Snow angels ikv-1

by James Thompson

  Jaakko has written an article that refers to Sufia Elmi as Finland’s Black Dahlia. He’s managed to paint Sufia’s murder as both a race and sex crime and called to mind a legendary Hollywood murder. I wonder if Sufia’s murder will also pass into legend, if she will forever be Finland’s Black Dahlia. I find this disturbing. It’s as if the tragedy of her death has been forgotten before it was even recognized, trivialized in favor of tabloid glitz and the terrible romance of celebrity murder.

  I didn’t want details of the crime released. The fucking diener must have sold Jaakko the photos. I’ll charge him with obstruction of justice.

  My cell phone rings-it’s Sufia’s father. We must have been looking at the morgue photos of her at the same time. I answer. “Vaara.”

  “Inspector, this is Abdi Barre. My wife is in tears. Can you imagine why?”

  I can imagine. “The photos.”

  “Her friend called and told my wife that revolting photos of her murdered daughter were published in a filthy magazine. She went to a newsstand and bought that filthy magazine. She is devastated and humiliated.”

  “I’ll press charges against whoever sold the photos to the magazine.”

  “You have failed to protect my daughter.”

  He has my pity, but I’m tired of taking shit from him. “You can’t expect me to be responsible for security at a government facility over which I have no control.”

  “I hold you responsible for all matters relating to my daughter.” Once again, he’s treating me like I’m on trial for Sufia’s murder. I don’t know why and it’s not fair. “You have my sympathy for the pain the photos caused you and your wife. I’ll deal with it today. I can’t do anything more.”

  “The Koran tells us Inspector Vaara, that ‘when the sky is rent asunder, when the graves are hurled about, each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.’ For my wife and I, the sky has been rent asunder. Do not fail in your duty.”

  He hangs up. I feel like he just punched me in the head.

  Before I can recover from Abdi’s accusations, Valtteri knocks on my door and enters. “Antti and Jussi are back”-he hands me Seppo’s house keys-“and Heli’s here.”

  He walks out, she walks in.

  Apart from this morning, we haven’t spoken since she left me so many years ago. I didn’t think it would, but being alone in a room with her makes my pulse quicken. I light a cigarette, try to hide my discomfort. “Thanks for coming,” I say. “Have a seat.”

  She hangs up a chinchilla coat and matching hat. “You didn’t leave me much choice.”

  She puts her hands on her hips and looks around, like she’s looking for something to criticize. If so, she can’t find anything. I have a polished oak desk, nice art on the walls, a Persian rug on the floor. I paid for them myself. One of my theories of life is that happiness is in part derived from a pleasant environment.

  She comes over to my desk and picks up a photo of Kate. “Pretty,” she says. She looks miffed about it, takes a seat across from me.

  “Want anything?” I ask. “Coffee, soft drink, water?”

  “What are you, a stewardess? I told you before, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to see me. If you wanted to meet for coffee, you could have just called.”

  She has a certain desiccated look. I often see it in wealthy female tourists. Fortyish, and making a desperate attempt to stop the aging process with overexercise and self-starvation, treatments, expensive lotions and makeup. It seldom works, and it hasn’t in Heli’s case. She looks older than her years and bitter. I can’t connect the woman in front of me with the girl I fell in love with.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” I say. “Your common-law husband butchered a girl he was having an affair with.”

  She crosses her legs, folds her hands in the lap of her designer jeans and looks amused. “Yes, let’s cut to the chase. My ex-husband has a thirteen-year-old vendetta and concocted some half-assed attempt at revenge.”

  I try to get this revenge theory she and Seppo have out of the way. “With your ego, you might find it hard to believe, but I’ve hardly thought about you for years.” I point at the picture of Kate. “I have a good life. You’re not worth wrecking it over.”

  She smirks. “You’re right, I don’t believe it. When I call the newspapers and explain the history behind your investigation of Seppo, I doubt others will believe it either. What I did was for the best. You must realize that by now.”

  I’m being dragged into a conversation I don’t want to have, but I can’t seem to stop it. “What you did was cruel. I didn’t deserve it.”

  “Deserve,” she says. “Nobody gets what they deserve. If we did, we’d all burn in hell. We’re all fucking guilty.”

  “You’re quite the philosopher.”

  “Just admit that you hate me for what I did.”

  I ask myself if this is true. “I don’t hate you. You want to know what I think? I’ll tell you. I don’t think about what you did to me anymore, but when I did, I used to remember when we were about fifteen. It was summer, you were in my folks’ house and I was doing something outside. I heard you scream and you kept screaming. I thought you were hurt. I ran in, and you had a sparrow in your hands. It had flown into the house and got tangled in flypaper hanging in the kitchen. It thrashed around trying to get loose and tore most of its feathers off. When I got there, you held it up to me. ‘Help it, help it,’ you said. I always wondered how you could have had so much pity for that bird, but so little for me.”

  We sit in silence and look at each other. A good three minutes go by. I feel old pain resurfacing and try to suppress it. I have no idea what she’s thinking. She uncrosses her legs, crosses them again, smoothes an invisible wrinkle on her pants leg. “I’ve wondered that too, but I didn’t.”

  I wait.

  “I don’t remember. What did you do with the bird?” she asks.

  It’s an ugly memory. I’m surprised she doesn’t recall. She followed me outside and watched me kill it. “I took it out to the front yard and stomped on it to put it out of its misery.”

  Another minute passes. “I’ll take that water now.”

  I pour it from a carafe on a sideboard and give it to her.

  “Tell me what you want to know,” she says.

  “Did you know Seppo was having an affair with Sufia Elmi?”

  “No.”

  “Not a clue?”

  She sighs. “Seppo has affairs from time to time. I ignore them. They always blow over.”

  “This doesn’t bother you?”

  “That’s not your business.”

  She’s right. I should keep the questions focused on Seppo. I know he has family money and that because of it, he used to sit on the boards of various corporations and institutions, but he seems to have gone off the radar. I don’t know what he does at present. “Does Seppo have any kind of work, any responsibilities?”

  She shakes her head. “Not anymore. He’s rich, he doesn’t have to do anything.”

  “Has Seppo ever been violent toward you?”

  “Seppo is incapable of violence. The sight of blood makes him sick. If he cuts himself shaving, he cries.”

  This is the man she left me for. Amazing. “He drinks a lot?”

  “Yes, he drinks.”

  “Does he exhibit psychotic behavior when he’s drunk?”

  She puts on a facade of boredom. “He giggles and gets cuddly.”

  “The murder occurred the day before yesterday, at about two P.M. It appears that your BMW was used in Sufia Elmi’s abduction. She may have been raped in the backseat. Do you know where Seppo and the car were at that time?”

  “No, I was in church all afternoon.”

  “Church?”

  “That’s why I’m in Kittila, to rediscover my religious roots.”

  I try to hide my surprise. Heli’s antagonism toward religion used to be extreme. That was a long time ago. I remind myself that I don’t know her anymore.

  “What
makes you think she might have been raped in our car?” she asks.

  “Blood and semen.”

  She looks at me like I’m stupid. “Have you stopped to consider that maybe he fucked her and she wanted it?”

  “I have, but thanks for your input.”

  She stands up. “I’m leaving now. Can I have my house keys?”

  I toss them to her.

  “What about the car?”

  I might want to sit in the garage and listen to Miles Davis again.

  “In due course.”

  “My advice to you,” she says, “is to release Seppo before you make things any worse for yourself. Good luck with your snipe hunt and with the media. I’ll be giving interviews soon. You’ll be hearing from our lawyer. I’ll see to it that Seppo sues you for fabricating a case against him.”

  “That’s your prerogative.”

  “Good-bye Kari.” She leaves, shuts the door behind her with a soft click.

  13

  I don’t want to see her again, so I give Heli a couple minutes to get out of the building before going out to the common room. Antti and Jussi are sitting there with Esko the coroner. Items from Seppo’s house are bagged and spread out over two desks.

  “I need to talk to you,” Esko says.

  “I saw the new edition of Alibi. Yeah, we need to talk about it.”

  “In private.”

  “Give me a minute.” I look at the potential evidence. There’s a lot of it. “Anything good here?” I ask.

  “Could be,” Jussi says. “We found two pairs of boots he could have worn, and a bunch of clothes. We figured they should all go to the lab.”

  “Yep.”

  “We got a hammer and a couple puukko and some knives out of the kitchen too.”

  I pick up the bag with the puukko, Finnish hunting knives. They’re less curved than the skinning knife used to kill Sufia, so I don’t make too much of them, and besides, almost every Finnish home has at least one or two lying around. Statistically, they’re the nation’s most popular murder weapon. Twice, I’ve investigated murders in which a group of men got drunk together and passed out. They wake up and one of them is dead with a knife in his chest. All of them have fingerprints on the knife, but nobody remembers what happened. Neither case ended in a conviction.

  Antti points at Seppo’s computer. “Seppo likes to look at porn.” If looking at porn were a crime, most men in this country would be in prison. “What kind?”

  “I didn’t go through it all,” Antti says, “but I didn’t see anything violent.”

  “Anything with Thai girls?” I ask.

  Antti’s face goes red.

  “And we got this.” Jussi picks up a bag with three half-liter Lapin Kulta bottles in it. “They were in the fridge. We figured we ought to check and see if they came out of the same lot as the one, you know, in her vagina.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.” I look around. “Where’s Valtteri?”

  “He said he had to go home,” Antti says.

  I look at my watch. It’s a quarter after six. “Maybe you guys should go home too. This stuff needs to go to the lab. Could one of you take it to the airport and get it to Helsinki on the next plane?”

  “I can,” Antti says.

  “By the way, I processed the car and got a lot of forensics. I think this case should be over soon.”

  Antti looks sheepish. “Think I’ll be able to go on vacation?”

  “Odds are good. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  “Can we talk now?” Esko asks.

  I motion toward my office. “About obstruction of justice, you bet.”

  I shut the door and we sit down. I toss the magazine at him. “The fucking diener,” I say.

  “I’m embarrassed about that but…”

  “But nothing. The photos were irresponsible and disrespectful. Details were released that could impede the investigation. I’m going to charge him.”

  “There’s no guarantee it was Tuomas. There are other workers, cleaners, it could have been any one of a dozen people.”

  “You know goddamned well it was the diener.”

  “Will you forget the fucking diener!”

  I’ve never heard Esko yell before. It shuts me up.

  “I’m not here to talk about that,” Esko says. “I got the DNA results from the crime scene and autopsy back from the lab.”

  I feel like a jerk, light a cigarette. “What did you get?”

  “Can I have one?”

  To my knowledge, Esko doesn’t smoke. I slide the pack over and he lights one, takes a couple drags, collects his thoughts. “The lab results turned up semen samples in and around her mouth. DNA testing shows it came from two separate sources.”

  I get a queasy feeling in my stomach that tells me the case has gone wrong. “How do you interpret that?”

  “She had to have performed oral sex on two different men on the day of her murder.”

  “So you’re saying Seppo had an accomplice?”

  “I can’t say Seppo was involved at all. I don’t have a DNA sample from him for comparison.”

  “I can’t force him to give one until I charge him. You can have a sample from the evidence collected from his house. It comes back from the lab tomorrow.”

  “There’s more.”

  I press the stress out of my eyes with my fingertips. “What?”

  “There’s a third set of DNA from the crime scene. You remember the sample I took from her face? You asked me to collect it.”

  I nod.

  “Teardrops.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “I didn’t know teardrops have DNA in them.”

  “Well, they do.”

  “If it’s minus forty and I spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Why didn’t the tears freeze and just bounce off her face?”

  “I looked it up. Tears are a saline solution and depress the freezing point of water. They only have about a tenth or a twelfth of the salt content of seawater, depending, interestingly enough, on the cause of the tears. It was enough salt to keep the tears liquid while they fell, until they struck her face. They spattered and then froze instantly. The lowest possible temperature for a saline solution is minus twenty-one-point-one degrees. It was minus forty outside, so the salt crystallized out of the water. That’s how you were able to notice it. Your flashlight made the salt crystals sparkle.”

  “No shit.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “That’s not the real news. The tears don’t belong to either of the men she performed fellatio on.”

  I hang my head in my hands. “That can’t be true.”

  He stubs out the cigarette. “It’s true.”

  I sit up straight, compose myself, chain another cigarette off the last one. “She performed oral sex on two men, who may or may not have murdered her, either individually or together. Then, a third individual, I presume male?”

  “Yes, male.”

  “A third man cries over her face while she’s being slaughtered, or maybe after.”

  “Correct. There’s still more.”

  This has gone so awry that I laugh. “There can’t be.”

  “One of the men she performed oral sex on was identified from the sex offenders’ DNA database. I recognized the name, Peter Eklund. His father is one of the wealthiest men in Finland. He owns a bank.”

  I know who Peter is, but I didn’t know he’s a registered sex offender. His residence is in Helsinki, so there’s no reason I would have been informed. He’s twenty-three years old and already drinking himself to death. He’s been a guest in our drunk tanks several times. I’ve also given him speeding tickets. He drives a BMW.

  “What are you going to do?” Esko asks.

  I want to scream out of frustration. This case should be winding down, but now it looks like this may just be the beginning. Too much has happened today. If I find Eklund and interview him tonight, I might make mistakes. “I’m going home
.”

  14

  Kate is on the bed, watching TV. I lie down beside her and pat her belly. “How are you and the kids?”

  She turns and kisses me. “We’re okay. That boy, Heikki, came by today.”

  “Was he any help?”

  “Not exactly. He wouldn’t speak to me in English. Doesn’t he have to take it in school?”

  “Yeah, but you know how we Finns are. If you can’t do something to perfection, you don’t do it at all. He’s just shy.”

  She looks like she just tasted something bad. “He’s not just shy, he’s creepy. The way he looked at me made my skin crawl.”

  I laugh a little. “It’s the religious thing. I guess they’re something like American Pentecostals.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “You mean they speak in tongues?”

  “I don’t think they do anymore, at least not frequently, but it used to be common. They believe the same thing about being entered by the Holy Spirit, and they have the same kinds of strict codes of dress and behavior. Laestadian women go for the natural look, tend to be on the plain side. Makeup is against the rules. He’s probably never been in the same room with a beautiful woman like you.”

  “I told him I didn’t need anything today. I’d rather he didn’t come back.”

  I don’t know how I could explain this to Valtteri. “If he tries to speak English, will you give him another chance?”

  She looks skeptical.

  “If he gets used to being around you, he’ll stop staring at you.”

  “All right, I’ll try one more time. But if he makes me feel icky again, he’s got to go.”

  “Fair enough. You could try speaking Finnish with him. If you both practice languages, it might make him more comfortable.”

  “I thought he was here to make me comfortable.”

  “Of course you’re right, but you’ve got some downtime. Maybe you should use part of it to study Finnish. Getting better at speaking it would make your whole life more comfortable.”