Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall

by Jarkko Sipila

  WEDNESDAY

  NOVEMBER 26

  CHAPTER 7

  PASILA POLICE HEADQUARTERS

  WEDNESDAY, 8:50 A.M.

  A fluorescent light was flickering in the VCU’s windowless conference room at the Pasila Headquarters. Though the room could accommodate up to twenty cops, it was largely empty now: only Mikko Kulta, Anna Joutsamo and Kirsi Kohonen were present. Various documents and newspapers were spread out on the table. In the adjacent kitchenette, the coffeemaker purred. Takamäki had called Joutsamo to set up a meeting for 9:00 A.M. sharp.

  “Mikko, can you do something about that?” Joutsamo said, pointing at the flickering light.

  “You mean call building maintenance?”

  “No, like now.”

  “Of course. Did you know, by the way, that the minister of the interior has set an objective of making Finland the safest country in Europe?” Kulta announced, getting up. “The plan is based on a skilled, helpful, trustworthy, cooperative, and efficiently organized police force.”

  He climbed up on the table. “So I’ll take a bold step toward accomplishing that goal by fixing this light bulb.”

  Joutsamo and Kohonen watched their colleague with gaping mouths.

  Kulta continued. “You know, this lightbulb business reminds me of that case in Malminkartano. We got a tip about a possible body in an apartment building and went to check it out.”

  He pried the translucent cover loose. “It was a strange place. The windows were covered up with black cardboard, and all the lights were out. Just one of those dim night-lights in the corner.”

  A cloud of dust descended from the fixture onto the conference table. “Well, we had our flashlights, but you can’t do a proper investigation only with them. We did find the decayed corpse of an older woman, though. The ceiling fixtures had no bulbs, so we had to go to the store to buy a couple packs. Once we screwed those bulbs in place, we could finally get things underway.”

  He held the cover in his other hand and worked the bulb loose. The flickering stopped.

  “Thank you,” Joutsamo said.

  “What was the deal with the older woman?” Kohonen asked.

  “She had some kind of light sensitivity disorder, and had been holed up in that cave for decades. Meals on Wheels had been bringing food to her… Except for them, nobody cared…” Kulta said, fastening the cover back in place.

  Kohonen interrupted. “Well, at least the police cared enough to come and figure out the cause of death.”

  Kulta hopped back onto the floor and set the burnt out bulb onto the table. “I can’t remember the cause of death anymore, but it’s a hell of a sad story.”

  “What’s a hell of a sad story?” Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamäki asked, stepping into the room. Suhonen was right behind him.

  “My paycheck,” Kulta said flatly.

  “Well, today you can earn every penny,” Takamäki replied. “Let’s grab some coffee and get started.”

  A few minutes later, they were back, each with a steaming cup of coffee. The lieutenant sat at the head of the table, as usual. Kulta, Kohonen, and Suhonen were on his right side, and Anna Joutsamo on his left.

  Forty-five-year-old Takamäki wore a gray sport coat, blue tie, and a white shirt. He had short brown hair, which he combed to the left, an angular face, and slightly sunken cheeks. His straight nose was straddled by piercing blue eyes. VCU cops had a saying that seeing a hundred corpses made your eyes callous. Takamäki had doubled that number a long time ago.

  “Okay, let’s run through the case first, so everyone’s on the same page.”

  Kohonen interrupted, “Just the five of us working on this?”

  “Don’t you trust my detective prowess?” Kulta joked.

  “I don’t. This is a homicide, not a property crime,” Joutsamo shot back. She had already done some preliminary work on the case.

  Takamäki was puzzled by the exchange, but decided to get back on course. “We’ll get help later on, I’ll brief them when they get here. Suhonen, you want to start?”

  Suhonen nodded. “Yeah… One of my informants brought the case to my attention last night. He told me that a certain Jerry Eriksson was rumored to have been killed and gave me a lead on a possible location.”

  “How’d he know about it?” Joutsamo asked.

  “Good question,” Suhonen said. “I asked, but he didn’t say.”

  “Okay,” Joutsamo jotted down some notes.

  “Jerry?” Kulta said, curious about the English name. “What Jerry?”

  “Baptized as Jerry, toe-tagged as Jerry,” Suhonen said, paused, and then continued. “Anyway. The coordinates I got were pretty vague. After the meeting, I decided to search the area around the Pakila Teboil station. According to the tip, it was possible the body was in an abandoned house. It took a few hours, but by about three in the morning, I stumbled on the right garage. There was a body there alright.”

  “Was it Eriksson?” Kohonen asked.

  “Presumably, but no positive ID yet. I only had my flashlight, but I was able to determine it was a corpse, not a mannequin.”

  Kulta interjected, “Those flashlights can come in handy.”

  “What?” Takamäki furrowed his brow.

  “Nothing,” Kulta said. “Go ahead, Suhonen.”

  Suhonen took a sip of coffee. “Anyway, the body was lying there, so I checked it to make sure he was dead. I tried to disturb the area as little as possible so Forensics would have a clean crime scene. I called in for a cruiser to seal off the garage, and Kannas’ techies got there around six in the morning, isn’t that right?”

  Takamäki nodded.

  “What kind of place was this?” Joutsamo asked.

  “It’s an old abandoned one-story farm house with a separate garage. There’s all kinds of junk in the yard, and walls full of graffiti. I don’t know who owns it, but clearly nobody has lived there for a while,” Suhonen said.

  “Was he killed there in the garage, or moved from someplace else?” Kulta asked.

  Suhonen shrugged. “My guess is he was killed there, but Forensics can make the final call.”

  “We have confirmation from Kannas that the guy was dead, and that nobody was in the house,” Takamäki said. “He thought he’d have more info by noon.”

  “Sounds like they’re using a slow approach. Good,” Joutsamo remarked. In forensics, a slow approach meant that the investigators don’t just bolt over to the body. Instead, every inch of the floor is studied systematically as they approach the body, so that all evidence in the room is recorded without contamination.

  Takamäki let Joutsamo continue.

  “Okay, for now we’re going to presume that the victim is, in fact, this Jerry Eriksson. I took a look at his record.”

  Joutsamo took several printouts of Eriksson’s mug shot from her stack of papers and passed them around. His face was narrow, his hair tousled. His gaze was vacant, as in most police photos.

  “This Eriksson seems to be one of these fast money guys. Twenty-seven years old and lived in Helsinki. We even found an address in Kannelmäki. He was a typical modern con man who knew how to use technology to his benefit. Back in 2000 or so, he had his own cluster of companies involved in charity fraud, as well as some other businesses, like selling cellphone games and ringtones. I’m not sure whether Eriksson was fronting for somebody else or if those were actually his own deals. At any rate, the charity frauds earned him a year and a half in the spring of ’06.”

  “That kind of guy usually has plenty of enemies,” Kulta interjected.

  “I haven’t had time to check on any of his known associates yet,” Joutsamo added. “We also found some older, minor drug charges, and a few fraud convictions. Then there’s this tidbit from Suhonen’s source about the possibility of Eriksson being a Customs nark.”

  “Aha,” said Kulta.

  “That would constitute a motive for murder. He was shot, wasn’t he?” Joutsamo looked at Suhonen.

  Suhonen nodd
ed. “Bullet hole in the forehead, not sure from how far away. Forensics or the medical examiner will give us an estimated time of death. It wasn’t a very fresh kill, though, I’d say two or three days ago, max.”

  “Okay,” Joutsamo said. “This garage doesn’t seem like the kind of place where one ends up accidentally. We can assume that Eriksson plus the shooter, at a minimum, were in the garage. Seems reasonable to assume that Eriksson was either lured there on purpose or then they had some deal that went bad all of a sudden.”

  “How reliable is this ‘nark’ allegation?” Kulta asked.

  “Just word on the street, though it came from the same source as the one about the body.”

  Kulta nodded. “Why did the killer leave the body there?” he wondered. “Obviously, if you leave it someplace like that, sooner or later someone’s going to find it.”

  “Good point,” Takamäki said.

  Joutsamo continued, “On top of that, how did word get out so quickly? Maybe the body was supposed to be found…like someone wanted to send a message. Suhonen’s source could be complicit in that.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not at that level,” said Suhonen.

  “Plus, why would he have come to the police himself?” Kulta pointed out.

  Takamäki cleared his throat. “Right, we can speculate endlessly on these issues, but first we need some hard facts,” he said.

  “Never assume,” Kulta said, smiling. He had heard that from Takamäki dozens of times.

  “Well said, Mikko. You’ve got the mind of a true cop—a traffic cop,” the detective lieutenant grinned. “Let’s start by digging up everything we can about Eriksson. I want a comprehensive background check. Anna, dig deeper into his history and track down his phone numbers so we can determine his friends and contacts. Stay in touch with Kannas, too. I’d think Jerry would’ve been carrying a cellphone.”

  “Okay,” said Joutsamo.

  “Mikko, check out Eriksson’s apartment in Kannelmäki.”

  Kulta nodded.

  “And Kirsi,” Takamäki turned toward Kohonen. “You take Pakila, see if any of the residents or businesses there have seen or heard anything. Suhonen, if you’re not too tired, try to figure out who Eriksson has been hanging out with lately.”

  They stood up.

  “I’ll go talk to Customs,” Takamäki said. “Our next meeting is at two P.M. By then we should have more information from Kannas, too.”

  “Kind of a tough case,” Kulta added.

  “Naah,” Joutsamo grinned. “These murder cases just solve themselve, right? Just wait for a cruiser to drop off the killer for a confession.”

  Usually that wasn’t too far from the truth, she thought. Finland was home to one of the top per capita homicide rates in Western Europe, but most slayings were the result of intoxicated drug and alcohol addicts solving their disputes with whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Sometimes the perpetrators called the police themselves to blubber a confession. At other times, they were too intoxicated to notice the death until morning.

  Professional hit men didn’t stop in to confess. They were good, though rarely perfect, at covering their tracks. As a result, contract hits consumed extraordinary amounts of police time. This one appeared to be one of them, Joutsamo surmised.

  * * *

  Jouko Nyholm had a headache. That wasn’t especially unusual. He had taken a couple 400mg capsules of ibuprofen, but this time they didn’t seem to be working.

  Customs Inspector Nyholm sat in his office at the Board of Customs on Erottaja. The building, originally designed by Theodore Höijer in 1891, was known as the Kaleva House, named after the life insurance company. The rooms were spacious, but Nyholm felt claustrophobic. He took off his thin-rimmed spectacles to clean the lenses.

  The Board of Customs employed nearly four hundred people, of which about seventy were involved in enforcement. Nyholm worked in the crime prevention group, which looked for intel on illicit shipments and coordinated the information with customs inspectors on the ground.

  Nyholm was perfect for the job because he knew how to bring people and things together. His forte was things, but his weakness people—at least when it came to those closest to him.

  Forty-five years old, Nyholm had short-cut hair, already turning gray at the temples. Gray was also the color of his suit, which he wore only for work. He had two of them, in case one needed dry cleaning. Amazingly, even after twenty-plus years, his wife continued to wash his shirts, though he wasn’t sure how much longer that would last. Beyond laundry, he didn’t have much of a relationship with her. Their daughter was already eighteen, so the inevitable divorce shouldn’t cause the kind of undue emotional burden that it would in a younger child. His relationship with Kristiina was not in good shape either. The girl brought her laundry home for washing and sat to eat at dinner, but that was about it. So at least in some sense, father and daughter were cut from the same cloth.

  Nyholm knew his job inside and out. Did anything else matter? Hell, this headache mattered. He shouldn’t have downed those last couple shots of whiskey last night, but why cry about it now.

  He had more work than he could ever handle. Over a million semi-trucks passed from Finland to Russia every year. It was impossible to track the sheer volume of imports and exports. And how would they know whether someone was giving false information? The real owners of the exporting, forwarding, and shipping companies also commonly hid behind fronts. The paper trails of these Russian and Finnish import-export companies often led to offshore tax havens: the Isle of Man and Guernsey in the UK, and even some obscure island nations in the Caribbean.

  The incidents of fraud were numbered in the thousands, but investigators were numbered in the tens. The scams were always connected to money: Russian Customs could easily be tricked by double-invoicing for goods. The documents listed a lower value for the imported goods to avoid customs and taxes. Often, the Finnish companies willing to double-bill received a piece of the action. Another method was to alter the contents of the shipment: flat-screen televisions magically turned into socks, and laptops into toothbrushes.

  Plenty of scammers, but only a few watchdogs—according to this equation, the watchdogs had plenty to watch, and the scammers plenty to scam. Nyholm knew he had a shitty job. It was only as good as he was willing to make it, and he was only as good at it as he needed to be. He didn’t care to be perfect.

  Nyholm got up. He had the sudden urge to wash his face with cold water. Whiskey, the wife, the daughter and the headache were hardly problems at all.

  He heard footsteps approaching in the hallway: 270 pounds were enough to wobble the piles of paper on Nyholm’s desk. He tried to improve his posture, shifting papers to look busy.

  Leif Snellman appeared in the doorway. He was a large man with a crew-cut. His only other remarkable feature was his nose, which was far too small in relation to his broad face.

  “Damnit Nyholm,” Snellman growled in a low voice. “I need that report from last month for the noon meeting. Hurry up,” he said and disappeared without waiting for a response.

  That didn’t bother Nyholm at all. As long as Snellman had left.

  CHAPTER 8

  KANNELMÄKI SHOPPING CENTER WEDNESDAY, 11:20 A.M.

  A large, red-brick building sat behind the run-down Kannelmäki shopping center, a strip mall in North Helsinki. The four-story apartment building was long, with four entrances leading into separate stairwells. Detective Mikko Kulta shook his head. Had it been built vertically, as in most capitals, the City of Helsinki wouldn’t always have to seize more land from its neighbors.

  A year ago, he had gone to look at a small studio nearby. But on his salary, it would be impossible to get a mortgage even for such a small pad. Either he’d have to find a rich woman to marry, or continue to rent.

  Kulta had left his unmarked Ford Mondeo next to the strip mall. On the east side, the single-story mall bore the bare aesthetic of the late fifties, and on the south side, the land dip
ped down, making room for two levels. A cement staircase cut through the center of the mall. In front of a body shop on the lower level were a half-dozen cars, each waiting its turn.

  Kulta spotted a blue maintenance van in front of staircase B. Though the distance to the door was only ninety feet or so, he pulled up the zipper on his blue fleece jacket. The rain had stopped, but the wind had picked up—thin clouds skirted swiftly across the sky. Earlier in the morning, the sun had peeked out at least briefly.

  Kulta thought about his upcoming basketball practice—he’d have to skip it. Duty would devour his free time, as usual. Debris from a tall grove of birches littered the pavement.

  When he reached the van, the maintenance guy was nowhere in sight, so Kulta banged on the side panel. A narrow-faced man in his fifties scrambled into the driver’s seat. He wore blue overalls and a black cap, from which tufts of messy gray hair stuck out.

  Kulta noticed a scar on his left cheek. It had been poorly cared for, making it a distinctive feature. He wondered what kind of colorful past he’d find if he looked into the guy’s record.

  “Hello,” Kulta said, “I’m from the VCU.”

  “You wanna show me a badge?” the man replied dryly.

  Kulta dug his wallet out of his side pocket and removed a small plastic card. It had the same blue and white colors as an ordinary Finnish ID card.

  The maintenance man squinted at it for a long time, then nodded. “Alright. Just standard procedure.”

  “Let’s go. Staircase B, second floor.”

  The front door was unlocked, and Kulta entered first. The stairwell smelled musty. Two strollers were parked at the base of the stairs. Kulta took the stairs two at a time; the maintenance man struggled to keep up.

  “What’s the hurry?” he panted.

  “Just standard procedure,” Kulta remarked flatly and pointed to a tan door. The name on the mail slot read Sainio, but according to Kulta’s information, it was occupied, or rather had been, by Jerry Eriksson.