Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Maybe Ilveskivi was trying to hit on—” Koivu began, but I cut him off.

  “Don’t start with that nonsense about gay men humping anything that moves! And how would a guy on a bicycle hit on somebody riding a motorcycle?”

  “Maybe the dude on the motorcycle stopped and asked for a light.” Koivu was grinning now, well aware that what he was saying was ridiculous. To his credit, he did his best to be open-minded, but the testosterone-saturated environment of a police station was a prime breeding ground for homophobia.

  “But if the attack was premeditated, how did the guy on the motorcycle know that Ilveskivi would be riding that particular route at that particular time? Ilveskivi was on his way to the city building for a City Planning Commission meeting at six o’clock, which was public knowledge. But what about his bicycle route?”

  Koivu spread his hands. I said he should probably ask Tommi Laitinen. Maybe Ilveskivi rode his bike to meetings all the time and everyone knew it.

  “That Eila Honkavuori lady is still with Laitinen. She answered the phone when I called. Will you have some time after the press conference? Let’s see what comes in from the field by then.”

  “Sure. Antti promised to get Iida from day care. Do you have time to eat? I have to get some food in me, or I’m never going to be able to handle the reporters.”

  Koivu had already eaten, so we talked a little more about how to divvy up tasks. Dutifully I placed a call to the chair of the City Council, but she was in a meeting, so I left for lunch with a clear conscience. The cafeteria downstairs, which was decorated with artificial plants, was packed. I had the soup of the day. I was in luck because Jyrki Taskinen, the head of the Criminal Division and my predecessor in Violent Crime, was sitting alone at a corner table. I had expected to see him at the meeting in Pasila, but he hadn’t shown up. In front of him sat a half-eaten ham sandwich, and he looked distracted as he stirred his cup of coffee.

  “Hi, Jyrki. You couldn’t make the meeting?”

  “Uh, no. I had to go help Silja. She got in an accident this morning.”

  “Oh no! Is she alright?”

  “She’s complaining about her neck. She must have strained it in the impact. Another car came through a yield sign and T-boned her. Thank goodness they weren’t going very fast. Silja’s Škoda just has some body damage. So all that’s lost is money, and the other driver has to pay the bill. It was a kid who just got his license.”

  Taskinen’s daughter was a top figure skater who spent most of her time training in Canada. Fortunately her taking fifth place in the world championships and bronze in the European championships had attracted new sponsors, so Taskinen didn’t have to pay for all her training by himself anymore. There were rumors that Silja was dating the current men’s figure-skating world champion, and Taskinen had complained about their insane phone bills.

  “How is the Ilveskivi investigation going? If you need more resources, we could probably move a couple of guys from Robbery.”

  “Could you?” I asked, pleasantly surprised, even though unsolved homicides were always at the top of the priority list.

  “I listened in on Koivu’s briefing this morning, and the case seems pretty wide open. Has anything changed?”

  “Nope. We have the press coming in at two, and we’re going to ask the public for help.”

  “Did Ilveskivi have any drug connections?” Taskinen asked suddenly, and I realized that that idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. Nothing at the Ilveskivi-Laitinen home had indicated drug use, but you never could tell these days.

  “We don’t have anything back from the lab yet.”

  “This is going to be a high-profile case. The mayor talked to the chief first thing this morning.”

  “How did he know? We haven’t announced the victim’s identity.”

  “Word gets around.”

  “So it seems. I’ve had calls from the head of the Espoo Greens, the chair of the City Council, and another city counselor who seemed to think he’s a big deal. The press are probably going to rip me apart,” I said gloomily. Ilveskivi’s sexual orientation was going to be a juicy nugget for the media; people were always more interested in homicides that could be connected to sex somehow.

  “You’ll do fine,” Taskinen said and placed his hand on mine for a moment before he stood up. “You can have as many people as you need.”

  Taskinen’s smile was warm, and it was easy to return. As a unit commander, Taskinen had been my dream boss, and he was handling his new position leading the Criminal Division just as well. The first time we met, I worried that he might lack a sense of humor, but soon I realized he was just a very direct person who demanded a lot of himself and others, and also he knew how to say what he wanted and what he didn’t want. When there wasn’t any snow, Taskinen ran fifty miles a week. He was fit and well groomed, if not particularly handsome. There had always been a spark between us, enough so that other people noticed. When I was promoted to unit commander, one colleague accused me of sleeping my way to the top. In reality we had never even kissed.

  On my way out, I grabbed copies of the tabloids to see if Ilveskivi’s killing had made it to press. The pictures were big, but there were only two columns of text. In the hallway I ran into Lähde and Mela. They had spent the whole morning canvassing the area around the crime scene, hoping to turn up more sightings of the motorcycle, but they hadn’t found anything.

  “People don’t pay much attention to road signs these days, so probably no one would notice if you drove a semi down a walking path,” Lähde muttered. He was the oldest officer in our unit, fifty-five and overweight enough that he could sweat outside in the dead of the winter. Since our former colleague Pertti Ström had died, he had put on even more weight. The two had been as close as men like them could be. Mela was Lähde’s diametric opposite, a twenty-two-year-old athlete who was completing his field training in our unit.

  “And you’re heading to interview Ilveskivi’s coworkers now, right?”

  “Yeah. What did he do again? Something with interior design? ‘Yes, ma’am, this yellow sofa cover will look absolutely fabulous with the rose shade of those drapes,’” Mela said, mimicking a stereotypical gay lisp. Lähde elbowed him in the side, not so much to shut him up as to warn him. I let it pass, even though I didn’t like my subordinates mocking the victim of a crime or making homophobic jokes. But Mela was still a baby, and I had other things to take care of at the moment.

  The press briefing went as well as it could. Someone had leaked Ilveskivi’s identity to a crime reporter at one of the tabloids, giving him time to do some background research.

  “Ilveskivi was openly gay. He even seemed proud of his homosexuality. Did his sexual orientation have anything to do with his murder?”

  “So far we don’t have any evidence of that.”

  “No? Ilveskivi’s partner was forced to change jobs a few years ago when the parents of the children at his school discovered he was gay.”

  I hadn’t heard about that. Apparently Tommi Laitinen’s current employer knew that homosexuality and pedophilia were unrelated. I changed the subject to our request for tips from the public. I knew we would get a lot of them, and I also knew that only a small percentage would lead anywhere. The camera shutters clicked, and I tried not to blink at the flashes. I didn’t want my picture in the paper, but I couldn’t stop it. Tomorrow my mother would call and complain that I still hadn’t learned to do my hair properly.

  When I finally escaped the press conference, my blouse was damp with sweat. I went back to my office to freshen up. On the door I found a note from Koivu: Come see me. Forensics found the metal pipe.

  Koivu was clicking at his computer attentively. I still wasn’t used to the reading glasses he recently had been forced to buy. Wang had chosen 1970s-style aviator frames reminiscent of the hard-boiled heroes of the first American TV police procedurals.

  “So they found the pipe?” I said at the door and then made for Puupponen’s chair. On the way I man
aged to bump the edge of the desk and send a pile of papers cascading to the floor. As I picked them up, I noticed that they were photocopies from a Finnish language textbook meant for high school students. Why would Puupponen be reading something like that? Was he trying to improve his case notes?

  “In the forest about thirty feet from the scene of the crime, they found a two-foot-long plumbing pipe with dried blood on it. It’s already on its way to the lab. There were motorcycle tracks too, and apparently they got pretty good molds of the tire tread. Then there was a cigarette butt, fresh-seeming, and that’s going to the lab too. It isn’t necessarily from the same person, but we have to test everything.”

  “Great! Maybe we’re getting somewhere. Taskinen promised more bodies from Robbery, even though this isn’t a theft.”

  “Maybe it was, and Ilveskivi resisted more than the perp expected. We haven’t showed the briefcase to Tommi Laitinen yet. Maybe something’s missing.”

  “True,” I said just before my cell phone rang.

  “Hi, this is Liisa Rasilainen from Patrol. Jani Väinölä is in his apartment. He just answered the phone. He hung up when he realized it was the police, though. We’re going to need an arrest warrant.”

  “I authorize patrol number five-two-five to arrest Jani Juhani Väinölä on suspicion of complicity in a homicide,” I rattled off, fulfilling the formality. “Take it easy, and call for backup if you need it. Koivu and I will be there soon.” I motioned to Koivu and then went to grab my jacket from my office. After a moment of thought, I decided to also take my sidearm.

  “You itching to make an arrest?” Koivu asked in the elevator.

  “I’ve been sitting around in meetings too much. I need some action. Väinölä may be a murderer, so shouldn’t we go at him with everything we’ve got? Did you bring your revolver?”

  “No,” Koivu said in confusion. “Are you carrying a gun all the time now?”

  I shook my head, and then we got in the car and Koivu started driving. There weren’t many public housing developments in Espoo, and they were cleaner and more upscale than average for the country. Espoo was Finland’s fastest-growing city, and it actively worked to attract highly educated, high-earning residents. People without education or jobs couldn’t be forced to move away, but there was no desire for more of them. That was why the powers that be wanted to build condominiums instead of rental apartments.

  In the older parts of this particular housing project, the trees had grown large and their branches were covered with buds just about to burst into greenery. A group of children spilled out of a school, and a kid about eleven years old pulled a cigarette out of his pocket as soon as he left the school grounds. Of course someone should have intervened, but we were in a hurry. Two patrols were outside the apartment building, and the situation seemed calm.

  “Väinölä still won’t come out of his apartment?”

  “He seems to know his rights a bit too well,” Rasilainen said. “He yelled through the door that he isn’t going anywhere without an arrest warrant.”

  Liisa Rasilainen was one of Espoo’s most experienced female cops. We had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday in the fall. She was about six inches taller than me, slender but well muscled. Her short, thick dark hair was developing wide silver streaks. She looked like she might have been born in her navy-blue police jumpsuit. When she was younger she had tried to become a motorcycle cop and even made it through the motorcycle lifting test that everyone thought was impossible for a woman to pass, but after the psychological testing they claimed she wasn’t tough enough for the job. Rasilainen thought that it was simply a matter of her test having been evaluated by men wanting to protect their last bastion of machismo.

  “I’m guessing there’s something in Väinölä’s apartment that he doesn’t want us to see, like drugs or an illegal weapon,” Rasilainen said. “Shall we go up again?”

  “And get a search warrant just to be bitches about it?” I asked with a grin.

  “Not a bad idea,” Rasilainen replied, returning the smirk. We went upstairs where Rasilainen’s partner, Jukka Airaksinen, was waiting with the building superintendent. They had called for him to bring the keys as soon as I issued the arrest warrant, but hopefully we wouldn’t need them.

  I rang the doorbell a few times and then lifted the mail slot.

  “Väinölä, open up. We have a warrant for your arrest. You’ve been implicated in a homicide. If you don’t open the door, we’re coming in anyway.”

  About a minute passed before we heard reluctant steps shuffling on the other side of the door, and then it opened slowly, just as far as the chain would allow.

  “Show me your badge,” Väinölä demanded, his voice artificially deep. That was when I started to lose my temper.

  “Stop screwing around. This isn’t Hollywood. Come out now with your hands up!”

  Slowly Väinölä complied, and Rasilainen cuffed him. From the way he moved, this clearly wasn’t his first time.

  Väinölä was relatively short, but he was broad enough to make me think his weight-lifting diet might include more than food. His shoulders barely fit through the door, and a sleeveless black shirt showed off impressive biceps. A swastika adorned one arm, and the other sported a tattoo of the Finnish flag. Another large swastika was tattooed on the back of his shaved head.

  “Are all pigs fucking chicks now?” he asked, ignoring Airaksinen and Koivu standing in the background.

  “No,” Rasilainen replied. “But these chicks are going to take good care of you like a woman should. I’ll just go grab your jacket. Wouldn’t want you catching cold.”

  “The fuck you will. Where’s your goddamn search warrant?” Väinölä screamed, and Koivu and Airaksinen grabbed him while Rasilainen and I went on our little jacket expedition.

  True, we couldn’t conduct a search, but getting a suspect’s jacket was a perfectly good excuse to have a glance inside. We stepped into the entryway, which offered a view into the rest of the apartment.

  Väinölä’s studio apartment looked like a veritable Nazi shrine. I wondered what Finnish heroes like Marshal Mannerheim and General Ehrnrooth would have thought about occupying the same altar as Adolf Hitler. One poster invited all the Somalis to go back to Somalia, and another encouraged Swedish-speaking fags to get the hell out too. The most amusing one was a “Niggers are Stealing Our Women” poster that showed a towhead Finnish boy trying to pull the ample-breasted girl we all knew from our breakfast cereal boxes away from a kinky-haired black man. Did Väinölä need constant reminders of who he hated so he could keep on hating, instead of realizing that the rest of the world didn’t share his opinions?

  From a hanger, Rasilainen grabbed a green bomber jacket, which also had a Finnish flag sewn to it.

  “Suspicion of incitement of racial hatred. That should be enough to get a search warrant,” I muttered to Rasilainen as we locked up the apartment and prepared to catch up with our colleagues and Väinölä.

  “Come on, Kallio. Having a swastika tattooed on your head isn’t a crime,” she said.

  “Well, no, but it sure looks pretty damn stupid. Oh, that reminds me, have you thought about playing soccer?”

  “Yeah, let’s do it!”

  At Rasilainen’s birthday party we had hatched the idea of putting together a female team at the station. Apparently Rasilainen had played in a boy’s league when she was younger too, but irregular work hours had made her give it up. I promised to schedule some field time.

  Väinölä was sitting in the back of a patrol car. He glared at us as we walked by.

  “Take him to Interrogation Room 4,” I told Airaksinen.

  “Listen to this, Kallio,” Koivu said when I got to the car. “I think that dude just gave himself up. He said he knew we thought he had murdered Ilveskivi. If he isn’t mixed up in this somehow, how would he know that Ilveskivi is dead? We only released the name an hour ago.”

  4

  Koivu and I held a quick meeting before we went
to Interrogation Room 4. I was going to play the bitchy bad cop, and Koivu was going to be the chummy good cop. In reality he had harbored a special animus for skinheads ever since one of them had stolen his girlfriend a few years ago.

  “If we interrogate Väinölä about this murder charge, he’s going to lie through his teeth,” Koivu said darkly.

  “Yes, he will. But we can’t help what the basis for the arrest warrant was.”

  Interrogation Room 4 was a windowless box with a desk lamp perfect for blinding the person being questioned while leaving the interrogator’s face in shadow. Väinölä sprawled in his chair, looking like he owned the whole police station. Koivu sat down behind the computer and opened a new interview record. Väinölä, Jani Juhani, born April 13, 1976. Profession: unemployed. Criminal record included suspended sentence for assault, then prison time for a combination of assault, robbery, and concealing stolen property. No previous drug charges.

  “According to Sergeant Koivu, you already know the crime you’re suspected of,” I began.

  “For that fucking fag’s murder! Duh! I didn’t do it, even though that dick-sucker deserved it.”

  “How did you know that it was Petri Ilveskivi who was killed when the victim’s identity was released only minutes before your arrest?”

  “Don’t you pigs listen to the fucking radio? It was on the Radiomafia three o’clock news. And besides, I called Piri and he said you pigs asked him about it too.”

  Koivu cast me a suspicious glance. Of course he hadn’t told Pirinen whose killing the police were investigating.

  “Do you own a motorcycle?”

  “Look at your fucking computer,” Väinölä said.

  “A loser like him wouldn’t have money for a bike,” I whispered to Koivu just loud enough for Väinölä to hear. Väinölä had been through plenty of interrogations in his life and knew how the game was played. We had to be careful to avoid him filing a complaint. Strange that he hadn’t refused to speak and asked for a lawyer. Unfortunately that suggested he was innocent.