Snow Woman

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “And what if we trade places and I come with you?” Hanninen suggested. Bravely, I thought. Every eyebrow around the table went up: there hadn’t been any talk of a trade.

  “This cop is worth more than you,” answered Malmberg. “The only person I’d be willing to swap Palo for is that cop bitch, Kallio.”

  A chill washed over me.

  “She’s here, would you like to speak with her?” the idiot Hanninen replied. Now I turned to ice.

  The others around the table started waving their arms and shaking their heads, and Jäämaa quickly took the phone. “Dr. Hanninen has no authority to arrange trades. Let’s talk some more about the car.”

  “I want to talk to Kallio,” said Malmberg.

  “I don’t think—”

  “I want to talk to Kallio. Or do you want me to start shooting Palo’s toes off? They’re right here.”

  Everyone in the tent was staring at me.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak a single word, but I took the phone. “This is Sergeant Kallio. Hi, Palo. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Too bad you parked your car in such an open place today,” said Malmberg. “I couldn’t risk breaking in. I was there at the Cultural Center this morning. I saw you. You know it’s you I really wanted. You’re probably a better cook than Palo.”

  “Could be.” My voice was stuck in my throat and I didn’t know what to say. The whole conversation was a gamble, and I was furious at Hanninen for revealing my presence. All it did was complicate things.

  “What would you say if I promised to let Palo go on the condition that you take his place? I’ve always liked women more than men. We could have a lot of fun together. What do you think, Kallio? Should we go for a little drive?”

  10

  Captain Koskivuori didn’t let me answer. He snatched the phone from my hand while Commissioner Jäämaa dragged Hanninen away from the table to enlighten him about what you did and didn’t say during telephone negotiations with psychopaths. Malmberg refused to talk to Captain Koskivuori again and hung up after repeating that we had one hour to bring him a car.

  Taskinen caught my eye, and I forced myself to smile and shrug.

  “I know you’d go in there, but we aren’t going to let you,” he said.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I replied, thinking of the child living inside of me. “He would kill me even more surely than Palo.”

  “You should head home,” said Taskinen gently.

  “You’re right. Hopefully my Fiat will start in this cold. But first I’m going to have a few words with Hanninen. It’s about the Rosberg case.”

  Jäämaa and Hanninen seemed to be arguing, but I could only make out snatches. Captain Koskivuori was conferring with a gas expert. Given that they’d installed the mics undetected, they thought they had a good chance to throw a tear gas canister down the chimney, but the risk was that Malmberg would just shoot Palo when he realized what was happening.

  The sound of the helicopters was growing louder again. I went to the door of the tent to see. One of the choppers tried to sweep in above the cabin but had to retreat when a series of shots exploded from a window. Buckshot rattled against its rotors.

  “He has a sawed-off shotgun,” someone shouted.

  The tent door rustled behind me and Kari Hanninen appeared at my side. After offering one to me, he lit a cigarette.

  “I’m sorry about what happened in there. I knew a female cop would cause a pretty strong reaction in Markku—that’s what I was hoping for. I would have succeeded if your colleagues hadn’t butted in.”

  “You think it would be a good idea to swap me for Palo?”

  “Of course not! How much do you know about Markku Malmberg? He doesn’t like women.”

  I said I knew that.

  “Do you know where that comes from? His mother. She watched for years while his father abused him sexually. She even participated sometimes. She was a real monster. Markku has never had a normal sexual relationship with a woman.”

  “A bad mother made him a thief and a killer?” I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice, although Hanninen’s insight did help me understand why Malmberg had lopped off his father’s penis with the saw.

  “They’re complicated processes,” said Hanninen. “Markku is a person for whom everything in life has gone wrong, systematically from day one. But we still have a moral obligation to care about him. He has the right to live, as does his hostage.”

  “I agree, although I put more weight on the hostage’s life,” I said. “On another note though, once this is over, I’d like to talk to you about a separate case. Or I should say another patient of yours who is mixed up in a case.”

  “Patient information is confidential.”

  “I know. But this is a murder,” I said. “As I understand it, you also knew the victim—your colleague Elina Rosberg.”

  “Oh, you want to talk about Niina! Is she OK?” Hanninen’s tone suddenly turned more serious, and his brown eyes looked concerned. It was easy to believe that Hanninen really cared about his patients and that the mantras he repeated in his manipulative voice were intended to make them happy, but there was still something that felt off to me.

  “She’s one of several persons of interest at the moment. That’s all. Is your number listed?”

  “Here, I’ll give you my card.” Hanninen dug through the pockets of his long, antique-finished leather coat. This guy definitely had style, a sort of relaxed masculinity mixed with empathy. I’m sure it worked well on his female patients.

  “That isn’t smart,” Hanninen said, handing over the card just as the helicopters moved in on the cabin again. “Markku wants to feel he’s in control of the situation. Those helicopters are only going to make him lose his cool.”

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked.

  “Talk to him as much as possible and wait for him to realize he isn’t going to get away. Convince him to surrender or at least give up his hostage. I’m still willing to take his place. Markku won’t hurt me.”

  Buckshot sprayed the rotors of the helicopter again. Inside the command center one of the men wearing headphones yelled something to Captain Koskivuori, and I rushed back into the tent. I was sure Malmberg had shot Palo.

  But no. It was just the operator saying that Malmberg and Palo were both losing it. Malmberg was alternating between firing at the retreating helicopters and shooting blindly behind the cabin. Everyone in the back took cover. The noise was insane.

  From the tent I saw the helicopters hovering over the cabin, apparently enticing Malmberg to shoot out the north window. While he was doing that, the SWAT team was climbing up the south side of the cabin. The noise of the helicopters covered their movements. The whole thing looked reckless to me, but what did I know? I was just a regular cop.

  Captain Koskivuori was shouting orders into the phone, and more than a dozen rifle scopes were trained on the cabin as the gas charge went down the chimney. Half of the SWAT team dropped from the roof onto the porch. One helicopter descended almost insanely low, and someone in it started firing on the cabin too.

  One of the guys with the headphones shouted, “Palo says there are no explosives!”

  The sound of the hovering helicopters almost drowned out the exchange of gunfire. I instinctively started running toward it, but someone grabbed my coat sleeve. Suddenly it was completely still. The shooting stopped, and both helicopters disappeared behind the trees. The person holding me released my sleeve. I recognized Ström’s aftershave without looking at him.

  One of the SWAT team members appeared, shouting for an ambulance, but the paramedics were already on their way. I hadn’t realized how many photographers and TV cameras were in the woods, but now they descended on the cabin like tigers smelling a fresh kill.

  Captain Koskivuori’s voice echoed from a megaphone: “The operation is over. Markku
Malmberg died during the exchange of fire. Unfortunately, he seriously wounded Sergeant Palo.”

  “Goddamn!” breathed Ström. I didn’t say anything.

  “Wait. I’ll go ask what he means by ‘seriously,’ ” Ström said.

  I watched the cameras approaching their prey and heard the sound of safeties clicking back on and the buzz of voices around me as if I wasn’t really there.

  When Ström came running back, his eyes told me everything: Palo was already dead.

  At that moment it didn’t matter that I detested Ström. He was my brother and we were experiencing exactly the same emotions. We wrapped our arms around each other. Within seconds Pihko and Taskinen were in the same heap. We all cried—some of us silently. I howled. I couldn’t bear to watch when the covered stretcher finally came out of the cabin.

  Other than to attend the crisis therapy meetings they organized for us, I didn’t go back to work for the rest of the week. Maybe it would have been easier to be at work, but either way, the days were hell and the nights were worse. Because of the baby, I could only take a sedative the first night.

  Fortunately Antti was able to take the rest of the week off too. Sex turned out to be the best therapy. Antti was surprised when I wanted to make love the same night I returned from the hostage scene in Nuuksio. But I always felt alive when I made love, and experiencing something through my body gave my mind a rest. Antti said he’d always thought women’s sexual desire decreased when they were pregnant, but so far I’d smashed that myth.

  Over the next few days, Antti answered all the phone calls for me, turning down interview requests and calming our parents and friends. I wasn’t able to talk about how I felt. One night I dreamed I was in the Cultural Center parking lot opening the door of the Fiat. Out collapsed Palo’s and Malmberg’s bloody corpses.

  I heard Taskinen went back to work the very next day. Ström, on the other hand, treated his depression in the grand tradition of most Finnish men—by going on a multiday bender. During the therapy session on Friday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether his shaking was a result of a hangover or trauma. On Friday they told us that Malmberg was quicker to shoot than they’d expected. He shot Palo instantly when he realized the gas canister had come down the chimney. The sawed-off shotgun made a mess of Palo’s torso. He didn’t die immediately, but nothing could have saved him.

  Malmberg was a different story. It was impossible to tell which bullet killed him. Apparently he’d shot himself in the head with a pistol at the same moment he shot Palo with the shotgun, but his lower body was full of SWAT team rounds. Clearly the investigation was destined to be a long one—even if the families of Palo or Malmberg didn’t sue. The media spent several days in a tizzy over the incident, but then a famous politician was pulled over for drunk driving on Epiphany, providing the papers with new headlines.

  Eva Jensen called that night to see how I was recovering. When she complained about how boring the third trimester was, I suggested we go for a walk the next day, Sunday. The weather forecast called for sunshine, and I wanted to start easing back into work. Wasn’t that what they told riders: when you fall off the horse, you have to get back on as quickly as possible?

  After Eva’s call, I flopped back down in front of the TV to watch figure skating. A massive Canadian male figure skater was throwing triple axels to a movie soundtrack. It helped me shut out the ghosts of Nuuksio for a few minutes.

  Eva came over Sunday morning. She said she could walk as far as I wanted as long as we went slowly. We walked across the frozen field toward the side streets leading to Central Park. Even though the ground was slick, Eva said she’d rather walk in the open than along a busy road inhaling exhaust fumes. The sun shone a dull winter yellow, and the fluffy clouds promised the dry weather would continue. Bullfinches were polishing off the last of the rowanberries. A rabbit scurried under a bush. Eva’s swollen belly barely fit under her cape-style coat, and her slender arms and legs looked comical compared to it.

  “So how are you doing?” she asked once we made it across the field to a group of houses and a freshly graveled lane.

  I shrugged. “About once an hour, I ask why I get to be alive when Palo is dead. Otherwise I’m fine.”

  “Do you feel guilty about being alive?”

  “Of course. But I know that’s normal. It was such a little detail. Malmberg was after me, but I happened to park in a more visible place. It bothers me that everything turned into such a mess at the end.”

  I had avoided reading the newspapers and their denunciation of the police’s handling of the situation, but at some point I’d have to face that reality. I’d asked Antti to save all the articles people were writing and to tape the news for me to watch when that time came.

  “By the way, do you know Malmberg’s therapist, Kari Hanninen?” I asked Eva. “I had a few minutes to chat with him before all hell was unleashed.”

  “Yes, I’ve met him a few times,” she said. “If you’re looking for enemies of Elina, there’s at least one for you. Elina didn’t approve of Hanninen’s astrotherapy thing. Or, actually, it was more because he tried to sell it as real science. Which I don’t think it is either, of course.”

  “It does sound weird,” I agreed.

  “In a way, Hanninen and Elina were competing for the same clients: self-aware, feminist-leaning women. Plenty of women like that take astrology and tarot reading completely seriously. They believe both are based in ancient female wisdom that male-dominated religions and the so-called hard sciences have tried to suppress.”

  “But Elina didn’t think so?”

  “I guess she thought it was dangerous telling people they aren’t responsible for their own decisions and letting them blame cards or stars.”

  “Did Hanninen and Elina have any public run-ins?”

  “Yep. They were students around the same time. I’ve heard rumors they were involved romantically. But that all ended when Elina kept getting better test scores than Kari.”

  I laughed, remembering my own college boyfriend, Kristian. The same thing had happened to us: the poor boy couldn’t handle me getting better grades. Now Kristian was writing a dissertation in law school, and I was risking my life as a cop.

  “A couple of years ago, they had a huge blowup when Elina demanded the Psychological Association censure and maybe even kick Kari out for mixing science and occultism,” continued Eva. “In the end he got off with a warning, but Kari’s relationship with the association has been cool ever since—to say the least.”

  “Elina stole at least one client from Kari. I’ll have to ask her whether she knew about the conflict between them. But I don’t want to talk about Kari Hanninen. I’d rather hear about Elina. You said she was your therapist too.”

  “Yeah, going through therapy yourself is part of the training for anyone who wants to be a therapist. When I applied to the program, it wasn’t that long since homosexuality had been removed from the diagnostic manual as a mental illness! Finding a therapist who didn’t consider the idea of a lesbian doing this work repulsive wasn’t easy. Elina was a real find in more ways than one. She also taught me a lot about the job.”

  The wind was blowing sharp crystals of snow from the branches of the fir trees; they raked our faces like a stiff bristle brush. A magpie took flight from the top of a tree but couldn’t stay aloft for long, settling instead on a branch high in a birch tree fifty feet away. It swayed there, cawing something that sounded like magpie cursing. I had once listened to Einstein arguing with a magpie sitting in a tree. One of them howled and the other cawed. I’d been completely sure they understood each other.

  Down the road, a man who looked like a retired sea captain was dragging a bushy, snow-colored Samoyed away from the trunk of a tree. The dog clearly had found the most interesting scent in the world and wasn’t willing to leave it for anything. Although I’m generally what you’d call a cat person, I’ve
always loved big, furry dogs. I couldn’t pass the Samoyed without scratching him behind the ear. Instantly he smelled Einstein on my boots and turned to sniff first me and then the scent of golden retriever on Eva’s clothes.

  “Elina was a great therapist,” Eva continued once we turned down the lane toward Espoo Central Park. “She was always present, and she really listened. When our therapy relationship ended and we became colleagues, we got to know each other better. We were never really friends though because Elina was so reserved. She didn’t talk much about herself, her feelings, or her life. She mentioned Joona Kirstilä occasionally, and it was clear he was important to her, but that was it.”

  “Could you imagine Elina committing suicide?”

  Eva shook her head, and her wide mouth pursed in doubt. “What was the actual cause of death?”

  “A drug and alcohol interaction left her unconscious, which led to hypothermia and death. It’s hard to say whether anything in the case was premeditated.” I considered mentioning the letter Aira had found in her purse. Because I still wasn’t sure it was genuine, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  “That’s a pretty chancy way to kill yourself. It seems more like a cry for help, like she was expecting to be found. But that doesn’t sound like Elina. She wasn’t the suicide type even though there was something about her . . . Like, I don’t know, hidden rooms under her calm public persona where she locked away all her sorrows. Sometimes she would crack those doors, but only for a second.”

  “What did you see through the doors?” I asked.

  “A tension between a need for solitude and a need for connection. Elina didn’t have any family except Aira. I had the feeling she wanted a child but also couldn’t quite face the idea. Her relationship with Joona was typical. They were close, but she didn’t want to be too close.”

  That description sounded familiar. I had been the same way. Actually, I still was. Part of the reason I married Antti was because he understood and shared my need for solitude. A child would change that. A child would always need someone around. Since Palo’s death, I’d started thinking about my maternity leave as a break from work, a time without murderers and desperate attempts to squeeze half-truths out of people. Yes, with a child things would be different, but maybe in a good way.