Lucifer's Tears (12 page)

I read enough to get a good sense of what happened there. Pure evil. A little piece of the Holocaust. I also see that, while not much is written about Arvid, it’s enough to get him extradited, maybe convicted. I need to find out if he lied to me. If he told the truth, I want to help him. Even if he lied, I consider whether I want to help him wriggle out of this mess. I don’t know yet. If Ukki were alive, I would still love him. I wouldn’t condemn him for past sins and ancient history, so how can I do it to Arvid? I check my watch. It’s time to go back to work.

I drive to Pasila. Two detectives, Ilari and Inka, are sitting in the common room. They glance up at me. Ilari nods. Inka ignores me. Ilari is in early middle age, has a bad haircut-he parts it too far over on the side and rakes thinning hair over his scalp to cover his bald spot-a mild dandruff problem, and a paunch. He does, however, wear expensive suits to work. Inka is middle-aged, has a short, shapeless haircut that renders her sexless, as do her frumpy clothes. She also has a paunch. Our two other team members, Tuomas and Ilpo, are working a kidnap murder and are seldom seen lately.

Ilari and Inka are reading today’s Helsingin Sanomat, the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper. They quarrel over who gets the sports section. I pick up the local news section. Murders rarely make the front page of Sanomat. The Filippov murder gets an eighth of a page, says nothing of interest. The press has left me alone about it. Arto and the PR folks are fielding the calls, an advantage of working for a major metropolitan police force.

One pastry sits in a box on the table. Ilari takes it.

“I wanted that,” Inka says.

Ilari shrugs. “You snooze, you lose.”

She calls him a bastard. He tells her to go fuck herself. I go to my office.

I log on to my computer and check e-mails. Without knocking, Milo jerks my door open and shouts, “Boo!”

It makes me jump in my chair.

“See,” he says, “you don’t like it, either.”

Milo is strange and antagonistic. It makes me laugh. “At least I wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction in secret,” I say. “Did you turn up anything at Saar’s apartment?”

“The only thing of interest was in his laptop. He has a collection of photos and videos of himself having sex with Iisa and other women in his bedroom. Judging by the camera angle, that’s the purpose of the hole in his closet door.”

“Doesn’t make him a murderer. Have a seat. The Filippov autopsy results are here.”

Normally, autopsy transcriptions aren’t delivered until months after the event, but I asked nicely, so the coroner sent me a summary.

Milo pulls up a chair next to mine so he can see my monitor screen. The autopsy painted a portrait of the crime much as we imagined it: Iisa’s broken bones, torture with a riding crop, cigarette burns, and cause of death-suffocation. But it turns up a major surprise. Several of the burns were inflicted not with a cigarette but are consistent with wounds caused by a drive-stun taser. This suggests that the killer first used the taser to incapacitate Iisa, then enlisted it as a pain compliance tool by inflicting multiple and prolonged shocks.

Time of death was somewhere between six and eight a.m.

“If Iisa was tased,” Milo asks, “then what was the point of hitting her with the frying pan?”

“Maybe to cover up the tasing,” I say, “to make it seem like a crime of passion rather than premeditated. The murderer might have thought the taser burns would go unnoticed because of the multiple cigarette burns.”

Milo looks thoughtful.

Forensics has e-mailed the results from Rein Saar’s shirt. I open up the file. The collar and shoulders were soaked in his own blood, from the blow to his head. His blood makes blood-spatter patterns from the riding-crop beating of Iisa Filippov hard to analyze, in terms of angle and velocity. It will have to be sorted out through DNA analysis and will take at least a few days. His right collar and shoulders bear some spatter, but it could be the result of his lying beside her while the beating took place. The results are inconclusive. Most interesting, though, is that the lower back of the shirt bears a scorch mark that, once again, is consistent with taser burn.

Milo stretches, folds his hands behind his head, and sits back in his chair. “Told you Filippov did it,” he says. “He tased them to knock them out, tortured Iisa and framed Rein Saar.”

I have to admit that, as Saar claims, it seems possible he was left alive in order to frame him. If Saar was convicted of Iisa’s murder, it would close the case and allow the true killer to avoid investigation and walk free. “Let’s go down to the lockup and talk to Saar,” I say.

We go downstairs, walk along the long white corridor and stop at cell S408. Out of politeness, I knock before entering.

“Might be nice if you showed your colleagues the same courtesy as you do your prisoners,” Milo says.

Saar shouts for us to enter and I open the door.

As jail accommodations go, ours are pretty good. The cell has a decent bed, a bench and a small writing table fixed to a wall decorated with creative inmate graffiti. Every cell has a few books in it for entertainment. The prisoners have a gym to work out in, and a canteen where they can buy snacks and smokes. They eat the same food as the staff.

Saar is sitting on the edge of his bed. Washing the shower of blood off has done wonders for his appearance. “Mind if we have a little chat?” I ask.

“Will it help me get out of here?”

“Possibly.”

“Then by all means, let’s chat.”

“I’m going to ask you some personal questions. Would you rather talk here, off the record, or in the interrogation room and have your statement recorded?”

“If we’re going to talk about my sex life,” he says, “let’s keep it between us for now.”

I sit on the bed beside Saar. Milo sits on the bench. “Would you lift your shirt and let me see your back?”

He does it, shows me a nasty burn just above his waist.

“How did you get that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you mention it before?”

“To be honest, when we talked before, my head hurt so bad and I was so drunk that I didn’t even notice it. Hurts now, though.”

He pulls his shirt down, sits forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Mind if I smoke?” I ask.

“Not if you give me one.”

“You don’t have any?”

“I don’t have any money on me to buy them.”

I take a twenty out of my wallet and give it to him. “You can pay me back. Tell me about you and Iisa-in more detail than before-and about your affair.”

He folds up the bill, unfolds it, puts it in his pocket, thinks how he’s going to spin this. “Iisa was wild,” he says, “loved to party. I wasn’t the only guy she fucked behind Filippov’s back. Just the only steady one. And I had other lovers, too. Like I told you, we had fun. We were comfortable together. Enough so that I gave her a key to my place.”

“Did Iisa use drugs?”

“Sometimes. Coke. Ecstasy. GHB.”

“You think Ivan Filippov killed his wife and framed you. Lots of women fuck around on their husbands. Their husbands don’t usually turn murderous. Why him?”

He ponders, stares at the wall. “Iisa didn’t like fucking her husband. Didn’t do it, in fact. She liked fucking me. I guess his bruised ego could have driven him to it.”

Yes, it could have. “What did you give Iisa that Filippov didn’t?”

“Iisa liked to play games.” He hesitates. “Maybe I shouldn’t have played them.”

“Describe these games.”

“Iisa liked to watch me fuck other women.”

This explains the source of the videos in his computer. “She hid in your closet and shot videos through the hole in your closet door.”

He nods. “I would fuck a girl, she would film it. I would get the girl out of my house, then fuck Iisa while we watched it on my laptop. It got her off.”

This explains the stool in the closet and the camcorder in Iisa’s purse. His story rings true. “How did these games begin?”

“I made a mistake giving her the key. She made a game out of coming to my house when I wasn’t home. She would hide under the bed or in the closet or in the shower. I might be there an hour or two before she jumped out and surprised me.”

I give Saar another smoke and we light up. “Seems like that would piss you off.”

“It did the first time, but it was hard to be mad at Iisa. She was like a little kid, just playing games and having fun. One day I brought a girl home and fucked her. Iisa came in the front door while we fucked. She did it quiet, so I didn’t hear her. She peeked through the door from the living room and masturbated while she watched. That’s how it started. Actually, the game was fun. Got us both excited. I stop interrogating him for a minute, take a break, smoke and think, try to sort all this out. Milo jumps in. “Do you know Ivan Filippov’s secretary, a woman named Linda Pohjola?”

“Yeah. She was a friend of Iisa’s.”

“They looked a hell of a lot alike. Was that a coincidence?”

“No. They’d known each other since they were teenagers and worked at the look-alike thing. Sometimes they would go to parties dressed in identical clothes. It was another one of Iisa’s games. They tag-teamed me once. They even looked the same naked. That was fun, too.”

“What else do you know about Linda?” Milo asks.

“Not much. Iisa didn’t talk a lot about her personal life. Really, our relationship just revolved around fucking.”

“Tell me more about Iisa’s games and other lovers,” Milo says.

“I don’t know much more. She kept a diary, though. She kept it in her purse sometimes. Maybe you could find out something from there.”

“You texted Iisa and asked her to meet you at seven thirty in the morning. Why?”

“I hooked up with a girl. She was going to come home with me, but she got too drunk and tired and took a rain check. Iisa was going to watch us fuck.”

“You lead an exciting life,” Milo says.

Saar manages a wan grin. “I try.”

He looks at me. “Are you going to charge me with murder?”

I remember Jyri’s demand to that effect. “Not today,” I say.

I set my pack of cigarettes on his table. We leave him in peace.

BACK IN MY OFFICE, given the interview, I ask Milo what he thinks.

“Same as I have since the beginning. That motherfucker Filippov killed his wife and framed Saar. I turned that apartment inside out, and there’s no taser in it. The killer took it with him.”

“Exactly,” I say. “The taser burn lends veracity to his story, and the taser is conspicuous by its absence. It’s possible that Iisa tased him, he recovered enough to fight and was angry enough to torture her to death, then dumped the taser and called the police himself. But given his head wound, it’s too much of a stretch. A third party took the taser out of the apartment.”

Milo starts to shake his head and laugh.

“What?” I ask.

“I just can’t picture one guy getting so much pussy. The only dates I’ve had lately are with Rosy Palm and Five Fingers.”

This makes me laugh, too.

Our boss, Arto, walks in behind Milo. “It always pleases me to see detectives enjoy their work,” Arto says. “Want to let me in on the joke?”

“Sure,” Milo says. “What do you call epileptic lettuce?”

“What?”

“Seizure salad.”

Milo howls at his own joke, which makes me laugh more than the joke. Arto giggles and says, “Jesus, that was awful.”

When Milo stops cackling, Arto asks, “You two have time to investigate a death?”

“No,” I say, “but we can make time.”

“Head over to the Silver Dollar nightclub. The bouncers there killed some guy.”

“Sounds good,” Milo says.

The problem is that when Milo says it sounds good, I think he means it.

Milo and I sign a car out of the police garage at seven thirty p.m. Today we get a 2007 Toyota Yaris. It’s dark out now. Snow still falls, and our headlights illuminate it. Helsinki is a lovely city in winter when it’s not hammered by sleet and covered in filthy slush.

I drive. Milo jabbers. “So you have an American wife,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“What language do you speak at home?”

“Mostly English. Kate has been here for going on three years. She’s learning, tries to at least use some Finnish words and phrases.”

“Well,” he says, “Finnish is a tough language. It takes time.”

“Yeah.”

“English is a moronic language.”

This seems to be my week to have strong and unsupported opinions thrust upon me. “And why might that be?”

“The letter C is unnecessary. It makes the same sounds as K and S. That’s a lot of waste. They should get rid of it. They don’t need B either. P is almost the same, does just as well.”

I make conversation, since I was so hard on him earlier. “Kate thinks A and O with the dots over them are pointless. English gets on just fine without them.”

Milo takes a pack of unfiltered North State cigarettes out of his coat pocket, cracks the window and lights one. My dad smokes the same brand. Tough-guy cigarettes. “So during this car ride,” he says, “we’ve managed to take two letters out of the English language, and two out of Finnish. We changed the world.”

Inane chatter. He’s trying to kiss and make up because he pissed me off earlier. “So you started smoking again,” I say.

He takes a drag and nods. “You really are a good detective.”

“How long did you stay off them?”

“Four years.”

His new job in murharyhma must be getting to him. We sit in silence for a few moments.

“Did you know Ilari and Inka are fucking?” he asks.

“Is this deduction another product of your people-person skills and extreme powers of empathy?”

“It’s the product of hearing them fuck in the bathroom after everybody got drunk at my ‘welcome to the new guy’ party.”