Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I remembered Tommi Laitinen’s quip about Espoo City Incorporated and wondered who they would sell stock to. Certainly not me, since I didn’t fulfill the home-ownership requirement. The metro-area cities actually designated rental apartments specifically for cops because our pay wasn’t enough to allow us to buy homes of our own. Of course no one thought of giving us a raise. That was so unfashionable. We were even moving to a merit pay system, which meant the bosses would have to evaluate their employees’ performances. I still wasn’t sure whether the criteria would hang on number of crimes solved, suck-up coefficient, family size, or general prowess.

  Eila Honkavuori had been a strong advocate for more affordable housing. What if Turo Honkavuori had wanted to stop his wife from talking to Petri about their plan to make a baby? Turo had brought Eila to comfort Tommi, and apparently Eila had spent the night. Had Turo gone to meet Marko Seppälä during that time and shot him? Turo didn’t have a gun license, but that didn’t mean much anymore. Anyone could get an illegal firearm if they knew who to ask.

  But how would a diffident academic like Honkavuori know anyone like that?

  The phone rang. It was one of the tabloid crime-beat reporters looking for more information. She had received a tip about the leathers on the body in the landfill and come to the right conclusion. I promised to hold a press conference sometime during the afternoon, but refused to comment on whether the two homicides we were investigating had any connections.

  The whole day went to organizing and negotiating. I was thrilled when the duty officer called at three fifteen to say that Tommi Laitinen was waiting for me. I had been hit by a sudden craving for ice cream, so I suggested to Laitinen that we go downstairs to the cafeteria. All he wanted was some juice. To my great delight, in the bottom of the freezer I found an enormous licorice ice cream cone, which I licked as Laitinen and I sat down to talk. From the beginning I made it clear that this was not an official interview and told him that we had found the body of the man we suspected to be Petri Ilveskivi’s killer.

  “We haven’t ruled out the possibility that this was a robbery. Could Petri have been carrying an unusually large amount of money? Did he ever wear a fanny pack or something else that might be missing?”

  “No. I’ve told you that over and over. Why do you keep coming back to this? Petri wasn’t robbed.”

  “Had he ever used drugs?”

  Laitinen squirmed in his chair.

  “Yes. Some marijuana when he was younger. Before we met. He took a trip to Amsterdam sometime in the early eighties. Back then it was practically the duty of every young man who was trying to find himself to go to the hottest place on the Dam and get stoned.”

  “Did you smoke too?”

  “No! I’ve never wanted to go on trips like that. Plus, it wouldn’t be smart, considering my line of work.”

  I showed Laitinen Marko Seppälä’s mugshot again and asked if he remembered seeing him before.

  He almost smiled. “Not exactly the kind of guy you’d remember. So he’s the one who killed Petri, and now he’s dead too . . . what the hell is going on?”

  According to Laitinen, Ilveskivi had been agitated and distant on the days just before his death. When Laitinen asked about it, Ilveskivi refused to answer.

  “He just said whatever it was would be cleared up soon. I’ve been racking my brain. Yesterday Eila and I went through all of Petri’s personal papers, but we didn’t find anything. You still have all of his work papers, though, which I’d like to take if I can.”

  “All in good time. Tommi, listen. Hiding things isn’t going to help Petri anymore. The only thing that will help is the truth.”

  “This is the truth!” Tommi shouted and then buried his face in his hands. I didn’t have the heart to torment him anymore.

  “I don’t dream about it,” he said before walking out the door, “but when I’m lying alone at night, I sometimes think about how much it must have hurt Petri. Did he know he was dying? Did he say anything before he died? Who was he thinking of? These are the things I’m going to be wondering about for the rest of my life.”

  I had seen enough family members of homicide victims to know the in-between space they lived in. The time from a killing to the funeral was like watching the victim cross the river to the underworld, inescapably slipping away. If the perpetrator was known from the beginning, people had to process their desire for revenge. Some people never got over that. Uncertainty cut the deepest, especially in cases where suspicion centered on other loved ones.

  My computer, which had been on during my conversation with Laitinen, dinged to alert me of a new e-mail. It was from the lab. Seppälä’s hair and blood DNA matched what they had recovered from Ilveskivi’s body and the cigarette butt at the crime scene. Another person’s blood had also been found on the sleeve of Seppälä’s leather jacket, and it belonged to Petri Ilveskivi.

  I didn’t shout for joy or pump my fist in the air, but I did run after Tommi Laitinen. When I reached the front entrance, I saw him climbing into a taxi outside. I let him go. A message on his answering machine would do for now.

  “Did you lose someone again?” asked the officer manning the front desk, the same one who had watched me run after Jani Väinölä.

  “Men always seem to be slipping through my fingers,” I said jauntily and then jogged back upstairs.

  We now knew who Ilveskivi’s killer was, although a skilled defense attorney might have been able to come up other explanations. Such as, Seppälä showed up at the crime scene by accident, tried to help, but then got scared and ran away. How would I get Suvi to tell me everything about the night it seemed both Seppälä and Ilveskivi had died?

  I called Koivu at the landfill, left a message for Laitinen, and then tried in vain to reach Taskinen. When I was trying to get into the police academy, I thought this job would be fast paced and glamorous and that I would be helping people. But in reality it was mostly endless sitting in cars, talking on the phone, and staring at the computer. I did meet new people, but they were usually either victims or suspects. Sometimes I was able to help the wrongly accused, but they rarely came around to thank me. Why hadn’t I become a midwife? Then I would have been able to help make lives, not clean up after deaths.

  I decided to take a trip to the landfill to see how things were going. Mela had set up in the conference room at the main office and created a spreadsheet that cross-referenced everyone who had used the dump with all of Seppälä’s and Ilveskivi’s known acquaintances. So far this hadn’t turned up any commonalities, but Mela hadn’t lost his optimism. Lähde had interviewed the garbage-truck driver who’d brought in the first load on the morning after Ilveskivi’s death. He had thought a pack of foxes must have been running around the night before, because the top of the pile had obviously been disturbed.

  The focus of the search had moved to the road to the west, although some officers continued to root around in the garbage heap. Half an hour earlier, the K9 unit had caught a scent at the edge of the landfill but lost it when the dog ran into a fresh rabbit carcass.

  “No one ever comes by here. The nearest houses are kilometers away, and everyone who lives there knows this is a dead end. There are signs that say as much too. The killer could be certain no one would bother him here,” Koivu said. “A couple of the Vantaa guys are interviewing the people who live down the road, but who’s going to remember what happened two weeks ago? If it’s even been two weeks.” Koivu shrugged in frustration. He was sporting a five o’clock shadow that was like moss yellowed and dried by the summer sun. I felt an urge to reach out and touch it, to draw strength from that contact, but I didn’t because half of the Vantaa Patrol force was standing around watching. Instead, I pulled plastic covers over my shoes.

  “When will the dog be ready to search again?” I asked his handler, who was drinking coffee out of a thermos.

  “Soon, but we can’t demand too much from him. How long are we going to keep at this? Are we sure this guy was killed along
this road?”

  “No, but keep at it for now,” I said, even though I felt like a general giving her final command before issuing a retreat. I didn’t think of myself as fighting a war against violence. I didn’t understand war very well, and I liked it even less. My grandfather had died for his country, even though he never wanted to be a hero. They were only made heroes after the war. I preferred to try to live without thinking too much about what I was living for. Whenever I attempted to figure that out, I found a new dead end.

  The first flashlight beams began glimmering in the forest. The sky had darkened, and gray tatters of cloud approached. I tried to remember how many times it had rained since Seppälä’s disappearance, and the result was “too many.” Looking for tire tracks would be pointless, and even though there must have been plenty of blood, most of it would have been washed away by now.

  The beams began converging into a circle, and excited voices followed:

  “There’s a motorcycle here! Koivu, come look!”

  Koivu and I set off tramping through the thicket with Wang following. Someone had tried to conceal the motorcycle under old logs twenty yards off the road, about five hundred yards from the gate to the landfill. First I checked the license plate. AV 623. I didn’t have to check my notes. I knew it by heart. Without a doubt this was Marko Seppälä’s motorcycle.

  “Great! Keep searching this same area. With luck, we might find the murder weapon too.”

  We weren’t lucky, because the clouds opened up, and when hail the size of my pinky fingernail started pounding my head, I called off the search. The motorcycle, now wrapped in plastic, was dragged to one of the forensic team vans, which could barely turn around on the narrow road.

  “Getting that out into the forest would have taken some strength. This isn’t a motocross bike, so he couldn’t have driven it,” Koivu said as we sat safely out of the rain in my car. “Have Puupponen and Puustjärvi caught up with Jarkola? He’s strong enough to have been able to carry the bike into the woods and stupid enough to have taken the body to the dump. Why didn’t he leave it here in the forest? No one ever comes here.”

  “Let’s go home. We’ve been at this for ten hours. Meeting tomorrow is at the normal time. Does anyone need a ride?”

  No one did, so I drove straight home. The rain and hail softened outlines and muted colors, and so I was forced to take it slow. The lights of downtown Espoo made the city seem beautiful and inviting.

  A beat-up-looking van moved into the left lane and sped up to pull even with me. I slowed down to let it pass, but it stayed beside me. Glancing at the tinted windows, I expected to see the muzzle of a rifle or sawed-off shotgun, and for a second I thought the van might try to run me off the road. So I slowed down again, and a heavy truck came up from behind. The van sped up and disappeared, but I spent the whole way home repeating its license plate number in my head. I wrote it down once I stopped. Probably it was just someone who had received a call on his cell phone while he was passing me and got distracted. Salo wasn’t going to hire amateurs who would try to make a hit on a cop on a busy freeway, would he?

  I spent the rest of the night sorting Iida’s clothes to separate out the ones that didn’t fit. My mother-in-law had already left, and Iida crawled around in the discards pile, pretending she was a hedgehog. I went downstairs to the cellar to see if any of my sisters’ kids’ old clothes would work for Iida this spring and summer. Our storage room was in a terrible state, and as I balanced one more box of clothing no one was going to wear anymore on top of the pile, I decided it was about time for some real spring cleaning.

  “We probably need to haul a load to the thrift store,” I said to Antti, who was sprawled on the couch reading a book. “We have at least five boxes of clothes Iida’s outgrown.”

  “Does that mean we don’t need them anymore?” Antti asked, a little disappointed.

  “I don’t know.” Sitting down next to him, I absentmindedly stroked his thigh. “My brain says no, but my body has other ideas. Sometimes my breasts want nothing more than to nurse. They can still feel Iida’s mouth on them and the sensation of milk flowing. Sometimes I imagine that someone is kicking inside of me again. Friday I have an appointment to get my birth control prescription renewed. When I’m there, I’ll ask her how long we have to dither about this. Or how much time I have. Our responsibilities aren’t exactly equal when it comes to this.” Standing, I scooped up Iida and took her for her bedtime snack. After she was safely in bed, I lay awake for a while, gazing out the window. A lone magpie dozed in the ash tree in the yard.

  In the morning the world smelled fresh and new again. The buds had grown since the previous day. Our first ladies’ soccer game was scheduled for this evening, so I packed my gear. Our field time was bad, 5:15 p.m. That cut out anyone who needed to rush home to feed her family, but no other times were available. The best slots were reserved for the men’s club teams.

  “It’s the fifth of May,” Antti said as we were leaving. He began to whistle the tune of a rock song by the same name, by Eppu Normaali. When I started the car after dropping Iida at day care, some clever disc jockey was playing the same song on the radio. Of course I sang along.

  During our meeting, I started to feel like we were actually making forward progress. Forensics had found a knife in Seppälä’s saddlebag and had sent it to the lab. The blade was four centimeters wide, which was a good match for Petri Ilveskivi’s wound. The knife seemed clean, but modern testing only required a tiny amount of blood to isolate DNA.

  However, we did find a surprise in the phone records. According to them, no calls were made from the Seppäläs residence on the night of Petri Ilveskivi’s death, even though Suvi had claimed that Marko had desperately tried to contact someone.

  “Did he have a cell phone?” Lähde asked.

  “Not as far as I know. We’ll have to interview the wife again. Wang, will you try to get ahold of her? Suvi Seppälä may be a key witness. We can be ninety-seven percent certain that Marko Seppälä killed Petri Ilveskivi, but why? Puupponen and Puustjärvi, did you get anything from Seppälä’s friends?”

  Before either could answer, Mela opened his mouth.

  “Come on, the fag was just hitting on him. They’re always like that. Once in the bathroom at Stockmann this one perv came right up next to me to show off his dick. I’m lucky he didn’t try to shove it in my pants. I felt like punching him in the mouth, but I couldn’t because I had already decided to apply to the academy.”

  “OK, smart guy, so tell us how Ilveskivi managed to hit on somebody while he was riding his bike to the Planning Commission meeting,” Puupponen said tersely, then went on. “We interviewed all of Seppälä’s accomplices, and according to them, Seppälä had never transported anything harder than marijuana or steroids. But right before he disappeared, he had been bragging about coming into some real money. They said Seppälä had always been a big talker who would say anything to shake off his reputation as just some petty crook. But he wouldn’t tell anyone what the job was, likely because he was afraid someone else would try to muscle in on his turf.”

  “We’re still looking for Jarkola. What else do we have?”

  Overnight a man had been arrested for driving his wife and children out of their apartment at gunpoint. A neighbor took the family in and called the police. In the cells next to him were the Ronkainens, a couple who had used every tool in their kitchen in their efforts to kill each other. The wife had even tried a cheese plane on her husband’s cheek.

  “Kallio, are you happy that women are sick of being victims and are giving as good as they get?” Lähde asked, and his chubby cheeks shook with mirthless laughter.

  “Why would anyone be happy that women are starting to act as stupid as men? Wang, Lehtovuori, see if you can handle the Ronkainens. Koivu, you can keep things going at the landfill. Lähde, weren’t you and Mela almost done at the dump? When you are, process the model father with the pistol and then get back to Seppälä when you’re done. We s
hould be able to wrap up the Ilveskivi investigation within a few days. A bottle of vodka to whoever figures out why Seppälä killed Ilveskivi.”

  “Is that the merit-based pay we’ve been hearing about?” Puupponen asked, and the meeting disbanded.

  Wang tried without success to reach Suvi Seppälä, and I tried a couple of times too, with no luck. Eija Hirvonen and I started putting together the formal preliminary investigation report. Working with such a sharp, energetic administrative assistant was a pleasure. She had gone to vocational school after middle school, and occasionally I got the impression that she was disappointed she hadn’t had the chance to go to college. Her job at the police station had come about almost by accident, at the recommendation of her brother, who was a cop. Eija had started out in the passport office, but moved to Robbery a few years ago and then to us. Sometimes, when we were working on an especially brutal crime, she could have strong reactions. Over the winter we had dealt with the gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, and Eija had wept as she typed up the final reports.

  Around three, the crime lab reported that they had retrieved a few blood cells from the knife in Seppälä’s saddlebag. Replicating the DNA would take a week, but I thought it was worth it. When I left for our soccer game, I was in a good mood: things were moving forward, and nothing gave me reason to think we wouldn’t be able to solve Seppälä’s murder as well if we kept making progress in the forensic investigation. Finding the bullet would be nice, although an experienced weapons specialist could say quite a lot about a bullet and the gun that shot it simply based on the entry and exit wounds.

  I changed at work because there weren’t dressing rooms or showers at the field. My twenty-year-old cleats still fit. I had bought new ones only two weeks before my sudden decision to stop playing on the boys’ team. Otherwise I was wearing normal workout clothes: T-shirt, thick socks, and tights. Wang and Mira Saastamoinen drove with me. At the field we found nearly twenty women, so we would be able to field proper teams. Liisa Rasilainen began leading the warm-up, and we were just getting to leg stretches when a trilling started up at the sideline. It was coming from my gym bag.