Death Spiral

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Did Teräsvuori ever act violently toward you?” I asked as I rummaged in my desk. As I had guessed, the box was empty. Koivu had taken the last one a few days earlier after cutting his middle finger with a pocketknife while trying to peel an unusually hard orange.

  “Not exactly. It was the eighteen-year-olds calling in the middle of the night that got me to go back home. One woman was never enough for Vesku. There was a high school girl in Karis he had promised to make a singer, and there was another one in Hamina. That one was married too. He kept visiting them, even though he said he was working. He told me I was the woman of his dreams. What a joke. I kept finding new sides of him I didn’t like. He had all kinds of debts, so I don’t know where he got the money to buy me all those presents and flowers. Kauko might not be handsome or the most exciting man in the world, but at least he takes care of our finances. His company makes honest money.”

  A red droplet fell onto Hanna’s black dress. Maybe Pihko should have a closer look at Vesku Teräsvuori’s activities, since he had already checked his alibi. Teräsvuori didn’t have a rap sheet beyond a few speeding tickets and some overdue taxes, but his little brother had done a couple of stretches for fraud. Maybe Teräsvuori had hired some muscle through him.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Vesku was trying to harass me by having someone beat up Noora. That wouldn’t take much imagination; they did the same thing to Nancy Kerrigan in the States. Stupid me, I told Vesku about how I wanted to be a figure skater when I was little, but there weren’t any opportunities for that in the sixties in a place like I was from.”

  Hanna’s eyes had turned to the wall, where I was sure she was seeing something completely different than the images that actually hung there.

  “Dad froze the front yard for a skating rink. It was small and bumpy, but it was enough for us kids. I dragged our old record player to the window and skated to my parents’ tango songs. My brother had a Beatles record too, but he wouldn’t let me play it. I wanted a real skating costume, one with fur and everything, like Marja in my class had, but Mom didn’t want to make it. That was when I decided if I ever had a daughter, she would be a figure skater.”

  I had heard the same sort of story far too many times, and it usually ended badly. But apparently Noora had accepted her role of living out her mother’s dreams, adopting them as her own.

  Hanna was sure that Teräsvuori was responsible for Noora’s death in one way or another, and she was trying to convince me too. It made me suspicious. Laying the blame on Vesku or some imaginary thugs was easy, but what if the truth was something else entirely?

  “We will definitely look into the possibility that Teräsvuori could have hired someone else to attack Noora. Did he ever threaten to do something like that?”

  Hanna shook her head, but then immediately told me about someone named Karttunen who had owed Vesku five grand and claimed he didn’t have the money to pay him back. That same night someone jumped Karttunen, and the next day he showed up at the door with a broken nose and the five thousand marks. Hanna had been home alone and wondered at the fat, grubby envelope shoved in her hands.

  “I didn’t dare ask about it, especially since I knew Vesku needed the money to cover his debts. It made me realize that Vesku wasn’t a safe person to be with, and besides—”

  A knock at the door interrupted Hanna—of course I had forgotten to turn the red light back on. Puupponen was bringing me the latest results from the door-to-door canvassing of Noora’s neighborhood.

  “When will you be free?” he asked, looking as if he had something important.

  “I was just leaving,” Hanna said quickly. Blood oozed from her left thumb.

  “Let’s go get Noora’s things,” I said, thinking of the torn, bloody clothing waiting downstairs. Would it be better for Hanna not to see them? And what was I going to do with the diaries? Not that it was any of my business, but I doubted Hanna and Kauko would want to see the disgust and anger toward her parents they would find in Noora’s diary entries.

  Hanna walked in front of me down the hall. She was having trouble managing her four-inch heels. I opened the elevator door for her, then the door to the evidence room without either of us saying a word. When Hanna saw Noora’s sports bag, now vacuumed clean, she took a deep breath but didn’t say anything. But when I asked whether she also wanted Noora’s clothes, she almost shouted.

  “No! Keep them here.”

  “The bag has everything in it except for the skates and her latest diary,” I said to Hanna, who was holding the duffel bag by the handle as if weighing it.

  “Yes, her skates. That’s why this feels so light,” Hanna said, absentminded and focused on something far away. Then tears began flooding down her face as she desperately tried to wipe them away. Her fingers smeared streaks of blood in with her makeup.

  I did my best to comfort her and led her to the ladies’ room to wash her face. I wasn’t remotely convinced she was in any shape to drive when she finally left for home, but I couldn’t supervise everything, could I?

  When I returned to my office, Puupponen was still lurking in the hall. His red hair blazed against the white wall and spring freckles glowed on his light skin. Puupponen was from Kuopio in central Finland and caught flack about being a country boy every once in a while from the native Espoo cops, who thought they were so urban. Fortunately he had the grace to take their idiocy with humor. Occasionally he really stretched his dialect just to irritate them.

  “I hear you’re missing some guards for some ice skate blades,” he said mysteriously and then slipped into my office behind me.

  “Yeah,” I said and collapsed on the couch. My back was aching, and I needed to put my legs up.

  “I think Ström found them.”

  “What the hell?”

  “He and Lähde were with a couple of guys from Forensics at an intersection not too far from the ice rink in Matinkylä because that’s one of the places that child molester has been. You know how obsessed Ström is with that case. They thought the molester dropped that picture of his dog between some rocks the last time he struck, so I think they were looking for that. They didn’t find it, but Ström ended up sticking his hand right on these bloody blade guards that had been shoved under a loose rock.”

  “This happened this morning?”

  “No, yesterday afternoon.”

  “Where is Ström? Why didn’t he tell me about this? Where did you hear?”

  “The guys from Forensics were talking about it in the john . . . something about Ström messing up the fingerprints, so he didn’t want anyone to know.” Puupponen’s face glowed—he hated Ström possibly more than anyone else in our unit and loved having the chance to stick it to him.

  “So you only heard about it by accident? Who was it you overheard from Forensics?”

  “I didn’t know one of them, but the other one was Hirvonen, the short one with the pointy beard. He’s one of Ström’s drinking buddies.”

  “Goddamn Ström! It’s good you told me,” I said, irritated and thankful to Puupponen. Things like this had happened before. Someone ruined evidence through negligence or ineptitude, and their coworkers hushed it up so nobody higher up heard. Sometimes evidence even just disappeared—the police chief had managed to protect friends of his that way a couple of times, one from speeding tickets and the other from a forgery charge. These cases traveled as rumors around the department, but everyone knew the score and watched their step.

  But this wasn’t just a case of accidentally damaging evidence. Ström was intentionally hindering a criminal investigation. And of course he wasn’t in the office and wouldn’t answer his cell phone. Lähde, who shared an office with Ström, was also out of the building. The duty officer said that Ström was in court, so I left a message for him to call me and marched over to Forensics, where I found Hannu Hirvonen. Hirvonen was in the middle of reading a report. When he saw me his eyes narrowed behind his thick glasses, and the end of his pointy beard started trembli
ng. He obviously guessed what I was there for.

  “I hear you found Noora Nieminen’s ice skate blade guards in Matinkylä,” I said, sitting down at the table with Hirvonen, so close that my belly almost touched him. As a general rule, forensic investigation was handled by the National Bureau of Investigation Forensic Laboratory in Vantaa, but we also had a few in-house technicians for routine tasks like fingerprinting and blood typing.

  “Yeah, we found some pieces of plastic. They didn’t have anyone’s name on them, though,” Hirvonen replied evasively. He tried in vain to continue reading his report.

  “What did Ström promise you for keeping quiet? A bottle of vodka or was a six-pack enough? Where are the skate guards now?”

  “Ström didn’t promise me anything. Were they important? Ström kept them. Ask him.”

  “He isn’t here. Tell me where you found them.”

  “I wasn’t right there.”

  Hirvonen was trying to hide behind the report, his face bright red like a fifteen-year-old kid caught riding a souped-up moped.

  Apparently pregnancy hadn’t managed to pump enough of those tender mothering hormones into my blood yet, because I completely lost it. Hirvonen’s ridiculous pointy beard was waggling there right at hand height, so I grabbed it and pulled his face level with mine.

  “Start talking! Don’t you get that only losers side with Ström? He isn’t going to get that promotion, I am. When I do, you’re going to be in for it if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  Evidently the combination of my threatening behavior and maternal condition threw Hirvonen so completely off guard that he started talking. When he ran out of words, he grabbed a piece of paper to draw a map. The skate guards had been found in a small patch of forest next to the West Highway where construction was underway on a new on-ramp for the Ring II freeway. There was a temporary bus stop there, and that was where the child molester had waited for his most recent victim.

  Where the skate guards were now, Hirvonen didn’t know. His best guess was Ström’s office. So I went and asked the secretary to open Ström and Lähde’s door.

  “Ström promised to leave a report for me on his desk, but he must have accidentally locked the door,” I lied. The secretary didn’t bat an eye. Our offices weren’t off limits to each other, and most of us didn’t bother locking our doors when we were out.

  Lähde and Ström were both smokers, and even though smoking was outlawed in public buildings, the two of them continued smoking in their shared office by mutual agreement. Because both of them were satisfied with the arrangement, the rest of us didn’t bother making a stink about it, even though smoke did escape into the hallway sometimes. On the contrary, the other smokers in the unit preferred to gather in their colleagues’ office than go all the way downstairs. How often the guardians of the law were the first to violate the very thing they protected.

  The air inside was bluish and thick even now. A screen divided the room in two. On Lähde’s side a jubilant chaos reigned, but on Ström’s side all the papers were neatly ordered in their boxes. Incoming, outgoing, in process. A couple of crumpled cigarette packets broke the meticulous scene, and the ashtray hadn’t been emptied in ages. The screen had a map of Espoo hanging on it, and the blue pins scattered around Matinkylä probably indicated where the child molester had struck. Next to the map hung smiling pictures of Ström’s children, Jenna and Jani. They were both still in school, and Ström complained often about not getting to see them enough.

  A desk drawer would be the natural hiding place for an object the size of the skate guards. Pulling on the latex gloves I’d brought with me, I got to work. I felt a strange guilt rummaging in Ström’s drawers, even though he was the villain here. The top drawer contained only some papers and a couple of full cigarette packets, apparently Ström’s emergency supply. The next drawer was empty, and the third had a pair of dirty socks and a brown leather right-hand glove with a hole in the index finger.

  In the bottom drawer was a plastic Alko liquor store bag that seemed to have a bottle of booze in it. Hell’s bells, Ström wasn’t drinking at work, was he? I quickly pulled the bag out. The contents turned out to be an empty half-liter vodka bottle. But I was less interested in that than what else was in the bag.

  Scuffed gray rubber figure-skate blade guards with dull dark stains, as if someone had tried to clean them off. The initials NN were clearly visible on the base of one of them. These had to be Noora’s guards.

  But how had they ended up at the on-ramp construction site? And why hadn’t Ström just thrown them away if he wanted to conceal their existence?

  Just then the door banged. All I had time to do was arduously straighten up and Ström was standing in front of me.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked gruffly.

  “I heard you had evidence about my investigation. I wanted to get it to the lab as fast as possible, so I didn’t wait for you,” I said as coldly as I could, holding up the guards.

  The red that flushed Ström’s face started from his amorphous nose and spread to his cheeks and low, thick-skinned brow. Finally his slightly protruding ears blushed.

  “Who talked?” His voice was barely more than a rasp. Ström must have wanted to snatch the guards away from me, but he didn’t have the nerve.

  “You know word gets around. You should have gotten rid of them a bit faster. These are going to the NBI lab. I imagine they already have your fingerprints there so they can eliminate them.”

  I pushed my way past him, but as I reached the door, he grabbed my arm. The color of his eyes was like unfiltered beer, and there was a bitter taste in his gaze. He was about a foot taller than me, but I stared back at him. I was so furious I didn’t even feel the pain in my arm from Ström’s vice grip.

  “And tomorrow the whole department will know about this. Is that it?”

  There was an odd edge to his voice. Good God, he was afraid! I shook myself free and slipped through the door, saying, “You just think about that, buddy boy.”

  Koivu was just walking down the hall, so I recruited him to join me. We would take the skate guards to the lab in Vantaa ourselves—I didn’t want to let them out of my sight until they were safe.

  It wasn’t until we were cruising down the freeway that I told Koivu where they had come from.

  Koivu whistled, rolling his blue eyes. “Are you going to tell Taskinen?”

  “No. He’s sure to hear from someone else. If we were going by the book, I would tell him myself, but in the game Ström’s playing, there aren’t any rules.”

  We dropped the guards off at the National Forensic Laboratory. Since Ström had fouled any fingerprints, possibly on purpose, it was doubtful they would find anything definitive, but it was worth a try. We made a quick stop at a diner for a bowl of soup, which made me feel like taking a nap, but there wasn’t time for that. We headed back along the boring, ugly, and constantly under-construction Ring III beltway toward the West Highway and the Matinkylä interchange construction site. I wanted to see for myself where the skate guards had been hidden. Maybe it would tell me something.

  Work at the site was at a standstill as it always seemed to be—the earth ripped open and then left as a reminder of the insanity of humanity. The landscape looked brutalized with gashes drilled in the rock and the gravel spread for the roadbed gleaming like a bruise at the edge of the forest.

  Hirvonen had drawn a good map, so I easily found the hiding place. It was a boulder about four feet tall with a gap about the size of my foot underneath. It was the kind of hole where you might shove banana peels, toilet paper wads, and other biodegradable waste into when camping. From the ice rink, it would be natural to cut across here to get to the temporary bus stop. No one would have paid any attention to someone stopping here to shove the guards under this rock.

  “Let’s walk toward the ice rink. I need to think,” I said.

  “Should we leave the car there? They might haul it off to a junkyard,” Koivu said, ind
icating our rust-orange, Soviet-made Lada, which should have been retired a decade earlier.

  “The head of the motor pool would be happy if someone stole it. OK, look. The ice rink is over there and the shopping center is over there,” I said, pointing through the stands of trees. “What if Noora’s murderer panicked, dumped the body the first place he thought of, and then realized he still had the skate guards? He must have known this area, how to get around.”

  The path through the stands of willow was muddy, and my running shoes quickly were soaked through. We walked carefully and in silence. An excavator had started growling over toward the West Highway, and neither of us felt like yelling over the noise. I was just about to turn back when I heard steps on the other side of the thicket and then a gentle male voice.

  “Excuse me for bothering you, little girl. Are you coming from the school? Good. Did you happen to see my dog there, a cocker spaniel puppy?”

  I didn’t hear the girl’s answer, but Koivu and I had both frozen in place. We could barely see through the willows to the other side. I could only make out something dark blue, maybe a coat or a track-suit jacket. Strange that our steps hadn’t been audible on the other side of the thicket. The noise of traffic must have drowned them out.

  “Are you sure you didn’t? Come over here and look at this picture. She’s so cute. Her name is Princess. She ran away this morning, and I’m so worried.”

  There was no way through the willows without making a noise, so Koivu started creeping back to look for an opening. When his foot made a squelching sound in the mud, I expected the man on the other side of the trees to make a run for it. But he was focused on the girl and continued his coaxing.

  “You have such beautiful hair, and so soft. Just like Princess’s fur. Do you like dogs?”

  Now I heard a shy “yeah” and could also make out a pair of pink shoes with white laces.

  “You could help me look for her.” The man’s voice was still sounded gentle and kind.