Wolves and Angels

by Jokinen, Seppo

  Koskinen realized that Ulla meant his dinner with Ursula Katajisto. Uneasy, he shifted some things around on his desk before answering, “That’s going nowhere.”

  Ulla’s eyebrows went up inquiringly.

  “She started psychoanalyzing me. Is that supposed to be romantic? First date and you get to hear what a jerk you are.”

  Ulla burst out laughing. Koskinen had always liked her gentle laugh, and now it was even more bubbly than normal. Still, he was surprised by it. Just a second before she had obviously been fuming, and now she was chortling cheerfully. And the laugh didn’t even sound malicious.

  Ulla stood up and then perched on the corner of Koskinen’s desk, wiping her eyes.

  “And so you arranged a second date, right?”

  Koskinen pursed his lips. “No, it’s just not going to work out.”

  “You never know.”

  “I do.”

  Ulla was wearing a hooded pullover and black jeans. She had tied her thick, blond hair in a quick braid, and her bright blue eyes were shining with tears from having just been laughing. She picked up a pen from the desk and started drawing in Koskinen’s notebook. A small, square house appeared on it.

  “Luckily my mother-in-law is coming to visit today,” she said as she drew. “She’s promised to watch the kids while her dear golden boy goes off to earn his bread on stages all over the country. I can work overtime both nights if I need to.”

  “That’s good,” Koskinen said. “Looks like we have plenty to do.”

  He was still confused by her sudden change of mood. He had never understood the workings of the feminine mind. Now less than ever.

  However, he didn’t have time to stop and think about that now. It was five minutes to eight, and they had a meeting to attend.

  It turned out to be a short one. Pekki stalked around the flip chart, smearing more of the marker on his hands than the paper. He made a quick summary of the Timonen and Salmi murder investigations. They were still spinning their wheels, so he didn’t have much to say. He moved to Ketterä’s disappearance and reported the detention of the taxi driver, Ilmari Laine.

  Tanse attended the meeting, but never opened his mouth. Koskinen did notice him shaking his head unhappily from time to time.

  They were done before nine. Koskinen would visit Ketterä’s parents. Eskola would question the taxi driver, and Kaatio would canvas the area on Sotkan Street where Ketterä had last been seen. They agreed that Ulla would go with Kaatio and interview Ketterä’s physiotherapist. Given she had been working with Ketterä’s rehab for over a year, she had to know something more about him than the condition of his muscles.

  Pekki would take the rest of the group to Wolf House to squeeze out every possible piece of information about Ketterä and his potential whereabouts. Mäkitalo from Forensics would go with them to go over Ketterä’s room with a fine-toothed comb. Koskinen gave the group one last instruction: no Wolf House resident was to leave the building without a police escort.

  Koskinen was the first to leave as the meeting broke. Tanse followed and tugged him by the sleeve. “Hold up a second, Sakari.”

  Koskinen turned and looked at his boss inquiringly. Tanse waited until the others were out of earshot. “About arresting Laine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do we have grounds for it? Is there enough evidence against him?”

  “Y-yes…” Koskinen muttered. “Yes, that’s what we came to.”

  “We?” Tanse pushed his face closer to Koskinen. “You are the lieutenant and you make the big decisions. You, alone, on your authority. There can’t be any ‘we’ team spirit stuff influencing that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Koskinen replied impatiently. “I was planning on releasing him if we don’t come up with anything today.”

  He was already turning to leave, but Tanse cleared his throat. “I have something else too.”

  “Well?”

  Tanse sized up his subordinate, who had six inches on him, for a moment before continuing. “I hear you bike to work.”

  Koskinen wasn’t sure where Tanse was headed with this. “Yes, I do,” he said hesitantly. “It’s a good way to combine commuting and exercise.”

  “I heard you’ve been doing some police business with your bike as well.”

  “If the trip isn’t long, it’s just as fast as a car, and quicker than walking.”

  Tanse shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t look good. Not good at all.”

  “What?”

  “I’d think you would understand. It isn’t hard to imagine what kind of an impression the public gets from seeing a detective lieutenant riding around on a bike in his tracksuit.”

  Koskinen was so taken off guard that he couldn’t find the words to reply.

  “Don’t you have your own car anymore?”

  “Well, I do have my old beater Volvo, but I gave it to my son since he has a longer commute.”

  “To where?”

  “Rahola.”

  Koskinen was sure that Tanse knew about Tomi’s non-military service. It seemed like everyone did. Tanse didn’t say anything, but his body language said everything. He straightened his tie with a brisk motion, and his voice remained tense. “You’re the first lieutenant in this building who doesn’t have a car. And I’ve been here since the Stone Age.”

  Tanse turned and walked away. Koskinen watched him go, confused and unable to unravel where the line between seriousness and humor ran in this situation. In any case, the mention of the biking lieutenant started to eat at him. Given that they were in the middle of a double murder investigation, it all seemed a bit pedantic. He recalled the old story of the fire chief who reamed out a group of young volunteer firemen for extinguishing a blaze without filling out the proper paperwork first.

  He walked up the stairs in a bad mood and turned into the hallway toward his office. He saw a flash of the familiar antenna and was surprised for a moment that it didn’t set him off. On the contrary, he found that his previous irritation immediately turned to good mood, just like Ulla a while ago.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked. “Today is Saturday.”

  Milla, who was two heads shorter than Koskinen, bent her neck back and said, seriously, “I heard everyone talking yesterday about how they’d be working overtime because of these wheelchair killings. That’s why.”

  Koskinen was amused by the round-headed girl’s bustling energy, and she could be helpful too. If nothing else, she could watch the phones and keep everyone connected. Someone should know where everyone was.

  “Well, let’s get to work then,” Koskinen said, continuing toward his office.

  “This is a freakin’ awesome job by the way. Bosses other places don’t give their employees flowers,” he heard from behind him.

  Pekki’s office was close to the secretary’s cubicle. His door was open, and he must have overheard the conversation in the hallway, because he rushed after Koskinen. He closed Koskinen’s office door behind him and started whispering with his neck hunched down.

  “So you brought her those roses?”

  “Yeah,” Koskinen said, smirking. “They were on sale at Prisma and—”

  Pekki didn’t let him finish. “What the hell! You don’t have something going with her, do you?”

  Now Koskinen understood what Pekki was getting at. He swatted at the air and laughed. “Not a chance.”

  This failed to calm Pekki down. He tap-danced around the floor, and his voice grew even more raspy. Soon it was difficult to make out what he was saying at all. “No one will be laughing if they find out. Just think of the headline: Pedophile Police Lieutenant. That wouldn’t look too good, would it?”

  Koskinen was truly amused at Pekki’s complete misapprehension. On the other hand, he was pleased by his colleague’s genuine concern. A friend in need.

  He decided to explain the real purpose of the flowers, but Pekki still wouldn’t give him a chance. “I happen to know one who’d be perfect for you.”
<
br />   “Perfect? One what?”

  Pekki stepped over right in front of Koskinen with the ambiguous expression of a conspirator flashing behind his eyeglasses.

  “Her name is Laila, and she’s a perfect match for you. She doesn’t care much for dancing either. She likes firemen but digs policemen even more.”

  Pekki raised his hand in front of Koskinen’s face and wagged his finger at him in warning. “I know Laila well enough to say that she’s perfectly nice, but whatever you do, don’t start calling her ‘baby’ right away. You can do anything else, but just don’t call her ‘baby’. She doesn’t like it.”

  Koskinen looked at Pekki, his mouth agape. He had lost count of how many people had tried to set him up just in the last week.

  The desk phone started ringing. Koskinen shooed Pekki out of the room and picked up the receiver.

  “Good morning, this is Lea Kalenius from Wolf House.”

  “Morning,” Koskinen replied. He would have recognized her just from her voice. It was just as troubled and anxious as the previous day.

  “I don’t know if this is important, but I decided to call anyway.”

  “It’s always good to call us, just in case,” Koskinen said. “At this point in the investigation, any information could turn out to be important, even the smallest, most insignificant-seeming detail.”

  He heard her sigh in relief. “You asked who has keys to the building.”

  “Yes,” Koskinen said, perking up.

  “I completely forgot something.”

  Koskinen shifted the handset from one ear to the other, waiting on the edge of his seat for what was coming.

  “Last summer we had a temporary employee named Pirkko-Liisa Rinne.”

  “I know,” Koskinen said, interrupting. “Pike.”

  A surprised intake of breath came from the telephone. “I just remembered last night that Pike lost one of the master keys in July, and we never found it.”

  21.

  After a long minute of dithering, Kuparinen had given Koskinen one of the department’s newest unmarked cars. It was a two-liter Opel Vectra, and Koskinen only needed to apply a little pressure on the gas to get it up to 85 mph on the Nokia Expressway.

  Lea Kalenius’ phone call was still bothering him, and he eased off the accelerator. Koskinen had asked Pekki to send some uniforms to handle it, and now he was wondering whether he should have gone himself. But they all had their hands full, and the patrol guys usually had enough free time during the day for pickup jobs. They would bring Pirkko-Liisa Rinne downtown. Koskinen would interview her as soon as he got back from Nokia.

  The house was on Koto Street. The otherwise idyllic setting was spoiled by an ugly, dirty-brown grain silo. Koskinen estimated the height of the edifice at 120 feet. It stood at the head of the street like any other concrete monstrosity, leering at anything that moved in the vicinity.

  Koskinen parked his car next to a low trimmed hawthorn hedge and walked into the yard. Three steps led up to the door. One of the railings had been removed and the ends of the sawed-off steel rods were still visible in the concrete. It had been replaced by a ramp built out of pressure-treated wood. It wasn’t hard to guess for whom it had been constructed.

  The doorbell was the old twisting kind, and even the sound it made was worn out. A minute passed, and Koskinen rang again. No one came to the door. He started cursing himself. He should have called Ketterä’s parents and made sure they were at home. He had plenty of work to do and places to be.

  He started walking toward his car, but then stopped after he heard a whistle somewhere. He turned and saw a man standing behind the wood fence surrounding the property.

  “You’re looking for the Ketteräs?” the man asked, placing a cigarette between his lips.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Koskinen walked toward the fence. Thank God for nosy neighbors! Sometimes they turned out to be worth their weight in gold when it came to police work.

  “They ain’t home,” he said and lit his cigarette with deliberately slow movements. He had a pudgy face and, despite it being the end of September, he was wearing just a holey undershirt and overalls, with a fat beer belly underneath.

  “The Ketteräs ain’t home,” he repeated with a sigh and then looked at the magpie that had anchored itself at the top of the birch tree in the yard.

  “I noticed,” Koskinen said, trying to make his voice sound nonchalant. “Where did they go?”

  The man bypassed the question with his own. “You a relative?”

  “No.” Koskinen tried to cover his impatience. “I was just dropping by.”

  “A salesman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Don’t waste your time.” The cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth swung in time with his speech, ash falling onto the front of his shirt. “Once I bought this book about the Olympics from a traveling salesman. It had Rautavaara’s winnin’ throw at the London games writ down wrong, and after that I’ve never bought anything from you Russkie hucksters.”

  “Good to know,” Koskinen said with a laugh. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “There are all kinds of hustlers running around these days.”

  Koskinen nodded with gusto. “There are a lot of them. But where did the Ketteräs go?”

  “Lielahti.”

  Koskinen was surprised by his sudden candor. The man scratched his side and continued: “Iiro left with his old lady fifteen minutes ago. He’s getting some reclining chairs for the back yard.”

  Koskinen wondered why someone would be buying yard furniture at the end of September, and it looked like the neighbor had read his mind. “They’re cheap this time of year ’cuz the stores are clearing out their summer inventory.”

  “When do you think they’ll be back?”

  “The Ketteräs?”

  “Yeah, the Ketteräs.”

  “Iiro said he’d be back in about an hour.”

  Koskinen thought whether he should drive after them to Lielahti. But how would he recognize them? In a big furniture store, he’d just be blindly guessing. He decided to use the opportunity to his advantage. “Do you know their son?”

  The neighbor had a sudden coughing fit. He cleared the phlegm from his throat twice and then, with his face red, croaked, “Hannu?”

  “Do the Ketteräs have any other children?”

  “No,” he said and then wiped his mouth and shoved the cigarette back in it. “Just Hannu.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Hell yeah. I’ve been living here next to them for thirty years. I remember when he learned to walk.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette and flipped the butt over onto the Ketteräs’ side. “Right after that the sneaky little bastard started coming over the fence to steal our apples.”

  “Have you seen Hannu much lately?” Koskinen asked tensely.

  “No. He moved out ages ago,” the neighbor said, looking at Koskinen in confusion. “You must not know that he’s a cripple.”

  “I do know.”

  “Strange how something like that can happen to somebody,” he said and leaned on the fence with both arms, looking thoughtful.

  “Something like what?” Koskinen asked, even though he knew.

  “He was skiing and was just coming down this steep hill, and some maniac had stretched a rope across the track. Hannu landed on his neck and got paralyzed.”

  Koskinen nodded, thinking exactly the same thing: something like that could happen to anyone, absolutely anyone.

  “Woulda been hard for anyone,” the neighbor said, continuing. “But especially for Hannu. He’d been into sports since he was little. He even bought a motorbike as soon as he turned eighteen. A beat-up Royal Enfield.”

  The neighbor pointed over the fence into the Ketteräs’ yard with his nicotine-stained finger. “He was always right there working on that pile of junk. Up to his elbows in grease. He had this friend who he’d always…”

  The man’s voice was drowne
d out by the thundering of an approaching train. The rail line ran right next to the houses. They would have to wait until the train passed before continuing. Two engines joined together were pulling a long line of cars, and the slipstream was strong enough that Koskinen felt it on his face after the last car went by.

  “That’s the Pori line,” the man said. “Taking paper to Mäntyluoto Harbor.”

  Koskinen considered how he could shift the conversation back to Hannu Ketterä, but it was already too late. His interlocutor turned without saying goodbye and then said over his shoulder, “Gotta go help the wife with the cleaning. That’s Saturdays for ya.”

  Koskinen started walking away, still thinking about what the man behind the fence had said a few moments earlier: could Hannu’s accident have happened to just anyone? Fate could not have punished anyone more blindly.

  That is if fate had anything to do with it—maybe the rope had been stretched across the track specifically with Hannu Ketterä in mind.

  Could that be the solution to all of this?

  But working that thought through was complicated. Koskinen already had dozens of questions running around in his head, and any one of them could just as easily have held the key to solving the case. Often all he needed to find that key was a little hint to lead him to a crucial insight. Sometimes he just had to wait such an excruciatingly long time for it to come.

  Koskinen sat in the car and thought about how he would kill the hour before the Ketteräs returned. Returning to Tampere would be pointless. Just the drive would take twenty minutes each way. He decided to use the downtime to have lunch and find the nearest service station cafe. As he was starting the engine, he remembered Riitta Makkonen’s little diner in the Myllypuro industrial park. It wasn’t more than two miles from here.

  He turned the Vectra left and did a dogleg up to Pori Highway and then over to the Myllypuro area. He found the diner easily. It was situated between a carpet cleaner and a home appliance repair shop in the middle of a long industrial building.

  Three customers all wearing coveralls were inside. Two were shedding jelly donut crumbs all over their clothes and the third was at the next table over spooning soup into his mouth. Koskinen stood at the counter for a good minute before Riitta Makkonen appeared from the kitchen with a towel in her hand.