Honkanen answered immediately, and Koskinen sighed with relief. At least he hadn’t been sleeping. Koskinen introduced himself and received a faltering answer: “From the Violent Crimes Unit? What’s happened?’
“Nothing,” Koskinen said. “I was just calling.”
“Just calling?” Honkanen repeated with a slight irritation in his voice.
Koskinen also realized how unusual his call was coming at this time of day, and for a moment he had to think about what he was really trying to achieve. An impatient cough came from the receiver, and he started explaining the reason for his call. He wanted to ask Honkanen’s opinion about the psychological changes after becoming paralyzed. It was related to a case, and unfortunately he couldn’t give any details to an outsider—as a former police officer, Honkanen would surely understand that.
For a while, it was quiet, and Koskinen feared that Honkanen would hang up. And he wouldn’t have blamed him.
However, he received exactly the opposite attitude. “C’mon over! It’s better to talk face-to-face than over the phone.”
Koskinen was surprised by Honkanen’s friendly invitation.
“It’s already late though.”
“All the better,” Honkanen said, laughing. “My family’s already asleep.”
“Aren’t you on your way to bed already?”
“No. Late at night is the most effective time of the day for me. I get to work without any distractions. And besides, five hours of sleep is enough for me.”
“Well, I guess I’ll stop by then.”
Honkanen told him the address. Koskinen scribbled it in his notebook. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He called a taxi to pick him up in front of the station, and was kicking himself the whole way there for not having his bike with him. Hallila was a residential neighborhood built in the middle of the woods, just big enough to keep one beer pub alive, and it was located nicely along the bike route between downtown and Hervanta.
The taxi left him in front of a white single-family house. Right from the front gate it was obvious that the house had been built with its resident in mind. The grass in the yard was as level as a pool table and a seamlessly laid flagstone path rose almost unnoticeably gently to the front door.
The door opened before Koskinen was able to touch the doorbell. Honkanen sat in the entryway waiting.
“I guessed it was you. This is such a quiet area that we don’t get many diesel Benzes at this time of night.”
He backed up his wheelchair out of Koskinen’s way and looked at him searchingly.
“Yeah, I remember you now. Your beard has grayed a bit, and maybe your hair is a little thinner. You haven’t put on any weight though.”
“Thanks,” Koskinen said, smiling with satisfaction and looking around. The first thing that hit him was how open the house was. The doorways were wide, there was a generous amount of space between the furniture, and there were no thresholds anywhere. Even the light switches were positioned lower than usual.
“Sit down and make yourself at home,” Honkanen said, grinning widely, “I’m already sitting.”
Koskinen chose a plush armchair. Honkanen rolled opposite him, leaving a low, pine coffee table between them. On the table was a portable CD player, headphones, and about a dozen albums in two stacks, with Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan on top.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Thank you, no,” Koskinen said, raising his hand. “I’m just passing through.”
Honkanen still looked strong; his shoulders were broad and his arms muscular. His blond crew cut fit his facial features well. They were narrow but still solid. He wore a sweat suit and looked relaxed in his wheelchair.
“You had something you wanted to talk about?”
“Yeah,” Koskinen twiddled his thumbs. “I just wanted to ask about a couple of things.”
Honkanen noticed Koskinen’s uneasiness. “I know that you can’t talk about your investigation. I graduated from the police academy too, you know.”
“Well, in this case I might be able to reveal a little more of the confidential stuff.”
“No need.” Honkanen flashed his wide smile again. “I read the papers. I doubt I’m too far off in guessing that what you have to ask is about the two homicides this week.”
“You’re not far off.”
Honkanen’s smile faded. “The news shocked the whole disabled community. If you were sitting in a contraption like this, you’d understand how it feels when you can’t properly defend yourself or run away from an attacker.”
He looked at Koskinen pointedly.
“Your question is something along those lines, isn’t it?”
Koskinen nodded. “More or less.” He tried to construct his next words delicately. “Can a disabled person be so difficult and offensive to another so the…second person…just gets utterly fed up?”
“Yes,” Honkanen replied vigorously. “You don’t have to be shy about your questions.”
He rubbed his thighs thoughtfully and then started to talk again in a relaxed manner. “To tell the truth, I’m a little amazed now in hindsight that no one ever punched me in the face. I was a real shithead.”
Over the next few minutes, Honkanen told his own story. He didn’t remember anything of the shooting. His first memory after it happened was waking up in the hospital. He had sensed immediately what was wrong. But still he wanted to hear the truth from the mouth of an expert, directly and without embellishment. The sympathetic and friendly doctor had told him that he was paralyzed from the ribs down with no hope of recovery—the bullet had damaged his spine too severely. The doctor had been hit in the face by the first thing that Honkanen was able to reach on the nightstand. Luckily it had only been a water cup.
His bitterness hadn’t eased up after leaving the hospital. Honkanen had spent months in rehab and been a complete nightmare for his therapists and nurses. He grumbled about everything, and even the smallest errors had him calling his nurses whores and bitches. The most peculiar thing about his reaction had been that his bitterness wasn’t directed at the shooter, but at everyone close to him, his friends and relatives, who lacked any culpability for his situation. There had been times when he had despised everything around him that could move.
Honkanen ended his story with a sigh. “There’s the answer to your question.”
But then he continued again before Koskinen could say anything. “Of course, I was an extreme exception. The majority of handicapped people treat the people close to them with even greater friendship and love than so-called healthy people. But there are ones like me. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone lost it with a shithead like that.”
“But still.” Koskinen shook his head. “These nurses are trained for their line of work. Aren’t they taught to treat their clients with long-suffering and understanding?”
“Of course,” Honkanen answered quickly. “Ninety-nine and a half percent probably get along even with the most difficult cases. But as you know, that one-half of one percent left over can be found in any profession. Even priests or policemen.”
Koskinen nodded and then looked at the paintings hanging on the walls as he thought. They were all tastefully chosen and all followed the same color scheme. Even with just a minimal knowledge of art he was able to pick out one watercolor from Raimo Kanerva and two winterscapes by Juhani Palmu.
Nothing in the room recalled Honkanen’s short career with the police. Koskinen didn’t even see the Police Cross of Merit he had been awarded after the shooting. He suddenly turned his head and looked at Honkanen searchingly.
“But how did you get over the bitterness?”
“I had better than average luck. Five years ago I met Katariina at a rehab center. She got ran over by a drunk driver on a bike path, and she had just as much reason to be bitter as I did.”
Honkanen stared at the floor with an absent expression.
“I whined to Katariina about everything just like I was doi
ng to everyone else around me. But Katariina wasn’t fazed by it. On the contrary, she was just as nasty back, but with a smile on her face the whole time. Then we just sort of clicked. We went and fell in love like in some French tearjerker. And now we’ve been married for almost four years. And we have a baby, almost a year old.”
“A baby?” Koskinen said in surprise. “I had understood that you were paralyzed from the ribs down.”
“As indeed I am,” Honkanen grinned happily. “They know how to do all sorts of things these days.”
Koskinen sat and thought. The Fallen Angels hadn’t had any similar strokes of luck. Maybe Pirkko-Liisa Rinne could have turned into that for one of them, but Timonen, Ketterä, and Harjus hadn’t been able to agree who deserved the good fortune.
He swept his eyes around the room again. The building materials and interior design all looked high quality and obviously cost a pretty penny. Even the fireplace was built out of patterned soapstone.
“What are you doing these days?”
Obviously Honkanen had guessed from his guest’s wandering gaze what had prompted this question.
“I get full retirement benefits from the state,” he said with a laugh. “But no, that wouldn’t have been enough to build this even if I spent thirty years filling my mattress.”
He raised his forefinger in a number one. “I have a one-man IT company. I do consulting for various businesses all over the world. I make pretty good money at it, and it’s a good setup in that I can work right here from home.”
Honkanen looked around as well and smiled with satisfaction. “All in all I have to say that things are going pretty damn well for me these days.”
He glanced at his watch. “Have I been any help?”
“Hard to say,” Koskinen said, drawing out his words. “As I’m sure you know, little pieces like this sometimes don’t fall into place until later in some other context. Then they can turn out to be worth their weight in…”
Koskinen’s sentence trailed off. One of the doors on the far end of the large room opened and a blond woman with a beautiful face appeared. She looked in confusion at the strange man sitting in her living room. Honkanen waved at her reassuringly, and a shy smile appeared on her round face. The bright ceiling light revealed the soft shapes of her body through her nightshirt, and Koskinen only got his eyes under control once she had disappeared with her wheelchair through the bathroom door.
Koskinen stood up and knocked Honkanen on the shoulders lightly with his fist. “My friend, things really are going well for you.”
Honkanen rolled after him into the entryway.
“Should I call you a taxi?”
“No need. I can walk.”
“Where to?”
“Hervanta. Doesn’t take more than half an hour from here.”
“With those legs hardly even that long.”
Koskinen was already out the door when Honkanen yelled after him. “Stop by again sometime!”
“I just might do that.”
The most direct route from Hallila to Hervanta went through a dense, pitch-black stretch of spruce forest. Koskinen couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. He had to walk feeling his way with his feet to stay on the narrow, winding dirt road.
Suddenly he felt like he had been wandering in the same darkness the whole day. He was lost in a dreary forest. Someone was calling out to tell him the right way, but he was still walking in exactly the opposite direction.
The same insistent feeling kept going around in his head. During the day something had slipped past his ears that he should have grabbed hold of immediately. Maybe he had heard it as part of some other, insignificant, off-hand remark. But still it would have solved so much. If he had only been more alert and understood its significance.
The feeling was unbearable. As if someone had been knocking him on the head constantly, repeating, “Hello in there? Don’t you understand what’s going on?”
20.
On Saturday morning Koskinen felt tired. He had slept lightly, tossing and turning all night. His subconscious had been waiting for the phone to ring and the report that a male corpse had just been found.
He put some water on to boil for tea, took a quick shower, and then called Riipinen, who was still on duty. Riipinen’s voice was raspy from being up all night, and occasionally Koskinen heard the hiss of his inhaler. Nothing significant had happened last night, and there had been no sign of Ketterä.
Koskinen glanced out the window. The sky was gray, and there was a thick layer of fog hanging over Lake Ahvenisjärvi. Still he decided to bike to work. The weather was cold and a strong wind nipped at his cheeks and tried to force its way through every opening in his windbreaker. He sped up, and little by little his muscles warmed up.
His conditioning was exactly at the level he had been aiming at. Nevertheless, he had decided to skip tomorrow’s race. They were tracking an extremely dangerous criminal—it would not look good if the head of the investigation was wasting his morning prancing around the woods.
It was just twenty past seven when he pedaled up the steep slope of Sorin Street and turned into the police station parking lot. Two patrol officers in blue field coveralls were standing outside the doors having a smoke. Koskinen hadn’t even managed to say hello before they were talking about the Pirkka Trail Run and making bets about what his time would be. One of them called him the Haile Gebrselassie of Hervanta and asked if he’d started carbing up yet.
Standing there, Koskinen reversed the decision he had just made—it was too late to back out. And there wasn’t a murderer alive heinous enough that could justify him pulling out.
He loped up the stairs to the third floor, wondering to himself whether there was anyone in the building who didn’t know about the race and his bet. Luckily, he didn’t see anyone and made it into his office to change clothes. The morning had been chilly enough that the ride hadn’t even left his forehead sweaty.
He had just managed to pull his pants up when a short knock came from the door, and Ulla walked in. Koskinen was delighted to see her.
“Morning. You’re up early.”
Ulla didn’t respond and sat down in one of the chairs. Her face showed that she still hadn’t gotten over her foul mood, although she did acquiesce to explaining why she had come in so early: “Pekki asked me to come in early. He wanted me to join in on the interrogation of Adolf Kantola’s attackers.”
“And you’re already done?”
“Why not?” Ulla asked haughtily. “They came down on the overnight train from up north. It got here before six, and Pekki wanted to do preliminary interviews right away. I was here at six thirty, and we talked to each of them separately for ten minutes.”
Koskinen closed his closet and sat down behind his desk across from Ulla. “And the kids?”
“The kids? What kids?”
“Yours of course.”
“What about them?”
“Who’s watching them since you had to leave so early?”
“Kristian,” Ulla looked at Koskinen, perplexed. “He got back from his show at five thirty, so he got the pleasure of cooking his little darlings their morning porridge.”
Koskinen wondered what was wrong with himself—the night before he had found his thoughts wandering in strange paths. Ulla’s private life wasn’t any of his business, not even a little bit. He quickly returned to the previous topic. “Did you get anything out of the two of them?”
“The boy denied everything, but the girl broke in three minutes flat. Pekki is an animal. He scares the shit out of people with that rasp of his. I’m sure the boy will talk too once he hears his girlfriend already spilled everything.”
“So what did the girl say?”
“She admitted to four separate burglaries, all houses on the west side”
“What did they do with their loot?”
“Traded for drugs.”
Koskinen sighed. “I should’ve guessed. Riitta Makkonen’s picture of her son was too rosy.”
“Apparently Mika wasn’t using. That was why Nina and Petri chose him as their runner in the first place.”
“So they were taking advantage of their shy, skittish friend,” Koskinen said bitterly. “They’re never going to be tried for Mika’s death, but they’re still indirectly to blame.”
He noticed Ulla’s surprised expression and realized what an overstatement that accusation had been. He quickly moved on to another topic.
“What did the girl say about the Kantola job?”
“It was supposed to be a cakewalk. They knew how sick the old man was and didn’t think he’d wake up even if they started rummaging around right under his bed.” Ulla leaned back in her chair, pausing as she thought. Then she shook her head. “But they were wrong. Kantola was in so much pain that he couldn’t sleep at all. He showed up in the yard in the middle of everything. Apparently Petri was so startled that he whacked him over the head with the first thing he grabbed. It happened to be a raven sculpture, which ended up being the only thing they got that night.”
“No wonder we didn’t find the weapon.”
“She also said that Mika had no part in what happened that night in Kantola’s yard.”
“Of course he didn’t. He was lying in the ICU.”
“Stop interrupting!” Ulla snapped. “What Nina meant was that Mika had talked them out of doing the job.”
Riitta Makkonen needs to hear that, Koskinen thought. This news would surely warm the grieving mother’s heart and bring some light into her life, if only for a moment.
“But Nina and Petri still went ahead with it,” Ulla continued. “Apparently they were so traumatized by Mika’s accident that they needed a quick fix to calm their troubled souls.”
Then, in true Ulla fashion, she jumped to a completely different topic: “How did last night go?”
“Last night?” Koskinen said, surprised. “Haven’t you heard that one of the Fallen Angels is missing?”
“Of course! Pekki already told me. I was asking about how your evening went.”
Wolves and Angels Page 23
