Snow Angels (21 page)

We step out into the dark together. The diner door has a bell on it that makes a friendly ring. The cold takes my breath for a second. “Thanks for the coffee,” I say, and head for my car.

She calls after me, “Kari.”

I turn toward her. She opens the door of the BMW, looks at me. “I’m sorry I hurt you when I left you. I loved you once.”

I’m not sure why, but I’m glad she said it. I nod at her but don’t know what I mean by it. Maybe it’s thanks-maybe it’s simple acknowledgment.

Heli starts the BMW. I have to test something out. I walk over, she rolls down the passenger-side window and I stick my head in while I talk to her.

“A couple days ago,” I say, “this crazy idea occurred to me that you learned about Seppo’s affair and decided to get rid of Sufia. You and Seppo were unmarried. If Seppo left you for Sufia, by Finnish law, you’d get nothing. You seduced Heikki and played on his religious beliefs, convinced him that Sufia was a nigger whore, a sinner that deserved to die, then you and he colluded in Sufia’s murder.”

I pause. Heli’s face registers nothing. I continue.

“You and Heikki used Seppo’s car and framed him, then you convinced Seppo to marry you, fed him some song and dance about how your solidarity would speak of his innocence. Marriage would assure your financial well-being. You drove Heikki to suicide by telling him the truth, that you used him and intended to discard him. Of course, I can see now that all this couldn’t be true. Seems like a stupid idea, looking back.”

Her expression doesn’t change. “You have a wild imagination.”

“Yeah, I do. A homosexual love affair between Seppo and Heikki is a far more economical solution. It’s all there. Motive. Opportunity. Still, you can see how all the pieces fit in the scenario with you and Heikki as well, it’s just more complicated that way.”

Heli smirks and starts to close her window.

Something hits me. “Hey, wait a second,” I say. “How do you spell
lasi
, glass, in English?”

“Why?”

“I have to send my wife a text message and can’t remember.”

“G-R-A-S-S.”

She rolls up her window and drives away. I light a cigarette. The cold makes my eyes run and blur. Her taillights streak red and fade away. Heli’s English always sucked. Could Sufia really have had a broken bottle stuffed into her vagina because Heli read a website wrong and mistook “grass” for “glass”? I stand under a streetlight, smoke and think for a while.

I BRUSH THE SNOW OFF my shoes and leave them in the foyer, then walk into the living room. Kate is sitting up in the bed reading, wearing only black panties. Modern Finnish homes are so well insulated that no matter how cold it is outside, you can always hang around the house in your underwear in comfort. She holds up her book, Finnish for Foreigners.
“Mitä kuuluu?” she asks.

I kneel down on the floor beside her. Her skin is white, as colorless as snow. The veins under her skin cast bluish shadows on its surface. I touch her breast, trace the azure map with my index finger. “Rakastele kanssani,” I say.

“I tried to ask how you are,” she says.

“And I said make love to me.”

She giggles. “How do we do it with my cast in the way?”

I start peeling off my clothes. “We’ll figure it out.”

We figure it out. After the third time, I lay my head in her arm-pit and nuzzle her breast.

“If this was a scene in a romance novel,” Kate says, “they’d write that you were furious with desire.”

My mouth is full of her breast, I have to turn my head to answer. “I’ve been around so much ugliness lately, I needed something beautiful.”

She kisses my lips.
“Minä rakastan sinua,”
I love you, she says. Her accent makes her sound like a child learning to speak. It makes me grin.

“I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had,” I say. “What if, instead of going to live in the States, we moved to Helsinki? It has a big international community, a lot of people speak English there. You might not feel so isolated.”

“Would they let you transfer back there?”

“I think so.”

“Would you be happy there?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know if you would be happy there either. We might be. But the big ski resorts are in the north. You’d have to manage another kind of business. It’s just an idea.”

She frowns. “I think you were right before,” she says. “Let’s figure it out after you solve Sufia Elmi’s murder.”

“The case should be closed soon.”

I tell Kate about everything that’s happened since I left the house earlier today. About how Pirkko murdered Urpo, about the chaos at the murder scene, Tiina attacking Raila. How I had to tell Valtteri and Maria their son was a killer and that I realized Heikki may have had a homosexual love affair with Seppo. About talking to Heli.

“That’s a nightmare of a day,” she says.

“Yeah. The good part is that if Seppo admits to an affair with Heikki, I can close the investigation. The Lone Gunman theory.”

“Why do you think Heli wanted to talk to you?”

“All that talk about making amends was bullshit. She tried to pump me for information about the case. She’s scared of something.”

“Do you really think she and Heikki might have murdered Sufia together?”

“I believe she knows more than she’s telling. I wanted to see her reaction when she realized she could be a suspect. The woman I knew had emotional problems but didn’t fit into a sociopath-murderer profile. But that was a long time ago. I don’t know her anymore. Her confusion about spelling ‘glass’ and ‘grass,’ and the glass and grass in Sufia’s and Elizabeth Short’s vaginas, if it’s a coincidence, is just plain weird. When you think about it, this whole case is just plain fucking weird.”

For me, a criminal investigation is like playing a card game. When I get more to work with as the game progresses, my imagination rearranges the cards. Discussing the case with Kate makes the whole deck reshuffle.

“I just got this mental picture,” I say, “of Seppo, Sufia and Heikki in a bedroom. Seppo fantasizes that he’s the Sheik of Araby, Sufia is his Nubian dancing girl, Heikki his teenage catamite. That would explain how Heikki knew about Sufia’s genital mutilation. He saw her vagina, maybe even had sex with her, while having a ménage à trois with her and Seppo.”

“But how did Heikki make the connection between Sufia and the Black Dahlia case?” Kate asks.

“I don’t know that yet. Maybe Seppo can tell me. Maybe that’s why Heli tried to pump me for information, to see how much I know about Heikki’s relationship with Sufia and Seppo. Maybe she blackmailed Seppo into marrying her by threatening to tell me the truth. Who knows, she could have read about the Black Dahlia murder and talked about it with Heikki.”

“Maybe,” Kate says, “but given that Peter Eklund and Seppo know each other from Helsinki, Sufia’s relationship with Peter seems more than coincidental, like too much of a loose end. If you’re right and there was some kind of sex circle, is it possible that traces of his semen could be found in her mouth alongside Seppo’s, without his playing some part in all this?”

The deck reshuffles again. “Peter admitted to having met Seppo a few times in nightclubs in Helsinki. Maybe they discovered they have a mutual thing for teenage boys. It could be that Sufia wasn’t cheating on Seppo with Peter. Seppo could have introduced Sufia to Peter, more or less pimped her out to him. Seppo and Peter could have been fucking Sufia and Heikki together. Maybe it didn’t go exactly like that, but some variation on the theme.”

Kate takes it all in. “Then who killed Sufia?”

The deck won’t reshuffle for me this time. I can’t imagine the sequence of events that led to her death. “I don’t know, maybe they all did.”

My cell phone rings. It’s Antti, he’s on call tonight. I pick up. “Fuck Kari,” he says, “you have to come here quick.”

“Where?”

“The lake where you and your dad like to fish. Somebody’s dead, burned to death on the ice, looks like a child. I can’t fucking believe it.”

I can’t believe it either. The clock reads twelve fifteen A.M. The investigation of Sufia’s murder just entered its sixth day. Three murders during that time period. I hear Antti choke back a sob. He’s tough, it must be bad. “It’s still burning,” he says.

“Get a fire blanket out of the cruiser and put it out. I’ll call Esko and be there soon.”

Naked beside me, Kate waits for me to tell her what’s wrong.

“Antti says a child’s been burned and murdered. I’ll be gone all night.”

She winces. “No,” she says.

My feelings exactly.

DAD AND I NEVER fish together, but we fish in the same spot, and I’m pretty sure for the same reason. It’s where my sister Suvi died. It’s a way of being with her. Sometimes I talk to her when I sit there on a crate, dangling a fishing line through a hole in the ice.

The starry night casts the frozen lake slate-gray. A half moon silhouettes a thin column of smoke rising into the sky. Antti stands near the source, not fifty feet from where Suvi fell through the ice and drowned. It makes me shudder. I get my fishing-tackle boxes out of the trunk, head down the bank and onto the lake.

Walking toward the body with a flashlight, I can’t quite take in what I’m seeing. The smoking figure in the beam doesn’t look like a person, more like a blackened candle that’s burned halfway down and been snuffed out. Antti and I nod at each other but don’t speak. I look at the victim, blink, look again. Part of me just won’t accept that it’s true.

A tire was hung around the child’s chest and arms and set ablaze. The smell of petroleum and scorched flesh is overwhelming, sickening. Someone filled the ring inside the tire with gasoline, lit it and watched the child burn. A rumpled fire blanket lies on the ice a few yards away from the body. Antti extinguished the flame, but the rubber is still smoldering.

The victim sat cross-legged while the killer attended to the details of his or her murder. Somehow, the body stayed upright while it burned. Because the tire was draped around the top half of the body, flame shot up and burned nearly all the skin away from the chest and head. Only fragments of charred and desiccated muscle and ligament remain attached to bone and a blackened skull.

From the waist upward, the body is shriveled by heat. Soot and ash cover the body from the waist downward, but in relative terms, the lower portion remains unscathed. Antti assumed the victim is a child because heat and flame caused a diminutive appearance, steamed out liquid, removed hair and flesh, in effect shrank the upper body. He was wrong.

I kneel down with my weight on the balls of my feet and examine the lower body. Under the filth from the burned tire, I see jeans and worn boots. Understanding knocks me backward. I fall on my ass and drop my flashlight. I try to breathe, can’t, clench and unclench my fists. I close my eyes, stop looking at the corpse so I can relax enough to speak. When I open them, Antti is standing over me.

“It’s not a child,” I say. “It’s a small adult woman. My ex-wife Heli.”

Antti’s mouth opens and closes, opens and closes again. “Fuck. Kari. I’m sorry.”

He offers his hand, helps me to my feet. We stand side by side on the ice. He picks up the flashlight and shines it on Heli. We stare at her for what seems a long time.

“What do we do?” Antti asks.

I consider the question, can’t think, sit down on a fishing-tackle box. “I saw Heli earlier tonight. I might have been the last one to see her alive. I can’t do anything, it might contaminate the investigation. You have to process the crime scene. Wait on Esko, he’ll help you.”

What I said is true, but also, I’m incapable of working and I know it.

He sits down on the other tackle box. “Okay,” he says.

Esko arrives, and Antti explains the situation to him. Esko hunches down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he says, “we’ll take care of it.”

Antti needs my crime kit. I stand up, walk a few yards away, chain-smoke and watch them examine Heli’s corpse, the husk that remains of her. I should feel something, remember moments from my life with Heli. Her life should pass before my eyes, but my mind is blank, I feel nothing. The cold seeps through me. It feels like ice water flows in my veins. I stare across the lake into the forest’s impenetrable shadows, then watch the stars.

After a while, Esko comes over. “You don’t need to stay here.”

It takes me a second to realize he spoke to me and another to understand what he said. “What if Antti needs something?”

“He won’t. Can you drive yourself home?”

I nod.

“Go on then,” he says.

I stumble off the lake and wade through the snow up the bank to my car.

I SHUT THE FRONT door behind me. Kate is sitting on the couch with her broken leg propped up on a stool. She’s watching an American sitcom with a canned laugh track. I sit down beside her.

“I thought you’d be gone all night,” she says.

I stare at the TV, shake my head.

She comes close, looks in my eyes. “What happened?”

“It was Heli,” I say.

“What are you talking about?”

Maybe she thinks I’m talking about Sufia’s murder or Heikki’s suicide. “Heli. My ex-wife. It wasn’t a child. Somebody put a tire around Heli’s chest and arms, filled it with gasoline and set her on fire. She’s dead.”

Kate’s eyes open wide. She reaches over and takes my hands. “Kari… ”

I keep staring at the television. I laugh at a stupid joke, look down at my feet. I forgot to take off my boots. I watch snow melt all over the carpet.

I almost never cry. Sometimes I go years without crying. When I was a boy, if I cried, Dad beat me. He must have beaten the tears out of me. I start to cry, just a little, and it surprises me. In a way, it terrifies me. “Suvi,” I say.

Kate keeps my hands clasped between hers. “What?”