Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Ursula sighed and wiped her face on a clean paper napkin. “It doesn’t matter. He’s a great guy, but you heard how he wants to make me a housewife.”

  “Kristian ditched me when I started getting better test scores than him. Back then it stung a little, but now it only makes me laugh,” I said. I felt like I was walking on thin ice, where any misstep could mean a sudden plunge into frigid water.

  “He told me a different story. But to hell with him. He’s gone! And besides, the only man I’ve ever really wanted since I’ve been in Espoo is Ville Puupponen!” Ursula burst out laughing. “Isn’t that crazy? Ville’s the only man in the whole department besides your Taskinen who’s never drooled over me. Ville Puupponen!” It sounded like Ursula was slipping toward hysteria. Tomorrow she would regret her admissions, and I would have to pretend I’d never heard it.

  “I’ve always liked Puupponen,” I said lamely, wondering how I could wriggle out of this situation without Ursula feeling she’d lost face. Her cell phone started ringing, with Kristian’s voice as the ringtone. Ursula declined the call and then began tapping through the menus, presumably throwing the ringtone into the digital garbage can.

  “Did you learn anything new at Adaptive Sports?” Ursula asked once she’d finished. When I told her about Miikka Harju’s confession, she whistled.

  “Särkikoski seemed to think the whole world revolves around her!” The old Ursula was back. “But this means we’re back at square one.”

  “Unfortunately. Koivu copied Vainikainen’s computer files onto a USB drive. The machine itself is still in his office. We forgot to get a search warrant to go through it, but we can do that retroactively. Vainikainen didn’t seem to be any cryptographic genius. His password was his wife’s name. I thought I might take a look at his files before I go home.”

  I’d never been to the sauna with Ursula, or in any other setting where she might be without her mask of makeup. Now that mask was cracked, though her lips were still perfectly glossed. She gave a cautious smile.

  “I can do it. I don’t have anything else to do. You go home to your kids since you have them, you lucky bitch!”

  “Are you sure you’ll be OK?”

  “I’d love to have something to distract me from my life right now,” Ursula replied. “Get going already! What time is the meeting in the morning?”

  “Nine. OK, I’m going. Thank you!” I grabbed my coat from my office, and when I returned to the conference room, Ursula was already immersed in the exploration of the memory sticks and only muttered a vague response to my good night.

  As I walked home, I thought about what had just happened. The fact that I now understood Ursula better wasn’t going to make our working relationship any easier. Her inability to have children didn’t justify her periodic peevishness. And what had she said about Puupponen? I would have liked to gossip with Koivu, but unfortunately, I would have to keep my mouth shut.

  At home dinner was still on the table, since Antti’s sister had dropped in unexpectedly and thrown off the family’s schedule. I enjoyed my husband’s homemade macaroni casserole with saffron milk cap mushrooms while listening to Taneli’s description of his art class, in which he’d traced the shapes of fallen leaves on paper and then colored the outlines in with hues not usually found in nature. Taneli was scandalized that someone named Sissi had only used green. “I had at least three colors on every leaf!” he told me.

  We were all tired, so we went to bed early to read Pippi. The book was one from my childhood, and the covers had been taped multiple times and bore my sister Helena’s attempts at coloring in the pictures. The result was a mess that Taneli found especially amusing. Iida stroked Venjamin, who was curled up on her stomach, and I could feel her warmth on my right side and Taneli’s on my left. He leaned against me, breathing straight into my ear. This was pure joy. Fortunately, we weren’t at the book’s emotional final scene, which I wouldn’t be able to read without crying—Iida and Taneli hated that. Instead, Pippi was shipwrecked and sending messages in bottles. I read Pippi’s lines, familiar from my own childhood:

  “Let’s see,” said Pippi, thinking hard.

  “Write: Save us before we perish! For two days we have pined away without snuff on this island.”

  “Pippi, we can’t—”

  “Mommy, what’s snuff?” Taneli asked.

  “It’s gross stuff that’s worse than cigarettes but doesn’t stink. People put it in their mouths,” Iida explained. “You’ve seen it at practice, when Julia’s dad’s upper lip looks all fat. That’s because he uses it, even though it’s illegal.”

  I realized that I hadn’t asked if Pentti Vainikainen used snuff. I’d asked about smoking, but snuff hadn’t even crossed my mind, even though Swedish snus and American snuff were common in the sports world. Was it possible that the excess nicotine dose had been from snuff or snus, in addition to the sandwich spread?

  I had to force myself to keep reading. Once the children were asleep, I looked up the autopsy report on my computer. I’d skipped past the damage to Pentti Vainikainen’s oral membranes, because I thought they were a result of the poisoning. Regular use of snus could cause the same kind of damage. Yellow teeth were another common side effect. Vainikainen had recently gotten dental veneers.

  Snus tasted of nicotine, so maybe someone wouldn’t immediately notice an extra dose. The poison in the sandwich had just been a ruse. The real target of the first homicide had been Pentti Vainikainen.

  19

  The next morning, I woke up before the rest of the family as usual. In the bright light of day, I wasn’t as sure of my theory as I had been the night before. I turned on the coffee maker and then padded outside with Venjamin, me to get the paper, him to sniff the autumn air. He’d been so happy to leave our high-rise apartment for a place where he could come and go as he pleased. He ran off into the neighbor’s yard, and I tried in vain to lure him back. The sun was shining for once, and my face looked tired in the entryway mirror.

  I could hardly taste my breakfast and had to force myself to eat. As I was brushing my teeth, any contact of the brush with the roof of my mouth triggered my gag reflex.

  On the walk to work I considered the possibility that extra nicotine had been slipped into Vainikainen’s snus. It seemed possible to inject a snus pouch with a syringe. Thinking about this felt strange on such a beautiful fall morning, as the last wagtails chirped their good-byes, and a Jack Russell terrier pup chased leaves in its yard before trying to follow me to the police station. I told it to stay home, and unlike Venjamin, it obeyed me.

  First thing at our morning meeting I told my team my nicotine theory. I’d been afraid of how Ursula would react to seeing me, but she acted as if our conversation the previous evening had never occurred.

  “We should look at the pictures and videos from the campaign launch event again,” she suggested. “Maybe one of them will show Vainikainen with snus in his lip. That won’t prove anything, but it would confirm your suspicions.”

  Ursula fetched the binder with the pictures and handed it to Puupponen, who flipped through the pages as she set up the DVD player and turned on the TV. Pentti Vainikainen only showed up occasionally in the pictures, since he hadn’t been the most important person at the event. We all examined the still shots, but none of us could spot a bump under his upper lip. Puupponen finally began inspecting them with a magnifying glass.

  “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” Ursula said, but she stopped laughing when Puupponen gasped. “Look at that!”

  Vainikainen was only half an inch tall in the picture, but with the aid of the magnifying glass, we could make out a bulge in his cheek. “It could just be tongue in cheek,” Puupponen said.

  “You’re killing today, Ville,” Ursula said dryly. “Why don’t we ask his wife or coworkers?”

  According to the autopsy report, Vainikainen’s internal organs hadn’t shown signs of long-term smoking. However, gum recession, one of the side effects of long-term snus usage,
had been mentioned. I looked up Merja Vainikainen’s number on my cell phone.

  “Is there news?” she asked eagerly after a perfunctory hello.

  “Not exactly, just a small question. Did Pentti use snus?”

  Merja Vainikainen went silent for a moment. In the background I could hear the sound of traffic. Apparently she was walking on a busy street. “Why do you ask?”

  “In a homicide investigation, everything is important.” I heard the screeching of a streetcar and honking horns, and Merja Vainikainen must have had a difficult time hearing me, because she practically shouted her response.

  “Yes, unfortunately Pentti did use snus occasionally. He learned the habit from his first wife, who was Swedish. I couldn’t stand it, especially not what it did to his teeth. He promised to quit, but I think he may have continued doing it in secret sometimes, hiding it from me like a teenager hiding from his mom. At least I was able to convince him to get some veneers. His teeth were this horrible yellow, and it was completely unprofessional for a person of his stature in the sporting world. Is there anything else? I need to get on the tram, and I don’t want to broadcast my personal business to the other passengers.”

  When I didn’t reply immediately, Merja Vainikainen hung up. Koivu was on another call, apparently asking Vainikainen’s coworkers about the snuff use. He received the same answer I had: Pentti Vainikainen occasionally used Swedish-style snus. He usually kept one or two pouches in a small metal container, which he carried in his breast pocket.

  “So where did the pouch from his mouth end up? It wasn’t mentioned in the autopsy report,” Ursula said.

  “He must have spat it into the trash, and now it’s in the same place as all the other MobAbility garbage,” Puupponen said. “Or his wife pulled it out of his mouth when she started CPR. Did she mention anything like that?”

  “No.” I pressed the callback button on my phone, but this time Merja Vainikainen didn’t answer. The call went to voice mail, and I left a message asking her to get in touch with me as soon as possible.

  “The spouse is always the first suspect,” Ursula said, stating the obvious. “But why would Merja Vainikainen want to kill her husband? Or Ristiluoma or Jutta? I thought they were supposed to be a happy couple, although you never can know how it is behind closed doors. Vainikainen sent his wife sappy love e-mails, even though they worked in the same building. I almost tossed my cookies when I read them.”

  My phone rang, and the number was vaguely familiar. A bright but businesslike female voice greeted me.

  “This is Kirsti Grotenfelt. You asked me to call you when I got back from vacation. What the heck are you doing back in the department? Isn’t Anni Kuusimäki supposed to be running homicide investigations now?”

  “Yes, she is. This is only temporary. But your timing is impeccable, because we were just wondering about a couple of things in Pentti Vainikainen’s autopsy report. The mucous membranes in his mouth showed signs of chemical burns, presumably because he died of nicotine poisoning. Would it be possible for snus to cause that?”

  I could hear Kirsti Grotenfelt tapping at her keyboard. She’d taken over a few years earlier from “Carcass” Kervinen, the previous medical examiner, after his suicide. I’d been elsewhere for most of that time, so I didn’t know Grotenfelt or her approach very well. We’d only worked together on one homicide case, which I’d thought was the last of my police career.

  “Wait, here are the details . . . The burns were concentrated on the roof of the palate and the right cheek. Yes, this does look like a snus lesion. I’ll look over everything more closely and then get back to you. This is what happens when I leave for a couple of days—everything turns to chaos. I was only away for a long weekend in Venice. It’s still full-on summer there.”

  Kirsti Grotenfelt’s original training was as a physician, but now she was studying the dead rather than healing the living. I wondered whether I should ask her about my nausea symptoms. I’d checked my IUD the previous night, and it was right where it was supposed to be, so pregnancy couldn’t be the cause. But my subordinates were listening, and asking Kirsti about my personal ailments while we were both on the clock wasn’t appropriate anyway. I would go to the doctor once I’d wrapped up this investigation.

  “Have you heard from Helsinki?” Puupponen asked, and I realized that I needed to inform Perävaara of the new turns the case had taken. That could wait until our meeting was done. Fortunately, the daily papers’ news of the homicides had already shrunk to a couple of columns that basically said there was no new information.

  “Did Vainikainen’s files contain anything more interesting than love notes to Merja?” I asked Ursula.

  “It was mostly business. But I have to point out that Koivu isn’t the world’s most competent computer user. There was one interesting folder named Finnish Field Sports Fund, which was password protected. What could that be? Google didn’t have anything on it.”

  “It’s just some coaching foundation. I found it too,” Koivu said indignantly.

  “That’s the only file Vainikainen bothered to secure?”

  “Yes. Should I check with someone at the Athletics Federation?” Ursula said.

  “Call after the meeting,” I said. Ursula continued her description of Vainikainen’s files, but the rest of them weren’t of much interest. He wouldn’t have stored any big secrets on a work computer that was open to everyone, however, and Koivu had already done a superficial search of Vainikainen’s home computer.

  “The next step is to talk to Vainikainen’s friends, relatives, and former teachers,” I finally said in frustration. “But let’s finish up what we’ve started first. Is there anything new on the threatening calls to Jutta?”

  “Koskelo is the only hit. Are you going to end Särkikoski’s protection?” Puupponen asked.

  “Of course not. The bomb was in her car.”

  “So now all we have to do is find the person who wanted to get rid of both Vainikainen and Särkikoski. Maybe he thought that a smaller amount of poison would work on Jutta, since she didn’t smoke or chew,” Puupponen said. “Maybe he thought he could get rid of both of them at the campaign launch, where there were lots of people and—”

  “Ville, come on. Are you saying he was willing to kill bystanders? There was a huge risk of someone besides Särkikoski eating one of those sandwiches,” Ursula said, interrupting.

  “We already know he’s a risk-taker. A gambler. Isn’t that what your profiling training said?”

  “Usually a perpetrator like this is extremely arrogant and believes he can’t fail,” Ursula admitted. “Only two names come to mind, and they don’t seem to fit the profile: Väärä and Koskelo. Koskelo did make that threatening call. But he wouldn’t have put his own protégé in danger. We only have Väärä’s word that he didn’t agree to the biomedical training program Vainikainen offered. Could Jutta be protecting Väärä?”

  That idea kept running through my mind as I closed myself in my office and tried to reach Perävaara. His cell phone went to voice mail, and when I tried to get in touch with him through the Helsinki Police Department switchboard, they said he was out of the building. So I sent him a text asking him to call me. It felt like most of my work was trying to contact people and failing. Then I checked in on Jutta at the hospital. The head nurse told me that she was ready to be released.

  Before that could happen, I needed to find a safe place for Jutta to stay until we had the killer behind bars. I would prefer to keep her where she was, but Töölö Hospital needed the bed. Maintaining a guard at Jutta’s home would be difficult, especially if the guard was a man, and it would also attract unwanted attention. The head nurse gave us until noon the next day to figure it out.

  After hanging up, I e-mailed Taskinen about the issue. Finland didn’t have as extensive a witness protection program as a bigger country like the United States, but we had a few safe houses, which we naturally didn’t mention in the media. With Taskinen’s unlimited budget, we mig
ht be able to get her a spot.

  Just as I hit send, Perävaara called. I told him it looked like Vainikainen had been the intended victim of the first killing.

  “Can we meet?” Perävaara said. “I can come out to Espoo for a change. We’re still investigating the explosive, and we still aren’t sure whether it was put together by an amateur or a professional. The terrorism and explosives group has been pounding the pavement all weekend, but all the usual suspects have been quiet. Either no one knows anything, or we’re dealing with someone everyone is afraid of. And I don’t want anyone like that in my city.”

  I heard someone enter the conference room and my colleagues greet them enthusiastically. Then a knock came at the door.

  “Enter,” I said, and Visa Pihko walked in.

  “What brought you here?” I stood up to shake Pihko’s hand, and he pulled me into the conference room with him. I was a little surprised, but then he explained.

  “I told you I was working on a big money-laundering case. We’ve made some progress, and it looks like our investigations overlap. The intersection is Pentti Vainikainen, or rather the Finnish Field Sports Fund, of which he was the chairman.”

  “I just spent two hours trying to crack the password on that file folder!” Ursula exclaimed. “I was about to give up and send it to IT. What is the Field Sports Fund?” She glared at Pihko, who had left our department before she came on board. They probably hadn’t met before. She didn’t seem to be testing her powers of attraction on him.

  Pihko sat down in the free chair next to Ursula and took a moment to get comfortable. He paused for dramatic effect. I remained standing and stretched nonchalantly, though I was excited too.

  “I’ll give you a brief outline. One of our suspected money-laundering sites is a luxury fitness club called Fit & Fun, east of the Market Square in Helsinki. It’s a private club, and to get in you have to have the recommendation of two members. The club has a gym and some aerobics classes, a couple of saunas, a swimming pool, hot tubs, and a bar and restaurant. The gym and the restaurant have great views of the sea. It’s a pretty sweet place. The owners have previously been accused of pimping, but the charge was dropped for lack of evidence, and up until now the club has managed to pass all of its audits. The last time they were audited, however, the investigators looked a little more closely. It appears that Fit & Fun not only helps its members with their health and nutrition, it also helps them meet their sexual needs, as well as providing supplements and even drugs to the ones who want them.”