Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “I have such a hard time understanding why someone would make death threats over something as trivial as sports,” Leena said with a sigh. “We don’t need someone to put Finland on the map anymore. The world already knows we’re here. We don’t have to prove ourselves by running fast or throwing things farther than everyone else. Sports is just show business, plain and simple.”

  “Watch it. You’re talking to a true believer!” Jutta said. “That was why I was so angry at those discus throwers, because they were ruining the thing I love!”

  I let them argue, because I knew from experience that Leena would calm down once she’d said her piece, and Jutta Särkikoski seemed to be a good sparring partner. I considered the phone calls and the letters. The repeated nature of the threats and the fact that they were intended to infringe on a journalist’s right to free speech made this a very serious matter. In Russia they killed political reporters who criticized the establishment, and elsewhere in the Nordic countries, bounties had been placed on the heads of journalists and comic artists who’d criticized Muslim extremists. So far Finland was satisfied to focus on sports reporters. But these threats still needed to be investigated, and that task would fall to my former colleagues. Of course, the police could try to trace the calls, but that probably wouldn’t lead anywhere.

  I had only a superficial relationship with my replacement as commander of the Espoo Police Violent Crime Unit, Anni Kuusimäki. According to Koivu, she was an OK boss. I’d have to tell Jutta to get in touch with him.

  “Who’s investigating the crash? The Raasepori police?” My question interrupted Jutta and Leena’s debate.

  “No, the Lohja police, since the accident happened just over the jurisdiction line. But they aren’t the slightest bit interested in these death threats anymore. Their theory is that we were just hit by a drunk driver who didn’t stop because he was afraid of the consequences. But there’s a really weird connection I didn’t see until a little while ago. The brother of the lead investigator in Lohja is married to Sami Terävä’s sister. Shouldn’t that mean he has to recuse himself?”

  “Wait, whose sister?”

  “Sami Terävä’s, one of the discus throwers I exposed!” Jutta’s eyes flashed as she described her conspiracy theory. She seemed passionate, not crazy. During my police career, I’d seen plenty of attempted cover-ups, and even though most of my colleagues handled their work irreproachably, there were always exceptions.

  “That wouldn’t create a true conflict of interest, because the relationship is distant and the cases are completely unrelated. Wasn’t the investigation of the anabolic steroid smuggling handled by Vantaa and Nokia, the police departments where Salo and Terävä live?”

  “Yes, but maybe the Lohja police swept my accident under the rug because of the lead investigator’s conflict of interest!”

  “When your accident happened, I was lying in the hospital myself and didn’t have much to do but read magazines and watch TV,” Leena said. “I’m not interested in sports, but I was interested in your accident because it had a lot in common with my own. And trust me, the media was screaming for the culprit’s head on a platter, because the runner was hurt too. They really criticized the police.”

  “You can be sure it was high on the priority list of everyone involved. No cop likes an unsolved case. Do you think that Salo, Terävä, or someone close to them would be capable of orchestrating something like that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know them very well. I only interviewed Terävä once. Female sports reporters mostly get assigned to covering kids, women, and para athletes. The big boys are the men’s territory.” Jutta gave a crooked smile. “My impression of Terävä is that he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and Eero Salo was probably the one who convinced him to start doping. Salo is all over the map. Back in the day he was always training, but now he mostly just practices tipping back pints, from what I hear. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they were both in that van. Although . . . I only remember seeing one person.”

  “How would they have known you would be driving on that particular road at that particular time?”

  “The federation would have known about the interview, and that I was going to bring Toni to the sponsor event. Maybe someone tipped off Salo and Terävä.”

  “But why take revenge on you when Toni Väärä was in the car?” Leena asked. I was starting to wonder whether she’d really asked me over to try to get Jutta to stop cooking up conspiracy theories. I took a careful sip of wine and a piece of the mushroom pastry. The sweet aroma of dusty waxcaps hit my nose when I took a bite. Leena couldn’t go mushrooming, so her husband must have gathered them.

  “There wouldn’t be any sense to it, but on the other hand, that’s exactly the kind of idiocy you could expect from Salo. Maybe it was mostly revenge with a little jealousy mixed in, since Toni was still competing, unlike him. Or maybe I’m on the wrong track, and the accident had nothing to do with me. Toni has always claimed he doesn’t remember anything. But the first time we met in the hospital afterward, he asked me if I saw who the driver of the gray van was. He seemed to think it wasn’t about me. Toni thought someone wanted to kill him.”

  3

  The upshot of the evening was that Jutta promised to file a report about the death threats with the Espoo police, and I promised to give Koivu a heads-up. But if they weren’t able to trace the phone calls or find fingerprints on the letters that matched someone in the police database, there was no hope of finding the perpetrator. Just as Jutta was preparing to leave, I asked her why she thought the death threats had started again.

  “I thought Leena told you about the campaign. I’ll be working with Toni again.”

  “What campaign?”

  “The Adaptive Sports Association, the Mental Health Association, and the Athletics Federation’s rehabilitation campaign. It’s for people recovering from physical and mental injuries, specifically amateur athletes. They roped me into handling PR for it. I’m a freelancer, and after that doping scoop, it hasn’t been easy to find work except with general-interest publications. I was a little surprised when Merja called—that’s Merja Vainikainen, the current director of the Adaptive Sports Association. The campaign launch is next Tuesday, and it’s supposed to run for a year. Toni Väärä is the mascot for the campaign, since he can attract media coverage. Leena, give Maria the brochures!”

  “She can find all the information on the website,” Leena said, but Jutta continued talking over her.

  “The principle is that exercise helps both people with temporary injuries and illness and those who are permanently disabled. I’m working on a series of articles about professional athletes, which is loosely related, because the magazine that commissioned it is a sponsor of the campaign.” Suddenly Jutta smiled broadly. “I love sports and exercise, and I intend to keep being active even if I never get rid of these crutches. That’s why I hate doping. To me it’s like the Nazis’ human experimentation. After the war, East Germany continued the tradition by conducting clinical trials commissioned by Western pharmaceutical companies, and it just so happened that most of the guinea pigs at BALCO in the US were black athletes. That is, before they got caught a few years ago, in 2003.”

  “Here comes the sermon again,” Leena said and sighed, but not meanly, and Jutta’s smile spread to her eyes.

  “They can’t take my beliefs from me, no matter how much they threaten me. You’re right, Maria, of course I have to contact the police. I’m not going to let these people frighten me.”

  “What are your security arrangements at home?”

  “High-security locks and a burglar alarm. I live in Kauklahti, in the model development they put up for the 2006 housing fair last year, and there are security cameras, but unfortunately none of them point at my parking spot. I’ve asked the management to remedy the situation. I always have pepper spray with me. So yes, I’m looking out for myself. Thanks for taking the time to give me some guidance tonight. I really apprec
iate it.” Jutta stood up and offered me her hand, then she hugged Leena. I didn’t quite understand what had caused the change in her mood.

  After Jutta left, I stayed for another glass of wine. Leena was trying her best to adapt to her wheelchair. After the initial shock, her attitude toward her mobility limitations had been emphatically courageous, so I was actually relieved when she started cursing about not being able to go mushrooming herself.

  “Jouko tries, but he can’t tell a chanterelle from a yellow birch leaf. And everyone says this year’s mushrooming has been amazing.”

  “I thought I’d go check some of my mother-in-law’s usual spots in Inkoo on Sunday. If I get a lot, I’ll bring you some.”

  “Thanks. I’m green with envy, though. But it’s nice you seem content with your life now. How are things going with Antti?”

  “Better than ever. Things have just sort of fallen into place.”

  After the taxi dropped me off at home, I stood for a moment gazing at the stars, which were faint against the glow of the streetlight. I wished I could turn it off to make them brighter. Once inside, Venjamin greeted me with a testy meow, but Antti told me the cat had already had his dinner and was just trying to trick me into giving him more. I tossed him a few treats, and he played paw hockey with them on the living room floor before eating. When I sat down with Antti on the couch, Venjamin curled up at my feet.

  Late the following Tuesday afternoon, I was in a client meeting when my phone, which was on silent, began flashing on my desk. I didn’t recognize the number. By the time the meeting ended, I had received eight calls, six from an unknown number and two from Leena’s cell phone. Just as I was dialing Leena back, the phone rang again. It was the same unknown number.

  “Hi, it’s Jutta. Särkikoski.” Her voice was mixed with sobs. “Those threats . . . they weren’t a joke. Pentti is probably already dead, though the sandwich was meant for me . . . What do I do now?”

  I looked out the window onto the square, where it was raining so hard the clock tower of the railway station was barely visible. Jutta continued crying into the phone, but I could also hear someone talking to her. The voice was a man’s.

  “Where are you?”

  “At home. Miikka brought me here.”

  “What on earth happened?”

  “We had that campaign launch today in Tapiola at the Waterfall Building, in the MobAbility offices. They’re one of our sponsors. Some media people were there, and everything went really well. Afterward, most of us organizers stayed to toast our success. MobAbility is a small company, so the Adaptive Sports secretary came along, and she organized the catering. I have celiac, and there was a little to-do because the secretary forgot to buy gluten-free bread. Merja made a huge deal about it. So the secretary went to get some rolls. I didn’t have time to eat when she got back, though, because a reporter had called me to ask whether the images on our website were in the public domain. Just as I finished answering, Pentti collapsed. Merja shouted that he was having a heart attack and started CPR, but it didn’t . . . Pentti lost consciousness before the ambulance arrived, and he was convulsing and vomiting so Merja couldn’t even try rescue breaths.”

  “Did the police come?”

  “No . . . Everyone thought it was a heart attack. According to Merja, Pentti’d had heart trouble before. Merja went in the ambulance, and Tapani Ristiluoma asked us all to leave. Miikka drove me home. He told me that Pentti ate one of the gluten-free rolls that was meant for me. It was no heart attack; it was attempted murder! Merja’s phone goes straight to voice mail, and Jorvi Hospital won’t even confirm that Pentti is there because I’m not family.”

  “Jutta, try to calm down. Do you have someone who can be there with you?”

  “Miikka is still here. And Leena promised to come if she could get an accessible taxi.”

  Cramps and vomiting sounded more like symptoms of a poisoning than a heart attack, but I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. If the doctors discovered that this man named Pentti had been poisoned, they would alert the police immediately.

  “Who is this Pentti person anyway?”

  “Pentti Vainikainen. He’s head of social affairs for the Finnish Athletics Federation and the husband of Merja, my boss at the Adaptive Sports Association.”

  In the background, I heard the muffled male voice again. I told Jutta I had to hang up. Work was calling, and I would get back to her. This was none of my business, I told myself. I couldn’t do anything for her at the moment anyway.

  I still had one client meeting that day, an old acquaintance from years ago. Anja Jokinen’s husband had beaten her with increasing ferocity until the family’s adult son ended the violence with a frying pan. Kalle spent time in prison for killing his father, and during that time his little brother, Heikki, followed in their father’s footsteps. When Heikki was found dead in a snowbank, Kalle was the prime suspect, since he’d just been released from prison, but he was found innocent and eventually Heikki’s death was declared an accident.

  Nowadays Anja was a happy grandmother of two. She ran a support group for people who had been abused by their children, and she wanted to be included in my study. When I investigated Heikki Jokinen’s death, I’d still been a wreck for a number of reasons, among them my colleague Pertti Ström’s suicide and my own marital crisis, and I still wasn’t sure whether the conclusion of the case had been entirely correct. But when Anja showed me pictures of Kalle’s children, Mielikki and Onni, I agreed with her that the story of the remaining members of the Jokinen family had ended happily.

  I didn’t have time to call Leena until after Anja’s interview, and she was still waiting in frustration for a taxi. Getting accessible taxis was a crapshoot, and even if the dispatcher agreed to make the order, the vehicle was usually late. I suggested a normal taxi van, because her husband was in a meeting, and I couldn’t drive her either, since it was my turn to take Taneli to his off-ice training session.

  “Maybe I’ll invite Jutta here,” Leena finally said. “Thanks for the mushrooms, by the way. They made a good soup.”

  Over the weekend I’d been in seventh heaven in the forest in Inkoo. The forest was overflowing with woolly milk caps and red-hot milk caps. Funnel chanterelles grew in mats, terra-cotta hedgehogs and the forest lambs practically jumped into my bucket, and I even picked some orange birch boletes. I’d brought Leena all the dusty black caps and some of the porcinis. Antti was our family’s dedicated mushroomer, but his enthusiasm had rubbed off on me. His mom had scampered through the forest with us too, finally finding a trove of chanterelles. I’d felt pure joy at being alive and energized by the thrill of the hunt, rushing from boulder to boulder, looking for more plunder. In a way I almost started to understand what hunters liked about hunting. Of course, you didn’t have to stalk mushrooms or kill them. They just appeared again every fall if there was enough moisture. Finally, we’d ended up on a cliff eating our lunch and gazing at the sea. Taneli had learned to recognize chanterelles and was exceedingly proud of himself, but Iida spent more time texting her friends than admiring the bounty of the forest. That had amused me, and my mother-in-law seemed to feel the same way. We’d exchanged looks of deep understanding.

  I was supposed to be thinking about mushrooms, not suspicious deaths. I ran for the bus and, once onboard, tried to concentrate on my book, but my thoughts kept returning to Pentti Vainikainen. I had a vague memory of him—he’d been interviewed on Sports Update. At home I grabbed a banana and then rushed with Taneli through the rain to catch the next bus. He told me about his crafting class where he’d learned to do a chain stitch, and how he intended to crochet a phone case for his dad. I thought Antti would like that. Taneli chattered the whole short bus ride, making me forget everything else for the moment.

  After he skittered off to the locker room at the gym, I went outside under the awning and called Koivu. Water was coming down in torrents, but the autumn air was still so warm that I had to unbutton my leather jacket. Koivu answered
after the second ring, which was enough to tell me that he wasn’t in the middle of anything important. Jutta Särkikoski had contacted him the previous afternoon, and they had a meeting scheduled in a couple of days.

  “That may be a colorful meeting,” I said and then told Koivu what little I knew about the day’s events at the Waterfall Building.

  “So what you’re telling me is you want to be a cop again.”

  “You wish! I’m just interested in all the commotion around Jutta Särkikoski.”

  “Puupponen suggested that this Vainikainen guy overdosed on Viagra. Just think: Puupponen is the same age as me, but his jokes just keep getting worse. Is that grounds for requesting a transfer?”

  “Ask your boss.”

  “If only I could find her. She always disappears after our meetings. She’s a fine boss, but she’s gone a lot.”

  “Try Jyrki, then.”

  “Taskinen?” Koivu laughed. The head of the Criminal Division, Jyrki Taskinen, was still my good friend, but there had always been too many steps in the hierarchy between him and Koivu. Koivu was indebted to Taskinen since Taskinen had arranged for Koivu’s wife, Anu Wang-Koivu, to move from Violent Crime to the Juvenile Unit, which kept eight-to-four hours, so things would be easier on their three kids. Koivu wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting he wanted his wife and the mother of his children in the safest job possible, but that was clearly part of it as well.

  “At least come over to watch the next qualifying match for the national team,” Koivu suggested. “During the last game, my neighbor Mehdi screamed louder against Poland than I did, so it looks like he’s starting to settle in to life in Finland. That would have been something for Ström to see. Just think how time flies. It’ll be ten years soon.”

  I knew that he was referring to Ström’s suicide. I’d told Koivu that I still had dreams about that, then said good-bye and hung up.