The Nightingale Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I looked at Autio in confusion since he wasn’t usually one to break with decorum. “Trust me, Kallio. The sea might still be frozen, but professionals have their ways when it comes to getting rid of bodies. The only tip we received about a potential address took us to a house in Leppävaara, which ended up being the home of a Russian radiology professor and his family. This Oksana doesn’t exist in any record or database, and she isn’t going to. We don’t even know if that’s her real name.”

  “Keep accepting tips. Maybe something will click.”

  “Like the Lake Bodom murders?” Autio replied, referring to one of the most famous unsolved murders in Finnish history.

  What stick did he have up his ass?

  “OK, let’s move on to Lulu Mäkinen. Puupponen has more information about her background.”

  Puupponen began with what he’d e-mailed me, then added new details.

  “The Blue Nightingale is registered as an escort service and erotic dance parlor.”

  Koivu gave a long whistle. “So it’s all aboveboard, is it?”

  “Based on the charges for procurement, it seems like they walk a fine line with the law. Lulu hired another woman as an erotic dancer, and the boys in Helsinki suspected it was something more than that. So Lulu arranged a full-on strip show for them, but they weren’t convinced. All in all, she seems to have made dupes of the cops and the taxman, and pushed the limits of just about every law she could find. On last year’s tax forms, she reported an income of one hundred and twenty thousand euros.”

  “I’m switching jobs,” Ursula said. “Who inherits all that now? She must have a lawyer we could talk to.”

  “Good call. Puupponen, will you find out?”

  “Sure, and one more thing: that bodyguard had another assault conviction from when he was a bouncer. He got off with probation, but it had run out before the second case,” Puupponen said. “Lulu paid him a salary and charged him rent for his room, so everything looked legal and aboveboard. But based on his behavior yesterday, we can assume Lulu was more than his boss.”

  “No surprise there. OK, let’s get out there. I’m waiting for the search warrant. Koivu, once it’s approved you can execute it with Forensics. I’ll try to come along. Autio and Puustjärvi, start reviewing the security tapes. Let me know the instant you find anything. Once you’re done with that, go interview Ms. Mäkinen’s parents.”

  “Will you want me to come back afterward?” asked Puustjärvi, who lived in Kirkkonummi, which was on the way to Lulu Mäkinen’s parents’ house in Inkoo.

  “Call me once you’re done. Ursula, contact the lab and the pathologist, and attend the autopsy if necessary. Koivu and I will work up an interview schedule before going on the search. Ville and Ursula, also check if anyone who was at the studio last night has a criminal record and take a look at all the attacks and murders involving prostitutes in the last ten years for the whole country. And find this girl Lulu was accused of pimping. The stripper. I’ll issue more instructions as we go. If you end up having some time, come back here to help with interviews.”

  Just then the unit secretary poked her head in and tossed the day’s tabloids on the table. Naturally the murder of Lulu Nightingale was in the headlines in both papers, and one of them put forth a theory about Lulu being connected to the mysterious woman who had disappeared from Jorvi Hospital. I’d wondered the same thing. Even though the activities of the Blue Nightingale were ostensibly legal, Lulu could have easily hired more assistants, thus making herself guilty of pimping.

  The tabloids had found out even more about Lulu than Puupponen had. One had interviewed her during the latest erotica convention and now republished excerpts from that story. The pictures were devastating. Under Lulu’s thick layer of makeup there appeared to be a beautiful thirty-year-old woman. What did it say about her that she hadn’t allowed the West Man Productions professional makeup artist to touch her face? Had that been a desire for control, to decide for herself what she looked like at any given moment?

  “‘I’m a sex industry entrepreneur, and I’m proud of my profession. I deal in the most basic human needs. If I ran a restaurant or cleaned people’s homes, people would admire me. It’s silly. Fulfilling people’s sexual needs is a basic service!’” Ursula read Lulu’s quotations. “‘If I were president, there would be state-run brothels in every county, where everyone’s needs would be met equally whether they were rich or poor. Sexuality doesn’t discriminate by wealth.’ Well, wasn’t she a regular Robin Hood! Why didn’t she run for city council on that platform?”

  “I would have voted for her,” Puupponen said. I snorted, even though I didn’t really find it funny. I had something more important to think about: Who might have wanted Lulu Nightingale killed?

  4

  “Can we construct a comprehensive timeline of who arrived when at the studio last night?” I asked Koivu once the morning meeting was over and we were sitting alone in my office. The makeup artist had sent her schedule via e-mail, and Länsimies had sent the guests’ arrival times. We could probably verify those from the security footage.

  “The broadcast began at 9:30. Terhi Pihlaja was asked to arrive at 7:30 and went straight to makeup. Nordström, Mustajoki, and Hytönen arrived at fifteen-minute intervals, and Lulu Nightingale came last, at 8:30. Hytönen’s makeup time was 8:00, Mustajoki’s 8:15, and Nordström’s 8:45. The makeup artist, Nuppu Koskela, arrived at the studio at seven, and the cameramen and sound technician came at around four. Länsimies said he was at the studio from five on with Riitta Saarnio, ironing out the final structure for the show.”

  “That’s an awful lot of back-and-forth. Today we need to talk to at least Länsimies, Nordström, and Sulonen. Hopefully Nordström’s position doesn’t complicate the investigation.”

  Koivu snorted. “You think they’ll give it to SIS instead of us?” Relations between the Security Intelligence Service and the National Bureau of Investigation weren’t particularly good, and the Sonera Telecom phone-snooping scandal had only made that worse.

  My door buzzer sounded, and outside I found Vesterinen from the evidence locker. He’d brought Lulu’s coat and purse. I hopelessly tried to shove my hair into a white cap, then Koivu and I donned protective suits and gloves. We spread a plastic sheet over my desk, then set the items on it. Koivu checked the coat’s side pockets. One contained a white handkerchief, and the other was empty. In the breast pocket was an object about the size of a bug-bite stick. Koivu pulled it out.

  “Well, well. Pepper spray,” he said.

  The purse was black leather, a little larger than a paperback and with red embroidery. Even though I wasn’t the best person to evaluate the prices of purses, I had the impression that this one was expensive. I snapped open the ornate latch. Inside were two compartments with a zippered pocket between. One of the compartments had another small zippered pocket and a cell phone sleeve.

  “Lulu’s phone. Excellent.” It was a clamshell model, which looked more like a compact than a phone. The makeup bag was so large it filled half the purse. In the pocket next to the phone was a ring of keys and a separate car key, and the middle zippered pocket contained a collection of medications: prescription pills, an allergy inhaler, a couple of sleeping tablets, heartburn medication, and a condom.

  “She was ready for anything,” Koivu said, trying to be funny, but then he realized how lame he sounded. Ultimately Lulu Nightingale hadn’t been prepared for whatever happened last night in her dressing room.

  In the other compartment of the purse was a small wallet and a thin calendar. I quickly flipped through it. It was obviously her private calendar, because the entries were sparse. The previous week Lulu had visited her hairdresser, and this week she only had her appearance on Surprise Guests marked. Today she was supposed to get her nails done at noon.

  In the wallet were a couple of credit cards, three different airline bonus cards, a social security card, a library card, and one hundred and sixty-two euros and fifty cents in cash.
There were also a bunch of Lulu’s calling cards. Making your wildest dreams come true. Lulu Nightingale, the Blue Nightingale. The card had a phone number and Lulu’s web address. We would also have to check her website, along with her calls and e-mails. Earlier in the morning I’d sent off requests for access to all of this, which had become routine in homicide cases.

  The wallet didn’t contain any actual personal effects, no photographs or other people’s business cards. There weren’t even any receipts or postage stamps. The calendar didn’t have a phone list or an address book. I opened Lulu’s cell phone but couldn’t get past the PIN code. I tried her birth date in various forms, then the combination of her building and apartment number, but without any luck. We’d be able to get information on her calls from the phone company, but it would be interesting to see whose numbers she kept in her contact list.

  The makeup bag held all kinds of expensive brand-name products, which were more familiar to me from advertisements than my own cosmetics collection. The eye-shadow applicators had been wiped clean after use. The liner pencils were freshly sharpened: bright red for the lips, dark violet for the eyes. The bag also included perfume, a travel size bottle of hair spray, two different blush compacts, and other small containers. I estimated that the total value of the contents of the makeup bag was more than two hundred euros. When I told this to Koivu, he shook his head.

  “Why do you women allow yourselves to be ripped off like that? Did Lulu at least get to deduct her makeup as a business expense?”

  “Puupponen can look into that. I—” Just then Ursula burst into my office. Sometimes she didn’t knock or ring the buzzer, presumably because she wanted to catch me gorging on candy or talking about personal business on the phone.

  “Wow,” she said when she saw the contents of Lulu’s makeup bag spread across my desk. According to Ursula my estimate was on the low side: Lulu’s foundation cream alone cost almost two hundred euros. A few years ago, I’d suspected Ursula of subsidizing her brand-name obsession by leaking details about investigations to the press, but I’d never found any real evidence. Apparently, she also had rich male companions who enjoyed giving her expensive gifts. Ursula didn’t hide the fact that she had a number of older gentlemen under her thumb, though she never gave any names—of course, these men likely preferred discretion. Maybe that was what Mauri Hytönen meant about paying for sex.

  “The autopsy is at three, so I can do interviews until then. I tracked down Iines Iivonen, who was the one implicated in Lulu’s procurement case. We’ll have to go all the way to Hämeenlinna if we want to see her. She earned a year for aggravated assault, and she’s been serving it since October. So she won’t know much about Lulu’s recent activities.”

  “Let’s ask for local help in questioning her.”

  Ursula reached out to stroke the soft fur of the coat’s collar. “Sweet coat. Of course, you don’t have any furs. Your husband wouldn’t approve.”

  My reply was interrupted by our unit secretary, Eija, who’d stepped in to deliver the approved search warrant for Lulu’s apartment. Koivu immediately called Forensics. I packed all of Lulu’s belongings except her phone and keys back into their plastic bags, and we dropped them off at the evidence room on our way to the parking garage. Koivu drove while I arranged interviews. Puupponen and Ursula would start with Tero Sulonen at noon, and I arranged myself a meeting with Nordström for three. Riitta Saarnio didn’t pick up her phone. So I called the number of the family doctor I’d been given yesterday.

  “She’s at home with a nurse. I’ll visit her this evening, but I can already tell you she isn’t in any shape to be interrogated today. She’s still in shock. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. Ilari Länsimies’s phone was busy, so I left a message on his voice mail. Koivu rolled around the Punavuori neighborhood of Helsinki searching for a somewhat-legal parking spot. In the end, we had to leave the car a few blocks away from Lulu’s building. As we slipped and slid along Iso Robert Street, I couldn’t help remembering a time thirteen years before.

  “Koivu, do you remember that building?” I asked, pointing to a postwar apartment building that rose above us. Koivu nodded.

  “We went there together to search Tommi Peltonen’s place,” he said. “Antti moved into Peltonen’s apartment, and you lived there for a while too. I was in my first job after the academy and all jazzed that I’d made it right into the Helsinki Criminal Division, which I thought was the best gig in the country. And then I had to go and follow a girl to Joensuu! Well, at least things worked out in the end . . .”

  I wrapped an arm around Koivu. There was no need for words. Koivu knew what the gesture meant. I released him as we turned the corner onto Punavuori Street. The Blue Nightingale was located on the top floor of a six-story building, and the entry was in the courtyard. From the street, there was no indication that an escort service operated inside. I wondered what the law said about the use of a residential apartment for business purposes. I imagined it was OK, since people cut hair and gave massages out of their homes.

  Even though the building had an elevator, I started climbing the stairs. I could feel my morning run in my thighs, since I hadn’t taken the time to stretch properly, and I no longer recovered as quickly as I had ten years ago. Koivu followed, puffing and panting. Forensics hadn’t arrived yet, but we went ahead and began donning our protective suits in the hallway. The nameplate on the door simply read “Nightingale” in Finnish and English. Apparently Lulu had paid some consideration to her neighbors’ sensibilities. Although on this floor there was only one other door, with a nameplate that read “National Federation of Bicycle Repair Shops.” It had never occurred to me that such a thing existed.

  Lulu’s door had both a standard Abloy lock and a high-security deadbolt. The key to the latter was easy to find in the bundle from her purse, but the former required three tries. Just as we got the door unlocked, my phone beeped with a text message from Hakkarainen saying they were a block away and looking for a parking spot. I wrote back to tell them to drive into the courtyard if the van would fit through the archway.

  When I opened the door, the day’s newspapers and pile of junk mail settled at my feet. Even though it was daytime, the entryway was completely dark. Koivu fumbled for the light switch. When he finally found it, dozens of red stars lit up on the ceiling and walls. The lighting made Koivu’s face blaze pink as if he had a fever. He tried again, and a normal yellow overhead light came on.

  There were two doors on the left side of the hallway and one on the right, all closed. The end of the entryway opened into an arched vault outlined by red vinyl curtains. Without any need for discussion, we moved in that direction.

  “So this is the Blue Nightingale,” Koivu said as we stepped through the curtains into a large room the size of a standard one-bedroom apartment. Lulu had combined the living room, dining room, and small library so the Blue Nightingale stretched the width of the building. The windows also had red curtains over black blinds. No daylight could get in. The main illumination came from reddish spotlights, which could be dimmed from the brightness of sunshine to perfect darkness. On the wall to the left of the arched vault was a row of cabinets extending to the outer wall. The four-poster bed was so large that four people could have made love on it with ease. On the bedposts were metal rings. In the middle of the room was a device that looked like a weight bench, with padding and four legs, as well as more metal rings. Next to it was a low divan. On the right side of the room was an enormous black bathtub with two steps leading up to it. Behind the bathtub, half-concealed by a curtain, I could make out a set of wall bars. On chains dangling from the ceiling was a set of hooks.

  The sound of the doorbell interrupted our search. It was Hakkarainen and Mikkola, with the photographer, Kerminen, lurking in the background.

  “What are we looking for?” Hakkarainen asked as he pulled on a protective cap. It made him look like an aging actor playing a doctor heading
into surgery.

  “Lulu Nightingale. Her whole life should be here, her work and her home. What do you think, boys?” I couldn’t help but grin at young Mikkola’s expression as he looked around Lulu’s studio. Give him twenty years and that expression would be gone. By then he’d think he’d seen everything. But no matter how jaded he got there would always be some new, incomprehensibly brutal crime that would shock him and remind him just what kind of evil people are capable of.

  The second key I tried in the lock of the cabinet was a hit. Inside were enough clothes to fill the pages of a porn magazine for a year’s worth of issues. Vinyl, rubber, leather, a gas mask, and a real nurse’s uniform, along with various corsets and garters. There were also an adult-size onesie and a baby bonnet. Who manufactured those?

  The next cabinet was full of shoes, including a pair of Nokian rubber rain boots and a pair of yellow wood clogs. In the third cabinet were wigs and masks, adult diapers, and a liter-size baby bottle with a giant nipple. The fourth cabinet was organized like the shelves of a hardware store, neatly filled with ropes, chains, locks, five different sets of handcuffs, and one set of ankle cuffs. Whips and clamps were in the final cabinet, along with a wheeled cart carrying a CD player and a small TV/VCR. Everything was carefully arranged to be easy to find. Still, the room had a strange feeling, as if the slaps and kisses exchanged there still echoed within the walls, as if the smell of all the bodily secretions still hung in the air.

  “Should I take pictures of all of this?” Kerminen asked. I said yes, even though I knew copies of the prints would end up in break rooms all over the police station.

  “This Lulu was a smart woman,” Hakkarainen suddenly said. “Look, Kallio. There are at least three panic buttons hidden around the room. She could have her bodyguard here in an instant.”