Snow angels ikv-1

by James Thompson

  The rushing water stops, his toilet flushes. “Are you sure you want this case?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “It’s something you should consider.”

  “Of course I want it.”

  “Think about it. Maybe you should step aside for this one.” Finland is a provincial little country, but people in Helsinki act like they’re sophisticates, while we here in Lapland are backwards-ass country shitheads. Sometimes they call us poron purija, reindeer biters.

  “It’s my jurisdiction,” I say, “my case.” My voice is getting louder. I tell myself to calm down.

  “There’s a lot riding on this,” he says, “a lot of potential embarrassment for both of us. You might be out of your league.”

  “I’ve conducted other murder investigations.”

  “Years ago.”

  I call him by his first name and work the personal angle. “Jyri, you decorated and promoted me. Don’t tell me you don’t think I can do this.”

  “I decorated you for bravery, not your crime-solving ability.”

  I want to tell him to go fuck himself, but don’t.

  “I promoted you because you deserved it,” he says, “but also because that bullet in your knee ruined you as a patrol officer. It was promote you or retire you. I did you a favor.”

  He did me no fucking favor, I earned it. I was a beat cop in Helsinki and answered an armed robbery call at Tillander, the most expensive jewelry store in the city, on Aleksander Street in the heart of the downtown shopping district. It was the middle of a gorgeous summer afternoon.

  My partner and I got there fast, arrived as two thieves exited the store carrying backpacks weighed down with jewelry. They pulled guns and one fired a shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased one of them down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists.

  All of a sudden, the thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand but he surprised me. I was still in mid-sprint when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I sprawled on the ground. He should have kept running but, for what reason I can’t imagine, instead he decided to kill me.

  When he came toward me, I got a shot off first and the bullet caught him in the side. He went down, and for a second we both just sat there on the sidewalk, looking at each other. He raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his gun. He didn’t, and I blew his head off.

  It turned out that he and his partner were gangsters from Estonia on a crime spree. They had come from Tallinn to Helsinki on a day cruise. I guess they expected to rob Tillander and go home on the same boat that evening.

  “If you take this case away from me,” I say, “you’re taking my career away with it. You might as well have retired me.”

  “Your career opportunities ended when you left Helsinki for Kittila. You requested the transfer, why complain about it now?”

  After the shooting, the department made a big deal about it, gave me a medal and promoted me to detective. Later, when I was promoted to inspector, I requested a transfer back here to Kittila, my hometown. He thinks this is about my pride, but he’s wrong, this is about my duty. “You either retire me right now or back off my case. Which is it?”

  He can take a chance on me and the case, or get rid of me and explain why he forced out a hero cop. Bad press. I wait while he thinks.

  “Okay, you win. However, should you decide that you want a homicide team to step in, I’ll oblige you. I don’t care who does it, I just want the case solved fast.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Anything else I can do to help?”

  “Locate Sufia Elmi’s parents. Have a pastor and an officer go to their home and inform them about the murder.” In this country, Lutheran clergy accompany the police when they notify relatives of the deceased. “And the autopsy will be later today. I could use twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA sampling.”

  “Done. Call me with daily progress reports. And Kari, this is on your fucking head now.”

  I hang up, so pissed off I can barely breathe.

  At eight a.m., I go out to the common room. Antti and Jussi, the only patrol officers I’ve got because the others are all on Christmas vacation, are lounging around drinking coffee. Their field uniform coveralls are rumpled. Antti looks so much like a stereotypical Finn that it’s almost comical. Blond hair and a face shaped like a frying pan. Jussi is dark-headed, heavyset and serious. They look sleepy.

  Valtteri looks tired too. Maybe he couldn’t sleep after seeing Sufia’s body. He’s wearing his newest dress sergeant’s uniform, starched and pressed. He knows today is important.

  I lean against a cluttered desk. “I guess you all know this murder is the biggest case our department has ever handled. We’re the crime team and the whole country will be watching, so we’re not allowed to make mistakes.”

  “I’ve never investigated a murder before,” Jussi says.

  “You went to school. Just do what you were taught.”

  When I was coming up in the force, you just had to attend the police academy for a couple months. Now you need a bachelor’s degree to be a cop. Antti and Jussi are young guys in their twenties: educated police officers.

  “Besides,” I say, “we have some good evidence, this might not be a tough one.”

  “My winter vacation starts the day after tomorrow,” Antti says, “I’m off for two weeks.”

  “Not anymore. Your vacation is canceled until this is over.”

  He raises his voice a little. “Why?”

  “Because it’s your job. Other people are already on vacation, there’s nobody else to do it. You were the responding officers, it’s your case.”

  “I’ve got plane tickets to Thailand.”

  He’s giving me a hard time because Sufia’s murder will interfere with him fucking Thai whores on Christmas. “Sorry,” I say.

  I dim the lights, go to the computer and set the PowerPoint slide show at ten-second intervals. Images from the crime scene flash on the wall.

  “I canvassed Marjakyla last night. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for someone who lives there to kill Sufia, drive the two hundred yards across the road and just slip back into his house.” I hand Valtteri my notebook. “I want you to start by checking alibis.”

  He takes out a pocket flashlight and flips through it. “Your father is in here.”

  “Him too.”

  An image of Sufia’s face and torso comes up and I freeze it. “We’ve got mutilation, including a broken beer bottle stuffed into her vagina. He may have raped her before he dumped her and killed her. Her eyes are gouged out, like he didn’t want her to see him. It could mean he was ashamed. He cut off a piece of her breast.”

  Jussi looks sickened and interrupts me. “Who the fuck could do something like that?”

  “He may be a psychotic sexual predator who hates women. We haven’t had much in the way of serial murderers in this country, but you never know. If it is and he’s a local, this is probably his first kill or we would recognize his modus operandi, and we can expect more murders to follow at intervals.”

  “There’s a typical profile for this kind of serial killer, if it is one,” Antti says.

  “Yep. Typical serial killers are male, age twenty to thirty. Their usual motives are sex, power, domination and control. They roughly fall into two categories-organized and disorganized. The motive for an organized killer is most often rape. Organized killers usually have above-average intelligence and plan their crimes methodically. They tend to abduct their victims, kill them in one place and dump the bodies in another. Disorganized killers are most often motivated by sadism, are of lower intelligence, commit impulse crimes of opportunity and leave bodies at the murder site. For both types, a series of five or more murders with a cooling-off period between each is common. As like as not, a serial killer has been wrapped up in a sex-murder fantasy since his teens or even earlier. The reality committed as an adult may
disappoint the killer, causing him to act it out again and again, trying to find a way to make the murders more satisfying.”

  “You know a lot about it,” Jussi says.

  “I did a lot of reading about serial killers while I was working on my master’s thesis. This murder is atypical. Abduction, three separate weapons, including a bottle broken beforehand in preparation, and writing on the body all meet the criteria for a methodical, organized killer. But killing her on site and leaving her there instead of dumping her in a separate location point to a disorganized killer. I’ll check out the crime database and look for similar crimes.”

  “What about the ‘nigger whore’ thing?” Jussi asks.

  “That’s our problem in determining motive. We can’t say yet if the crime is the product of a deranged mind, or maybe a race crime dressed up to look like one. We need to figure out which one it is to focus our investigation. Maybe the autopsy will help. For now, we’ll stick to the basics and work with what we’ve got until we can narrow down the field of potential suspects. We’ve got the tire tracks and the Lapin Kulta bottle he used on her eyes and vagina. I have a lead on the car. Eero Karjalainen claims he saw a BMW 3 Series sedan pull out of Aslak’s driveway around the time of the murder.”

  Antti raises his eyebrows. “Eero?”

  “Not a reliable witness, I know, but sometimes he can surprise you.”

  “If he testified, the court would laugh.”

  “True, but the tire tracks aren’t too sharp. If they point to six different makes of vehicle, including a BMW, we can focus on the BMW. Everything helps.”

  “Have you got assignments for us?” Valtteri asks.

  “Let’s pray it isn’t a local,” I say. “Antti, get a list of tourists currently in Levi. Focus on Americans first, because they have far and away the world’s highest rate of serial murderers.”

  “There are thousands of tourists,” he says, “in six hotels and dozens of rental cottages.”

  “That’s right. Call every place of lodging, have them e-mail or fax their guest lists. Call every vehicle rental agency. Match their rentals against the list of tourists. Divide the list into Finns and foreigners. Run the Finnish citizens through the computer and get their crime sheets and vehicle registrations. Call the border police and get the foreigners’ identity numbers. Divide foreigners by home country, then call each of their embassies and request a crime sheet on every person that rented a car. It won’t take as long as you think. The Finnish ones can be done in a day.”

  “This is a needle in a haystack.”

  “For the moment.”

  “You’re going to ruin my vacation over a dead nigger refugee?”

  I can’t believe he said it. I try to check my anger and don’t react. Valtteri solves the problem for me. He stands up, strides across the room and slaps Antti’s face.

  Antti is speechless. His face turns red from embarrassment and redder from the slap.

  “Take your vacation,” Valtteri says. “It might be longer than you think.”

  Antti looks at me. I shrug and back up Valtteri. “He’s your sergeant.”

  I’ve never seen Valtteri lose his temper before, let alone hit anybody. I don’t know if he did it because Antti was disrespectful to me or to Sufia. Either way, it’s a bad way to start the investigation.

  A few tense seconds tick by. “Inspector,” Antti says. He always calls me Kari. He must be trying to say he’s sincere. “I was disappointed about my vacation and said something I didn’t mean.” He looks at Valtteri like he’s afraid he’ll hit him again. “I understand how important this case is, and I’m happy to cancel my vacation to work on it.”

  I might dismiss him if I could do without him, but I can’t, and I don’t want him to file a complaint against Valtteri. “And in return for my ignoring a racist comment, in which you suggested that the victim in this investigation doesn’t deserve justice because of the color of her skin, you’ll forget about Valtteri slapping you for being a jackass?”

  He nods.

  “Okay with you Valtteri?”

  He sits down, looks distressed. “Yeah.”

  I try to get us past a bad moment by acting like it never happened. “Jussi, work on the wax casts from the tire treads. They’re our best lead. Use the database, find out what makes and models are possibilities. Shouldn’t take too long. Do the best you can with the shoe prints too. When you get done, help Antti. In a day or two, we’ll know who in Kittila and Levi had vehicles that make them possible suspects.”

  Jussi nods.

  “Get it now Antti?” I ask. “It’s not that fucking hard.”

  He nods. “I got it.”

  “Valtteri,” I say, “you work the local angle. Make a list of known racists and sex offenders. Find out where they all were. That shouldn’t take too long either. I’ll get the lot number off the beer bottle, and you can try to figure out where it was sold.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sufia’s place of lodging is a potential secondary crime scene. I’ll find out where she was staying, collect evidence and lift prints, then go to the autopsy. After that, I’ll try to figure out where she was when she was abducted. Any questions?”

  No one has any. Sufia’s image hovers on the wall. She stares at us with empty eye sockets. I flip on the lights.

  6

  I go to my office. Valtteri trails in behind me and sits on the edge of my desk.

  “Did you kiss and make up with Antti?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Going to?”

  “No.”

  I don’t blame him. “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  They can’t even laugh it off over a beer. Valtteri doesn’t drink. His religion precludes it. It precludes a lot of things which for most of us are basic entertainment, like watching TV and dancing. Laestadians tend to live passive, rather ascetic lives. They keep to their own and don’t associate much with people outside their church.

  We have a large Laestadian community here in Kittila. Valtteri is thirty-eight years old, two years younger than me, and has eight children. His wife is his age and looks fifty. They had their youngest child four years ago. Their religion also forbids contraception, so either one of them is sterile or Valtteri’s sex life has come to a close.

  As far as I know, Valtteri doesn’t want to be anything besides a small-town police sergeant. Laestadians don’t take part in any form of competition. He seems content to be part of his religious community and raise his family. We’ve been working together for a few years now, and he’s the most tranquil person I know. Aside from hitting Antti today.

  “Why do you want me to investigate your father?” he asks.

  “Dad didn’t kill anybody, it’s just something we have to do. We look at everyone.”

  “Like you said, he didn’t kill anybody. I don’t see any need to look into your family.”

  I don’t get why he’s making a big deal about it. Maybe it’s a Laestadian thing. Laestadians do a lot of things I don’t get. My ex-wife was raised Laestadian, but it didn’t take with her and she hated it. I’m starting to think Valtteri knows something about Dad. “Everyone.”

  Valtteri still looks bothered.

  “He was probably at work.”

  Dad is a bartender in a dive near downtown. He has a bad drinking problem, but to my knowledge, he’s never touched a drop while behind the bar. I’ve often wondered if all that alcohol surrounding him doesn’t make him drool with craving while he’s selling it to customers.

  “The truth is,” I say, “Dad was drunk and foul-tempered last night, and I didn’t ask him where he was because I didn’t want to fight with him. It’s easier for me if you just check. Do you mind?”

  “No problem. Did you know Antti is such a racist?”

  “Antti was upset, he’s no worse than most. He didn’t kill the girl, he was on duty with Jussi.”

  “Still.”

  “Sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

>   “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  Valtteri never talks much, that’s one of the reasons I like him. My phone rings, he leaves to give me privacy.

  “Vaara,” I answer.

  “This is Jukka Selin from the Helsinki police department. You asked that the parents of Sufia Elmi be notified of her death.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A pastor and I visited them. It didn’t go well. They want to talk to you.” He gives me their names, Abdi and Hudow, and their phone number.

  I call them right away. A woman answers the phone. I’m nervous and don’t know what to say, so I just start talking. “Ma’am, this is Inspector Kari Vaara from the Kittila police department.”

  “Anteeksi?” Excuse me?

  Even that one word of Finnish is barely understandable. I repeat who I am.

  “Sorry, I get man.”

  I’m worried they might not speak Finnish well enough for me to be able to make myself understood. Her husband comes to the phone. “Abdi.”

  “Sir, this is Inspector Kari Vaara. I’m a police officer in Kittila. I’m told you want to talk to me about Sufia.”

  “What has happened to her?”

  Still at a loss for words, I restate what he already knows. “Sufia is dead sir. She’s been murdered.”

  Seconds tick by in silence. “Who killed her?” he asks.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m doing everything in my power to find out.”

  “You are responsible for finding out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you do it. Give me your phone number.”

  I give him my work and cell phone numbers.

  “My wife and I will drive from Helsinki and be there tomorrow, to see our daughter. And you.”

  I call Jaakko Pahkala. I’ve known him since I was a cop in Helsinki. He’s a freelance writer for the Helsinki daily newspaper, Ilta-sanomat, and also for the gossip magazine Seitseman Paivaa and the true-crime rag Alibi. There’s little about the goings-on of our celebrities that Jaakko doesn’t know.

  “This is Kari Vaara. Sufia Elmi is vacationing in Kittila. Do you know where she’s staying?”