Snow Woman (The Maria Kallio Series Book 4)

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “And I can’t stand their questions either,” she continued. “What is the prime minister like in real life? Is the president really as fat as he looks on TV? They talk about the people who lead our nation as if they were characters on The Bold and the Beautiful.”

  The inklings of sympathy I was beginning to feel toward Tarja Kivimäki evaporated, even though I realized her arrogance was just a self-defense mechanism. I sped through greens the rest of the way to the senate building. As she opened the door, Kivimäki looked me straight in the eyes.

  “Elina was right,” she said. “You two are alike in some ways. I don’t usually hang out my dirty laundry for perfect strangers.”

  The door slammed shut, and I sat wondering whether her last statement had been genuine or a warning not to take her too seriously. I was ten minutes late to my doctor’s appointment, but I still had to wait. I distracted myself by reading a health magazine.

  When the gynecologist confirmed my pregnancy with a blood test and said she would take out the IUD immediately to prevent any danger to me or the baby, my main emotion was relief. Finally someone else was going to take part of the responsibility for my body and the raisin growing inside it now. The gynecologist seemed apologetic on behalf of the entire medical community for the IUD’s failure and asked whether we wanted to abort.

  It was my last chance. They wouldn’t ask again. How easy it would be—a few minutes of waiting and then I could go on like before. Instead, I muttered no and walked behind the screen to take off my clothes.

  Pulling the apparently useless gadget out of me hurt, but I endured it, thinking that in just over eight months I’d be in for something much more painful. August 25 was the due date. So much for our hiking vacation in Corsica, the City Marathon . . .

  When I got up to dress, bloody and light-headed, the doctor yelled over the screen, “Your job can be dangerous sometimes. You might want to ask for a transfer to something a little less exciting.”

  “Mostly I just sit behind a desk and talk to people or write reports. But are there specific things I can’t do now?” I asked.

  “Do everything that feels good,” she replied. “Your body will tell you what’s too much. I don’t know that much about police work . . . I mean, I’ve never seen someone in uniform in her third trimester.”

  “I work in street clothes,” I said, “and I mostly just need my brain. Pregnancy isn’t going to affect that, is it?”

  As I drove along the slush-choked roads back to Espoo, I decided not to tell anyone at the department about my pregnancy until I had to, even though Ström seemed to have guessed. It was no one else’s business. I could just imagine how Palo would fuss and Ström would bitch and moan if I made even a single mistake.

  After work I headed to the gun range. It was as far removed as possible from the pastel-pink image I had of pregnancy. But however rebellious I felt about the role of motherhood now being thrust upon me, I still didn’t go out for a beer after emptying my ten clips.

  7

  When I returned to the station, I found that Niina Kuusinen had replied to my message, leaving both her home number and the number for the Espoo Music Institute, where she apparently worked. No one answered at either, and the machine at the music institute said they would be starting classes again after Epiphany on January 6.

  After calling Elina’s lawyer to ask about her will—she promised to send me the main points by tomorrow morning—I decided to head back to Nuuksio. I wanted to look at the land and walk in Elina’s footsteps. Maybe that would help me figure out how and why she ended up in the forest. My doctor had ordered me to take it easy for the rest of the day, but even though blood was trickling between my thighs and my head was still spinning a bit, I decided to stay at work. At home my thoughts would just keep circling around the fetus floating inside me, and I couldn’t bear that. It wasn’t as easy to deal with my personal life rationally as it was my work.

  I called Rosberga Manor to verify that Aira was at home. When I ran into Palo in the hall, I asked him to go with me. Fortunately Ström was gone; otherwise he would’ve forced himself on us just to piss me off.

  Palo had spent the morning with Taskinen in Mankkaa following up some leads in the dump corpse case, but there was no sign of Madman Malmberg. Palo said Ström was making the rounds of all the drunk tanks in the metro area, gathering information about Malmberg’s father’s final days. Although I already knew that Palo was taking Malmberg’s threats more seriously than I was, it still surprised me to notice he was carrying his pistol on his belt rather than in a shoulder holster. When I looked closer, I discovered he was wearing a vest under his sweater too.

  “Oh, Nuuksio . . .” Palo seemed hesitant. “That’s a good idea. Being there is the best way to figure out how Rosberg could have ended up in the forest. But is it smart for you and me to be together? I mean . . .”

  “You mean that Malmberg might come after me first and then go looking for you?” I said a little more ill-temperedly than necessary. Of course Palo had every right to be afraid. I was probably the one being stupid.

  “I’m not your boss,” I continued more softly. “I was just really hoping you’d go with me. Malmberg isn’t going to follow us to Nuuksio. They might have already caught him anyway.”

  Palo stared at the floor. His short, straight brown hair had plenty of gray in it, and his otherwise slender body spread into a soft tire around his belly. Palo needed glasses for more than reading and driving, but for some reason he wouldn’t wear them, and the constant squinting made his gray-blue eyes red and watery and gave him wrinkles around his eyes and in his cheeks. Palo had been working for the Espoo Police Department for more than twenty-five years, and he knew every petty crook and professional thug in town. He had a wide network of informers and an excellent memory. As a coworker, he was a reliable foot soldier, not someone who was ever going to think of anything new, but he did his job and was rarely difficult.

  “How’s that hangover doing?” Palo finally asked, trying to make peace.

  “I’m fit as a fiddle now. And look.” Dramatizing a bit, I patted my shoulder holster. “I’m taking precautions too.”

  Palo suggested that I drive. He wanted to keep an eye on the roadway. I threw some high boots in the trunk for tromping through the snow, although skis probably would’ve been better.

  “We can continue questioning Aira Rosberg too,” I said as I drove, “but the most important thing is to get out in that forest and walk to the place where Elina’s body turned up and think about how she ended up there. We don’t have a lot of time before it gets dark, but that might be good since that’s when she disappeared. Things look different at night.”

  “That’ll put me into overtime again,” Palo said. “But the wife is working the night shift, and our youngest is with a babysitter, so why not.”

  The children from Palo’s previous two marriages lived with their mothers, and some of them might have even moved out and had their own families by now. Wife number three was fifteen years younger than Palo, and the guys in the unit claimed his vitamin habit was less about longevity and more about keeping up with his youthful bride.

  The light was already dusky, and the forest along the road to Nuuksio was an impenetrable green-black. The lights of an oncoming car blinded me for a second, almost making me miss the turnoff for Rosberga Manor. The manor was dark but for a single window upstairs. Not even the front porch light was burning. I got out of the car and was fumbling with the buttons for the intercom in the inadequate beam of my headlights when the gate opened. A moment later the porch light switched on.

  Aira stood at the front door and showed us in without comment. I got the feeling Aira wasn’t really with us. She was just a shell of a person with the heart and thoughts missing, perhaps gone to the same place Elina was. The silence in the large, empty house was deafening. In the entryway, I stomped the snow from my boots and talked to Palo
louder than I needed to, although I knew it wouldn’t diffuse the heavy sense of grief in the home. Sorrow had carved new grooves in Aira’s face, flattening her gray hair and slumping her wide shoulders.

  She opened the door to Elina’s rooms for us. I stood and looked out through the lacy frills of the living room curtains and then went and lifted the blinds in the bedroom. The landscape outside the windows was almost pure darkness. You could just catch a glimpse of the shore of Lake Pitkäjärvi. When I turned off the overhead light, the darkness outside began taking on shapes. The lights shining from Aira’s room and the kitchen reflected off the snow, giving definition to the wall and forest beyond.

  “Palo, go outside,” I said. “First inside the wall and then on the other side. I want to know how well I can see someone moving around outside.”

  The slowness of Palo’s steps showed how little he wanted to go outside alone. I understood. I didn’t want to go out either, but I’d opened my mouth first.

  “Could you hear Elina’s phone from your room?” I asked Aira after Palo left.

  “In general, yes, but not that night. As I said before, I took a sleeping pill and wore earplugs so I could finally rest.” Aira didn’t even have the energy to sound irritated.

  “Elina had her own personal number separate from the main house phone, right?”

  “Yes. It was unlisted, and she rarely gave it out. Elina usually turned on the answering machine for the house phone at night.”

  “Which number did people call to reach you?” I asked.

  “Me?” Aira smiled faintly. “No one calls for me. A couple of old work friends keep in touch a few times a year, but otherwise my life is here.”

  I jumped when Palo knocked on the bedroom window. It was easy to see him from the lit room when he pressed his nose against the glass. I tried different lighting alternatives as Palo walked around the yard, glancing constantly from side to side as if he thought Malmberg might jump over the wall any second. Watching events in the yard had been easy for Elina, even with all the lights on. But beyond the wall, all I could see was the beam of Palo’s flashlight. When he turned it off, the darkness swallowed him. But had the moon been visible that night? With a moon, the landscape might look different than on a cloudy night like this.

  Palo had no trouble getting the gate open with the code. When he came back in, I sent him to look at the rooms upstairs—mostly for outside visibility and possible egress points such as balconies or fire escapes. If Elina had seen something from the window that lured her outside, it had to have been inside the wall. And who besides those in the house itself could get onto the grounds? But if Elina had received a phone call that lured her into the forest, the possibilities were endless.

  This clowning around wasn’t really getting us anywhere. We still had to go into the forest. I had to be Elina. I had to know why she’d gone out wandering in her nightgown in the bitter cold.

  Remembering Elina’s scarred cervix, I asked Aira whether Elina had ever been pregnant.

  Aira looked shocked. “Elina, pregnant? Not to my knowledge. Do you mean she was pregnant now?” Aira’s eyes started fluttering with anxiety.

  “No, I don’t mean that,” I hurried to say. “The shape of her cervix indicated she might have given birth or had a miscarriage, but we couldn’t find any notes in her medical records.”

  Aira’s expression relaxed again, but the underlying sorrow still showed behind the relief.

  “That must be that old thing. I’d almost forgotten about it. When she was in her twenties, Elina spent six months in India. While she was there she had a bleeding disorder caused by a growth in her uterus. Some local quack performed surgery on her, and the scars must have stayed. I don’t remember the exact chain of events, but it took Elina’s hormones a couple of years before they were normal again. Her gynecologist should be able to tell you more.”

  So this oddity had a perfectly reasonable explanation. No out-of-wedlock pregnancies or tragic abortions. What had I been expecting? That Elina had seen the ghost of her abandoned child outside the window and gone out chasing it?

  “Have you made any progress?” Aira asked.

  Glumly I shook my head.

  Palo’s footfalls echoed heavily on the stairs. It was as if they were only accustomed to the light tread of women. Once Palo’s size nine boots tromped the rest of the way down, he just shrugged to indicate he hadn’t found anything.

  “It’s pretty damn dark out there. If someone was in the forest without a light, you’d never see it inside,” Palo said. I wondered whether he’d been trying to spy Madman Malmberg out in the forest.

  “Let’s go out anyway,” I said with a sigh.

  Aira started pulling her coat on as if to come with us, but I said no. Aira was one of our suspects, after all, and I was certain she was hiding something from us.

  Outside the gate, a stiff wind coming up from Lake Pitkäjärvi assaulted us immediately. By the time we reached the top of the hill, the wind could have pushed us over. I stopped to tighten my bootstraps and shove the ends of my scarf more securely under my coat to protect my breasts. Slogging through the snow crisscrossed by the shadows of trees was no fun. The shortest path to the location of the body was across an overgrown field ending at the forest’s edge. Another option was to walk along the road for a while and then turn into the forest and follow the ski track. There’d been a lot of snow on Boxing Day, and as far as we could tell, Elina was wearing no shoes, so maybe she had taken the shorter way across the field, despite its steep ascent.

  Resigned, I started tramping uphill with Palo. After a while we could see the lights of a neighboring house, the one from which the skier had called the police after finding Elina’s body. An occasional light glimmered along the shore of the lake, but otherwise the landscape was windswept and empty. Palo walked with his face scrunched up, glancing around furtively even though we would’ve heard Madman Malmberg coming from a long way off. The frozen snow crunched loudly under our feet.

  “I don’t know . . . Maybe Elina Rosberg just accidentally took some Dormicum with a whiskey chaser while she was on the erythromycin, and that put her into a state of confusion and she went wandering? Then she sat down in the snow and passed out. It might be that simple.” I was talking more to myself than to Palo.

  “Then where did the scratches on her back come from?” Palo replied, sweeping the beam of his flashlight across the closely set fir trees at the edge of the forest. They didn’t look the least bit inviting, especially in the dark. I tried to see a break in the trees where Elina might have passed through, but not a single limb was broken. They looked impenetrable, as if no one had gone that way in ages.

  “Let’s go back and try the ski track,” I suggested. “Maybe someone found her and started dragging her under cover and then got frightened when they realized she was dead? Someone completely unrelated?”

  Backtracking across the field was at least easy, and walking on the road was nothing compared to slogging through the heavy snow. There was a path of sorts running along the ski track as well, making the going even easier.

  Inside the forest, the wind only blew the tops of the trees. It didn’t reach us at ground level. Our lights distorted the shapes of the trees, and branches grabbed at my hair. Tripping on a spruce seedling, I only avoided landing on my rear end by holding on to a scrubby birch tree. Then I spotted a pink piece of satin snagged on a branch.

  “Shine your light over here, Palo!”

  The scrap of fabric was small, maybe one by three inches. Carefully I broke off the whole branch and pulled a small plastic bag out of my pocket. I dropped the fabric into the bag. I was almost certain it was torn from Elina’s robe. Pink satin wasn’t a particularly common material for ski clothing. Of course the forensics lab would provide the final verdict.

  Maybe knowing Elina’s route would help us keep moving. We proceeded more slowly now, p
eering between the trees and at the ground. Suddenly Palo froze. The beam of his flashlight started shaking.

  “What’s that?” he breathed.

  From the forest to the left came a thumping and breaking of branches. Someone was coming through the woods—fast. Immediately I envisioned Madman Malmberg charging through the trees like Rambo carrying an assault rifle with a knife between his teeth and the glint of murder in his pale, babylike eyes. Palo pulled his revolver. Seeing the panic in his face, I realized just how afraid of Malmberg he was.

  After my own initial panic subsided, I recognized the sound coming through the trees. Even though I wasn’t frightened anymore, I also didn’t have any interest in mixing it up with an angry moose. Based on the noise, there were two of them. Hopefully they’d be too afraid of us to come any closer.

  “Put your gun away. Hunting season is over,” I said, trying for a lighthearted tone. Moose didn’t frighten me, and the pounding of their hooves was already fading in the darkness. But what did frighten me was the panic in Palo’s eyes and how fast he had grabbed his gun. The chance for a miscalculation was huge. I’d heard stories about cops in similar states of mind—and of the accidents that uncontrolled fear could lead to. Fear was beginning to creep into me, but I wasn’t afraid of Madman Malmberg. I was afraid of Palo. And for him.

  “They were moose,” I said again when he kept aiming his weapon. “Holster your gun and let’s keep going. The body was found right up here. We’ll take a look and then get out of this forest.”

  The darkness concealed Palo’s face, but his posture conveyed some degree of embarrassment as he inserted his pistol in his hip holster and turned back up the hill along the ski track.

  The crime scene was the same as before: almost out of sight of the ski track at the top of a small rise was a large fir tree with weeping branches, the kind of tree we pretended was a cave when we were kids.