Snow Angels (17 page)

I’M GETTING READY FOR BED. My cell phone rings. I look at the clock: eleven forty-five P.M. It’s Valtteri. I answer and hear him crying. He’s trying to talk but I can’t make out what he’s saying. He sobs in big heaving gasps.

“Valtteri, I can’t understand you. Try to calm down.”

“I can’t help him,” he says. “He’s gone.”

“Who?”

“He’s cold, and I can’t help him.”

Now I’m scared. “Valtteri, what’s happened?”

“My boy, Heikki, he hanged himself.”

He wails so hard that he chokes.

Valtteri loves his family beyond all things. He’s living a nightmare. “Shit. I’ll be right there.”

He forces out words. “What do I do? Can I take him down?”

“No. Is Maria with you?”

“Uh-huh. She… she found him.”

“Just stay with her and wait for me.”

“Thank you,” he says, “I’m sorry.” We click off.

I wake Kate up. “There’s an emergency. Valtteri’s boy, Heikki, killed himself. I’d like you to come with me, to be with his wife, Maria, while I sort out what happened.”

We bundle up and go out into the cold. When we get to Valtteri’s house, he’s barefoot, sitting on his front porch steps in a T-shirt and sweatpants. It’s minus twelve out. I help Kate out of the car and onto her crutches. They slip and slide on the ice and she has a hard time staying on her feet. I help her to the porch and sit next to Valtteri.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

He turns and puts his arms around me. He bursts into tears. He cries and cries, and I hold him until he gets it out.

The three of us go inside. Maria is sitting on the couch, weeping. Her long gray hair is matted to her face from tears. Kate hobbles over to her side and embraces her. Maria sobs on her shoulder. They’ve never met.

“Where is Heikki?” I ask.

Valtteri wipes his face. “In the cellar. Maria found him when she went to put clothes in the dryer.”

“Where are your other kids?”

“I sent them to the neighbors.”

“You stay here, and I’ll go down and take care of Heikki. Would that be all right?”

“No,” he says. “No no no. You can’t take him down by yourself. I have to help you. He’s my boy.”

He bursts into tears again. He’s getting hysterical, starting to hyperventilate. Maria’s not much better.

“Okay,” I say.

I put my arm around him and we go down to the cellar together. It’s a combination laundry and junk room, dank and lit overhead with a single bare bulb. Heikki used a section of laundry line and hangs from a rafter in the center of the room. His feet dangle over an overturned stool. His face is black, his tongue protrudes from his mouth. The cellar smells like feces. Heikki voided himself when he died.

Valtteri stares at him, sits down on the floor, rocks back and forth and cries.

Heikki is a big boy, but I don’t need any help. I set the stool upright and stand on it, lift Heikki enough to take the weight off the cord and cut it with a pocket knife. I lay him down on the floor, cross his arms and close his eyes, then drape him with a clean sheet from a laundry basket. When I do, I notice a half sheet of paper on the floor and pick it up: Hän sai minut tekemään sen. The Finnish language has no gender marker, so Heikki’s suicide note reads either “He made me do it” or “She made me do it.”

Further, it could mean that someone drove him to kill himself, or that he committed an act so terrible that he felt only his death could atone for it. His religion guarantees an eternity in hell for the sin of suicide. What could have been so heinous as to cause him such guilt? An internal alarm goes off. Out of gut instinct, I wonder if he was involved in Sufia’s murder.

I form a mental picture of Heikki crying over Sufia’s corpse. He was in my house, alone with Kate. I suppress an irrational surge of anger toward Valtteri for sending him there.

I sit down on the floor beside him. “Did you see this?”

He nods.

“Do you know what it could mean?”

He shakes his head.

“Valtteri, I’m sorry. This may be an admission of murder.”

He nods, he thought of it too, and that reinforces my suspicion.

When Valtteri called me, he said he was sorry. A possible reading of the note is that one of his parents drove him to kill himself after finding out he was a murderer. Valtteri and Maria love their kids more than life, but still, I can’t discount the possibility.

“I’m going to have to investigate,” I say.

He looks at me and his upper lip quivers. “Does that mean me and Maria have to go?”

“No. With your kids coming and going all day, there’s no reason to treat the house as a potential crime scene. But I’m going to have to look in his room, take some of his things.”

“I know,” he says.

I take Valtteri upstairs and call for an ambulance. EMTs take Heikki to the morgue. Before they leave, they give Valtteri and Maria tranquilizers. Kate sits with them. Nothing she can say will soothe them, but her presence forces them to be strong.

Heikki shared a room with a younger brother. I quickly process it, take some clothes and his computer. I go back down to the cellar and look through boxes of junk, hoping I won’t find Sufia’s missing clothes or a murder weapon. I don’t.

It’s three thirty A.M. when we leave. Valtteri and Maria are on the living room couch, asleep in each other’s arms. We put on our coats, and I help Kate across the ice to the car. I start it but can’t drive yet. Kate and I look at each other for a long moment. We don’t speak. There aren’t any words. I think Kate has just discovered the meaning of Finnish silence.

THE NEXT PLANE FROM Kittilä to Helsinki leaves at four forty-six. If I’m right, and Heikki participated in Sufia’s murder, the DNA samples I’m sending to the lab will prove it. Kate and I drive straight from Valtteri’s house to the airport. I tell her about the suicide note and what I think it might mean. She looks distraught. We don’t discuss it further. It starts snowing, and the monotonous slap of the windshield wipers destroys the quiet I need to mourn the death of the son of a trusted colleague and dear friend.

I keep picturing Heikki crying over Sufia, his tears freezing and spattering on her battered face. Possible scenarios flicker through my mind like different edits from the same film. Maybe the boy was a sociopath: he stole Seppo’s car, abducted and murdered Sufia alone. I see him hit her in the head with a hammer. He cuts her clothes off and carves “nigger whore” on her belly in the parked car, drags her naked and unconscious into the snow and brutalizes her, twists a broken beer bottle into her vagina. She wakes up blind, writhing and screaming. He cuts her throat and cries at the sight of his fantasy become reality.

Or perhaps Seppo held some kind of power over Heikki and forced him to become an accomplice. They parked in Aslak’s driveway. Heikki stood by while Seppo sodomized, maybe raped Sufia in the car, and then dragged her into the snowfield and committed atrocities. Heikki knelt over her and cried while witnessing the aftermath.

I imagine it the other way around. Heikki and Seppo are in the car together, but Heikki commits the brunt of the crimes. I see the same things over again, except Peter Eklund replaces Seppo. This scenario seems implausible. A Laestadian like Heikki and hedonistic scum like Peter would likely detest each other and everything the other stood for.

Then I picture Heli orchestrating the murder. She could have met Heikki at church. She could have been behind the wheel and relied on Heikki’s size and strength for the abduction and murder. She could have motivated him in some way, given him the keys to Seppo’s BMW and been absent during the commission of the crime. I consider the sexual forms her encouragements may have taken. If he had been true to his faith, Heikki was inexperienced, vulnerable.

These visualizations make me shudder. Whatever Heli may have done to me, I once loved her and want to think of her as good. The idea that she might be capable of such evil hurts me in deep places, makes me remember the way I felt about her when we were young. My gut reaction is that it’s not possible, but then I remember what I said not long ago: I can’t picture anyone committing such a murder, but someone did. I could never have imagined the way she betrayed me either, and I ask myself if, on a subconscious level, I’m skewing the investigation to punish her for that betrayal.

I don’t think so. Seppo’s affair with Sufia gave Heli motive. Valtteri was right. Overexercising combined with dieting have left Heli a skinny bag of bones, too small and weak to have carried out the murder by herself. The addition of Heikki to the picture gives her means and opportunity. Maybe Kate was right, maybe I should cite conflict of interest and recuse myself from the case. I can’t though, and I’m not sure why.

By the time we get home, it’s five thirty in the morning. I take Heikki’s computer from the trunk of the car, then bring it and the car battery inside. Kate sits down on the couch, throws her crutches on the floor. She hasn’t taken her shoe off. Snow melts on the rug. I don’t say anything, sit down beside her. She stares straight ahead. A few minutes go by, then she buries her face in her hands and starts sobbing. I wonder if I should hold her and comfort her, but I have the feeling she doesn’t want me to, so I wait.

“I can’t do this,” she says without looking up.

This night has been hard on her, maybe harder than I realize. I put an arm around her. “What?”

“Did you see that boy?” she asks.

She had seen him on a gurney as the EMTs took him out. I cut him down. “I saw him.”

“I spent the night comforting a woman I had never met before. We don’t even speak a common language. I’m glad I was there for her, but where were her family, her friends?”

I can’t explain the Finnish concept of privacy. When we grieve, often we can’t talk about it. Maria may have been more comfortable with a stranger. “You’re the best friend she could have had.”

“That boy, Heikki, I told you he was creepy, and now he’s dead. I feel so awful that I said those things about him.”

“You don’t need to.”

“The note he left. He killed Sufia Elmi, didn’t he?”

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced of the likelihood. If he murdered Sufia, I ask myself again if Valtteri and Maria knew. He might have confessed to them. Talk of the Bible and deserving punishment, of fire and brimstone, could have driven him to suicide. My hands start to shake. He was alone in the house with Kate, and I brought him here. “Probably.”

“Even I noticed he was strange. How could his parents not have known there was something wrong with him?”

“They have eight kids. In a family that size, children don’t get much individual attention. Things go unnoticed.”

She starts to cry harder. “I want to leave this place. I want to go home.”

I equate “leaving this place” with leaving me. I don’t fear much, but this scares me. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to live here anymore.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Back to the States, to Aspen.”

In my mind’s eye, I see Kate every moment of the day. Her cinnamon hair, dove-gray eyes so light they’re almost without color. Since we met, our relationship has been something self-contained, both a beginning and an end, like I picture death must be. I thought nothing could ever come between us. I get the same feeling I had when Seppo threatened her. My heart pounds, my ears ring, my vision goes blurry.

“In the States,” she says, “I never met anyone who committed suicide, never even knew anyone who had a suicide in their family. In this little country, it seems like someone does it every day. Finns are like lemmings rushing off a cliff.”

It’s true. Most years, Finland has the world’s highest suicide rate. Last year, it was twenty-seven out of a hundred thousand citizens. If I lost Kate and the twins, I would feel like joining the statistics.

Kate looks at me and reads the panic in my face. “Oh God. Kari, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I want you to come with me. I would never leave you.”

I start to calm down. She puts her arms around me and kisses me. “We could leave here,” she says. “You speak and write almost perfect English. You’re educated and a decorated officer. Any police department in the U.S. would be privileged to have you on its force.”

Her opinion of me is higher than my own. “Why do you want to leave?” I ask.

The sadness in her face tells me she’s going to speak from the heart. “When I first arrived here, my picture of Finland was different. Nature and the environment seemed wild and beautiful, life seemed orderly. I thought people were happy.”

“You were mostly right,” I say.

“No, I was wrong. This is an ugly place. The silence, the misery, the months of darkness. It’s too extreme, like living in a desert made of snow instead of sand.”

Sometimes I think this too.

“When I talk to people,” she says, “they hardly ever laugh or even smile unless they’re drunk. Finns are inscrutable. I have no idea what they’re thinking or feeling. Sometimes I feel like people hate me for being a foreigner, like the nurses at the hospital when I broke my leg. I’m uncomfortable. Worse, I’m terrified because I’m pregnant. I’m at the mercy of people I don’t and can’t understand.”

I didn’t know how deep her cultural alienation had become. I try to explain. “What you perceive as silence, we view as peaceful solitude. Most of us aren’t miserable, but our approach toward life is serious, maybe because of our extreme environment. People don’t hate you, they respect you because you’re successful. Finns are afraid of making mistakes. If we can’t do something perfectly, it’s hard for us to try to do it at all. The people that work for you speak fluent English and are proud of it, but a lot of people are too scared to try.”

“That’s no excuse for the way they treated me at the hospital.”

“You were in pain. Sometimes, people here ignore suffering so the sufferers can maintain their dignity. When you give birth, your medical care will be excellent, for the same reason the nurses wouldn’t speak to you. Health care professionals expect themselves to excel at their work. Our educational system is one of the best in the world. There’s no better place for our children to grow up.”