Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I laughed. “You men!” I said and then heard myself say, “I’ll go with you. My paperwork can wait. At three, you said?”

  Puustjärvi nodded, but a bewildered expression had appeared on his face. Hopefully he didn’t think I was coming to spy on him.

  “This could be our breakthrough. At least it sounds promising.”

  “How much should we trust the word of a first grader?” Puustjärvi asked, already backtracking, but I dug in my heels.

  Before we left we looked deeper into Marko Seppälä’s background. During his last stint in prison, Seppälä had asked to be moved away from the drug offenders. Apparently he had had trouble either with drugs or with drug dealers. Seppälä had married after his first child was born. He was nineteen at the time, and his wife, Suvi, was seventeen. Now they had three children, nine-year-old Janita, seven-year-old Tony, the one whom Puustjärvi had spoken with on the phone, and three-year-old Diana. I asked the Organized Crime and Recidivism unit for their tracking info on Seppälä. I didn’t know what profession he claimed on his tax forms, but he had acquired significant skill as a smash-and-grab artist. The armed robbery had involved emptying the cash register at a convenience store while threatening the clerk with a knife. His take had been eight hundred marks and three packs of cigarettes. Four years later he attacked a random passerby because the man didn’t have a cigarette to lend him. Seppälä could have assaulted Petri Ilveskivi for some equally absurd reason.

  We set off at quarter to three. We took my department car, which was unmarked. Puustjärvi couldn’t bear sitting in a silent car, so he started turning the radio dial. To my surprise he landed on Maija Vilkkumaa’s “Fairyland Tango.” I had expected a middle-aged Go player to prefer something a little more restrained, but I was happy to be mistaken.

  The Seppäläs lived in a row house on the western outskirts of the city. Once again I was startled by the two faces of my city: the ugliest city center in Finland had grown up in the middle of farm country, and to this day a quick peek beyond the prefab concrete buildings revealed nearly virgin forests. The days of this contrast were numbered, though, as every remaining patch of green in the city was going to be paved in the next few years. Real estate prices had jumped like a pole vaulter. Nowadays someone would pay a cool million for our little house and acre of ground. The lot was zoned for more construction, so the siblings who had inherited it might be tempted to sell. Of course they would offer us the right of first refusal, but we weren’t sure we would accept it, since the area had changed so much recently.

  “It’s unit J 62. There’s the visitors’ spot.”

  I parked in the narrow stall and tried to squeeze out of the car without catching my clothes on the bushes. Children played on the asphalt parking lot among the cars, and a handsome red cat lounged on the front stoop, enjoying the warmest day of spring so far. I greeted it like an old friend, which made the cat squint and stretch as Puustjärvi looked on in amusement.

  The Seppäläs’ door had a wrought-iron nameplate with the names of all the family members. Maybe it was from the Sörnäinen Prison metal shop. Maybe Marko was a stand-up father who used his time in prison to make useful home furnishings. I rang the doorbell, and a slight girl with long hair answered. She wore a pink Spice Girls shirt that was too small for her, and in the background I could hear the sound of guns firing, apparently coming from the TV.

  “Hi. Is your mom or dad home?”

  “No.” The girl shook her head, sending her six silly pigtails swinging back and forth. “Mommy will be here soon. We’re not allowed to let people in.”

  “That’s a good rule. We can wait outside,” I said and sat down on the front step to take in the sunshine. After the darkness and snow of the winter, the warmth felt like a luxury, and I drank in the light like medicine. Puustjärvi remained standing, looking morose. After a while, though, he started picking dried leaves off the honeysuckle vine that climbed along the wall.

  We waited perhaps ten minutes before a bright-yellow Datsun Cherry appeared in the parking lot. A wave of nostalgia washed over me: our band’s bassist’s older brother used to have the same car. I had spent more than a few rainy nights on the main drag in our small town with a beer bottle in my hand, listening to the Hurriganes and trying in vain to get the boys to change it to the Clash or Eppu Normaali.

  A woman got out of the Datsun and hauled two Eurospar plastic shopping bags from the backseat. She was thin in the way of women who live on coffee, cigarettes, and microwave pizza. Her dark-blue jeans were tight, and she wore heavy black eyeliner. Her short, yellow-blond hair showed a quarter inch of dark roots. As she walked toward the door, she glanced at us in irritation.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Maria Kallio and this is Senior Officer Petri Puustjärvi from the Espoo Police. How are you?” I said, extending my hand. Suvi Seppälä didn’t take it.

  “The police? Have those fucking social workers been spying on us again? It isn’t my fault that I couldn’t find after-school care. I was waitlisted for this class and got in at the last second! And Marko is usually home. He might be inside right now.” Suvi Seppälä dropped her bags on the ground, sending a package of frozen French fries tumbling out. “Goddamn it!” she said, then pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her fringed leather jacket and lit up.

  “And they yell at me about this too. I can’t even smoke in my own home, and the neighbors bitch about smoke coming in their windows if I smoke outside. You tell those hags that the employment office forced me to take this class or else they’d cut off our benefits. They can find us an after-school program or leave us alone!”

  Suvi Seppälä voice was piercing and apparently loud enough to hear inside, because the door opened and the delighted face of a little boy appeared.

  “Mommy! I was the best at long jump out of the whole class!”

  “Wow!” When Suvi Seppälä smiled at her son, her entire demeanor changed. There was no hint of that hard edge.

  “Come inside and look around if you want. Our kids are fine.” Suvi stubbed out her cigarette and threw it in a nearly full one-liter glass bottle on the porch. With a sigh she picked up her shopping bags and headed inside.

  When we stepped in after her, we found a familiar-looking jumble of shoes in the entryway. Now the sounds of a car chase were coming from the living room. We followed Suvi into the cramped kitchen, where she started putting away the groceries. In front of us she set out the frozen French fries, a carton of 2 percent milk, and a pack of bologna, as if to show us that the children were being fed regularly.

  “Our business has nothing to do with your family situation. We’re looking for your husband, Marko Seppälä. When might he be home?”

  “Marko?” A cup of yogurt trembled in her hand. “Marko is on a trip.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can we get ahold of him? On his cell phone?”

  “He’s riding his motorcycle and can’t answer when he’s on the road,” Suvi said, the defensive tone in her voice again. Her head was turned toward a cupboard, so I couldn’t see her expression. We hadn’t been able to find a mobile phone number for Marko Seppälä in any of our directories, so I asked Suvi for it.

  “What do you want with Marko?” she asked and slammed the cupboard door.

  “His phone number,” I replied just as unpleasantly. “Where is he traveling and when did he leave?”

  “He has business in Kotka, and he left on Tuesday night,” Suvi muttered. “Janita and Tony, have you had your snack? Good. I have to go pick up Diana from day care now. You should have seen how I had to fight to get her a spot when the order came to go to this leather sewing class. There may be a day-care law on the books, but do you think this city follows it? There are people who break laws but never get sent to prison like my husband does. No one will hire him because he’s been arrested so many times. You try raising three kids on the basic daily allowance!” Suvi turned on
the range hood fan, lit another cigarette, and blew it into the updraft. Her nose wrinkled in pleasure as she drew the smoke into her lungs. Her silver Kalevala Jewelry snake ring looked enormous on her left ring finger, which was barely thicker than a cigarillo.

  “Does Marko have friends in Kotka or is he staying in a hotel?”

  “I don’t know. I have to leave now to pick up Diana. She’s been at day care since seven. This damn class starts at eight, and it’s all the way across town.” Suvi Seppälä stood up and walked toward Puustjärvi, who was standing in the door.

  “You’ll be better off answering our questions now so that you don’t have to come down to the police station,” I said firmly. I had no interest in arresting a mother of three who obviously had a hard enough time just getting through the day, but this was a murder investigation.

  “To the police station? I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “We can arrest you for obstructing an investigation. I doubt the day-care center is going to close in the next few minutes. Answer my questions, and then you can go pick up your daughter.”

  Suvi knew that if I arrested her and Marko was AWOL, Child Protective Services would take away the children, and of course she didn’t want that. She ripped part of an advertisement out of a magazine laying on the table, grabbed a pen from the refrigerator door, and wrote a phone number on it.

  “There. Marko’s friend. He runs a flea market in Kotka. He told me that he hadn’t seen Marko when I called yesterday. If he’s with another woman, I’m going to kill the fucking bastard!”

  I tried to quickly add all this up. Suvi obviously didn’t know where Marko was, but she also didn’t want us to know how concerned she was.

  “So he left Tuesday night,” Puustjärvi said. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about him?”

  “No.”

  “Come on in here, Tony!” Puustjärvi said into the living room, but the little boy was glued to the screen. So Puustjärvi and I went into the living room, with Suvi trailing after.

  “What do you want with Tony? He’s only a child! Leave him alone!”

  “Tony, do you remember talking on the phone with me earlier today? You said your dad came home Tuesday night with blood all over him,” Puustjärvi managed to say before Suvi rushed at him.

  “You can’t question my child without my permission! I could sue you!” she yelled and pushed Puustjärvi away from Tony. She paused, then said quietly, “Marko did have some blood on him. He got hit in the forehead by a rock bouncing off a dirt road. It freaked the kids out, but he was fine.”

  “Doesn’t he wear a helmet?” I asked.

  “The visor was up or something. He bandaged himself up and then left again that night. He said he had to take something to Kotka. Some antique dealer whose name I don’t remember asked him to deliver something. And yeah, it’s all cash under the table, so sic the tax man on us too! Leave your number, and I’ll tell Marko to call you when I hear from him. That’s all I can do. Now I’m going to go get Diana, and I’d appreciate it if you left.”

  Puustjärvi and I left our business cards next to the home phone. Once she got us out the door, Suvi took off at a jog.

  After watching her for a few seconds, I glanced at their little square of lawn, which hadn’t weathered the winter terribly well. Dirt showed through in patches, and there were depressions that looked like tire tracks.

  “Looks like Seppälä keeps his bike on the lawn, since the family Datsun takes up the parking spot. We don’t have enough evidence for a search warrant, so we can’t take plaster casts of these tracks, but we could try to draw them. Maybe the tread is the same as the one from the crime scene. Aren’t you pretty good at drawing? Give it a try, but be fast. Suvi will be back soon.”

  Puustjärvi did his best to measure the width of the track and accurately sketch it in his notebook. When we drove past the neighborhood day care, Suvi Seppälä was pushing an energetic little girl in a stroller. I thought of Iida and Antti, who were probably already on their way to Inkoo, and suddenly I missed them terribly.

  7

  At the station, Puustjärvi and I compared his sketch to the tire track mold we had from Forensics.

  “What, you didn’t take a hair from her jacket or steal a comb for a DNA sample?” Koivu asked with a grin.

  “This is when we need that DNA registry. Too bad Seppälä hasn’t ever committed a crime that would have warranted taking a sample. How does it look, Puustjärvi?” I asked. With his magnifying glasses on, Puustjärvi looked like the caricature of a detective.

  “I think it’s possible that the tire type is the same, but there are lots of similar ones,” Puustjärvi replied. “But at least this doesn’t rule him out.”

  Koivu called the junk dealer whose number Suvi had given us. The man claimed he hadn’t seen Seppälä in weeks.

  “I was thinking we could call the station in Kotka and ask them to pick up Seppälä,” I said. “They could also check with other fences in the area to see if someone has any information about him.”

  I was on the phone with my counterpart in Kotka for a long time, and I found myself slipping back into my North Karelian accent. The previous summer, Iida had spent a week with my parents and her cousins and had come home speaking fluent Savo-Karelian, albeit with the vocabulary of a two-year-old. Antti, who had lived in Espoo or Helsinki all his life, had been astounded.

  Around seven, just as I was considering a well-earned departure, Koivu appeared at the door.

  “Do you have a minute? Want to grab a beer?”

  “Now? I’ve got my bike, but maybe I could have just one. Is Anu coming too?”

  Koivu shook his head. I hadn’t been alone with him in ages. Apparently he wanted to talk about something other than work.

  “If I leave my car here, will you give me a lift?” Koivu asked in the hallway. “You don’t think we’ll be out past the time that the thirty-five stops running?”

  “No, we won’t be out late. I’m still planning on coming in to work tomorrow. I have to get that presentation for next week ready.”

  “Being a lieutenant sure is busy,” Koivu said and then started trying to convince me to ride on the rear rack so that he could pedal the mile to the bar.

  “I certainly will not! That would look great in the tabloids. ‘Police officer seduces boss, breaks traffic laws.’ Take the bus if you aren’t up for walking. I’ll see you there!”

  Even though I was on a busy street the whole way, the five minutes of biking perked me right up. Coltsfoot brightened the ditch banks, and it was still so warm that I would have been fine in only a shirt. The sun shone high in the sky with the promise that it would linger longer and longer each day. Blackbirds called from the tops of the birch trees whenever the noise of traffic subsided, and dust billowed under the tires of the cars, many still with their winter studs.

  Koivu waved from a bus window, and I waved back while barely managing to dodge a man who had decided to go rollerblading in honor of spring. I was thirsty by the time I got to the restaurant, and a large Kilkenny sounded fantastic. Koivu was already camped out in a booth with a beer stein in front of him.

  “Did you have something you wanted to talk about?” I asked after we had made it halfway through our beers.

  “Yeah.” Koivu was suddenly uneasy. “Anu and I have been talking . . . about maybe moving in together. Or at least I’ve been talking about it for a long time, and she just agreed. Yesterday she said we could start looking for an apartment.”

  “That’s great!” I said sincerely. I wasn’t terribly surprised.

  “There’s just one ‘but.’ Anu’s parents. They want us to get married first.”

  I laughed. “Then I can be the best man!”

  Koivu was not amused.

  “I just never thought I’d get married. At least not after Anita . . . What’s the point of making solemn vows when a person’s mind can change so easily? And I hate all that church stuff.”

  “You don�
�t have to get married in a church. Isn’t Anu Buddhist anyway?”

  “Her parents are. Anu belongs to the Lutheran church. That was another part of her teenage rebellion. She wants a traditional Finnish church wedding with the veil and everything.”

  “You’ll look delicious in tails,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but Koivu sulkily downed the rest of his glass.

  Then he went to get another. He was most of the way through that one too, before he spoke again.

  “It just bugs me. Why do we need permission from some church or judge? Isn’t it enough to just live together?”

  Five years ago I had contemplated these very same questions. Antti had been much more eager to put a legal stamp on our relationship than I was. To me, marriage had seemed hopelessly bourgeois, but I didn’t regret my decision.

  “Couldn’t you just move in together and then get married later when it feels right?”

  “Anu’s parents don’t approve of couples living together outside of marriage. What I don’t understand is why she suddenly feels the need to please them. She’s a grown woman! And it worries me a little that she’s twenty-six and still lives with her parents. The only time she’s ever lived alone was at the police academy, and that was in the dorms.”

  “Of course you’re nervous. You’d be stupid if you weren’t. But if we’re comparing Anu to Anita . . . remember that you’re the one who followed her to Joensuu. And there’s no question you’ve raised your standards since then,” I said, taking on a maternal tone.

  Koivu was like a little brother to me, and right now our age difference felt like much more than four years. I liked our sister-brother relationship, but it came with some problems—even though I was now the unit commander, sometimes he still expected me to be some sort of compassionate mother figure who was going to look the other way when he screwed up. When I didn’t, I was an uptight bitch, but when my predecessor, Jyrki Taskinen, had done the same thing, he was just being a hard-nosed professional.