Snow Angels (7 page)

He looks the body over for hair and fiber samples, for any kind of foreign materials. The only hair samples he finds most likely belong to her, unless the killer is of African descent, and we don’t have many black people in Kittilä, neither locals nor tourists. He picks up some fibers, maybe from her own absent clothing.

He goes over the body with a UV light to make secretions fluoresce, then draws blood samples with a syringe for toxicology. Although he’s done it once already, he takes blood samples from various areas on the corpse. A single drop of the killer’s blood might expose his identity. He doesn’t find anything else and starts looking at her injuries.

“I’ll start with her eyes,” Esko says. “Puncture wounds have penetrated the cornea, iris, sclera and vitreous humor. Little ocular fluid remains. Rough, irregular intrusions suggest an imprecise instrument, and corresponding circular wounds around the eyes suggest he used the broken beer bottle, still embedded in the subject’s vagina, as the instrument.”

I stand up and look into Sufia’s eye sockets. Yesterday, she could see through those bloodstained maws. I find myself wishing I had taken the national police chief’s advice and bowed out of the investigation. I sit down again, and Esko goes on.

“Upon examining the scalp, there’s ecchymosis in the right and frontal areas, a subarachnoid hemorrhage on the right side and small hemorrhagic areas in the corpus callosum.”

Meaning the two hammer blows to her head caused heavy bruising and internal bleeding.

“The throat is incised. The esophagus, internal carotid artery and superior laryngeal nerve are severed. Aggressive compression and shearing from one cut resulted in a wound that reaches to the spine, which was nicked by the blade.”

Esko is saying he nearly cut her head off.

“To go so deep and through cartilage without sawing, the instrument must have been sharp and of some length, and so not a scalpel. He used a knife with a curved blade. A skinning knife comes to mind. I see an irregular laceration and superficial loss of skin from the right breast. The tissue loss is more or less square in outline and measures three and one-eighth inches transversely and three and a half inches longitudinally. The manner in which this skin from her breast has been removed, with two unidirectional slashes rather than with a sawing motion, reinforces my opinion about the cutting instrument.”

I want Esko’s examination to tell me the story of her death. “Can you give me the order of attack?”

“Hang on until I finish, I’m trying to figure it out.”

“The words ‘nigger whore,’ ” Esko says, “have been written, one below the other, with a series of cuts on the body’s midsection, between the breasts and the umbilicus. Each letter is approximately three inches transversely and one and a half inches longitudinally. The writing is precise and the wounds are shallow. If a curved blade were used, it would have been awkward to use the tip to cut the words into the body while holding the knife by the handle. I think he held the knife by the tip, like a pen. The words are intersected by a light cut, interrupted by other wounds, that runs from the throat to the pelvic area.” He turns her over. “The body is nicked in other places, on the thighs and buttocks, and once in the center of her back, by a blade with similar characteristics.”

“How long do you think it took him to cut ‘nigger whore’ into her belly?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Grab a scalpel and a pad of paper and try it for yourself.”

I take a scalpel from the instrument tray and paper from a shelf, hold the blade like a pen and time myself while I scratch out the letters. “Forty-nine seconds.”

Esko moves on. “The trunk is lacerated by an incision that travels almost straight through the abdomen, severing the intestine at the duodenum and through the soft tissues of the abdomen. The incision is deep and nearly reaches the intervertebral disk between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.”

“It almost looks to me like he tried to cut her in half,” I say.

He considers it. “Maybe.”

He examines her pubic area and tries to remove the broken Lapin Kulta bottle from Sufia’s vagina. It doesn’t want to come out. He uses both hands, gives it a jerk, and it comes free. He examines her vagina and the wound inflicted by the bottle.
“Mitä vittua?”
What the fuck? “Come over here and look at this,” he says.

I go to the other side of the gurney. All I see is a mutilated vagina. “What?”

“Her vagina is damaged,” Esko says, “but not just in the way you think. Look again.”

I get down close to look and feel embarrassed, but now I see. Her clitoris and part of the labia minora are missing. “You think the killer is a surgeon?”

“No, I think her family had it done.”

I overlooked the scar tissue because Sufia’s vagina is smeared with dried blood and damaged by the beer bottle. I’m shocked, but I shouldn’t be. Back in the nineties, when we took thousands of Somali refugees into Finland to help them escape genocide, I made an effort to learn a little bit about Somali culture. The vast majority of Somali women have undergone clitoridectomy as a rite of womanhood.

“You ever see one of these before?” I ask.

“Only in pictures. This is what they call a Type II clitoridectomy. Because of the absence of the labia minora and clitoris, the anterior perineal structures have an unusual contour.”

“It looks ungodly painful.”

“In my medical opinion, it hurt like screaming fucking hell. They dug her clitoris out at the root, down to the bone.”

I think about her cottage and the semen-stained sheets and panties. “Could she have derived enjoyment from sex?”

“Not the kind of physical pleasure usually associated with it.”

“Learn anything about the sexual assault with the bottle?”

“Not much, he pushed it into her while twisting and cutting. There’s semen present, but that doesn’t prove anything. The killer did so much damage with it that I can’t tell if she was raped or not. Makes me wonder if he’s as smart as he is brutal. She could have had intercourse a day or two before her murder.”

The external examination is complete. The diener finishes an apple, throws the core in the trash and puts down his magazine. He weighs and measures the body. “Five feet and eight inches, ninety-six pounds,” he says.

Dieners are an odd lot, tend to stay in their low-paying jobs for decades. They live in the cool quiet of the morgue, moving and washing bodies. Makes me wonder about them. The diener moves Sufia’s corpse while Esko takes a break. He and I drink more coffee. He looks lost in thought, so I stay quiet to let him sort things out.

The diener moves Sufia to a slanted aluminum autopsy table. It has raised edges, faucets, gutters and drains to rinse away blood and drek. The diener washes the body. If there was any evidence left on her, it’s gone down the drain. He places a body block, a rubber brick, under her back, to make her chest protrude. It will make it easier to cut her open.

I remember the first time I went deer hunting. My oldest brother, Juha, and some of his friends took me. Hunting dogs cornered the deer, a six-point whitetail buck, and since it was my first time, they let me take the shot. The bullet went behind the shoulder and through the heart, a clean kill. Juha handed me a knife and told me what to do. I zipped the buck open from the sternum to the genitals and plunged my hands in to pull out the organs. The morning was bitter cold, and the heat inside the dead animal made me sigh with pleasure.

“Isn’t working with chilled bodies uncomfortable?” I’ve attended quite a few autopsies, but never thought of this before.

“You get used to it, like anything. Refrigerated flesh is easier to work with. Warm flesh is squishy, harder to cut.”

Esko goes back to work. He makes a Y-shaped incision from each shoulder to the bottom of her breastbone, then from the breastbone to her pubic bone. He pulls her skin away in flaps. The chest flap hangs over her face so that I can see her bones and muscles.

He removes her rib cage and detaches her esophagus and larynx by cutting arteries and ligaments. He cuts the attachments to the bladder, spinal cord and rectum, then flops out her internal organs in one go. He takes his bread knife and slices organs for tissue samples.

“How does her liver look?” I ask.

“Pure as the driven snow.”

“What about her lungs?”

“Pink as the day she was born.”

I try to see Sufia as she was. “I processed her cottage today, there were booze bottles and cigarette butts everywhere.”

“Unless she has new vices, they weren’t hers.”

“We get twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA. The evidence bags from her room are in the trunk of my car. When you get done, we’ll send them and your samples to Helsinki on the next plane. We might know whose they are in a day or two.”

Esko opens her stomach. The smell is less than pleasant. He dumps the contents into a container. Then he zips a scalpel around Sufia’s head, across her forehead and from ear to ear. He pulls her skin away in two flaps. “Blows to the head from the blunt instrument caused a fracture in the frontal cranium,” he says.

He cuts into her skull with an electric Stryker saw, then pulls off the top like he’s taking off her hat. He cuts her brain’s connection to the spinal cord and lifts it out, slices it with the bread knife for samples. When he’s done, Esko flops into a chair, exhausted. The diener starts sewing her back together.

“We’ve got this girl,” I say. “She appears to be a chain-smoker living in alcoholic squalor, but she doesn’t drink or smoke, so I think she has a boyfriend who does.”

“A fair guess.”

“She has sex she doesn’t enjoy. She’s sexually mutilated both in life and in death. There might be something to that, some kind of symbolism.” “Could be.”

I mull it over. “Paint me a picture of what you think happened.”

“That’s your department.”

“But I’m asking you.”

He takes a second. “I think he kidnapped her somewhere, used the knife to intimidate her and the noose to control her. Cut her to scare her into submission. Maybe raped her somewhere along the line.”

“The semen. You’re sure there’s no way to tell if it was his, if she was raped?”

He shrugs. “She’s so torn up, I can’t tell you more. I wish I could. I just don’t get it,” he says. “The way he butchered her suggests an agenda, but I can’t imagine what it was.”

“Let’s try to sort it out,” I say. “What do you think happened before he took her to the snowfield, and what did he do after he got there?”

“We know what he did there because of blood loss into the surrounding snow. He attacked her eyes, removed a section of skin from her breast, made a deep laceration in her lower trunk and inserted the bottle into her vagina.”

“She was awake at least part of the time,” I say, “because she thrashed around in the snow.”

Esko goes quiet for a minute, then covers his face with his hands. “I think I got it,” he says, lowers his hands and looks at me. “He abducts her using the knife and the noose. Maybe he rapes her, maybe forces oral sex on her, maybe he doesn’t do either. Anyway, he hits her in the head with the hammer and knocks her out. He drives her to the snowfield. When he drags her out into the snow, she’s still unconscious from the concussion, maybe he even thinks she’s dead, and he goes to work. He cuts off a flap of skin from her breast, gouges out her eyes with the bottle and inserts it into her vagina. Then he makes the deep incision in her abdomen, maybe intends on cutting her in half.”

I see where he’s going. “You can’t mean it.”

“Yeah, I mean it. He’s cutting her in half, and she wakes up, starts flailing around, screaming and making noise. It scared him, so he cut her throat to finish the job.”

“Jesus,” I say. “She woke up to find herself blind and being cut in half? That’s when she flailed around and made the snow angel?”

“I can’t be certain of the exact order of events, but it looks that way. Before he kills her on Aslak’s farm, he cuts off her clothes and strips her-that’s why she’s got the nicks on her body-and writes ‘nigger whore’ on her with the knife.”

“Then he drives her to the reindeer farm, drags her unconscious out of the car and kills her. Sounds premeditated,” I say.

“Yes it does. There weren’t any fragments of broken glass at the scene. He broke the bottle beforehand and brought it along.”

I try to take all this in. “There’s a lot of hate here,” I say.

Esko nods. “A lot of hate.”

The diener finishes sewing her up. Sufia’s next stop is the funeral home.

I GET BACK TO the station at nine P.M. Antti and Jussi are still at their desks. They’ve put in long days too. Antti is calling realtors, asking for occupant lists. Jussi stares at his computer screen with bleary eyes. He looks up at me. “I got something for you.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The tires on the vehicle used in the murder were Dunlop SP Winter Sport M3 DSST snow tires mounted on seventeen-inch rims.”

I clap him on the back. “That’s great.”

“There’s more. That particular make is a factory option on the BMW 3 Series sedan. Maybe Eero didn’t imagine it after all.”

There can’t be many new 3 Series sedans in a small town like this. The car will break the case. “Good work. The next thing is to get online with vehicle registration. Check out every 3 Series owner, both private and rental agency, in Kittilä and Levi. Tomorrow, we’ll inspect each one and find out which of those BMWs have the same model Dunlops on them.”

“I’m already working on it,” Jussi says. “Oh yeah, and the footprints were size tens.”

The break with the tires is heartening, but this may still be a long haul and I don’t want them to burn out yet. “Listen guys,” I say, “I appreciate your hard work, but maybe it’s time to call it a day.”

Antti puts a hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. “In a little while.”