I snapped out of my thoughts, but my vexation increased as I came upon a dog running back and forth on a retractable leash in the middle of the bike path. It looked like a crocheted potholder someone had washed in too-hot water. The cord stretching from dog to master blocked the entire trail. I rang my bell testily, and when the dog owner turned to look, I recognized him as Doctor Hellström, Armi’s boss. I didn’t remember seeing a dog when I had visited him.
“Oh, hello, Ms. Kallio. How do you do?” He seemed like he was in the mood to talk. “I hear Kimmo Hänninen is in jail for killing Armi. Is that right?” Hellström lit a cigarette and tried unsuccessfully to curb the dog, now yapping at a crow perched in a tree. The crow cawed back, flapping on a branch and raining last year’s dried pine needles down on us. The dog strained at his leash. “I’m really no good with this animal; it’s my sister’s dog, and I told her I’d watch him for a couple of days,” the gynecologist complained.
With a thick jacket and a scarf pulled up almost to his ears, Hellström looked overdressed for the rather warm late evening. Suddenly he sneezed violently. Obviously, a cold. Physician, heal thyself, I thought, and then replied, “Yes, it looks that way. The prosecutor plans to charge Kimmo with murder.”
“Such an unfortunate incident. One feels sorry for Annamari. First Sanna’s death and now this. Annamari isn’t a terribly well balanced person to begin with.”
“Was Armi on good terms with her?”
Hellström laughed.
“Armi was generally on good terms with everyone. Although Annamari may not have been on equally good terms with Armi, if you catch my drift. I doubt any daughter-in-law would have lived up to Annamari’s expectations. She doted over Kimmo too much, and let Sanna walk all over her, doing whatever she wanted.”
“Was Sanna Hänninen your patient as well?” I remembered Eki mentioning an abortion and thought that Hellström might know something interesting.
“My client. Yes, she was.”
I wasn’t able to talk to Hellström about Sanna’s sex life after all. Suddenly the dog started a row with an approaching greyhound just at that moment, and instead of waiting for things to calm down, I pedaled off.
When I arrived, Annamari was flitting around at home like a moth caught in a light fixture. She was dressed in a flowing yellow dress with big sleeves that rippled with each of her abrupt, nervous motions. The police had allowed her in to see Kimmo the previous day, which seemed only to have addled her even more.
“I don’t really know about your seeing Sanna’s papers,” Annamari said. “Perhaps destroying them would be best, like we did with the diaries. Wouldn’t it be best to let poor Sanna rest in peace? She had a hard life—why would we want to dwell on that anymore?”
“Is that stack of paper all that’s left of Sanna’s belongings? Is there anything else remaining in her room? Keepsakes, clothing, books?”
“We turned Sanna’s room into a guest bedroom; Matti and Mikko sleep there sometimes. Henrik took Sanna’s clothing and donated all of it. None of us would have worn rags like that. I suppose Kimmo kept some of Sanna’s books and music. I don’t remember what is whose anymore. Look in Kimmo’s room.”
“Let’s get those papers out as well, though,” I coaxed. I had with me a large backpack and my bicycle saddlebags to transport the whole lot home. As it turned out, my decision to leave the papers at the Hänninens’ Monday night had been a godsend. A bath in seawater would have rendered most of them illegible. Would Annamari have wanted that?
“Maria, you don’t understand how difficult being a mother is. And alone, like I am, with Henrik always traveling. To raise Henrik’s child and two of my own. To be in constant fear of what will happen to your children. What if they get run over by a car or fall in with a bad crowd and start getting into trouble? And then you realize you can’t save them if they do. The worst can happen no matter what you do, no matter how much you love them, just like with Sanna. Yes, I do want to forget that.” Annamari stayed at the base of the stairs while I fetched the stack of papers from the closet.
Then I opened the door into Kimmo’s room. No one had cleaned it since the police had visited. The bed covers were a tangled mess, the clothes closet was turned inside out, and here and there lay strange objects, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be various S&M paraphernalia: a riding crop, a small rubber sheet, locks. Apparently Ström’s investigators had dumped the sex-toy section of Kimmo’s closets onto the floor.
“Did the police say not to touch anything in here?” I asked Annamari, who was now behind me, peeking over my shoulder.
“No. I just didn’t want to go in there. I don’t want to find out what horrible things Kimmo keeps there.”
Except for the sex-toy section, Kimmo’s room was just like that of any young male college student. A computer on the desk and a printer, a couple of posters, and a giant picture of a smiling Armi wearing a flowery sundress. In one corner there was a TV and a VCR, and most of the books on the shelves were technical manuals and textbooks, along with a few best sellers. Sanna’s books were easy to pick out: Collected Works of Sylvia Plath, some Virginia Woolf, and some older English poetry. The margins of the Plath books were full of notes, so I added them to my bag. Next to the books sat a grinning skull.
“Where is this from?” I asked Annamari, who stood hunched in the doorway.
“Sanna bought it somewhere—she always kept it on her desk. Kimmo wouldn’t let me sell it. Ugh, it’s repulsive. Take it away!”
Since she told me to, I shoved the skull into my backpack. I had the urge to start cleaning Kimmo’s room properly, but I couldn’t very well do that with Annamari watching.
When I promised to return the papers, Annamari waved her hand dismissively.
“No need—just burn them. We don’t want them. It’s just more of Sanna’s scribbling. Sanna was gifted, yes, but why couldn’t she have just studied normal things like everyone else? Why did she have to drink and do all those other horrible things and be with all those horrible men? Sometimes she was like a complete stranger, and once I even said to Henrik that maybe the nurses switched her by accident at birth in the hospital. She looked exactly like Henrik, though.”
“When is Henrik coming back to Finland?”
Annamari began shaking again. “Maybe next week. He shouted so much on the phone. He told me…” She stopped, as if to steel herself. “He told me…that this was all my fault, that I didn’t know how to raise our children. But maybe he will be able to get Kimmo out of prison.”
I realized that Annamari feared her husband, which brought me back to Mallu’s suspicions that Henrik Hänninen might have had something to do with Sanna’s death. The Hänninen patriarch was interesting me more by the minute, his shadow constantly lurking in the background behind the rest of the family.
My backpack was heavy as I biked over to retrieve my bus pass from Mr. Herman Lindgren, who lived south of Annamari Hänninen right next to the swimming beach and breakwater. When I rang the doorbell, a dog started barking with a sound like a bass drum with a loose head, but nearly a full minute passed before someone came to the door.
The man looked to be about a hundred, and the graying Labrador retriever next to him should have been in a doggy retirement home. Still, the dog sniffed me curiously, probably smelling Einstein and Hellström’s loaner dog on my legs. The old man got straight to the point, handing me my bus card after first glancing with a smile at the picture and then me.
“Yep, it’s the same girl.”
“You must have gone to a lot of trouble tracking me down, since the number for me in the phone book is old.”
“I got your number from the phone company. And it was no bother—I have plenty of time for tracking down pretty young girls. I found your pass over there on the beach. It was almost in the water,” the man stated with a question in his tone that made me feel as though he deserved an explanation.
“Monday night I was riding a little too fast and flew off
the walking bridge into the water. The card probably fell out of my pocket during the fall.”
“Into the water? Well, thank goodness you weren’t hurt. Thank goodness you didn’t drown like that other girl.”
“What girl?” I asked, feeling my heart rate suddenly accelerate.
“The girl who drowned the winter before last out on the breakwater. I will always remember—it was the second of March. My wife died the same night.”
The elderly man seemed to withdraw backward in time, into his memories.
“It was a rainy night, as gray as autumn, no snow anywhere and no ice on the sea. I took Karlsson out here at around seven o’clock, and he ran off to the beach to sniff at something. I went to see what he was up to, and there on the beach lay a boy with blond hair. I was startled, worrying that he might be dead or sick, but his snoring and the smell of him told me he was just drunk. I couldn’t leave him there, as cold as it was, but an old man like me couldn’t do anything for him alone. Out on the breakwater I could see two people, and I shouted to them that a man was lying there and asked them to help.
“One of them—the woman—ran a little closer and shouted back that the man was her friend and she would take care of him; I could leave. When I arrived home, I found my wife on the kitchen floor. Her heart had given out, the doctor said later, and she didn’t suffer. But I still wouldn’t have wanted her to die alone.”
The dog whined as if chiming in. The old man bent over to pat his companion.
“I ended up in the hospital myself then for a while, since my own pump was acting up too, and then I spent the following month living with my son. I didn’t hear from a neighbor until several months later that a girl drowned that same night. They said it was suicide. It was the same girl who ran toward me on the breakwater.”
“I knew that girl,” I said, unable to restrain my impatience any longer. “I didn’t know someone else was out there on the breakwater with her in addition to her boyfriend. Who was he? Or was it a woman? What did he look like?”
The old man simply shook his head apologetically.
“I couldn’t see very well in the fog, and it’s been such a long time. I do remember that the other one had an umbrella and a long, black coat. Maybe a man, maybe a woman. How should I know, when women are so tall nowadays.”
Suddenly the old man looked directly in my eyes as though searching for something small and valuable there and then said pointedly, “Besides, I’m not sure it was human at all. I think it was Death. He had come to take my wife and now he was coming to take that girl. Maybe you’ll say these are just the ramblings of an old man. I may be three times older than you are, but I’m not senile yet. Someone was out on the breakwater with that dead girl.”
“I believe you,” I said reassuringly. “But you didn’t tell the police what you saw. You didn’t tell them about the other person.”
“What difference would it have made two months after the fact? The neighbors said the police ruled it a suicide and closed the case. Didn’t she even leave a note?”
“Would you still be willing to come and tell this to the police if the need arose? Information has recently come to light that calls into question whether it was a suicide after all. You might be a key witness…”
“A key witness. That sounds like something from one of those strange American miniseries on television. But what do I have these days other than time? What do you say, Karlsson?” The man patted his dog again, obviously very much back in the present.
Thanking Mr. Lindgren sufficiently was difficult, and I decided to send him a bouquet of flowers the next morning. I was sure he was right: the figure he saw out on the breakwater was Death. But not the imaginary scythe-wielding phantom—Herman Lindgren had seen Sanna and Armi’s murderer.
10
On Friday night, I was sitting comfortably ensconced in an armchair in our living room reading snippets from a draft of Sanna’s thesis on Sylvia Plath. Abundant notations filled the margins of the pages, but they all kept strictly to the topic of the paper. The working title of the thesis was “Body Language and Images of Self-Destruction in the Work of Sylvia Plath.” At the very least, Sanna had chosen an appropriate subject for herself.
I was tearing through Sanna’s papers with a defiant determination after having words with Eki earlier in the day about my investigation into Armi’s murder. Eki told me flat out that I was wasting my time.
“In this job you have to learn to make judgments about what’s worth doing and what isn’t. Our job is to get the Hänninen boy, if not released, then sentenced as lightly as possible. Rummaging around in his sister’s unfortunate life isn’t going to help you in that task one bit.”
Since I disagreed, Eki thought I was losing perspective. Even so, I announced my intention to take Sanna’s file home with me. I assumed that if Eki didn’t trust my judgment, the chances he would continue my contract after my three-month probationary period were slim. On the other hand—if he didn’t trust me, I wouldn’t want to work for Henttonen & Associates anyway. When I entered law school, my intention was to train for the bench, but I had put my court internship on indefinite hold. Placements in the Helsinki area district courts were few and far between, and I had no intention of going somewhere out in the sticks. I didn’t want to admit to myself that one of the most important things preventing my departure was Antti, now that our relationship had subsided from the initial giddiness to a fumbling process of working out a life together. Despite my weekly questioning of “whether this is really going anywhere,” we still wanted to be together. I just hated feeling dependent.
I decided to read the thesis more closely after inspecting the rest of the material. I had just finished sorting the papers and was starting in on the binder of files from our office when the phone rang. I rushed into the entryway, thinking that it might be Antti wanting to clarify something about our plans for the next day.
“Sarkela residence, Maria Kallio speaking.”
Complete silence. Then a strangely disembodied, husky voice: “Don’t go digging around in things that don’t concern you. Otherwise, you might be next…” The voice disappeared into the ether, and then came a click as the speaker hung up.
My old police instincts failed me this time, because I lowered the receiver before realizing that I could have tried to trace the call. When I returned to the living room, I was angry. Someone wanted to intimidate me. I knew in my heart that the person who sabotaged my bike wasn’t just a kid playing a prank—he was a double murderer.
People had threatened me before, and I’d had some close scrapes. But usually the threat had a face—when you were arresting someone, you knew what you were up against.
I watched as a motorboat docked in Otsolahti Marina. The rocks along the shore glistened from the recent rain. The living room’s large picture window no longer looked like a charming way to view the scenery—it was part of the threat. How easy it would be for anyone to come right in through the window.
I shook myself mentally. Sneaking up on me wasn’t easy, as Sebastian had learned at the Club Bizarre party. This murderer was an idiot if he thought he could get rid of me as easily as Sanna and Armi. Having thus laughed down my fear, I opened the binder and worked my way toward the end of Sanna’s life.
Hänninen family drama had kept Henttonen’s team busy, and Eki personally had done a considerable amount of work keeping Sanna out of jail. Two DUIs, both squeaking in below the standard for aggravated drunk driving, one charge for possession of marijuana, and a long list of citations for public intoxication.
The first drunk-driving arrest occurred at a sobriety checkpoint during Sanna’s second year in college. The car was full of drunk students, but Sanna claimed to have consumed only a single beer.
“Performed well in court. Dressed nicely. Schoolgirl,” Eki had written in his notes. I could imagine Sanna standing before the judge looking sweet, her big brown eyes scared, her voice even more childlike than normal. That was an easy case.
However, by the time of Sanna’s next DUI arrest, she had spent several nights in the drunk tank. One of these detentions was a result of a run-in with her boyfriend, whom Sanna threatened with a large folding knife. When Sanna ran her dad’s car into a lamppost, her with a blood alcohol level of 0.14, getting her off was a bit more difficult. Eki’s argument centered on Sanna’s grief over her boyfriend leaving her and the stress of school. Her broken leg was sufficient punishment. The result was just more fines and a suspended license.
“Works hard to save her own skin. Knows how to play innocent better than anyone I’ve seen. Criminal material?” Eki had written in the margins. I was starting to understand why he doubted Kimmo’s protestations of innocence.
Sanna’s marijuana possession charge came at the same time as Otso Hakala’s arrest for distribution. Eki managed to convince the judges that Sanna had been completely under Hakala’s influence, and the court dismissed the count against her of distributing a controlled substance due to lack of evidence. For possession, Sanna still took home a three-month suspended sentence.
This case lacked any notes. Was that what Eki had removed? Why? Would Martti or Albert remember what had been in the file? I was leafing through copies of the trial transcripts and Sanna’s deposition when the phone rang a second time.
Probably the same person trying to scare me again. This time I would leave the line open.
“Hi, it’s Angel. How was your head on Wednesday morning?”
“Not the best.” I didn’t know whether or not to be pleased by Angel’s call.
“Listen, I just remembered that our old member newsletters have some of Kimmo’s drawings in them. Would they be of any use? I was thinking they could be, since they all show women dominating men.”
“Maybe. Go ahead and put them in the mail.”
“You don’t want to come pick them up?”
Her Enemy Page 15