Lucifer's Tears

by James Thompson

  This is a nightmare scenario. Finland has suffered three school shootings. The first in 1989, in Rauma. A fourteen-year-old shot two fellow students. The second in November 2007, at Jokela High School, near Tuusula. A sixteen-year-old gunman killed eight and wounded twelve before turning the gun on himself. It rocked the nation. Then, not long after, in September 2008, it happened again in Kauhajoki. Ten people murdered before the shooter blew his own head off. Finland seems to be following the U.S. schoolshooting trend. Parents are terrorized. And now, here we are again.

  Not long ago, such situations fell under the province of Karhuryhmä—the Bear Team—or, as they’re nicknamed, the Beagle Boys. They have SWAT units, handle riots, special ops and counterterrorism. In the past, in a case such as this, normal police would have waited on the Beagle Boys to bring in snipers and hostage negotiators. The Finnish National Police, however, made a recent decision—because schoolkids can’t wait while they’re being shot to pieces—that the first officers on the scene must respond in the event of a school shooting. The responsibility falls to me and Milo.

  We enter the gate and scurry to the front door. My heart pounds and blood roars in my ears.

  Milo looks calm enough. His face doesn’t betray how he feels inside. “How do you want to handle it?” he asks.

  “Have you tried out your modified pistol?” I ask.

  “Not yet.”

  “Then don’t. If it misfires, you or someone else could die.”

  “It works.”

  Adrenaline makes my hands shake. I draw my Glock. “You haven’t talked down anyone with a gun. I have. If possible, let me handle it.”

  I don’t say, but I’m certain he knows, that I tried such a thing once, not long ago. I failed, and my friend blew his brains out before I could stop him.

  I open the front door. Milo crouches and darts through it. I don’t crouch. My bad knee won’t allow it. There’s no point anyway. Thirty feet down a hall decorated with crayon artwork by students sits Vesa Legion Korhonen with a boy of about eight clutched in one arm. He has a chrome snub-nosed .357 Magnum pressed to the child’s head. A bottle of Finlandia vodka rests on the floor beside him.

  I level my Glock at his head and walk forward.

  “You,” he says. “Dis is pwovidenthial.”

  “Vesa,” I ask, “what are you doing, and why are you doing it?”

  “I am saving souws,” he says. “Da childwen’s and my own. And now youahs.”

  With peripheral vision, I see Milo to my right and behind me. He circles farther to the right, close to the wall of the hall, trying to keep Legion’s attention on me and away from him.

  “You made me dwink da whoe bottle. You hewt me,” Legion says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  The boy is motionless and quiet. A dark stain spreads around his crotch. My own bladder wants to let go. I tell the child to stay calm and not to move.

  “Put yooah gun down,” Legion says.

  “No.”

  “I wiah shoot dis boy.”

  I lower the Glock to my side, but inch closer. With my bad knee, I can’t move fast. I have to get within arm’s reach of Legion if I’m to have any chance of restraining him. Given his .357, though, I can’t imagine how I might accomplish that.

  “Have you hurt anyone?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeth. Many.” He chugs vodka.

  Milo continues to slink along the wall. He’s almost at a right angle to Legion now.

  “What would it take to get you to let the boy go?” I ask.

  “Hmm,” he says. “Wet me think. I know. Shoot youahthelf.”

  “Why?”

  “You toad me, ‘Bottaw to wips and dwink.’ I’m tewing you, gun to head and puu twigger.”

  Fuck. I don’t know what to do. I put the Glock to my temple. It pounds from the migraine. I’m still inching forward, just a little more than three feet away from him now.

  Legion jams the Magnum harder against the boy’s head. The child whimpers. “Shoot youahthelf,” Legion says again.

  I’m at a loss. I might consider shooting myself, if it would save the boy’s life, but there’s no reason to think my suicide would change anything. I wait, terrified.

  “Do it,” Legion says and drinks again.

  The boy squirms. Legion holds him tighter. Legion turns his face toward him. The back of Legion’s head faces Milo.

  A piercing sharp crack. For a brief instant, I think I accidentally shot myself, or Legion shot the child. But Legion’s head jerks and slumps. His gun arm drops, his hold on the boy releases. I kneel down and gesture to the boy. He gets up and falls into my arms.

  Legion slumps to the floor. Blood from his head trickles onto the tiles, much as it trickled onto the ice after I gave him a beating. I look at Milo. He smiles at me and winks, then blows imaginary smoke from the barrel of his Glock.

  “Jesus, Milo.” It’s all I can say.

  “You’re welcome,” he says.

  I still shake, but now from relief. I still feel like I might piss myself. “I guess you had to.”

  “Well,” he says, “it’s like this. One of us had to shoot him. First: you weren’t in much of a position to do it. Second: a shot that will paralyze and render a killer incapable of pulling a trigger must be placed at the junction of the brain and the brain stem. A target about the size of an apricot. I didn’t know if you knew that. Third: if you did know it, I didn’t know if you were capable of doing it. So I did it myself.”

  I realize the bullet didn’t exit Legion’s head because the crosshatched round split into four chunks and didn’t have much punch left. “Hurry,” I say, “other cops will be here in a second. Swap clips with me and get that dum-dum out of the chamber.”

  We make the switch fast. Beagle Boys come through the front door. They run past us to clear rooms and search for victims.

  “Congratulations,” I say to Milo. “I guess your hobbies and weapons enthusiasm paid off. You’re the first Finnish cop in modern history to gun down a suspect without being fired upon first.”

  “You criticizing me?”

  “No. You did the right thing. You enjoyed it though. That, I am criticizing.”

  He spins his Glock on his index finger, gunfighter-style, re-holsters it fast. “We’re the only partners in the Finnish police to have both killed perps. We’re going to be famous, like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.”

  The Beagle Boys lead teachers and children into the hall and out of the building. They found no murdered children, no casualties at all. Legion just walked around, screamed weird religious gibberish, swilled vodka and shot holes in the walls and ceiling. Commander Beagle asks Milo and me for our accounts. I explain that Milo had no choice, killing Legion was warranted. Commander Beagle shakes our hands, thanks and congratulates us for saving the boy. He doesn’t request Milo’s weapon.

  Legion didn’t come here to hurt anyone, probably wouldn’t even have let me shoot myself. He came here to die. Torsten was right. He sought punishment, but for what crimes I can’t imagine.

  Milo finds the idea glamorous and I loathe it, but he’s also right. I killed an armed robber in self-defense many years ago. Because I was with Milo today, that old bad business will be resurrected. We’re going to be famous as killer partners, particularly among our colleagues, stuck with the label for the rest of our lives. Worse, because the children in the school lived, we’ll be celebrated in the media. Legion dies. We live. Legion vilified. Milo and me lauded for bravery. Some fucking heroes.

  27

  MILO AND I exit the school together. A large crowd has formed, despite the freezing cold. Police cars and officers ring the building. The press got here fast. Their camera lights and flashes break the darkness. Reporters beg for statements.

  I point at a cruiser and turn to Milo. “Fuck this, let’s get out of here.”

  We push through the crowd. People shout at us. We hop in the back of the squad car. Two uniforms are in the front keep
ing warm. They congratulate us. I ask them to take us to the Pasila police station. The car pulls out.

  “I know that guy I shot,” Milo says.

  I’m more than a little surprised. “From where?”

  “He’s in Mensa. I’ve run into him at meetings. He’s a freelance software engineer.”

  This floors me, I’m not sure why. Maniacs are all around us, but we usually don’t recognize them for what they are. “What kind of person was he?” I ask.

  “Timid. Soft-spoken. Like he was ashamed of his speech impediment. I got the idea that he attended the meetings so he could be around people who wouldn’t make fun of him.”

  “Then why didn’t you talk to him before you shot him?”

  Milo shrugs. “Seemed pointless. Better to get it over with.”

  I’m not much of a talker. Maybe because Dad beat me for any show of emotion, I tend to regard anything less than total selfcontainment as a weakness. I like people, but from a distance. I feel that most other people just don’t have much to offer me, and I don’t have anything to offer them either, and so I prefer to observe more than interact with others.

  I have a low bullshit threshold, and, since for me, most chat is mind-numbing drivel, I don’t often engage in it. I can count the people I enjoy talking to on my fingers, including Kate. She’s not just my wife, she’s my best friend. Before I met her, I had only ever really opened up to one person in my life, my ex-wife, Heli, and she betrayed me. For the better part of the next dozen years, my best friend was a cat named Katt. And even that dumb bastard died on me.

  At this moment, though, I feel an urge for some mind-numbing drivel. “So what do you geniuses do at Mensa meetings?”

  Milo shifts in his seat to face me. “They’re fun. We get together maybe once a month, get drunk and have dinner. We might have a speaker, or we might play poker or Go or maybe just hang around and yack. High-IQ geeks have more interesting hobbies than you might think. Scuba diving. UFOs. Witchcraft.”

  The requirement for entrance into Mensa is a measured IQ in the top two percentile of the population. As such, I could join, too. I’ll pass on it.

  “Later,” Milo says, “I need to tell you the rest of the story about Linda’s apartment.”

  “There’s more?”

  He grins. “Much more. But I don’t want to talk about it in the station.”

  Apparently, Milo enjoys nothing more than dragging his stories out forever. They go something like: God made the heavens and the earth. God gave Adam and Eve the boot out of Eden. God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Moses parted the Red Sea. Now let’s talk about the Filippov murder.

  We arrive at the station and step out of the cruiser into a media frenzy. More lights and flashes blind us. We push our way up the stairs. Journalists scream for interviews. I start to open the front door. Milo asks me to wait. He puts an arm around my shoulder and raises his other hand to hush the crowd. They go silent, expectant.

  Milo wipes away an imaginary tear. “I have little to say on this sorrowful day,” his voice fake-cracks, “but I’ll make a brief statement. Praise God the children were saved. Let’s all pray for the soul of the poor man who had to die as a result of his sad mental illness. I wish that the burden of taking his life hadn’t fallen upon Kari and myself.”

  We go through the door. Once inside, we look at each other and burst into simultaneous laughter. It’s just a stress reaction, but we laugh harder, can’t stop, and soon we’re howling. We find ourselves hugging each other. Two hours ago, I could never have imagined such a thing. “You’re too fucking much,” I say.

  “Aren’t I, though,” he says, and we laugh even more.

  Cops stare at us, bewildered. We calm down, and a parade of cops congratulate us, shake our hands. We make our way to my office. Our boss, Arto, greets us. “Detectives, well done.”

  We thank him. He tells us the background info for Vesa Korhonen is already in. He attended Ebeneser School as a child, has no priors, has dysphasia but no history of mental illness, lived a quiet life with his parents, ran his own business out of their home. Where he got the pistol remains unknown. Legion just came out of nowhere. It happens.

  Milo and I sit in my office. To avoid departmental conflict of interest, Arto brings in a detective from Vantaa to interview us and write the report. Our phones keep ringing, interrupting us and slowing us down. Most are media, and we don’t answer unless our phones display the names of callers we know. Mom calls. Then my brother Jari. Then Timo, another brother. I don’t hear from my oldest brother, Juha, but he’s working in the Norwegian oil fields and probably hasn’t heard about the shooting. Kate might see me on TV and worry. I call her, tell her a brief and edited version of what happened, let her know everything is fine. Her voice shakes. She asks me to come home as soon as I can.

  Jyri Ivalo calls. “Nice work,” he says. “I got you a slot in Helsinki homicide, and you make me look better and better all the time. Keep it up.”

  “I’ll kill as many school shooters as possible,” I say.

  “Good. You haven’t filed a murder charge against Rein Saar. Why?”

  “It’s complicated, and I’m a little too busy to explain right now.”

  “Just get it done.” He rings off.

  The Vantaa cop gets the report written and leaves. I check my e-mail. Pasi Tervomaa has e-mailed me scans of documents containing testimony stating that Arvid was an executioner at Stalag 309. I forward them to Jyri and the interior minister.

  I stretch out in my chair and turn to Milo. “I need to get home to Kate.”

  “You need to hear the rest of my story,” he says.

  “Just fucking tell it.”

  He shakes his head. “No way. Not here.”

  Moses led his people to the Promised Land. The Jews were exiled to Babylon. I sigh. “Where, then? Anywhere we go, we’ll be mobbed.”

  “My house,” he says. “It’s on Flemari, just a ten-minute walk from your place.”

  Legion’s death brings back bad memories of other people I’ve watched die. I want to go home. “Okay, but let’s make it quick.”

  TWO COPS give us a ride to Milo’s apartment in a patrol car. We step inside a one-room dump, kneel and take off our boots. I look around. Newspapers, books and mail are scattered everywhere. A sink full of dirty dishes is in a dirtier kitchen. Dirty laundry is in a pile beside an unmade bed. The place smells of must and mildew. Milo shoves a pile of papers off a chair by a big computer table onto the floor. “Make yourself at home,” he says.

  He goes to the fridge, brings two beers and a bottle of kossu. He sits on the edge of the table, unscrews the cap from the bottle and hands it to me. “Sorry, I don’t have any clean glasses.”

  I take a deep swig and pass it back. “The bottle will do.”

  He drinks, shuts his eyes for a moment. He’s been up for almost two days and looks like shit. Between fatigue and adrenaline, it’s a miracle he made the kill shot, put the bullet in the right spot in Legion’s brain. “You need to go to sleep,” I say.

  He drinks again, hands the bottle back. “Soon.”

  He stares at me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The scar on your face is cool.”

  Trauma is making him strange. “I’d give it to you if I could.”

  “Your wife’s name is Kate Vaara. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Katevaara, in English, means, for example, highway asphalt erosion. You should tell her that.”

  He’s spewing hogwash to release tension. I indulge him and I swill kossu. “I’ll make a point of it.”

  Vintage posters from the Second World War hang on the walls. A gun cabinet stands in the corner. A long and narrow glass case with daggers and bayonets from the war—Finnish, German and Russian—rests on the rear edge of the table. I look closer at them.

  He points at one of them. “That’s a Nazi Hitler Youth dagger. The inscription reads BLUT UND EHRE—Blood and Honor. There’s a good story behind it.�
��

  I don’t want to hear any of his long-winded stories at the moment. However, I’m becoming somewhat interested in him as a person. An ammo-reloading setup is on the other edge of the table. Empty shotgun shells and lead shot I don’t recognize are piled around it.

  “What’s the fascination with war and guns?” I ask.

  “It’s a hobby I picked up from my father. I inherited his collection of militaria.”

  He waits for me to inquire further about his father and said “militaria.” I don’t. “And these shotgun loads. What are they?”

  He sips beer. “Beehive rounds. Shells loaded with razor-sharp darts instead of normal shot. They’ll take a man’s whole leg off.”

  “I see.” I change the subject. “Nice computer.”

  “It’s an Apple MacBook Pro notebook with a seventeen-inch monitor. Expensive as hell.”

  “You seem to have top-notch computer skills. With your big big brain, you could be earning a lot of money. Instead, you became a cop. You spend your time building toys that inflict death. Why?”

  “I want to help people.”

  He doesn’t smile when he says it. Strange, but I think he’s being honest. The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

  My phone rings. It’s Kate. “Kari, why aren’t you home?”

  She sounds near tears. I check my watch. Nine thirty p.m. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m still working. I’m just around the corner and I’ll be home soon.”

  “The school shooting is a headline on BBC World. The report said a maniac forced you to put a gun to your head and tried to make you commit suicide. I’m upset. Please come home now.”

  “Kate, I’m fine, and I’ll be home soon. I promise.”

  “I love you,” she says.

  “Me too,” I say and hang up.