“Yes.”
“Who was the e-mail originally intended for?”
“That person never received it and to this day doesn’t know that in their own way they were part of this chain of events. That’s all I’m going to say. The person who forwarded the e-mail to me would never hurt me or anyone else. And the original sender of the e-mail probably didn’t realize they set off this avalanche, or if they did, they were probably happy about it. They wanted Salo and Terävä to get caught.” Jutta leaned back on her pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was gray like ice formed on a puddle, and there were beads of sweat on her forehead. The nurse returned, looked at her patient, and then turned an imperious gaze on us.
“She has to rest. It’s time for you to leave.”
We complied, because I guessed the only way to get the information I wanted was to have this same conversation over and over again. A street sweeping machine was running through the parking lot outside the hospital, so we had to wait a couple of minutes to leave, but I didn’t bother turning on the lights or sirens.
“So our heroic journalist used some shady methods to get her information,” Koivu said as I turned onto the street, “considering reading a message intended for someone else is a criminal violation of privacy.”
“Yes, but we don’t know whether Jutta realized the message wasn’t meant for her. If the person who forwarded it added their own message, then she must have known. Call Ville and Ursula, and let’s head to Kauklahti. It’s Saturday, so we’ll just have to hope that at least some of Jutta’s neighbors are home. That’s where I’d rather be too.”
After a few blocks, I stopped at a red light. A family of beggars sat on the sidewalk, a mother and two children who looked too young for school. “We are hungry” read the cardboard sign leaning against a plastic box. The woman’s age was difficult to determine. She was very thin, with a scarf covering her hair and felt shoes on her feet. The children were seriously underdressed—although the fall day was sunny, the wind was biting. I didn’t have time to see if there was any money in the woman’s cup before the light changed.
“Those children shouldn’t be on the street, even if they don’t need to be in school yet,” Koivu said sternly. “I’m calling a patrol.”
“What will that help? Begging isn’t illegal per se. My guess is they’re from Romania or Hungary, and there the police aren’t always friendly. Calling social services would be better. Or . . . I don’t know. Should we turn back and intervene somehow? That isn’t a good spot anyway. Not enough people walk by there. Or has Helsinki been divided into begging turfs, and that corner belongs to that family?”
A few times I’d stopped to chat with the increasingly prevalent beggars in downtown Helsinki, although finding a common language was often difficult. Some of the Romanians spoke spotty Russian, and some knew a few words of German. Hardly any knew English. They rarely appreciated my inquiries. Occasionally I gave money out of pity, even though I knew that doing so propped up the begging system. I tried to forget the woman’s anguished gaze and the children’s frozen faces. Koivu called Puupponen to tell him we were headed to Kauklahti.
“Put together a flier with our contact information. If we can’t track down everyone who lives there, we can at least post it on the bulletin boards,” Koivu said into the phone, acting on his own initiative. Maybe simply placing a notice requesting the public’s assistance in the local paper would be enough, but I wanted to see with my own eyes the parking spot Jutta used so I could picture how and where the bomb might have been placed.
I’d visited the Kauklahti Housing Fair area a couple of times out of curiosity, and I remembered the apartment building Jutta lived in. The parking lot was relatively open, visible from the road and the neighboring building. However, the windows of Jutta’s apartment faced the other direction.
We started by interviewing the residents of Jutta’s building and then moving on to the other buildings nearby. People were inquisitive, and we often had to give more answers than we received. When Ursula and Puupponen joined us, we began to cover more ground. It was Saturday afternoon, so many families were cooking, and some were working outside, although the tiny yards probably didn’t require much upkeep. Jutta’s immediate neighbors did their best to recall anyone strange they might have recently seen in the area, but when we finished our interviews, we weren’t much wiser than when we started. One old man in the next stairwell over claimed he’d seen a man fiddling with the undercarriage of a car, but when I dug deeper, we established that the mysterious car mechanic had been at a single-family home on another street, one that the old man had walked along the morning before.
The housing area was large enough that the residents didn’t all know each other, and the neighborhood often had visitors coming to gawk at the houses they’d seen in magazines and to tour the ones that hadn’t sold yet. Jutta’s building had a sparse, chic style, with commercial space on the first floor. She’d moved to Kauklahti immediately after the housing fair, a month before the car accident. The change of address had been a relief, because she’d still been receiving hate mail at her old apartment.
“Are there any security cameras around here?” Puupponen asked. We were sitting at a picnic table in the courtyard between the apartment buildings, going through the information we’d gleaned so far.
“Not in the parking lot, but there should be cameras that cover the entrances and the street, since now they automatically set those up in all new housing projects. Check with the building manager and then maybe ask Lehtovuori to go through the tape. At least that will tell us who was in the area before the bombing. My guess is that the bomb was placed at most one day before the explosion. Koivu and I didn’t learn a damn thing. Did you have any better luck?”
Ursula shrugged. “I think these days you could sink a hatchet into someone’s head without the neighbors intervening. No matter how close people say they are, tragedies always seem to be a surprise.” We posted Puupponen’s flier on a few bulletin boards and then left, all of us in low spirits. Because no more progress was going to be made that night, I thought I’d just drop by the station briefly and then head home. Ursula must have turned on her sirens and sped back, because she and Puupponen were already sitting in the conference room when Koivu and I arrived. Puupponen was typing furiously at his computer.
“I have Särkikoski’s phone records. Your number is listed,” he said. “What conclusions should I draw from that?”
“Don’t even start with me.” I marched into my office and closed the door. I would take a moment to collect myself and then call Merja Vainikainen and arrange a meeting. Then it would be time to go home and heat the sauna. I could come back to the station if the results of the forensic analysis demanded it.
Puupponen burst into my office before I could make the call. His face was flushed.
“Maria, I think we got a hit! I went through the death threats Särkikoski received right before Pentti Vainikainen’s death. There are a couple of calls from burner phones, and we can’t trace them because they aren’t from numbers connected to any previous cases. Then there was one number I was able to trace. It belongs to a phone registered to an eight-year-old named Olivia Kämäräinen from a village named Vahto, north of Turku.”
“Why would an eight-year-old threaten Jutta?”
“I doubt she did. But guess who her grandfather is? None other than Ilpo Koskelo, Toni Väärä’s trainer. Should I have the Turku police pick him up?”
14
Puupponen had certainly found something interesting in Jutta’s phone logs from the past week. The timing of the call from Olivia Kämäräinen’s number matched with the timing of the threat Jutta had received. According to Jutta, that particular call hadn’t been a direct threat to kill her, just a prediction that she might have another accident if she meddled with things that were none of her business. Jutta had noted that the caller seemed to be a man trying to alter his voice, and that there were sounds of traffic in the background.
I looked up Ilpo Koskelo’s number and called him.
Koskelo answered immediately.
“Hello, this is Detective Lieutenant Maria Kallio. I’d like to talk to you—”
“I’m glad you called! I’m here outside the boy’s apartment. He didn’t come to the gym for circuit training today, and his parents don’t know where he is. I don’t think he’s home either. At least, he won’t come to the door. He isn’t answering his phone, and I haven’t heard a word from him since we split up outside the Espoo police station. I’m really worried. Should I ask the super to open his door?”
Ilpo Koskelo sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. It felt like an eternity since we’d sat face-to-face in this same room, but it was only yesterday. Puupponen had tried in vain to reach Väärä too, but we hadn’t worried too much about the young man not returning our calls. But according to Koskelo, missing practice was very out of character for Väärä.
“The boy’s very diligent about training. He always shows up. Something must have happened.”
“Then yes, it’s a good idea to get in touch with the building superintendent. Call me back when you’re in his apartment. I was thinking about coming for a visit anyway.”
“To Turku? Today?”
“First let’s see if we can track down Toni Väärä. Stay in touch.”
When I hung up the phone, Puupponen stared at me, dumbfounded. The fervor in his face had dimmed.
“You didn’t say anything to him!”
“Toni Väärä is missing. He didn’t show up to practice. Koskelo was out of his mind with worry.”
“But we only have his word that Väärä stayed in Helsinki and Koskelo went to Turku alone. Koskelo was seen on the train, but Väärä could have snuck off anywhere. What if they’re working together, and Koskelo arranged for Väärä to leave the country? Didn’t you and Koivu say that Koskelo would be willing to do anything for Väärä?”
“That is the impression we got. But why would Koskelo and Väärä team up to kill Jutta?” Different scenarios ran through my head, each more ridiculous than the last. Covering up Väärä’s doping was the obvious motive, but he’d been hurt in the car accident too. Maybe when Jutta had gone to Turku to interview Toni Väärä, she’d seen or heard something with a significance greater than she realized. Were Väärä and Koskelo up to something we couldn’t even imagine? Were they in a relationship? Koskelo was a married man, but that commitment had failed to stop plenty of people before. Admittedly, that idea seemed pretty far-fetched.
I went back to the conference room with a confused Puupponen in tow.
“You probably already heard Ville’s discovery about the phone number. I called Koskelo—”
“Did he confess?” Ursula asked, interrupting.
“I didn’t have a chance to ask about the death threat because he was too preoccupied. Toni Väärä is missing. Ursula, check with the airlines and ferries to see if Väärä left the country yesterday or today. Koivu, you call the hospitals, and Puupponen, you check the jails. Let’s assume that Väärä is still in the Helsinki area. Koskelo is calling Väärä’s building super to get into his apartment.”
“Does this mean Väärä’s our perp?” Koivu asked, sounding startled, but then he got to work on his phone. My heart beat faster than normal, and I expected my phone to ring any second with Koskelo’s number on the display. What if Väärä blamed Jutta for his injury and wanted revenge? He claimed he didn’t remember anything about the accident, but that could be a lie.
Ursula had headphones in, and Puupponen moved into my office to talk because he couldn’t hear over Koivu’s and Ursula’s chatter. Should I have issued travel bans for Toni Väärä and the other suspects from the beginning? It’d be crazy to start an international manhunt for Väärä without solid evidence. And there was still the possibility that Ilpo Koskelo was lying. He’d managed to conceal at least one threatening phone call.
My colleagues’ voices rolled over me in a steady stream in which it was impossible to make out individual words. I was tired, and I felt as if I’d received so much information in the past few days that my head was going to explode. Four days had passed since the poisoning, and the bomb had exploded at the Sports Building yesterday. I realized that I hadn’t heard from Detective Perävaara since our press conference. They were probably pulling long days in Helsinki too.
“He isn’t and hasn’t been in police custody anywhere in Helsinki, Espoo, or Vantaa.” Puupponen had finished his task first. “Should I put out an APB? Väärä is famous enough that a lot of sports-loving cops will recognize him without a picture.”
“I don’t think an arrest warrant is necessary yet, but spread the word that we want to know if anyone sees him. The fact that he’s missing doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything. And let’s see what we find out about his apartment.”
We could drive to Turku in two hours, and a train would take an hour and forty-five minutes. The thought of the steady, calming rhythm of a train was appealing. I could have more than three hours alone with my thoughts. But if I went today, I’d have to stay overnight in Turku. That would mean getting a hotel room. Since I had an unlimited budget, Taskinen wouldn’t mind if I booked a suite at the Marina Palace. But what would I do there alone, without my kids? Should I send someone else to handle it? Ursula?
We didn’t hear anything from Koskelo; it seemed to be taking forever for the building superintendent to arrive at Toni Väärä’s apartment. While we waited, Koivu established that no one matching Väärä’s description had been admitted to any of the hospitals in the metro area. Checking whether he’d left the country was more difficult, and Ursula cursed between each phone call. Koskelo finally called back after forty minutes.
“That took a while, and now I don’t know whether to be relieved or more worried. There’s no sign of the boy in his apartment. The morning paper and a stack of junk mail were on the floor under the mail slot, so he probably didn’t return to Turku yesterday. Can’t the police track a missing person using their cell phone? If you can, for God’s sake, do it now.”
There was pleading in Koskelo’s voice, but all I could tell him was that the situation didn’t warrant such dramatic action yet.
“The boy’s parents promised to call me if he shows up there. I never should have let him stay in Helsinki alone. Who knows where he could be now. His parents said they’d ask their church members in the area, since he knows a lot of them from summer revivals. Maybe he ran into one of them. Kids like that can lose track of time—”
I interrupted Koskelo’s agitated monologue. I said that I would take the morning train, which would leave Espoo at 9:21 and arrive in Turku at 11:00. Koskelo told me that he and Väärä were supposed to meet at the track in Kupittaa from ten to twelve. I said we would meet there, and Koskelo promised to wait for me even if Väärä didn’t show up. I asked him to notify me immediately if he heard anything regarding his protégé.
After I hung up with Koskelo, Detective Perävaara finally called on his way home for a sauna. The bomb technicians had determined that the explosive had been placed under Jutta’s car near the front, and the evidence still pointed to TATP.
According to the technicians, at least part of the explosive had gotten wet and failed to go off, so the bystanders had been lucky. More people could have been killed.
“Remember to get some sleep too, Kallio. I asked a patrol car to give me a ride home. I’m so tired I don’t dare get behind the wheel. Until tomorrow!”
When I passed along the latest about the bomb, Ursula nearly exploded herself.
“That bitch is hiding something from us! She must have stepped on some big toes for anyone to go to so much effort to try to kill her. Is she working on a report about drugs or arms trafficking that she hasn’t told us about? She’s making fools of us. Just think what a great marketing stunt it would be. ‘Two people died but I just kept courageously digging . . .’ We need to search her apartment, impound her computer an
d all her disks and memory sticks. We could get a warrant by tomorrow, couldn’t we?”
Ursula’s fury only grew when I said that instead of searching Jutta’s apartment, I was going to meet Koskelo in Turku the next day. Because everyone had their hands full, I would take Koskelo with me either to the local police station or bring him back here to Espoo if an official interview was necessary.
“That bastard threatened Särkikoski!” Puupponen was stunned. “You make me go through all those Goddamn phone numbers, and then suddenly none of it matters. Why, Maria?”
I didn’t have the energy to explain. Of course the information Puupponen had found was valuable. And Ursula’s insistence that we execute a search warrant on Jutta Särkikoski’s apartment was reasonable. But I still had the feeling that this tangled web was even more complicated than we thought, and I couldn’t quite shake the paranoid idea that Jutta was the killer, not the intended victim.
None of us left the police station feeling very triumphant. The evening sky was clear, and I walked home under a moon that was nearly full. It was the autumnal equinox, and the hours of darkness would only increase. Every year, that seemed to affect my mood more. The mild, mostly black winters of southern Finland were far from the frozen paradise of my youth in Arpikylä, with ski outings through glittering white fields and the blaring music at the skating rink, which called me alternately to play ice princess or throw on my dad’s old hockey skates and join a game as if I was one of the boys. Even though Arpikylä had a couple more hours of darkness than Espoo, the winters in my memory were full of light reflected from snowbanks at every hour of the day. For Iida and Taneli it was a rare treat to skate on an outdoor rink like their mother did as a child. The artificial ice built in Arpikylä in the early eighties had seemed like a great miracle, but nowadays even there they had an indoor facility.
It smelled good at home. Antti was emptying the dishwasher. Taneli was building a skating monster out of Legos, and Iida was reading a collection of scary stories, wide-eyed on the couch in her room. Venjamin was curled up on her lap, and she had a half-eaten pulla roll next to her.
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