Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Where is Ström? Has anyone heard from him?” I asked, hoping I wouldn’t sound like a schoolmarm asking about the class troublemaker. I scanned the room until my gaze rested on an uncomfortable-looking Lähde.

  “Do you know where Ström is?”

  Lähde shifted his short, pudgy legs.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly, but . . . Ström’s ex-wife’s wedding was this weekend.”

  I didn’t have a chance to ask whether Ström was watching the kids while his wife went on her honeymoon or whether there was some other connection between her nuptials and his absence before Puupponen jumped in.

  “So Ström doesn’t just have a sensitive stomach, he has a sensitive heart too?” he said.

  This time the guffaws weren’t very loud because the whole unit knew what a tender spot Ström’s divorce was even after four years. After a long period of stalling, Ström had let his wife go back to work as a lab technician at Jorvi Hospital once their youngest turned three. After six months at work, his wife had announced that she was moving out because she had fallen in love with a hospital orderly. A custody dispute ensued, but eventually Ström agreed to give the kids to their mother, because a cop’s work hours weren’t conducive to single parenting.

  The worst thing for Ström had probably been that the children grew fond of their stepfather. Maybe Marja’s wedding and new pregnancy made him feel even more shut out of his children’s life. It was typical that Ström hadn’t told anyone but Lähde about his ex-wife’s wedding. For a moment I felt some sympathy for Ström, but it passed quickly. The rest of us were overworked as it was, and nothing gave him the right to keep drinking after a weekend off. At least he could have called and lied about having a sore throat.

  Although I wasn’t going to put up with excuses and boozing for long. I would have to talk to him about this, no matter how hard it was.

  Forensics had promised me their first report on Juha Merivaara around noon. Turning on my computer, I answered a couple of e-mail queries from the Helsinki Police Department. Internet communication saved time, but I preferred to talk to a real person over the phone. But since I was online anyway, it occurred to me to check the Merivaara Nautical website.

  I found the address and then waited for it to load as I cursed the slow network connection. I was naturally impatient, and waiting for machines irritated me whether it was a computer, an ATM, or my old home answering machine.

  When it finally loaded, the website showed two ships sailing off into a wide expanse of sea with blue skies overhead. The menu offered information about the company’s products, navigation, environmental issues, and the Rödskär lighthouse. I opened the page about the environment.

  Everyone who travels the water wants to protect the irreplaceable beauty of Finland’s nature. The magnificent lakes and archipelagos of Finland are a national treasure we all have a duty to protect. At Merivaara Nautical our goal is to offer you the most environmentally friendly boating products available, including paints, primers, toilet chemicals, and lubricants. Our research and development team is the best in the business, backed up by the deep, personal relationship every one of our employees has with boating and sailing. Trips to Rödskär Island are a regular part of employee training.

  Even though something like the composition of your boat’s bottom paint may seem like a small factor in polluting our waterways, small trickles form great rivers. Did you know that if you mainly operate in fresh water, your boat doesn’t need antifouling products? For sailboats on lakes, such as the waterways of Saimaa, Merivaara Nautical Sweet and Soft paint provides sufficient hull protection. Our bottom paints meant for boats operating in salt water also avoid the use of chemicals that might harm marine life.

  The site felt a bit thrown together. As I continued browsing, I found various recycling tips and instructions on what kinds of eco-friendly products boaters should buy. “Eco-friendly” was an easy hook for selling nature lovers just about anything. Not many people ever bothered to check what the term concealed. I knew I was more than a little lost in the current jungle of environmental certifications: Who knew whether any of those little green stamps meant anything at all? According to their site, Merivaara Nautical had recently applied for EU Ecolabel status.

  Traffic hummed outside my office window, and a patrol car took off from the garage with sirens wailing. Hopefully it wouldn’t be anything for us, I thought, when the phone rang. The forensic pathologist confirmed that based on the condition of Juha Merivaara’s lungs, he had been dead before he entered the water.

  “Did a heart attack cause the fall?”

  “Merivaara’s heart wasn’t healthy by any means, but his death had nothing to do with heart failure. As I said yesterday, the skull fracture was the cause of death. He was hit in the head with an object of indefinite shape. There was rust on his skin and we found shards of glass in the wound. The rest of the injuries to his body were caused by the fall. The height was about five meters, right?”

  I took a breath and didn’t answer. Although the doctor wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t been prepared for, starting my first homicide investigation as head of the unit felt fraught, especially since it meant I would have to dig into Harri’s death too.

  Why was this happening to me again? Why couldn’t I escape my past? Harri reminded me of a version of myself I didn’t particularly like: the thoughtless, irresponsible, selfish girl I hoped I had grown past.

  “Are you still there?” the pathologist asked.

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “Based on the lividity, the body was moved a few hours after death.”

  “The person who found the body pulled him out of the water. What can the lividity tell you about the body’s position in the water?”

  “He probably fell on his side, with his neck bent. It’ll be easier to explain if you come look.”

  I sighed. “When I find the time,” I said and then asked whether he could give me any estimate of the size or strength of the attacker. He didn’t want to start guessing. The blow that caused the skull fracture hadn’t been terribly powerful, and he couldn’t estimate what position Juha Merivaara had been in when he was hit. Based on the shape of the wound, the weapon hadn’t been very heavy, and it was blunt but angular.

  Forensics had scoured Rödskär Island until dark, but they hadn’t found any appropriate murder weapons or the victim’s glasses. Based on initial analysis, there were foreign fibers on Juha Merivaara’s clothes, and a fingerprint other than his own had shown up on the metallic insignia on the collar of his jacket. Although that could have been from sometime earlier, it was still a place to start. I asked Koivu to come into my office.

  “You’re going to go take fingerprints from everyone who was on the island the night of the murder. I’m also going to want all the clothes they were wearing for fiber analysis. Puustjärvi can go with you to inspect the clothes. He might remember what everyone was wearing that morning,” I said, cursing the fact that I was already a day behind. We should have made all the suspects strip yesterday.

  I glanced at my calendar. At one o’clock I had the Criminal Division commanders’ weekly meeting, which I couldn’t miss. Koivu and Wang would have to interview the Merivaara family without me. I found Koivu at the coffee machine, and Wang was with Lähde in Interrogation Room 2 working on some of the brawlers from the weekend. Koivu wasn’t surprised when I told him that the Rödskär case had turned out to be a homicide.

  “It had to be someone on the island, so let’s focus on them. I doubt whoever it was will be able to hide it for long.”

  “That Holma guy seemed familiar for some reason,” Koivu said, frowning.

  “He’s a pretty famous opera singer,” I said, surprised because Koivu was more of a Bon Jovi type.

  “I didn’t mean that. I was just looking at my files because I remembered he had something to do with a case I investigated back in April.”

  I hadn’t made the time to look up Holma’s police record because I d
idn’t think I’d find anything worse than a parking ticket.

  “Holma saved a girl from an attempted rape.”

  Then I remembered the interview where Tapio Holma said he had been forced to play a hero in real life, not just on stage.

  “And the girl’s name was Riikka Merivaara?”

  Koivu nodded and told me where the folder was with the case files. He had followed the case because one of the attempted rapists had also been involved in an aggravated assault a few weeks earlier.

  If I got lunch from the cafeteria, I would have just enough time to look at those case files before my meeting. After grabbing a cup of coffee, cheese sandwich, and a yogurt, I retreated to my office.

  Over the years I’d developed a talent for building a coherent narrative out of the disconnected, often contradictory statements in a pretrial investigation file. Now the chain of events I was reading was like a soap opera.

  On the last Saturday in April, Riikka Merivaara had been partying in downtown Helsinki. The closing bell at the bar came at three thirty in the morning, and an old school friend who happened to be at the bar offered Riikka a ride home.

  Riikka hadn’t hesitated long. The night buses drove all over Espoo, so getting back to her house in the south part of the city would take at least an hour. A taxi from Helsinki would cost nearly two hundred marks. Her school friend, Aki, swore that the driver, who had also gone to the same school, was sober.

  Riikka didn’t like the third man in the party. Tuomo Haaranen was big and hairy, and he had more than the average number of tattoos. She could tell from his eyes that he had messed up his head with more than alcohol. But Riikka had drunk five lemon grappas and was exhausted. The trip home on the empty freeway would only take twenty minutes. Riikka decided to take the ride.

  Riikka and Tuomo Haaranen had sat in the back seat of the Mitsubishi. Riikka was disgusted when Tuomo lit up in the car, and she asked him to throw his cigarette out the window. Haaranen responded with an arrogant laugh, saying that he would be setting the rules in the car. That was when Riikka started to be afraid.

  About halfway home, Haaranen had started complaining that he hadn’t had his Saturday screw. He asked if Riikka was willing and started touching her breasts. Riikka tried to struggle away, but Haaranen continued groping her, and the two in the front seat didn’t intervene. When they turned off at Riikka’s exit, she asked the driver to stop. But Haaranen told him to keep driving to the marina.

  Riikka couldn’t understand why Aki and the driver weren’t trying to stop Haaranen. Later she learned that Haaranen was an Ecstasy dealer to whom both boys owed a couple of thousand marks. Haaranen had a bad reputation. That spring someone who couldn’t pay had ended up with a cigarette in the eye.

  At an intersection, the car had to slow down, and Riikka had jumped out. In her fright she ran the wrong direction, though. At four o’clock on an April morning, the city was deserted and dark. It was drizzling and just one bird was singing.

  Tapio Holma had decided to drive out to Porkkala Peninsula to spend Sunday watching the spring bird migration, which was expected to be swift and dense. He was driving along the West Highway carefully because earlier he had nearly run over a rabbit. At an overpass, the beam of his headlights illuminated Riikka running on the road below with a large man in pursuit. Holma realized instantly that something was amiss, and he took the off-ramp. Haaranen was just about to catch Riikka when Holma’s car screeched to a halt, stopping them both.

  “What’s going on here?” Holma had asked as he got out of the car.

  “Just a little disagreement with my girlfriend here,” Haaranen said calmly.

  “I’ve never seen this guy before in my life! He’s trying to rape me!” Riikka screamed and literally threw herself into Tapio Holma’s arms.

  Holma had looked at the girl, who was surely twenty years younger than he, and at Haaranen, who was several inches taller than he, and he told the latter to get lost.

  “Get lost yourself, runt!” Haaranen replied.

  Then Holma grabbed his spotting-scope tripod out of the car. He was used to life in big cities and had learned to decide quickly when to stand a fight and when to just give your money to the junkie waving the knife around. On the dark street, Haaranen couldn’t quite make out what Holma had in his hands, but he was a realist. He had missed his Saturday screw, and it was best to clear out. So he started trudging back to his friends, throwing a few last insults as he went. Holma attempted to calm the sobbing Riikka as best he could. He took her home and demanded that Riikka file a police report.

  The next day Holma called to check in on Riikka. In the end they went together to report the crime and both were interviewed, Riikka as the complainant and Holma as a witness. The charge of attempted rape was added to Tuomo Haaranen’s already long rap sheet.

  I looked up the trial information next. Haaranen had appeared before a judge in July. Neither Holma nor Riikka had appeared to testify. Haaranen received a pathetically small fine for the incident, but he was doing a six-month stretch now for drug dealing and an earlier assault.

  That was how Tapio Holma became the hero in the drama of Riikka’s life. Too bad the case file couldn’t tell me how their relationship had developed since then. I was starting to understand why Riikka had fallen in love with Holma. In everyday life he was a normal, relatively short, broad-shouldered Finnish man, but on stage he changed. His Marquis de Posa had made an impression on me too. Holma had the tragic dissonance of a fanatic hero, and despite the ridiculous lace collar, he had managed to look handsome. Maybe Riikka had seen the Savonlinna Opera Festival version of Don Carlos too.

  It was a few minutes to one. I quickly powdered my face and headed to my meeting, painfully aware that we had a serious homicide investigation ahead of us.

  The division of labor in our department had been in constant upheaval in recent years. The centralization of police services for the entire western half of the county in our department had meant more work and yet another organizational chart. Organized Crime and Recidivism had been under us before, but since January 1, it had its own unit. I was sitting in the meeting with the commanders of Violent Crime Unit 2, Organized Crime and Recidivism, Narcotics, Robbery, and Traffic. At the head of the table sat my old unit commander, Jyrki Taskinen, who had been promoted a year earlier. I was the only woman in the meeting, but that was nothing new. Luckily our department did have one other woman in a high-profile position, a sergeant who worked as the department spokesperson.

  Although the various units met each other every morning upstairs for coffee, I didn’t make it up there very often. These weekly meetings were essential, since Narcotics, Robbery, Violent Crime, and Organized Crime cases so frequently intertwined. The head of the national Security Intelligence Service had been particularly worried over the previous summer about racial conflicts and the rise of extremist groups, and we often mulled over the same issues in our meetings.

  So it wasn’t a surprise when the commander of the Organized Crime and Recidivism unit, an eager lieutenant named Laine who was a few years younger than me and had come over from the SIS, piped up when I described Juha Merivaara’s death.

  “Have you thought about Merivaara’s son? These eco-radicals have started getting pretty violent. What if Junior killed his dad?”

  “That isn’t logical,” I argued. “I just visited the Merivaara Nautical website, and the company is as greenwashed as can be.”

  “Anarchists aren’t logical. The worst enemies of the Animal Revolution are environmental liberals. They think anyone not as radical as them is just watering down the whole environmental movement by making rational concessions,” Laine said.

  “A seventeen-year-old boy killing his father over an ideological disagreement? Hard to believe,” I said, but I then remembered the pathologist’s suspicion that Juha Merivaara’s death could have been the result of a struggle. Maybe Jiri had been fighting with his father. But why on the top of the cliff in the middle of the night? />
  Although the meeting moved on to other topics, I continued thinking about the Merivaaras. Things were busy in Narcotics too. A week earlier they had caught a gang of Moroccan drug runners, and the interrogations had generated leads all over the metro area. The tabloids had been full of stories about foreign drug traffickers, and the Espoo skinheads had taken it as a good reason to beat a group of Iranian boys on their way home from high school. Ström was handling that incident too, I remembered with irritation.

  “Do you have time for lunch tomorrow?” Taskinen asked when the meeting finally ended.

  “I’m not sure. Hopefully. I’ll call you in the morning.” Just as I arrived at the door to my office, my cell phone rang.

  “We’re here at the Merivaaras’ place. Puustjärvi just came with Forensics to pick up the clothes. It almost caused a fistfight,” Koivu said, sounding anxious.

  Jiri Merivaara, who hadn’t been at school, had refused to turn over his only decent clothes, a green flea-market army jacket, camo cargo pants, and tennis shoes. Riikka and Tapio had to spend several minutes convincing him to cooperate. To my surprise, Anne Merivaara had been at the office instead of at home, but Riikka had given Forensics the clothes she thought her mother had been wearing the night of Juha’s death.

  “Should we get Mrs. Merivaara in for questioning today?” Koivu asked.

  “Tomorrow is fine. Then I can be there too.”

  “Holma and the girl can come with us now. Should be bring them in?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was actually curious to hear how the romance between Tapio Holma and Riikka Merivaara had begun. I reserved the interrogation room and then grabbed a Diet Coke from the machine to perk me up before dialing Pertti Ström’s home number.

  I was almost sure Ström wouldn’t answer. But after five rings, he picked up.

  “This is Ström.”

  “Hi, it’s Maria. Are you sick?”

  A grunt came from the phone. In my mind I could see Ström’s expression: acne-scarred face red with anger, nostrils of broken nose flaring, light-brown eyes beginning to wander.