As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) (21 page)

The past few days had taken away the daddy Elisa thought she knew. In place of him, she now had this strange man who
cheated on Mom with younger women and was mixed up in something dangerous and illegal. Elisa wished she could look her father straight in the eye and ask him, “Terho Väisänen, who are you really?”

She was afraid for Lumikki, but also afraid of what she might find out. The safest, most dependable thing in Elisa’s life had been ripped away from her, and she wasn’t sure whether she could deal with any more revelations. Not that she had a choice.

Tapping on his smartphone, Kasper suddenly looked up.

“Uh-oh. I just realized something.”

Elisa’s pulse sped up.

“What?”

“I doubt they let anyone keep their phones there. Polar Bear is supposed to be super strict about stuff like that,” Kasper said.

“And you just thought of that!” Tuukka snapped. “How is she supposed to reach us then?”

Elisa kept her cool.

“Lumikki can handle a problem like that. She’ll come up with some way to let us know she’s all right.”

“You seem to trust her an awful lot,” Tuukka said, looking at Elisa searchingly.

More than I trust you two,
Elisa thought. Of course, she was grateful she didn’t have to spend all night alone in her big house watching the red dot blinking on the screen. But she had decided that, once this was all over, she was going to put an end to her friendship with Tuukka and Kasper. They were never going to be a trio again.

Elisa’s eye strayed back to the red dot showing the position of the Garmin locator unit. It was supposed to have helped her parents feel safe when she went jogging alone, but now Elisa only felt dread and guilt knowing where Lumikki was. What was Lumikki doing right now? What was she thinking? Elisa twirled a lock of blond hair and stuck the end in her mouth. Sucking on her hair had soothed her since she was little. She knew it annoyed Tuukka, but she didn’t care.

“And if she doesn’t tell us she’s okay . . .”

Kasper left the sentence dangling unfinished in the air.

“Then we follow the original plan,” Elisa said, trying to steady her voice.

“Where did you hide the GPS?” Tuukka asked.

“On her thigh,” Elisa said. “On a garter strap.”

“And what if someone notices it?” Kasper asked. “How do we know someone didn’t rip it off and throw it in the trash and now Lumikki is dead and stuffed in some closet or dumped in the woods?”

Elisa stood up. She wanted to smack Kasper, or at the very least shove him.

“You shut up right now. Talking like that isn’t going to help anything. Both of you shut up until you have something useful to say. Lumikki is there at the party and she’s fine and everything is going the way it’s supposed to. If she could hear us right now being all panicky, she’d probably laugh in our faces.”

And with that, Elisa marched into the kitchen. She wanted something to calm her nerves. Her eyes landed on her mother’s wine rack. Mom would probably never notice one
missing bottle. A couple glasses of red wine would soften her thoughts and fears.

Elisa’s fingers were already wistfully stroking the neck of a bottle, but she decided against it.

No, she had to keep herself sharp. She had to be ready if Lumikki needed help.

Each crate contained sixteen bottles of red wine. There were four crates. Each glass bottle contained 0.75 liters. Lumikki remembered reading somewhere that a glass wine bottle weighed one pound empty. Adding in the crates themselves, nearly 170 pounds of weight was sitting on top of the freezer. Not a pleasant thought.

Once, at the gym, Lumikki had managed to leg press 220 pounds. This wasn’t a leg press machine though. This was a freezer.

Lumikki kicked off her high heels. Then, bracing her lower back as well as she could against the bottom of the freezer, she thrust the soles of her feet against the underside of the lid. She pushed. Nothing.

Hypothermia: When a person’s body temperature drops below ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.

Symptoms: Shivering, cold sensation, lack of coordination, muscle twitching.

As core temperature continues to fall, the feeling of cold disappears, muscle twitching stops, and mental acuity suffers. Respiratory and heart rates slow. When core temperature drops below eighty-six degrees, the risk of arrhythmia becomes significant.

At that point, the body’s self-defense mechanisms begin moving warm blood closer to vital organs and cold blood to the extremities. The hands become disabled. Moving becomes difficult. Unnecessary movement of the extremities can cause cold blood to circulate, and when it reaches the heart, the resulting chilling of the heart muscle can cause ventricular fibrillation and even death.

Lumikki was no stranger to severe cold. That fall, after the breakup, she had started swimming regularly in the lake at the Winter Swimming Club’s sauna. The cooler the water got, the better it felt. Diving into a hole in the frozen lake was one of the most amazing experiences of her life. Winter swimming was like a drug. With tiny ice crystals sloughing off her skin as she climbed out of the water, warmth would flood through her body, leaving her giddy from the endorphins singing in her veins. The feeling was amazing. You just wanted more and more and more.

Lumikki was the odd girl out at the sauna. Most of the regular visitors were old. Some of them wore knit hats in the
steam of the 250-degree sauna, and all of them wore official Winter Swimming Club slippers. Lumikki hadn’t bought a pair yet. The grandmas and grandpas generally called her “the girl.” That suited her just fine. Lumikki had never seen anyone else under twenty at the sauna. Occasionally, groups of thirtysomething men or women came for noisy bachelor or bachelorette parties.

Usually though, the swimming hole, kept open year round by water left running from a hose, was quiet. Serious swimmers lowered themselves into the frigid water without any squeals or groans. They took a few strokes and then climbed out, standing on the patio of the sauna building for a while, letting their skin steam. Lumikki loved that moment. Seldom in her life had she experienced anything that could be called
holy
, but when she had visited the sauna one evening a week before Christmas with lanterns burning on the patio and stars shining in the sky and every cell in her body feeling completely awake after her swim, a strange gratitude had overwhelmed her, a mixture of longing, melancholy, and joy that contained a kernel of holiness. That moment was her Christmas mass, gazing at the stars and the spruce trees, heavy with snow, standing solemn and immovable.

But while the occasional dip in an icy lake was good for your health, lying in a freezer was not, under any circumstances. Thirty-two-degree water was different than a zero-degree coffin.

Right now, Lumikki wished she hadn’t listened quite so carefully in health class. She forbade her brain from thinking about all the things lack of oxygen would do to her. She
just had to focus on getting the lid open. It was all the same whether she moved her extremities too much or used up the oxygen in the freezer too quickly. She was either going to get herself out of here or she was going to die.

Her legs were like frozen tree trunks.

Sucking in a deep breath, Lumikki tensed every muscle in her body and pushed, pushed, pushed.

The lid budged a little. Too little. Lumikki’s strength faltered, and the lid clamped shut tight again.

Tears welled up uncontrollably in her eyes even though the last thing she wanted to do right now was cry. She just felt so hopeless. Having everything end here was just so stupid and pointless. She didn’t want to die. Just when her time in Tampere had started making life feel worth living again.

Snow White in a glass coffin. Sleeping her eternal sleep.

No, she refused to let someone else write her story.

Lumikki thought of the girl she had been. That she was now. She had never given up. Not even in the darkest moments.

She adjusted her position a bit. Squeezing her eyes tight shut, she concentrated all her strength in her leg muscles. She hadn’t done all of those squats and lunges and leg presses and uphill sprints for nothing.

Muscles burning? Let them burn. Pain is just weakness leaving the body. And now for one more round. Sing along with the music if it helps!

Once more, Lumikki pushed and pushed and pushed. Her quadriceps shook. Pain burned in her thighs. Strange patterns flashed behind her shut eyelids.

She felt the lid lift. She didn’t give up, showing her muscles no mercy. She heard the crates shifting. She heard them tip off and fall to the floor. She heard the glass breaking.

A ripple of tinkling glass like fairies ringing enchanted bells. The sweetest sound in the world.

Now she could stand up and push the lid open completely. She was trembling with cold and exhaustion. Red wine and glass shards covered the floor. Pulling her high heels back onto her feet, Lumikki climbed out of the freezer. High heels did have the advantage of only letting a very small portion of the sole touch the floor. Carefully placing her feet between the shards of glass, she cautiously moved toward the door.

Only now did she realize that she could have called for help. Maybe someone would have heard.

But that had never even crossed her mind. She had never called for help.

Boris Sokolov looked on as the other revelers began to relax more and more. He slowly sipped Jack Daniel’s, his favorite whiskey. Polar Bear had remembered. Sokolov wasn’t working now, so he could concentrate on whiskey and the nice view. Beautiful women—he was always happy to look at that. There was a touch of melancholy in his watching, though, since he knew he was old enough to be these women’s father. One of them might keep him company for a night or two, but it wouldn’t amount to anything serious. Sokolov’s chance for a normal, long-term relationship had long since passed. Dozens of lonely years with Jack as his only real companion loomed ahead of him.

Polar Bear wanted to keep anything illegal out of these parties. A perfectly reasonable precaution. If the police did happen to raid one of them eventually, no one would get nailed for anything. This river of liquor was perfectly legit.

Sometimes Sokolov hated drugs. Yes, they gave him a job and a comfortable life. A nice house without any neighbors too close. Influence. Women. And he wasn’t too good to refuse a couple lines of high-grade stuff, given the right opportunity, though he had never had any interest in shooting up.

But drugs also filled his life with constant stress. He had to make sure shipments arrived in Finland. He had to handle distribution, keep dealers in line, find new clients, and worry about old clients running their mouths. He always had too many irons in the fire. Balls were always falling on the floor.

Before, it was enough just to keep all the other Sergeis and Jorges and Mahmuds and Petters off his turf, but now he had to compete with the .com’s and @hotmail’s too. Designer drugs had caught up with normal ones and in some places galloped past. And to get those, all you had to do was sit down at your computer, go to some illegal website in the Netherlands, enter your order, and wait for the mailman to arrive. Fighting them was hopeless.

Polar Bear’s idea that their target group was the rich, beautiful, and successful was great, but impossible to implement in practice. In order to make ends meet, they also had to deal to people who were so bottomed out that they could only pay in cash. Who had already sold their laptops or traded them for heroin. Whose bank transactions Social Services and
their parole officers watched like hawks to make sure they were staying clean. Who didn’t have the option of ordering online.

If the business hadn’t been so dangerous, Sokolov wouldn’t have needed to kill Natalia. In his own way, he had cared about her more than he’d ever admitted to himself. He’d even looked the other way when Natalia and Väisänen got together, despite the fact that it was a risk.

Boris had justified this leniency, telling himself that the relationship with Natalia was one more weapon in the arsenal of blackmail he might need to unleash on Väisänen at some point in the future. The stupid cop who swore he was done. He’d see about that. Boris was sure that Väisänen would come crawling back, begging to be let back in the game. And Boris would agree, of course, but with certain conditions. They had been letting their pet narcotics detective live a little too high on the hog. Väisänen had looked surprisingly sincere when he claimed not to have received the money. Maybe he was even telling the truth. Maybe someone had stolen the plastic bag from the yard that night. Boris didn’t care, though. The money had been delivered to Väisänen, so Boris wasn’t going to cry himself to sleep over it. The more important thing was that Väisänen seemed to be over it too. In the future, he wouldn’t be getting nearly such hefty payoffs.

If Natalia had just stayed in line. She’d had a good, secure future ahead of her. The possibility of rising to be Boris’s right hand. But she’d gotten restless and started to daydream. Boris had seen it happening, sensing the change in her face and
tone of voice. He’d only needed to take one trip to Moscow and Natalia’s brother had confessed his sister’s entire plan.