Snow Angels (6 page)

I GO TO MY OFFICE. Valtteri trails in behind me and sits on the edge of my desk.

“Did you kiss and make up with Antti?” I ask.

“No.”

“Going to?”

“No.”

I don’t blame him. “Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

They can’t even laugh it off over a beer. Valtteri doesn’t drink. His religion precludes it. It precludes a lot of things which for most of us are basic entertainment, like watching TV and dancing. Laestadians tend to live passive, rather ascetic lives. They keep to their own and don’t associate much with people outside their church.

We have a large Laestadian community here in Kittilä. Valtteri is thirty-eight years old, two years younger than me, and has eight children. His wife is his age and looks fifty. They had their youngest child four years ago. Their religion also forbids contraception, so either one of them is sterile or Valtteri’s sex life has come to a close.

As far as I know, Valtteri doesn’t want to be anything besides a small-town police sergeant. Laestadians don’t take part in any form of competition. He seems content to be part of his religious community and raise his family. We’ve been working together for a few years now, and he’s the most tranquil person I know. Aside from hitting Antti today.

“Why do you want me to investigate your father?” he asks.

“Dad didn’t kill anybody, it’s just something we have to do. We look at everyone.”

“Like you said, he didn’t kill anybody. I don’t see any need to look into your family.”

I don’t get why he’s making a big deal about it. Maybe it’s a Laestadian thing. Laestadians do a lot of things I don’t get. My ex-wife was raised Laestadian, but it didn’t take with her and she hated it. I’m starting to think Valtteri knows something about Dad. “Everyone.”

Valtteri still looks bothered.

“He was probably at work.”

Dad is a bartender in a dive near downtown. He has a bad drinking problem, but to my knowledge, he’s never touched a drop while behind the bar. I’ve often wondered if all that alcohol surrounding him doesn’t make him drool with craving while he’s selling it to customers.

“The truth is,” I say, “Dad was drunk and foul-tempered last night, and I didn’t ask him where he was because I didn’t want to fight with him. It’s easier for me if you just check. Do you mind?”

“No problem. Did you know Antti is such a racist?”

“Antti was upset, he’s no worse than most. He didn’t kill the girl, he was on duty with Jussi.”

“Still.”

“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Valtteri never talks much, that’s one of the reasons I like him. My phone rings, he leaves to give me privacy.

“Vaara,” I answer.

“This is Jukka Selin from the Helsinki police department. You asked that the parents of Sufia Elmi be notified of her death.”

“Yeah.”

“A pastor and I visited them. It didn’t go well. They want to talk to you.” He gives me their names, Abdi and Hudow, and their phone number.

I call them right away. A woman answers the phone. I’m nervous and don’t know what to say, so I just start talking. “Ma’am, this is Inspector Kari Vaara from the Kittilä police department.”

“Anteeksi?” Excuse me?

Even that one word of Finnish is barely understandable. I repeat who I am.

“Sorry, I get man.”

I’m worried they might not speak Finnish well enough for me to be able to make myself understood. Her husband comes to the phone. “Abdi.”

“Sir, this is Inspector Kari Vaara. I’m a police officer in Kittilä. I’m told you want to talk to me about Sufia.”

“What has happened to her?”

Still at a loss for words, I restate what he already knows. “Sufia is dead sir. She’s been murdered.”

Seconds tick by in silence. “Who killed her?” he asks.

“I don’t know yet. I’m doing everything in my power to find out.”

“You are responsible for finding out?”

“Yes.”

“Then you do it. Give me your phone number.”

I give him my work and cell phone numbers.

“My wife and I will drive from Helsinki and be there tomorrow, to see our daughter. And you.”

I call Jaakko Pahkala. I’ve known him since I was a cop in Helsinki. He’s a freelance writer for the Helsinki daily newspaper,
Ilta-sanomat
, and also for the gossip magazine Seitsemän Päivää and the true-crime rag Alibi. There’s little about the goings-on of our celebrities that Jaakko doesn’t know.

“This is Kari Vaara. Sufia Elmi is vacationing in Kittilä. Do you know where she’s staying?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you if you tell me why you’re asking.”

“Because she’s dead.” I didn’t mean to be so gruff. This day isn’t going the way I had hoped.

“Jesus,” he says, “I’m sorry. How?”

He doesn’t sound sorry, he sounds itchy for details. Jaakko loves his work. “She was murdered yesterday. I’ll give you the scoop and fax you the police report before I enter it into the crime database if you help me out.”

“Sure. She’s at-she was at-Pine Woods Cottages.”

I know the place. It’s walking distance from the main ski slopes. I thank him and get his fax number.

“I’ll come up on the evening flight,” Jaakko says.

“You don’t need to, I can keep you informed.”

“See you soon.” He hangs up.

I have the feeling Jaakko is going to be a pain in my ass, but at least now I know where Sufia was staying. I make some phone calls, get a search warrant for her hotel room and subpoenas for her bank and phone records, then head off to see what I can learn from Sufia’s cabin.

I’M TIRED, so I stop at a gas station and get a big takeaway coffee to sharpen up. The gas station is in the middle of a snowfield with a two-lane road running through it. In the dark, big neon signs reflect off the snow like crayon marks on a sheet of dirty white paper. I lean against the car, smoke, sip at the scalding coffee, and through the steam rising off it, watch the signs flash, flicker on and off.

My next stop is Pine Woods Cottages. It may be that Sufia was abducted from her room, and good investigative work could solve her murder here and now. I go to the manager’s office and get the keys, tell him Sufia’s place is a crime scene and no one else can enter until I say otherwise. He tells me the maid hasn’t cleaned it for five days, Sufia didn’t want anybody in her room.

I take the crime kit fishing-tackle boxes from the trunk of my car, stop and look around. It’s not a cottage, more like a motel. Twelve units are housed under one roof with a log facade. It’s a nice-looking place. A ski vacation in Levi is expensive. Even a place like this runs a few hundred euros a week. The lift pass and ski rental is about a hundred euros, a beer is five. If you want to do something like go on a dogsled run around a reindeer farm with lunch included-exotic if you don’t live here-it’s a hundred and fifty for three hours. At those prices, tourists expect things to be done right.

It’s warmed up to minus fourteen now, and the ski runs are open again. Blazing lights cut through the dark and illuminate them, and from Sufia’s door, I have a good view of the slopes. Hundreds of black dots rush down the mountain. Still, there’s a degree of privacy here. An abduction could have been carried out if she was subdued, not kicking and screaming. A knife and the noose around her neck could have sufficed.

There aren’t any footprints in the snow leading up to her door. The last snowfall ended yesterday around noon, so she was away from here for at least two hours before she was murdered. My hope is to find a bloody mess, signs of a violent struggle. If I can type the killer’s blood and get a DNA sample, I’ll have gone a long way toward solving her murder.

There’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I go in and do a walk-through. It’s spacious, nicely decorated. There’s a living area and bedroom, a bathroom with a sauna. It’s also got empty beer and liquor bottles all over the place. Maybe because she was a Muslim, using alcohol embarrassed her, and Sufia didn’t want the maid in to clean it until she got rid of them first.

An overflowing ashtray sits on a coffee table. I sift through the butts: they’re all Marlboro Lights. I take a long minute to let it sink in, to get a sense of what might have happened here. Nothing broken, no bloodstains evident. It’s just a little messy.

I take out the cameras and start snapping photos. The sheets are stained with semen, but nothing that might link to Sufia’s murder presents itself.

Two books sit on the nightstand beside the bed. One is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Sophisticated reading, and in English. Sufia must have had good language skills. The other-in Finnish-is Nalle ja Moppe: The Life of Eino Leino and L. Onerva. It’s about two Finnish writers, both most famous for their poetry, the stories of their lives and their on-again/off-again love affair. Romantic stuff, but only of interest to someone with intellectual inclinations. Her address book is on the nightstand by the other books. I slip it into an evidence bag. I had hoped to find her purse and cell phone, but it’s better than nothing.

On television, crime-scene investigators just hose down everything with Luminol, and-abra-cadaver!-invisible blood pools are exposed, crimes solved, murderers brought to justice. In fact, Luminol reacts with lots of chemicals, household bleach among them, and can destroy other crime-scene evidence. If the room had been professionally cleaned before I processed it, I might use Luminol, but for me, it’s a last resort.

I lift fingerprints from the doorknobs, the desk, the bathroom sink, every surface that will hold them, then I start bagging evidence. First I do detail stuff, collect pubic and other hair from the bed and toilet. Then I move on to bigger things. I strip the dirty sheets off the bed and fold them inward to keep evidence intact before bagging them.

In a closet, I find several pairs of dirty panties in a hamper, most of them semen stained. I bag the cigarette butts and liquor bottles. When the floor is clear, I spend an hour on my hands and knees going over the carpet, focusing on hairs and fibers, angling a flashlight low to make them stand out.

I finish and look at my watch. I’m supposed to meet Esko for the autopsy in forty-five minutes. As far as yielding evidence goes, the place is a mixed blessing. There’s nothing here to bring the case to a quick conclusion, but a lot that may help me down the road. I sit down on the edge of the bed for a minute to form a mental image of the person who’s been living here. There’s been a lot of drunken fucking going on.

The murdered have no privacy, their flaws and secrets are held up to scrutiny in an effort to bring them justice. Because of the circumstances of her death, I had canonized Sufia slowly but surely over the past day. Sufia, the snow angel-that was a mistake, I know nothing about her. To get at the truth, I need to see her as she was. This room is a beginning. I hope the autopsy will tell me more.

ESKO HANDS ME a cup of coffee and tells the morgue attendant, the diener, to bring him Sufia’s body. We wait in the examination suite, and I look around to pass the time. Photos of Esko’s family hang on the walls: his daughter’s wedding, one of him and his wife at a summer picnic. I browse through a tray of surgical tools. Among the saws and scalpels, chisels and forceps, I find a set of garden shears. “What are these for?”

“This place runs on a tight budget,” he says. “A pair of rib-cutters from a surgical-supply company costs three times as much. It’s not like my patients bleed to death if they get a nicked artery from a less-than-perfect instrument.”

He comes over to the table and picks up a piece of cutlery from the collection of scalpels. “Discount stores are great. This is a bread knife I picked up on sale at Anttila. Perfect for making thin organ slices. It’s got way more cutting surface than a scalpel and does a better job at a fraction of the cost. You gotta think of this stuff if you want to run a backwater government facility.”

The diener, Tuomas, wheels in Sufia’s body on a gurney. “Want me to do anything?” he asks.

Esko scratches at his gray beard. “Break the seals on the bag and photograph the body while I finish my coffee.”

The diener unzips the body bag. Sufia is exposed, naked and violated, swathed in shiny black plastic, like an offering to an angry god on the glittering steel altar of the gurney.

Esko has dark circles under his eyes. “I guess you didn’t get much sleep either,” I say.

“I’m knackered,” he says.

An interesting choice of words, given that Sufia was knackered, like a farm animal, with a hammer.

“I’ve been province coroner for seventeen years,” Esko says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this, let alone autopsied a body so mutilated for a murder investigation. Like I told you yesterday, I’m scared I’ll fuck it up. I stayed up most of the night reading forensics journals because I was afraid I’ll forget something.”

“You won’t,” I say.

The diener finishes snapping photos. He sits down on a stool in the corner, pulls off his surgical cap. Lank blond hair falls in his face. He starts reading a magazine. I don’t bother to say hello. When I’ve spoken to him in the past, he never answered, just nodded and went on with what he was doing.

Esko examines the body while it’s still in the bag, before it’s cleaned up. He turns on a tape recorder. He states that he’s positively identified the victim as Sufia Elmi from dental records, then notes her race, sex, hair color and length and her age. He takes the bags off her hands and scrapes under her fingernails, enters the scrapings and the bags themselves into evidence. He takes samples for DNA analysis from her lips and inside her mouth with swabs, and continues.

“There’s a cord with a simple slipknot around the neck, located above a laceration in the throat.” He lifts her head and removes the noose. “The ligatures aren’t deep, the esophagus isn’t crushed. Asphyxiation wasn’t the cause of death.”