Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “The whole thing was a farce. I was one of the first ones to start setting up the roadblock, since I happened to be out this way inspecting some graffiti. We had five patrol cars on site and SWAT on the way when Vainikainen drove right over our spike strip. She got out of her car, swearing and waving that round bomb, seemingly unconcerned about all the guns pointing at her. She wasn’t afraid; we were. My heart rate had to have been a hundred and fifty. Vainikainen claimed the bomb was so powerful that if she detonated it, everything within a square kilometer would be vaporized, leaving nothing but a hole in the ground. Of course, we had bomb experts with us, and they said that was bullshit. Vainikainen freaked out because we didn’t believe her and threw the bomb in the air. I took off running like everyone else, but I stopped short when nothing happened and Vainikainen started to laugh like a maniac. The bomb was just a metal part to a washing machine. Is she the one you’ve been after for those murders?”

  I nodded. Liisa looked at me for a moment and then wrapped her arms around me. For a moment we held on to each other as if our lives depended on it, and we didn’t let go until my phone rang.

  The incident commander at the roadblock confirmed that Merja Vainikainen had been arrested and taken to the Espoo police station. As far as I was concerned, she could spend the night in a cell alone. I sent my team a text message notifying them that Vainikainen had been captured and that we were taking the rest of the night off. We would meet as normal at nine a.m.

  Rasilainen and I caught a ride home in car 56. My kids were still awake, and my mother-in-law was with them, because Antti had gone to a concert he’d bought the tickets for weeks earlier. Iida asked about the smell of smoke that clung to my hair and clothes, and Taneli asked if I had time to continue reading Pippi Longstocking to him. We’d left off at a cliff-hanger: Pippi was leaving Tommy and Annika to go to the South Seas. Even though Iida knew how the story went, her lip trembled during the good-bye scene, and Taneli looked terribly serious. I didn’t burst into tears until the part where Pippi decides to stay with her beloved friends.

  My blubbering irritated the kids. I didn’t want to explain that I was weeping more for the events of the past week than the happy ending of the book. After they fell asleep, I stood outside their doors for a long time, just listening. Then I went to wash my hair and hang my clothes to air out.

  We’d tried to find a home where we could see the stars. Venjamin slipped outside after me, and I let him go. He wouldn’t be gone long, because he was afraid of dogs and cars. I waved to the woman next door and her two-year-old daughter, Norppa, who was Venjamin’s greatest admirer. We talked about homeowner’s association business. Thinking about when to hold the last neighborhood cleanup day of the year was relaxing. This was the normal life I wanted to return to.

  I was still awake when Antti got home. He’d gone out with a couple of friends to analyze the concert over a beer. I’d considered drinking some whiskey, but after a sniff I’d decided that it smelled too smoky for this night. I sat in the kitchen with a cup of rooibos tea in front of me, along with a couple of cinnamon sweet rolls thawed out from the freezer. I offered one of them to Antti.

  “Was it a good concert?” I asked. Antti’s answer flowed right past me. He could just as easily have been speaking Croatian or Swahili. I was suddenly starving and thought about making myself a cheese sandwich.

  “How early do you have to get up?” Antti asked after completing his rundown of the concert.

  “Just the usual. I’m almost done. We had a breakthrough, and the perpetrator confessed. She’s in jail now.”

  “You should have told me! That’s fantastic!” Antti hugged me, which was a little awkward because he was standing up. I felt his abs through his black cotton shirt. Thankfully I wasn’t feeling weepy anymore.

  “So no danger this time?” Antti continued. I didn’t elaborate, because I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon. But if Harju and I hadn’t sped out to Porkkala, Mona might be dead now, and Merja might have tried to frame her for the murders. Antti held me tight, and he muttered words of relief into my hair. He had been worried about how I would cope, but he’d still let me make my own choice. I appreciated that immensely.

  Despite the grandiose admissions Merja Vainikainen had made at the vacation home in Porkkala, by the next morning she’d changed her tune. I went to see her with Koivu, and she claimed the whole thing had been a big misunderstanding and that she’d just been distraught because the clinic wouldn’t take Mona. She continued this charade for three days.

  There was enough circumstantial evidence for the district court to remand her for trial. Merja refused to breathe a word without her lawyer, and at first, I handled all the interrogations during business hours, with Koivu as my partner. Ursula and Puupponen worked half days on the Vainikainen-Ristiluoma pretrial investigation, spending the rest of their time on the Violent Crime Unit’s other cases. Soon I began to tire of dealing with arrogant and tight-lipped Merja Vainikainen, in part because she brought out the worst in me. When she claimed that Mona had set fire to the cabin in Porkkala, I had to leave the interrogation room to stop myself from hitting her. Detective Perävaara came to a couple of interrogations, and during those Merja pretended to be completely ignorant about explosives. Pihko interviewed her as well, and to him Merja claimed that she hadn’t heard anything about the Field Sports Fund and only knew Fit & Fun by name.

  “We’re in a tough spot with that one,” Pihko said. “But Kari Laakkonen will talk once we soften him up a little, and maybe he’ll testify against Vainikainen.”

  Merja had been arrested on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, Taskinen was in Tampere at the Police University College, lecturing future squad leaders on leadership skills. On Thursday morning I tried again to get Merja to talk, and when I got sick of it I returned to my office. I found Taskinen hanging around in our conference room.

  “Maria! Congratulations! You caught your woman in record time.”

  Koivu, who’d been just behind me, thought it best to make himself scarce. Ursula and Puupponen had gone to Helsinki to interview Perävaara’s bomb expert, so we had the room to ourselves. Taskinen pulled over a chair for me, and I sat down, waiting for what he had to say. Taskinen hadn’t shaved that morning, and the stubble on his cheeks and jaw was a mixture of gold and silver. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was the color of yeast, as it always was when he hadn’t been sleeping.

  “It turned out to be so simple,” Taskinen said and sat down next to me. “The killer was the next of kin. I feel sorry for Pentti. We were in the same marathoner group in the early nineties. I think you’ll get the silver cross of merit for this. I’m going to file the nomination.”

  “I don’t need medals. I just want to get back to my life.”

  Taskinen put one hand on my shoulder and brought his face so close to mine that I could no longer distinguish between the gold and the gray in his beard.

  “Think carefully, Maria. You’re good at this. Don’t waste your skills.”

  “Good at what? This was all luck. The information just fell in my lap. Anyone could have come to the same conclusion. Someone quicker could have done it before Ristiluoma died.”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. We’re getting praise from a lot of important people. Pentti Vainikainen was a nice guy, but his methods were a little quaint. No one would have wished him such an unpleasant end, but had they known, people wouldn’t have approved of his actions.”

  I remembered all the praise of Pentti Vainikainen I’d heard during the investigation. The acclaim would dissolve quickly when it came out that he hadn’t been playing fair.

  “How many of the people who are complimenting me knew about what was going on at Fit & Fun?”

  “How should I know?” Taskinen replied all too quickly. “Anyway, it’s good everything is now coming to light. Visa Pihko has turned into a top-notch white-collar crime investigator. That boy’s going to go far. By the way, have you eaten? They’re serving pesto chi
cken downstairs. It’s the best thing this kitchen puts out.”

  I was hungry. For appearance’s sake I called Koivu to be our third, and in the end his wife, Anu, joined us, as well as Puupponen when he returned from Helsinki. He was in such a boisterous mood that the rest of us didn’t have to do any talking. I did like these people, and I enjoyed working with them. But the work itself wasn’t what I wanted.

  I took the weekend off. I’d purposefully kept my work phone turned off, but on Sunday morning, the officer on duty in Holding called our landline.

  “Hi, Detective Kallio. Merja Vainikainen is demanding to see you. She says she wants to talk.”

  “Let her wait till tomorrow. I’m taking the day off.”

  “She’s screaming and beating on the door.”

  “I think the door can handle it. I’m going mushrooming with my family.”

  On Monday morning there were messages on my phone from Merja and her lawyer. I never figured out what convinced her to confess. I suspected it might have been as simple as a desire for attention.

  Detective Perävaara and I had issued a terse statement to the media, saying that one person had been arrested for the murder of Vainikainen and Ristiluoma. Most of the reporters were able to draw their own conclusions when they found they couldn’t reach Merja Vainikainen, and the owner of the vacation home in Porkkala was only too happy to accept payment for revealing who his renters had been.

  Because Merja had requested the meeting, I’d assumed that she’d reached her breaking point, but I really didn’t know what to expect. Her hair helmet was backcombed as high as it could be without the hairspray to hold it in place. Her eyes beneath were just as hostile as before, and the faded, oversize prison jumpsuit didn’t make her look the least bit cowed.

  “I asked you here because I finally intend to tell the truth . . .” She paused. “. . . the truth about Pentti, my third husband. I’ve truly never had luck with men. The first was a good-for-nothing dreamer, the second was a bomb-obsessed mercenary, and the third was a complete idiot with money. He invested the wealth I’d worked so hard for in an illegal scam, while I slaved away to pay our mortgage. You can’t imagine what it’s like to work in the sports world, or maybe you can. Is it the same in the police? In speeches the bigwigs always say they want more women in leadership, but in practice we jump from one short-term gig to the next, and we get paid eighty cents for every man’s euro. And, even if you manage to do something important, the men take all the glory. I left the Athletics Federation because if I’d stayed, I would have ended up doing all of Pentti’s work, even as he played the great leader. At Adaptive Sports I could at least try to build my own career, but then Pentti had to ruin it all by getting mixed up in this shady business.”

  That was the beginning of Merja’s three-hour monologue, which I occasionally tried to interrupt with a question. It was pointless—Merja told what she wanted to tell. She was trying to earn my sympathy by blaming Pentti and the patriarchal sports world, but that didn’t account for the fact that she had abused her child and then tried to burn her to death. Or that she’d spiked her husband’s snus with nicotine, as well as added it to the garlic mayonnaise, which just so happened to have been one of Pentti’s favorite foods. She’d pulled the snus out of his mouth while pretending to attempt to revive him. She’d also been the one to suggest that he’d had a heart attack, though she’d known otherwise.

  “Where did the snus pouch from Pentti’s mouth end up?” I was finally able to ask during our third interview the following Tuesday evening.

  “I put it in a napkin in my pocket, then threw it in a trash can on the street,” she said. “I always hated Pentti’s snus habit. That bulging lip was so not sexy, and his teeth were disgusting before he got those veneers. I always said that using snus would cause him trouble, and I was right, wasn’t I?”

  These meetings with Merja Vainikainen were exhausting. She didn’t regret what she’d done. She believed she was entirely justified, and so clever, because she’d thought to grab Jutta’s car keys ahead of time and make a copy. That was why the car alarm didn’t go off when Merja installed the bomb. For Merja it was personally mortifying that the heavy rain had gotten water on the TATP, which delayed the explosion and killed the wrong person. Ristiluoma had weighed sixty pounds more than Jutta, which may have played a role in the late detonation.

  “It was Olli’s fault. He didn’t tell me the stuff isn’t always reliable. If Jutta had died, I never would have been caught. How can I have such fucking bad luck?”

  I tried to understand what had made Merja so vengeful, and I was startled to realize that it was easy for me to label men who behaved the same way simply as psychopaths with no logical reason for their actions, but when it was a woman, I went looking for an external explanation. I decided that I didn’t need to understand Merja. Still I was sure that her lawyer would request a psychological evaluation.

  So far, the Field Sports Fund money was nowhere to be found, and Pihko doubted it would ever be recovered, but the Fit & Fun money launderers had been arrested and would drown under a deluge of charges. Once she’d started talking, Merja Vainikainen seemed happy to tell Pihko everything she knew about their activities. Pihko said that, at first, he’d thought she was being so talkative to lighten her own sentence, but soon he realized that she just enjoyed creating trouble for others. Gradually it also became clear that Merja’s main motivation had been money.

  “Everything I’ve ever had came from hard work. I never inherited anything, and I lost in each divorce,” she said during an interview with me and Pihko. “Pentti thought I didn’t know about the Field Sports Fund money. He left his log-in and password right out in the open. Who will get the money now? It’s mine, do you hear me?”

  Merja had been plotting for a long time. Hiring Jutta Särkikoski at Adaptive Sports had been part of it, and Merja had been the one to restart the death threats. She’d bought several prepaid SIM cards for that purpose. And she’d planned for the death threats to end with Jutta’s death.

  “I don’t have anything against Jutta. Actually, I quite like her. We’ve both been oppressed by stupid men,” Merja said when I questioned her for the last time. “But she happened to fit my plan. She should have been a martyr to Finnish free speech, which would have been an honorable death. Just like I’m a martyr to inequality.”

  “No, you aren’t,” I said. Koivu looked up from the voice recorder. I went on, “If you think that equality means acting like the cowardly men who oppress you, then you have a lot to learn.” For a moment I felt that I’d found my inner Ursula, and it felt good.

  Mona was the only thing Merja wouldn’t talk about, other than to maintain that the girl had set the fire herself. But the fire investigators proved otherwise: The tower room had been locked from the outside, and rags and paper soaked in heating oil had been piled in the hall in front of the door.

  Mona was finally in the eating disorder clinic at Lapinlahti Hospital. Jari Linnakangas had left the Crystal Commune for the time being and was living in an apartment hotel so he could visit her every day. Her recovery would take a long time, years perhaps. Merja had encouraged her daughter’s compulsive eating, to justify her contempt and, ultimately, the abuse. According to Olli Salminen, Merja needed a sense of control and superiority in order to feel powerful. Still it was hard for me to understand what she’d done.

  “Women can be just as cruel as men,” Ursula said. We were sitting in the conference room drinking coffee. “Take me, for example. About once I week I want to kill someone, and I entertain myself by planning how to do it. Thankfully I’m a cop and know there is no such thing as a perfect crime. I’m a pretty smart chick, but even I would get caught in the end. So all the rat bastards in this building are safe.”

  Many times I’d felt like asking Ursula what she intended to do about Puupponen, but so far I’d managed to keep my mouth shut. Maybe Ursula needed to want someone unattainable, and oddly enough that person was our scrawny, red-hair
ed corny joke slinger. Kristian seemed to have disappeared from Ursula’s life, and he faded from my thoughts as well.

  Three weeks after the explosion, I was sitting with Leena and Jutta at Tapani Ristiluoma’s memorial at the Haukilahti Water Tower restaurant. The sea stretched out below us, looking silver-blue and cold. The day was sunny, with some red blazing in the trees. Raking had become part of my nightly routine, serving to get the blood moving in my arms and legs after a day in front of a computer.

  Ristiluoma wasn’t a member of any church, so he’d been cremated in the presence of his nearest relatives. I’d hesitated to come to the memorial service, but Ristiluoma’s sister had asked that I attend. There was no priest to preside, but at least there would be a police officer, albeit one soon to leave the force. The pretrial investigation was nearly complete, and soon I would be able to return to my office in downtown Helsinki. But first I intended to demand some change in protocol for the project.

  “We need to have the authority to track down anonymous sources like the Snork Maiden, like Mona. We can’t treat these people like guinea pigs. Pentti Vainikainen and Tapani Ristiluoma would be alive today if we’d figured out who Mona was and put a stop to Merja Vainikainen,” I’d told Leena as I drove to the memorial.

  “You and Miikka Harju are both so eager to take the blame, you idiots. Merja Vainikainen killed her husband and Ristiluoma. No one made her do it. And people have a right to anonymity. Maybe there could be an exception for minors, but do you really want Big Brother keeping tabs on everyone all the time?” Leena asked. “Sociologists aren’t any more responsible for the lives of the people they study than lawyers are the people they defend. Are you sure you can approach your research objectively?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But don’t start with me. I have no intention of filling in for Anni while she’s on maternity leave, not even if Taskinen comes begging on his knees. I’m going to finish this project and then see what comes up next. I may be able to find some international work through the Police University College. I forgot to tell you—I met with Merja Vainikainen’s second husband, Olli Salminen, when he was on leave. He came to give a statement about Merja’s explosives knowledge. He said that they really need female police officers in Afghanistan, and that means women to train them.”