Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Salo and Terävä are members of the Finnish Athletics Federation B team, and Sami Terävä received EUR 3,000 in training funds from the Finnish Olympic Committee. Both were last tested in the spring before the international competition season, and at that time all results were clean. According to information received by our newspaper, following this, Eero Salo failed to appear for one scheduled doping test.

  Jutta wouldn’t have risked a charge of libel and the possibility of demands for compensation, so she must have substantiated the information about Salo and Terävä’s activities. After the article, Salo and Terävä weren’t able to avoid doping tests for long, and both tested positive across their A and B samples. Apparently, one of the men’s clients had developed a conscience and decided to file a police report, and Salo and Terävä were either stupid or greedy, and they hadn’t disposed of the drugs in time. The chain of events was actually a bit comical, but the case still aroused intense emotions in some track-and-field fans. Jutta was seen as having taken advantage of the athletes to advance her career. From other sources I learned that Jutta had received death threats following the publication of the article. That seemed excessive, especially since Jutta’s reporting had been accurate.

  Leonardo replied to me on Friday.

  Hi. I live in the city. I guess our police district is East Center. But the cops won’t believe me. Who would want me? I’m ugly and fat. That’s what my mom said when I tried to tell her what that shithead did.

  If I worked in the Helsinki East Center Police District, I would have started sifting through our databases for women with multiple marriages and teenage children. But that probably wouldn’t have helped find Leonardo, since I didn’t know whether the mother’s partners had been husbands or boyfriends. All I could do now was send Leonardo the contact information for his neighborhood police office and one of my colleagues who worked sex crimes in that area, whom I knew to be an approachable, sensible person. I just managed to finish the e-mail before Hillevi arrived for our final meeting.

  My good friend and former colleague Pekka Koivu from the Espoo police had sent Hillevi our way. She provided a typical case study of how domestic violence escalated. The shouting and slapping while she and her now-ex-husband, Jouni, were dating turned into punching and hair pulling after their wedding. Hillevi hadn’t told anyone about any of it. When Jouni stabbed Hillevi under her left collarbone, friends and relatives were shocked. They’d seemed like such a happy couple, who hadn’t wanted for anything but a child.

  “No one would have believed me if I’d told,” Hillevi had said during our first meeting when I asked her why she’d kept quiet. “According to Jouni, I was just exaggerating. ‘Everybody slaps their old lady around a little when they don’t behave,’ he’d say.”

  Koivu had handled most of the interviews following the stabbing, and according to him, Jouni Litmanen had been a self-confident, even charming man who dismissed the stabbing as an unfortunate accident—the knife had just slipped—and claimed that Hillevi’s accusations of repeated attacks were nonsense. His wife’s body bore evidence of previous beatings, however, including two broken and poorly healed ribs, as well as burn scars. Koivu had done careful work, ultimately convincing a couple of neighbors to admit that they had heard sounds of fighting and strange thumps from the Litmanen home. Hillevi’s boss also testified to noticing bruises on her from time to time.

  Usually people didn’t want to intervene. Looking the other way was easier. Occasionally, in my work as a detective, I’d also run into a witness who felt she was above getting involved, or that he wasn’t the kind of loser who had to deal with those issues. The country as a whole was more secular now than in the past, and few Finns still feared the wrath of God or hell. But whether people were religious or not, it seemed as though everyone thought they could find redemption on earth by feeling superior to everyone else. For some people, self-esteem required comparison. You were closer to paradise if you were thinner or looked younger than your neighbor, weren’t on welfare like your cousin, or weren’t pissing yourself like that wino at the front of the tram. That was probably the allure of reality television. People got to watch someone getting booted off the island or being sent home without the trophy, whether the trophy was in the form of a fiancé or prize money. Then viewers could thank their lucky stars they weren’t as unattractive or as bad at dancing as those idiots on TV. In the same vein, it was simply easier to treat domestic violence victims as if they were to blame for their troubles, and Hillevi would have received plenty of “no” votes if there were a show that judged people based on the problems in their life.

  Hillevi was thirty-four but looked older. She had difficulty sitting through our forty-five-minute meetings without smoking. Her dark hair was cut short as if to ensure that no one would ever pull it again. Eyeglasses hid much of her face, and she tended to keep her small, narrow mouth shut. I had to squeeze every word out of her. In Hillevi’s case, my job was to find out if the police had operated in a way that may have prevented or discouraged her from filing a criminal complaint. My initial assumption was proven wrong during our very first meeting: Hillevi hadn’t been afraid of the police, only of her husband.

  She still moved in a nervous, birdlike fashion, as if Jouni might burst into my office at any moment and stab her again. A sudden glance over her shoulder reminded me of Jutta Särkikoski. Sometimes I still had that same kind of vigilance while I was out jogging, at least when there weren’t other people nearby. I knew the person who’d attacked me was serving a ten-year sentence, but sense rarely won out over emotion.

  Hillevi’s situation was much worse than mine. Jouni had received only two years and would be out in a year because it was a first offense. Seven months had already passed.

  Hillevi had just returned to her secretary job. Work matters weren’t part of our project unless they had something to do with the abuse. We did have a few workplace-violence cases to study, but they had all happened in family businesses, mostly in ethnic restaurants where a whole extended family worked together. If the crime was recorded as workplace related instead of domestic, it was taken more seriously in Finland and most other countries. Many still held the old belief that the workplace was a public space, while the home was inviolable.

  The clients who participated in the project had agreed to allow officials to exchange information about them, which had been quite the bureaucratic can of worms. Most of our sources were victims, so we had access to their records. But information on perpetrators wasn’t always available other than from court records. The most cooperative perpetrators were alcoholics in recovery, but mostly people completely denied what they’d done, people like Jouni Litmanen. I suspected that the Snork Maiden’s Groke belonged to that group too.

  “Make sure the restraining order is in effect as soon as Jouni goes free,” I advised Hillevi at the end of our meeting and then sighed to myself. These were precisely the kinds of issues Leena and I had wanted to take care of in our law firm. Social services would arrange counseling for the prisoner rejoining society, and there was nothing wrong with that per se. But sometimes the victims got overlooked, and they weren’t always informed of what their rights would be once the perpetrator was free.

  “Where do I apply for it? I don’t think I can,” Hillevi replied, and her thin shoulders rose a good two inches in agitation.

  “She was always so helpless. Of course I lost my temper sometimes,” Jouni Litmanen had said to Koivu during his interrogation. Hillevi reminded me of a girl I knew in school. Anne was her name, and she would become paralyzed by fear and then pee her pants when the bigger boys started throwing snowballs. Once I’d tried to protect her, blocking her from them and shouting. The boys knew my reputation, so they stopped that time. But I don’t know what happened to Anne after school, since to get home we walked in opposite directions.

  As was my habit, I gave Hillevi my card at the end of our conversation and told her to contact me if she had anything new to report. The card
only had my work cell phone number. The project didn’t offer services twenty-four seven, just during regular working hours.

  A giddy feeling of freedom came over me once again when I closed the office door behind me. I was more than ready for the weekend. My clients came from all over Finland, so I rarely ran into them during my free time. However, today two guys I knew from my days on the force in Espoo were sitting at the base of the Aleksis Kivi statue in the square, drinking beer. Jani Väinölä and Mape Hintikka seemed to be on furlough from prison, apparently legally, since they were hanging out in a public place. I said hi to them, but I didn’t bother stopping to chat since they were already so far gone. We’d nailed Hintikka for a stabbing, but my history with Väinölä was complicated enough that I only wanted to interact with him when he was sober. I suspected the pair had enjoyed something more bracing than the twelve pack they’d gone halfway through.

  Iida had arranged to sleep over at her friend Nea’s house after skating practice, so I was able to leave for Leena’s house earlier than planned. I picked up a bottle of wine at the Big Apple Mall on my way. Even though Leena was still on medication, she could have a glass every now and then.

  Her home in southwest Espoo had undergone remodeling after she became wheelchair-bound. Why would she and the family architect have thought of accessibility when they’d originally planned the house? Who of us would have? Accidents only happened to other people. I asked if she needed any help around the house before Jutta arrived and ended up folding sheets with Leena’s eldest daughter. She was already full-grown and heading out for the evening. I tried to ask Leena why she wanted me to meet Jutta, but Leena just said that Jutta could tell me herself. On Leena’s desk I saw literature about sports, some of it in English, mostly focusing on athletes with disabilities and disability categorization. She was obviously boning up for her new job.

  Jutta Särkikoski arrived in her own car, because despite her injury she was able to drive an automatic transmission. We greeted each other, curious like two dogs meeting for the first time, neither of us sure who was the leader of the pack. Jutta was young, thirty at most, thin, and about four inches taller than me. There was a sort of impatience about her, as if she was used to doing everything faster than she could at the moment. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her clothing was loose and relaxed, with an emphatic sexlessness. She wore very little makeup, and her face showed the tension that comes from having experienced severe pain.

  Leena chased the rest of the family out of the living room so we could speak in private. I’d seen her do this a few times over the years and knew that Leena’s family didn’t mind. Her husband was a lawyer specializing in competition law, and the family’s three children seemed to have absorbed a respect for confidentiality from their mother’s milk. Leena opened the wine, and Jutta asked for a cup of tea. When Leena went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, Jutta began to speak.

  “I know you’re not a police officer anymore, but it’s actually better that way. I don’t trust the police anymore. They made horrible mistakes in that doping investigation and the car accident, as if they didn’t trust me, or they were getting orders to bungle the job from higher up. I wanted to talk to you because the death threats have started again.”

  I had a hard time believing the police hadn’t taken her death threats seriously. I asked her what she meant by “mistakes.”

  “For starters, they didn’t try to find out where Salo and Terävä got the drugs, even though they were illegal. Of course, I didn’t reveal my sources.”

  “But you knew where the drugs came from?”

  “I knew. I’d received a tip from my source. But it wasn’t my job to follow up—I’m not a police detective.”

  “I’m not either, not anymore. What was the result of the accident investigation?”

  “I haven’t heard anything in six months! I called the lead detective when the death threats started again, but he said I should contact the Espoo police because I live in Espoo now. Leena said you used to work there. Who there can I trust?”

  The first person who came to mind was Pekka Koivu. But instead of giving a name, I asked Jutta to give me more information. The threats had started when Jutta finally returned to work after her sick leave. She had just come back from an assignment covering the World Para Athletics Championships for STT, the Finnish News Agency, and was planning a series of articles about the rehabilitation of athletes after sports-related injuries that required surgery.

  “There shouldn’t be anything about that that’s worth threatening me. I did think I might interview Toni Väärä too, but I’m not sure that would be ethical since we were in the accident together. I still need to talk to the editor who assigned the articles.”

  Leena rolled in, carrying a teapot. A tray holding a mug, two wine glasses, and a plate of hors d’oeuvres was attached to the armrest of her chair. Jutta poured the tea before continuing.

  “It was a nightmare. I changed my phone number several times after Salo and Terävä were convicted, but somehow whoever’s doing this always found it. I suspect one of my colleagues must be passing it on. After the accident, I did have a few months of peace. Maybe whoever ran us off the road thought he’d succeeded in intimidating me. That was what the messages before the accident always said: if I wanted to stay alive, I had to stop reporting on sports.” Jutta took a sip of her tea and then looked me in the eye. “I know you’ve been a victim too, and that you were just doing your job, like I was. So I think you can understand where I’m coming from.”

  I nearly spat out my wine. This person knew what my attacker had done to me, just as he had wished—he’d wanted all of Finland to know how he’d humiliated me. Jutta looked at me quizzically, then took a mushroom hors d’oeuvre from the tray and asked Leena if it was gluten-free. With a napkin I wiped up the wine I’d spilled on the table.

  “What were the death threats like?” I finally managed to ask.

  “A couple of calls, a couple of letters. Just like before the accident, although now there have been much fewer of them. Last time the police caught a few cranks. Some of them were stupid enough to call from their own phones. Here are the letters, and the messages are saved on my phone.” Jutta handed me two envelopes, which I did not take.

  “How many people have touched them?”

  “No one but me, I think. But how should I know?”

  The fall was still warm enough that I didn’t have gloves with me, so I went to the kitchen to get some rubber gloves. I might save the crime lab some bother if the letters ever ended up there. Both letters had been postmarked in downtown Helsinki, and the envelopes were the same, brown standard C5 size. The stamps bore a stylized Finnish flag and commemorated the centennial of the Olympic Committee. At first glance the letter paper seemed like normal printer paper you could buy by the ream. The font was Times New Roman, and the size looked like fourteen point.

  I’d seen numerous death-threat letters during my police career. Some were genuinely scary, some formal, and some outright amusing. The first letter Jutta had received was mostly strange.

  You lying whore leave Finnish Athletes in peace. You’ve caused enough trouble already. Now shut up or you won’t get off so easy next time. I’ll bury you.

  Of course, there was no signature. The second letter used even more direct language.

  Didn’t you understand my first letter? Leave Finnish Athletes alone or a big knife will stick you or your car will explode with you in it. We know what to do with people who foul the nest. If you get near Toni Väärä again, you gonna regret it. It be your fault he didn’t go to the Olympics. Remember that, whore.

  “Apparently he doesn’t know how to use spell-check. I thought they taught that in every beginning computer skills course,” I said, mostly to myself. Some of the comments in the online message boards were written in the same bad Finnish, and you could never quite tell if it was intentional or not. I put the letters back in their envelopes and set them on the table,
then took off the gloves. I didn’t like the feel of the cold rubber. “Are the voice mail messages more of the same?”

  “Listen for yourself.” Jutta tapped at her smartphone. “I saved them in their own folder. Hopefully the fact that I moved them won’t affect whether they can be traced, even though I’m sure the caller was using a prepaid phone.”

  “Did you answer them?”

  “No. I never answer unknown numbers. If someone has important business, they’ll leave a message. Here they are.” Jutta handed me the phone. The voice that spoke into my ear a moment later was fuzzy, and the person had clearly tried to mask it. The first message said simply that Jutta was already a dead woman, and the second one threatened to rip her limb from limb if she didn’t stop working as a reporter. I listened to the messages again, this time with the speaker on so Jutta and Leena could hear. It was a low mumble, and it was hard to tell whether a man or a woman was speaking. The tone was monotone and unaccented, the words betraying no specific dialect.

  “Does the voice sound at all familiar?” I asked Jutta.

  “No! It could be any crazy person. There are plenty of those. Nothing has changed. Those two discus throwers were slapped with a ban, but the federation is still full of the same old fogies. I’m not at all surprised what those boys did. It’s no wonder that, when you’ve been working for something since grade school, you might get confused about the line between right and wrong, especially if someone comes along promising a shortcut to success. It’s the same for the fans.”