Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Assi was taking pictures and studying the rugs carefully, searching for possible bloodstains and DNA with a spectrometer. I looked out the window in the larger of the bedrooms and saw the building the Koivu family lived in. Where was Aziza? Where was her family? Was another small band of people wandering Europe now, a group that would never put down roots? Maybe they would get caught in Provence or Sicily for using false papers, or they would be forced into virtual slavery on the streets of Hamburg. Perhaps they would try to get back to their homeland, even though a human life was cheaper there than Lordi’s second album on an online auction site. I would probably never know their fate.

  Investigating murders had its downsides, but over 95 percent of homicides were solved eventually, which offered some semblance of closure. Of course, a violent death cast a permanent shadow over the lives of everyone closely connected to it. The lost, the missing, and the runaways who were never found would never really have their police files closed. A person was presumed dead after they’d been missing for ten years, but when Aziza’s family got to that point, almost everyone would have already forgotten them, including me. Still, I felt a strange responsibility for them, even though the only things that tied us together were that they had come from a country whose democracy I had been doing my part to build, and that they happened to end up in my city.

  On Friday, while Koivu was handling other matters, I got in contact with the Child Protective Services authorities and the police in Bosnia. I asked my colleagues there about the possibility of getting Sara Amir to come in for a video interview. I was in no way questioning the competence of the Bosnians, but I wanted to know whether Sara was telling the truth when she said she was happy in Bosnia, or if she had been ordered to say so. I thought about the birth control pills we’d found in her drawer and about Tommi from Siuntio, who had only been a one-night stand. Had Sara’s parents taken it too seriously? Then I forced myself to let it go. Child Protective Services would ask the police for help if they needed it.

  One of the domestic violence incidents the previous day had been a fight between a man in his thirties, who was living with his parents, and his sister, who was about ten years his junior and had moved away from home. The sister had attacked her brother while he was sleeping and tried to smother him with a pillow. Ruuskanen and I decided that this should be classified as a “special” case and that my cell would take over the investigation. The attacker was currently in Jorvi Hospital under strong sedation. The alarm bells in my head said that it might be a case of incest, because neither family member had a criminal background. The brother drifted from one temporary job to the next, and the sister had cut herself frequently as a teenager. Now she was studying to be a licensed nurse practitioner, and in school they had been doing their section on psychology. Their sixty-year-old parents were completely baffled by the incident. However, the investigation could wait until after the weekend.

  Friday evening, I started making dinner early. Antti was out swimming with his friends, so it was my turn to cook. My dad’s back was already in better shape than before, but he still wouldn’t be able to travel for quite some time. My mother called at least three times every day and had decided to come to Espoo the following week. Maybe my father could travel with her by air, since they weren’t running sleeper trains to Joensuu anymore. Progress was marching on in that regard too. While I was in school, taking the sleeper trains had been a sensible use of time, even though, after a scroungy night on the train from Tampere to Viinijärvi, I was always useless the next day.

  Antti had managed to buy some local organic ground meat through a colleague, so I’d decided to keep it simple and make a ground lamb sauce. I was grabbing some shallots from the cupboard, hoping that they wouldn’t make me cry as much as normal onions, when my work phone rang. I had saved Heini Korhonen’s number in my contacts, and I didn’t think she would call for no reason, so I answered.

  “Kallio here.”

  For a few moments all I could hear was a strange, distant murmuring. Then a sob, and a voice said, faltering, “This is Heini . . . Heini Korhonen from the Girls Club. Is this Detective Maria Kallio, Iida Sarkela’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m at home . . . in Hakalehto.” She gave me the address. Then she said, “I’ve been raped.”

  “When and where? Who did it?”

  “Just now, here at my home. The person who did it is sitting over in the corner. It’s Samir Amir, Sara Amir’s brother. Could the police come and take him away?”

  Before, Heini’s voice had contained a cool determination, but now she was talking in a shrill, little girl’s voice. Of course, she knew what to do after being raped; she had lectured the girls at the club about it over and over. She was still probably in shock, though. Maybe that was why she’d called me instead of the emergency number.

  “Don’t hang up. I’m going to use my personal phone to send a police patrol over.” I punched in the speed-dial code for the emergency call center with my other hand. My father looked at me from the mattress we’d set up for him on the floor with a quizzical expression, but there was nothing he could do to help. Thankfully the children were in their rooms, hopefully with headphones on or so engrossed in their books that they wouldn’t realize what was going on. I put my work phone on speaker, so I would hear if Samir attacked Heini again. It took way too long for the call center to answer, even though in reality only about ten seconds had gone by.

  “This is Detective Maria Kallio of the Espoo police. I just received a report of a rape incident. Send a patrol car to Hakarinne Street 6 M 765. The perpetrator is still on-scene, as is the victim. Exactly, the report came straight to me, because the victim is an acquaintance of mine. I’m on my way too. It would probably be a good idea to send an ambulance. The perpetrator is Samir Amir, a Bosnian immigrant with severe psychiatric problems.”

  I looked at the clock. Antti had promised to come home for dinner at six, and it was still half an hour until then. My family wouldn’t die of hunger; there was bread and fruit in the cupboard if they needed a snack. I told Heini that both a police patrol and I were coming and ordered her to stay on the phone. I reminded her not to shower or change her clothes until she’d been examined by a doctor. I’d been in a similar situation myself, and afterward I’d frantically scrubbed my body and my teeth for weeks on end in order to get every last cell of my attacker out of me. But evidence was evidence. Sperm, ripped clothing, and bruised skin held more weight in a court of law than the word of an honest person.

  I explained to my father that something unexpected had come up, but that it shouldn’t keep me away too long. Luckily, Antti had taken the bus, so I took our car. Jahnukainen ran out from underneath when I started it. The cold engine coughed a few times, and the steering wheel was so ice cold that I had to put on my gloves. The line was still open to Heini’s phone. No sounds came from her apartment other than an animallike whimpering, apparently from Samir.

  “Heini, are you still there?”

  “Yes. I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Try to hold it. I’m sorry. Did penetration occur? Did he ejaculate inside you?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “An ambulance is coming. If you have to urinate, do it in a cup of some sort.” It felt cruel to be giving clinical instructions like this to a person who had just experienced something so horrendous, but that was my job. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Old Mankkaa Road was full of speed bumps, but they’d gotten rid of most of the traffic lights in favor of roundabouts, which I swerved through as recklessly as the best rally driver. The car bounced over the speed bumps. Thankfully there wasn’t much traffic, and no pedestrians got in my way except for a Shetland sheepdog that had escaped its master. Fortunately it had on a high-visibility vest so I managed to avoid it in time.

  Just as I was turning into Heini’s neighborhood, I heard the doorbell ring through the phone speaker. The patrol had made it before me.

  “Police.
Open up,” a familiar female voice said. Rasilainen. Thank God. “This is Officer Rasilainen and Officer Timonen from the Espoo police. We received a report of a rape.”

  I hung up the phone and turned onto Hakarinne Street. There weren’t many parking spots, and some of them were still covered in snow, so I left my car parked illegally next to a pile, where it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. The police van was parked next to the steps. I’d been in this building once ages ago, when I’d worked for a short time in a somewhat shady law office in North Tapiola.

  Heini Korhonen’s apartment was located on the third floor. There was an elevator, but instead of using it I jogged up the stairs. The door next to Heini’s was open, and an elderly woman stood in the hallway, holding the door open by its key.

  “Why did the police go into Heini’s apartment?” she asked loudly, almost shouting. “She’s always such a well-mannered young lady. There aren’t thieves about, are there?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “What?” the woman yelled. “I don’t have my hearing aids in. I just saw the police come to the entrance, and I was looking to see where they went.”

  Due to her hearing difficulties, it would be pointless to ask her about what had happened in the apartment next door. I rang Heini’s doorbell, and when it opened, there stood Timonen decked out in a protective suit, which made me jump. He couldn’t be the detective from Ruuskanen’s unit, because he was wearing a patrol uniform, so this had to be a twin brother.

  “Hi. Yeah, I’m not my bro,” he said, amused, but I wasn’t laughing. The twin jokes would have to wait for another time. I took my own protective coveralls out of my investigation kit and put them on. The whining I’d heard over the phone was still going on, and when I stepped inside the apartment, I saw Samir Amir curled up in a fetal position in the corner. He was rocking back and forth and whimpering. I could see Heini’s legs protruding from an alcove. She had on bobby socks, but her lower legs and thighs were bare. When I stepped closer I saw that her blouse had been torn open and she’d wrapped her lower body in a bath towel.

  “I couldn’t hold it,” were the first mumbled words out of her mouth. “I had to . . .”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll still be able to get a sperm sample from you.” There was a contusion on her temple, and her nose was bleeding. Blood had dried on her jaw and her neck. “I know that being examined by a doctor after this will feel horrible, but the medical evidence we get from doing so may be essential for the trial. I assume that there weren’t any outside witnesses to the rape.”

  “What?”

  “There was no one in the apartment except you and Samir. Can you tell me briefly what happened?” I wasn’t able to evaluate what shape Heini was in. That would be a job for the doctor. However, I took a recorder from my investigation kit and dictated the usual introductory details. Then I sat down next to Heini. The bed was made, the bedspread stretched tight. Had Heini put the covers back in order after the rape out of habit, or had the act been perpetrated somewhere else? In addition to the sleeping alcove, the studio apartment had an open kitchen and a small balcony with a drying rack full of clothes. Heini apparently wore lavender underwear.

  “I know all about this. You’re supposed to tell the police. You can’t stay quiet, even though you’ll want to.” Heini’s mouth formed the words slowly, as if she were struggling to move the muscles of her face.

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t feel up to it.”

  “I have to. I just have to. I just made the mistake I’ve warned the girls about. Don’t let strangers into your home. But he wasn’t a stranger. He was Samir, Sara’s brother. The one the war broke. He was on the same bus as me. I invited him up for coffee. He was so happy because he got to speak his language with someone other than his family. I thought he might know something about Sara. I didn’t even have time to put the grounds in the coffee maker before he attacked. And he’s strong.”

  Heini was relatively tall, maybe an inch taller than Samir, and looked like she was in good shape, but she had apparently been so stunned that she hadn’t been able to put up much of a fight. Timonen tried fruitlessly to question Samir, but it was like he was on another planet. The ambulance would be needed more for him than for Heini; I could take her to the Jorvi Hospital emergency room in my car.

  “Please understand that I have to ask this: You’re saying that you in no way did anything to make Samir Amir think that you wanted to have sex with him?”

  “No!” Heini’s whisper was emphatic.

  “Where did the rape occur?”

  “He knocked me down on the floor, choked me with one arm, and pulled my clothes off . . . I don’t really remember the rest.”

  Rasilainen motioned me back toward the door.

  “Hold on a second, Heini. I’ll be right back.” I stood up and walked over.

  “Forensics won’t be able to come over until tomorrow,” Rasilainen said. “We’ll have to seal the apartment. Ms. Korhonen will need to go to a friend’s house or to her parents’. Otherwise the police can arrange a hotel room for her. And the suspect is totally messed up. I wouldn’t dare put him in a cell.”

  “What happened when you arrived?”

  “Korhonen came to the door. She’d wrapped a towel around herself and had a bread knife in her hand. I took it away from her and bagged it.”

  “Was Samir Amir already curled up in the corner like that?”

  “Yes. The suspect hasn’t said anything in any language the whole time. What does he speak?”

  “A Serbo-Croatian dialect from Bosnia. He does know some Finnish, but we would need an interpreter to question him—if it ever gets that far.”

  The doorbell rang. It was the paramedics. They didn’t seem particularly thrown by the fact that they were told to treat the suspect rather than the victim. A man whose uniform said “Oinonen” asked how Samir had collapsed.

  “I don’t know,” Heini said, still speaking slowly. “He . . . he got off me and moved away. I had my eyes closed. I heard him open the balcony door. I still didn’t dare move. He went out onto the balcony, and I crawled toward the kitchen to get a knife. When he saw it, he started to cry and sat down on the floor. I closed the balcony door so it wouldn’t get cold and called the police.”

  Samir didn’t react when the paramedics approached. It wasn’t until Oinonen touched him that the volume of his whimpering went up. He didn’t resist when they lifted him onto his feet. His pants were unbuttoned, he didn’t have any socks on, and the nailless last two toes of his right foot looked raw. The men from the ambulance crew led him away, supporting him by his arms, and Officer Timonen followed after.

  “I’ll make sure they get him loaded up,” he shouted back to Officer Rasilainen as he left.

  I tried to find any signs of a struggle in the apartment. The main room contained the usual furnishings: a sofa, an armchair, a TV stand, and next to the kitchen nook a table with two chairs. None of the furniture had fallen down. If Heini had been standing next to the coffee maker in the kitchen, Samir might have been able to drag her to the rug between the sofa and television stand without banging into any of the furniture, if Heini weren’t struggling too much. Her jeans were in a heap next to the sofa. A pastel purple-and-pink scrap of fabric had probably been a pair of panties.

  Nausea rose in throat. I tried to fight it. I didn’t want the same nightmare for Heini that I’d experienced myself five years earlier: retelling the violent act again and again—with the doctor, in the police interview, in court. The same questions were presented by different people, the worst being the defense attorney’s claims that I had somehow been responsible for the crime. Even though I knew how irrational his questions were, they still felt like stabs at my soul. I could still feel that from time to time even now. If only I hadn’t gone out running alone . . . I’d been attacked outside, but Heini had let the rapist into her home voluntarily. There were judges who would think that was a mitigating circumstance.

  Timone
n returned, putting new covers on his shoes.

  “There were a few gawkers out in the parking lot. I told them to put their cell phone cameras away. If I were you, I’d put something on Ms. Korhonen so she can hide her face. Are we going to take her in to get checked out?”

  I answered that I would handle it. Now I had to think about Heini, not my own past. This wasn’t about me.

  “Maria, are you OK?” Rasilainen asked. She knew me too well.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m going to take Heini to the hospital and make sure she finds a safe place to spend the night. You keep in touch with Forensics. Theoretically Ruuskanen will be heading this one up. I’ll figure out with him how to divvy up the work. Heini just happened to call me because we know each other from before.”

  I wondered why Heini wasn’t at the Girls Club tonight; on Fridays, they held their popular improv night. I searched the closet for some loose sweatpants, some underwear, and a shirt to go over the ripped one, which could stay on until she got to the doctor. Then I would take possession of it and deliver it to Forensics.

  “Heini, do you have any maxi pads?”

  “Why? I’m not on my period.”

  I didn’t bother to explain. I just looked in the closets again and then went into the bathroom. There were only tampons in the medicine cabinet, but I was able to find a compress in my investigation kit. I asked Heini to use it as a pad. She dressed as slowly and clumsily as a five-year-old child trying to delay putting on her raincoat because she doesn’t want to go to nursery school.

  “Does it hurt much? Do you want some painkillers?”

  Heini stared at me oddly. I felt like wrapping my arms around her, but instead I just grabbed a hooded jacket from the coatrack and offered it to her, asking her to pull the hood over her head as we went out.

  “Should I get you anything for staying overnight, like a nightshirt or a toothbrush? What else might you need? Who could you stay with?”