Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  One of the nearby residents remembered seeing a motorcycle sometime before ten on the twenty-second of April. The woman was sure of the date because the next day had been her daughter’s birthday, and she had left the sponge cake she was making in the oven.

  She had tried to drag the dog outside to do its business quickly so the cake wouldn’t burn. The motorcycle had been speeding, and woman and dog had to jump out of the way to avoid being run down.

  An aging veteran who lived in another house had been surprised by a van driving back and forth on the road one night before May Day. He couldn’t remember the date exactly, just that the van was dark blue and that it had something in a foreign language written on it. The letters were western, though, not Russian. He was sure of that.

  Two forest roads, two victims. And two killers.

  “How long was Seppälä conscious? Did he know he was dying?” I wondered aloud. “Did he know he was dealing with someone this dangerous? Let’s head back. I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  I was seeing my gynecologist at eleven thirty. As I was leaving, I ran into Puustjärvi in the hallway, who said that Jarkola was on his way over for questioning. Puustjärvi and Puupponen would handle the interrogation, as agreed.

  My gynecologist’s office was easily accessible by bus, but I didn’t know if the schedule would work for me coming back, so I took the car. Even though I supported reducing private driving, I drove an awful lot. As a squirrel made a kamikaze attempt to cross, I noticed that its coat was already almost completely brown. Thankfully, the oncoming driver also had the patience to brake.

  Even though the exam should have been routine for a woman who had given birth, every time I found it unpleasant. It didn’t help that the doctor was a pleasant woman and that I knew the exam was necessary. My blood pressure was a little high, but not too high to prevent renewing my prescription.

  “So what do you think? Is Iida going to be an only child? If you don’t want to have any more kids, you should consider sterilization.”

  “Whose?” I asked, since I knew that for men it was a fairly minor procedure.

  “Either one. You have to decide that for yourselves.”

  That sounded so final that I didn’t even want to think about it, so I just took the prescription and headed to a nearby café for a Diet Coke and a mozzarella-tomato sandwich, which I ate in the car. I would have to remember to stop at the pharmacy, although I still had two and a half weeks left of the previous batch.

  Puupponen had left a note on my door asking me to come talk to him. So I went and knocked on the door of the office he shared with Koivu. Of course it would have been easier if partners shared offices, but these two had been sharing a space for years now. Koivu wasn’t around. Maybe he was meeting with the ballistics experts.

  “So how was Jarkola?”

  “How do you think? Angry. Wait, I’ll pull up the report.” Puupponen typed furiously. He complained sometimes about Puustjärvi, who tended to take his time with things. Apparently Puupponen would be halfway across the street before Puustjärvi realized he should start walking. Along with his slightly heavy-set build, Puustjärvi’s restrained pace could be an asset in interrogations, making people relax and let their guard down. Puustjärvi could keep an interview going for hours, since playing Go and tying flies had developed his patience. Puupponen, on the other hand, got his best results in fast-paced interrogations that were more like wars of words.

  “Pete had to leave. His youngest is sick again. He tried to call you, but your phone was off.”

  I had turned off my phone during my appointment, because the thought of me crawling off the table with no pants to answer the phone was ridiculous, and I only used my phone while driving if it was an emergency.

  “Doesn’t he have a couple dozen hours of comp time too? I’m fine with him going. Did you get anything out of Jarkola?”

  “Helsinki already knew that the Ecstasy operation was being funded by our common friend, Salo, apparently from behind bars. Jarkola is going to be joining him there, even though he just got out after doing four months. What the hell kind of sense does it make letting these pros out on parole when they just pull new jobs? A guy like Jarkola may never spend more than a couple of months on the outside ever again. Jarkola saw Seppälä a couple of days before the attack on Ilveskivi. Seppälä had been paying a debt, about fifteen hundred marks. He bragged that he was going to throw the May Day party of the century for his friends after the big job he had coming up. He said he was going to be a torpedo.”

  “Did Seppälä mention any names?”

  “He did tell Jarkola that the target was ‘a queer you know too.’ Then he promised to add a couple of punches on Jarkola’s behalf. Jarkola’s understanding was that the queer, Ilveskivi, I mean, had been hitting on the wrong piece of meat, and so he needed a lesson. Nothing bad, just a smashed knee or something. Guys who limp don’t get as much tail.”

  “So Jarkola didn’t think it had anything to do with drugs?”

  “No, but I’m not sure how much we should trust him. He said that Seppälä didn’t really seem to know what he was doing. Jarkola was just happy to get his money before Seppälä got himself thrown back in jail.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us anything about this the last time we asked him?” I said bitterly.

  “Jarkola isn’t a snitch. It’s different now that his friend is dead, though. You can be sure he’ll do some asking around. Puustjärvi and me took it really easy on him. Jarkola was worried that he wouldn’t be able to go to Seppälä’s funeral if he was already in prison. It was very moving,” Puupponen said dryly. “I almost believed him.”

  This seemed like an opportune time, so I asked Puupponen what he thought about switching partners. Puupponen didn’t have any serious objections, although he complained that Anu Wang didn’t always get his jokes. I didn’t bother saying there were plenty of other people who didn’t either.

  As I walked back to my office, I wondered if Reijo Rahnasto had found out about Kajanus’s relationship with Ilveskivi after all. But Rahnasto seemed more like the kind of man to punch Ilveskivi in the mouth himself rather than hiring a thug to do it. And Rahnasto wouldn’t have had any reason to kill Seppälä.

  It wasn’t hard guessing whose word would hold sway, the well-known politician and business leader who had never done anything worse than get a speeding ticket or the puny two-bit crook.

  I read through the drug test results for Petri Ilveskivi again. Zeros across the board. They hadn’t even found any caffeine in his system. Ilveskivi used to sing karaoke at Café Escale. Were there drugs there? I remembered a visit a few years back to Club Bizarre, another LGBT gathering place. Some of the revelers were enjoying more than alcohol and sex, but I was a lawyer then, not a cop, so I didn’t intervene. Café Escale was Liisa Rasilainen’s usual haunt, so I dialed her number. Liisa was on the road with her partner, Jukka Airaksinen, and clearly didn’t want to talk about her private life while he was listening, so she just said she hadn’t ever noticed any drugs there. Although plenty of people knew what her job was, so they could have been hiding them.

  Kim Kajanus was a photographer and had said himself that he met all kinds of people at work. Did that include drug dealers? Could Kajanus have been taking speed or Ecstasy to enhance his sexual experiences? A lot of teenagers didn’t realize until it was too late that MDMA was just as dangerous as other amphetamines.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine Petri Ilveskivi dealing drugs. Maybe he smoked a little weed every now and then. But traces of that stayed in your system for weeks, so he couldn’t have been a regular user.

  Could Marko Seppälä have attacked the wrong person? What if he was supposed to rough up someone else? That sounded too far-fetched. Or maybe someone had tricked Seppälä. In frustration I shoved a stack of paper to the corner of my desk, sending the top layer flying to the floor. The pages were a joint memo from the Finnish Police Federation and the Ministry of the Interior about im
plementation of the merit-based pay system. I was crawling around on the floor picking them up when the phone rang.

  “Hi, it’s Eila Honkavuori. I read in the paper that you found out who killed Petri. Congratulations. Why did he do it?”

  “That isn’t clear yet.” After a moment’s thought, I asked directly: “Did you ever think that Petri might have been using or dealing drugs?”

  “Petri? Not a chance. Why are you still trying to make Petri into some sort of criminal?”

  “I’m just looking for a motive. Did Petri ever mention the name Marko Seppälä to you?”

  “No. I’m calling because of another man. Tommi and I were going through Petri’s papers over the holiday weekend. We found a picture of an attractive young man that neither of us recognized, but I still had this nagging feeling I had seen him somewhere before. I didn’t remember where until today. I saw him with you on May Day Eve. Who is he?”

  “Kim Kajanus, a photographer, just an acquaintance,” I replied quickly.

  “Tommi was shocked. Petri wasn’t in the habit of collecting pictures of good-looking boys. Do you know if Kajanus knew Petri?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “Was there anything special about the City Planning Commission meeting the night of Petri’s death?”

  “Actually, it was an abnormally boring meeting. Lately we’ve been having to reassess our old decisions because the City Council keeps overriding them. That happened with the South Espoo master plan and that big superstore controversy. The Commission can be quite critical at times, but the chairman has a lot of power to act on his own. Rahnasto and the head of the City Council are good friends. Sometimes he seems to know things that he won’t even tell the people in his party until after a decision is made. There have been some whispers about bribes too. I don’t know if it’s appropriate for the chairman of the City Planning Commission to make zoning decisions and then, a couple of years later, the businesses that benefited from those decisions buy security systems from his company for their new buildings,” Honkavuori said.

  “Wait . . . didn’t you say that Rahnasto told some off-color jokes when Petri was late for the meeting? Did he seem relieved?”

  “He was certainly in a good mood. Petri and Rahnasto didn’t like each other. The last thing they squared off about was the plan for Laajalahti Bay. Petri thought Rahnasto and the powers that be were trying to sell the whole city to big business without any thought for people or the environment. And it does feel that way sometimes. When the normal planning process moves too slowly, they find shortcuts. Sometimes they start building even when the planning process isn’t finished.”

  Shivers ran down my spine. This was getting interesting.

  “Could Petri have learned something that threatened Rahnasto or someone else on the City Planning Commission? I’ve read the minutes for that meeting, but I’m not an expert like you. What could Petri have uncovered?”

  Eila Honkavuori didn’t know, but she promised to look into it. The next Planning Commission meeting was the next week, and she would contact me before then.

  “Are you coming to Petri’s funeral on Sunday?” she asked just before we ended the call.

  “No. I have my own Mother’s Day responsibilities,” I replied. After the call, I asked our administrative assistant to search for anything having to do with Rahnasto and his company.

  Maybe it was real estate money, not drug money, behind Petri Ilveskivi’s murder.

  15

  On Sunday morning I woke up to Iida’s excited giggling and a loud rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” It was Mother’s Day. At day care Iida had made a card and a clumsily folded paper flower growing out of a brown painted cardboard pot, and I almost cried when she presented it to me. Iida and Antti had picked wood anemones for me too. Images flashed through my mind of my sisters and me secretly baking cookies and cakes for Mother’s Day, until we got older and started criticizing the whole motherhood myth.

  Sending Mother’s Day cards to my own mom and grandmother was much easier now that they were also from Iida. Antti’s parents had gone on an orchid-hunting expedition to Estonia, so we didn’t have any obligation to visit them. I didn’t want to go out to lunch, since Mother’s Day lunches were for those mothers who cooked all the family meals.

  Petri Ilveskivi’s obituary appeared in the morning paper. The timing of the announcement was odd, since the funeral was the same day. As if to say that the funeral was open to the public, but please don’t actually come. The poem that accompanied the obituary was outdated and vapid. The text mentioned Petri’s mother and father first, then his sister and her family, and Tommi last. A casual reader would never know that Tommi Laitinen was the deceased’s partner, not his brother. Why had Laitinen agreed to that?

  We spent the day getting our yard ready for summer. Iida collected a pile of dead leaves with her pink plastic rake. I planted a few gladiolus bulbs, which I should have done weeks ago. Right around the time the Ilveskivi case started.

  Surveyors had been working across the road in the forest the week before; apparently new building lots were going to be carved out of the woods. Living next to a construction site wasn’t a particularly appealing idea, but the idea of moving sounded even worse. We were used to the peace and quiet of our own home, and with rents like they were, we wouldn’t have the money for anything better than a two-bedroom apartment. If we wanted to buy a house, it would have to be far outside of the city and not as nice as where we were now. We had put off the decision while we waited for prices to fall. The economy seemed to have a short memory: only ten years had passed since the last bubble, and everyone was making exactly the same mistakes again. Every investor and CEO seemed to believe they were going to win at a game of roulette that could turn into the Russian version at any second.

  Einstein lurked under the ash tree, eyes glowing and tail swishing. His aging body tensed and then he lunged toward his prey. This time the mole was faster, and the cat retreated under the house to tend to his mussed fur and his bruised ego. Einstein was clearly entering old age. He spent more time in warm spots, like in the sauna as it cooled or under the reading lamp, and he never played with his toy mice for longer than a couple of minutes. A few times I had found him sleeping at the foot of Iida’s bed, even though just a year ago he had always kept his distance from her. But now the spring was clearly affecting him, because fifteen minutes later he was back trying again, and this time he caught the mole. Before retreating to his hideout to eat, he did a lap of honor with the rodent in his mouth.

  “Doesn’t it hurt the mole to get eaten?” Iida asked, looking worried.

  “Yes, I’m sure it hurts,” I said and changed the subject. On my day off I didn’t want to contemplate the death of a mole, but I couldn’t escape my own thoughts. Petri Ilveskivi’s memorial was at the Espoo Cathedral. A year and a half ago, I had attended Pertti Ström’s funeral there. On the night before the service, I hadn’t slept a wink. But foolishly I still thought I could get through it without sedatives.

  When Ström’s children had gone to lay flowers on the grave, I broke down completely. I howled like a puppy missing its mother, losing all self-control and making a frightening scene. I was scheduled to present the wreath from our unit and read a brief eulogy, but I couldn’t even stand. Taskinen had to handle it for me. At the reception afterward, Ström’s father came to ask whether his son and I had a very close relationship, since Pertti had talked about me so much. That made me lose it again.

  My relationship with Ström had been difficult. Maybe his suicide would have been easier to bear if I had liked him. I thought of Tommi Laitinen, whose final words to his beloved had been an invitation to go to hell. Fate had been listening too closely, and those words had condemned Tommi to hell on earth.

  Lauri Jensen called around seven.

  “I thought you’d like to hear about Petri’s funeral,” he said formally.

  “Yes, I would.”

  The funeral had started awkwardly because
apparently the priest hadn’t taken the time to prepare properly and had just rambled on about a life cut short, the suddenness of death, and the inscrutable ways of the Almighty. Petri Ilveskivi’s parents had been the ones in contact with the church, but apparently they hadn’t given any information beyond Petri’s age, profession, and that he didn’t have any children.

  Before the presentation of the floral arrangements, Petri’s nephew played a melancholy saraband on the cello. Tommi laid his own flowers down after the immediate family, but he didn’t say anything. He just stood with his face set like stone. At the reception afterward, he sat at the friends’ table, not the family table.

  “Jukka and I talked about making a scene. The whole thing was such an appalling pretense, as if Tommi didn’t even exist. He did get to carry the casket, but he was just another ‘friend of the family’ like the other pallbearers. They probably only let him carry it because Petri’s father has a heart condition and his brother-in-law has a weak back. I hope someone is keeping Tommi company tonight.”

  “Was Petri’s photographer friend there? Good-looking young guy with red hair.”

  “Oh, the one who looks like a Russian nobleman?” Lauri asked, and I laughed involuntarily. “Yes, I think he was sitting in one of the wings of the chapel. He spent the whole time staring at the statue of Jesus hanging over the altar, like he was praying. Some of us wondered who he was. Who is he?”

  “He’s the photographer who did the series on Petri’s couches. He was shocked when he heard about the killing and called me to see if he could help with the investigation. I guess a lot of people liked Petri Ilveskivi.”

  “Yes, they did. I just wished we’d had a different funeral. One that better represented Petri. A bunch of us agreed to go to Escale to sing on Thursday in Petri’s honor. We can mourn and be sentimental in our own way.”

  “Good idea. Was anyone from the city at the funeral?”

  “I recognized some of the Green Party people, and some others in fancy suits who I didn’t recognize,” Lauri replied. He didn’t pay attention to politics and had only voted in the local elections because a good friend was a candidate.