Darling (14 page)

She couldn’t stop thinking about Jorma
Korpivaara. It wasn’t the past that bothered her, but the fact that he had picked her as his attorney and then acted the way he did. Of course she’d heard the stories of how oppressive prison walls can be

Nea’s gaze wandered
around the living room until her eyes focused on a picture on the light-blue wall. The colors in the picture were calm, maybe even dull. It revealed an organized chaos, just like the apartment, she thought, as her gaze shifted to the plates scattered on the walnut coffee table.

Her
packed suitcase still waited in the entry hall. She had taken a taxi from the airport to her office and then gone to the police station before coming home. She had piles of laundry to do.

Lind lived alone. She’d dated and lived with an engineer
for a while, but she didn’t like the way he wanted her to act as his doting mother and she left him.

Thinking about
Korpivaara, she wondered how his memory could come and go like that. It was possible, she thought, but she couldn’t dismiss the fact that he might have faked the initial memory loss. Something seemed amiss. Didn’t Korpivaara understand that she was on his side, trying to help him?

Lind took a sip of the
smooth wine and thought about their meeting in the interrogation room. She was waiting there when Korpivaara was brought in. They greeted each other, and Korpivaara recognized her immediately. Then he said life had treated them differently. It was true.

This was per
fectly normal, she thought, but suddenly realized that she had no idea of what normal was for a murder suspect.

When Lind asked
Korpivaara why he had picked her, he said his finger simply landed on her name. Was it as simple as that? Perhaps. Lind couldn’t say. She knew he’d been drunk, so it was probably just a quick thought. Picking someone he knew was a safe choice. That’s probably all it was.

“
What’s your take on it?”
she had asked. Somehow the question cut him to the core, and Lind tried to figure out why.

“What’s your take on it?”

To Lind it seemed like a neutral question that addressed the suspect’s angle on the case.

“Shit,” she said when it dawned on her. The question was neutral from the interrogator’s point of view, but not the suspect’s. The police had probably pressured Korpivaara, as was their custom, and now the attorney, who was supposed to be the guardian angel, showed up with the same attitude.

Lind cursed again. It made sense that
Korpivaara, who was suffering from memory problems, would’ve believed Joutsamo’s account. He perceived that his attorney was only asking for his version of it, as if she assumed the suspect was lying, just like the police did.

Korpivaara
’s confession wasn’t the result of the police pressuring him;
she
was the one to blame. This was the second time she was about to ruin Jorma Korpivaara’s life. Lind thought it was possible that Korpivaara was the killer, but she wanted to see the evidence, not just hear his confession. As his defense attorney, she needed to do her job perfectly.

* * *

Takamäki was reading a tabloid he had grabbed at the station. He sat at the dining room table with a towel around his waist. His dark hair was wet from the shower, and a few drops ran down his back. As he had promised Joutsamo, he’d gone for a five-mile run before he hopped in the sauna.

The paper had a story about how petty thieves were becoming bolder and more insolent since unpaid fines could no longer be
converted into jail time. When a pickpocket was caught red-handed and given a fine, they could tear up the ticket and laugh about it to boot.

In
Takamäki’s opinion, the change in the policy wasn’t due to the naïveté of the lawmakers, but rather to the former attorney general’s view that the poor shouldn’t be punished for being poor. Sending someone to jail for unpaid fines wasn’t punishing them for being poor, but for the original crime, like theft, Takamäki thought. But now, the deterrent to petty crime had been removed.

Another article in the paper was about a homicide by an outpatient in
a Kuopio mental health hospital. A thirty-four-year-old man had stabbed his fifty-seven-year-old mother. Takamäki lamented that this was yet another example of how sending the mental health patient home with a bottle of pills didn’t work. He thought patients should stay in regular contact with their doctors, and someone—other than the police—should ensure that they stay clean. He wondered if the Salvation Army or perhaps the Red Cross could do something for local communities besides just chasing donations.

These were both examples of how
accountants were increasingly at the helm. It was cost effective, at least on paper, to reduce the number of people incarcerated for unpaid fines or number of patients in mental health hospitals. The daily cost of an inmate had become astronomical at two hundred euros.

In reality, the savings was questionable as
eighty percent of the expenses were fixed, including building operating costs and staff salaries. Incarcerating a hundred fewer prisoners didn’t actually save all that much in cash—even if on paper it was twenty thousand euros per day.

The continual attempts to save costs meant that more prisoners—and more hardened criminals—were getting transferred to low-security prisons, where it was easy for
them to pursue their criminal ventures before they were even released.

In
actuality, a first-time offender ended up serving only five years of a ten-year sentence, and of that the last third was usually in a minimum-security facility. The actual time inside a proper prison ended up being three and a half years rather than ten. Prison math was tough—for the victim.

And it became
even tougher if the criminal, say, killed again after being clean for three years. The record was wiped clean after three years, and the killer was once again treated as a first-time offender. The rights of crime victims, and the safety of citizens at large, always took second place to offenders’ rights.

FRIDAY,

DECEMBER 9
, 2011

CHAPTER 12

FRIDAY
, 11:00 A.M.

DAGMAR STREET, HELSINKI

The elderly lady never stopped talking for even a second while Lind helped her with her fur coat. Mrs.
Harju had come to her ten o’clock appointment, as agreed, to draw up her will. This was her third appointment, even though Lind could usually write up a simple will while the client waited.

Lind’s
neat and conservative office was totally different from her modern, “organized chaos” apartment. The furniture looked majestic. While picking the set, she had wondered if she was trying to compensate for being female. She decided the ambience of the office was more important than her personal taste. Being an attorney required being trusted, and the furniture needed to be dignified.

She was renting the Dagmar Street office
space. Having two rooms gave her the option of one day hiring someone else to work there, too. But she wasn’t ready for that yet.

The elderly lady was still
hesitating about something, so Lind had set up another appointment for her. Mrs. Harju had assured her it had nothing to do with the fact that Lind was female. Her previous attorney had been a skinny man who, according to Mrs. Harju, was only after her money. Ms. Lind, however, seemed very trustworthy.

Lind
thought the will was complete, but the lady wanted to think about it some more. Lind got her drift: Mrs. Harju just wanted someone to talk to. This time the conversation was about her grandson’s academic success and his university alternatives. Lind charged the woman two hundred euros for the hour, which the elderly lady gladly paid.

“Till next week, then,” the woman
said from the door.

“Good-bye,” Lind replied, closing the door.

She had slept poorly, woken up early, and come to the office. Her apartment on Museo Street was only a few blocks away. She had picked up a pastry on the way and made some coffee in the office. The
Helsingin Sanomat
newspaper printed only a short piece about the homicide, and both afternoon papers gave the seemingly routine incident only two columns each.

The media saw
nothing special about the case, since the perpetrator had been taken into custody. They hadn’t been told about the brutality of the killing. The police bulletin’s mention that the killer had confessed irritated Lind to no end. A direct statement of the man’s guilt or innocence wasn’t the police department’s job. They were merely to investigate; the prosecutor would prosecute, and the court would determine whether the suspect was guilty.

Lind kept thinking about
the case. She couldn’t put her finger on what bothered her about it, but something was off. In the back of her mind she didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that Korpivaara was a killer. But it had been twenty years since their last meeting, and people changed—especially those who got into drugs, and Korpivaara definitely had.

Before Mrs.
Harju’s appointment, Lind had searched the web for information about Korpivaara and the victim. She found nothing on either one—no Facebook pages, blogs, or anything else. She was perplexed.

Late the night before, she had sat on her sofa
making a list of questions she wanted answered. The first was, “Is it possible for the perpetrator of a crime to lose his or her memory?”

The police seemed to think that memory loss meant the suspect was
either unwilling or too scared to confess. But Lind found an article in a medical journal about dissociation, which discussed how dissociation, psycho-dynamically, is an automatic adaptive reaction to trauma that threatens one’s psychic balance, such as feeling shame or being horrified. As a result of the reaction, memory loss, disorientation, and hallucinations tend to cause a feeling of insecurity. Even though the original source of pain is gone from the conscious mind, the realization of not remembering one’s identity or what has happened is confusing.

Lind read the article twice, but still didn’t totally understand it. She came to the conclusion that one might protect oneself from a traumatic experience by blocking it from memory.

So the scientific answer to her question was yes. Of course, in Korpivaara’s case, the memory loss supported his guilt rather than his innocence. Had Korpivaara not been in the victim’s apartment, he would have no reason to forget what happened.

Lind listed another half dozen questions, but in order to gain answers she needed to know more about
Korpivaara and Vatanen and their relationship.

Lind glanced at her watch. She would stop by the Alamo Bar in the afternoon, but first she had to represent a client in a real estate dispute in small claims court. It would take a couple of hours for several witnesses to be called to the stand. Lind would rather take on criminal cases, but she was glad to have any work. This case
had been referred by a friend.

* * *

Crime Reporter Sanna Römpötti sat on one of the chairs near the side wall, looking at the computer screen projected on the white wall at the end of the conference room. While reporters sat to the side, the management was seated at the conference table. About twenty people were in the room for the Channel 3 News morning meeting to review the day’s events, listed on the wall. Beyond corporate press conferences, not much was going on.

Römpötti
yawned, not even bothering to conceal it.

“Is t
hat your view of today’s news agenda?” News Chief Risto Lӓhdesranta asked. He was nearing fifty and always wore a striped tie, whether his shirt was plain or plaid. Römpötti suspected that he slept with his tie on, and she could’ve had a chance to find out when Lӓhdesranta, drunk as a skunk, hit on her at a company Christmas party. To no avail.

“What?”
Römpötti asked. The meeting was mandatory, and she hadn’t paid attention while discussion centered on education statutes and the administration’s plans to focus on secondary education over the next few years.

“You’re not interested in education
statutes?”

“Just as interested as our viewers,”
Römpötti retorted, and the others, except Lӓhdesranta, laughed.

Römpötti
wondered if she had made a mistake. Sometimes news chiefs, not to mention editors-in-chief, had their own ideas on what made interesting news. Some of the ideas were good, but some were impossible, or impossible to cover in the two minutes of airtime each story got on the nightly news. Those suggestions were simply ignored. But under no circumstance were they to be shot down in the morning meeting—certainly not with jokes.