Lucifer's Tears

by James Thompson

  We also look into an average of a hundred and twenty-five suicides each year. Helsinki has a higher rate than the rest of Finland, partly because of sexual minorities. They come from all over the country to the nation’s largest city, seeking the acceptance and promise of happiness that they lacked in smaller communities. Since they have higher rates of depression and mental illness than the city’s norm, and hence a greater propensity toward selfdestruction, I presume many of them don’t find what they’re looking for. In the couple of weeks that I’ve been working in homicide, I’ve looked at twenty-seven dead bodies, but I’ve yet to investigate one as a possible murder.

  Over the next hours, Milo and I examine an overdosed junkie, a middle-aged man who died of a heart attack while watching television, and a teenage girl who got drunk, passed out in the snow and froze to death. It’s eight thirty a.m. We should have gotten off work a half hour ago. My phone rings. It’s Arto, my boss. “I know your shifts are over,” he says, “but we’re shorthanded. I’ve got a murder for you if you want to take it.”

  This takes me aback. I didn’t think he was prepared to trust either me or Milo with a murder and risk the precious murharyhmä winning streak and reputation, unless we stumbled upon one in a normal death investigation and he couldn’t take it away from us.

  “Do tell,” I say.

  “A woman was beaten to death in Töölö. The responding officers say it’s bad.”

  I ask Milo. He’s about to jump up and down from excitement. If I take it, it means I won’t get a chance to sleep tonight, but solving a murder might go a long way toward quelling the misgivings the other homicide unit members have about me. What the hell. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.

  “Yeah,” I say, “we’ll take it.”

  Arto gives me the address and says, “A forensics team is already on the way. Get over there now.”

  5

  MILO AND I TAKE THE CAR we signed out from the police garage earlier. The department is big on economy. We get a Ford Fiesta. Milo wants to drive, and given the icy road conditions, he does so faster than necessary. The murder scene is only a few minutes away. A time and temperature sign on the side of a building reads eight forty-four a.m. and minus twenty-four degrees. Snow cascades through the darkness.

  Europe is experiencing its worst winter in thirty years. Even Helsinki, eminently well-prepared for cold-weather conditions, is in chaos. Hoarfrost coats everything. Constant plowing has created mountains of snow and buried cars. The central railway station is out of commission. Trains still running have to be frequently deiced, and it’s wreaking havoc on their timetables. Water mains have burst and flooded the streets. The water has turned into vast sheets of ice and brought the tram lines to a standstill. Traffic accidents abound.

  This is the antithesis of the normal Helsinki winters I experienced living here years ago. Usually, in January, the temperature hovers around zero. Helsinki is like that most of the winter, although sometimes the temperature dips down to as much as minus twenty or thirty. We get some snow and it melts. Snow melt snow melt snow melt. Makes it like walking around in icy gray mud for most of the winter. Still, at a certain point some snow piles up. Then the spring thaw exposes a winter’s accumulation of dog shit, and the city is overwhelmed by the stench for a week or two. I missed Arctic winter during my seven years here, the meter or two of snow reflecting moon and starlight. The beauty of snow-laden forests. This year, we get to experience real winter in Helsinki, and it brings joy to my heart.

  Töölö is a fashionable district. It’s not tremendously expensive, but has a reputation for a better class of residents. We pull up behind a police van, next to a snowbank in front of a pretty yellow apartment building at the address Arto gave me. My phone rings. The forensics team’s pathologist tells me their vehicle was involved in a minor collision with another car. One of the crime-scene technicians wasn’t wearing a seat belt and his head hit the windshield. He needs stitches. They have to take him to the hospital, and we have to wait until he’s patched up.

  “Fuck that,” I say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The investigation starts now, without you.”

  “That’s against procedure.”

  “Time is wasting. We’re setting a new procedural precedent.” Pause. “Do you have the right gear to wear?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  Milo and I enter the building and take the elevator to the fourth floor. A uniformed officer stands in the hall. “You the detectives?” he asks.

  “That’s us,” I say.

  “Where are the crime-scene techs?”

  “Late. They had a car wreck. Fill us in.”

  “This apartment belongs to Rein Saar, an Estonian citizen. He called in the murder himself. He claims an unknown assailant struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. When he woke up, he was in his bed beside his lover, Iisa Filippov. She was beaten to death, and he was covered in her blood.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the back of our van.”

  Something is amiss here. “Where’s your partner?” I ask.

  “He went to get us coffee.”

  So much for police procedure. “You left an injured suspect, alone and unsupervised, in the back of your vehicle?”

  He reddens. I let it go.

  “What’s your impression of the situation?” I ask.

  “Rein Saar has a bad cut on his head from a blunt instrument. It looks to me like a lovers’ quarrel ended badly. She hit him with something, he killed her and hasn’t been able to think of a better lie.

  “Does he need stitches?”

  “At least not immediately. The bleeding stopped. He might be concussed.”

  Milo and I don surgical gloves and paper suits, complete with head and foot coverings, to prevent our fingerprints, hair and clothing fibers from contaminating the crime scene, walk into the apartment and take a look around. The home is neat and clean, in large part decorated with inexpensive furniture from Ikea. The kitchen is off the living room.

  I go back out into the hall and hand the patrol officer the keys to the Ford Fiesta. “There are more gloves and paper suits in the trunk of our car. Get some for yourself and the suspect, put them on and sit in the kitchen. Just don’t touch anything.”

  “That’s not going by the book,” he says.

  I use Milo’s line. “Show me where it says that in the police handbook.”

  The uniform doesn’t know how to respond.

  “It’s fucking freezing outside,” I say, “our suspect is injured, and I’ll want to talk to him before he’s processed and treated for his injuries. I would prefer he not be angry, miserable and traumatized while I do it.”

  The uniform shrugs. “It’s your case.” He goes downstairs to fetch Rein Saar from the van.

  Milo and I examine the kitchen, to make sure the victim can sit in it without contaminating evidence when he comes back inside. I see Rein Saar in the hall while he and the uniform put on paper suits. He looks like he took a shower in blood.

  Milo and I walk over to him. “I’m Inspector Vaara. This is Detective Sergeant Nieminen. Do you feel that you require immediate medical attention, or can you stay here for a while so I can talk to you?”

  He nods. He can wait. I instruct him and the uniform to sit at the kitchen table.

  I turn to Milo. “Let’s go look at Iisa Filippov.”

  “The bedroom is a fucking mess,” the uniform says. “Have fun.”

  We go to the bedroom. The uniform wasn’t exaggerating. Blood soaks the bed around the corpse. Fine mists of blood feather the walls and ceiling. Her murder speaks of both method and rage. The smell of fresh blood and scorched flesh, menthol cigarettes, as well as urine and feces, is strong.

  We need duplicate documentation so there’s no chance of evidence from our initial investigation being lost. I take a digital audio recorder and notepad out of my coat pocket. “Which one d
o you want?” I ask Milo.

  “I’ll write,” he says.

  I start recording. “The victim, identified as Iisa Filippov, is located in the bedroom of a man identified as Rein Saar. The bedroom itself is about a hundred and thirty square feet and unexceptional. It contains a standard queen-size bed in a corner, headboard and left side of the bed against walls. The victim’s body lies on the right side of the bed. Other furnishings include a dresser, a single wooden chair, and a nightstand with a reading lamp and a woman’s purse on it. There’s one closet, not yet inspected. About halfway up, the closet door has an approx two-inch hole bored through it. The room shows no damage to indicate struggle.”

  I open her purse and rifle through it. “The purse contains a Finnish passport issued to Iisa Filippov. From the photo, I believe the victim is indeed Filippov. It also contains a wallet, makeup and related cosmetic accessories, a pack of Belmont cigarettes and orange Bic lighter, a cell phone and a compact Samsung camcorder.” I unfold a sheet of paper. “And a copy of Rein Saar’s work schedule.”

  I give Milo a moment to write and catch up, then continue.

  “Filippov appears to be a woman approx age thirty, five foot five inches tall, athletic build, about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

  I’m careful about what I say, because the recording may be entered into evidence, but before being beaten to a pulp, she must have been damned good-looking. Tanned. Long black hair cut in bangs. One eye is burned through, I guess by a cigarette, but the other is open and also nearly black in color. Great figure, something like 36-23-36.

  “She’s nude and lying face-up on the bed. Her feet are bound tight with several wraps of duct tape. Her hands are behind her back, underneath her. I kneel down and look. They’re bound in the same manner. The remainder of the roll of tape is on the nightstand. Her mouth is stuffed with women’s socks. Her clothes—jeans, sweater, panties and bra—are wadded up in a pile on the chair, but I don’t see her socks there, so I think the ones in her mouth belong to her.”

  “Care to add anything?” I ask Milo.

  He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

  Although this murder scene is gruesome, Milo doesn’t seem fazed by it, shows no sign of coming unglued, like he did last night when we investigated Rauha Anttila’s death.

  “Filippov has been struck multiple times with a blunt instrument. Her forehead is split open. Her left arm is broken just above the elbow. Bone protrudes through the skin. Her chest, on the right side, is flattened, suggesting that multiple ribs are caved in. Nothing in the room seems heavy or hard enough to have inflicted this kind of damage.”

  Milo takes a look around. The place hasn’t been dusted for fingerprints yet, so with one gloved finger, he opens the closet door. We look in. I see only men’s clothing and shoes on the floor. A stool is inside, a closet seems a strange place for it. “Nothing here either,” he says.

  Then I notice equestrian clothing on the shelf overtop the clothes rack: shirts, breeches, a jacket and helmet. Interesting.

  We go back to Iisa’s body. “Filippov has in the neighborhood of fifty burn marks on her body. Most are located on her abdomen, her genital area, her nipples, her face, and one through her left eye. The diameter and circular shape of the burns indicate she was burned with lit cigarettes. The wounds could have been inflicted after death, but I think they were probably used as a method of meting out pain. She voided her bowels either while being murdered, from fear or pain or both, or maybe upon death. Feces and urine are on the sheets between her legs.”

  “It’s enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon,” Milo says.

  I point at the audio recorder, press a warning finger to my lips and continue. “The blood pool pattern around the victim indicates that another body lay next to her while she bled. The outline of a head, arm and torso are clear. The resident of the apartment, Rein Saar, claims to have woken up next to the victim and found her dead. This lends some credence to his story. Most unusual is that Iisa Filippov has been struck dozens, perhaps more than a hundred times, with a light instrument at high velocity. It’s notable that her face around the lips was beaten with particular severity.”

  The tone of my description is neutral, but the scene reeks of torture, horror and agony. Iisa’s face is nearly destroyed by cigarette burns, whipped to pieces, scored by marks and welts. Deep and wide-open wounds that ooze.

  “She was struck on the same surface areas, mostly on the face and torso, multiple times. It appears that the first lash abraded flesh, and that subsequent strikes deepened the wounds. This resulted in significant blood spatter. The walls and ceiling are misted with patterns of thousands of blood droplets that I estimate are an average of two millimeters in size.”

  I hear the front door open, then voices. The forensics team is here.

  Milo points. “Look at this little spot on the wall,” Milo says. “Whatever the killer used to hit her smacked it and left a small tongue-shaped bloodstain. Given the clothes in his closet, I’d say Rein Saar beat her to death with a riding crop.”

  “A good guess,” I say.

  I go to the closet, get down on my knees and look at the floor. A bloody crop is propped up against the inside wall. I don’t touch it, leave it in place for the forensics team to photograph it. “Found it.”

  Milo comes over and takes a look.

  I speak into the tape recorder. “In the bedroom closet, we discovered the probable weapon used in the lashing attack. A riding crop, a little over three feet in length, with a leather tongue on the end. It appears to be made of fiberglass, has a leather-wrapped handle, and a loop on the end to secure grip.”

  We return to the bedside. Both of us stare down at her for a moment. Milo asks me, “What do you think was the cause of death?”

  “She took a terrible beating, but there’s no arterial spurting. I doubt if it was blood loss. She’s got those socks stuffed in her mouth. I think he beat her with the horse whip until he got bored with it, then maybe just held her nose until she suffocated and died.”

  “I tend to agree,” Milo says.

  “Maybe we should call Saska Lindgren and have him come take a look,” I say. “He’s the bloodstain-pattern expert.”

  Milo shakes his head. “No fucking way.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is my first big homicide case and I’m not sharing it with anybody.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  He flushes, embarrassed at his gaffe. “Except you, of course. Listen, I’m going to tell you something personal.”

  Not again. I wish he wouldn’t. I wait.

  “You’ve probably heard that I have a high IQ. People make a big deal about my being in Mensa.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I have advanced development of spatial relations and mathematics. The forensics guys are going to come in here, make detailed measurements and photographs, then enter it all into a computer program that will more or less re-create the attack. I don’t need the computer program. I can do it in my head.”

  I don’t quite believe him. “Then do it.”

  Somebody knocks on the bedroom door frame. I look. A member of the forensics team says, “Sorry we’re late. You guys want to let us in there?”

  “Give us a couple more minutes,” Milo says. “Can you loan me a viewing loupe magnifier and a measuring tape?”

  She brings them.

  Milo looks close up at blood droplets at various points on the walls, measures distances. He stands on the chair and examines the ceiling. This feels silly, like I’m Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

  My phone rings. It’s Kate. “Where are you?” she asks.

  “At a murder scene.”

  “The weather is so bad, I was worried.”

  I made a mistake taking this case. I want to be at home with Kate right now and I could be. A fuckup. “I’m fine. I should have called, but I got caught up in this.”

  “John and Mary will be here this evening. How are you going to be able to s
pend time with them if you haven’t slept?”

  She sounds peeved, doesn’t realize I seldom sleep. I haven’t told her. While she sleeps, I lie in bed beside her and think. “I’ll be fine. We’ll have a nice evening, and I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

  “Please try. I miss you.”

  I ring off. Milo is waiting, smiling and expectant. I guess I’m supposed to share his joy.

  “Okay,” he says. “I got it.”

  “I’m bursting with anticipation.”

  “Trajectories are three-dimensional and so have three angles of impact. I calculated gamma, the easiest angle, which is the angle of the blood path measured from the vertical surface and extended angle. Then I calculated alpha, the angle of blood spatter moving out from the surface. Then finally beta, the angle of blood pivoting around the vertical. The three angles are connected through trigonomic equations that determine the major and minor axes and angle of impact.”

  I interrupt. “Please get to the point.”

  “The tangential flight path of blood droplets is determined with the angle of impact and the offset angle of the blood spatter. They converge at the intersection of two blood-spatter paths, and the stains come from opposite sides of the impact pattern. The area of convergence is formed by the intersection of stains from opposite sides of the impact pattern.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I’m trying to. The area of origin is the area in three-dimensional space where the blood source was located at the time of the attack . . .”

  The dark circles around his eyes seem to have taken on a dull shine. I’ve noticed this happens when he gets excited. “Milo, please. The goddamned fucking point.”

  He purses his lips, frustrated. I’ve ruined his fun. “The killer didn’t beat her at random. He chose small points on her body, hit the target areas repeatedly to cause maximum pain and damage, resulting in the great number of blood-spatter patterns, then chose a new area of flesh to whip.”