She recognized him immediately and didn’t even try to conceal her alarm.
“What now?”
“Nothing,” Koskinen said, smiling in an attempt to reassure her. “I just happened to have some business in the area and thought I’d drop in for a bite.”
Makkonen didn’t look entirely convinced. She looked at Koskinen suspiciously and then waved the rag toward the kitchen.
“Today is Saturday, so I don’t have anything but onion and spinach soup or meatballs with mashed potatoes. Milk and bread are included in the price.”
“Meatballs would hit the spot.” Koskinen smiled and pulled out his wallet.
Makkonen still wasn’t smiling. Obviously she couldn’t believe that a lieutenant from the Violent Crimes Unit had just happened to pop in. She gave Koskinen his change. “Get your bread and milk from there and choose a table. I’ll bring the meatballs,” she said curtly.
It took five minutes for the food to be ready, and by then the other customers had left. Koskinen munched on a piece of rye bread and looked around. The diner was clean and attractively decorated. There were blooming fuchsias in copper flower pots hanging over the tables, and the wooden bread boards attached to the walls sported food-related aphorisms.
Makkonen brought a plate from the kitchen and placed it on the table next to his glass of milk. She immediately turned to leave, but Koskinen managed to catch her by the arm.
“Do you have a moment?”
She glanced at the empty tables around them as if wondering whether Koskinen was joking. Then she sat down across from her only customer.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked timidly.
Koskinen squirted ketchup onto his potatoes. It was a heaping serving with a couple of dozen meatballs.
“I came to talk about your son.”
Makkonen lowered her head, crossed her arms on the table, and sighed. “I should’ve guessed. You’ve found out about more crimes, right?”
“Nothing like that,” Koskinen said.
He told her what he had heard from Ulla. Mika’s friends had been arrested at the Oulu train station and were returned to Tampere under police escort. Nina had immediately admitted everything, emphasizing Mika’s negative attitude toward their jobs. Had it been up to Mika, there wouldn’t have been any break-ins.
A faint smile crept onto Riitta Makkonen’s lips, making her face look even more fragile. Her mouth was small and her lipstick a fiery red, which enhanced the paleness of her face and her blond hair that was parted down the middle and then pinned back above her temples.
The relief disappeared from her face just as quickly as it had come, and another sigh revealed the depth of her longing. “Mika’s heart was pure gold.”
Koskinen forked mashed potatoes into his mouth while giving Makkonen time to unburden herself.
“Mika always helped when asked at home. Except lately when he wasn’t around as much anymore.” Makkonen paused for a moment. Then she said quietly, “But he still existed.”
These words touched Koskinen, and he remembered his call to Tomi earlier that morning. It had been eating at him all day—he had had no choice but to cancel their fishing trip that afternoon. Tomi had been bitterly disappointed and hadn’t held back expressing his irritation. He had already bought a new spinnerbait with his meager funds. Their conversation had ended in a minor fight, as so many times before during Tomi’s childhood and teenage years.
Makkonen had already moved on to another topic. Koskinen felt that she wanted to drown her sorrow in words. She said how hard of a time she was having with her diner—selling five-euro meals didn’t leave much of a profit. But she couldn’t raise her prices if she wanted to keep the few customers she had. Only occasionally was she able to hire outside help. The past week had made a serious dent in her budget, since she had spent three days in the ICU. She had allowed herself one day of rest after her son’s death and then returned to work this morning.
Koskinen mopped up the gravy from his plate with the last of the meatballs and then glanced at the burled- wood wall clock. His conscience was pulling him in two directions—he was just sitting here idly while the others were hunting for a killer who had taken the lives of two defenseless people. On the other hand, he felt bad leaving Riitta Makkonen alone with her sorrow.
“I have to go,” he said. “I have lots of work.”
“But today is Saturday.”
“For us, the day of the week doesn’t mean much of anything.”
“I understand,” Makkonen said and tried to smile bravely.
They both stood up, and Koskinen thanked her profusely for the excellent food. He was not exaggerating. It made her smile, and this time there was something new in it, maybe even a hint of cheerfulness
“Don’t you have a wife to cook for you?”
“Not anymore. I divorced her a couple of years ago. Or, actually, she divorced me.”
“So you’re all alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Not even any kids?’
“A 20-year-old son, Tomi. But he’s already moved out and is living his own life.”
“A little older than my Mika,” she whispered, and once again they both returned to reality.
Makkonen suddenly took Koskinen’s hand in her own and squeezed it long and hard. With demanding, serious eyes, she said, “I’m not trying to recruit you as a customer, but it would be nice if you stopped in again sometime.”
“Yeah, I’ll be around. Maybe sooner than later,” Koskinen said and then walked out to his car.
He headed out to the deserted street that ran through the industrial park and then headed back toward the Ketteräs’ house. He drove without hurrying and thought about Riitta Makkonen. He found himself feeling strangely attracted to her—it wasn’t just sympathy for a woman mourning the loss of a loved one. There was something else to it. He just couldn’t figure out what.
The ringtone of his phone cut off his muddled thoughts. He pulled the phone out of his breast pocket and wondered for an agonizing second whether the body had been found. The display showed that the caller was Pekki, but that did not allay his fears in the slightest.
Pekki’s news was not quite that bad though. But it wasn’t much better either. “We found Ketterä’s wheelchair. Abandoned in the same thicket as the other one.”
Koskinen pulled over to the shoulder and got out of the car with the telephone stuck to his ear. “Are you absolutely sure it’s Ketterä’s chair?”
“Yes,” Pekki yelled into the phone with some rhythmic pounding sound coming from the background.
“How?”
“The backrest has his name and address velcroed to it.”
Koskinen blew all the air out of his lungs. There was no doubt—it looked like a repeat of the Timonen case. It was only a matter of time before they found Ketterä’s body somewhere around town.
“You said the wheelchair was found near the other one. Be more specific!”
“About thirty yards off, in the same brush. Ketterä’s wheelchair was on the side of the new road.”
“I know the spot,” Koskinen could see the place in his mind and even guessed the source of the pounding in the background. It was the sounds of a construction site. They were driving piles into the ground for the foundations of the new apartment buildings. He had jogged past there on his night runs many a time, wondering why hundreds of apartments had to be crammed into such a small space. There was plenty of space elsewhere.
“Cordon off the area immediately!” Koskinen started rattling off instructions. “And I want you down sniffing around the roots of every single bush.”
Pekki’s voice went acidic. “Yeah, yeah. Now we’re doing canine work.”
“Ask the station for backup. Nothing gets overlooked.”
“Okay.” Pekki sighed and then shouted, “Hey, wait just a second!”
Koskinen waited and listened. He could hear a muffled conversation in the background, then a couple of disconnected exclama
tions from father off. Thirty seconds later, Pekki came back, out of breath. “Guess what we just found.”
Koskinen squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep himself under control. “The body?”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Damn it, Pekki! This isn’t any time for your games.”
“A pillow,” Pekki said quickly. “It had been thrown farther back in the forest.”
“Send it to Forensics.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to take it home,” Pekki replied impertinently. “And now we know what we’re going to find in Ketterä’s windpipe.”
Koskinen had been pushing it out of his mind the whole morning, but finally he had to resign himself to it. “Where could the body be?”
“That’s the million euro question.”
“Exactly,” Koskinen said and ended the call before he could say anything spiteful.
Only a second later he was already wondering why he had gotten on Pekki’s case. He had just been stating things like they probably were—Ketterä was lying dead somewhere.
It was pointless to believe anything else.
Koskinen closed the car door and started walking. He wanted a few minutes of peace and quiet to think. He walked across a deserted parking lot at the edge of the forest. They were already well into the fall, and the summer cultural season was long since passed, but the Kennonnokka Summer Theater placard was still advertising a performance of Astrid Lindgren’s Emil & the Great Escape. Lower down through the trees he could see a glimmer of Lake Vehnusjärvi. The wind was spinning the yellow birch leaves around the beach, and even the water slide seemed to be shivering with cold.
Koskinen sat down on the top step of the long wooden stairway that led down to the beach. What would happen next? Had the killer’s appetite been satiated, or was he already out somewhere stalking his fourth victim? What kind of person was he? A blood-thirsty maniac or the merciful angel of death Pekki had described, a psychopath playing God?
But the world was full of suffering people. And they did not all live in one assisted living center in Tampere, Finland.
So why were all three victims from Wolf House?
Koskinen noticed that all he had was questions and not one single answer. And still he had to make quick, smart decisions. For example, should he place every disabled housing facility in the city under police guard? That felt like a step too far. At a minimum, it would cause a panic, no matter what they said about precautionary measures.
He sat watching a flight of swallows flitting along the surface of the water. Presumably the warm September had messed up their internal clocks so they were congregating for their migration far behind their normal schedule. They had a long journey ahead of them, and Koskinen wondered how many of them would ever make it to the warm shores of Africa. Who would protect them from birds of prey, storms, and hunters’ nets stretched across their path? The world was full of people in need of protection. His mind returned to Riitta Makkonen, left alone in her empty diner.
His phone rang in his breast pocket. Koskinen jumped at the sound, and the flight of swallows swept into the sky as if driven away by it. He dallied over putting his hand in his pocket, thinking that this must be it. Pekki had found the body deeper back in the forest.
However, the caller was Eskola. “I’ve been interrogating Laine for two hours now and nothing new has come up. What should we do with him?”
“Ask him if Ketterä had anything with him when he got off on Sotkan Street.”
“He didn’t. I already asked.”
“Not a pillow, for example?”
Koskinen wasn’t even sure what he was getting at with this question. But Eskola replied without hesitation. “No, Laine is positive that Ketterä didn’t have anything with him, not even in the compartment under his wheelchair.”
“You’ve done a thorough job,” Koskinen said and then reported the discovery of Ketterä’s wheelchair. “Looks like we have a third murder to investigate.”
He was surprised by Eskola’s confident response. “Well, at least Laine isn’t responsible for it. He left Ketterä on Sotkan Street and from then on we know every move he made.”
“You’re right,” Koskinen said and then remembered the reprimand from his boss that morning. The police really didn’t have any evidence against Laine. On the other hand, Laine’s arrest may have been the best thing that could have happened to him, because now the suspicions about him had been significantly diminished. At least he couldn’t be blamed for Ketterä’s death. Koskinen’s mind didn’t have room for the concept that the Wolf House homicides had different perpetrators.
“Cut him loose.”
“Understood.”
“What do you think about all this?” Koskinen asked and then sensed Eskola’s confusion. A lieutenant had addressed him as an equal.
“I… Well… Finding the pillow seems odd since we know that Ketterä never returned to Wolf House last night. It means that he was smothered somewhere else. I mean that the pillow has to be from somewhere else. Or, then again…”
Eskola fell silent for a moment.
“Yeah?”
“If the pillow turns out to be Ketterä’s, the perpetrator has to be from Wolf House. Someone who had access to Ketterä’s room.”
“That’s sound reasoning,” Koskinen said. “So now our first priority should be identifying the origin of the pillow. Would you be willing to take that on?”
“Affirmative!” Eskola replied, and it sounded to Koskinen like Eskola had just barely managed to swallow the word “sir” at the last moment.
“The pillow is on its way to Forensics. Tell Mäkitalo or whoever is up in the case rotation that as soon as they get fiber samples from the pillow, they need to compare them to the other bedding. Then go to Wolf House and make sure that no one outside of the investigation goes in Ketterä’s room.”
“Roger that,” Eskola said. “I’ll have Laine released immediately. Following that I’ll go to Forensics and then to Wolf House.”
Koskinen had to smile at Eskola’s enthusiasm. He decided to pour a little more gas on the fire: “You’ve done good work. Keep it up.”
He thought he might have heard a clicking of heels just as he ended the call.
He started back toward the parking lot. At the other end of it, a path plunged into thick forest, and he suddenly felt a compulsive desire to go running. Had he brought his running gear, he might have. He sat down sideways in the driver’s seat of the Vectra and stretched his legs outside. Then he looked for his phone and called his secretary.
Milla answered immediately.
“It’s me,” Koskinen grunted absent-mindedly.
“Who?”
“Koskinen.”
“Oh, you! Where are you calling from?”
“Nokia.”
“Are you chasing the killer?”
“In a way.”
“Oh, man! That’s so freaking awesome!”
Koskinen envisioned how the antenna on Milla’s stocking cap would be quivering with excitement. But he wasn’t in a mood for chit-chat. “Have the uniforms brought in Pirkko-Liisa Rinne?”
“No one’s been brought in.”
Koskinen glanced at his watch in concern. It had been several hours already since he had given the order to have her picked up.
But Milla didn’t give him any time to think. “You’re in really good shape, right?”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just that this officer with a sort of a long face came by.”
“Turpeinen.”
“Yeah, that was probably his name.”
“What did he want?”
“He was taking last-minute bets on tomorrow’s race. I put down ten.”
Koskinen bit his lip. “On who?”
“You!” Milla exclaimed. “I have faith in you.”
“Thanks.”
Koskinen slammed the door of the Vectra with a force that would have given Kuparinen in the garage nightmares for days had he been
there to witness it. Then he spun the car around and drove back to the Ketterä house.
22.
A red Lada Samara was sitting in the driveway, so Koskinen concluded that the Ketteräs had returned from their shopping outing. He left his car on the street and walked into the yard. His mood was much heavier and more uncertain than it had been an hour ago, when he hadn’t yet known about the discovery of Hannu Ketterä’s wheelchair.
They must have seen him through the window, since the door opened before he touched the doorbell. An old man with a delicate build stepped out onto the landing. He had hair the color of snow and jerky movements.
Koskinen introduced himself as a police lieutenant, at which the man became visibly agitated. He glanced around nervously and asked Koskinen to come in quickly. Koskinen complied, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the neighbor was still lurking on the other side of the fence with a cigarette in his lips.
Ketterä closed the door behind Koskinen and indicated with a jerk of his thumb that Koskinen should continue on into the house. A quick count said that there were a good dozen plastic bags of apples and a few cardboard boxes of empty glass bottles on the floor of the sunny, glassed-in porch. It wasn’t hard to guess that the Ketteräs’ short-term plans involved a visit to the cider press.
A woman with a short stature but hips that were all the wider for it appeared on the porch. Her face was rosy and burned with a mixture of concern and curiosity. Koskinen decided not to tell them about the wheelchair yet, but wondered at the same time whether withholding it was the right thing to do. The news would probably make the elderly parents frantic with worry. Anyway it was premature to talk about Hannu’s death until the body was found.
Koskinen shook both of their hands and told them in vague terms that his visit was just a formality, that the police were just making routine visits in the name of public safety, but it wasn’t that easy to pull the wool over Iiro Ketterä’s eyes. He seemed to know a thing or two about the police organization and asked why a lieutenant was making such a menial house call.
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