My head roaring, I sat down on my green sofa under President Ahtisaari’s portrait. I felt like an idiot. I hadn’t even been a substitute for Meritta, just an alibi.
“Johnny…I mean, Miettinen, paid me a visit here yesterday. He had some bruises and claimed he fell off the little Jopo he had ridden earlier in the night. Let’s bring him in. Arrest him. Put him in handcuffs and lock him up.”
“Maria…”
“I can’t stand being taken advantage of like that! OK, fine, let’s go talk to him. I want to hear why he lied. Can you drive?”
Only once my hands had stopped shaking and Koivu and I were sitting in one of the station’s two Saab blue-and-whites, did I notice how tired Koivu looked.
“Were you up late last night with all these interviews?”
“No. I was home by eight, but then Anita and I had a huge fight.” Koivu sighed, trying not to look miserable. “It was actually over something pretty big. At first, she was angry because I have to work over the weekend again, but then she started talking about those skinheads we arrested Friday night. The one who got hurt the worst, the real monster Nazi of the bunch, is Anita’s patient. I’m still having a hard time believing this”—Koivu paused to look me in the eyes before turning his head toward the windy back road that leads to the lake—“but Anita defended him. Apparently he’s a ‘nice guy,’ a health nut just like she is, who doesn’t drink or smoke and only eats food grown in Finland. He doesn’t want to pollute his body with anything foreign. Anita thinks the skinheads are right and that we don’t need any refugees here. She thinks the Finnish police should be on the Finns’ side.” Koivu’s voice was shaking.
“Anita’s always been proud of you being a police officer, hasn’t she?”
“Yeah, she’s always had a thing for cops. We protect people from the bad guys. But now I’m the wrong kind of cop. Can you understand how that feels?”
I nodded. “My first real boyfriend dumped me because I was a cop and therefore represented the organized society he was trying to rebel against. Slightly different reasoning, but basically the same thing.”
“So things are going pretty well for us,” Koivu said as we parked in the Miettinens’ yard. “For both of us,” he added, smiling dejectedly. I smiled back, glad that I had Koivu—and not anyone else—sitting next to me at that moment.
“You’re the lead interrogator. I’m just here as a witness,” I reminded him as we climbed out of the car.
The day was already hot, especially in my jeans, and the sun was blinding. At first, I couldn’t see clearly what was making all the clattering up on the roof.
Three men were on the roof. Johnny’s dad was pulling up shingles next to the chimney, and another man I didn’t recognize was dropping them into some sort of chute that carried them down to the yard. Johnny was nailing down new sheathing on the west side of the roof, and his body sharply silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. An ugly yellow baseball cap with Arpikylä Athletics on it balanced backward on his head, and light brown curls were damp at his neck. His face had smears of black and his lightly tanned skin glowed in the sun, the muscles of his shoulders and upper back oscillating in time with his hammering. A trail of sweat running down his back disappeared into the waistband of his cutoff shorts. When he noticed us, Johnny stood up, and the yellow down that covered his calves and thighs glittered in the sun, adding definition to his perfect leg muscles.
For a second all I could do was stare, and I’m sure my mouth was open too. I felt a floating sensation, as if I might glide right up onto the roof and into Johnny’s arms, taste his warm, sweaty skin, inspect every muscle as I removed his shorts and tennis shoes, moving that terrible ball cap to my own head…
“Jarmo Miettinen, your account of your movements on Friday night could use some clarification.” Koivu’s cool voice was like a bucket of well water dumped on my head. And it had the same effect on Johnny too. The hammer slid from his hand onto and off of the roof, landing almost on Koivu’s toes. Johnny himself didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at his hands for a moment before sitting, then swung down to hang from his arms before dropping from the roof. The arrogance in the way he carried himself was the thing that finally brought me to my senses. I stared angrily into those gold-flecked blue eyes.
“What’s this all about?” Johnny’s voice was gravelly, and with the back of his hand he smeared the tar on his cheek as he tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
“You made a statement to the police yesterday that you arrived at your parents’ home at approximately one thirty a.m. But four witnesses claim to have seen you in the center of town after two thirty,” Koivu said.
Johnny’s eyes broke contact with mine and moved to the tips of his shoes.
“Can anyone confirm the time you arrived at your parents’ house Friday night?” Koivu’s voice was calm and firm.
“We aren’t in the habit of spying on grown men’s comings and goings,” Johnny’s father yelled from the roof. “The missus and I were both sleeping.”
“Is your wife at home, Mr. Miettinen?” Koivu asked. Johnny’s father pointed inside to the kitchen, and Koivu disappeared.
Johnny was standing so close to me that I could feel the tension radiating from his body. His sweaty skin smelled of brazen masculinity and the heat of the sun. Up close, I could see bruises on Johnny’s left side, and his left knee was also scraped. The men on the roof had stopped working, and I could feel their gazes on me, at once accusatory and fearful. A moment later, Koivu reappeared. Standing in the doorway, he said, “Miettinen, put some clothes on. We’re going down to the station to sort this out.”
Johnny first looked at me, then Koivu, then me again. I tried to look as if none of this was having any effect on me.
“Are you arresting me, Maria?”
“This isn’t an arrest,” Koivu said, his voice still cool, and I could almost believe he was enjoying the situation. “You’re just coming in to clarify your statement.”
Johnny went inside compliantly, asking Koivu for permission to shower as he went. I waited in the yard.
“Um…Is the boy mixed up in that artist’s death somehow?” Johnny’s father sounded confused. I didn’t know if he remembered that I used to be Johnny’s friend. As recently as Friday night.
“We just want to check a few things.” How normal my voice sounded surprised me. It was funny, because fifteen years earlier I had hated Johnny’s father, the man who thought his son should concentrate on his schoolwork instead of wasting his time playing in a band. He had approved of soccer at least. Their fights had been epic, at least the way Johnny told it, painting his dad as a regular domestic tyrant. I wondered what their relationship was like now, since his father clearly had no interest in providing Johnny with an alibi.
Johnny came out with his hair wet and slicked back. A blue shirt hung unbuttoned on his shoulders, but thankfully, his faded blue jeans were buttoned and buckled tight. I slipped behind the wheel, hoping that driving would give me a good excuse not to talk. Koivu sat in the back next to Johnny just to keep him uncomfortable.
I wondered whether Johnny’s distress the day before had been an act. I thought I knew him, and he had always been open with me almost to the point of transparency. But of course a thirty-four-year-old is different from a nineteen-year-old. All of our minds now had growth rings, making them harder to penetrate with each passing year.
We sat in silence all the way to the police station. Once there, we marched Johnny into my office. I ensconced myself behind my desk, and Koivu sat in the armchair next to it and asked Johnny to take a seat across from us on the sofa.
I took notes as Koivu began repeating Johnny’s first statement and noting conflicts with the testimony given by the other witnesses. When Koivu said that Tuija had testified that she had seen her husband in their yard, Johnny snorted.
“My soon-to-be-ex wife isn’t exactly an impartial witness! We almost got into a fistfight at the party on Friday.”
&n
bsp; “So you deny visiting your wife’s home the night of the death?”
“No…I was there. I was feeling kind of antsy after the party.” Johnny glanced at me, but when I stared back impassively, he bit his lip and continued. “And then I fell off my bike just after I dropped Maria off at her parents’ house. I bent the front wheel and had a helluva hard time riding it after that. I thought it would be easier to get a better bike at our house.”
“What are you talking about? It’s almost the same distance to your parents’ house as to your wife’s house. Of course, we can check on that bent bike wheel. But the people who saw you didn’t mention anything about a broken bicycle. You’re going to have to come up with a better story than that, Johnny.” I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. It was so obvious that Johnny was lying.
Koivu continued ladling out the questions. “You had a relationship with Meritta Flöjt. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Was that the reason for your marital troubles?”
I would have wanted to ask Johnny the same questions myself, but I never would have had the nerve.
“No.”
Koivu jumped to a new question before Johnny could reply with more than a single syllable. “Did you intend to marry Meritta Flöjt once your divorce was finalized?”
“We never talked about it. Do you think this is fun?” Johnny was addressing me again. When I didn’t answer, he jumped off the couch and walked right up to my desk.
“I did not kill Meritta. I didn’t see her at all after I left the Old Mine. What are you driving at here?”
“Why do you keep lying?” I said, throwing the words in his face and then pointedly staring at the damaged knuckles of his right hand squeezing the edge of my desk. If the bruises on his jaw and torso were on the left side, then why were the knuckles of his right hand split open? You would think he would have smashed his left hand if he really did fall off his bike.
“What I just told you is the truth.” Johnny backed away from me toward the sofa. “I could still ride the Jopo, just not very well. Maybe the people who saw me didn’t notice the bike was broken since I passed them going uphill, which is difficult even when not on a broken bike. But that Jopo is ready for the junk heap. Go and look. Be my guests! It’s probably still in Tuija’s yard.”
Johnny’s eyes flickered nervously between Koivu and me. I remembered Johnny hemming and hawing as he thanked me for my contribution to our soccer team, trying to hide his relief that he didn’t have to ask me to leave. Every word he had said just dug the hole deeper. And now it was happening again.
We didn’t have any reason to arrest Johnny. The fact that he had lied didn’t make him a murderer. But was he lying to protect himself or someone else?
Fifteen years ago, I often dreamed of helping Johnny get off the hook for something. The daydreams always went something like this: Johnny was the passive victim in distress, and I was the savior. I braved all sorts of dangers from lightning storms to assassins, and my reward, of course, was the handsome prince. My favorite fairy tales were always the ones where the girl saved the boy, like in The Snow Queen and Beauty and the Beast. I couldn’t imagine myself sitting on some glass mountain waiting for someone to save me or sleeping for a hundred years until a prince woke me with a kiss.
But if Johnny was a murderer, I wouldn’t be able to save him. And I wouldn’t want to.
“I guess that’s all for now, Miettinen. Of course, we’ll check on the bike. Someone will contact you to sign an affidavit based on your statement. It’s best you don’t leave the city without notifying us though. Do you need a ride home?”
“You mean I don’t get to see the inside of a cell?” Johnny said, pretending to be disappointed. He glanced at me as if he was going to say something, but then changed his mind and just left.
“I’m surprised his nose didn’t start growing, he was lying so much,” I said to Koivu before the door had even swung all the way shut. After I explained my doubts about Johnny’s pattern of bruising, we went over the events of Friday night again. When I told him my suspicions about Ella’s brooch, Koivu suggested that we check with the county lab to see whether they had found any fingerprints on it.
After hanging up the phone with the county lab, Koivu said, “At least three sets, one of them our vic’s. Flöjt’s fingerprint pattern indicates she only held it momentarily, possibly tearing it off. The other prints are more from fiddling with it, and one set probably belongs to a male.”
“Those could be Matti’s…We should figure out some excuse for getting his and Ella’s prints. Do you still have a lot to do? Do we have time to eat?”
“At the mine restaurant?” Koivu asked, grinning.
“Yeah, right. No, let’s go to the Copper Cup.”
At the restaurant, we were the only customers sitting on the grill side, which was no wonder, since the Wiener schnitzel they served was totally dry. The windows of the pub opened onto the main drag, which was devoid of traffic. As we were finishing our Sunday lunch, I saw Matti Virtanen enter the Copper Cup through the bar-side door.
I found him at the bar nursing a vodka tonic, his face red and swollen. Matti’s eyes were barely visible between his sausage-like eyelids. He looked as though he had been drinking for several days straight. Or crying. Or both. Replying listlessly to my greeting and obviously ashamed to be seen in such a state, he proceeded to explain that he didn’t usually drink in the middle of the day. “But I—I can’t even paint. Or sleep. Meritta…,” he said, his voice shaking and his hand trembling as he moved the glass to his lips, splashing some of the drink onto the table.
“Wouldn’t it be better to see a doctor? You’re a mess. They could give you something to calm you down.”
“I’m going to try this booze first. Have you found anything out?” Matti asked, noticing Koivu behind me, who had hung back to pay the bill.
“Nothing conclusive yet.” In his condition, nothing was going to come of asking him about the brooch. I dug a single midazolam out of my bag.
“This is really mild. Finish your drink, go home, and take this. Try to sleep. The drug should relax you.” I also handed him my compact mirror. “Look at yourself. You need sleep, not alcohol.”
For a moment, Matti stared at his image in my smeared mirror, then shook his head and promised to try. I grabbed the mirror and, instead of shoving it back in my bag, I fished out the plastic baggie that I usually used to store my eye shadow palette with the broken cover.
“Fingerprints,” I said as we walked back toward the station.
“And I thought you were just trying to be friendly.”
“Among other things.”
Detectives Antikainen and Järvi had come back from their break, which gave us a chance to review the interviews, which were increasingly peculiar. No one had seen Meritta after two a.m. No one had seen her leave the mine area, and no one had spoken to her after Kaisa left the party at around one thirty.
About thirty names remained on the list to be interviewed, and I promised to handle some of them myself. The afternoon didn’t yield much new information though. None of us found out anything more significant than that the handlebars of Johnny’s bike were indeed bent, but it was still rideable.
When I returned to the police station, Koivu was there, having just arranged a meeting with his boss and our detectives for nine thirty the following morning, at which point we would decide how to proceed with the investigation.
“I tried calling Anita too, but she slammed the phone in my ear,” Koivu said. “So I don’t really feel like going home.”
“Well, if you have to be back here in the morning anyway, why don’t you come to my place for the night? We can heat the sauna, and I still have half a bottle of Jack Daniels left. I don’t really feel like being alone either.”
“You talked me into it.”
Koivu lit the fire in the sauna stove while I fed Mikko, who seemed irritated with me. Before heading into the sauna, we decided to run of
f the pressure of the day, so Koivu borrowed a ludicrously small tracksuit from my uncle’s closet. Jogging with someone felt strange since I had always preferred running alone. Antti wasn’t much of a runner. He preferred to keep himself in shape by biking, chopping wood, and skiing during the winters when that was possible down south. I had always liked running precisely because the solitude and silence allowed me to think. That was why I usually didn’t even listen to music. Running with another person easily turned into a competition. You always had to run a little faster than normal and listen for when they started breathing more heavily.
With Koivu it wasn’t so bad though. We were pretty well matched in endurance events, and we both liked to start out slow and end sprinting. And Koivu knew how to keep his mouth shut. I figured he was thinking about Anita as we ran past the thickest stand of pine trees on my route, the Tower still peeking through in the background. Today it was dark and mysterious, as if mocking us for our inability to discover what had happened beneath its watchful eyes the night of Meritta’s death. My own head was full of Johnny, Matti, and Ella. And Kaisa Miettinen, who was the last person to see Meritta alive. I found myself wanting to interrogate her myself.
When we got back, the sauna was ready. After stretching, I started stripping off my sweaty clothes, but Koivu stood staring at the sky. Then, obviously a little embarrassed, he asked, “Um…Are we going in together?”
I hadn’t even considered another option since it would be idiotic to make one person sit outside all sticky with sweat while the other one squatted alone in the sauna. I guess I forgot we were the opposite sex.
“That’s what I was thinking. Should I get you a beer too?”
When I returned, Koivu had his clothes off and was hiding himself in the darkest corner of the sauna. We had been in a sauna together before, but always with other people. Out of courtesy, I made sure to look only at his face the whole time we were in the sauna, although I have to admit the situation amused me a little. I didn’t remember that I was four years older than Koivu very often, but it did cross my mind then. Mikko the cat perched on the lower bench, occasionally rubbing his head against Koivu’s hairy ankle.
Copper Heart Page 9
