Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Otherwise the room was normal, although rather sparsely decorated. The bed was narrow, and the gray quilt thrown over it had been mended many times. On the shelves were more CDs and videos than books, and although Jiri opposed wasting energy, an expensive AV system stood on a rack. Jiri didn’t have a computer, though, just an old typewriter. On the desk were stacks of paper, with one biology textbook looking out of place among them.

  I picked up the topmost flyer. It talked about why people should boycott Shell. The pictures of environmental devastation in Nigeria and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s murder were at once dispassionate and effective, making me think maybe I should pay attention to where I tanked up too. The next leaflet was in a different style, painting EU meat processors as a group of murderous gene-manipulators. A third made an appeal for Turkish political prisoners and demanded a tourist boycott of the country. How many movements did Jiri belong to?

  “Interesting videos,” Koivu said behind me. On a seventeen-year-old boy’s shelf I would have expected to find horror movies and rock music videos. Maybe some porn. But Jiri’s titles were different: TV2 Current Affairs: Report on EU Cattle Transport, Meet the Meat Murderers, BBC: The Animal Liberation Front, Why Do We Do This?: Legitimate Violence Against Animals. More than half of the videos seemed to deal with animal rights. I did notice a few movies too, like Trainspotting and Jurassic Park.

  “Should we take these too or leave them for SIS?” Koivu asked, indicating the leaflets.

  “Someone should definitely go through them. And I’m sure SIS will be interested in them,” I said with a sigh. All the recent raids on the homes of animal-rights activists and the offices of perfectly innocent-sounding organizations had seemed like overkill to me, and now I was doing the same thing. In with Jiri’s papers was a list of cosmetics that hadn’t been tested on animals. I made sure the brands I used were on the list before putting it back on the pile.

  Koivu turned on the TV and flipped through the channels. Finnish MTV and its international namesake were showing the same rap video, and Eurosport had a tractor pull. Koivu pressed play on the video remote and switched the TV to the right channel.

  The scream that came from the speakers startled us both. The image was grainy and dark, clearly a handheld shot.

  A herd of pigs so large they could barely walk jostled each other in panic. The person who had screamed was masked, but based on her build she was female, climbing desperately up the steel fence to avoid being trampled by the swine. The person with the camera retreated as well when the herd changed direction. Another figure dressed in black opened the door at the rear of the barn, apparently trying to drive the pigs out. Their grunting and squealing intensified. Clearly they didn’t know what they were supposed to do. I could almost smell the hog house through the screen. Then someone, apparently the person holding the camera, screamed, and the picture broke for a few seconds.

  “What the hell?” Koivu said, but then the video continued. Now a person in a sack-like black hooded jacket stood outside with the lights of a large industrial building far in the background.

  “Operation Free the Pigs was completed ten minutes ago. We succeeded . . .”

  “Oh, so this isn’t from Finland,” Koivu said, and we continued listening while members of the Animal Liberation Front strike team reported freeing hundreds of pigs from a farm near Bristol. They promised to continue their strikes until Britain and the EU outlawed the genetic manipulation of pigs. I turned the player off.

  “Yuck. I think I may have to skip the sausage after sauna tomorrow,” Koivu said.

  “Oh, you were going to have to do that anyway. Don’t you remember we’re going to the soccer match? Where is this video from?”

  I put my gloves back on and pressed the eject button. There was no label on the cassette, only the manufacturer’s logo. Pushing it back in, I rewound a bit. It seemed to be an instructional video from some English animal-rights activists about how to attack different targets: hog houses, fur farms, and laboratories that did animal testing.

  “The SIS is definitely going to be interested in this, and probably the Brits too.” I pulled out my phone and called my SIS contact immediately. I said that we were executing a search warrant for a homicide investigation on one of the suspects in the meatpacking plant arson.

  “He’s on our list,” the agent said, and then assured me that the memo I had requested on Animal Revolution was already on its way.

  “Bag the fliers and videos. Check inside all the cases. Trainspotting might actually be Pigspotting,” I told Koivu. We would take the Animal Revolution material with us to the Espoo Police Station so SIS could pick it up there. Jiri was still in custody, and apparently his interrogation hadn’t even begun.

  “Who checked this room?” I asked Koivu.

  “Probably Puustjärvi. I focused on the garage, and Anu did the women’s rooms.”

  I realized I hadn’t received the report on Monday’s search of the Merivaaras’ house. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it in the pile of paper on my desk that had grown to depressing proportions ever since I took command of the unit. Recently in a leadership meeting I had suggested establishing an antibureaucracy commission, but some of my colleagues missed my sarcasm. They didn’t realize what was really going on until I started outlining the commission’s first intra-office memo.

  Jiri’s CD collection demonstrated our very real generation gap, which was also depressing: I didn’t recognize any of his favorite bands. I glanced in the closet. There were hardly any clothes, mostly just more stacks of paper. Koivu went to get a plastic bag from the car. The desk drawers were full of random stuff like earrings and dirty socks. The top drawer was locked. A search warrant allowed us to break locks, but I decided first to ask Riikka where Jiri kept the key.

  Jiri’s bedroom window was on the side of the house, facing the road, and I heard a car pull up. Glancing through the blinds, I expected to see Anne Merivaara, but the car in the driveway was Tapio Holma’s dark-blue Volkswagen. I saw Holma climb out of the car and nearly run into Koivu, who was shaking out a bag. Apparently Holma asked something, because Koivu shook his head. Then Holma opened the door, which Koivu must have left cracked. I heard Riikka’s quiet footfalls.

  “What did they say?” Riikka’s tone was enthusiastic.

  “I’ll tell you soon. Are the police here because of Jiri?”

  “Jiri? Did something happen to him?”

  “Haven’t you heard the news? Someone burned down a meatpacking plant. Three people went to the hospital for smoke inhalation and two almost died. The police arrested a bunch of AR members. Jiri had to be there.”

  “They didn’t say anything about that!” Riikka’s steps approached Jiri’s room and she flung to door open.

  “Did Jiri get arrested?”

  When she was angry, Riikka resembled her father: her clenched jaw was the same, and her eyebrows had the same decisive arc.

  “Yes. The Security Intelligence Service has him,” I said and continued moving papers from the closet to the bed. I accidentally bumped a hanger, which dropped a hooded linen shirt, one of the two garments Jiri had bothered to hang. Two pairs of pants, T-shirts, and sweaters, as well as his socks and underwear, were carefully folded on the shelves.

  Tapio Holma appeared behind Riikka, taking her by the shoulder and turning her to him.

  “Hello. How did the visit to the doctor go?” I asked as if no one had mentioned Jiri at all.

  “Very well. Looks like I have a surgery ahead of me. Was Jiri really involved in that fire? The radio was saying it was arson.”

  “Jiri was definitely there with the other protesters.”

  Riikka started to sob. Had the SIS already notified Anne Merivaara? Jiri could be detained until Sunday morning without filing charges. I hoped the SIS wouldn’t let him go until I had a chance to talk to him too. I had been looking forward to a free weekend and the Finland-Hungary soccer game on Saturday night that would determine whether Finland made it into the World Cup.
What was going to happen with that now?

  “So Jiri helped light the fire?” Holma asked me.

  “Seems that way. The investigation is ongoing, though. You should be prepared for the SIS to come interview you too. Riikka, we really need to get your official statement. What did you say about Monday?”

  “I have a test, and I don’t know anything!” Riikka turned her weepy face toward me, and Holma shot me an accusatory glance. Koivu, who slipped by the couple and started loading Jiri’s things into the bag, didn’t improve the situation.

  “Riikka, do you know where Jiri keeps the key to his top drawer?” I asked. The answer was an angry no. I thought for a second and then decided to wait on breaking the lock. SIS could do that if they thought it was necessary.

  “So you might be able to get your voice back?” I asked Holma, trying to sound friendly. For a moment he looked at me as if he didn’t understand what I was saying.

  “Maybe, maybe not. The laryngologist thinks I should try if I can get an appointment quickly. He promised to contact a colleague in Los Angeles with experience in this kind of procedure.”

  “That’s great. But you can’t leave the country for now.”

  “What the hell? What kind of clown show are you running? You mean because of Juha . . . ? I didn’t kill him! Why can’t you solve this murder and stop tormenting innocent people?”

  This was the first time I had seen the normally relaxed Holma really lose his cool. He turned away, pulling Riikka with him. Koivu looked at me and pursed his lips, and I did the same in return.

  “I’m going to take a look downstairs at the sauna area and then at Riikka’s room,” I told Koivu, who started dragging the large plastic bag out to the car.

  The sauna area was spacious and inviting. A den, sunroom, and bathing room formed a space in which I would have gladly spent the afternoon lounging. In one corner of the bathing room was a large whirlpool tub that was full of fermentation equipment, apparently for home winemaking. Maybe the family didn’t use the tub anymore because it was so wasteful. The sauna was wood fired, with enough space for at least two people to stretch out fully on the benches. There was also a utility room on the lower level, the only room in the house with no windows. The washer and dryer were expensive, high-efficiency models, both with environmental-certification stickers shining on the front.

  What did these rooms say about Juha Merivaara? Really only that he had tried to live life in a way that was comfortable but environmentally responsible. He only brought durable, expensive, high-quality goods into his home. His ideological principles—or maybe his wife’s—were on display everywhere, but that still said very little about the man himself.

  Uncommonly little.

  I walked back upstairs. Koivu had come inside and was talking with Holma about the fire. Riikka was banging around in the kitchen. I heard a kettle whistle and suddenly a desperate need for coffee hit me. It was almost four o’clock, and we easily could have called it a day. But I still had to take a peek in Riikka’s room.

  Marching down the hall to the north end of the house, I opened the door. A piano dominated the large bedroom, which had greenish wallpaper with a fir-tree motif. Riikka slept on a two-person futon that was folded up into a couch right now. Under the piano was a soundproofing platform, and the door and two interior walls also seemed to have some sort of soundproofing.

  On the music stand was a collection of Sibelius songs opened to “The First Kiss.” I clumsily plunked out the melody. I may have been a rock-n-roll chick, but I had heard plenty of classical music growing up, so the song was vaguely familiar. There was more sheet music on the piano: Kuula, Mozart, a compilation of soprano arias. Then my eyes landed on a picture of a smiling Tapio Holma in a silver frame on the desk. On the wall there were newspaper clippings of him, as if Holma were Riikka Merivaara’s teen idol rather than her boyfriend.

  There weren’t many books in Riikka’s room either. Apparently the Merivaaras weren’t big readers. In the living room there had also only been the obligatory national classics, Seven Brothers, The Unknown Soldier, and the like. On Riikka’s shelves I found books on natural cosmetics, some music literature, and romance novels.

  I was just opening the closet door when Riikka burst in.

  “Do you really have to? I’m just surprised you didn’t have that guy with you go through my lingerie!”

  When I didn’t respond, Riikka demanded to know why we were searching the house again.

  “Mom and I don’t know a lot about what Jiri does. I mean, we think that fur farming and the way pigs and other animals are treated should be banned, but we don’t agree with Jiri on how to get there. I think the most important thing is to take care of yourself and your family, not throw rocks through windows.”

  “Have you gotten Tapio to give up eating sausages yet?” I asked as I glanced at Riikka’s wardrobe. Just like the outfit she was wearing today, the style of her clothes seemed suited to a more mature woman: lots of long, slim-fitting skirts and silk blouses, although there were a couple of pairs of designer jeans and a World Wildlife Federation hoodie.

  “I can’t force anyone to do anything. But Tapio has already come around on a lot of things.”

  I walked to Riikka’s desk and started pulling open drawers.

  “That Wang lady already looked at everything. Did she find something that made me a suspect?”

  I shook my head and emotionlessly went through the drawers. Riikka had the right to be present when her room was being searched. The condom in the top drawer wasn’t a surprise, nor was the handsome collection of jewelry in the next. Then I reached the bottom drawer.

  “Oh, don’t look in there. It’s so stupid!” Riikka exclaimed.

  I opened the drawer anyway. It was empty except for one object.

  The photograph had probably been taken during an opera performance, as suggested by the performer’s stage makeup, wide skirts, and enormous hairdo. The mouth was smiling, but the eyes had been cut out, and there was also only a hole around where the heart would have been.

  I didn’t recognize the woman, but based on the context and Riikka’s reaction, it had to be Suzanne Holtzinger, Tapio Holma’s ex-wife.

  “It was Suzanne’s fault that Tapio lost his voice,” Riikka said, suddenly impassioned. “The voice is a delicate instrument. It reflects our state of mind. The shock of being left by a loved one can take it away.”

  “Is that what Tapio told you?”

  “No, I worked it out myself. I’ve been studying the physiology of singing. Suzanne didn’t want to have children with Tapio because both of their careers would suffer, but now she’s pregnant from that Italian tenor. Tapio heard about it from an old colleague from Hamburg.”

  “You don’t believe in crystals, but you believe in that?” I said dryly and closed the picture back in the drawer. “Tuesday at ten thirty at the Espoo Police Station. Ask for me at the desk. Oh, and by the way, have Seija Saarela or Mikke visited the house since Monday?”

  “They were here on Wednesday, and Mikke stayed the night. The renters have taken over his apartment. Mom said he could stay in the den downstairs until Dad’s funeral, but Mikke said he would rather sleep in his boat.”

  After leaving Riikka, I walked to the entryway and went to the door that led to the garage. The door didn’t have a lock. It would have been easy to slip the flashlight into the garage.

  Koivu was in the kitchen drinking coffee with Holma. It smelled amazing, but we needed to go. A slew of reports were waiting for me on my desk, and I was probably going to have to take them home if I wanted to get there in time to put Iida down.

  “Damn, I need a weekend,” I said to Koivu as we drove back to the station. “If that flashlight is the murder weapon, at least we’ll be one step closer. That would narrow our list of suspects down to six: the three Merivaaras, Holma, Saarela, and Mikke Sjöberg. Katrina Sjöberg went back to Åland before the killer returned the flashlight.”

  “Why would Seija Saarela
have killed Merivaara?” Koivu asked dubiously.

  “Maybe this was just a good old-fashioned Finnish fight over a bottle of booze. Juha Merivaara and Seija Saarela fighting over the cognac. And in the end Saarela hit him with the bottle.”

  “But they didn’t find cognac in the wound . . .”

  “Koivu!” Usually my dear colleague kept up with my wisecracks, but I think the long day was getting to him.

  I sat staring at my stack of paperwork for a little while. The envelope from the Security Intelligence Service weighed at least four pounds. A report from Puustjärvi, another from Lähde, a memo from the county police commissioner with a title that meant nothing to me, and a message about the National Bureau of Investigation commission of inquiry. I glanced through that one. Ström’s list of transgressions had already been so long that the recommendation was to keep him on administrative leave as long as the court proceedings about the beating continued. Väätäinen was certainly going to press charges. There was also a message from Personnel. Due to a lack of appropriations, a temporary replacement for Ström was unlikely. I kicked a chair; the rest of the unit was going to have to work themselves to death for weeks.

  Cramming all the papers into my backpack, I decided to walk home, since I had come by bus in the morning. Using my work car still felt weird. I crossed the highway and started winding my way through the residential streets toward the nearby fields. When I passed the last of the houses, I reached an area that had been green fields but was now torn apart and transformed into piles of dirt and mud ten feet tall. In order to get to my usual shortcut, I had to cross the construction zone. I knew I wasn’t supposed to trespass, but I didn’t care. A couple of digging machines growled a little ways off, and one of the workers waved at me, but I just continued on my way.

  We had lived in our house on the other side of the fields for about three years, and in that time the surroundings had changed quickly. On many undeveloped lots, large homes had sprung up that made our little one-and-a-half-story rented slice of paradise look like a hovel. In the spring, the city had dredged nearly half a mile of the nearby canal, felling trees all along the banks. Antti had been one of the most vocal advocates for halting the work. Although the reclamation had succeeded in saving a swamp in a nearby nature reserve from drying out, the barren canal banks were a pathetic sight. Where cuckooflowers once grew along the water, now there was only gravel.