Snow Angels (12 page)

“No, I was in church all afternoon.”

“Church?”

“That’s why I’m in Kittilä, to rediscover my religious roots.”

I try to hide my surprise. Heli’s antagonism toward religion used to be extreme. That was a long time ago. I remind myself that I don’t know her anymore.

“What makes you think she might have been raped in our car?” she asks.

“Blood and semen.”

She looks at me like I’m stupid. “Have you stopped to consider that maybe he fucked her and she wanted it?”

“I have, but thanks for your input.”

She stands up. “I’m leaving now. Can I have my house keys?”

I toss them to her.

“What about the car?”

I might want to sit in the garage and listen to Miles Davis again.

“In due course.”

“My advice to you,” she says, “is to release Seppo before you make things any worse for yourself. Good luck with your snipe hunt and with the media. I’ll be giving interviews soon. You’ll be hearing from our lawyer. I’ll see to it that Seppo sues you for fabricating a case against him.”

“That’s your prerogative.”

“Good-bye Kari.” She leaves, shuts the door behind her with a soft click.

I DON’T WANT TO see her again, so I give Heli a couple minutes to get out of the building before going out to the common room. Antti and Jussi are sitting there with Esko the coroner. Items from Seppo’s house are bagged and spread out over two desks.

“I need to talk to you,” Esko says.

“I saw the new edition of
Alibi
. Yeah, we need to talk about it.”

“In private.”

“Give me a minute.” I look at the potential evidence. There’s a lot of it. “Anything good here?” I ask.

“Could be,” Jussi says. “We found two pairs of boots he could have worn, and a bunch of clothes. We figured they should all go to the lab.”

“Yep.”

“We got a hammer and a couple
puukko
and some knives out of the kitchen too.”

I pick up the bag with the
puukko
, Finnish hunting knives. They’re less curved than the skinning knife used to kill Sufia, so I don’t make too much of them, and besides, almost every Finnish home has at least one or two lying around. Statistically, they’re the nation’s most popular murder weapon. Twice, I’ve investigated murders in which a group of men got drunk together and passed out. They wake up and one of them is dead with a knife in his chest. All of them have fingerprints on the knife, but nobody remembers what happened. Neither case ended in a conviction.

Antti points at Seppo’s computer. “Seppo likes to look at porn.” If looking at porn were a crime, most men in this country would be in prison. “What kind?”

“I didn’t go through it all,” Antti says, “but I didn’t see anything violent.”

“Anything with Thai girls?” I ask.

Antti’s face goes red.

“And we got this.” Jussi picks up a bag with three half-liter Lapin Kulta bottles in it. “They were in the fridge. We figured we ought to check and see if they came out of the same lot as the one, you know, in her vagina.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” I look around. “Where’s Valtteri?”

“He said he had to go home,” Antti says.

I look at my watch. It’s a quarter after six. “Maybe you guys should go home too. This stuff needs to go to the lab. Could one of you take it to the airport and get it to Helsinki on the next plane?”

“I can,” Antti says.

“By the way, I processed the car and got a lot of forensics. I think this case should be over soon.”

Antti looks sheepish. “Think I’ll be able to go on vacation?”

“Odds are good. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

“Can we talk now?” Esko asks.

I motion toward my office. “About obstruction of justice, you bet.”

I shut the door and we sit down. I toss the magazine at him. “The fucking diener,” I say.

“I’m embarrassed about that but…”

“But nothing. The photos were irresponsible and disrespectful. Details were released that could impede the investigation. I’m going to charge him.”

“There’s no guarantee it was Tuomas. There are other workers, cleaners, it could have been any one of a dozen people.”

“You know goddamned well it was the diener.”

“Will you forget the fucking diener!”

I’ve never heard Esko yell before. It shuts me up.

“I’m not here to talk about that,” Esko says. “I got the DNA results from the crime scene and autopsy back from the lab.”

I feel like a jerk, light a cigarette. “What did you get?”

“Can I have one?”

To my knowledge, Esko doesn’t smoke. I slide the pack over and he lights one, takes a couple drags, collects his thoughts. “The lab results turned up semen samples in and around her mouth. DNA testing shows it came from two separate sources.”

I get a queasy feeling in my stomach that tells me the case has gone wrong. “How do you interpret that?”

“She had to have performed oral sex on two different men on the day of her murder.”

“So you’re saying Seppo had an accomplice?”

“I can’t say Seppo was involved at all. I don’t have a DNA sample from him for comparison.”

“I can’t force him to give one until I charge him. You can have a sample from the evidence collected from his house. It comes back from the lab tomorrow.”

“There’s more.”

I press the stress out of my eyes with my fingertips. “What?”

“There’s a third set of DNA from the crime scene. You remember the sample I took from her face? You asked me to collect it.”

I nod.

“Teardrops.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I didn’t know teardrops have DNA in them.”

“Well, they do.”

“If it’s minus forty and I spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Why didn’t the tears freeze and just bounce off her face?”

“I looked it up. Tears are a saline solution and depress the freezing point of water. They only have about a tenth or a twelfth of the salt content of seawater, depending, interestingly enough, on the cause of the tears. It was enough salt to keep the tears liquid while they fell, until they struck her face. They spattered and then froze instantly. The lowest possible temperature for a saline solution is minus twenty-one-point-one degrees. It was minus forty outside, so the salt crystallized out of the water. That’s how you were able to notice it. Your flashlight made the salt crystals sparkle.”

“No shit.” I don’t know what else to say.

“That’s not the real news. The tears don’t belong to either of the men she performed fellatio on.”

I hang my head in my hands. “That can’t be true.”

He stubs out the cigarette. “It’s true.”

I sit up straight, compose myself, chain another cigarette off the last one. “She performed oral sex on two men, who may or may not have murdered her, either individually or together. Then, a third individual, I presume male?”

“Yes, male.”

“A third man cries over her face while she’s being slaughtered, or maybe after.”

“Correct. There’s still more.”

This has gone so awry that I laugh. “There can’t be.”

“One of the men she performed oral sex on was identified from the sex offenders’ DNA database. I recognized the name, Peter Eklund. His father is one of the wealthiest men in Finland. He owns a bank.”

I know who Peter is, but I didn’t know he’s a registered sex offender. His residence is in Helsinki, so there’s no reason I would have been informed. He’s twenty-three years old and already drinking himself to death. He’s been a guest in our drunk tanks several times. I’ve also given him speeding tickets. He drives a BMW.

“What are you going to do?” Esko asks.

I want to scream out of frustration. This case should be winding down, but now it looks like this may just be the beginning. Too much has happened today. If I find Eklund and interview him tonight, I might make mistakes. “I’m going home.”

KATE IS ON THE BED, watching TV. I lie down beside her and pat her belly. “How are you and the kids?”

She turns and kisses me. “We’re okay. That boy, Heikki, came by today.”

“Was he any help?”

“Not exactly. He wouldn’t speak to me in English. Doesn’t he have to take it in school?”

“Yeah, but you know how we Finns are. If you can’t do something to perfection, you don’t do it at all. He’s just shy.”

She looks like she just tasted something bad. “He’s not just shy, he’s creepy. The way he looked at me made my skin crawl.”

I laugh a little. “It’s the religious thing. I guess they’re something like American Pentecostals.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You mean they speak in tongues?”

“I don’t think they do anymore, at least not frequently, but it used to be common. They believe the same thing about being entered by the Holy Spirit, and they have the same kinds of strict codes of dress and behavior. Laestadian women go for the natural look, tend to be on the plain side. Makeup is against the rules. He’s probably never been in the same room with a beautiful woman like you.”

“I told him I didn’t need anything today. I’d rather he didn’t come back.”

I don’t know how I could explain this to Valtteri. “If he tries to speak English, will you give him another chance?”

She looks skeptical.

“If he gets used to being around you, he’ll stop staring at you.”

“All right, I’ll try one more time. But if he makes me feel icky again, he’s got to go.”

“Fair enough. You could try speaking Finnish with him. If you both practice languages, it might make him more comfortable.”

“I thought he was here to make me comfortable.”

“Of course you’re right, but you’ve got some downtime. Maybe you should use part of it to study Finnish. Getting better at speaking it would make your whole life more comfortable.”

“Kari, I’m trying. Finnish is just so hard. Even simple things are difficult, because we just don’t have those sound combinations in English. Every sentence is like a tongue twister. Like saying good night.
Hyvää yötä
. See what I mean? I sound stupid.”

“You don’t sound stupid, just strange because your pronunciation is so soft. The more you practice, the more natural it will sound.”

I’m being kind. No matter how well foreigners speak Finnish, no matter how good their grammar, it just sounds wrong to me. Still, improving her Finnish would make her more functional and comfortable in everyday life.

“It’s like trying to learn Chinese,” she says, “except it has a Roman alphabet.”

“People learn Chinese too.”

She looks put out and changes the subject. “Tell me about the case.”

I don’t know how to begin, so I just blurt it out. “You remember I told you my ex-wife left me for another man. He’s the suspect.”

She sits upright and looks at me. “You must be kidding.”

“I wish. Things would be much simpler.”

“Are you sure he did it?”

“I was, until about an hour ago.”

She lies back against propped-up pillows. I tell her most of the story, about the BMW and the money trail connecting Seppo to Sufia.

“Wow,” she says. “What karma.”

“Valtteri tells me it’s the will of God.”

She smiles. “You never know.”

“I have to tell you some other things too. I think they’ll be public soon, and I’d rather you hear them from me.”

She raises her eyebrows.

I tell her how Seppo threatened her, how I pulled off the road and stuck a gun to his head, shouted in his ear and scared him, made him piss himself and faint.

She shakes her head in disbelief. “I just can’t picture you doing it.”

“You didn’t see the murdered girl. I got this mental picture of you being killed like her, and I lost it.”

She puts an arm around me. “Emotions make us do things. Maybe nothing will come of it.”

I relate my interview with Heli. “She says they’re going to sue me. If our past comes out in court, it could look like it’s not an honest murder investigation, and they might win.”

“Does she have any basis for suing you? Don’t you have to do anything like question people and check their alibis before you arrest them?”

“No. With such a violent crime, it’s pretty much left up to the arresting officer. Besides, I only followed instructions from a superior.”

“Unbelievable. After all this time, she’s going to try to hurt you again.”

“It’s because of the way she hurt me before that they could win. A lot of people would think it’s a good motive for revenge.”

She runs a hand through my hair. “Want to tell me about it?” “Not really, but I’m going to anyway. After I got shot, I was in the hospital for almost a week. She didn’t visit or answer the phone. When I got home, her stuff was gone. A note on the kitchen table said she wouldn’t be back.”

“You told me that much before.”

“I guess that’s all I was ready to tell you.”

“In the States, dating is like going to confession. If people don’t have any traumas, they’ll invent them just so you won’t think they’re shallow. I had a first date once, and this guy tells me that when he was a kid, his mother had an obsession that made her lick the floor clean. I’m sitting there thinking, if that’s what he’s willing to tell a near stranger, what’s he hiding? It’s like people think they have to give you a secret before you’ll trust them. I’ve always liked it that you believe in privacy, both yours and mine. I admire it.”

“Kate, I had just killed a man. I thought my shattered knee would cripple me. I couldn’t get in touch with my wife and I was worried sick about her. Then I go home and find out she left me.”

“What did you do?”

“She filed a change of address. That’s how I found out she was living with Seppo. Since she wouldn’t talk to me, I called him. I meant well-I was still worried about her. I told him that Heli had a lot of problems, that I was her husband and to send her home to me.”