We took my Saab. When we arrived at the training area, military police at checkpoints guided us in the right directions, and we arrived about seven thirty. Colonel Nilsson greeted us, then stepped out of our way, indicating that he would leave us to our own devices.
The sun had been up for only an hour and cast long shadows. The crime scene techs were done with the body and combing the surrounding area for evidence. Snow is a double-edged sword in a homicide investigation. Fresh snow is every cop’s investigative dream. Even the smallest objects, unless white themselves, leap out and announce themselves. Trampled snow, the policeman’s nightmare.
This area, in a stand of birch, had been stamped on by hundreds of soldiers for the past couple days. The snow was gray, most of it mashed up, and full of pockets created by footprints beside the main walking paths. Even a detailed, thorough search would yield only the most obvious evidence. A squad had occupied this small area. After the murder, they had been ordered to vacate it, with the exception of a soldier who was on guard duty when the attack occurred. Only their empty tents and a rifle rack made of crossed tree branches remained. Two rifles remained on the rack.
This was all new to Sweetness. He’d exercised his right to choose civil service over military duty. After he graduated from high school, while most of his male classmates were performing their mandatory nine months in the army, he spent a year working in a kindergarten. He preferred crayons to hand grenades, even if it meant an additional three months’ service for being-in the eyes of most men-a sissy. The victim was a young man with his throat cut. The corpse seemed to mesmerize Sweetness. He couldn’t stop staring at it.
Milo knelt down and examined the wound. “Nothing special,” he said. “The throat was cut from left to right with a single motion. The weapon had a long, sharp blade. He was probably grabbed from behind, and it was all over before he knew it even happened.”
The remaining soldier sat on the trunk of a felled tree, chain-smoking. He flicked ashes and put extinguished cigarettes in his coat pocket, so as not to further contaminate the crime scene.
I was right. Sweetness had to pretty much carry me around. It was a bit on the humiliating side. The military pathologist told me to have a look at the body. His preliminary examination was complete. The murder was self-explanatory, he said. The victim had been placed faceup on a stretcher. His arms crossed. They were only waiting for me to view him before taking him away. The cut across his throat was deep, nearly to his spine. His tongue flopped out through the laceration.
I sat down on the tree trunk beside the soldier, introduced myself and the others. Milo and Sweetness stood in front of us, listening.
“What’s your name,” I asked.
“Harri.”
“Can you relax and tell me what happened? We’re not here to judge or blame you for anything. We just want to find out who did this.”
We all lit cigarettes except for Sweetness. He hit his flask and injected nuuska.
Harri pointed at the corpse. “Me and Rami were taking our turn at guard duty. Everybody else was asleep in their tents. I got tased and everything after that is blurry. I guess I got hit with a lot of volts and a couple times, because the burns on my back and neck are bad. When I got my senses back, I was duct-taped to a tree, and Rami was dead.”
He pointed at the tree. Much of the tape was still hanging from it in tatters, where he’d been found and cut free.
“My mouth was taped shut. Two men were dressed in black military clothing and balaclavas, but they were definitely black. I could tell from the areas around their eyes. The squad’s rifles were stacked on the rack. They packed all they could into duffel bags. There are two left, so they took ten. One of them got up close so our faces almost touched. He had a thick accent and really bad grammar, but I guess he knew it and spoke slow to make sure I understood. He said, ‘I allow you to live so you will deliver this message. We pray that Allah gives us the strength to use these weapons to do His will.’ Then they just walked off, and about half an hour later, somebody got up to take a piss and found us.”
“What kind of unit are you in?” Milo asked.
“A mortar squad.”
Milo walked over to the rack and picked up one of the two remaining rifles, gave it a once-over. “This is an Rk 95 Tp,” he said. “Most people just call it the M95.”
A Kalashnikov AK-47-style rifle made by Sako, the Finnish arms manufacturer. “And the significance is what?” I asked.
“There aren’t that many of them. A lot of them went to mortar units. Most soldiers are still carrying the old Rk 62. That means if we come up with a suspect in possession of an M95, as compared to an Rk 62, the odds of him having stolen it from here are quite high.”
I asked Harri, “Is there anything else you think I should know?”
He shook his head. “Just that I feel responsible. Safeguarding this area was my duty, and now Rami is dead.”
He wasn’t still a kid. His uniform was almost new. He’s probably only been in the army since the last cycle, in January.
“I’ve been a cop for twenty-two years,” I said, “and my experience is that when a man turns predator and you’re the target, you don’t know you’re being hunted and you don’t stand a chance. There was nothing you could do.”
His face said my pep talk, which was a simple truth, made him feel no better.
A reasonable assumption was that black immigrants had taken the murder of Lisbet Soderlund as a declaration of war and begun arming themselves. Somalis have a semblance of political organization and gangs that occasionally commit violent race crimes against whites, and vice versa, so their desire to acquire arms wasn’t entirely surprising, especially given the threats and violent rhetoric that were now daily directed against them. But blacks armed with AK-47s would terrify many Finns. The extremist Real Finns preached the inevitability of a race war between Finns and immigrants. I had an ominous gut suspicion that it might be coming true.
This lent a new sense of urgency to the Soderlund murder, and I wondered how many would die before I solved it.
15
It was almost noon by the time we got back to Helsinki. I figured Jyri Ivalo would have put out the nationwide call to police forces, and also to SUPO, requesting that all information concerning racists be sent to me. I asked Milo to come over to my house so we could start the sorting process and begin looking for potential suspects in the murder of Lisbet Soderlund.
We stopped at his house, around the corner from mine, to pick up his laptop, and set up shop on my dining room table. My Outlook in-box was jammed and more e-mails were coming in by the minute. We networked our computers and set up a database. In 1977, the differences between towns, cities and municipalities were removed, and we now have a hundred and nine municipalities. This makes things a little easier in a nationwide search, as previously there were between four and five hundred towns that we would have to deal with separately.
We created a method, tried to sort groups with racist beliefs from moderate to extreme, and then members of those groups from moderate to extreme, red flagging any person accused or convicted of committing a race crime. Sweetness passed the time looking over our shoulders, trying to learn police work. He played errand boy, brought us coffee. Kate ignored us so we could work in peace.
Real Finns, despite the anti-immigrant stance of many of its members, was the most moderate of our target groups, and also the hardest to investigate. In the 2008 municipal elections, they took around a hundred fifty thousand votes. Those records are of course sealed. They have their own magazine, published every three weeks. The circulation is twenty-five thousand. There were insufficient grounds to subpoena the list of recipients. The list would have been valuable, as this murder was political, and I could have cross-checked against known racists. They had around five hundred municipal councillors in office, but in fact, only seven or eight people were the true organizers of the movement. Most of them were from the other end of the country, but I could at least
have them questioned. Not that I thought that any of them were likely murderers, but their known associates could have been.
I got an e-mail that contained compiled statistics of crimes committed by and against foreigners. It interested me.
Two point five percent of the population is foreign or naturalized.
Foreigners commit nine percent of all crime.
Foreigners commit twenty-seven percent of all rapes.
The majority of crimes by foreigners are committed by Estonians and Russians, not by people of color-blacks, Turks, Gypsies, etc.-who bear the brunt of racial hatred. Turks, for instance, have a near monopoly on the pizza shop industry. Their storefront windows are frequently smashed out.
Race crimes against foreigners were up twenty percent in 2009, and numbered over a thousand.
Race crimes against Swedish-speaking Finns were on the rise. Nationalist Finns were beating up other Finns for speaking their mother tongue.
The organization Finnish Pride ranks high in virulence. The seven-hundred-member organization is xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and many members hold neo-Nazi beliefs, including Holocaust denial. Many were also Real Finns, had political aspirations, and had toned down their rhetoric as those aspirations increased. Still, it was poisonous. Some had been involved in race crimes. I thought I could get their membership role subpoenaed.
Neo-Nazis were well organized in many cities. They had several dozen full-time activists and large memberships, especially in the Joensuu area. The neo-Nazi demographic had changed. The movement was growing by leaps and bounds among university students. Academics had joined them. They were discussing forming their own political party, which requires five thousand signatures, and were close to getting them. They embraced the swastika. That kind of confidence speaks for itself. “If a party’s leader wants to be a fuhrer, then so what?” said a leading neo-Nazi.
The police and department of corrections began sending records of those convicted of hate crimes in batches, usually sorted by municipality but not by crime. There were thousands. Each one had to be looked at individually.
SUPO had jackets on hundreds of hate activists. The sheer number of them intimidated me. Even if I assembled a large team of investigators, how could we possibly look at them all in sufficient depth?
Each so-called hate crime had to be considered. Was the crime committed because of a person’s ethnicity, or was that incidental? For instance, the beating of bus drivers. Some black bus and taxi drivers had been beaten, but so had white ones. Those crimes weren’t necessarily racially motivated. Legally, however, if the victim had been attacked by a person or persons of a different ethnicity than his or her own, they were almost always considered hate crimes. There were no instances of racially motivated decapitation or anything like it. As the hours passed, neither Milo nor I saw anything that might make any individual stand out enough to be considered a suspect.
At about five p.m., news of the murdered soldier and the theft of the AK-47 rifles hit the Internet. Every newspaper pumped it up on its Internet page. Someone had taken a close-up of Rami, the boy whose throat was cut, his tongue flopped through the incision. The image captured the nation. And young Harri had told-or sold-his story.
Real Finns Party leader Topi Ruutio remained silent on the subject.
Roope Malinen wrote a hate tract gloating over his prescience. His every word and thought had been vindicated. His blog received fifty-four thousand hits that day. A new record for him.
Hate coalesced.
Anti-foreigner animosity roared through the media. In the moderated newspaper commentary sites, readers voiced their opinions following the articles on the soldier’s murder. All blacks should be immediately deported, stripped of Finnish citizenship if they possessed it. We took them into this country out of the goodness of our hearts and now they waged jihad against us. Blacks and Muslims should be placed in concentration camps. Finnish Gypsies are scum. What the fuck kind of Gypsies take up residency and don’t move around nomad style. Finnish Gypsies go back and forth from Sweden to Finland on the ferry, claim residency in both countries, and draw on the welfare systems of both. Finland was a white man’s paradise, now destroyed by the black man’s seed. If they won’t go home and stay there, drive the Gypsy beggars into the sea.
Un-moderated bloggers and social networking sites ran wild. Sterilize blacks and Arabs to prevent the dilution of Finnish blood. The mud people make mud babies. Tar babies. Burn mosques. Fuck Lisbet Soderlund, the dead nigger dick licker got what she deserved. Niggers destroy order, breed chaos.
Finland roiled with hatred. Race crime threats abounded.
In Joensuu, five neo-Nazis wearing bulletproof vests, presumably in case police shot them with rubber bullets to quell the riot, attacked a left-wing candidate and her supporters during a speech. The anonymity of social networking generated straight talk. Facebook pages sprang up and discussed the pros and cons of sending the niggers back to Africa versus feeding them to gas chambers and ovens. They discussed eliminating more politicians from the left with bullets.
Plus, there were two more junkie suicides and one more pharmacy robbery.
I got a call from SUPO. The country’s major newspapers had all received a fax. It appeared constructed in the same way as the note accompanying Lisbet Soderlund’s severed head. It read, “For every crime committed by blacks against whites, we will kill a nigger in retribution.”
They sent me a scan. The angles at which the letters had been cut out looked like work by the same hand.
Milo shook his head, disgusted. “You know, they brought a lot of this on themselves.”
If I’d felt emotions, I don’t know if I would have been angry, or laughed at his ignorance, or both.
“And why,” I asked, “do you think that might be?”
“Because our Muslim immigrants breed like rats, and they make little or no attempt to assimilate. Suomen Islamilainen Puolue-the Muslim political party-calls for Sharia law. With the rise of political Islam, what many term Islamofascism, by which fundamentalist Muslims pervert their religion and attempt to build a worldwide caliphate and impose Sharia law on all of us, it’s our natural inclination to be opposed to it.”
It had become our habit to speak English when Kate was present, out of politeness. Her ears perked up.
Milo continued. “If they succeeded, they would take away all our freedoms, force us to change our way of life, take away our right to free speech and all the basic rights of women, such as education. Do you want Kate to be forced to wear a veil? Our criminal justice system would no longer include fair trials and our limbs would be amputated as punishments. Those possibilities scare a few people.”
“And after a few generations,” Kate said, “all the little Finnish babies would be chocolate colored instead of Aryan snow-white.”
Milo hesitated, he knew he couldn’t give a non-racist answer. “I like Finland as it is. Finnish people living the Finnish way.”
“Milo,” Kate said, “for a bright guy, you can be a real fucking dipshit.”
She turned on the radio so she could tune him out. I was glad she didn’t understand the words to the song that was playing. It was a hit from the early nineties, when Somali immigrants first began arriving, by Irwin Goodman. It was about getting rid of the mud people and licorice clowns.
16
The following day, Sweetness and I set out early and went to post offices to see if any postal workers remembered the person who mailed the box that contained Lisbet Soderlund’s head. The box was uninsured and required no receipt signature, so we knew only, from the ink stamp, that it was mailed in Helsinki. We began at the neighborhood post office that services Kuninkaantie 38 and so the Finnish Somalia Network. No luck.
However, after receiving the pig’s head in the mail just before Christmas, a worker there invented a Finnish pseudonym and set up a Hotmail account. Fearing a more violent attack, she joined every anti-immigrant Facebook group she could find, including I Would Give Two Y
ears of My Life to Kill Lisbet Soderlund, in order to gather evidence in the event that the Finnish Somalia Network was targeted again. She printed out all the posts daily. She made me copies of all of them. A valuable gift for the investigation. No criminal justice authorities had done the same.
We moved on to the main post office downtown and got a copy of the work roster for March sixteenth, the day the package was mailed. The place is a madhouse, always busy. We interviewed every worker who had been on duty that day in person if they were on-site, or by telephone if they weren’t. Too many customers. Just faceless cattle in long lines. We got zilch.
We stepped outside, I lit a smoke and my phone rang. The caller was Detective Sergeant Saska Lindgren, from Helsinki Homicide. He was at a crime scene investigating the murder of two black men. A note at the scene, the letters clipped and glued to a sheet of printing paper, read, “For Rami Sipila,” the soldier whose throat had been cut the day before.
I’d consulted with Saska before, and he’s sharp, considered one of the best policemen in the nation.
The murder scene was in East Helsinki, a district with a bad reputation and a high immigrant population. Sweetness grew up there, and so knows the area like the back of his hand. We headed over. It was a little below zero, but we had twelve hours of sunlight a day now.
We arrived at a single-family home with a yard. There weren’t many around here. The area is dominated by apartment buildings, most of them built in the 1970s, when functionality was the style and ugly was the result. The area was cordoned off. Television news vans and reporters lined the street. They waved microphones and shouted. Saska and I exchanged greetings and ignored them. I introduced Sweetness. He usually takes people aback because of his massive size, but Saska appeared not to notice. Half-Gypsy, he’s taken a lot of racial shit in his life, and I’ve noticed that he’s non-judgmental about people, or at least reserves judgment until given cause to form one. “Have a look,” he said.
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