Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “You have a bruise on your eye. I think my ring clipped you. I’m sorry,” Suvi said. “Are you going to charge me for attacking you?”

  “No, of course not. Suvi, is there a relative or friend who could come and be with you and the kids? Or is there a social worker assigned to you that you could ask for help?”

  “Don’t you dare tell them!” Suvi shouted. “We don’t need anyone. We have each other.”

  “You don’t have to do this alone. You have a right to receive support.”

  “Right, and you really care how I feel!” Suvi screamed and swung in her seat so violently that I thought the car would run off the road from the force of it. “All you cared about was catching Marko and pinning that fag’s murder on him!”

  As I merged onto the freeway, my phone rang. Taskinen asked where I was. He had heard about the body.

  “I’m taking Seppälä’s wife home.”

  “I realize that’s important, but it’s a more junior officer’s work. We need you here. Someone leaked the story to the press, and now I have reporters breathing down my neck. I don’t know enough to answer their questions, and neither does the press secretary.”

  “I’m coming,” I said with a sigh. I felt like turning the phone off completely, but I couldn’t do that. When I nagged Suvi again about who she could ask to come over and suggested a neighbor or someone from the church, she finally said she would call her brother.

  “I know Jari’s just going to say Marko got what he deserved, but he does like our children. There’s the school. Stop! Let’s stay and wait for Janita and Tony. But I won’t tell them until we get home. The other kids would make fun of them for being crybabies.”

  I had been in the third grade when my friend Jaska’s dad died. Jaska came to school anyway and cried at his desk while the teacher expressed her condolences. I remember the complete sense of helplessness that hit me as I listened to Jaska cry. I wanted to comfort him, but what could a nine-year-old do? The next day a boy named Esa and I were sent to take flowers from our class to the family. His mother sat in her armchair and offered us juice, treating us like adults. I wanted to comfort her too, but I didn’t have the words. Later I heard that she had been confused by the teacher’s sending children on such an errand instead of coming herself.

  The teacher had been trying to avoid her own emotions.

  I offered Suvi my phone so she could call her brother. Suvi delivered the news calmly, like a person who’d suspected the worst and was now just relieved to have had her fears confirmed.

  “And what about Marko’s parents and the rest of the family? Do you want the police to notify them or would you like to do it yourself?”

  “Marko didn’t even know who his father was, and his mother drank herself to death just before our wedding. There isn’t anyone to tell. He didn’t have anyone but us.”

  Children had started streaming out of the school gates, so I spoke quickly.

  “Thank you for the hundred-mark bill. It could really help our investigation. Did Marko say who he got it from?”

  “No,” Suvi replied and then removed her seat belt as Tony and Janita came out of the schoolyard. Opening the door, she yelled to her children, who seemed surprised to see their mother in the middle of the day.

  She flashed a radiant smile. “I got the day off from school,” she lied and then helped the kids get buckled in the back. “Let’s stop at the day care and pick up Diana too,” she said and motioned to me to start the car as royalty might command a chauffeur. The drive was only a few hundred yards. “This nice lady will keep you company.” She climbed out of the car but then suddenly stuck her head back in and spoke to me in English as if we were coconspirators. “Say nothing.”

  “Who are you?” Tony asked as soon as his mother was gone.

  “A friend of your mom’s.”

  “No you aren’t. You’re a cop. You came to our house in a cop car once!” Janita hissed, in the same way her mother did. “There’s no point coming to get Daddy. He isn’t home.”

  “I think you’re right. I’m just taking you all home.”

  “Our mom knows how to drive too,” Tony said defiantly as Suvi returned with Diana in her arms. She put the girl in the front seat.

  “Now we want to be alone,” she said to me. “You can leave.”

  So I got out of the car, even though I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing. I stopped Suvi as she was climbing behind the wheel.

  “You understand we’re going to have to get back to this within the next couple of days. If you think of anything, call me. Here’s my card in case you lost the last one.” I gazed into Suvi’s light-blue eyes, which looked so vulnerable without all the makeup. “I care about what happens to you. Call me at any time if you need someone to talk to.”

  Suvi muttered something and then got in the car and sped away. I called a taxi and returned to work.

  Forensics had some of the photographs ready, and Puustjärvi was hanging them on the wall of the conference room for our meeting. He didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic about going to the autopsy, but of course he would go. Taskinen appeared in the conference room too and sighed heavily when I told him everything I knew.

  “Is this some sort of underworld score settling or is there a connection to Petri Ilveskivi’s killing?” he asked.

  “If only I knew. I’m going to have Organized Crime look into all of Seppälä’s accomplices and people he knew in prison. With any luck, we’ll find some suspects. Anyway, the body has probably been in the landfill for almost two weeks. There weren’t any sightings of Seppälä after the night of Ilveskivi’s death. As soon as she recovers from the initial shock, I’ll have the wife confirm her statement. We also need to get Seppälä’s phone records. According to his wife, he came home covered in blood and then tried to call someone. Apparently he seemed pretty desperate.”

  Before the meeting, I went to my office to check my phone messages. Koivu and Wang came in from the dump. They smelled revolting.

  “I have a clean shirt in my office. Do I have time to change before the meeting? I think it would be best for everyone,” Wang said, and I wholeheartedly agreed.

  The unit met in the conference room, and we started to go over the information we’d collected so far. The landfill was open on weekdays from seven to nine, and everyone who brought in a load had to check in at the gate, sign the log, and note what kind of garbage they were bringing in. During the day most of the traffic was garbage trucks, and in the evening it was mostly private customers. Theoretically, the body could have been brought in with all the other trash, but a garbage-truck driver should have noticed such a heavy bin, and other customers would have noticed someone dumping a body wrapped in black plastic.

  “When the dump is closed, there’s a guard on patrol,” Koivu reported. “Someone could climb over the fence—it’s just chain link—and there aren’t any alarms or electronic surveillance. A strong man might have been able to lift Seppälä’s body over and then climb after it, but no one would take the risk of dragging a body almost half a mile across a guarded area. And then you’d have to pull it all the way up the garbage mound. There could have been more than one person, and maybe they had a wheelbarrow or something, but my guess is the body came in a car. Locks can be picked, and the west gate just has a big padlock on it.”

  “But wouldn’t the guard notice a car?” Lehtovuori asked.

  “It’s a big area, almost fifty hectares. It would also depend on the weather. In the rain or fog you wouldn’t be able to see very far there. We’ve already talked to one of the night guards, right, Lähde?”

  “Yeah, I got in touch with the guy who was working all of last week. He wrote in the log that on last Tuesday night he thought he heard the sound of a car over on the west side of the dump around midnight when he was on his way to the maintenance building for coffee. He went to check but didn’t find anything. And there was a lot of fog that night.”

  “We need to have the gate locks chec
ked for tampering. You handle that right after this meeting,” I told Lähde, who nodded.

  “The manager thought a driver could make it to the dump without the guard noticing if they drove with the lights off, but only through the west gate.”

  “Then we need to focus more resources on that area. Koivu, will you call the field team? Are we going to have the guys from Vantaa tonight? Yes? Good. It won’t be dark until ten, so we can keep going until then. Mela, did you find anything else in those log books?”

  “Not yet. I’ll get through the rest tonight, though,” Mela replied more sedately than usual. Obviously he wanted to stick to paperwork so he wouldn’t have to go back to the dump.

  “The lab said the hair DNA test results can be ready on Wednesday, since they don’t have to run as many replications when they have a large-enough sample,” Hakulinen said. He was a natural-born forensic investigator who loved all the possibilities that new technology was opening up for criminal investigation. But he enjoyed practical investigation more than lab work, which was our good fortune. He had amazingly keen perception at a crime scene.

  Puustjärvi called around five thirty to report that the autopsy had confirmed that Seppälä died of a gunshot wound. Probably a pistol. One shot, barely missing the heart. The wound wouldn’t have been fatal if he had received medical care immediately. Technically, the cause of death was loss of blood.

  According to the medical examiner, Seppälä had been dead for one to two weeks. The warm conditions of the landfill complicated identifying a precise time of death. I had a hard time believing that this was merely a settling of scores. Petri Ilveskivi’s and Marko Seppälä’s deaths were connected, but how? What or who was the link between these two men?

  13

  On the way back to the landfill, we picked up my car in Leppävaara. While we were there, Wang suddenly said she wanted to ride with me, and Koivu watched in confusion as we got out and walked over to my car.

  “About the partner situation,” she said as soon as she had her seat belt fastened. “I thought about it over the weekend, and I think it would be good if I wasn’t Pekka’s partner anymore. Whatever happens with us, I think that would be best.”

  “Does Pekka agree?

  “Yes, I think so, even though he says he likes working with me better than working with Puupponen or Puustjärvi.”

  “It’s settled, then. As soon as we get these two homicides solved, I’ll put the wheels in motion. Do you still have a hard time imagining working with Puupponen?”

  Wang gave a wry smile.

  “Ville is fine when he stops trying to be funny all the time. Maybe he’s different when he’s alone with people. At first I think he only liked me because Ström hated me so much, and then it just stuck . . . I’m sure we’d get along, but ask Ville and Pete too.”

  “Definitely. And what about the moving-in-together issue? How’s that going?”

  Wang and Koivu were still at loggerheads about marriage. “I think if we’re going to move in together, we should do it for real. Like, I can’t imagine having a baby out of wedlock. And it kind of offends me that Pekka wants to be free to just leave whenever he wants.”

  “He did have some bad experiences with past girlfriends. Maybe he’s afraid.”

  “Yes, but that’s not my fault. Why should a new relationship have to suffer because of the last one?”

  We drove through the gate to the dump. When we left, I had put the emergency flasher on top of the car, which ensured unimpeded passage through the gate. I thought about what Wang had said. My own hesitation to marry Antti had also been because of previous failed relationships. I had been almost certain that I was born to live alone, and my unresolved relationship with Johnny had also loomed somewhere in the background. Koivu’s apprehension was easy to understand.

  There was still a flurry of activity up on the trash mound. The investigators had found pieces of plastic that could have been from the bags concealing Marko Seppälä. He had died of blood loss, so there had to be a bag full of it somewhere. I tried to imagine how the situation had gone: Seppälä had gone to meet the person who hired him, unaware of the danger. Or had he known he was in danger and had the same knife with him that he had used to pierce Petri Ilveskivi’s pericardium? Was that why he’d been shot?

  Despite my doubts about finding any fresh tracks after so much time had passed, I had to make my people work until dark. The landfill supervisor had stayed on-site too. He was helpful but got worked up at any suggestion that one of the landfill employees might be involved.

  I went home a little before nine. A chaffinch sang in the rowan tree in the yard, presumably the same one that was there every morning and evening. Einstein had decided hunting it was pointless, so he let the bird sing in peace. The next morning as I retrieved the newspaper, a black-and-gray-striped tail fluttered by, followed by another, and a familiar energetic chirping filled the edge of the field. The wagtails had come. The sun was already high in the sky. It painted the sprouting field a deep green, evoking scents of awakening. Spring never ceased to amaze me. Year by year its arrival surprised me, as if I had doubted all winter that I would ever see another.

  Inside, my mind returned to work as I dressed and ate a quick breakfast. Antti was shaving in the downstairs bathroom. I kissed his bare neck, which I could barely reach, and left. Antti’s meeting wouldn’t start until ten, and his mother had promised to fetch Iida from day care in the evening.

  In our morning meeting, we learned that the lock on the west gate did have evidence of tampering, most likely jimmied open. The crime lab would tell us more, but I didn’t have much hope of them finding fingerprints. The marks on the lock were relatively recent, and although they didn’t necessarily connect to Seppälä’s death, logic dictated that we direct our investigation to the west gate and surrounding area. A small, rarely used road led to the gate through farms and forests.

  “A dog might be helpful for finding blood,” Koivu said.

  “You’re right. Find out how busy the K9 units are. It would be nice to get one out on that road soon.”

  Lehtovuori had made a list of Seppälä’s possible accomplices. I divided the interrogations between my own detectives and a couple of guys from Organized Crime, which didn’t have a single woman. Their unit commander, Laine, sat in our meeting too, since he said he was interested in the case.

  “Are you absolutely sure Ilveskivi didn’t have any drug connections? This stinks of a drug-world hit.” I tried to interrupt him, but Laine spoke over me. “What this looks like is that Ilveskivi didn’t pay his debts and his dealer hired Seppälä to put the fear of God in him. After things got out of hand, Seppälä was a liability. It took a hell of a cool head to shoot Seppälä and then drag him to that dump. Are all the guards clean?”

  “No criminal records.”

  “Too bad they haven’t had drug tests. I think anyone working in security should have to submit to random testing,” Laine said. “I’d suggest that someone take Ilveskivi’s picture by all the usually shooting galleries and crack houses.”

  “You’re forgetting that the autopsy didn’t find any indication of drug use. Seppälä’s death might be a drug-revenge killing, but Ilveskivi’s death has something else behind it,” I said to Laine, who was really starting to get on my nerves. “I’m leading both homicide investigations. If you have any other ideas, I’d be happy to discuss them with you in private. Now, let’s get back to the matter at hand.”

  When I left the conference room, I heard Laine’s footsteps behind me.

  “You’re making a big mistake! Why are you trying to protect Ilveskivi’s reputation? We all know how tolerant you are, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a criminal investigation. Or do Salo’s threats have you so frightened that you aren’t willing to get involved in a drug case?”

  “Thus far we haven’t seen the slightest indication that Petri Ilveskivi had any connections with drug dealers or any other organized crime groups,” I said icily and then g
rabbed Puupponen by the arm as he passed. “Hey, Puupponen. One clarification. Jarkola, the guy who knows Seppälä and Väinölä. He has six months behind him and an ongoing trial for possession of Ecstasy. He might be highly motivated to talk if there’s some way it might make the time he’s about to spend in prison easier.”

  “I can think of a few other people who could use some amphetamines right now,” Puupponen said with a sigh. “This is such a mess. I’m thinking Marko Seppälä was just a small potato in a big old bowl of mashed crime.”

  Despite everything that was going on, I burst out laughing. “Oh, Puupponen, have you been reading Kinky Friedman again?”

  “Did you like that metaphor?” Puupponen asked enthusiastically.

  “I always like your jokes,” I replied and slipped into my office. Then I called Tommi Laitinen’s work number. After a long wait, he came to the phone. Apparently he had been playing floor hockey with the kids.

  “I still have a few more things to talk to you about. What’s your day like? Could I drop by your work?”

  “No, absolutely not! One of the other teachers is out with the stomach flu, and the Espoo City Incorporated substitute system is crap. I’ll be done at three. We can meet then. I’m on my way to visit Petri’s parents tonight, since the funeral is on Sunday. Won’t this be a nice Mother’s Day? I can stop by the police station on my way.”

  “Please do. Things are starting to look clearer.”

  After turning on my computer, I dove into the Internet and pulled up the minutes from the City Planning Commission meeting from the night of Petri Ilveskivi’s death. Maybe someone wanted to stop him from getting to the meeting. Could Ilveskivi have been the deciding vote on some important decision? But no—the meeting had only considered routine rezoning matters, not anything dramatic. I had heard complaints before that the City Council routinely circumvented the Planning Commission’s decisions. They were unlikely to have any real power, although they had seen heated debates about the new general plan for South Espoo and where new residential construction should be concentrated. A few members of the Planning Commission, among them the chairman, thought that building any new rental units was counterproductive, since they only wanted people in Espoo who could afford to own their homes.