Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  The telephone rang.

  “Hey, it’s Puustjärvi. We just got to the marina. What do I do with these people?”

  “Let them go. Wasn’t that what we decided? Tell them that I’ll call them in for official questioning later.”

  “OK, sounds good. I’m feeling a little groggy. I fell asleep on the boat, since I was awake the whole night.”

  I sighed. I had no doubt Puustjärvi was dead tired, but I had wanted to hear whether anything interesting was said during the trip back.

  “Go ahead and go home if you don’t need to come back here for anything.”

  “I need to grab my car.”

  “OK, swing by my office then. I won’t keep you long.” Puustjärvi was what they called a good old-fashioned cop, even though he was barely forty years old. In his previous job working on a small-town police force, he got to know all the crooks, petty thieves, drunks, and moonshiners, and he learned to get along with them. I wondered why he had chosen to come to Espoo during the recent reorganization, since more than once I’d noticed how confused he could get working with hard-core professional criminals. He was used to the bad guys playing fair. Puustjärvi’s reaction to working for a female boss had included some hiccups during the first week too, but since then there hadn’t been any problems.

  “Well?” I asked when Puustjärvi sat down on the other side of my wide desk.

  “Well what?” he asked, and I wasn’t quite sure whether his lack of comprehension was a result of the exhaustion or whether he really just didn’t understand what I wanted to ask.

  “How did the boat trip go?”

  “Pretty quietly. The kid with the green hair just lay in the front cabin with headphones on. The girl cried sometimes and sometimes drove the boat. Holma spent most of the time at the wheel, though. The difference in their ages is pretty big. I got the impression the girl’s father didn’t much like their relationship.”

  Puustjärvi had fallen asleep halfway through the trip and then didn’t wake up until they had reached the marina. When he did, he heard Tapio Holma kissing Riikka, who was sobbing again, and saying that now that her father was dead, nothing could stop her from moving in with him.

  Juha couldn’t have prevented his adult daughter from moving wherever she wanted, but this was still interesting.

  After Puustjärvi left, a reply came back with the information on who owned shares in the Merivaara family business. Juha Merivaara owned a clear majority of the shares, 72 percent. Anne Merivaara held 16 percent, and the remaining twelve belonged to a company named Mare Nostrum. Its owners weren’t listed in the message, so I had to send another request.

  The rain had stopped, but there were no breaks in the cloud cover. The fall equinox had been the previous week, and the days were getting so short that sometimes I would have been willing to pay for a few hours of sun. Usually I liked the darkness, burning candles and sipping tea fortified with whiskey. This fall the lack of light had started feeling foreign, though, almost frightening. Within a few weeks it would be dark when I got out of bed, and by a month from now I usually wouldn’t be seeing the sun at all, other than through the narrow slit of my office window.

  Shaking off these gloomy thoughts, I got on the computer and started searching for criminal records for any of the Rödskär party, but a knock at the door interrupted me. There was Koivu, looking green.

  “Back from yachting, I see!” I said cheerfully.

  “Come off it. You aren’t ever getting me on any damn boat smaller than a cruise ship ever again. I spent half the trip bent over the railing puking my guts out.”

  “Next time take a pill. Where are Saarela and Sjöberg?”

  Koivu’s expression turned to one of alarm.

  “Wasn’t I supposed to send Saarela home?”

  “Yes, that’s fine.”

  “Sjöberg is downstairs. He’s the one I thought we were going to question. Do I need to come along?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and for at least the hundredth time in my police career I thanked my lucky stars I was able to work with Pekka Koivu. We had handled all sorts of cases together, first in the Helsinki Police Department Violent Crime Unit, then in my old hometown out in the country in Northern Karelia, where I had worked one summer. Koivu had gone up that way chasing a skirt, but after that romance wilted, I lured him back with me to Espoo. Koivu was a friend and a little brother to me, one of those few colleagues for whom I didn’t have to put on a tough-girl act.

  “My insides are empty. Any chance I could get a bite to eat?”

  “I’ll order more sandwiches. Has Sjöberg eaten?”

  “He roasted steaks and potatoes on the boat while Saarela was steering. The smell just made it worse . . .”

  “How were they otherwise? Did they say anything interesting?”

  “I was feeling so bad I didn’t hear much,” Koivu admitted in embarrassment. “Saarela tried to ask about the investigation, but Sjöberg was mostly quiet. He was really wound up as we were leaving, but he seemed to calm down when we got out to sea.”

  Mikke Sjöberg waited in the downstairs lobby leaning his head against the wall. When he heard our steps approaching, he lifted his face, which looked exhausted. The scrape on his jaw was dark red under his blond stubble.

  “Hi again. I hear the ride was a little choppy.”

  “Sailing under power with a headwind can definitely get bumpy. We could have avoided some of that by tacking upwind, but then we still wouldn’t be here yet.”

  “Want some coffee? We’re headed to Interrogation Room 2,” I said.

  Picking up his backpack and anorak, Mikke Sjöberg followed Koivu and me down the hall. The seascapes hanging on the walls of the interrogation room provoked a slight frown, but then he pulled off his thick gray sweater and sat down in the chair I indicated. I liked Room 2 because it was larger than the others and decorated in warmer colors. Room 4 was more like a cell, so that was where I took anyone who needed squeezing. There the interviewee and the lead interrogator sat face to face across a narrow table, and you could turn the light so it shined right in the person’s eyes. The couches and armchairs in Room 2 evoked a feeling of a relaxed chat between friends.

  “Hopefully your plans aren’t completely ruined,” I said once I had repeated usual litany of date, time, and so forth into the recorder.

  “In sailing you learn to be flexible. And this is nothing compared to someone losing his life,” Sjöberg said as if begging me to put an end to the repartee and get to the point. So I started asking questions about the discovery of the body. And he repeated what he had said on the island.

  “Of course I’ve been excited to get on the water,” he admitted. “That’s why I was up so early. I thought I wouldn’t bother anyone else in the lighthouse. And besides, I wanted to see how the sky looked. Usually the sunrise will tell you something about the weather later in the day.”

  “Did you notice anything in particular outside—before you saw the body, that is?”

  “No.”

  There wasn’t even the slightest hesitation in Sjöberg’s response. I spread some Polaroids the crime-scene photographer had taken on the table in front of Sjöberg.

  “You said you pulled your brother out of the water. It would be important to know what position he was in when you found him. Look at these pictures—take your time—and then tell me how the position he’s in here differs from how he was when you found him.”

  Sjöberg obviously didn’t want to look at the pictures of his dead half brother. His pronounced Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. A knock came at the door when the coffee and sandwiches arrived. Koivu attacked the vittles as if he hadn’t seen food in a week. Sjöberg didn’t even seem to notice the coffee cup placed in front of him; he looked through the pictures intently, seemingly at something the rest of us couldn’t see.

  “Juha was floating on his stomach between that big rock and the shore. His arms were spread out, and his head was bloody. I slipped and almost fell in the wat
er too. I waded in until I could grab his pants. The rocks were slick, and water ran in over the top of my boots. I pulled Juha up on the rocks so he wouldn’t float away and then checked for a pulse. I was frantic so I wasn’t being very smart. I woke up my mom and Tapio before I realized we had to call the police. My phone was on the boat, so Tapio went with me to the shore to call from his phone. We thought we should be able to see Juha when they started asking us questions.”

  I nodded and wondered why so many people, especially men, had a hard time admitting they panicked around a body, even though it was a perfectly natural reaction. We think we can quarantine death in special buildings and desensitize ourselves by watching murder on TV, but we’re wrong.

  “Juha’s clothes . . . were they the same ones he had been wearing the previous night?”

  Sjöberg thought for a moment before answering. “Yeah, I think so. He wasn’t wearing a jacket when we were sitting in the kitchen, but could have put it on when he went outside.”

  Anne Merivaara had tossed and turned in the couple’s bed. We would have to try to figure out if Juha had slept in it at all last night. Had the sheets been clean, taken out to the lighthouse just for this weekend? Where were Juha’s pajamas? Forensics would have to go through their things for any evidence that Merivaara had slept in his bed.

  “According to your mother and Seija Saarela, you went to get a book from your boat around the time they went to bed. Did you see where Juha went?”

  “He went out too, probably to take a leak. Wait . . . he put a jacket on. I remember it now. I put a sweater on because there was a cold wind.”

  “How long were you at the boat?”

  “Not long, maybe five minutes. The book was easy to find. For a six-month sailing trip you have to take enough stuff that it’s best to have it all organized. Otherwise I get nervous.”

  “You’re planning to be away for six months?”

  “More or less. I thought I’d go to Madeira because I’ve never been there before. It’s supposed to be nice and quiet there in January and February.”

  Koivu had emptied the plate of sandwiches and was now coughing, trying to dislodge some cookie stuck in his throat. Standing up, I slapped him on the back until the coughing ended. I leaned against the wall near the window so my own face was in shadow, but I could see Sjöberg’s perfectly.

  “Did you hear anything out of the ordinary during the night?”

  “Jiri went outside at one point,” Sjöberg said and then seemed to realize after he did that it could be interpreted as an accusation. “Just quickly. I woke up when he left and hadn’t fallen asleep again before he came back again. He was gone maybe a minute or two.”

  I thought of the motor sound Katrina Sjöberg had mentioned. It would be too leading to ask Sjöberg about that directly.

  “Anything else? Other people moving around? Sounds from the sea? Anything . . . ?”

  “The sea was full of sounds. Freighters are always sailing along those lanes. I didn’t pay any attention to them, although I did sleep lightly and not nearly enough.”

  Mikke Sjöberg was pale, and blood was crusted around the bandage on his left hand. How close had the half brothers been? There were twelve years between them, and they hadn’t lived together as children, but that didn’t have to mean they were estranged.

  “You sold your shares in Merivaara Nautical to your brother several years ago. Why?”

  Sjöberg’s tired face quickly turned into a grin, which, just as with his mother, instantly transformed his face. Although Mikke hadn’t inherited his mother’s facial features, his expressions and wiry frame were the same.

  “I’m not the sitting-at-a-desk type! Although as a boy I thought it was my duty to follow my father in the business. That’s why I went to study nautical engineering, but I wasn’t interested in the theory. By the time I graduated, I knew that running a business wasn’t for me. I spent a year in the navy thinking about it and then sold my shares to Juha when I got out.”

  “So the decision to sell didn’t have anything to do with problems working with your brother?”

  I had just been trying to avoid leading questions, but now I was wading right in.

  “No, I mostly just wanted a lot of money so I could sail around the world. After all, I’m just a rich deadbeat who got his money for free and spends his winters at sea while the unemployed are getting frostbite in bread lines and proper working folk are rushing to their jobs in the snow and sleet.”

  There was the same edge in Sjöberg’s voice as when he had said that no one was interested in a drifter like him.

  “So you’re still living off of the money from that sale?”

  “I invested it wisely. I do work occasionally, writing articles about my trips, teaching sailing classes, and things like that. Early this summer I worked sailing rich Japanese people from Helsinki to Tallinn. I don’t spend much when I’m traveling, so I don’t need much. At least the way I live doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  Except by making them jealous, I thought. How many Finns had that dream to leave it all behind and sail south to warmer waters without any schedule or work pressure? But a life like that would be lonely—or did Sjöberg have a girl in every port like a good sailor should? That was definitely something I couldn’t ask about.

  Instead I asked about Juha Merivaara’s heart trouble.

  “Yes, he had some issues. His first heart attack was last September, not long before I left for the winter. I thought about putting off the trip, but he recovered quickly. I guess he had another one around New Year’s, but then his issues seemed to calm down. Juha started playing squash and tried to stick to a vegetarian diet. You’d have to ask Riikka and Anne about all that, though. I was gone until May Day.”

  The interrogation room telephone rang. It was the pathologist.

  “I’m opening up Merivaara and heard you wanted some prelims as soon as possible.”

  “Yes. Wait. I’ll go to another phone.”

  I told Mikke and Koivu that we’d take a short break and went to Interrogation Room 1 to answer the call.

  “The cause of death is obvious. It was the skull fracture caused by the blow to his temple. He probably died five to eight hours after his last meal.”

  I quickly calculated that that would be between one and four in the morning.

  “His BAC was 0.11. So far I haven’t found any other intoxicants in his blood.”

  “Can you say anything about what caused the skull fracture? Did someone hit him or did he take a fall?” I asked impatiently.

  “The worst damage is to the front of his head. If he slipped, it would be more likely that he would have fallen on his back. There aren’t any rock fragments in the wound, which you would expect to find if he fell. I doubt the water would have washed all of them away. My best guess is that something struck him other than a rock, but I can’t say what it was yet. I did find a couple of glass fragments, but they could have been from his glasses. Have they been found?”

  “No. We’ll have to look in the water. Could this have been a result of a heart attack followed by a fall? He had some heart trouble last winter.”

  “I haven’t gotten to the organs yet,” the pathologist said irritably. From the phone came a grinding sound I could imagine was a drill going through a skull, but it probably wasn’t. “They said you wanted to know as soon as possible if we could rule out the possibility of a homicide. At least at this point, doing that would be out of the question, but I’ll know more tomorrow once I’ve had time to take a look at the internal organs and do some analysis. Pictures of the scene would help too.”

  When I returned to the interrogation room, Koivu’s inquisitive gaze greeted me. He had probably guessed it was the pathologist calling. I shrugged. Mikke Sjöberg seemed to be dozing in his chair, with his head leaning against the wall and his eyes closed.

  “Let’s call it day,” I said, but my voice didn’t wake him up. He couldn’t have fallen that deeply asleep in the middle of a police i
nterview, could he? No, suddenly he opened his eyes, yawning and stretching like a napping cat.

  “So that’s it?” he asked, seeming a little surprised.

  “We’ll probably have to go over this again, but this was enough for today. Your mother is waiting for you in the lounge. We’ll show you the way.”

  Sjöberg pulled on his sweater. His movements were strangely slow. Did Mikke need professional help too? Some of my colleagues—Ström, for example—outright laughed at the crisis-help brochures I always handed out, but my experience told me that talking to a professional did a lot of good.

  “Mikke, you just found a dead body,” I said, touching his arm. “Don’t try to carry that alone. There is help.”

  He stared at me with his sad sea-blue eyes for what seemed like a long time. Then a grin appeared on his lips, but it didn’t extend to his eyes.

  “I’ve got my mom to take care of me!”

  Sjöberg turned and walked out, with Koivu following behind. For a few seconds I stood there with my face in my hands, wishing I were someone else. Someone more rational.

  5

  In our Monday morning meeting, we reviewed the events of the weekend and all our unfinished cases. I was a good way into the Juha Merivaara case when I realized that Ström hadn’t made an appearance yet. That momentarily broke my concentration.

  “So we still aren’t sure whether Merivaara’s death involves a crime,” Puupponen summed up after my pause had stretched to fifteen seconds.

  “Forensics and the lab are promising more results by the afternoon. Let’s hope it turns out to be an accident. We have enough work already,” I said with a sigh and suggested that we move on to Friday night’s brawl. A heavy silence followed, and I realized that it was Ström’s case.