My First Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Did you have anything else? My coffee break doesn’t last forever, but I’m so close to the station that you can have me run by every day if you need me to,” Mira said brusquely, as though regretting her earlier loquacity.

  After Mira had gone, I cursed my stupidity when I realized that I could have at least offered her a cup of coffee in exchange for taking up her break time. On the other hand, an interview over coffee mugs would have felt like a gab session, and I was afraid of creating such congenial situations while working on this case.

  While Mira had been calm, Antti at least looked like he was sad. Though it was possible he always wore black jeans and a black T-shirt, his pale face and red-rimmed eyes made it look like more than that. I wondered about the reason for the red eyes—insomnia, drinking, or crying—or perhaps a combination of all three?

  “Hi—what was your rank again? Detective? Any results yet in the investigation?” he asked in a tired voice as he slumped down in the chair across from me.

  “Yes. We found the murder weapon, and it has your fingerprints on it,” I stated grimly. Antti’s hostility irritated me much more than Mira’s had, and I became even more irritated as I realized I was irritated at all. Back in the day, Tommi had been nice to look at, but Antti had been nice to talk to. Antti wasn’t bad looking either, especially since I had always thought that men with large mouths and Roman noses were sexy. A cross between Mick Jagger and Dustin Hoffman would have been my ideal. I checked out the biceps Mira had mentioned, trying to maintain an indifferent expression as I did so. The black T-shirt covered some undeniably nicely shaped arms.

  “What the hell? Do you really mean Tommi was murdered?” Antti was unable to conceal his alarm.

  “It’s starting to look that way.”

  “What murder weapon are you talking about?”

  “An ax someone tried to conceal under the sauna. Laboratory tests show that it’s the murder weapon.”

  “Oh, that ax.” A hint of a smile appeared on Antti’s lips. “I split at least half a cord of wood with that ax. The Peltonens only have one usable ax. Typical for that family—they have at least four different bark scrapers, but only one decent ax. Anyone could tell you about it—about the firewood chopping, that is, not bark scrapers. If you need any more evidence, just look at these blisters on my palms.” Antti spread his hands out on the desk, palms up, so I had no choice but to look at them and see the blisters on his long-fingered hands.

  “I’m getting pretty decrepit if I get blisters from a little job like that. So anyway, of course my fingerprints are on the ax.”

  “And later in the evening you used it to kill.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You murdered a fish in cold blood.” Antti’s tense expression relaxed as he laughed, which seemed to do him good. My words made me want to laugh too, but I mentally kicked myself in the shin.

  “Well, I guess I did. There wasn’t anything else for it, though I admit I would rather have let the fish go. Obviously, we left the ax on the dock and...oh damn it to hell!”

  “Did you find your cat?”

  “Einstein? He was asleep on the sauna roof when I went back to Vuosaari. He always ends up there in the afternoon when we’re at the villa, because the sun is so warm right there. Einstein was born under that sauna. He’s a kitten from the Peltonens’ old cat.”

  Talking about the cat seemed to thaw him out a bit, but I had to get back to business.

  “How much did you owe Tommi?” I asked.

  “Owe Tommi? What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t owe Tommi anything. Why do you think that?”

  “Who owed Tommi money?”

  “Tuulia probably owed him some, but I doubt it could have been very much. Riku’s finances have been pretty messed up for as long as I’ve known him, and I think Tommi had loaned him quite a bit. Riku doesn’t have any common sense when it comes to money. He spends it all on champagne for pretty girls in restaurants and stuff like that. Tommi always acted a little like Riku’s older brother and probably wanted to help him out.”

  “OK. We’ll have to find out. You mentioned Tommi and Pia’s relationship when we talked yesterday. What was it like?”

  A look of vexation passed over Antti’s face.

  “If I only knew. It was usually easy to see what role each of Tommi’s women played for him. He never had more than two serious girlfriends, Jaana and a girl named Minna, who he went out with in high school. The others...” Antti spread his hands wide. “Pia was sort of a different case. Tommi didn’t talk to me much about it, possibly because he knew how I felt about it. Maybe Tommi really was in love for the first time in his life. I’ll probably never know.”

  “Maybe not. Has anything occurred to you since we last spoke that might help with the investigation?”

  “No. The whole thing is still just as senseless to me as before, I’m afraid. I spent all last night thinking about old friends like Pia and Tuulia and trying to decide if one of them could have killed my best friend. And now you tell me Tommi was definitely murdered. Do you get what’s going to happen here? We’re all going to start spying on each other and turning against one another just to save our own skins. I’m already feeling like I need to hurry and come up with a murderer for you before you arrest me.

  “And then there’s EFSAS...” Antti paused for a moment. “We call our choir director ‘Hopeless,’ although that might be a better description of the whole choir at this point. Hopponen is his real name. He called me today. Mira told him about what happened: best bass singer dead, paying gig canceled, bad press for the choir, and to top it all off, one of the other core members probably a murderer...Although I’m sure he’d prefer to twist things to have it be Tommi who made that hole in his own head.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “That’s for you to find out, Miss Detective. The funeral will probably be within a couple of weeks. Don’t arrest anyone before then. We’ll need as many of our singers there as possible.” Antti buried his head in his hands and then shook himself as if to chase away his own bad thoughts. “It would be best for Maisa...for Tommi’s mother, that they bury him as soon as possible. She isn’t mentally stable as it is, and I’m afraid all of this will crush her once and for all. This is a terrible thing for her.”

  Since my return to the force, I had investigated a dozen or so homicides, all of which had turned out to be manslaughter of one type or another, mostly crimes of passion. They had always been terrible for someone, not just for the victim and perpetrator but for their friends and family as well. They caused insecurity, self-accusation, fear, and doubt. Though I had always tried to keep my emotions in check, I couldn’t help but feel them. Now I felt even worse. I wished there were a switch in my head I could flip to turn off all my feelings, leaving only a robotic crime-solving machine.

  “About the ax again...How did you leave it after you finished off the fish?”

  “I rinsed the worst of the scales off the blade and then probably left it on the right side of the dock. It would have been right there for anyone to pick up. If I had just taken it back to the sauna...”

  “Don’t start what if-ing.” It came out more as a command than friendly encouragement. I muttered a quick farewell and then kicked him out of the office. I was in a hurry since there were so many things I needed to check on-site. But one thing had become clear: this was probably premeditated murder, not manslaughter. Anyone could have remembered that the ax was down on the dock and lured Tommi there. But unless the murderer was Mira or Antti, we were missing a set of fingerprints. And the perpetrator of a premeditated murder might also have had time to plan how to throw off the police.

  4

  Rocks scraping underfoot we walk

  It was surprisingly calm on the East Highway for late afternoon traffic. I was driving a faded gray Russian Lada that belonged to the department, and listening in as the boys from Forensics traded stories over the seats. I had gotten them to drop w
hat they were doing and come with me because I thought I would probably be able to lift the restrictions on the Peltonens’ villa after this visit.

  There was a speed trap on the Vuosaari Bridge. I was driving significantly over the sixty kilometers per hour speed limit, but I calmly zipped past the baby-faced traffic cop. It felt like an eternity since I had done my stint in Traffic, as though I had been a completely different person six years ago.

  Being in Violent Crime was easier in the sense that my current work didn’t generally cause moral dilemmas. There was always sense in chasing down rapists and killers. As a patrol officer, however, I had felt like a nitpicker lying in wait for speeders—which hadn’t been as big a problem then—arresting drunks, and handing out tickets to old ladies riding their bicycles without headlights.

  Then I received the transfer to Vice that I wanted. I imagined I could save the world, but the only thing I’d felt was complete helplessness. One woman’s goodwill couldn’t do anything to combat the revolving doors of institutionalization and drug abuse. The underage prostitutes and abused children were the hardest. In school, I guess I had upheld this image of myself as a kind of Mother Teresa of law enforcement, but in reality, I couldn’t do a thing for anyone. I reacted too strongly to everything happening around me, and I didn’t realize until afterward that I was just too young to endure the constant chaos of crime I had been submerged in. My departure to study law was an escape, a desperate attempt to make some sense of the system in which I found myself spiraling downward.

  And now I was back at square one, as a police officer. I remembered the captain’s comment earlier that morning that my placement could continue after September if I wanted. The person who actually held my position, Saarinen, was on an extended sick leave with a bad back. Rane claimed it was more of a psychosomatic problem: Saarinen was bored with his work and tired of covering for Kinnunen’s drinking and fixing Kinnunen’s mistakes, so he was putting off returning to work for as long as possible.

  In a lot of ways, continuing on would be the easy answer. I still wasn’t interested in going back to school, and I didn’t have the energy to contemplate changing professions yet again. I had piled up enough student debt already. Of course it didn’t make any sense to leave my degree unfinished with just a thesis and a couple of big tests left, but I lacked the necessary motivation.

  They were dissecting the Narcotics Unit’s latest clown act in the backseat. If the impatient cops had waited just another week to start making arrests, they would have collared a good chunk of the capital’s newest properly organized drug ring. As it was, all they had netted were a few hash dealers who didn’t know much of anything about the ring’s organization.

  I sneered along with the technicians as they made their jabs. I knew I didn’t want to be a drug cop. Their work had grown a great deal more dangerous in recent years. Lately, the Violent Crime and Narcotics Units had been liaising a lot, since a good number of homicides had been turning out to be internal score-settling between the drug gangs. The work was completely different from my police academy days when all you had needed to know to work Narcotics was how to arrest and interrogate the odd pot smoker.

  The sea appeared for the first time along the road. A cat bounded after a bird in a field full of yellow tansies along the side of the highway. I rolled the car window down all the way.

  The Peltonens’ summer home looked just as idyllic as before. The patrol officer guarding the place was on the lawn reading the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper with his shirt off. He was surprised to see us. He was also clearly vexed when I explained that we probably didn’t need anyone to keep watch anymore.

  “Were you here when the Peltonens came back?”

  “Yeah, one of the choir singers came back just before them too. Apparently, you had given him permission to come get his cat. He told them about their son. The old lady almost had a seizure and wouldn’t stop screaming until the man rammed some sort of tranquilizers down her throat. But luckily they left quickly and took the dude and his cat with them. By the way, did you hear Forensics found a little blood down on the end of the dock? They sent it back to the lab. Maybe it’s the murderer’s. Or it could have dripped off the ax.”

  “Really? Good.” I turned my face away—the images of the ax dripping blood and Tommi’s smashed skull covered in gore turned my stomach.

  I went over to the sauna building by the water in hopes of discovering something new where the ax had been found. The Peltonens’ ten-meter sailboat was gleaming on the water, anchored to a nearby buoy. The family certainly wasn’t lacking money. A villa in Vuosaari, an apartment in Westend. If I remembered correctly, there was also a log cabin in Lapland near one of the resorts. Jaana had gone skiing up there with Tommi a couple of times. A snippet of conversation sprung to mind from several years earlier.

  “Sometimes it bugs me that he’s such an effing silver-spoon brat,” Jaana had huffed after another fight. “He’s so used to getting whatever he wants. I just can’t stand it anymore. If he wants to sleep with some other woman, then he just goes ahead and does it and doesn’t give a damn how I feel. If he wants to take me to Stockholm for the weekend, then his dad picks up the tab. But then he’s so freaking nice and smart and handsome when he wants to be. Sometimes it makes me afraid...It’s almost like there’s something cold inside him that he’s always trying to hide, but sometimes it comes through by accident.”

  I could picture Jaana’s legs, tanned from sailing, her anguished sea-blue eyes, a bottle of beer—which was always available from my part of the refrigerator in the apartment—in her hand.

  “I can’t always understand his logic. He tells me I don’t own him, and of course I don’t, but then he tries to own me. He enjoys having power over me. He wants to own people, to control them. With sex, with flirting, with lending them money and so on. He’s exactly the kind of guy who’s so damn nice until you get to know him.”

  Almost immediately after that conversation, Tommi had shown up to make peace, and Jaana had relented—all too easily, in my opinion. Tommi had known how to make people forgive him—sometimes the peace offering consisted of flowers, other times it was champagne.

  But this time Tommi had failed. He had made someone so angry that their only solution had been the ultimate one.

  The heather was already blooming behind the sauna, and some late cow-wheat poked through the blueberry bushes here and there. There was no actual foundation under the sauna, just an empty space in which you could have stuffed all sorts of things. I wondered how Hiltunen had thought of looking under here and found the ax, which, based on the photographs I had seen, looked like it had been carefully placed there rather than thrown under. Studying the spot in person made me none the wiser.

  So someone had left the house, clocked Tommi with the ax that had been left on the dock, and then gone to the trouble of coming all the way up to the sauna to hide it. Why? Why had he, or she, rinsed the ax instead of throwing it into the sea to hide it? If the murderer had been some outsider coming from the water, you would have expected him to at least take the ax along and dump it out somewhere in deep water. That the murderer had hidden the ax under the sauna seemed to suggest that one of the choir members staying in the house had, in fact, killed Tommi.

  Had the murderer come to the sauna to get cleaned up? But no blood should have sprayed out from a wound like that. Were the fingerprints they had found on the ax any use as evidence? Both Antti and Mira had given credible explanations for them. But how had the murderer handled the ax, then? No glove fibers had stuck on the smooth ax handle, and gloves would definitely indicate planning. I crawled under the building to look for a hidden pair of gloves and cut my wrist on some glass shards. I crawled out rump-first, swearing, back into the bright light of day.

  Gulls screeched on the shore, and a water bird that looked like a great crested grebe was swimming farther out. Would this house remain the Peltonens’ idyllic retreat, or would Tommi’s body always be floating next to the dock
? On dark autumn nights it would rise from the sea...

  I thought of my own parents. If any of their children were killed at their beloved summer cabin, I doubted they would ever set foot there again. My mother had called me the night before to ask how I was doing. She thought it was awful that my job was solving homicides, and she sounded worried. My parents had been terribly disappointed when I entered the police academy. They thought there were much more appropriate uses for my intellect, like, say, studying Finnish or some other language. Something more fitting for a girl. Though I had always been the “boy” in the family (there were three girls altogether, which my parents clearly viewed as some sort of failure), they had still imagined I would end up in a “softer” profession. Though it had nothing to do with either of their fields—my father taught math and chemistry, and my mother English—they would have been perfectly satisfied with law school. One of my sisters was studying German and Swedish and was married to a chemist, and the other was studying English and dating a mathematician. I was the oddity of the family, both with regard to my profession and the lack of a man in my life. My mother, who thought any idiot was better than no man at all, was clearly becoming quite concerned about it. For now, things were less tense than usual though, because I had convinced my parents I was back on the force only to help pay for the rest of my law degree.

  I walked upstairs to study Tommi’s room again. On the desk, someone had placed a picture of an energetic-looking Tommi on the deck of a sailboat. Next to it was a half-burned candle. Otherwise, everything was as it had been when I last saw it.

  Then I noticed that an expensive watch—presumably Tommi’s—had also appeared on the desk. Where had that come from? The watch was ticking obstinately. I picked it up, admiring its beautiful hands. The hour and minute hands were made of gold and slightly curved, and the second hand was silver. The bronze alarm hand was set for three thirty. Strange time to wake up, I thought. Who would want to wake up at three thirty? Unless...unless Tommi had wanted to meet someone from the party in secret and arranged a meeting for three thirty in the morning. Or maybe this other person had wanted to meet Tommi—to murder him.