It was like repeating a mantra during meditation.
His thoughts galloped along, completely clear, making his mental work just as easy as the running. Taru’s telephone call was still foremost in his mind. He thought about Emilia’s suggestion to bring the bullying up with his whole team. He knew how Pekki and Kaatio would react: can’t he take a joke, and so on.
Koskinen wasn’t going to solve this problem by talking. He simply wasn’t good enough at it. Emilia had always criticized him for his lack of conversation skills, saying that she might as well have married a mute.
But Koskinen still didn’t think it was a defect worthy of divorce.
He sped up, pushing himself to the limit. He felt pain in his thigh muscles and burning in his lungs—one long in—two quick out, exorcising his anguish once again through sweat and agony.
At the next intersection, he decided to continue straight along the highway and ran another half mile to Näyttelijä Street. He had been avoiding this area since the divorce, and hadn’t been by the old house in almost two years. It had been too painful. He turned left at the intersection and came to a stop on the same corner where Sopanen and Saari had seen the wheelchair.
Young birch trees with wrinkled pine trees farther in covered the area. All sorts of junk and trash had been dumped in the trees: a car battery, a tattered armchair, and a broken mountain bike. Koskinen thought about why the wheelchair had been thrown here in particular. The killer could’ve driven through here from the Wolf House to Peltolammi where the body had been found, but it was a pretty big detour. But what if the wheelchair had been abandoned after dumping the body in Peltolammi? That could mean that the perpetrator lived somewhere in the Hervanta area.
Koskinen continued on. The brief break had stiffened his legs, and the last half mile was painful. There was also a new thought eating at his mind.
Koskinen had the feeling that this wheelchair murder was going to mean a lot more work.
14.
She knew her killer.
She had been expecting him, sensing the inevitability of her fate. Death smiled at her with crooked teeth, and she welcomed him. He brought her fear and one final indignity. Yet still she did not wish to resist him any longer.
Nor would she have been able to.
Death covered her face and eyes, but even he could not take her sight. The woman saw all that she wished. She saw herself on the bridge over the fast-moving stream. A small girl with bare feet. In a red-checkered dress and white bows in her braids. A flower basket hung from her arm with a freshly picked bouquet of oxeye daisies.
Then she had still known how to walk.
And soon she would walk again. She knew it. For years, decades, she had waited for this moment.
She had imagined everything differently, but death was still the same. Liberating, a return home. Soon she would be with her little brother, still wearing his breeches as she remembered him.
Pain tore at her lungs that had been atrophied by disease. But that was only the briefest twinge compared to all of the agony and aching that had cast their shadow over her life. Suddenly the pain was gone. A bright flash illuminated the base of her skull, making her as light as an angel.
In that moment she took flight.
15.
Friday began with a nightmare. His sleep had been fragmented and his dreams painfully recognizable—his limbs wouldn’t work. He tried to run, but couldn’t even make a single step. He was stuck in mud up to his knees. He was trying to reach a woman walking in front of him. The woman would disappear into a dark mist, then reappear and turn to look back. Through a fine blanket of fog shone gleaming red lips in a calm, scornful smile, exactly the sort one wears after issuing a sharp refusal. The face was sometimes Emilia’s, sometimes Taru’s—the familiar features of two women, and yet still so foreign. Suddenly the woman disappeared, leaving only a nebulous haze. Somewhere a telephone rang, and he had to answer it. The woman was calling from the fog, and this would be the last opportunity to contact her.
Koskinen snapped completely awake. His mobile phone continued its stubborn ringing in the entryway. He had left it there the previous evening to charge. The circulation in his legs was poor, and he hobbled out of bed like an infirm old man. After his punishing run the night before, he should have had his hammies massaged. Koskinen just didn’t have anyone to do it.
He tottered into the entryway, glancing at the clock on the VCR on the way. The display burned an ominous red—4:36. A phone call at this time of the morning never meant anything good.
His fears were confirmed when he heard a familiar, flat voice.
“Morning. It’s Niininen, from the station.”
Koskinen croaked back a good morning with his dry mouth and went into the kitchen. He filled a glass with cold water from the tap while listening to what Niininen had to say.
“I was already starting to think you were out for another nighttime jog somewhere, but it looks like you just sleep abnormally well.”
“Just the opposite. Had a nightmare.”
“Pekki thought we should wake you up.”
“What happened?”
“Some old lady just rung down the curtain and joined the choir.”
Niininen was one of the dispatchers. He was a former freestyle wrestler and known for his inability to conduct even the smallest piece of business without larding it with some more or less light-hearted banter.
Koskinen, however, was in somewhat less of a joking mood at four thirty in the morning.
“What does that have to do with me?” he snapped into the telephone. “Somebody’s grandmother dies almost every night.”
“I asked Pekki the same thing. When did Koskinen turn into the reaper?”
“Where did she die?”
“An assisted living center called Wolf House.”
Koskinen flinched. Now he was totally awake. “Send someone to pick me up. I’ll be on the street in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll set up the ride,” Niininen said in his rumbling bass. “We just might have a free car or two.”
Koskinen rinsed his face with cold water and started dressing. He grabbed the first things that happened into his hands from the hangers in his sparse closet: black corduroy pants, a green plaid flannel shirt, and a gray sport coat. The whole time he was dressing he refused to think about homicide. People died all the time in nursing homes. After the Timonen case, the nurses at Wolf House were just overreacting and…
Koskinen’s thoughts cut off midstream. The Wolf House hadn’t had any night nurses since the cutbacks, which smashed to pieces his wishful thoughts about a natural death.
It was dark and humid outside. A cold wind hit his face immediately, and Koskinen decided to go back up to his apartment to get an overcoat. But then he saw the police car waiting down the street. He ran through the parking lot, his legs still feeling painfully stiff.
The numbers 341 were painted in a large, black font on the back of the cruiser. Koskinen suspected the worst. He opened the back door and squeezed his long legs into the seat. His fears were confirmed once again: it was the SS Patrol. Sopanen and Saari were sitting in the front.
“Morning,” Koskinen said with artificial ease and received a low grunt in response.
“Where to?”
“Wolf House in Kissanmaa. Didn’t Niininen say?”
“He just said that Koskinen needed a taxi.”
“Of course.”
And with that the conversation petered out. From the rigid necks of the officers sitting in the front seats, it was easy to guess that they hadn’t yet forgotten Koskinen’s dressing-down of the previous morning. Sopanen, sitting behind the wheel, didn’t open his mouth until they reached the highway.
“Ever thought about buying your own car?”
Koskinen mumbled something evasive from the back seat, which Sopanen could have failed to hear.
“You ain’t going green on us, are you, Koskinen? Word has it your son’s a civvy…”
; Koskinen decided not to lose his temper no matter what came from the front seat. They weren’t going to upset him about Tomi’s choice of not serving in the military.
Sopanen glanced at him confrontationally in the rearview mirror.
“I know you bicycle types. You’d probably raise the price of gas to ten euros in a heartbeat if you could.”
It looked like his partner’s trash talking was starting to make Saari uneasy. He stared out at the early morning landscape from under the long brim of his cap. The street was glistening with moisture, and the asphalt reflected the yellow blinking of the traffic lights. There wasn’t a soul in sight. An early morning newspaper delivery van zipped past them toward the northeastern parts of town, and a lone taxi made its way back toward downtown.
Saari cleared his throat. “So…what’s going on in Kissanmaa?”
“A body in a disabled assisted living center”
“Is it connected to the wheelchair case from Monday night?”
“Hopefully not.”
Saari rubbed his neck in embarrassment. “Not good. With better luck we could’ve already had a suspect in custody.”
“Probably not,” Koskinen said, loosening his seat belt and leaning forward. “The chair hasn’t been any help at all yet.”
He waited for Sopanen to comment, but, surprisingly, he stayed silent without even glancing in the rearview mirror.
They had already made it to the lights at University Hospital, and Koskinen guided them the rest of the way to Wolf House.
Four vehicles were parked in front, and lights shone from the tall windows of the lobby. Nothing else revealed the drama that had touched this quiet weekday night. The neighborhood was asleep, and even the wind had died down momentarily.
Koskinen climbed out of the car and thanked Sopanen and Saari for the ride. Both waved in response, and the Ford wheeled back the way it had come. Koskinen felt like the needless quarrel between them was already fading.
The sudden presence of death made many things seem insignificant.
Koskinen looked at the cars as he walked past. Pekki’s shapeless Corolla was parked at the curb behind a Saab patrol car. A fire department ambulance was blocking the entire walkway, and a white Ford Escort stood in front of the main doors. Its front door read Tampere Security in red letters.
The front doors were locked. Koskinen rang the bell, and a uniformed officer came to open it. He was a familiar face, an officer they called Rummy Rantanen.
“Morning, Koskinen,” Rantanen said, pushing back his old-style side cap. “They woke you up for this?”
“They did indeed. I guess they thought a guy like me doesn’t have anything going on in middle of the night anyway.”
“You should be resting up.”
“Why?”
“We wouldn’t want to give Kangas and Havukainen any undue advantage by ruining your conditioning by working nights. The Pirkka Trail Run isn’t just a traipse down to the sauna.”
Another great start to a day, Koskinen thought as he pushed past Rantanen into the building. Pekki met him in the lobby. The gray pallor of his face spoke of shock, and the left corner of his mouth was twitching restlessly.
“Female in her seventies. Died a couple of hours ago.”
Koskinen’s blood went cold.
“Is it…”
“Yes.” Pekki gave a nod to the side. “They think she was suffocated.”
Koskinen looked in the direction Pekki had indicated. Three men were sitting on the lobby sofa group. Two of them were paramedics in white coveralls, and the third was a youngish man dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket.
“How do they know?”
“Don’t even need a basic course in pathology.” Pekki shook his head dejectedly. “It’s pretty hard for a quadriplegic to fill her own mouth with feathers. Her mouth was the only part of her body that still worked. Apparently she managed to sink her teeth into the pillow before suffocating. We found the ripped pillow on the floor.”
“Who found her? I was told there wasn’t anyone on duty at night.”
“There isn’t,” Pekki said and glanced at his notes. “The victim’s name is Rauha Salmi. She managed to sound the alarm using her alert phone. Wolf House has a contract with a first response service called Tampere Security, and that guy in the leather jacket is from there. He uses the title ‘safety assistant.’”
“So he found her?”
“Yes. He realized what had happened and called an ambulance and the police. Rummy was the first one here. He connected this to the Timonen case and called me at home.”
Koskinen walked over to the safety assistant, introduced himself and sat down on the next sofa, kitty-corner from him.
“So you found her?”
The man nodded, looking past Koskinen. Apparently the effects of what he had seen hadn’t worn off yet.
“You have a key to the building?”
He took a white plastic card out of his breast pocket and showed it to Koskinen. On the upper edge was a long string of numbers and below it a magnetic strip.
“Will that get you into all of the rooms?”
Again a silent nod. Koskinen was starting to wonder if he had lost the power of speech. You would think that working as a first responder, he would have become hardened enough that seeing a body wouldn’t shock him enough to render him mute.
Koskinen swept his eyes from the police officers to the ambulance men and then spoke to everyone all at once: “Sergeant Pekki just told me that the deceased passed two hours ago. How were you able to make such a specific determination?”
Surprisingly, the safety assistant began to speak. “I decided that.”
“How?”
“That was when the call came in to Helsinki.”
“Helsinki?” Koskinen’s brows went up. “Calls go all the way there?”
“Yes. Alarms go straight to the Red Cross emergency dispatch. If they can’t contact the person who sounded the alarm, they forward the request on to the local safety assistant.”
“In this case you?”
“Not directly,” he said. “Helsinki calls the service center here in Tampere. There are a couple of operators on duty around the clock, and they contacted me. It was 3:15 then, and even though I was sleeping with my clothes on, I still didn’t get here for half an hour.”
Koskinen shook his head silently. He could imagine how long half an hour was for a person in need of help. For someone having a medical emergency or for someone who couldn’t move and had fallen out of bed, that could be an agonizing eternity.
The security assistant must have misinterpreted Koskinen’s dark expression. He hastily began explaining himself.
“I left home right when I got the call, but I couldn’t get here any earlier. I live all the way on the other side of the town.”
Koskinen raised his palms to calm him. “You did exactly what you should have. I don’t think anyone could’ve gotten here fast enough to do anything, even if they had been here in five minutes.”
In his mind Koskinen was blaming other parties entirely. Who could know whether the savings of one employee’s salary had once again cost a priceless human life. The killer probably wouldn’t have even tried if there had been a night nurse on duty.
A memory from two days ago popped into his mind: Rauha Salmi sitting in her wheelchair in a stiff position, her head twisted in a painful-looking way and her hands withered, lifeless stumps. She would not have been able to press the alert button of the phone.
Koskinen turned to the security assistant again. “How did she sound the alarm? According to our information she was a quadriplegic.”
“With cases like her, we use an auto-alert system,” the man explained. “Salmi had what we call a smart bracelet that reports changes in the vital signs of the host individual.”
The word “host individual” must have sounded off to him too. He swallowed deeply and continued in a gravelly voice.
“In this case the device reacted to a rapi
d pulse and an increase in blood pressure.”
“And at that point it activated and contacted the security call center?”
“Yes.”
“And of course the operator didn’t receive a response, so they called you.”
“That’s what happened.”
Koskinen looked at the ashen-faced man thoughtfully. Surely the system served its purpose. However, this time it was no help. Probably nothing would have been able to save Rauha Salmi from the hands of her killer.
Koskinen stood up and motioned to Pekki to follow.
“Let’s take a look at the body.”
Pekki led the way down the hall. The room was the second to last on the street side. The door was being guarded by Rummy’s partner, a youngish officer with a flattop whose name Koskinen couldn’t remember. The next door down still had police tape stretched in an X from one corner to another. That room had belonged to Raimo Timonen, and the grizzly idea crossed Koskinen’s mind that the killer could be working his way through the building room by room.
The officer stepped aside, and Koskinen stepped into the room with Pekki. The room was similar to Timonen’s, simple and mostly unfurnished. There were no chairs around the table and no pots or pans in the kitchenette. But where her neighbor had decorated his walls with motorcycle posters, Rauha Salmi’s room was full of angels. They were everywhere, from small stickers to icons and framed prints.
Koskinen and Pekki stood in the middle of the floor, not touching anything.
“Is someone coming from Forensics?”
“I just called Mäkitalo,” Pekki answered, smirking tensely. “He’s like a Boy Scout. He promised to be here right away, even though it’s five in the morning.”
Koskinen nodded and took a step closer to the bed. He had seen Rauha Salmi before. She was the one Lea Kalenius had been feeding when Koskinen had visited Wolf House the first time. Now her mouth was frozen open, and white fuzz was visible against the dark inside of her mouth. Her eyes were open as well. Despite their lifelessness, they still told of all those decades of agony which an outsider could only imagine. Her frail body was concealed under a blue and white blanket, and her wizened arms were crossed on top of it like two dried willow branches. The security bracelet had stopped measuring vital signs and looked like a disproportionately large soap container on her wire-thin wrist.
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