Death Spiral

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Haikala pulled out a Breathalyzer and roughly shoved it between Janne’s lips. “Blow in this. So where is that driver’s license? Come on, blow!”

  They were obviously disappointed when the needle didn’t move. Janne lifted his head off of the hood just enough to notice me. I didn’t quite know how to interpret his expression, which changed quickly from anger to relief, then to embarrassment and finally back to moroseness.

  “I must have left my wallet at home,” Janne said, straightening up.

  “Don’t bullshit me! Left it at home, my ass! You don’t have a license, and this definitely isn’t your car,” Akkila said.

  Janne’s eyes flashed, and a look of satisfaction appeared on his face. “Ask her. Detective Kallio knows me.”

  Akkila and Haikala turned to me, so I nodded.

  “His name is Janne Kivi, he has a valid driver’s license, and this is his car.” The situation was almost amusing. “So what happened here? I heard the license plate on the radio and followed because I recognized it.”

  “We were just coming through the Ring I intersection when we saw this dude zig-zagging in and out of traffic like a kamikaze at ninety in an fifty zone. Of course we were going to stop him,” Akkila said.

  “Ninety miles an hour? Pretty good for a Nissan this size,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  Janne didn’t answer, but Akkila continued. “And then he wouldn’t stop until we pulled up next to him. Said he couldn’t hear the sirens because he had the music up so loud.”

  “And then he wouldn’t come out of the car until we dragged him out, and then he hit me,” Haikala added like a six-year-old tattling on a playmate. I was just glad Janne was still in one piece. I felt like laughing. Even though I bit my lip, I couldn’t help letting out a little giggle, which made Janne’s eyes flash again.

  “So you’re sure this car is his?” Akkila asked suspiciously.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “You can understand how we thought it was stolen. But in any case, we’ve got him at least for aggravated reckless driving and resisting arrest,” Akkila said. He still wanted excitement and action. He hadn’t learned yet that for a cop, the best days were the boring, uneventful ones.

  Theoretically Janne’s little escapade was none of my business. The smartest thing would have been to leave him to Haikala and Akkila and scram. But I was sure the incident was a result of Noora’s death. And besides, I had something I needed to talk to Janne about.

  Janne had been at Tommy’s Gym the night I got trapped. Maybe he’d wanted to teach me a little lesson for snooping around.

  “Does he have a record?” Akkila asked curiously. Even though I understood his desire to learn where I knew Janne from, the assumption that he must be a criminal annoyed me. In Akkila’s world the police were “us” and everyone we arrested was “them.”

  “His figure-skating partner was murdered last week,” I said in a tone I hoped would curb Akkila. “I’m investigating the case. Actually, I have a few questions to ask him on that theme, so I can take him to the station if one of you can bring my car. Then I can hand him over to Traffic for questioning.

  “If I were you, I’d forget about the resisting arrest,” I told Haikala. “The force I just saw you using wasn’t exactly by the book.”

  Haikala avoided my eyes, but it was easy to see he was peeved.

  “Just go back to whatever you were doing before,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “And take those bracelets off. I can handle him.”

  Akkila glowered at me and then roughly jerked Janne up off the hood of the car and took off the handcuffs.

  A telephone ringing in the patrol van saved all of us from an embarrassing situation as the guys were called to the other side of town. Akkila threw the Nissan keys at my feet. I thought I caught the words “fucking bitch” on Haikala’s lips as he was climbing into the van.

  Janne rubbed his wrists, where the overly tight handcuffs had left red marks.

  “You’re probably going to end up in traffic court over this speeding ticket. Pretty stupid. What’s got into you that you have to go speeding around like a maniac?”

  “What the hell does it matter?”

  “You’re the only one who can answer that.” Bending down I picked up the Nissan keys and handed them to Janne. “Can I trust you? Will you follow me to the police station if I let you drive alone?”

  Janne nodded, looking taciturn. He obviously understood that running away didn’t make any sense. Still I carefully watched the little red car in my rearview mirror, and the tension in my shoulders didn’t release until we met again at the front doors of the station.

  I led Janne to my office and after grabbing a couple of coffees, I dug my emergency chocolate cookies out of my desk drawer. Janne had collapsed on the couch. Exhaustion replaced his expression of defiance, and the milk I had brought didn’t quite hit his cup and some splashed on the table. Instead of sitting behind the desk, I pulled a chair over next to the couch and started playing kaffeeklatch.

  “So, what’s bugging you?” I asked as if addressing a friend.

  Janne snorted. “That’s a stupid question. Maybe I’m bugged because my whole life has gone to shit and everything I’ve worked for is gone!”

  Sounded logical. Everyone agreed that Janne had no future as a skater without a talented partner, and finding another partner wouldn’t be easy, at least not in Finland. But I was sure something else was going on. Since I didn’t know how to get him to open up, I started talking about other people.

  “How well do you know Tomi Liikanen?”

  “Tomi? I don’t really know him at all. I just go to his gym, which you already know.”

  At least Janne wasn’t refusing to talk today. Maybe my maternal solicitude was finally starting to work.

  “I think you also know Vesku Teräsvuori, the man Noora’s mother was dating for a while. Have you ever seen Teräsvuori at Tommy’s Gym?”

  “I think he stopped by there a couple of times after they split up, but Tomi banned him. He was bothering Noora, so he was blacklisted.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that. Tell me more.”

  According to Janne, Teräsvuori had started training at Tommy’s Gym the previous fall. The first time he’d showed up, the figure-skating team had just been leaving, so Noora didn’t make a big deal about it. The next time Rami and Janne had been there along with Noora. Teräsvuori hadn’t said anything to Noora, but kept getting on machines next to her. Noora complained to Tomi, who ordered Teräsvuori to beat it without any further argument.

  “Did it seem to you like Teräsvuori and Tomi already knew each other?”

  Janne couldn’t say, since he hadn’t given it any thought before. The whole group had met Teräsvuori after Hanna moved in with him, but Janne never liked him.

  “I chased him out of the ice rink more than once after he and Noora’s mom broke things off. I’m sure Tomi and Elena would have talked some sense into him if they had known him. They definitely didn’t seem like friends at the gym, though.”

  Shifting the topic of conversation away from himself had helped relax Janne. Propping his back against the arm of the couch he put his legs on the coffee table. This handsome young man was a perfect addition to the collage on my wall.

  “How do you think Tomi and Elena’s relationship is?”

  Janne frowned, looking as if this was the first time he had considered it.

  “I don’t really know. Elena doesn’t talk about herself. She’s more of a distant kind of coach. She doesn’t hang around with us or invite us over.”

  “Unlike maybe Rami Luoto?”

  Exactly. According to Janne, Rami was completely different. For Janne, Rami had always been more of a friend than a coach. Ulrika thought that was Rami’s weak point, that he didn’t have enough authority. But Janne’s warm tone of voice revealed how much he liked Rami as a person. When I tried to turn the conversation to Ulrika Weissenberg, Janne’s answers were more evasive.
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  “Are you dating?” I finally asked, and for some reason my question made Janne flush.

  “When would I have time for that?” he asked angrily but was saved from my follow-up question when a knock came at the door.

  “Hi, Janne,” Jyrki Taskinen said after opening the door a crack. “Maria, do you have a second . . .”

  “We’re just finishing up. Thanks, Janne. You do still need to go turn yourself in to the Traffic Division.”

  First Taskinen wanted to know what Janne was doing at the police station. After I told him, he looked concerned, but hurried on to his own business.

  “This morning I called my old friend Boris Harlamov in Moscow about Anton Grigoriev’s death. Boris promised to check the case file and then just called back.” Taskinen paused, intentionally baiting me, and I fell for it.

  “Well?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “There isn’t a case file. It’s missing.”

  “What?”

  According to Boris, a missing case file wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. During the political upheaval, the Russian militia had undergone several reorganizations, and attempts had been made to conceal previous abuses of power by destroying evidence and archival records. Anton Grigoriev’s file had been in a storage facility where an explosion had occurred a couple of years ago, and it was likely that the papers disappeared then.

  “But don’t they have any kind of backup copy system? And there has to be someone there who remembers the case, like the police officers who investigated it?”

  Taskinen sighed. “Boris said he’d keep digging, but he was pretty skeptical about ever finding anything. Even though we’re talking about a Sports Ministry official and a European bronze medalist—or maybe precisely because of that—the investigation was limited and sloppy, so there wasn’t much material to begin with.”

  “But that has to point to something big!” I said. During my years as a cop I had been involved with a few international drug investigations, but now it was looking like Noora’s murder might have connections to something even bigger. What could she have learned and about whom?

  “Yes, it might, but it also might mean that they never caught the driver who hit Grigoriev because it was some big Communist Party muckety-muck or the cop in charge of the investigation was too drunk to do the investigation.” Taskinen thought my sudden excitement was amusing.

  “What else can we do besides wait for information from Boris? Should we give Elena a good raking over the coals?” I asked.

  “I think we should actually try Rami Luoto. He was competing at the same time as the Grigorievs, so he’s known them for more than fifteen years. And Silja has always trusted Rami as a coach. It’s possible Noora told Rami what she knew about the Grigorievs.”

  I nodded. Then we talked about my maternity leave stand-in, Anu Wang, who was the first woman of Vietnamese descent who had ever graduated from the Finnish police academy. Anu would start a week before I left, so she would have a chance to get up to speed with the cases I was working on.

  “You haven’t said whether you’re taking your full leave,” Taskinen said.

  I had to admit I still didn’t know. I’d been watching my friends’ and sisters’ lives with their little children, but I still didn’t have any idea what it would really be like. My conversations with my sisters had made me feel like a bad mother before I’d even given birth. My sister, Eeva, had asked straight out why I wanted to have children at all if work was the most important thing in my life.

  “Your priorities are going to have to change after the baby comes,” she said, after first complaining that she hadn’t read a single book or even been out for a beer with her girlfriends in the two and a half years since Saku was born.

  Taskinen invited me to lunch, but I said I would catch up with him after I contacted Rami Luoto. When I did, he sounded as if he had just woken up and said he was busy. Ultimately we agreed that I would pick him up after juniors practice at the ice rink around five thirty. We could chat at his apartment.

  Five thirty . . . exhaustion washed over me, reminding me that these ten-hour days were insane. Surely now I had a legitimate reason to rest. Stretching out on the couch, which now held the crisp lemon scent of Janne’s aftershave, I watched the Creature’s rear end make the skin of my stomach ripple. Everyone seemed so interested in whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. Antti’s parents were hoping for a girl as their third grandchild; Antti’s sister had twin boys. I only allowed myself the tiniest selfish hope of a daughter, as if by giving birth to a girl I could somehow make up for the fact that, for my parents, I was only ever a poor substitute for the boy they never had. But at the same time, I was terrified I was already passing down these distorted gender expectations to a child who wasn’t even born yet. How was hoping for a girl any better than hoping for a boy?

  My eyes closed, and the Creature’s movements became even more vigorous. I wrapped my arm around my belly as if my embrace would assure this child that it was welcome in either case, no matter what its gender was.

  The sound of the phone pierced my tender thoughts. Koivu sounded agitated. He had spent the morning sitting in his car outside Vesku Teräsvuori’s apartment.

  “I’m on Lauttasaari Island,” he said. “About ten minutes ago a white van came and picked Teräsvuori up.”

  “I think I can guess what it says on the back,” I interjected. “Tommy’s Gym?”

  “Yep. Short guy driving with a flat top and chest like a refrigerator.”

  Tomi Liikanen.

  “What are they up to?”

  “They went in an apartment building. I’m outside. Kind of a funny coincidence. A few years ago when we were still working in Helsinki, somebody was selling drugs out of this building. You remember the Mattinen gang? One of their main dudes lived in the B stairwell of this building. He got out of prison last year. I already checked if this is still his address. And guess what, it is. Something gives me the feeling Teräsvuori and Liikanen are paying a visit to unit B 22. Are you in a betting mood, Maria?”

  13

  The rain that had been drizzling for weeks gave no sign of letting up as I drove toward the Matinkylä ice rink that night. In the cafeteria the main topic of conversation among my coworkers had been where in the Canary Islands each of them was going on vacation. No one had any faith in the weather changing before Midsummer. Even though it was the end of May, the stores were still selling rubber boots instead of bikinis.

  “You’re probably happy it isn’t hot,” Pihko had said to me almost accusingly.

  “At least as long as I fit in my rain coat,” I responded, my thoughts elsewhere entirely than on the day’s weather. Even though I hadn’t been as excited about Koivu’s news as he’d probably hoped I would be, my head was still buzzing. Koivu had promised to stick to Teräsvuori for the rest of the day despite Ström’s loud demands for his help with one of his own cases. Even at midday Ström had still stunk suspiciously of old booze. I was almost worried; I didn’t want Ström ending up as one more name on the list of cops the job had driven to drink. He definitely fit the risk profile: over thirty-five, divorced, few friends.

  The wheels of the semi driving in front of me kept splashing mud, so I turned up the windshield wipers. An unlucky pedestrian was soaked up to his waist when the semi sped through a puddle on a crosswalk to make it through a yellow light.

  The ice rink parking lot was full of parents waiting in idling cars. I understood after what had happened to Noora why parents would drive their children to practice, but otherwise I had a hard time understanding all the people who drove to the gym to work out or complained if they couldn’t find a spot right in front of the supermarket. But I was from the country originally, and even after the two years I’d lived in Espoo, I still wasn’t quite used to the local customs.

  The skating association’s schedule must have been thrown off, because the juniors training session was still in
full swing when I walked in. Apparently hockey was up next, since the hall was swarming with irritated fathers and pimple-faced fourteen-year-olds looking like aliens in their pads.

  On the ice, delicate, flat-chested girls glided around, among them Irina Grigorieva. Watching an eleven-year-old lightly throw one triple toe loop after another was amazing. Skates cut sharp slashes in the already abused-looking ice.

  In their training tights and tight ballerina buns, they were practically carbon copies of each other. Only the way they moved varied. It was clear that most would never be in medal contention at even the county level. Next to Irina Grigorieva, they looked clumsy and stiff.

  “Remember your knees!” an imperious female voice yelled from the edge of the ice. “More flex, Johanna, bend, bend!” came as a girl who was practically skating on wooden legs bumped to the ground with a resigned expression on her face.

  The coaches stood in a line rinkside, Rami in skinny jeans and a sweatshirt, Elena in a track suit jacket and tights, and Ulrika Weissenberg in a shiny black vinyl raincoat, lecturing Rami about something. Elena’s attention was on the ice, though, where most of the girls were just turning pirouettes. She glided over to one girl who looked about ten and corrected her posture, pointing to Irina, who, at least to my eye, was doing the pirouette perfectly.

  “Listen everyone! Knees. If you want any movement, especially your jump landings, to look and feel soft, you have to bend more at the knees. Flexible knees are the foundation of beautiful skating at any level. Jumping high is not enough if you thump back down on the ice with your jumping leg straight. Watch the difference between a straight-leg jump,” Elena said as she did an easy double toe loop, “and this one with a flexible knee.”

  As I watched Elena’s jumps, I thought of Noora’s jumping leg, which bent incredibly deep especially in her throw jumps. That had made her landings look solid and effortless, even though those flexible knees must have required highly trained thigh muscles.

  “Everyone remember the extra funeral practice on Saturday morning,” Ulrika said as the girls began skating around the rink. The music, which had been classical strings during their movement practice, changed to a brisk techno beat. Funeral practice? They weren’t going to have pallbearers wearing figure skates, were they? But what did I know? Maybe Ulrika had organized a memorial service in the ice arena. Although the practice seemed to be running smoothly, Noora’s death must have cast a shadow over everything the skating association did. For the younger skaters, Noora had been an idol they could relate to—one of them. The violent death of a figure like that would be distressing for anyone. Hopefully the parents and coaches realized how these little ice princesses were feeling; maybe a big funeral all of them could attend would be a cathartic experience.