Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  When I told Ursula what Taskinen had said about the Council of State’s interest in the Vainikainen and Ristiluoma murders, her expression brightened. Once she left, I finally had the chance to look through Jutta Särkikoski’s calendars. I started with the oldest one to get a general idea of how she took notes. After working through the first two, I was sure that Jutta recorded both her work and personal meetings in the same calendar. There were significantly more of the former than the latter, which were usually walks or movie nights with girlfriends. I wrote down names as they appeared. Maybe Jutta had confided in someone about her source.

  The first reference to the doping story was from January of the previous year, when Jutta wrote Call P. Heiskanen in her calendar. The number that followed had been erased and rewritten, so she must have started out with the wrong number. Then there were several days of normal entries, including the names of some athletes I recognized, with addresses sometimes written next to the appointments. Jutta had also visited Toni Väärä during that period. Here and there I saw an entry that read simply M, once with Forum Mall 4:30 and once with Free Record Shop Forum 6 p.m. They didn’t seem like dates with a boyfriend. Within her circle of friends, I knew of a couple of names that started with M, for example two other journalists, Milla Kettunen and Ulla Martikainen, whom she also called “Marsu.”

  On the day of the car accident, she’d entered Pick up Hande 1:30 at Karjalohja Neste Station, then Väärä 3:00 Kupittaa Sports Park. After that, several weeks of calendar entries were blacked out, as if Jutta hadn’t wanted the reminder of the work she’d missed.

  I’d collected a long list of names, addresses, and phone numbers, but I wasn’t any closer to figuring out who Jutta’s source was. I peeked into the conference room, where Puupponen was just finishing a call.

  “Great, thanks. Same to you!” He hung up with a flourish and gave Ursula a wink as she looked up from her computer screen, apparently still delving into the secrets of the USB drives.

  “I just talked to the employment specialist Miikka Harju worked with. She remembered Harju, because he’d been such an active, positive job seeker. According to her, Harju found the listing for the Adaptive Sports job on his own. He insisted on applying for it.”

  17

  Since I was already planning to visit Adaptive Sports, I could leave grilling Miikka Harju until then. I returned to my office, because my brain seemed to work better when I was alone. I wondered whether the M in Jutta’s schedule could mean Miikka. Working as a firefighter required physical strength, and maybe Miikka had been getting supplements from the same people as Salo and Terävä. Perhaps his finances had been a mess after losing his job, and so he betrayed them for money. But why would Jutta protect Miikka Harju?

  At Adaptive Sports, I would see Leena, Merja Vainikainen, Miikka Harju, and Hillevi, whose sick leave had ended. The two remaining MobAbility employees were also supposed to be there. What would happen to the company now that the primary owner was dead? Ristiluoma didn’t have children, so his parents would probably inherit his assets.

  I read Pentti Vainikainen’s autopsy report again. The mucous membranes of his mouth had been badly corroded, but the small amount of nicotine in his stomach didn’t match up with the severity of those injuries. Would the medical examiner be able to explain that? I tried to reach her, but she was on vacation. Of course. I left a message.

  My phone rang as soon as I hung up. It was a TV crime reporter who had played a key role in helping me solve a previous case. I couldn’t deviate from the information-sharing policy Detective Perävaara and I had agreed on, but I told the reporter as much as I dared. I owed him.

  Public relations was usually a tightrope walk, and I always did my best to ensure that a victim’s family got information from the police first, not the media. When the next of kin were suspects, the situation could get dicey. The worst-case scenario was when the media revealed information too early and labeled an innocent person as guilty.

  I began to browse the news online. The newspapers put forth that Jutta Särkikoski was the intended target of the killings. A reporter from one of the tabloid websites had interviewed Sami Terävä and Eero Salo. In the accompanying photo, Salo’s face was puffy, and he looked ten years older than he really was. He leaned on a lamppost, apparently in need of the support.

  Since the doping scandal, Eero Salo has learned who his real friends are. At his local pub, we found a group of loyalists who are quick to point out how many Olympic medals have been earned using banned substances. Among his own, Eero Salo isn’t a villain, he’s just a regular guy. No one at Salo’s table believes the revenge theory, and the attempts on reporter Jutta Särkikoski’s life, which have resulted in two other homicides, are considered just as shocking as anywhere else. “This is Finland. We don’t want any of that American nonsense,” says a man who introduces himself as Stode.

  I continued to search, reading everything I could find about the case. Sometimes reporters’ speculation could be useful. Vainikainen’s connections to the high and mighty, and his famous golf partners, were mentioned repeatedly. That made me wonder again if Pentti Vainikainen might have somehow managed to kill himself out of carelessness. Could he have given something to Hillevi and ordered her to put it in the sandwiches and just not realized that it ended up in the gluten-free ones that he ate? What if Vainikainen had known all about the doping? I couldn’t entirely trust anything Hillevi told me, because she’d been forced to lie to her ex-husband to protect herself, and maybe she’d gotten used to it.

  Once I’d exhausted the online news, I went to see if Ursula had extracted anything from Jutta’s files. In the conference room, Ursula’s fingers were flying across the keyboard. The printer hummed, apparently spitting out everything she found the slightest bit interesting.

  “Don’t get your hopes up yet. There were a couple of good pictures in this story about athletes as sex objects. It included men too. They’re pretty yummy, but Särkikoski didn’t take the pictures. Then there’s a story about all the foundations that support athletes. Some of them seem to have an awful lot of money to throw around. State grants are carefully regulated and have strict criteria, because they come from the Ministry of Education budget. But the Finnish Field Sports Fund, for example, has a board made up entirely of people in sports. She’s certainly written a lot. Särkikoski, I mean.”

  “A freelancer has to work hard. Did IT give you any advice for cracking those passwords?”

  “It depends how smart Särkikoski was about protecting her files. There’s one drive here that she obviously copied her e-mails onto. The security is pretty light, so I can read the senders, the recipients, and the subject lines.”

  “We have to treat e-mails like letters. Check the senders and subjects anyway, even though we’re breaking the law.”

  Ursula smiled. “Look at you! What happened to all the chickenshit nitpicking? I was sure you were going to order me to hand over the drive. Are you finally realizing that we can’t follow every last letter of the law when the people we’re up against don’t give a rat’s ass about any of them? Anni just looks the other way. Seems like you have to do that to survive as a mother too. Is your daughter checking out boys yet?”

  I stayed to gab with Ursula for a moment, taking advantage of the chance to build rapport. Though I did steer the conversation away from Iida. Puupponen kept talking on the phone, and Koivu wasn’t around. Ursula said he’d gone to the cafeteria. “He heard the siren call of the meat pie. Or maybe it was his wife.”

  I hadn’t seen Anu Wang-Koivu in ages, so I went downstairs to the canteen too. She and Koivu were hiding behind a fake fern. Anu didn’t look particularly glad to see me, so apparently I’d interrupted a serious family meeting. Pekka, on the other hand, seemed overjoyed at my arrival. He jumped up holding his half-eaten meat pie wrapped in greasy paper and asked if we were leaving for Adaptive Sports. I told him to finish his food and went to get myself a sandwich.

  I knew a lot of the people
in the cafeteria. Among them were many young police officers who looked fresh from the academy. To my surprise I saw Visa Pihko, who had worked in our unit ten years earlier but had left for law school and now served the fatherland as a member of the fraud team at the Helsinki Police Department. Pihko was an ambitious guy, and he’d be perfect as temporary VCU commander for the Espoo police, if he was interested in getting back into violent crime. I was already walking over to him when I realized that the search for Anni Kuusimäki’s substitute was not my problem. But Pihko noticed me and closed the distance.

  “Hi, Kallio! I hear you’ve returned to the scene of the crime?” Pihko gave me a friendly handshake; we didn’t know each other quite well enough for a hug.

  “Only temporarily. What brings you to Espoo?”

  “A meeting with your White Collar Division. We’ve had a long-running money laundering investigation that’s about to come to a head. There’s a salon here in Espoo that’s part of it. They’re known for their low prices, but the receipts tell a different story. Fifty euros for a men’s haircut, that sort of thing. We know the money is coming from prostitution. Luckily it isn’t my job to prove that part of it or to track down the johns.”

  That reminded me of Ursula’s suspicion that Ristiluoma had been paying for sex. What did it matter if he had?

  After lunch, Koivu and I walked down to my car. We mulled the thought over, then tried to imagine motives for Vainikainen’s and Ristiluoma’s slayings. It was possible that the sandwich was meant for someone other than Jutta, but the bomb must have been for her—unless Jutta had wanted to get rid of Ristiluoma.

  We kept talking as we drove to Pasila. “I’ve met victims of domestic violence who will lie to protect the person who beat them,” Koivu said with a sigh, “but never the target of two murder attempts who still won’t talk. Which means I don’t get to go home to see my kids. Speaking of, are you going to fill in for Anni while she’s out on maternity leave?”

  “No,” I said firmly. Koivu sighed and opened his mouth but closed it again immediately. Traffic was a mess again. At one point no one would let in a little green Nissan trying to merge from the right, until Koivu acted magnanimously. The driver was an old man with silver hair, who drove so slowly that someone started to honk behind us.

  The Sports Building parking lot still had signs of the explosion. There was plenty of space to park.

  “Could the explosion be a coincidence? What if someone had wanted to protest something at the Sports Building and just chose a car at random to blow up?” I said to Koivu as we walked toward the main entrance.

  “It could have been an eco-terrorist protesting cars in general. Why don’t you mention that theory to your husband?”

  “Yeah . . . maybe not.”

  Security at the Sports Building had been heightened, with a uniformed guard in the lobby and another watching the parking lot with binoculars. Our identities were carefully checked before we were allowed to pass. Because I hadn’t caught whoever was after Jutta following Vainikainen’s death, the hundreds of people who worked in this building now had to live in fear.

  The Adaptive Sports Association was located on the fourth floor, at the end of the north hallway. On the inner doors I saw familiar names: Harju, Vainikainen, Litmanen. I knocked on the final door, guessing the meeting would be in there. When no one answered, I opened it.

  Inside a girl dressed in black sat at a table reading. When she saw me, she jumped up and closed her book. She bowed her head, her hair hanging down over her eyes and concealing her expression.

  “Mona? What are you doing here?”

  Now she looked up at me in fright. She didn’t seem to recognize me.

  “I’m Detective Lieutenant Maria Kallio, from the Espoo Police Department. I’m investigating your stepdad’s death. We met at your house, in your room. I’m here to see your mother. Do you know if she and the others are in the conference room?”

  The girl continued to stare at me as if I were a ghost or an alien.

  “Who did you say you were?” she asked. I repeated my name and rank, and Mona repeated after me. Then she sort of woke up and informed me calmly that her mother and the rest of the staff were in the conference room down the hall.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, trying to connect with her. She blushed but showed me the cover of the paperback. The Coarse Salt of Andalusia. I knew the book, which was a cookbook-memoir. What might Merja Vainikainen think of her daughter’s taste in books?

  “Why aren’t you in school?” I asked.

  “Doctor’s appointment,” Mona replied quietly. “After Mom’s meeting. Mom always comes with me to the doctor . . . to make sure they don’t take me away.”

  From what Merja Vainikainen had told me, I’d thought that she would have liked her daughter to be admitted for eating disorder treatment, but our visit to their house had been so chaotic, and Merja had been so addled, that maybe I’d heard wrong, or she’d misspoken.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, enjoy your book.”

  Koivu and I set off to find the conference room. It didn’t take long—we could hear Leena’s agitated voice through the door. “According to the contracts, the campaign can go on!” she was saying. “It will take time for Ristiluoma’s estate to be settled, and the fate of MobAbility to be decided. I can speak with the remaining board members. We have to keep operating, even though two of them are dead. Merja, why weren’t we informed that your husband, Pentti, was on the board of MobAbility?”

  I hadn’t known that Pentti Vainikainen was a member of the board of MobAbility either. That seemed potentially problematic, given their sponsorship activities, although that wouldn’t necessarily mean that he or his wife would receive any direct financial benefit. And anyway, he didn’t own any MobAbility stock. Maybe that was why not even the crime reporters at the tabloids had noted it.

  “It didn’t matter from a practical perspective—” Merja Vainikainen replied. I knocked on the door and opened it. Merja stopped midsentence as all five heads in the room turned toward me. In addition to her and Leena, there sat a haggard-looking Hillevi Litmanen, Miikka Harju, and a tall, sturdy woman in her sixties, whom I’d caught a glimpse of during my visit to the MobAbility offices. Merja looked annoyed.

  “Detective Kallio. Hello. As you can see, we’re in the middle of our meeting. Hopefully your business can wait.” She turned back to Leena and continued. “Of course the campaign will go forward as planned. You contact the remaining members of the board, and I’ll speak with Toni Väärä. Kai Toijala’s factory can produce the devices at the usual pace, since it’s the foreman, not the CEO, who’s in charge of that.”

  Apparently Merja Vainikainen was still in the denial stage of grief, trying to live life as though nothing was wrong. She was just as well-groomed as ever. The only sign of distress was the darker shadows around her eyes.

  “When will Satu return from sick leave? Did she tell you, Anneli?” Merja asked the other MobAbility employee. She looked at Merja in surprise.

  “I already told you, the doctor gave her until the end of next week! I visited her yesterday because she needed company. The poor girl was so attached to Tapani.”

  “Well, it isn’t like she was married to him!” Merja said curtly. Hillevi trembled at the sharp tone.

  “No, but maybe she wanted to be.” The woman named Anneli leaned back in her chair and looked at me. “So you’re from the police. I met other police officers the last time they came to our office. At that time I didn’t think it mattered, but I guess I should tell you that poor Satu was infatuated with Tapani. That’s why she’s so broken up. She must have thought something was going to happen between the two of them. At least she hoped it would, ever since he left his ex.”

  “And she wasn’t exactly subtle about it,” Merja Vainikainen said with a snort. “That’s probably why Satu didn’t like Jutta much. I sensed some coldness between the two of them.” Vainikainen didn’t address her words to anyone in particular. Koivu and I e
xchanged a glance. Ursula and Puupponen had interviewed Satu Häkkinen and Anneli Vainio after Pentti Vainikainen’s poisoning, but with meager results.

  “Of course, I don’t believe Satu could have hurt anyone,” Anneli Vainio continued. She seemed to enjoy having our undivided attention. “But when you work with someone for a few years, you get to know them pretty well, and Satu tends to confide in me, because she’s younger. She fantasizes about having a family and children. She’s getting to that age.”

  “Let’s take it one thing at a time,” I said. “Once you’ve finished your meeting, I’d like to speak with each of you individually. Perhaps starting with you,” I looked at Anneli. I didn’t intend to question Leena, but the others didn’t need to know that. “For how long do you have this conference room reserved?”

  “For the rest of the day,” Hillevi replied quietly.

  The conference room could have been located in any office building. The furnishings were as bland as those at the Espoo police station, and the photocopier was exactly the same model as ours. The only thing that gave the room some personality was the couple of basketball posters on the wall.

  “I think we’ve handled everything,” Merja Vainikainen said. “My daughter has a doctor’s appointment in an hour and fifteen minutes, so if you need to speak with me, could we do it first?” This question, which was addressed to me, sounded more like a command.

  “Certainly, as long as Mrs. Vainio has time to wait.” I was guessing at Anneli Vainio’s marital status from the rings she wore. There were three of them on her left ring finger, two narrow gold bands and a flashy diamond ring, presumably an anniversary present.