Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Katrina picked up a fist-size piece of red granite and threw it in the water. The water was so clear that after the ripples faded, I could see the rock on the sandy bottom.

  “I still have a hard time believing that even Juha could have murdered Harri intentionally. Do you know how it happened?”

  I shook my head. The only people who had been there were dead. Most likely Juha had staged his trip to Tallinn and then gone to Rödskär instead to find out how much Harri really knew. I doubted that good-natured Harri, who literally wouldn’t kill a bug—we had argued heatedly about that on a camping trip—had known he was in mortal danger. Maybe Harri had just slipped trying to get away from Juha, who had seen a golden opportunity. Instead of calling for help, he left Harri on Rödskär to die.

  I told Katrina about my suspicions, and she silently stared out to sea. Squatting down, I took off a glove and plunged my hand into the water. It was colder than over the weekend in Inkoo, at most forty degrees. The granite bedrock along the shore was strangely warm in comparison.

  “It’s ironic that Jiri is single-minded just like his father but in a different direction.” Katrina’s words came slowly, thoughtfully. “Anne called and told me about that fire. She hoped it would scare the boy enough that he would stop rushing off to make trouble in the name of protecting animals. I do believe in Jiri’s sincerity, though. No one would be able to live such a meager life simply out of rebellion. In a way I understand these Animal Revolution kids. The world is shaped the wrong way and it’s too big, so of course people will try to remake it in the image they want.”

  I didn’t respond, just pressed my palm to the stone. The dock was a few dozen feet away, and in the bay a couple of buoys floated as if waiting for fishermen’s boats. No matter what the cost, we would have to get some divers out to Rödskär tomorrow, and Interpol would have to drag out of Peders and Ramanauskas everything they knew about the tributyltin barrels. According to Jiri, the Lithuanians had been to Rödskär the previous summer, so maybe they had been with Juha Merivaara when he dumped the barrels in the water.

  “This rock was where the women of my family waited for their men to return from the sea. Most of them returned, but not all. My Uncle Daniel’s boat disappeared in the winter of 1950, and only one of the men was found once summer came. The winter was harsh enough that even these waters froze, and the currents underneath carried away the other bodies.”

  Katrina was just a few inches behind me. I sensed the trembling of her muscles, and an intense desire to move came over me. Katrina knew the sea and polished granite even better than Juha had. The shore of Mattsboda was invisible from the other houses, and the only sound was the murmuring of the wind. I whirled around so violently that Katrina jumped and her foot slipped. The only thing that saved her from falling headlong into the water was that I grabbed her forearm. Suddenly I realized that she feared me much more than I did her.

  “You didn’t twist your ankle, did you? Should we go inside?” I asked.

  “I’m perfectly fine. What came over you?” Katrina tried to smile, but the result was more of a grimace. She walked higher up on the shoreline, and her gaze scanned the ground. Finally she picked up a rock almost the size of her head and tossed it in the sea. There was a splash, and the smooth surface broke into concentric rings.

  “The stones don’t yet whirl on the water,” she said and turned to look at me. There were tears in her eyes. And then I knew.

  18

  I called in the arrest warrant from Mattsboda. I told Katrina it was pointless trying to warn Mikke after I left. We would catch him anyway. Katrina claimed she had no intention of trying, no matter how sad she was. She hadn’t wanted to betray her own son. How could she help that I recognized that verse from “The Brother Slayer,” one of thousands of traditional Finnish folk poems, in which the murderer promises his mother to return only once “ravens glitter white and stones on water whirl”? It was pure coincidence that Antti’s choir had sung Pentti Saarikoski’s lyrical adaptation of the poem a few years before.

  But it wasn’t just because of that quote. Who else could it have been but Mikke? Everything had pointed to him the whole time. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

  As I drove back toward Mariehamn and the airport, I received word that Mikke Sjöberg had been taken into custody. He had not resisted arrest.

  “My plane will be in at 6:45. Can you send someone to pick me up? We’ll start the interrogation tonight,” I said to Puupponen over the phone.

  Everything was starting to fall into place. Word had come from the Russian police that tributyltin had been used widely in bottom paint for the Soviet navy. The technician working on Harri’s old computer hard drive had found a piece of a file with a report about the effects of tributyltin on sea creatures, including fish and mollusks. The Veterinary and Food Research Institute reported that Mikke Sjöberg had come in earlier in the fall, asking about the marine samples Harri had brought in.

  It wasn’t clear why Juha Merivaara had hidden barrels of toxic paint on Rödskär. Had it been an intermediate point, where the Lithuanians brought the paint for repackaging? Had they unceremoniously dumped the broken barrels in the water around the island? Juha had taken an insane risk exporting toxic paint as environmentally friendly eco-paint for sale abroad. Had he thought no one in Lithuania would ever notice? Maybe Mikke would know the answers to these questions.

  At the airport I bought a stuffed airplane for Iida and a bottle of Laphroaig for Antti and me. This late in the day, the flight didn’t upset my stomach. I watched as the rays of the setting sun shone almost horizontally, casting shadow bridges from one islet to the next. Gradually twilight won the battle for mastery of the sea, and by the time we made our stopover at the Turku Airport it was fully dark. Now even airplane coffee tasted good, and I drank three cups because I didn’t know how long a night was ahead. Mikke might deny everything—and so far all we had was circumstantial evidence.

  A uniformed officer from Patrol, Mira Saastamoinen, was waiting at the airport, and as I climbed into the front seat of her van, I asked her to use the lights and siren. There wasn’t really any rush other than my own desire to get the case to the prosecutor and off my desk as quickly as possible.

  “Did you hear that there was an Animal Revolution protest in front of the Orion building today? They were demanding the release of all the test animals,” Mira said as we pulled off the freeway.

  “I hadn’t heard. How did it go?”

  “We ended up using tear gas. Thirty or so arrested, and a lot of those had to be dragged away in cuffs. Akkila got into it so badly with this one girl that both of them needed stitches.”

  “Stupid.”

  “The brass are saying that we’re going to have to get tough with the protesters, who they’re calling dangerous anarchists,” Mira said coolly, without revealing what she actually thought.

  Technically I was actually part of “the brass” now, but I was sure Mira knew that I wasn’t always in lockstep with the administration. I didn’t want to take sides, since that always meant turning against someone. I was upwind and free, although right now that wind seemed to be howling a little too hard and at the wrong angle.

  Mira had been at the Orion building for most of her shift, so she wasn’t on the team that arrested Mikke Sjöberg. Once at the police station, I headed through the quiet halls to my office to drop off my coat and gather the Merivaara case files. Puustjärvi came by and said he would be my witness. I asked him to bring Mikke Sjöberg from his holding cell to Interrogation Room 2. I visited the restroom, powdered my face, and tried to put on a harsh expression. I promised myself half a bottle of the Laphroaig as soon as I got home.

  “Is the case solved now?” Puustjärvi asked as we set off for the interrogation room.

  “Probably. We’ll see what we get out of Sjöberg.”

  Mikke was waiting. He stood up to greet us like a schoolboy. His face looked like a pale, immobile mask; even his eyes were still. Although h
e shook my hand, he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Instead of sitting on the couch, he took the chair across from me at the table. Puustjärvi plopped down on the couch looking pleased.

  “Would you like something to drink? Coffee?” I asked Mikke before I sat down. He declined. He was wearing the same faded gray sweater as on our sailing trip, but he seemed cold.

  “You were probably told when you were arrested that you have the right to an attorney during your interrogation. Would you like to contact anyone? We can wait until your lawyer arrives.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t want anyone.”

  “You’ve been brought in for interrogation on suspicion of killing your half brother Juha Merivaara on the night between the fourth and fifth of October. You have previously denied your guilt, claiming you were asleep until you found your brother’s body. Would you like to change your testimony?”

  Mikke’s cheek muscles twitched. He nodded. I didn’t urge him to speak, and it took a couple of minutes before he said anything.

  “I knew you would be coming eventually. Actually this is a relief. When we went to Rödskär and you made me show you how I slipped on Juha’s body, I almost ran away the next night. I guess I should have left right away or just confessed that I killed Juha.”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to hide forever.”

  “I would have, though. I didn’t intend to hide somewhere in South America. I would have piloted Leanda into a good storm and gone down with her. I can’t stand living knowing that I killed my brother.”

  Mikke leaned forward and rested his head in his hands, his knuckles white. He was so close that I easily could have touched him across the narrow table.

  “Of course I would have confessed if you would have arrested someone else. But I stupidly thought that maybe you wouldn’t be able to prove that Juha’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  “So how did it happen? Maybe telling will make it easier.”

  Mikke raised his head, and his eyes focused behind me. I knew all he was looking at was an empty white wall.

  “You know that Juha killed Harri.”

  “I had concluded as much. How did you find out?”

  Mikke explained that over the summer he had found the tributyltin files on Harri’s computer, which aroused his suspicion. He had begun looking into the events surrounding Harri’s death. Seija had told him about the dead duck, and Katrina told him about Harri’s call. Getting access to the Merivaara Nautical files through Marcus Enckell had been effortless, since as a result of his dementia, the elderly man didn’t remember that Mikke wasn’t a shareholder anymore.

  Mare Nostrum’s role was almost ironic. Juha hadn’t been able to get rid of the company as easily as he would have liked because his nosy CFO had started asking questions about why Merivaara Nautical wasn’t paying Mare Nostrum dividends. Mare Nostrum had been importing raw materials for the eco-paints while smuggling hazardous waste from the Soviet navy. Mikke didn’t know why Juha had decided to hide the damaged barrels on his own property.

  “We were too drunk the night of Anne’s birthday party. I had been trying to ask Juha about Harri and the tributyltin paint, but he wouldn’t admit anything, and I didn’t have enough evidence to go to the police. I had actually been thinking about staging my departure for the winter. I’d take my mother to Åland, then sail back to Espoo and try to get a couple of my diver friends to check out the seafloor around Rödskär. But it bothered me not to know where the tributyltin had been dumped and how much poison there was.”

  After the party broke up, Mikke visited his boat. Then he chatted with his mother. When he saw Juha go out, he went after him.

  “Juha looked at me with such a pompous drunken grin on his face and said, ‘You’re leaving tomorrow, little brother. So you’ve come to your senses and decided to forget Harri and this poison-paint nonsense?’ After a moment he said, ‘We have to celebrate the anniversary of his death somehow, though. I thought I’d go piss where we found the body.’”

  That had made Mikke lose control. He took a swing at Juha, but Juha pushed him away and continued toward the shore. As Juha urinated off the cliff into the water, Mikke announced that he wasn’t going to leave and that he was going to start an investigation into the tributyltin.

  “This enraged Juha. He shouted, ‘Little brother, I wouldn’t make threats if I were you. Or do you want the same thing to happen to you as Harri?’ Juha’s face was red and his eyes bulged out of his head. Still I asked him what happened to Harri.”

  Mikke gave a vivid imitation of Juha’s voice, and I could almost see him standing before me, radiating that entitled self-confidence of his. “‘I might as well tell you, since there isn’t any evidence! I handled that little snoop. First I tried to talk sense into the kid, but when he wouldn’t agree to forget it, even though I offered to quadruple his salary, he didn’t leave me any choice. He didn’t even know how to fight back. And don’t you worry about those paint barrels. What are they, next to all the shit the farmers here in Finland dump in the water every day? Not to mention all the manufacturing pollution in Poland and the Baltic States. Fuck, I probably killed Harri for no reason. The police would have just laughed in his face if he would have gone in there babbling about mysterious paint barrels and showing them his dead clams.’

  “Then I attacked him,” Mikke continued. “The craziest thing is that I killed Juha the same way he killed Harri, in anger, on the spur of the moment. Juha was forty pounds heavier than me but more out of shape and drunker. And he definitely would have killed me if I hadn’t beaten him to it. I had an old bronze storm lamp in my hand. When I hit Juha with it, he fell and started rolling down the cliff into the water.”

  Mikke had stood and watched for a moment before fleeing the scene. He had taken the broken lamp with him, and he filled it with rocks and threw it into the water on the other side of the island. He didn’t sleep at all because he expected to hear Juha returning to the building.

  “But he never came. I didn’t dare go back to the shore to see what I had done until dawn. Juha was lying dead in the water. All I could think of to do was pull him out and claim that I had just found him.”

  “Did Katrina guess what had happened?”

  “She didn’t say anything, but I suspected she knew.”

  Katrina had refused to answer when I asked her how she knew that Mikke had killed Juha. That was wise, because she could be charged with aiding and abetting if she had real knowledge of the crime. Katrina had asked what Mikke’s sentence would be. I hadn’t been able to answer, since I didn’t know whether we were dealing with murder or manslaughter, or whether it had even been voluntary.

  Puustjärvi sighed heavily from the couch.

  “Can we take a quick break? My heartburn is killing me. I just need to grab a pill from my office.”

  “OK. Bring us a couple of cups of tea while you’re at it. This is still going to take a while.”

  When the door closed behind Puustjärvi, Mikke looked at me for the first time. I had to work not to avert my eyes.

  “You should let me go. I can’t bear the thought of prison and losing the sea. I’d do just like I said. I’d take the Leanda into a storm and send us both to the bottom. You can give me that, can’t you?”

  “Of course I can’t,” I said firmly. After an act like that, I would never be able to work as a cop again.

  If Ström hadn’t killed himself, I might have considered it. Now I knew how senseless suicide was. And Mikke wasn’t going to have to serve very much time.

  “You aren’t losing the sea forever. Based on what you’ve said so far, you’ll get off with involuntary manslaughter and a short sentence.”

  “I’ve already sentenced myself. The only way I’ll ever escape this guilt is death.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “How will I tell Anne and the kids?”

  “I think that’s my job, and we can leave it for tomorrow.”

  “No, I should do it myself,” Mikke said, burying his
face in his hands again. Standing up, I was just about to wrap my arms around Mikke when Puustjärvi returned.

  Mikke’s desire to cooperate made the rest of the interrogation easy. We were finished by eight thirty.

  “What now? Back to the cell?” he asked as I wrapped up the recording.

  “Yes. I’ll speak to the prosecutor tomorrow, and he’ll make the decision about remand on Thursday.”

  I would have to tell the prosecutor that Mikke had threatened to flee and commit suicide. I didn’t know if doing that would make me a traitor or a guardian angel. If Mikke was released on bail, he might harm himself before the trial.

  “They took me from the boat awfully quickly. Could I stop by and grab a few of my things?”

  I couldn’t deny him that. Puustjärvi went with Mikke to fetch his coat and the boat keys from the holding area while I got the car. I decided to drive, since I didn’t want to be next to Mikke in the back.

  When we arrived at the marina, I just couldn’t go with Mikke to the Leanda. Puustjärvi could handle it while I waited in the car. I wasn’t watching the dock, which is why I didn’t see what happened. I just heard the splash as Puustjärvi fell in the water. I charged out of the car, but Mikke had already managed to close the gate behind him. The fence was six feet tall and the chain-link mesh was tighter than normal. Climbing it with the blunt toes of my boots was a challenge. I saw Mikke cut the mooring line and heard Puustjärvi struggling to shore as I pulled myself up and thought for a second about whether I dared to jump down onto the dock.

  “Mikke, don’t be stupid! We’re going to catch you anyway!” I yelled over the noise of the motor starting up. I fumbled in my pocket for my cell phone. I alerted the Coast Guard and the police department’s water patrol, and I asked for one of our boats to pick me up at the marina.

  “Do we really have to call out the whole cavalry for one suicidal maniac?” the duty officer asked grumpily.

  “You fucking do as I say right now!” I shouted, still balancing on top of the fence, strangely satisfied that I had the power to set the wheels I wanted in motion. We had to capture Mikke alive. “Tell the Coast Guard to send a helicopter too!”