Helsinki Blood

by James Thompson

  “Me too,” he says.

  He jams toilet paper up his nostrils to plug up the bleeding, then we go the dining room and scarf double cheeseburgers and fries.

  “It’s not my business,” I say, “so feel free to tell me to fuck off, but don’t you and Jenna use birth control?”

  He has half a burger stuffed in his mouth. It takes him a minute to answer. “Sure we do. The rhythm method. Usually the rhythm of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re Jenna’s favorite fucking music.”

  22

  The sound of the door opening wakes me. I hear the trundle of suitcase wheels. Kate is home. I pull on sweatpants and go out to greet her. Her eyes are flat, lifeless. She looks like she’s aged ten years in a week. Milo is behind her, as if to cut off her escape. I hug her. She allows it, but doesn’t return it.

  “I missed you,” I say.

  She slurs, “Where is Anu?”

  “In her crib, sleeping.”

  “Would you get her for me?”

  “Of course.”

  I knock on the door, wondering what kind of scene I’ll find after Jenna’s anger and her TKO of Sweetness last night. “Come in,” she says.

  I find them in bed, her head on Sweetness’s chest. It seems all is forgiven.

  “Kate is home,” I say. “And Jenna, I think you have an impression otherwise, but I didn’t have sex with Mirjami. She just wanted to sleep in the same bed with me. Nothing happened.”

  “Not my business,” she says. “Why tell me?”

  “Because I don’t want some innuendo about me cheating on Kate slipping out unintended. I’ve never cheated on her.”

  And then it comes to me. I intended to change the bedding. It will be redolent of Mirjami. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

  I bring Anu to Kate. She takes Anu in her arms, squeezes her so hard I’m afraid she might hurt her, and Kate starts to cry. Not just crying, but wailing from grief. The kind of crying one would expect if her baby was dead, not reunited with her.

  Milo whispers in my ear. “She didn’t sleep for the whole trip, so she’s been up for almost two whole days. Plus, she’s been drinking the whole time.”

  Anu starts to cry, too. “She hates me,” Kate says.

  “Of course she doesn’t hate you,” I say. “She loves you. She’s just upset because you are.”

  “I abandoned her and she hates me for it. And she should, I deserve her hatred. And I don’t deserve her. A woman like me doesn’t deserve a baby.”

  She sits on the footrest of my chair, holds Anu, rocks back and forth, and just cries and cries. I don’t know what to do, so I sit on the couch and wait.

  Milo whispers, “Got any tranquilizers?”

  I nod, get them and hand him a sleeve of Oxamin.

  He goes to the kitchen, and I see him crush some of them to powder with the back of a spoon, make a stiff drink with kossu and Jaffa, and stir them into it. He takes it to her. “Here, Kate,” he says, “this will help.”

  She wipes away tears and snot. “My kidnapper and bartender,” she says, and sucks down half the drink in one go.

  Her crying stops as she finishes the drink, and her eyes start to close. “I have to go to bed,” she says, hands Anu back to me, and wobbles to the bedroom.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

  Milo sits beside me on the couch. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s confused and she stays drunk. Not much of what she says makes sense.”

  “Have you had any sleep?” I ask.

  “I didn’t have much time to sleep in Miami, so I caught a few Z’s on the plane, where she couldn’t get in any trouble. I’m in OK shape.”

  “Thank you for this. I owe you.”

  “You’re welcome, and no you don’t. You would have done the same.”

  “A lot has happened,” I say, “and none of it good. We need to trade stories. Who goes first?”

  I sit in my chair. He lies back and stretches out on the couch, legs out straight and feet crossed, hands on his stomach and fingers laced. He closes his eyes while he talks. “I guess I can. Like I told you when I got there, John was speedballing and Kate was drunk. I spent time listening to their conversations through the open window. Kate going on about how killers can’t be mothers, talking about a man who fell burning from the sky. Crazy shit.”

  “She has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say.

  “That was apparent, and it was also apparent to me that it was only a matter of time before she picked up his bad habits. She was curious, asked him what speedballing was like. He said, ‘Like falling down an elevator shaft.’ I saw that the idea appealed to her. He’s a ‘one more day’ junkie. ‘Another day and I’ll go to rehab.’ Which, of course, she believed. So I went to a place called Walmart. Ever heard of it?”

  “They talk about it on American TV.”

  “What a freaky place. As big as a shopping mall and they sell everything imaginable. If a nuke went off, you could survive for years in there without ever leaving the building. They have like a hundred different kinds of potato chips. The place is so big that they have electric carts to ride around in. You would think mostly geriatrics use them, but almost all the people riding around in them are just too fat to walk. It’s the fattest fucking place I’ve ever seen.”

  Milo and his stories of biblical length. I wish, just this once, he would cut to the chase.

  “So anyway, I bought a hunting knife in there. My disguise was a baseball cap and sunglasses I got at a gas station. The gas stations are weird, too. Huge. They stock like a hundred different kinds of energy drink. Why the fuck would you need a hundred different kinds of energy drink?”

  I’m resisting the urge to yell at him.

  “John’s daily routine consists of going out early, buying eight balls of heroin and cocaine, flogging most of it, and using the rest to support his habit. I followed his dealer, B&Eed his house, and stole an ounce of each. The next morning, I met John on his way out to buy dope. I told him Kate was leaving with me. He got all indignant and threatening until I put the knife to his throat and showed him the dope. I told him I would trade him the dope for Kate. The price: he could never, ever, have contact with her again. And I lectured him, told him he could either put the shit up his nose, or sell it and pay for rehab. He snatched the drugs out of my hands and told me to come pick up Kate later in the day. He sold me his sister.”

  “No surprise there,” I say.

  “So I showed up in the afternoon, she was half in the bag, and I told her to start packing, that she was going home now. She got haughty and told me to make her. I showed her the knife and said if she didn’t, I would kill John on the spot. He played his role, backed me up, told her she belonged with her husband and child and he was kicking her out.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “Badly. But, as you can see, she did it.”

  “What do you think will happen to him?” I ask.

  “He has a laptop on a table facing his couch. It has a webcam in it. I infected the computer, so we can watch him with his webcam and find out.”

  I didn’t take Milo’s voyeuristic obsessions into account. Of course he has to know what happens to John. His life wouldn’t feel complete without it. In giving John the drugs, he played a game. Sell them and detox and live. Put them up his nose and die. Speeedball freaks have short life spans. Play for blood. Milo spun the roulette wheel and played for John’s life.

  “I have hard things to tell you,” I say.

  I start with Mirjami and work through the murder of the Russian diplomat to the poker game and The Shit List to the harassment and discovering Captain Jan Pitkänen was behind it.

  He doesn’t say a word while I talk. I watch fury course through him, see veins in his neck and forehead pumping harder and harder as his heart races from adrenaline. When I’m finished, he says, “People will die for this.”


  “Who? We’ve made so many enemies that we can’t kill them all.”

  “You realize,” Milo says, “that they burned up Kate’s car. Your wife was the target and my cousin, Mirjami, was just collateral damage.”

  I’m pretty sure he’s right, but think we should make sure before we let our emotions run high and go on some half-cocked revenge spree. In the end, we could wind up behind bars, and prisons aren’t the nicest places for anyone to live, but especially not for cops. “We should find out the cause of the fire before doing anything,” I say.

  “Fine. Let’s go look at it.”

  “I can’t. I want to be here when Kate wakes up.”

  I also want to find Loviise Tamm again and parade her in front of Kate to prove the sanctity of my mission. I hear the trumpets sounding again.

  Milo snickers and talks to me like a child. “Kate hasn’t slept in two days, she’s got more alcohol than blood coursing through her system, and I just doped her with enough tranquilizers to knock down a horse. She’s not waking up today. Maybe tomorrow.”

  I call her therapist. Torsten asks how I got her home. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, “but now that I have, I need to know how to best take care of her.”

  He asks me to bring her to his office tomorrow at eleven a.m. And he would like to talk to both of us, not just Kate. I agree.

  Sweetness and Jenna are still in bed. I ask Jenna if she minds looking after Anu for a while. She says she will, and asks if I’m pissed off at her. I say no. I ask Sweetness if he can clean up any blood left over from last night, because it might upset Kate to see it. He promises.

  I go to the bedroom to get dressed. Kate snores like a chain saw. Milo is right, she’s dead to the world. As he said, “Maybe tomorrow.”

  23

  Milo drives his Crown Victoria, the cliché of all police cars, and we go to the National Bureau of Investigation garage. A forensic mechanic is underneath the Audi when we enter. We announce our presence, he slides out from underneath the chassis, and we introduce ourselves.

  “I heard people got hurt,” he says, “are they going to make it?”

  “Two girls got burned,” I say, “one very bad, somebody close to us, but she’ll make it.”

  “I’m sorry for her,” he says. “I can picture the fire from the state of the vehicle.”

  Milo and I nod thanks for his sympathy. “What happened?” I ask.

  He wipes grease off his hands with a filthy rag. “To be honest, I’m stumped. You guys know cars?”

  We both say yes.

  The hood is up, some parts under it disassembled. He points at them as he explains. “You got two of the fuel injectors clogged by carbon, like you were using cheap petrol, but the others are clean. So you had two pistons not working and fuel spraying onto the engine. That could start a fire, but it would take a few minutes until the temperature reached combustion level, and the fire broke out almost as soon as she started the car. Plus, it’s a new car, has only seven thousand kilometers on it. Not enough mileage for that dense carbon buildup. And why only those two? And how did the fire make it to the gas tank? The fuel line would have had to lose pressure for the fire to travel backward and ignite there. It’s not easy to start a gasoline fire. You can throw a cigarette into a bucket of gas and like as not it will just go out. It’s the fumes that ignite, and a little oxygen helps. The gas cap is gone. I guess it blew off when the tank exploded. And last, why the fire inside the car? It came up out of the floor like it had fuel there, like the gas line sprayed it up there. The line is burned up. It’s hard to tell what happened with it.”

  “The car has only been driven a few times in the past few weeks,” I say, “and for short distances. I filled it last, and I’m sure the tank was almost full. And no way the injectors were clogged. It’s just not possible.”

  The mechanic raises his hands in frustration, apologetic. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t picture the scenario that led to a fire like that.”

  Milo says, “Picture this. The car was stolen and taken to a garage where it could be worked on. Two good fuel injectors were replaced with clogged ones. The car was driven back, running on four cylinders. Then petrol was siphoned out of it and replaced with a hot fuel mix, like in race cars, to make the remaining pistons work on overdrive and heat up the engine fast. They probably didn’t put a lot of fuel in the car, because a full tank might hamper the combustion with lack of oxygen, just enough to get the car started and travel a short distance, in case it took that long for the car to heat up and the fire to start. The gas cap was left off to provide the oxygen and help the tank blow when the fire hit the fumes. Some holes were punched into the gas line, to spray up under the driver’s floorboards. Some volatile accelerant, maybe ether in plastic containers, was placed in the engine compartment and under the driver somewhere. The plastic melted, the ether or whatever accelerant ignited, and then the injector nozzles were spraying fire. The squirting fuel line lost pressure and the fire traveled backward. It shot out of the fuel line and spewed flame into the combustible under the driver, which ignited, and back into the gas tank, which then blew.”

  The mechanic ponders this. “It’s possible, but so complicated that it’s not probable. Most murder attempts by tampering with vehicles are conducted in a simple way. Cut brake lines, things like that. But I can look for melted plastic, take residue samples from the engine, fuel line and gas tank and have them analyzed. It’s as good as any theory I can come up with.”

  We thank him and get on our way. I want to run the prints I lifted from the murder scene when we found Loviise Tamm, to find out who visited the apartment and intervened in her intended sexual abuse after the ambassador made his call. We go to NBI headquarters. It’s the first time I’ve been there since I was moved from Helsinki homicide to NBI employ, some months ago. As an inspector, I should have an office. Out of curiosity, I ask where it is. I find it. It’s barren, except for a chair and desk with a computer on it.

  I log in to the computer and check the database to see what’s come of the killing of Sasha Mikoyan and the two Russian spooks. I could have just as easily done this from my apartment. My computer is networked in to the database for a home workstation. There’s been nothing in the news, and I think crime scene investigators would have been surprised to find a bullet-riddled door and black fingerprint powder everywhere. The killings are unreported, so the Russians must have spirited the corpses away, replaced the door and covered it all up.

  The fingerprints from the butcher knife, though, are on record. They belong to Yelena Merkulova, wife of the Russian ambassador. How could this be? Diplomats and their families aren’t subject to arrest and booking. I call the arresting officer. He tells me she’s a kleptomaniac who likes to shoplift from the downtown boutiques and Stockmann department store. She was arrested and processed because she had no identification and refused to say who she was for several hours. He also states that she’s possibly the most beautiful woman alive.

  And she almost certainly murdered Sasha Mikoyan. Interesting.

  It strikes me that the Russian ambassador and whatever spooks are in on the prostitution ring might think Sweetness and I murdered Mikoyan. We were on our way there. He must have been told to meet us. Why would they think anything else?

  Then it comes to me, the answer that explains the appearance of the spooks at the apartment and their re-kidnapping of Loviise Tamm: because the ambassador’s wife Yelena called someone at the embassy—as the ambassador at that point had no phone—and explained what she had done. And the troops were called in to protect her and make it all go away.

  24

  Milo and I go back to my house. It’s time to put the puzzle together and reconstruct the events leading up to Sasha Mikoyan’s death. His murder is of little interest to me in and of itself, but Loviise Tamm couldn’t have been the only girl pressed into the sex trade by him, and he was almost
certainly working with a group of his colleagues.

  First, I check Sasha’s bank account. It has a hundred and three thousand euros in it. I check his purchases. He lived the high life. Monster restaurant bills, clothing stores, and boutiques that suggest he bought gifts for a woman or women. And he had a room at Hotel Kämp permanently reserved for nine weeks. At four hundred euros a day, he accrued a massive bill, which he paid once a week. However, Kämp made sense as a place to meet a lover, as it’s in easy walking distance from the Russian embassy. Most convenient, especially if that lover was Yelena Merkulova, the ambassador’s wife.

  True to her word, Mirjami loaded the info from all the electronic gadgets into my computer. Sweetness is in the bedroom with Jenna. I guess this is snuggle and make up day. Some of the info is in Cyrillic, so I need his help to read Russian. I knock and ask if he has a few minutes. “Sure,” he calls through the closed door. He doesn’t sound aggravated, so they must be all snuggled out at the moment.

  He comes out in jeans, shirtless. He looks like a lifelong power lifter, but he’s far too lazy for that. He’s just blessed with good genetics. He’s also barefoot. One of his feet is almost as long as both of mine together. His nose looks swollen near to bursting and both his eyes are black and blue.

  “Who broke your nose?” Milo asks.

  Sweetness puts his hands in his pockets and stares at the floor, shame-faced. “Jenna.”

  Milo heehaws. “Good girl.”

  Sweetness won’t meet his eyes. Staring at the computer screen gives him a way around it.

  On the night of the poker game, the Russian ambassador’s last phone call was to a woman named Natasha Polyanova. The last call Sasha received is identified by the number twenty-three. The number is the same as the last call made by Ambassador Sergey Merkulov, so twenty-three equals Natasha.

  An Excel spreadsheet from the iPad has a list of numbers, one to seventeen across, and the time and dates by week for the year down the left-hand column. Another spreadsheet is set up the same way, numbered one to one hundred seventy-nine, gives first names, the capitalized letters of surnames—I’m certain of this because the name Loviise T is on the list—and what appear to be passport numbers, and shows “profit” and “debt.”