I closed my eyes and waited.
8
“Tapani Lehtinen?”
I opened my eyes.
“If you’re reporting a theft, robbery, or assault, take a number at the first window.”
Harri Jaatinen was amazingly similar in person to the way he seemed in the news clips—just as tall and chiseled as he was in those painful close-ups. I got up and shook his hand. He was quite a bit older than me—nearer to sixty than fifty, with dark gray at his temples, in his mustache, and in his eyes. He reminded me of Dr. Phil, the American psychologist on the old television show. But it took only a few words of conversation to easily distinguish where Dr. Phil ended and Inspector Jaatinen began. Where Dr. Phil would have coaxed and flattered with artificial empathy, Jaatinen’s tone was dry, gruff, and unapologetic. It was impossible to imagine that voice dithering, sentimental, or fawning—it was a voice made for pronouncements, statements of fact. His handshake was the same: straightforward and professional.
I instinctively touched the bandage on my ear. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might seem to be my reason for being here. I shook my head.
“I’m here about the Healer. I believe my wife, the journalist Johanna Lehtinen, has been in touch with you about the case.”
Jaatinen seemed to remember and understand immediately what I was talking about. He switched his weight from one leg to the other.
“That case and many others,” he said, and I couldn’t quite tell from his expression whether he was pleased and faintly smiling, or vexed by the memory. Then he said, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”
The coffee was acrid, but warm. The stark room contained a desk, two chairs, and Jaatinen’s computer.
I quickly told him everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours: Johanna’s disappearance, how I had found out about her investigation, and, of course, my own investigations, which had resulted in the bandage on my ear, a back that was black and blue, and a crazy theory about waves on the seashore.
“Johanna’s a good reporter,” Jaatinen said. “She’s been a lot of help to us.” His voice didn’t rise or fall and had no shades of color or tone. He didn’t take sides or make commitments. But it was a surprisingly pleasant voice to listen to. “As you no doubt know, we’re short of staff at the moment. I’m sure you understand that I can’t spare any staff to search for your wife. Or for anyone else.”
“That’s not what I’m looking for,” I said. “I want to know more about the Healer, because that’s how I can find Johanna.”
Jaatinen shook his head sharply.
“That’s not at all certain.”
“It’s all I’ve got. And the police have nothing to lose, whether I find her or not. In any case, you’ll have one more man investigating the murders. Everybody wins.”
Jaatinen measured me with a glance and didn’t answer right away. Maybe he was calculating my trustworthiness, or comparing me in his mind to the thousand other people offering or asking for help that he must run across in his profession. I sat in my chair and tried to look as forthright as possible, tried to look like I’d be a lot of help to him. The bandage on my ear probably didn’t reinforce that impression.
“We have DNA tests from only some of the cases because the lab is overbooked and understaffed, and the equipment is starting to wear out. Anyway, there are DNA tests from the most recent case, the murder in Eira. What I’m about to tell you is absolutely confidential until you hear otherwise. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Johanna was a great help to us, and to me particularly, in solving those kidnappings three years ago.”
He took a sip of coffee and glanced at his cup with a satisfied look. I was perplexed, and tasted mine again. It was almost undrinkable.
“We have one suspect, the same person who’s suspected in the first murder, the one in Tapiola. We got a DNA sample in that case, too, and we even got it to the lab for testing, which happens less and less nowadays.”
He took another mouthful of coffee. He was enjoying his so much that he was willingly lingering over it before swallowing.
“So. We compared the samples to the national DNA bank and got a name. There was only one problem.”
His gray-blue eyes shone in the poorly lit room. He looked all of a sudden like he was sitting much closer to me than I’d realized. Either that or the room around us had shrunk and the walls were pushing us closer together.
“The man in question died in the flu epidemic five years ago.”
“OK,” I said after a little pause, trying my best to make myself comfortable in the suddenly confined space.
He put his coffee down and pushed it away from him, dropped his gaze to his elbows leaning on the desk, and scooted them forward, too. If the desk had been a living thing it would have been crying in pain.
“The suspect was about to graduate from medical school. Pasi Tarkiainen. Died at home.”
“So?”
Jaatinen’s expression was unchanged, and the pitch of his voice remained the same. Apparently he was used to explaining things to people slower than himself.
“So we have a dead medical student who left traces of himself that were found on the victims,” he said. “And he may be using the name ‘the Healer.’”
“There must be some explanation.”
He seemed to be of the same opinion; an indentation appeared between his lower lip and the tip of his outstretched chin that seemed to say: Exactly. Quite. That is the point.
“Of course there is. But we don’t have enough investigators to find out what it is. We had three detectives officially resign yesterday, and one of them was assigned to this case. Last week two of my employees didn’t come to work, and it looks like they’re gone for good, since they took their weapons with them but left their security passes. And this bunch has a calling for the job—I can only imagine what the situation’s like in other departments.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk a few times and sharpened his gaze.
“All our time goes to recording new cases. There’s no time for investigation because new, and worse, cases are constantly arriving. We go as fast as we can and we’re still at square one. It’s no wonder people give up. Maybe I should leave, too, while I still can. But where would I go? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“Did Johanna know about this?” I asked. “About Pasi Tarkiainen?”
Jaatinen leaned back and sized me up again, me and the whole situation.
“Probably not. Unless she found out through her own research. Our department’s not as airtight as it used to be. After all, here I am talking to you. But did she know? I don’t think she knew.”
I shifted my position in the chair, trying to throw my left leg over my right, but the pain in my lower back stopped me like a wall. It was as if someone had taken a screwdriver directly to the nerve. I let out a squeak and put the leg back where it was before.
“Do you know who they were?” Jaatinen asked.
“The ones who clobbered me?”
He nodded. In a friendly way this time, I thought. I shrugged. It was of absolutely no importance, I thought. “If I had to guess, I’d say they were from some private security company, paid professional sadists. There are still people living in those houses, and they can afford to pay someone to keep the place clean.”
“The only sector that’s growing,” Jaatinen said. “We’ve had a lot of people defect. They want to try to earn enough to go north. But the space up there isn’t unlimited. And life up north can’t be much easier or more delightful than it is here.”
I had to get the discussion back on track. I was looking for Johanna, not pondering convulsions in the labor market.
“Let’s assume that you could investigate the Healer and Tarkiainen,” I said. “Where would you begin?”
Jaatinen seemed to have expected this question. He didn’t think for even a second before saying, “I’d look for Tarkiainen. Dead or not.”
“How?” I asked.
“With the information you have, some instinct, and a bit of luck. You’ll need all of it. The evidence indicates that Tarkiainen is alive. Somewhere there are people who know him. I’d be surprised if they weren’t right around the corner. I have a feeling the killer knows the areas he’s active in very well. The same would apply to the people around him. I would look for old friends of his—workmates, neighbors, golf buddies, kindred spirits. One of them might still be in contact with him. He might even go to the same pub he used to.”
Jaatinen was quiet for a moment and seemed to purposely leave the obvious question hanging in the air.
“You don’t believe that Tarkiainen’s dead?”
He didn’t need to wrestle with his answer.
“No,” he said in a dry and implacable voice.
We talked for a few more minutes, and I had the feeling he was still keeping me at a distance. He had told me a lot, but not everything.
* * *
I DIDN’T PRESS HIM. Nor could I bring myself to ask him directly what he thought Johanna’s chances were, but we did talk about the kidnapping case three years earlier that she had helped to solve, thanks to which two girls, aged six and eight, though permanently traumatized, had been returned alive. I could tell that Jaatinen hoped this chat would encourage me. I did my best to accept whatever crumbs I could get from it.
After a moment of silence, he got up and pulled up his dark suit pants. I did the same with my jeans. There was another sharp pain in my back. We shook hands and I thanked him for his time. He said, “We’ll keep trying,” and I said, “Yes we will.” We were at the door before his choice of words registered.
I turned to him and asked, “Why do you keep trying?”
For a moment, he didn’t look like Dr. Phil. He looked like someone else—maybe himself.
“Why,” he said. It was more a statement than a question.
His face had a look that was familiar by now, the faintest trace of a little joy—or was it annoyance?
“There’s still a chance to do more good than harm here. And I am a policeman. I believe in what I do. Until I have evidence to the contrary.”
9
“You’re the strangest person I know,” Johanna once said as she came and rested her hands on the back of my neck. “You can sit there for hours staring at emptiness and still look completely focused.”
“That’s just it,” I answered, rousing myself from my thoughts. “I’m not staring at emptiness. I’m working.”
“Take a break once in a while,” she said with a laugh. “So you don’t wear yourself out.”
She swung herself astride my lap, her legs dangling above the floor, and pressed her lips against mine for a long time, then laughed again.
Life’s most significant moments are so fleetingly short and so much a matter of course when they’re happening that they’re greeted with a grunt or a smile. It’s only later that you realize you should have said something, been grateful, told a person you love her. I would have given anything now to feel Johanna’s gentle hand caress my face or her warm, full, almost dry lips on my temple.
I sat in the backseat of the taxi exhausted, staring into the dark, and didn’t like what I was thinking. Hamid asked where to. Nowhere yet, I answered. I needed a minute to breathe. So we sat in the car in the dark, not far from the Pasila police station. Hamid turned up the heat, then turned it down. It seemed balance was a challenge even in this task.
The rain was so soft and light now that you didn’t realize it was a cold winter rain until you were soaked through and shaking with the chill. The digital clock made to look analog on the dashboard said it was half past two. Hamid moved his lips in time to the softly playing music, glanced at me in the rearview mirror, fiddled with his phone, and was clearly bored. I opened my phone to the map Johanna had made.
Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari.
Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Töölö, Punavuori.
West–East / North–South.
I searched for information on Pasi Tarkiainen, but everything I found was more than five years old. There were at least four former addresses: in Kallio, Töölö, Tapiola, and Munkkiniemi. He had worked at doctor’s offices in Töölö, Eira, and right downtown, on Kaivokatu.
I remembered what Jaatinen had said. I looked through the lists again. Töölö was on every one of them.
I did an image search, too. The picture was from ten years ago. The young Pasi Tarkiainen didn’t look like a murderer. He looked happy, like a bright, optimistic medical student. His smile was so infectious that I almost smiled back. But when I looked closely at the photo, I saw something else. The eyes behind the glasses were ever so slightly mismatched to the dimples in his glowing cheeks. They were older than the face that surrounded them—serious, nervous even. His light hair was short, gelled, and styled in sawtooth bangs. In spite of his broad smile he looked like a man who took things very seriously.
I put down the phone and leaned against the headrest. For a moment I was somewhere else. Closing my eyes was like a time machine. I could go anywhere, forward or back, in seconds.
Johanna.
Always and everywhere.
I opened my eyes and was back in a taxi with a North African driver, surrounded by rain.
I gave Hamid an address, and he pulled onto the road with relief. We descended the hill from Pasila toward the zoological gardens. The windows of the Aurora Hospital reflected bright spotlights like a long row of mirrors. The hospital was guarded by soldiers, particularly around the infectious disease clinic. There were rumors that the guards were there for two reasons: to keep the public out, and to keep the patients in. The same rumors spoke of Ebola, plague, a strain of diphtheria resistant to every treatment, tuberculosis, malaria. The trees of Keskuspuisto formed a wall of gloom behind the hospital. There was no reliable count of how many people were living in the park, permanently or temporarily. The highest estimate was ten thousand. It was as good a guess as any.
We drove past the hockey arena, where hundreds of people flocked, even at this hour of the night. The arena filled with transients every evening—it had become a permanent emergency shelter.
A tram stood dark at the corner of Mannerheimintie and Nordenskiöldinkatu like a great green forgotten thing, like someone had simply walked away and left it there. Hamid was quiet. He drove around the tram and continued down the street toward Töölö.
We stopped on Museokatu. Tarkiainen had lived at 24 Museokatu, and the director of a plastic packaging company and his family of five had been slain at Vänrikki Stoolin katu number 3. The distance from Tarkiainen’s former front door to the scene of the crime was about a hundred meters.
I didn’t tell Hamid why we were parked on Museokatu—I wasn’t sure myself.
I got out of the car, walked to the front of number 24, and looked toward the intersection of Vänrikki Stoolin katu. I felt the rain, first softly on my face, a moment later in swift, freezing drops that slid down into my collar. I looked at the dark, rain-soaked street and then glanced around—I didn’t see anything that screamed mass murderer or missing wife.
I walked across to Vänrikki Stoolin katu and looked back to where I’d been. Many of the apartments at Museokatu 24 had a direct view of where I was standing. The windows of the building were dark now except for the topmost floor, where I counted a row of six lighted windows.
I walked back to the cab and was about to get in when I recognized a green and yellow sign a little farther down the street. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I asked Hamid to wait a minute and jogged the hundred meters with my shoulders hunched and my hands in my pockets, as if that could protect me from getting drenched. Memories from years back flooded my mind. They came in no particular order, with no reference to the year or the nature of the events. The one thing they all had in common was that each memory was as unwelcome as the next.
Some things never change, and some things just don’t improve with age. The bar looked basically the same
as it had ten or fifteen years earlier. Four steps led up from the street and a long counter sat on one side near the door. There were three tables on the right and a dozen in the lounge on the left, and a gap in the wall at the end of the bar. You could see through it into the back room, where there were a few more tables. The place swayed and shook with the sound of music and shouting.
It took effort to make my way through the wall of people to the counter and at least as much effort to get a beer ordered. A pint of beer was slammed down in front of me; I paid for it and tried to see if there was anyone in the bar I knew. The bartenders running back and forth behind the counter weren’t familiar, nor was the thin-bearded loudmouth bumming money next to me. He looked remarkably young up close.
I had come to this bar for years, sometimes too regularly. It was on the route I walked to or from downtown back when I lived on Mechelininkatu. That was the time before Johanna. It wasn’t a good time.
Patrons at numerous tables had already passed the point where coherent conversation becomes impossible—the only point now was to manage to make a noise at all, to lean on one another and drink some more. I didn’t recognize anyone so I continued into the back room.
It was even more poorly ventilated than the front. The smell of liquor and piss intertwined and took command of the air. The people at the tables were complete strangers to me, and I was already turning back when I saw a familiar face through the narrow crack of a half-opened door at the rear of the room. A broad-shouldered bartender that I remembered from ten years before finished stacking a pile of boxes, picked up the top one, walked out of the storage room, and slammed the door shut behind him with one elbow. He noticed me. I gave him a cheerful hello and wished I could remember his name. I couldn’t, so my greeting was brief. He continued to the front room with the case of vodka in his arms.
I followed him and shouldered my way up to the counter. I put my beer down on the glass countertop and put my hand in something dark and sticky. I greeted the bartender again. He noticed me and came to stand in front of me behind the counter. He hadn’t really changed in ten years; his face was a little more angular, it was true, and there were deep lines in his cheeks on either side of his mouth. His eyes had dimmed and become more expectant, as sometimes happens with age. But his ponytail was still there, his shoulders still spread broad, and the stubble on his chin was the same dark, scruffy mat as it was long ago.
The Healer Page 5