My First Murder (10 page)

The Peltonens’ summer home looked just as idyllic as before. The patrol officer guarding the place was on the lawn reading the
Helsingin Sanomat
newspaper with his shirt off. He was surprised to see us. He was also clearly vexed when I explained that we probably didn’t need anyone to keep watch anymore.

“Were you here when the Peltonens came back?”

“Yeah, one of the choir singers came back just before them too. Apparently, you had given him permission to come get his cat. He told them about their son. The old lady almost had a seizure and wouldn’t stop screaming until the man rammed some sort of tranquilizers down her throat. But luckily they left quickly and took the dude and his cat with them. By the way, did you hear Forensics found a little blood down on the end of the dock? They sent it back to the lab. Maybe it’s the murderer’s. Or it could have dripped off the ax.”

“Really? Good.” I turned my face away—the images of the ax dripping blood and Tommi’s smashed skull covered in gore turned my stomach.

I went over to the sauna building by the water in hopes of discovering something new where the ax had been found. The Peltonens’ ten-meter sailboat was gleaming on the water, anchored to a nearby buoy. The family certainly wasn’t lacking money. A villa in Vuosaari, an apartment in Westend. If I remembered correctly, there was also a log cabin in Lapland near one of the resorts. Jaana had gone skiing up there with Tommi a couple of times. A snippet of conversation sprung to mind from several years earlier.

“Sometimes it bugs me that he’s such an effing silver-spoon brat,” Jaana had huffed after another fight. “He’s so used to getting whatever he wants. I just can’t stand it anymore. If he wants to sleep with some other woman, then he just goes ahead and does it and doesn’t give a damn how I feel. If he wants to take me to Stockholm for the weekend, then his dad picks up the tab. But then he’s so freaking nice and smart and handsome when he wants to be. Sometimes it makes me afraid...It’s almost like there’s something cold inside him that he’s always trying to hide, but sometimes it comes through by accident.”

I could picture Jaana’s legs, tanned from sailing, her anguished sea-blue eyes, a bottle of beer—which was always available from my part of the refrigerator in the apartment—in her hand.

“I can’t always understand his logic. He tells me I don’t own him, and of course I don’t, but then he tries to own me. He enjoys having power over me. He wants to own people, to control them. With sex, with flirting, with lending them money and so on. He’s exactly the kind of guy who’s so damn nice until you get to know him.”

Almost immediately after that conversation, Tommi had shown up to make peace, and Jaana had relented—all too easily,
in my opinion. Tommi had known how to make people forgive him—sometimes the peace offering consisted of flowers, other times it was champagne.

But this time Tommi had failed. He had made someone so angry that their only solution had been the ultimate one.

The heather was already blooming behind the sauna, and some late cow-wheat poked through the blueberry bushes here and there. There was no actual foundation under the sauna, just an empty space in which you could have stuffed all sorts of things. I wondered how Hiltunen had thought of looking under here and found the ax, which, based on the photographs I had seen, looked like it had been carefully placed there rather than thrown under. Studying the spot in person made me none the wiser.

So someone had left the house, clocked Tommi with the ax that had been left on the dock, and then gone to the trouble of coming all the way up to the sauna to hide it. Why? Why had he, or she, rinsed the ax instead of throwing it into the sea to hide it? If the murderer had been some outsider coming from the water, you would have expected him to at least take the ax along and dump it out somewhere in deep water. That the murderer had hidden the ax under the sauna seemed to suggest that one of the choir members staying in the house had, in fact, killed Tommi.

Had the murderer come to the sauna to get cleaned up? But no blood should have sprayed out from a wound like that. Were the fingerprints they had found on the ax any use as evidence? Both Antti and Mira had given credible explanations for them. But how had the murderer handled the ax, then? No glove fibers had stuck on the smooth ax handle, and gloves would definitely indicate planning. I crawled under the building to look for a hidden pair of gloves and cut my wrist on some glass
shards. I crawled out rump-first, swearing, back into the bright light of day.

Gulls screeched on the shore, and a water bird that looked like a great crested grebe was swimming farther out. Would this house remain the Peltonens’ idyllic retreat, or would Tommi’s body always be floating next to the dock? On dark autumn nights it would rise from the sea...

I thought of my own parents. If any of their children were killed at their beloved summer cabin, I doubted they would ever set foot there again. My mother had called me the night before to ask how I was doing. She thought it was awful that my job was solving homicides, and she sounded worried. My parents had been terribly disappointed when I entered the police academy. They thought there were much more appropriate uses for my intellect, like, say, studying Finnish or some other language. Something more fitting for a girl. Though I had always been the “boy” in the family (there were three girls altogether, which my parents clearly viewed as some sort of failure), they had still imagined I would end up in a “softer” profession. Though it had nothing to do with either of their fields—my father taught math and chemistry, and my mother English—they would have been perfectly satisfied with law school. One of my sisters was studying German and Swedish and was married to a chemist, and the other was studying English and dating a mathematician. I was the oddity of the family, both with regard to my profession and the lack of a man in my life. My mother, who thought any idiot was better than no man at all, was clearly becoming quite concerned about it. For now, things were less tense than usual though, because I had convinced my parents I was back on the force only to help pay for the rest of my law degree.

I walked upstairs to study Tommi’s room again. On the desk, someone had placed a picture of an energetic-looking Tommi on the deck of a sailboat. Next to it was a half-burned candle. Otherwise, everything was as it had been when I last saw it.

Then I noticed that an expensive watch—presumably Tommi’s—had also appeared on the desk. Where had that come from? The watch was ticking obstinately. I picked it up, admiring its beautiful hands. The hour and minute hands were made of gold and slightly curved, and the second hand was silver. The bronze alarm hand was set for three thirty. Strange time to wake up, I thought. Who would want to wake up at three thirty? Unless...unless Tommi had wanted to meet someone from the party in secret and arranged a meeting for three thirty in the morning. Or maybe this other person had wanted to meet Tommi—to murder him.

As I drove back toward Pasila and the station, I realized that I had successfully reconstructed in my mind how the crime must have happened, but that still didn’t help much. The perpetrator remained faceless and sexless.

Who did I still need to interview? Tommi had been the assistant director of EFSAS, so the choir director, Hopponen, might be able to tell me something about him. And maybe the other members of the choir would have something to add. Maybe it would be useful to drop in on one of their practices.

Where to go from here? I thought I should probably pay Riku a visit as soon as possible, because his debts could constitute some sort of a motive. The thought of a scared, drunk Riku hitting someone over the head with an ax seemed plausible enough.

One born to pleasure and another born to pain

Riku lived in the heart of one of the roughest working-class neighborhoods in the city. The windows of his building faced a notorious liquor store, and the sounds of clattering trams and disheveled bums’ colorful commentary filled the street. I watched as one staggered in front of a tram coming from the east, saved only by the driver’s sudden braking. I was glad once again not to be in uniform, because if I had been, I would have had to intervene. As it was, I just continued on my way and let passersby gawk at the quarrel unfolding between the driver and the wino.

Finding the correct back door was difficult because a single brick wall spanned several buildings. After a couple of tries, I located the last name Lasinen on a resident directory and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. I was happy to note that the climb didn’t leave me panting. I rang the doorbell and switched on the small voice recorder in my purse when I heard steps inside. Recording our conversation wasn’t legal, but I didn’t have any intention of using the tape as actual evidence. Our meeting could not be considered an official interview, as that would have required the presence of a second police officer as a witness. I simply wanted to chat with Riku, as off the record as possible.

Riku looked surprised to see me, but not frantic. With the redness in his eyes gone and his stubble shaved off, he barely looked like an adult.

Riku’s apartment was a caricature of the quintessential bachelor pad. The cramped entryway opened onto a spacious room with a loft built over the kitchenette. The apartment was comfortably and stylishly decorated, but cluttered in the extreme. Ashtrays and rumpled clothes everywhere, orange peels on the floor, and empty beer bottles in the corner. Despite my high tolerance for clutter, even I thought it looked filthy.

Riku made room for me on a black leather armchair by haphazardly tossing a couple of Benetton shirts on the floor. He sat down across from me on the unmade bed and lit a cigarette. After a moment’s hesitation, he offered me one too. I declined. I smoke only when I’m drunk.

“Sorry it’s a bit of a mess here, but I haven’t had time to clean much because I’ve been so busy.” He sighed. “And I really should be leaving soon. We play
kyykkä
on Mondays during the summer at the Kaisaniemi field since we don’t have rehearsals that night.”

“
Kyykkä
? What the—? No, never mind. Don’t explain,” I said, silencing his enthusiastic attempt to reply. “Let’s handle the official business first. Last night when you were all together at dinner, you said you thought you heard Antti in Tommi’s room on Saturday night. But you didn’t say anything about that to me during our interview. So which is it? Did you hear something?”

“Well, see...I don’t really know. I dunno if I was dreaming or what, but I just thought somebody was over in Tommi’s room and I kinda thought it was Antti.”

In reality I wasn’t nearly as interested in what Riku may or may not have heard as I was in his finances. Maybe he had just cooked up a way to blame Antti when the others started to
suspect him. Did that mean Riku was guilty? I lost patience with pussyfooting around and got to the point.

“How much did you owe Tommi?”

Riku’s expression went from relaxed to frightened in the blink of an eye.

“It was somewhere around one thousand, right? And of course you didn’t have a red cent to pay him back with. Then Tommi started getting difficult when he didn’t get his money. You must have had a pretty bad run-in over it; am I right?”

“Yeah, but that was on Thursday...” Riku stammered, tamping out his old cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and lighting another. Apparently, I had guessed right, but I wasn’t sure how to get Riku to keep talking.

“I have your bank statements,” I lied smoothly. “But it would still be best if you told me about the state of your finances yourself.”

Riku took a few nervous drags on his cigarette, stood up, opened the window—which let in air so full of dust and exhaust fumes that it wasn’t much fresher than the tobacco smoke in the room—and then sat back down, defeated.

“Well, see, I owed him almost two grand,” Riku said. “But he promised he wouldn’t tell anybody! Who snitched? Or did you search his place and find the IOU? He fuckin’ made me sign one. Couldn’t even trust a friend...”

The search warrant had not come yet, but I hoped to have it the following day. Riku didn’t need to know that though, so I just nodded.

“I’ve needed money for all kinds of stuff lately. Nobody can live on these goddamn student grants and there just aren’t any jobs. I borrowed a little from him just before Christmas, when I was out of cash, but I paid him right back when I got
my spring semester money. But then I ran out again. And I couldn’t ask for money at home ’cause they’d just pester me, saying things like, ‘Why you gotta travel and how much you been drinkin’ and why you got them weird clothes, ain’t regular jeans good enough for you like everybody else...’ Tommi was real decent—he loaned me the money and said I didn’t even need to pay interest. But he wanted that promissory note. And I’m working now, as a pizza delivery driver. Boring, but I wanna go to Nice in August...”

“But on Thursday, Tommi demanded that you pay him back immediately or there would be trouble, right?”

“Yeah...He called me at work and met me there and we came back here. I wondered why we couldn’t go to a bar, but he said he wanted to talk alone. He said he needed a pile of money ’cause he had to buy a new car, even though I couldn’t see what was wrong with the old one. And when I said I didn’t have any, he threatened to tell the police that...” Riku swallowed.