Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I stood up and my chair clattered to the floor. I knew I was acting stupidly, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. As the door closed behind me, I could feel Taskinen’s disappointed gaze. Maybe he was starting to think it had been a mistake to appoint me unit commander. Taskinen had had to fight to get his proposal through. Some in the hierarchy had thought I was suspect because I belonged to organizations like the Finnish Feminist Association and LGBTI Rights Finland. What I had just said would probably start rumors that I not only supported animal-rights activists but also graffiti vandals.

  I flew up the stairs to my office at record speed. Just as I thought, there was a bag of salmiakki licorice in my top drawer, which would help my irritation.

  “Someone’s waiting for you,” Lähde said as he passed me in the hall.

  “Yeah?” I didn’t have any meetings scheduled, but I could see Jiri Merivaara with his green hair leaning against my door. Had he come to the police station voluntarily?

  “Hi, Jiri. How’s it going?”

  The boy shrugged and then followed me into my office and slumped on the sofa. The green of his hair had faded since I saw him last, and a bare knee protruded from his ripped jeans. His jam-packed backpack hung open.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked.

  “I’m never going back there! I turn eighteen in February. When I get Dad’s money, then I can do like Mikke and go traveling around the world.”

  I remembered Anne Merivaara talking about Jiri’s desire to go to college. Had that just been a mother’s wishful thinking?

  “And I missed three tests, since the SIS kept us in jail for days, even though we didn’t do anything.”

  “Didn’t you? Didn’t a few of you finally confess to lighting the fire? Did you know about that?”

  “No,” Jiri said, and I was sure he was lying. The girl who had interned at the meatpacking plant, her big sister, and another girl in the same high school as Jiri were going to be charged with arson. Jiri was probably looking at aiding and abetting. The fines were going to be huge, and Jiri was almost certainly going to need his inheritance to pay them.

  Jiri sat on the couch, silent and sullen as if he had been dragged into the police station instead of coming on his own volition. My phone rang and Puupponen asked about something routine, so I answered as if Jiri hadn’t been in the room. He stared at his backpack and the toes of his canvas shoes, biting off the nails of his right hand and then pulling them out of his mouth as if they tasted bad.

  After I ended my call, Jiri remained silent. I opened the Juha Merivaara case file on my computer and read through it backward and forward. Pulling the salmiakki out of my drawer, I put two in my mouth and offered the bag to Jiri. He glared at it suspiciously—the product label included three artificial additives—but then took some anyway. After chewing a couple of times, Jiri started to talk.

  “I lied about the night Dad died. I wasn’t sleeping the whole time. I went out for a piss and had a hard time getting back to sleep. That fight between Dad and Tapio was bugging me. How was it any of his business who Riikka sleeps with? Dad was always bossing everybody around!”

  Jiri’s eyes glowed almost as hot as his cheeks. “In that little room where I was, you can hear what everyone else is doing. Mikke went outside, or at least out in the hall. I heard him talking to his mom.”

  “Katrina Sjöberg?” I asked. I was a bit surprised, since neither mother nor son had mentioned anything about a nighttime encounter.

  “They were talking Swedish, so it had to be Katrina.”

  “What time did that happen?”

  “I didn’t look at the clock. It was totally dark, though. But I don’t know . . . I don’t think they went outside. I mean I don’t think they . . . you know . . . killed Dad . . .”

  Jiri blushed and tripped over his words. He clearly didn’t want to blame Mikke or Katrina directly, and I wondered if he had made the whole thing up to turn our attention away from someone else. Was he that afraid his mother was a murderer?

  “There’s another thing. Riikka and Tapio were sleeping in the room next to me. Mom always put them as far away from herself as possible, like she was afraid she would hear something horrible from their room. Anyway, one of them was awake, and based on the footsteps the one who went outside was Tapio. The only ones I absolutely didn’t hear going outside were Mom and Riikka.”

  I had expected something like this. Changing the topic, I asked about Harri Immonen’s connections to Animal Revolution.

  “Harri an AR member? No way. He was so old. I’ve never seen anyone over thirty at our events.”

  I nodded. Animal Revolution’s direct-action approach didn’t fit the image I had of Harri the lonely pacifist. But he had had some contact with the organization, because he ended up on that Security Intelligence Service list. I asked Jiri to think about it again, but he seemed more interested in the contents of his backpack than in Harri. He started digging around for something, first removing a sweater and some carrots in a mesh bag. He seemed to find what he was looking for but didn’t pull it out.

  “Harri was a nice guy. He left people alone. He didn’t approve of everything AR stands for, but he at least tried to be part of the conversation. A lot of times I’ve wondered why Dad couldn’t be more like Harri or Mikke, why he didn’t ever listen and just ran right over people.”

  Jiri’s flood of words and apparent desire to cooperate mystified me. Had the SIS managed to scare him? Or was it that the fire at the meat plant almost turned them into murderers? Perhaps compared to the SIS agents, I seemed gentle and understanding.

  “Oh, Harri came to a demonstration against animal testing once,” Jiri suddenly recalled. “He was passing out fliers with me and some clowns in business suits started yelling at him about a grown man playing with little girls and their fluffy animals,” Jiri said with a grimace. “As if defending animals was some kind of female privilege. Dad was a little surprised when I told him I knew Harri. He tried to quiz him about his politics, but Harri wouldn’t argue with him. Maybe he was afraid Dad would fire him.”

  Jiri shoved his hand in his backpack again. I wondered what had changed about him. The intensity of his speech was still there, as was the aggressive reserve, but in the aftermath of his father’s death, the boy seemed less distressed than before.

  Then I realized that even though the eyes beneath his green shock of hair still flashed, they weren’t alive with the same anger. That had disappeared completely. I didn’t have time to think about whether he had just stopped hating me or had made peace with some larger slice of humanity, because just then he opened his backpack wide and pulled out a gallon of paint.

  “I don’t know if this has anything to do with Dad’s death, but . . .” Jiri hesitated for a second and then handed me the can. It was covered in rust. The label colors were the same as on the Lithuanian paint cans I had seen in the Merivaaras’ garage, but the words on this one were in Russian, which I only knew enough of to identify the letters. The skull painted on the side with a red circle around it didn’t leave much to the imagination. I took the can carefully as if it might explode in my hands.

  “What is this? Where did you find it?”

  “Last fall on Rödskär. Harri was there watching the bird migration.”

  Harri had caught a bad cold and came down with an ear infection, so Mikke had gone to get him so he could see a doctor. Juha encouraged Harri to take some sick leave over the weekend, but Harri didn’t want to take a break because his research was already behind schedule.

  “Dad said directly that he had some visitors coming to the island that weekend and that he wanted to be alone with them. I don’t know who they were. On Sunday morning Mikke called and asked if I wanted to go with him to take Harri back to the island. It was a great day, as warm as June.”

  Jiri explained that he had decided to go because Mikke would be leaving soon for his winter sailing trip. From a distance they had made out what looked like a military vessel in the ha
rbor at Rödskär, and they started to have doubts about whether they should go to the island before Juha’s guests had left. So instead they took a spin around the end of Porkkala Peninsula, and on their return to Rödskär they passed the same boat. It was flying a Lithuanian flag. Juha Merivaara hadn’t been the slightest bit pleased that Harri had returned to the island earlier than arranged.

  “Dad had a massive hangover. He had had a real throw-down with his guests. The kitchen was full of Russian vodka bottles. I got ready to go heat the sauna, but Dad got all upset when I said I was going out there. Mikke asked if he was hiding a girl, and Dad almost hit him. Then he said one of the dudes had puked in the sauna and that he was going to clean it up himself. I was pissed, so I went out for a walk and noticed that someone had been digging at one of those grass patches on the south shore. My imagination started running away with me.”

  Jiri chewed his nails, looking sheepish. “I think I watched too much TV when I was a little kid. I thought they must have had an accident with some chick and that she died and the sauna was covered with blood and they had buried her body under that grass. I read a book like that once. I was so stupid I didn’t think to wonder why they would bury a body when it would be so much easier to sink it. I went to the sauna to check, but Dad hadn’t been lying. The dressing room was covered in puke. It was disgusting. The hole in the ground still bothered me, but I didn’t find a body in it. There were just rusted paint barrels and a couple of smaller cans. I don’t know why, but I took one of them and hid it again in the rocks near the west shore. Probably just to irritate Dad. I was a little embarrassed about imagining there being a dead body, though, so I kind of forgot the whole thing.”

  Jiri had been the next to get sick and hadn’t gone back to Rödskär until January. By then the rocks had been covered in ice and snow. He didn’t have a vague memory of the paint barrels until the summer and didn’t have a chance to poke around until August, the same weekend we had visited Rödskär on my in-laws’ boat. The barrels had disappeared, but he found the can he had hid. One weekend he stashed it in his sleeping bag and brought it home. The police had failed to find it either time they searched the Merivaara property because Jiri had buried it in the yard under some rocks.

  “I tried to ask Mom about Dad’s Lithuanian business partners, but she claimed they were just investors who didn’t have anything to do with the paint the company sold. I don’t know what to believe anymore. There’s gotta be some kind of fucked-up poison in this paint. What if Harri found Dad’s stash? He knew a little Russian. And what if Harri realized that Dad was selling poison paint under the table and Dad killed him because of that?”

  Jiri’s face was young and naked. Believing that his dad was another shill destroying the environment just like everyone else was probably easier than thinking that he killed people.

  “Did you suspect your father when Harri died?” This direct question almost made Jiri let out a squeak, and he wouldn’t look at me when he responded.

  “I thought about it. Dad wasn’t home the night Harri died. According to him he was on a business trip in Tallinn and came back on the early ferry with his bags full of champagne and caviar for Mom’s birthday party. But Mom doesn’t even eat fucking caviar! No one kept track of where Dad was, though, and he went to Tallinn at least once a month because the company had a lot of clients in Estonia. Maybe he was on Rödskär that night, though.”

  “But your boat . . . your mother would have noticed if it was gone.”

  “Last fall it was still at the marina. Dad didn’t have our beach dredged until this spring.”

  A headache seized the back of my head as if someone had been trying to bore through my skull with a corkscrew. I had to get the paint can to the crime lab. I had to interview Anne Merivaara about Harri’s death. That incident had clearly bothered her. Was that because she suspected it was murder rather than suicide? What if she knew Juha had been on Rödskär the night of Harri’s death?

  Could Anne have killed her husband in revenge for him killing Harri? Maybe Jiri’s greatest fear was that both of his parents were murderers.

  “This can of paint could be very significant. Interpol is tracking down those mysterious Lithuanian investors. There’s something suspicious about them. But that doesn’t necessarily connect your father or especially your mother to any criminal activity,” I said to calm him down.

  “Our whole family is a bunch of degenerates. And I thought I was the only one.” Jiri tried to look tough again, but the act resulted in another frenzied bout of nail biting.

  “How is your mother?”

  “All she does is work. She isn’t sleeping. I can hear her walking around the house at night drinking chamomile tea, but it doesn’t help. Tapio brought her some of his own sleeping pills, but she doesn’t want to take them. And Riikka doesn’t want to see Tapio anymore. I guess she . . .” Jiri hesitated again, then looked at me and almost shouted. “I guess she thinks Tapio killed Dad! She told me that Tapio had a cut on his arm that he said came from the fight in the sauna. Riikka remembers that he didn’t have it when they were screwing that night, but it was there in the morning.”

  My head buzzed. Paint, dead birds, and unexplained injuries. I had to have some time to myself. I lied and told Jiri I had a meeting in five minutes and thanked him for his cooperation. He even smiled faintly when I shook his hand.

  I turned off the light. The day was overcast and dark. Flopping down on the couch, I closed my eyes and tried to relax, starting with the tips of my toes. But emptying my head was impossible with the details of the Merivaara case and Ström’s bloodied face whirling around in my head like a jerky carousel with a bad motor. This was going nowhere. It was 3:15, and I had been logging enough overtime recently that I thought it was fine to go home. Just a few more seconds on the couch and then I would get up . . .

  Apparently I nodded off, because I startled awake to a knock at the door and then Koivu stuck his head in.

  “Sorry. Were you napping?”

  “Come on in,” I said. My mouth tasted like yesterday’s chewing gum.

  Koivu sat down next to me on the couch, and for the first time I noticed wrinkles around his eyes. Even bear cubs couldn’t stay young forever.

  “I just interviewed Seija Saarela with Anu.”

  “And?”

  “She spent an hour telling us the sad story of her marriage. Shotgun wedding at twenty, guy just wanted to fish and drink booze. They got divorced after a few years and never saw each other again except at their son’s graduation. There’s no way she cared enough about her ex-husband to kill Juha Merivaara over him.”

  I closed my eyes again. That was probably true, although it seemed like quite a coincidence that Seija became friends with the Merivaara family after her ex-husband’s death. I wasn’t completely ready to cross her off the list of suspects. She at least had several good reasons for protecting Juha Merivaara’s murderer.

  “I also got hold of the Immonens. Guess how happy they were when I reminded them of their son’s death.”

  “No, thanks.” With some effort I got myself into a sitting position.

  “They sold their son’s computer to Mikke Sjöberg in the spring.” Koivu glanced at me as if wanting to say more, but thankfully he didn’t.

  So the Olivetti laptop in the cabin of the Leanda was Harri’s old computer. Why hadn’t Mikke mentioned that? Probably just because he didn’t see any significance in it. He was sure to have wiped the hard drive clean.

  I asked Koivu about the files he had found on Harri’s computer during the initial investigation of his death. He didn’t remember much.

  “There were some bird charts. I wasn’t very interested. For me it’s enough that I can tell a magpie from a crow. There was something about environmental toxins, fertilizers causing sea-eagle deaths, and stuff like that. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Rödskär. But ask Sjöberg about it. Mrs. Immonen said he bought all of Harri’s old disks too.”

  16 />
  Resting in the forty-five-degree water, the rain on my face felt warm. Only the lone light of the sauna pierced the darkness of the world. The water was deadly. Half an hour in it would lead to hypothermia. I looked down at my breasts floating, white and warm. I didn’t have to be so careful about them anymore. The food for Iida, who slept peacefully in her bassinette in the cool entry of the sauna building, no longer flowed from them.

  The parents of Arttu Aaltonen, the teenager who had drowned, had asked whether we could tell from where we found his body whether he had regretted his decision to commit suicide. They feared that after their son jumped in the water he had changed his mind and tried to swim ashore but couldn’t anymore. I couldn’t offer them any comfort other than to say that based on where we found him, Arttu had swum quite far out to sea before drowning.

  The wood of the dock was wet and smooth, unlike my own gooseflesh skin. The cold made my teeth chatter and my nose run. I couldn’t help contemplating what Ström had thought just before he pulled the trigger. Shooting himself was at once easier and more cruel than drowning. With the latter there was always the risk of being saved, but Ström, who had been the best marksman in our class at the police academy, had chosen a sure death.

  I grabbed the ladder. My arms were strong, pulling me toward the warmth, and my legs, also strong, pushed me out of the water. Rain pelted my face. I felt the bite of every drop and the lash of the wind on my back. Turning my face to the sea, I laughed in its black face and then rushed back into the warmth of the sauna.

  “Was the water still warm enough for swimming?” Antti asked. I snuggled against him and let my skin tell the story as I soaked up the steam coming off his body. The salts of sweat and seawater intermingled, and the chill left me, inside and out, replaced by a desire for our bodies to be one.