The Nightingale Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Yep. I watched the upper-level tape first, but that particular spot is in a dead zone. It’s like our shooter knew. But the mall has a good enough camera system that he must have been caught on tape somewhere. And I’ll check the parking garage logs. Oh, and one more thing about Lulu Nightingale’s computer. We noticed some deleted files on the hard drive, which we can try to recover if you want us to. But we haven’t found any notes about the Russian mafia or any more diary entries.”

  “OK. Autio and Ursula, question the West Man Productions staff again. Start with Ilari Länsimies. I’ll handle Arto Saarnio myself. Meet back here at three thirty. And remember to eat during the day,” I said as if I were their mother. Autio and Puustjärvi were the same age as me, but the others were younger: Koivu by about a year, Puupponen by ten, and Ursula was only thirty. Sometimes I wished for a really experienced, hard-boiled sixty-year-old detective who’d lived through the time when matching a fingerprint was the greatest technical achievement conceivable in police work. Most cops that age had taken early retirement by now, since the work was so emotionally demanding. When you added to that the constant development of investigative methods and the increasing brutality of the criminal underworld, it was no wonder that few field officers managed to make it to full retirement age. But no technical wizardry could replicate the human brain’s ability to imagine standing in someone else’s shoes.

  As the group was disbursing, I remembered one thing:

  “Oh yeah, Riitta Saarnio’s autopsy. Koivu, be ready for that. I don’t know if they’ll have time for it today, but I’ll have them notify you.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Koivu said, playing the martyr. “Today we’re having Anu’s niece’s birthday party.”

  “Yeah, and I need to take my dog to the barber. Don’t even, Koivu,” Puupponen said.

  “When did you get a dog?” Koivu retorted, and I was happy that they were still able to rib each other. Thankfully the announcement of the news conference had made the media requests quiet down. The tabloid headlines didn’t hold back. “Terror at the Mall: Eyewitnesses Tell All” and “Is a Serial Killer Hunting Prostitutes?” They certainly knew how to attract readers. I quickly glanced over the articles, which already felt like old news. Riitta Saarnio’s death had turned everything in a new direction.

  Pamela Lahtela’s personal information was waiting on my computer. She’d started with shoplifting in elementary school. Then she became a ward of the state at age fourteen, and now she was a runaway from a youth home. A year ago, she’d gone through drug treatment. I called Holding, where the officer on duty said Pamela was still sleeping, but according to their notes she hadn’t fallen asleep until six in the morning.

  “Sleeping? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I even went in the cell to make sure she was OK, and she was breathing normally.”

  I decided to let Pamela sleep as long as she needed, because I had plenty of other things to do. The first reports from Forensics were already in by ten o’clock. In Riitta Saarnio’s purse they’d found a small bottle with a white, strong-smelling liquid at the bottom. I’d have to ask Arto Saarnio who’d been treating his wife and ask for a statement about her mental state. When a copy of the letter found next to Riitta’s body showed up on my desk, I called her husband. He didn’t answer his phone, but I left a message to call me back. Almost immediately he did. I told him about the letter, which I wanted him to read, and he said he’d come right over. That was also a common reaction: people in shock tried to bury their grief in frenzied activity and motion. Some people went to work just to pretend that everything was still the way it had been. But there was no way to escape pain forever, and when it came, it overwhelmed everyone.

  I checked my salmiakki supply, but it was still empty. Damn it. How was I going to survive this press conference without my brain-boosting licorice elixir? I tried to make myself look more chipper with powder, mascara, and lipstick. I used three times more highlighter than usual. As I was smoothing the color on the lines around my eyes, someone began ringing my door buzzer. I pressed the button to unlock the door. Outside stood Kaartamo.

  “What’s this press conference you set up without telling me? I just spoke with the public relations officer, and he said you’re going in front of the reporters at one. Didn’t we agree I’d handle PR for the Big Apple case?” Kaartamo’s face glowed red like the ancient director of the ski association after news of the Lahti doping scandal came out.

  “Yes, we did. Didn’t he tell you this is about another case?”

  “What damn case?”

  I gave a mental sigh. Our department public relations officer was a competent person, but he didn’t like people stepping on his toes, which Kaartamo did constantly. “Riitta Saarnio, the producer at West Man Productions, was found dead today at the TV studio. We have to issue a statement.”

  “So we really are chasing a serial killer. Maybe it’s about time we called in the SIS and NBI. If Nordström’s theory holds up, we might be facing an enemy that’s bigger than we can handle.”

  “I think it’s premature to get Security Intelligence involved. There isn’t anything about the case that indicates a threat to national security. And aren’t you already in contact with Nordström? You could ask him how much the NBI really knows about Lulu. That would be a big help.” I wondered whether the National Bureau of Investigation knew about the connection between Arto Saarnio and Oksana Petrenko.

  After a moment’s consideration, Kaartamo said, “Fine then, let’s hold a joint press conference at one. But before then I need you to brief me on everything we have so far. What do we know about what happened yesterday at the mall?”

  “We have numerous eyewitness accounts but no suspect. Sulonen’s condition remains critical.”

  “Lunch at twelve thirty in my office,” Kaartamo said, turning a deaf ear to my objections. I suspected I wouldn’t keep much food down in his company.

  Arto Saarnio was quiet but calm. He said he’d notified his children about their mother. His daughter was trying to make it back to Finland for the weekend. We talked about practicalities, such as the release of the body. The thought of the autopsy clearly wounded Saarnio, but he understood the necessity. He reminded me of a soldier who knows that in order to win the war, killing the enemy is unavoidable. Was that how he justified firing people too? Did he think that some had to suffer so the others could carry on?

  I handed him the letter.

  “Does this signature belong to your wife?”

  Saarnio first read the whole letter, and the rest of the color drained from his face once he understood what it said. Otherwise he didn’t reveal his agitation.

  “Yes, this is Riitta’s handwriting. Her signature has stayed the same all these years. I remember her practicing it when we got engaged. She claimed that writing beautiful, round letter As had always been hard for her . . . Her maiden name was Riipinen.” Saarnio paused. “It’s just so hard to believe that what’s written here could be true. I can maybe imagine about Lulu Nightingale, since I’d suspected as much, but the other attack . . . Riitta never could have done something like that. But why would she lie about it?”

  “Does the phrasing sound like something she would write?”

  “I don’t know!” Saarnio suddenly turned in his chair to hide his face from me. When he finally spoke, his voice was husky.

  “I drove her to this. I’m the one you should put in prison.”

  I allowed Saarnio to calm down before asking him about his wife’s doctor. Saarnio gave me the information willingly. All during our conversation he didn’t ask anything about Oksana, as if the girl had ceased to exist even though a few days ago she had been so important to him that he’d been willing to endanger his privacy for her.

  After Saarnio left, I went downstairs to buy some salmiakki. Puustjärvi ran to catch me in the hall; he had news.

  “A car matching the description of Riitta Saarnio’s was seen in the parking garage at the mall,” he said. “We don
’t have a license plate, but the make, model, and color match. And the time is right, a little before five.”

  “Does the witness report seem reliable?”

  “Mira Saastamoinen did the interview. Ask her. I’m about to review all the security footage for that area. My eyes are about shot, though.” Puustjärvi rubbed his temples. He was used to careful work with his hands from tying fishing flies.

  “Would you rather do interviews?”

  “No, I’ll finish what I started. But you can bet I’m taking all my comp days once this thing is solved. Soon the twins are going to be asking who that nice man is,” he said, with rare jocularity for Puustjärvi. Apparently, all was well on the home front again.

  Puupponen and the sketch artist sat in the conference room, and when Puupponen saw me walk by, he yelled for me to come look at the composite drawing from all the eyewitness reports.

  “Hi, Kallio! Doesn’t this remind you of someone familiar?” the sketch artist asked enthusiastically. “Everyone talked about a face with no expression. But if you look closely, doesn’t this look a lot like our neighbor to the east? Putin, I mean.”

  “Putin? Does he have a brother in the mafia?” Puupponen asked, and then he realized at the same moment I did:

  “Oh, damn it to hell! Of course, he was wearing a mask!”

  16

  Puupponen and I spent some more time with the sketch artist, but we concluded that our guess must be correct. We would have to interview the eyewitnesses again and ask them if their determination of the sex of the person leaning on the railing in a black coat was based on facial features or body type. That would be Puupponen’s job.

  Kaartamo had ordered chicken fajitas. Usually I liked them, but now I had a hard time forcing the guacamole down. Kaartamo spit salsa on his tie when he heard our theory about the Putin mask. In contrast, Riitta Saarnio’s letter delighted him immensely: now we could wrap up the preliminary investigation and send the case to the prosecutor to decide what to do next. Our case closure statistics would go up.

  “I think it’s premature to announce Riitta Saarnio’s confession. I’m not convinced it’s authentic. Let’s wait to hear from her doctor.” I’d left a message for Dr. Erkko-Salonen, but she hadn’t called me back yet. “I propose we tell the facts and not exaggerate anything. We can call a new press briefing when there’s more to report.” I forced myself to swallow some chicken and tortilla.

  “The most important thing is to calm the public down. We don’t have mafia assassins rampaging around Finland. Is it hard for you to accept that the perpetrator is a menopausal woman with a screw loose? Why invent bogeymen?”

  I didn’t bother reminding Kaartamo that the previous day he’d been 100 percent behind the mafia theory. Regardless of any of that, we’d have to do our best to present a united front to the media. Afterward I’d have to ask a couple of reporters I knew what their informants were telling them.

  Kaartamo said he’d start and I could answer the detailed questions. That was fine with me. I visited the women’s restroom to add some powder and touch up my lipstick. I’d already put my hair up in a tight bun before lunch. Kaartamo put on a clean tie, although he complained that red flowers weren’t the best choice for an official event. According to him that tie was more appropriate for after work.

  I was nervous as we marched into the auditorium, where the members of the media waited. Even though I often felt small standing in front of the cameras and microphones with the public relations officer, I would have preferred that to trying to manage Kaartamo. He couldn’t help hinting that the police were hot on the trail of the killer.

  “Has anyone been arrested yet?” asked the Channel 4 reporter. Kaartamo gave a self-satisfied smile but didn’t reply. When one of the tabloid reporters asked him for a comment on his statements about the mafia the previous day, he blushed in embarrassment and redirected the question. The reporter tried again and Kaartamo lost his cool.

  “Do you really have to whip people into hysteria? The situation is completely under control.”

  “But as far as we know, Riitta Saarnio didn’t have any connection to the prostitution business. What would be the motive for her killing?” I didn’t recognize the reporter, who sat in the front row. Maybe he was from one of the regional papers. They rarely sent reporters all the way to Espoo, instead relying on the newswire. The fact that this reporter was here was significant. His question caused a commotion in the crowd. What could be juicier? “Hatchetman” Saarnio’s wife mixed up with pimps and whores.

  “Mrs. Saarnio discovered Lulu Nightingale’s body,” I said for clarification. We couldn’t ignore the fact that Tero Sulonen had called Riitta Saarnio the previous day, though. The TV lights blazed right in my eyes. I could feel my skin sweating under my makeup. My armpits were damp.

  “Is there any information about the weapon used to shoot Tero Sulonen?” The MTV3 reporter directed this question to me. Kaartamo opened his mouth, but I cut him off.

  “We do know what it was, but we can’t comment yet for reasons having to do with the investigation. As Assistant Chief of Police Kaartamo already explained, we’re close to a breakthrough. The killer has made too many mistakes. We may be able to provide more information tonight or tomorrow at the latest. We’ll be sure to keep everyone in the loop. Your cooperation is important. I’m sure you’ll want to interview eyewitnesses from yesterday’s incident and Riitta Saarnio’s coworkers. We’ll appreciate any tips the media can provide. We’re all on the same side in this case.”

  “We haven’t heard anything about that missing Russian woman in a while. Have the police determined her identity? Does she have any connection to these crimes?” the MTV3 reporter asked.

  “We do know who she was, but unfortunately I can’t comment,” I replied. At the beginning of the briefing I’d put my phone on silent, but it kept vibrating in my pocket and causing static in the reporters’ microphones. Now I turned it off completely. I answered a few more questions and then let Kaartamo talk. Once the briefing was over, the reporter from MTV3 hung back to talk to me.

  “Care for a smoke?” he said, even though he knew I didn’t smoke and I knew that neither did he. I agreed, and he asked his cameraman to stay behind. Normally smokers were sent outside to the parking lot, but for emergency situations—in other words, for bribing people we were interrogating or building trust in relationships—we had a couple of places in the building where smoking was allowed, even though it was a gross violation of the indoor clean air laws. I took the reporter to the smoking cell in Holding and told him to give me one too so the officer on guard wouldn’t wonder what was going on. Then I closed the door.

  “I don’t know if this means anything,” he began, “but yesterday I was chatting with a political reporter I know. He was pretty worked up about all this attention surrounding Ilari Länsimies. According to him, Länsimies’s name has been getting attention in a slightly surprising context lately.”

  I immediately thought of the mafia, but the reporter continued.

  “Some powerful people want Länsimies to return to politics. They want him to run for president.”

  “Powerful people?”

  “It’s worked before, bringing in a presidential candidate from outside the normal party machine. Think about Martti Ahtisaari. I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything or whether the rumor is even true, but that’s what I hear. Apparently Länsimies is on board because he never really fulfilled his political ambitions.” The reporter gave a wide smile. “A lot can happen in a year, as we saw in the last election. But I’m not a political expert.”

  “I’ll remember this.” The ventilation in the smoking cell was terrible, and even though the room lacked any textiles, the oppressive stench of thousands of cigarettes clung to the walls and the cement furniture. My hair would stink for the rest of the day. “I’ll call you as soon as I can talk about the weapon from the Big Apple,” I promised in return. “And let’s have a beer once this case lets up.
My treat.”

  After the reporter left to file his story, I went to see how Pamela Lahtela was getting on. She was awake and looked even more miserable than she had the night before. Her pupils were almost normal, but she was perspiring and shaking uncontrollably. When I opened the cell door, she jumped up and rushed so close to me that for a second I thought she meant to attack me.

  “Why am I here?” Her breath smelled of vomit. “I didn’t do anything. You have to let me go!”

  Pamela was a runaway from a youth home, and that was enough by itself to hold her. According to information collected by the welfare authorities, her mother had left about ten years ago, and her father, whom she’d lived with, was a serious alcoholic. In the past, she’d been able to skip the line for drug treatment because of her age. However, her eighteenth birthday was only a few weeks away.

  “They were here during the night, the Russians! I couldn’t sleep because they were coming!” Pamela explained. “I was waiting the whole time for them to take me. I want to get out of here. I’m not safe anywhere!”

  Pamela had been on the run for almost three months, since the week before Christmas. I asked where she’d lived.

  “What do you mean lived? I don’t live any fucking place. When you’re on speed you don’t get tired. And the winter has been warm. There’s always someplace to crash. I’m used to being free. Let me out of here!”

  “How did you get to know Lulu Nightingale?” I sat down on the bunk, but Pamela continued pacing the floor. Four steps in one direction, four steps back. Amphetamine made a person move compulsively.

  “I saw her in an interview in a newspaper when I was still in that Nazi concentration camp they call a youth home. I thought that I wanted to be like her, with my own studio and everything, and then no one could hit me. I could choose my johns too. I . . . I called her, since her number was in the phone book. She told me to come over, and I did.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “When there was that flood at the Market Square. I almost jumped in to swim, it was such a fucking cool thing to see . . . And I like water. Sometimes guys take me to hotels with showers and bathtubs. Once at the Tower there was a claw-foot tub. It was so sweet.” Pamela’s eyes glinted, and for a moment she looked her age.