic photographer. His arrival snapped me back to reality.

  “So the mother called the ambulance?” I said. “What did she say?”

  “According to the dispatcher, she was screaming hysterically that her baby wasn’t breathing. Took a while before she came to her senses enough to say her name and address. When we arrived, it was far too late. The child had already been dead for several hours.”

  “Was anyone here besides the mother?”

  “No,” Pihko replied. “She lives alone. And she’s seriously hungover, or maybe she’s even still drunk. I don’t know. Not in her right mind, anyway.”

  And for the second time within two days I had to face a mother mourning her child. Leaving the bedroom for the small living room, I found that it was also modestly furnished. The only thing that caught my eye was the thirty-two-inch television under the window, which seemed too expensive for its surroundings.

  Jaana Markkanen was a young woman, really still a girl. She was very slim, with thin legs extending below her nightgown and a dragon tattoo on her ankle. Jaana was crying, shaking silently, tears and mucus running down her face. Near the balcony door I noticed a brownish puddle as if she had tried to rush out to vomit but hadn’t made it in time.

  “Jaana?” I asked carefully and sat down next to her on the dull-green plush sofa, the kind you can get at a flea market for fifty marks.

  “My baby is dead,” Jaana whispered. “Minni . . .”

  “Get us a doctor,” I said to Puupponen, who was staring at Jaana from by the TV. “And clean up that puke. We can’t work with that stench.”

  “She tried to get out to the balcony saying she was going to jump, and when I wouldn’t let her, she almost threw up on me,” Puupponen said miserably.

  Jaana grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled my face close to hers. Her raisin-colored eyes blinked, looking first into my eyes and then at my belly.

  “You’re having a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is it due? Give it to me. My baby died!”

  And then a fresh crying fit. Jaana lifted the hem of her nightgown to wipe her face. She wasn’t wearing underwear, and a mottled purple C-section scar ran across her lower abdomen.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said between her sobs. “I just couldn’t stand her screaming, and I was so fucking drunk and I just wanted to sleep. You believe me, you’re pregnant too! I didn’t want to kill her. I just pressed down and she stopped screaming.”

  The photographer had stopped snapping pictures, and Puupponen’s finger was frozen on the phone keypad. Jaana Markkanen collapsed in my lap and screamed as I stroked her messy, dyed-black hair and muttered meaningless words. Puupponen started cleaning up the vomit, as if thankful to have something he could do. I wished I could cover my ears, but instead I listened as a still-inebriated Jaana Markkanen repeated over and over that she didn’t mean to kill her baby, she just needed to sleep. The paramedic offered her diazepam, and between the two of us we convinced her to swallow it, although she suspected we were trying to poison her.

  “Please let this kill me!” she whimpered. “Then I can be with Minni in heaven.”

  The doorbell rang again, this time a shrill neighbor inquiring what had happened.

  “Did Jaana hurt herself? She was so drunk when she came home last night. I was here watching Minni. I like little ones so much . . .”

  “So Ms. Markkanen was out partying last night?” I heard Pihko asking.

  “Partying? Drinking and trolling for men more like! She promised to come home at one, but it was almost two when she finally showed up. I was looking out the window. She barely made it out of the taxi. What happened to her? I can take care of Minni. I’m closer to her than her own granny . . .”

  I didn’t hear how Pihko replied, because the paramedics brought in a sheet to wrap Minni in now that the photographs had been taken and the cause of death was clear. The curious neighbor must have realized that the victim was little Minni, because she started to scream. Jaana lifted her head out of my lap just as the baby was being carried out.

  “Don’t take my baby!” she cried and tried to tear herself away. The paramedic who was carrying Minni’s body stared at me questioningly. Puupponen had rushed over to help me hold Jaana back as she continued to beg that her baby not be taken away.

  “Let her hold the baby for a second,” I said quietly and let Jaana go. I couldn’t watch as the paramedic hesitantly released the tiny bundle into the mother’s arms. Jaana started humming something reminiscent of a lullaby.

  Then she flatly refused to give her child’s body back. Ultimately I convinced her to get dressed, promising she could travel with Minni. The doctor showed up just in time to give her more diazepam, straight into a vein this time.

  “Where do you intend to take her?” Pihko whispered to me as Janna slowly pulled on her shoes.

  “If she doesn’t calm down, we’ll go to the hospital first. With any luck, she’ll fall asleep on the way. Then we’ll have to arrest her. This is open and shut. Could you do me a favor and call Antti and ask him to pick up our Fiat here? I’ll take Markkanen to the hospital and then to Holding.”

  As I had hoped, Jaana fell asleep in the ambulance. I wished I could go home and take the same sedatives as Jaana or maybe get good and drunk. Instead, I helped the doctor walk Jaana to the police station’s medical cell. The Creature was doing somersaults in my belly like a pinwheel, apparently realizing that the world outside wasn’t that safe after all.

  “Let her rest today. I’ll come tomorrow to take a statement,” I said to the officer on duty in Holding, who was a little more pleasant than the last joker I had had to deal with there. “Take it seriously if she asks for a doctor or anything like that. I’ll have Ström send over an arrest warrant.”

  With that I started walking back to our department, running into Ström in the lobby as he came from the other direction with two uniformed officers.

  “Hi, Pertti. Good I bumped into you. Will you drop by and confirm an arrest warrant? For the child homicide you called about.”

  “Open-and-shut case? No need for the famous Kallio feminine touch?”

  Ström knew that his weak interpersonal skills were the greatest obstacle to his selection as unit commander. I was considered somewhat better in that regard, although the police chief himself had complained I didn’t have sufficient respect for authority.

  “The mother confessed,” I said. “The paramedics already suspected her. You’re pampering me, giving me such easy cases.”

  “I was just thinking of your delicate condition,” Ström said, smiling with feigned sweetness.

  “Yes, you really were,” I said and continued on back to my office.

  On my desk I saw phone messages from Ulrika Weissenberg and Kauko Nieminen. Turning the sticky notes over in my fingers, I decided that I didn’t have the energy. They could wait until tomorrow or Monday. Or could they have something important to tell me?

  Even so, I dialed our home number first.

  “Oh, hi!” Antti said, panting. “I just came from getting the car. What on earth happened over there? The people in the yard said something about a child being killed. Maria, are you OK?”

  I hadn’t dared call Antti earlier because I was afraid
that hearing his voice would trigger the tears I’d been fending off all morning. Apparently I was right, because I started sobbing violently into the receiver. The attack didn’t last long, and within a couple of minutes I was able to tell Antti what had happened.

  “I’m going to punch Ström in the teeth the next time I see him!” Antti hissed.

  “Let it go. I know how to take care of myself. And in a way, Ström’s right. If I want to keep this job, I can’t be turning down assignments.

  Maybe I would have a chat with Eva Jensen, Antti’s coworker’s psychologist wife. I didn’t want to turn into one of those cops who never feel anything.

  “Come pick me up and let’s go out to eat somewhere fun. I think it’s time for that once-every-other-week drink.”

  Antti promised to come immediately, and I moved back to the phone messages. Kauko Nieminen . . . I hadn’t bothered to check the Nieminens’ alibis, since I had a hard time believing the parents would kill their own child. But whose car would Noora have climbed into as trustingly as her own parents? Could Hanna have gone to the ice rink to meet her, or did Kauko pick her up on his way home from work?

  Sometimes a parent’s rage could spin out of control. My own mother had a terrible temper when I was little. A few times she’d nearly torn the hair out of my head. My sisters and I thought it was normal—a lot of our friends received full-on beatings. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized my mother’s tantrums were usually out of proportion.

  I feared the same tendency in myself. At the police academy I had almost broken another student’s arm because he was such an asshole, and once during a fight I’d tried to bash in the brains of a two-time murderer with bronze statue. I had verbal outbursts almost daily. What if my baby screamed day and night like my sister Helena’s first one did? What would that do to my self-control? The baby books talked about hormones and maternal instincts that made mothers treat their children gently regardless of the situation, but I had seen too many examples where that failed. Abusive parents weren’t really all that different from anyone else most of the time.