Dad and I never fish together, but we fish in the same spot, and I’m pretty sure for the same reason. It’s where my sister Suvi died. It’s a way of being with her. Sometimes I talk to her when I sit there on a crate, dangling a fishing line through a hole in the ice.
The starry night casts the frozen lake slate-gray. A half moon silhouettes a thin column of smoke rising into the sky. Antti stands near the source, not fifty feet from where Suvi fell through the ice and drowned. It makes me shudder. I get my fishing-tackle boxes out of the trunk, head down the bank and onto the lake.
Walking toward the body with a flashlight, I can’t quite take in what I’m seeing. The smoking figure in the beam doesn’t look like a person, more like a blackened candle that’s burned halfway down and been snuffed out. Antti and I nod at each other but don’t speak. I look at the victim, blink, look again. Part of me just won’t accept that it’s true.
A tire was hung around the child’s chest and arms and set ablaze. The smell of petroleum and scorched flesh is overwhelming, sickening. Someone filled the ring inside the tire with gasoline, lit it and watched the child burn. A rumpled fire blanket lies on the ice a few yards away from the body. Antti extinguished the flame, but the rubber is still smoldering.
The victim sat cross-legged while the killer attended to the details of his or her murder. Somehow, the body stayed upright while it burned. Because the tire was draped around the top half of the body, flame shot up and burned nearly all the skin away from the chest and head. Only fragments of charred and desiccated muscle and ligament remain attached to bone and a blackened skull.
From the waist upward, the body is shriveled by heat. Soot and ash cover the body from the waist downward, but in relative terms, the lower portion remains unscathed. Antti assumed the victim is a child because heat and flame caused a diminutive appearance, steamed out liquid, removed hair and flesh, in effect shrank the upper body. He was wrong.
I kneel down with my weight on the balls of my feet and examine the lower body. Under the filth from the burned tire, I see jeans and worn boots. Understanding knocks me backward. I fall on my ass and drop my flashlight. I try to breathe, can’t, clench and unclench my fists. I close my eyes, stop looking at the corpse so I can relax enough to speak. When I open them, Antti is standing over me.
“It’s not a child,” I say. “It’s a small adult woman. My ex-wife Heli.”
Antti’s mouth opens and closes, opens and closes again. “Fuck. Kari. I’m sorry.”
He offers his hand, helps me to my feet. We stand side by side on the ice. He picks up the flashlight and shines it on Heli. We stare at her for what seems a long time.
“What do we do?” Antti asks.
I consider the question, can’t think, sit down on a fishing-tackle box. “I saw Heli earlier tonight. I might have been the last one to see her alive. I can’t do anything, it might contaminate the investigation. You have to process the crime scene. Wait on Esko, he’ll help you.”
What I said is true, but also, I’m incapable of working and I know it.
He sits down on the other tackle box. “Okay,” he says.
Esko arrives, and Antti explains the situation to him. Esko hunches down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he says, “we’ll take care of it.”
Antti needs my crime kit. I stand up, walk a few yards away, chain-smoke and watch them examine Heli’s corpse, the husk that remains of her. I should feel something, remember moments from my life with Heli. Her life should pass before my eyes, but my mind is blank, I feel nothing. The cold seeps through me. It feels like ice water flows in my veins. I stare across the lake into the forest’s impenetrable shadows, then watch the stars.
After a while, Esko comes over. “You don’t need to stay here.”
It takes me a second to realize he spoke to me and another to understand what he said. “What if Antti needs something?”
“He won’t. Can you drive yourself home?”
I nod.
“Go on then,” he says.
I stumble off the lake and wade through the snow up the bank to my car.
I shut the front door behind me. Kate is sitting on the couch with her broken leg propped up on a stool. She’s watching an American sitcom with a canned laugh track. I sit down beside her.
“I thought you’d be gone all night,” she says.
I stare at the TV, shake my head.
She comes close, looks in my eyes. “What happened?”
“It was Heli,” I say.
“What are you talking about?”
Maybe she thinks I’m talking about Sufia’s murder or Heikki’s suicide. “Heli. My ex-wife. It wasn’t a child. Somebody put a tire around Heli’s chest and arms, filled it with gasoline and set her on fire. She’s dead.”
Kate’s eyes open wide. She reaches over and takes my hands. “Kari
… ”
I keep staring at the television. I laugh at a stupid joke, look down at my feet. I forgot to take off my boots. I watch snow melt all over the carpet.
I almost never cry. Sometimes I go years without crying. When I was a boy, if I cried, Dad beat me. He must have beaten the tears out of me. I start to cry, just a little, and it surprises me. In a way, it terrifies me. “Suvi,” I say.
Kate keeps my hands clasped between hers. “What?”
“Suvi. Heli died where Suvi died.”
She turns off the TV. Her voice goes gentle, like she’s talking to a child. “Kari, would you like a drink?”
I nod.
She hobbles to the kitchen on her crutches and returns with a bottle of scotch and a water glass. I pour a triple and think of Dad, sitting in his armchair, drinking vodka out of a water glass, getting drunk, yelling at Mom and us kids, hitting us. I down the scotch and pour another just like it.
Kate wraps an arm around me. “Suvi died where Heli died?”
I take another drink. “Yeah.”
“Who is Suvi?”
I haven’t said Suvi’s name out loud in thirty years. Tears shoot out of me. I can’t see. I try to talk through the snot choking me. “Suvi died because I didn’t take good enough care of her. Heli died because I didn’t solve the murder. They’re dead and it’s my fault.”
After I finish off the second drink, Kate takes the glass away from me. “Kari, you still haven’t told me who Suvi is.”
“Suvi was my sister.”
I’m crying and choking and choking and crying and through it all I’m spitting out the story of how Suvi fell through the ice and drowned and how Dad and I did nothing and how they dragged the lake under the ice and pulled her body out. In between broken sentences, I’m taking swigs out of the scotch bottle. I’ve drunk most of it.
Kate pulls me close. I try to push her away but don’t have the strength. “Why didn’t you tell me about Suvi before?” she asks.
Crying embarrasses me. I wipe snot on my sleeve and sob. “Because I didn’t want you to blame me.”
She pulls my face next to hers, cradles me in her arms. “Kari, you were nine years old.”
I start crying harder again, spread tears and snot on her shoulder. “Do you blame me?” I ask.
“No Kari, I don’t blame you.”
She rocks me back and forth. I pass out drunk, don’t remember anything after that.
29
Kate shakes me awake. “Antti is on the phone,” she says. “I didn’t want to answer your cell phone, but he kept ringing. I told him you needed to sleep, but he says it’s important.”
My mouth feels like a rat crawled into it, died and rotted there while I slept. My head throbs. Drinking three quarters of a bottle of whiskey like a pitcher of water has given me an awful hangover.
I take the phone. “What?”
“Sorry to bother you,” Antti says, “but I thought you should know about what’s going on with Heli’s murder.”
“It’s okay, tell me.”
“Esko and I processed the crime scene. The tire around her chest was a Dunlop Winter
Sport, the ID was still legible. I found a star-spoked hubcap and an empty gasoline can by the edge of the lake.”
My stomach churns from guilt more than the hangover. “You’re telling me I turned Seppo loose and he killed Heli?”
He refrains from passing judgment. “I went to his cottage and his BMW was in the driveway. The keys were still in it. I looked in the trunk and the spare tire was gone, so I’m pretty sure he used it to kill her. Her purse was still in the car. This was about four A.M.”
“Did you find Seppo?”
“He answered the door when I rang, said he’d been asleep and looked like it. Passed out is more like it. He was still pretty drunk. I guess he got tanked, killed his wife, then drove home and went to bed.”
“How did he react about Heli?”
“I didn’t say anything about it. I arrested him but didn’t charge him. I thought I should leave it up to you to decide how to handle him. Being arrested again upset him, to put it mildly, but I just couldn’t see leaving him free when his vehicle is evidence in a second murder.”
“You did right. I’ll call Esko and get his take on things, then come to the station and question Seppo.”
“Esko already did the autopsy. I was there with him.”
“Why so quick?”
“To tell the truth, Esko was afraid you’d want to attend, and he thought it would be too hard on you, so we met at the morgue at seven this morning.”
I look at the clock. It’s eleven now. “When did you sleep?”
“I haven’t yet. Esko went home and got a couple hours of shut-eye while I went to Seppo’s cottage.”
“Fuck,” I say. “I have to see Heli’s parents.”
“I already went to their house with Pastor Nuorgam and talked to Heli’s father.”
“How did he take it?”
“Bad. I told him you were broken up about it, that you’d talk to him when you could.”
Having the people I work with try to spare my feelings touches me, but also embarrasses me a little. “Thanks, I appreciate all you’ve done.”
“No problem. You okay?”
I’m not sure yet. “Yeah, I’m okay. Go home and get some rest, I’ll talk to you soon.”
Kate sits down on the bed. “What are you planning to do?”
I shrug my shoulders. “Go to work.”
“Do you remember last night?”
It’s a little fuzzy, but I remember more than I want to. I imagine how I looked, crying like a baby. I feel my face turn red. “Sorry, I guess I let things get on top of me.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, I just wonder why you never told me about Suvi before.”
When I lived in Helsinki, I had an apartment on the fourth floor of a nine-story building. About six months after Heli left me, I came home and found a big orange tomcat on my balcony. The only way he could have gotten there was to have jumped from a higher floor. No one inquired about him and I didn’t ask. I named him Katt-Swedish for “cat.” A stupid name for a stupid animal, but I came to love him.
Katt loved nature shows on TV, seemed to think all the other creatures of the earth lived in a little box in the living room. In the evenings, I would lie on the sofa, he would lie on my chest, we’d share a bowl of ice cream and watch antelopes mate or cougars stalk bison or whatever. He liked the documentaries with other cats in them the best.
I transferred here to Kittila and brought Katt with me, had him for eight years. One day I came home and found him dead. He tried to eat a fat rubber band and choked to death on it. Katt had shit for brains. It broke my heart. I buried Katt in the backyard in an unmarked grave. Still, every year on All Saints Day, I light a candle on it for him. I never told anybody how much I loved him, and I never told anybody how much it hurt me when he died. I’ve never told Kate he existed at all. Sharing pain just isn’t part of my emotional makeup.
I didn’t realize until last night how much I wanted to tell Kate about Suvi. “I didn’t know how,” I say.
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me, anything you want to tell me?”
I think about it. “No.”
“I’m worried about you,” she says. “I don’t want you to go to work.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You know what I want and you know I’m right. Things have gone too far. You told me you would.”
I nod. The case has spun out of control, gone to places I never would have imagined, and it’s taken a heavy toll on me. I don’t want to because it feels like failure, humiliating, but I should give it up. “I’ll do it now,” I say.
I call the national chief of police. He starts in on me before I can speak. “You didn’t write the press release the way I told you. Now things are fucked up.”
“Jyri, my ex-wife is dead. She was murdered last night.” I tell him about the circumstances.
Momentary silence. “Jesus, I’m sorry. How are you bearing up?”
“Not that well. I’m recusing myself. This has become too personal. I may have been the last person to see Heli alive, and given my relationship to her and her husband, the prime suspect, it’s inappropriate for me to continue.”
“Are you up to talking about the case?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what you know and where you think the case is headed.”
“The last time we talked, I told you that when we found the third man, the one who shed the tears on Sufia’s face, he would lead to someone else and we’d solve the murder. The boy, Heikki, committed suicide, and a DNA test proved the tears were his. He connected to Heli and Seppo, and that left me with four working theories. I figured I didn’t have to prove any of them, just disprove the others, and process of elimination would leave me with the truth.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“At first, I thought it most likely that Heli and Heikki did it together. She stood to lose a lot if Seppo left her for Sufia, and she also had a revenge motive. Heikki was young, malleable, impressionable. She could have used sex and his religious beliefs to coerce him. But then I thought Heikki and Seppo acting together was a more elegant solution with fewer working parts. I asked Heli if Seppo is bisexual. She didn’t deny it. A homosexual relationship would give Heikki a simple jealousy motive.”
“Since Heli is dead now,” he says, “that pretty much just leaves Seppo.”
“Wait. That doesn’t explain the Elizabeth Short copycat aspect of the murder and how Heikki knew about Sufia’s genital mutilation.” I explain the common features of the two murders. “If Heikki was involved with Sufia and Seppo in a sex triangle, Heikki would have been aware of it. In this instance, Heikki might have acted alone out of jealousy, or he and Seppo might have killed her together, most likely because Sufia tried to blackmail Seppo, since she was known to have attempted it in the past under similar circumstances. Maybe that’s what happened. Heli found out about it and forced Seppo to marry her by threatening to tell me the truth about Sufia’s murder. That would provide Seppo with a motive for killing Heli.”
“But the way he did it, with the tire from his own car, would be an act of complete idiocy. If he killed his wife, he’s made himself the main suspect.”
“He’s not the brightest bulb, but yeah, the stupidity involved makes me question his guilt.”
“You said four theories. That’s three.”
“Sufia’s relationship with Peter Eklund is the piece of the puzzle still unaccounted for. She performed oral sex on both Seppo and Peter earlier in the day of her murder, had traces of semen from both of them in her mouth. Peter and Seppo knew each other in Helsinki, maybe they both like young boys. If they both had sex with Sufia, maybe they also shared Heikki. It’s ugly, but it’s a possibility.”
The chief mulls it over. “What do you think now that Heli is dead?”
“I haven’t had a chance to think about it.”
“Think about it.”
“Honestly, my gut feeling was that Heli and Heikki did it, but now I just don�
�t know anymore.”
He barks it out, surprises me. “Don’t recuse yourself.”
“Jyri, that’s ridiculous. I may have been the last one to see her alive. It makes me a possible suspect.”
“Did you kill her?”
“Of course not.”
“Then you weren’t the last one to see her alive. Have you seen the papers or watched TV today?”
I’ve been avoiding them. “Not for a couple days. I haven’t had time.”
“You’re all over the news, national and international. They’re flashing pictures of Sufia Elmi, talking about how the handling of the Finnish Black Dahlia case is all fucked up. The implication is that a dumb redneck cop, a reindeer biter from Lapland, abused his authority and used the murder of a sweet and innocent but talented Somali refugee-who worked her way to fame and fortune against all odds-as a way to get back at his ex-wife and the guy who fucked her when they were married. If you’d written the press release the way I told you, been up-front about your relationship to the accused, then painted the shithead black, you would have seemed like a good guy. Now you could end up losing your job over it. Or worse.”
Now I see why Jyri is the national chief of police. He understands politics. I knew the media might make me look bad, maybe incompetent, but I didn’t expect them to crucify me. “What should I do?”
“Finish the case and solve it.”
“My friend’s son and my ex-wife are dead. I’m too emotionally involved and I feel like I’ve lost my judgment and perspective. I’ve done my best, but I’ve had about all I can take. You were right in the beginning-I never should have taken the case.”
“But you did take it. In for a dime, in for a dollar, they say.”
“Let someone who’s better equipped take over.”
“If you give up the case after already being demonized in the press for malfeasance, you might end up getting prosecuted for your ex-wife’s murder. My willingness to let you continue the investigation will demonstrate official belief in you. If you solve the case, you save yourself.”
“I didn’t do it, so they can’t prove it. They can write what they want.”
“You can’t be that naive.”
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