Holy Ceremony

by Harri Nykanen

  I started browsing through the Anteroinen paperwork. The photos of the crime scene were chilling. Anteroinen lived in a house that was a little way outside Kouvola, so the killer or killers had been able to take their time. The burning had taken place in the garage. After that, Anteroinen had been dragged out alive and thrown into a septic tank no more than a few hundred gallons in size. The cause of death was suffocation. I read the half-dozen interrogation reports Rimpelä had written up, but there was nothing interesting in them. For such a gruesome case, they were surprisingly tame. As if the entire incident hadn’t had the least effect on the investigator.

  The medical examiner’s office was tucked away in a funny little cul-de-sac closely shaved on either side by two of the city’s main traffic corridors. I parked in the space reserved for police and funeral-home vehicles and climbed the stairs to the main entrance. At the corner of the building, I made a note of three surveillance cameras pointing in different directions.

  I announced my business to the receptionist. She called Vuorio.

  “He’ll be up in just a minute. You can wait over there.” She nodded at a cluster of pale-blue chairs by the window, and I accepted her offer.

  My phone rang; it was Huovinen. He got right down to business: “Where are you?”

  “Medical examiner’s. I’m trying to figure out how Nevala’s body made it out.”

  “Good. Come see me when you get back.”

  “Something out of the ordinary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There will be plenty of time when you’re back. Solve the mystery of the stolen body first.”

  I saw Vuorio walk into the lobby. In his lab coat, he would have passed for a good-natured pediatrician. After we shook hands, he started to lead me into the building, although I knew my way.

  “As you can see, all the doors are equipped with alarms that will alert the security company if the door stays open too long,” he explained. Then he pulled out his keychain and showed me his ID card. “You have to have one of these to be able to move around in here, and your movements are tracked by the security system.”

  “Who was on duty the other night?”

  Vuorio chuckled. “I was. And I didn’t see or hear anything. I opened up a vagrant who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and then I went to sleep in my office. I woke up around four, plugged my way through about an hour’s worth of paperwork, then went online and reserved a week at a lodge in Estonia. I’m headed there this fall to hunt wild boar. My guess is the body was removed earlier in the evening. If I were you, I’d check with the security company.”

  “Are there many other alternatives?”

  “Such as?”

  “Current or former employees? Janitors, for instance. One of them could have stolen the key. Maybe it was the cleaning lady’s boyfriend. But back to that night: I suppose there were others here, aside from you?”

  “Nope. The prep guy went home once he finished laying the groundwork. We’re on a budget, just like all government agencies. Overtime is expensive. If we get a drunk driver or a suspected drug user, we call in a chemist.”

  Vuorio pushed the door to his office wide and held it open for me. His desk was heaped with stacks of papers, various forms, instruments, books, pizza boxes, and paper cups. It was pure chaos. A gray armoire stood behind the desk. On the wall hung photographs of Vuorio during high-caliber hunting trips to the ends of the earth: Africa, Russia, Estonia, Lapland. He enjoyed traipsing about the great outdoors, although you’d never know it from his appearance. An oil painting in blue tones hung across from the desk, a sharp contrast to all the masculine paraphernalia. It was of a woman, fortyish, foreign-looking. I knew the subject was Vuorio’s deceased wife. She had died from cancer over ten years earlier.

  The medical examiner waved a coffee mug he had unearthed from the mountains of papers. “Should I make us some coffee?”

  “No thanks. Where are the surveillance camera tapes?”

  “At the security company, or at least I think so. Pretty interesting case if it turns out someone came in using their keys.”

  “Are you sure there’s no way to circumvent the security system to get into the building?”

  “You’ll have to ask the lads from the security company.”

  “How often do they come here?”

  “Only as often as necessary, in other words if the alarm system indicates something’s wrong. This isn’t one of those sites they visit every night. There’s nothing here of interest to the guards, except maybe the ethanol.”

  “Ever have false alarms?”

  “Apparently not very often, because I’ve never seen or heard of one.”

  “Where was the body?”

  “In the morgue.”

  I tried to remember where it was located.

  Vuorio seemed to read my mind. “Two floors down. You can access it directly from the loading ramp. There are other ways of exiting the building from the morgue, too.”

  “If the body was moved from the morgue on a stretcher, it would have been left somewhere. Did anyone report anything like that, finding a stretcher outside?”

  “Good thinking. No, at least not me. I went home in the morning, slept, and came back to work. I have to take a couple more years of this butcher shop. You can bet your behind I won’t be missing this job once I retire… Do you want to have a look around the morgue?”

  “I’d love to.”

  I wondered at my choice of words. There were some things I loved; spending time in a room of bodies in steel drawers wasn’t one of them. But it had to be done.

  Vuorio called the elevator, which we rode down two floors. Then there was a bit more trudging down echoing corridors until we arrived at our destination.

  The space was just like the ones everyone has seen on foreign cop shows, the ones where they show a body lying under a sheet with a name tag looped around the toe. The room was cold, and smelled of disinfectant and rancid meat. An entire wall was nothing but stainless-steel lockers.

  Vuorio studied a folder on the desk and stepped right over to one of the steel doors.

  “Here’s our little runaway,” he said, yanking it open.

  He stood there staring at the drawer that had popped out. I saw the same thing he did.

  The locker was empty.

  4

  When I conveyed the information that Roosa Nevala’s body was missing again, Huovinen’s response was brief: “Unbelievable.”

  Which was a lot, coming from him. With over twenty years on the force under his belt, he knew almost anything was possible.

  “Vuorio suspects it was never even returned.”

  “The guys from the funeral home, huh?”

  “Yeah. When we left Töölö, we just left a patrol behind. They probably wouldn’t ask too many questions if two guys in lab coats showed up with a stretcher and a body bag to do a pickup.”

  “Maybe. Find out which patrol turned over the body.” Huovinen scratched the underside of his chin. “If the first theft didn’t make any sense, this makes even less, or if it does, it’s some sort of sense that’s beyond me.”

  “Yeah, this corpse recycling is a total mystery to me, too.”

  “If this leaks to that reporter punk, I’m going to turn the whole PD upside down until I find out who did it.”

  I shared my suspicions that the leak had come from outside, potentially from Laurén himself.

  “I have to hand it to him, he’s cooking up a real mess. If we could grasp even a tiny bit of what he’s thinking, we would know what to anticipate. This is an unusually contradictory case, Ari. When it comes down to it, simple theft of a body, even twice over, isn’t much of a crime. If, on the other hand, it’s an omen of something more serious to come, we should try and prevent it. But you and I aren’t mind readers. I guess we can’t do much more than try and figure out how the body was stolen.”

  “There was something else you wanted to talk about, too,” I reminded him.
/>
  “Yeah, that’s a shitty piece of business, too. It’s about Oksanen.”

  Huovinen took a letter from a locked desk drawer and passed it to me. I sat in my familiar spot. The letter was brief, but the gist was clear. The author purported to be the recently retired secretary of the CEO of a well-known auto parts business.

  For years now, in my capacity at work I have been forced to watch a detective named Jari Oksanen exploit his position to extort discounts or free parts for his rally car. My impression is that he has something he’s using to blackmail Mr. Berg, the CEO, or at least threatening to do so. I feel sorry for Mr. Berg, because he’s quite nice, a real old-fashioned gentleman. I’m certain the value of these extorted handouts totals thousands of euros. Oksanen was occasionally accompanied by a member of police command from the ministry; I don’t recall the name. I’ve never dared to go public with this matter, but now that I’ve retired, I feel it is my duty. Detective Oksanen will of course claim that it’s part of a sponsorship arrangement, but you can rest assured that is not the case. I have heard Mr. Berg speak about it in dismayed tones on numerous occasions. You are free to use my name, because I know anonymous tips are not held in very high regard.

  They say a crow never pecks out another crow’s eyes, but I hope you get to the bottom of this and Detective Oksanen is called to account. If not, I will turn to the media.

  Saimi Vartiainen

  The letter also included Ms. Vartiainen’s phone number and address.

  It was a straightforward matter. Either the information was accurate or it wasn’t. There was no question it needed looking into.

  “Everyone knows about Oksanen’s rallying, so unfortunately the letter has the veneer of credibility. It looks bad,” Huovinen said. “What do you think?”

  It’s not always easy being a superior, especially when you have to be loyal and critical at the same time.

  “We have to investigate.”

  “Of course… do you happen to know who Oksanen’s co-driver is?”

  I scoured my memory. Oksanen’s hobby held zero interest for me, but some of it couldn’t help but stick. I recalled the police rally team’s victorious pose after the competition in Poland, the photo published in PD magazine. It also hung on the wall of Oksanen’s office, along with memorabilia from other wins.

  “Goddammit! It’s Kalliola!”

  Arto Kalliola was the deputy national police commissioner from the Ministry of the Interior.

  “They drive together, so he’s at risk of being accused of benefiting from Oksanen’s dealings. He probably doesn’t know anything about Oksanen’s shenanigans, but that’s hard to prove. If it looks shady, it is shady.”

  Huovinen sounded frustrated. I wasn’t sure if it was because of what Oksanen had done, or the fact that Oksanen had gotten Kalliola mixed up in his dirty business. The rules on internal investigations mandated that a police officer couldn’t investigate a colleague working in the same municipality of any suspected crimes. In Oksanen’s case, that meant the investigation would presumably be turned over to the Espoo PD, and the investigation would be led by someone appointed by the prosecutor general’s office.

  Once I had time to think about it, I started feeling guilty. I had been Oksanen’s superior and knew all about his expensive hobby, but I hadn’t bothered to think how he financed it. On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? It’s not like he would have confessed to me that he was wheedling or demanding discounts from a car-parts supplier. In addition to the guilt, I felt a creeping schadenfreude. Oksanen’s endless tinkering, branded jackets, and prize-podium photos had been getting on my nerves for a long time, especially since there was no question they ate into his working hours. I had tried not to show my frustration, because everyone was free to have whatever hobbies they wanted, as long as they weren’t illegal – a line we were fast approaching.

  “How should we proceed?” I asked Huovinen.

  “It’s best to do things by the book. As his closest superior, you have a word with him first. After that we’ll talk to him together. If there’s the slightest cause for suspicion, we’ll turn it over to the prosecutor.”

  I headed for my office, and of course just then Oksanen trudged down the corridor towards me in his blue branded jacket, still looking groggy even though it was almost ten. I looked at my watch long enough for him to notice.

  “Sorry. It was my turn with the kid and her day-care lady was sick. I had to drive her to my mom’s in Tikkurila. The ex wouldn’t take her, said she had an important meeting, supposedly… what did the bosses say about that stolen body? It was in the headlines.”

  “We’ll keep handling it for now. Check in with Arja and she’ll give you the rundown. Conference room, 10:30.”

  The instant Oksanen shut the door behind him, my phone rang. I glanced at the number, but it didn’t say anything to me.

  “This is Kafka.”

  For a second, all I heard was vaguely agitated breathing.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  I snapped to attention. “Yes, thanks. I’m not sure I understood everything you were trying to say, and even less about why you needed Nevala’s body.”

  “That was what she wanted. She said that would be her contribution to our struggle. I didn’t want her to do that to herself, but God has granted us free agency. Which makes us almost like God. I honored Roosa’s agency by using her, and before long I’ll carry out her second wish, too.”

  “Is that the reason you stole her body a second time?”

  “The one and only. You’ll find out what I mean soon. Follow the signs of fire to their origins. You’ll find a message for you there.”

  “Why don’t you just give me the message now?”

  “There’s a time and a way to tell.”

  “At least tell me what battle you’re talking about?”

  “Against the dragon, against evil incarnate.”

  “Like Anteroinen, huh?”

  “Yes. He was the first, but not the last. He was not able to escape God’s wrath. Just as there are three goods, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, there are also three evils. Three is God’s number, and evil mimics God in everything.”

  “In what way was Anteroinen evil?”

  “You’re a Jew, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the New Testament. Jesus taught us to fear not those capable of killing the body but rather those who are able to destroy both body and soul. The worst thing you can do to a person is defile his soul and body. Don’t worry, you’ll find out everything in time.”

  “We know who you are. You know you’ll be caught, so it would be wisest to turn yourself in – to me, say. We can talk things out—”

  “I have responsibilities that I cannot leave unfulfilled.”

  “At least tell me what the Holy Vault means, then.”

  An impatient tone entered Laurén’s voice. “The time hasn’t come yet to reveal that.”

  While I still could, I quickly asked him, “Why did you want to tell all of this to me, specifically?”

  “Isn’t it clear, Ariel Kafka? Ariel means the light of God, the flame that will cleanse Jerusalem of her sins. You are the purifying flame, just as we are. Together we will burn the dragons so they can no longer wreak their evil on the souls of men.”

  The line went dead. I stared at my notebook, where I had only written five words: follow the signs of fire.

  I went to see Stenman, but she wasn’t in her office, and neither was Oksanen. I found Oksanen’s absence particularly irritating. Knowing him, it had something to do with his cars. I went to have another word with Huovinen. At least he was there. I told him about the call and the information I had gathered immediately after.

  “Did the number tell us anything?”

  “Prepaid. Line was closed right after the call. I’ll try to find out the IMEI code, but I’m guessing the phone was bought secondhand or under a false name.”

  “What Laurén told you about your name reveals the logic that’s
driving him. He’s battling phantoms in his own head.”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  Huovinen frowned.

  “Even though he speaks in metaphors and is mixing everything up with his Lord of the Rings gibberish, the motive might be grounded in real events. And remember, he spoke in the plural. His exact words were: you are the purifying flame, just as we are… I believe the motive will become clearer once we find out if there was a connection between Anteroinen and Laurén. It’s clear that Laurén wants publicity for the case and is prepared to put himself on the line to achieve it. I think he’s the one who called Ilta-Sanomat.”

  “I have to admit, I was pissed to see it in the paper on the way to work,” Huovinen said. “I’ve already gotten three calls from reporters. Who knows, maybe the publicity will help us. But my instincts are still telling me this is going to end up a shitstorm for the department. If it turns out that Laurén is behind both deaths and has been evading us for years, we’ll spend all spring pulling knives out of our backs.”

  “It’ll be even worse if it turns out he warned us and was still able to kill someone else without us stopping him.”

  Huovinen’s face darkened in concern. “This is starting to smell like a case for the National Bureau of Investigation. They already have their hands full, so I wouldn’t bet they’ll be clamoring to take it off our hands. But we should follow protocol and let them know what’s going on. You’re involved for the simple reason that Laurén specifically wanted you to investigate.”

  The further along I got in my story, the more worried Hyppönen, the CEO of the security company, looked. By the end, he looked almost hopeless. He loosened his tie; he seemed to be having a hard time breathing. The suspenders I caught a glimpse of under his jacket also seemed to tighten.

  “I’m personally familiar with all our sites, including this one. Some outsider has to be involved, or else the intruder has gotten his hands on a badge belonging to one of the staff or the authorities. I’ll get on it right away.” Hyppönen jabbed briefly at his computer’s keyboard with his sausage fingers, but he clearly wasn’t comfortable with the machine. “This isn’t exactly my forte… I’ll bring in an expert.” He shifted over to jabbing at the phone. “Seppo! Could you come to my office now… When I say now, I mean now!” he growled.