Wolves and Angels

by Jokinen, Seppo

  Koskinen heard Ulla’s dismayed exhalation beside him. Pekki and Kaatio, who had just walked up, were just as astonished, and Koskinen knew the sight would stick in his mind for a very long time. Actually, none of them would ever forget this moment.

  Salonen stood there for a few long seconds with Ketterä in her arms. She stared at the police defiantly and then finally huffed, “Are we going, or what?”

  Koskinen nodded. Pekki and Kaatio started walking ahead with Koskinen and Ulla pulling up the rear, Salonen walking in between, leaning back a bit under her load. It was two hundred feet back to the cabin, and Koskinen asked if she needed any help. She shook her head and lengthened her stride.

  Koskinen thought over how events had progressed. Apparently Salonen had heard the sound of their vehicles and quickly carried Ketterä to the hideout. A wheelchair could never have navigated the path. Maybe they had planned it all in advance—the police might very well find bedding and provisions for several days in the shelter. If his father hadn’t unwittingly let it slip, Ketterä’s whereabouts could have remained a permanent mystery. At least until the police brought the search dogs.

  In the yard was a hammock made of synthetic canvas stretched between two birch trees, and Salonen set Ketterä down in it. Carrying him did seem to have worn her out after all, but she stumbled a few steps to the side and fell to her knees. Her shoulders began to shake uncontrollably. As was her way, Ulla rushed over to comfort Salonen. She crouched down next to her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Koskinen, Kaatio, and Pekki gathered around the hammock. It was the strangest scene of an arrest Koskinen could remember.

  “You probably know what’s going to happen now.”

  Ketterä stared at Koskinen with his eyes narrowed and asked, “What?”

  “You are being arrested on suspicion of two murders.”

  “Who’s arresting me?” Ketterä looked at each of the three of them in turn with defiance in his eyes.

  Koskinen replied dryly, with exaggerated formality. “As you know, I am a police lieutenant, authorized to use force as necessary in the execution of the law.”

  “Is that why you’d stand out in a crowd?” Ketterä said, forcing a laugh. “Isn’t a police officer supposed to wear a special uniform or something?”

  Koskinen refused to glance at Pekki and Kaatio. He knew they were smirking without looking. He was struck by Ketterä’s cavalier behavior. It had to just be an act; he was obviously just trying to cover up how degraded he felt. It had to be humiliating to lie incapable of movement in a hammock and feel the curious stares of three officers on him.

  “Get the wheelchair,” Koskinen said to Kaatio and pointed at the cabin. “It’s in the sauna dressing room under the table.”

  “So you’ve already searched the whole place, have you!” Ketterä hissed angrily. “Do you even have the authority to do that?”

  “Yes,” Koskinen said calmly. “When hunting a double murderer, we have the right to axe our way through walls if we feel like it.”

  Koskinen’s self-assurance was crushing—Ketterä closed his eyes, held his breath for a moment and then ripped his eyes open again. He stared for a long time at the yellow tops of the birch trees and the scattered clouds sailing across the sky. Finally he said, almost casually, “Anyone would’ve killed Timonen if they were in my shoes.”

  Koskinen and Pekki exchanged a glance. Neither said anything—best to let the confession come on its own.

  “You would’ve taken revenge on him too.”

  “Revenge?” Pekki whispered. “For what?”

  “This!” Ketterä pounded his numb legs with both fists. “He did this to me, and he got what he deserved.”

  Kaatio had just returned. He put the wheelchair against the trunk of one of the birch trees and then looked at Ketterä in disbelief. Pekki and Ulla’s faces wore the same expression of shock.

  Koskinen wasn’t surprised. In a neutral voice he asked, “When did you figure it out?”

  “This July,” Ketterä replied immediately. “Raymond and me were doing shots and watching the European Championship final. Italy botched the match right at the end, and Raymond got all worked up like you wouldn’t believe. He started raving at me like I was the Italian goalkeeper or something. He dug up all of our history all the way back to when he got hurt, and Sanni and I started going steady. He accused me of stealing his girl and anything else he could think of, saying he had hated both of us ever since then.”

  “Strange,” Koskinen interjected. “But he bought you that expensive trip as a wedding present.”

  “Raymond was trying to adjust to the situation. I can’t come up with any other explanation. Maybe back then he still thought he could accept the facts. Sanni was better off with having a healthy husband than a cripple.”

  Ketterä suddenly turned his head and his mouth distorted into a venomous grimace. It wasn’t until now that Koskinen noticed how Ketterä’s front teeth had partially grown over each other.

  “Raymond wasn’t able to adjust. He’d been playing things up in his mind for years convincing himself that Sanni and I had already had something going before the diving accident.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, we were just friends. And besides, I had my own waist candy on the back of my bike then. But try explaining any of that to Raymond. He wouldn’t listen to reason. He uncorked another bottle of vodka that he’d been saving for the victory celebration, and after just a couple of swigs he wasn’t making any sense at all anymore.”

  Ketterä let out a strained laugh and then continued. “Apparently his paralysis was my fault. Supposedly I had arranged the accident so I could have Sanni all to myself. He went on in detail about how easily I had planned it all—I knew that Raymond loved diving and would jump off the dock head-first into the water the minute we got there.”

  Pekki couldn’t hold himself back. “How did he justify his accusations?”

  “Because I hadn’t said anything about the rock. Raymond thought I should’ve warned him about it.”

  “And did you.”

  “I didn’t have time. Raymond left his bike there by the path and started running to the shore. He was ripping his clothes off as he ran and went straight for the dock.”

  Ketterä fell silent looking at it. Koskinen guessed that he was seeing the distant series of events once again. He had probably replayed it in his mind hundreds of times, over and over, likely even in his dreams.

  “Raymond said that I had deserved the same shit future. Because I ruined his life. In a blink of an eye I figured it all out—Raymond had paid someone to stretch that rope across the ski trail. It made me so fucking angry. I remember how they were handing out the championship medals to the French players and playing the “La Marseillaise” right then, and that was the moment I decided to kill him.”

  “But you waited three months.”

  “I wanted to think through carefully how I’d do it without getting caught. It all started when Anniina said that she had gotten her dad’s van. I decided to suffocate Raymond with his own pillow, slowly and quietly. It wasn’t hard. The only thing strong about Raymond was his jaw, and his arms were like a three-year-old’s. Anniina could help me move the body to Peltolammi near Pike’s apartment. Everyone knew what had gone on between them. And just in case the police didn’t suspect Pike, as a diversion I decided to leave Raymond’s wheelchair by the side of the road somewhere far away from Wolf House.”

  Ketterä paused for a moment. “And that’s what I did.”

  “How did you get Anniina to go along with such an insane plan?” Pekki asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t tell her anything ahead of time. I killed Raymond in his own room and then called Anniina.”

  “You were sure she would help you?”

  “Positive. Of course she was in shock when she heard what I had done. But she still drove right down to Wolf House and didn’t leave me after that either.”

  Something about Ketterä’
s account had been bothering Koskinen. “Going back to that Christmas five years ago, how did Timonen know when you would be at the lake skiing?”

  “I told him myself,” Ketterä answered. “On the day before Christmas Eve, we went to take Raymond his presents. Sanni had knitted him a striped scarf, and I gave him a bottle of vodka. We talked about everything, and Raymond wanted to know how we were going to be spending Christmas Eve. I told him that we usually had our Christmas sauna at 5:30 and how I was going to do a lap around the lake before that. That was a tradition too, and Christmas wouldn’t have felt like Christmas without it.”

  Ketterä was squeezing the sides of the hammock with white knuckles. “And that was the last time I visited Wolf House on my own two feet.”

  Koskinen continued his questioning before Ketterä’s bitterness could rob him of his desire to talk.

  “Did Timonen ever admit to you his role in what happened that Christmas Eve.”

  “Never straight out.”

  “Straight out?”

  “He went on like some fanatic preacher that it was the Hand of God that had punished me. That was enough of a confession for me.”

  Pekki had dug out his notebook. “Who did he hire to set the trap on the ski track?”

  Ketterä shook his head. “I don’t know. Raymond took that secret with him to the grave. And I don’t really give a shit who his stooge was. Raymond was the real guilty one.”

  “But why Rauha Salmi?”

  This surprise question from Koskinen took Ketterä off guard. He bit his lip and raised his arm to shield his eyes. Thinking about it hurt.

  “It was a terrible accident. Maybe it was too easy to off Timonen, and I went a little crazy. It was so easy, especially because someone claimed to have seen Laine’s taxi that night in the parking lot. That fit my plan more perfectly than I could’ve hoped. But then I heard from Anniina how Rauha had tried to tell the police that it wasn’t Laine after all. That got me nervous. Wednesday and Thursday were agony, and in the end I couldn’t wait any longer. I decided to find out how much she really knew. I snuck into her room at night. She was awake and started jabbering accusations at me. She knew I had killed Raymond. She had heard our death threats over the summer. She threatened to tell everything to the big policeman first thing the next morning. I guess she meant you. Then everything sort of went dark. I grabbed the pillow and pressed it over her face.”

  “How did you get into her room?”

  “Pike was so stupid; she always left her key card lying around. She had a habit of setting it down on the corner of my table when she came to clean. I stashed the card under my ass and then pretended not to know where it was even though they looked for it for days.”

  Ketterä took his arm away from his eyes. They were shining with moisture, it was hard for him to talk.

  “I’ll never forgive myself for Rauha’s death. Even though I knew I did her a favor. None of us suffered as much as she did.”

  Pekki didn’t have the habit of playing pious, but this time even his voice was harsher than normal. “That doesn’t mitigate how reprehensible your actions were.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Ketterä admitted. “I know and that was why I decided to punish myself—I was going to stage my own death as a murder too. I wanted all this to remain a mystery.”

  “How did you plan to do it?”

  “Drowning.” Ketterä pointed at the shore. “From the same dock where Raymond dove fourteen years ago. That would’ve completed the circle.”

  A cold smile flashed across Ketterä’s lips. “I started setting it up by scaring Tapani. I told him I knew who had killed Raymond and Rauha, but that I was too afraid to expose the murderer. I said that this mysterious killer had threatened to take me next and then Tapani. No matter what it took.”

  Koskinen remembered his visit to the Hatanpää Hospital the previous day and Tapani Harjus’ overwhelming fear. “Harjus took that pretty seriously.”

  “Anniina told me,” Ketterä said, nodding seriously. “It wasn’t supposed to happen quite like that.”

  “How then?”

  “I wanted Tapani to tell you guys that someone had threatened to kill me. “I thought that would dispel any suspicions of suicide.”

  Koskinen thought about how in the worst case scenario the chain of events could have ended up as a permanent mystery. They would have had three unsolved homicides, two by smothering and one by drowning. Having to put them in the cold case file probably would have haunted him the rest of his life.

  Lost in thought, he asked, “But you didn’t go through with it?”

  “No.”

  Ketterä tried to lift his upper body up in the hammock. He looked for Salonen.

  “Anniina convinced me to change my mind.”

  Salonen was standing next to Ulla with her head hung low, and her wide shoulders slumped. Her face was a pale gray and her resignation was palpable fifteen feet away. No one knew what to say, and Koskinen felt like time had come to a complete stop for a moment.

  Then Salonen slowly raised her head, looking at each of them in turn and then suddenly shouted, “Go ahead and stare! Yes, someone who looks like this fell in love with a cripple.”

  Ulla took her by the arm to try to calm her down, and her shouting subsided to a quiet moaning. “No one has ever treated me as tenderly as Hannu did this summer. Who else would ever fancy a hulk like me? No one!”

  Salonen’s outburst woke Koskinen up and got him back into action. He asked Kaatio to assemble the wheelchair and bent down himself to lift Ketterä out of the hammock. He didn’t resist, instead taking hold of Koskinen’s shoulders. Koskinen’s muscles felt like he’d just had a flogging. But he was still surprised by how light Ketterä was.

  Salonen went with Ulla to get her necessities from the cabin and lock the doors. They started walking slowly across the yard toward the road. Kaatio was pushing Ketterä’s wheelchair, and Pekki was walking behind them with his hands in his pockets.

  Koskinen stayed behind to look at the lake for a few minutes. The man and boy were paddling up the river. The canoe made a quiet lapping sound and then suddenly a splash from the reeds—the boy had hooked a fish. He enthusiastically reeled in the line, and the man slipped a net under their catch. The canoe rocked dangerously, not straightening until the man jerked the net up out of the water with a good two-pound northern pike trashing around in it.

  Koskinen turned away wistfully and started walking. The wind had started to blow, it whipped leaves around in the yard as if in farewell to one more summer. Two magpies were fighting around the outdoor grill over a burned sausage casing. An angry dog barked on the other side of the lake. Somewhere even farther away a chainsaw growled into life.

  The women had already made it to the back seat of the Corolla. Pekki waved to Koskinen and drove off. Ketterä was sitting in his wheelchair, transfixed at the rear of the car until it disappeared from sight. Then he swung his chair around toward Koskinen and Kaatio.

  “Off to jail then,” he said, his voice shaking. “It’s all the same to me. Life can’t get any worse than it already is.”

  He banged the right wheel with his fist. It had to hurt. “I was already put away for life five years ago.”

  Ketterä closed his eyes and squeezed both wheels so hard the whole chair trembled. Koskinen gave him time to calm down and only then helped him into the rear seat of the car. Kaatio folded the chair up and lifted it into the trunk. In passing he whispered to Koskinen, “At least this time we don’t have to worry about him doing a runner.”

  “No, thankfully not,” Koskinen said with a snort. “I’m not exactly in any shape to be chasing anyone down.” He walked around the car and climbed into the back seat next to Ketterä.

  Koskinen watched the landscape, lost in thought, and didn’t start talking until Kaatio turned onto the highway back to Tampere. “We’ll start the official interviews tomorrow, but there’s one more thing I wanted to ask now.”

  “Go right ahead,”
Ketterä grumbled. “Lay it on me!”

  “I can’t understand why you left your wife and children. Wouldn’t they have been an important source of support after your accident?”

  “No one can understand it. At least not someone who hasn’t been condemned to living on other people’s pity for the rest of his life. Yeah, Sanni tried—I can’t deny that—but I still saw how hard living with an invalid was for her. I knew I’d lose her eventually anyway, and the more dependent I became on her, the worse losing her would hurt.”

  “And the children?” Kaatio asked from the front seat. “Didn’t you think of them at all?”

  Ketterä sighed. “It was exactly them I was thinking of. The girl was three then, and the boy was just a year. I knew that at that point they wouldn’t have any real memories of their father, so they wouldn’t really miss me. I went through all the scenarios—how one day they’d be ashamed of their crippled father with their friends. And I wouldn’t have been able to bear that.”

  They had already made it halfway back to Tampere. Ketterä looked to the right at an old stone bridge as they passed, and the brokenness of his voice told how difficult it was for him to speak. “The solution I came to hurt like hell, but I still decided to never see them again. I was just thinking of what’d be best for Sanni and the kids. And it didn’t take long before I heard that some guy had taken them under his wing…”

  Ketterä swallowed the rest of his words and then fell completely silent. Koskinen was realizing what an avalanche of feelings Ketterä had been through. His last five years had been a constant battle between love, hate, and jealousy.

  They were downtown by the Orthodox church, when Ketterä started talking again. “I’ll say right here and now that I don’t need a lawyer. I don’t regret killing Raymond. Not one little bit! I would’ve done it eventually anyway. Even if hadn’t figured out that he was to blame for my injury.”

  Koskinen thought back to what Matias Honkanen, the ex-officer, had said about the bitterness that followed being paralyzed. It was like a buildup of toxins in the body after an illness. But still it was hard for him to understand it.