Sweetness cuts him loose. This guy is a trained killer. I’m a crip with guns I barely know how to use. I cock the hammers of the shotgun and keep him at arm’s length. “Don’t say a word. Don’t make sudden movements. Or you get both barrels. Walk in front of us out to the street.”
He nods.
When we get to the Wrangler, I order him to get in the rear of the vehicle, rebind his ankles, retape his mouth, and throw a tarp over him.
16
We drive away. The dashboard clock reads ten after three. We drive a short distance to the address supplied to us. I ring the buzzer. No answer. I smash the apartment building’s front-door window with my sap, an extendable steel baton, reach inside and let us in. We take the elevator to the fourth floor. I ring. Again, no answer. Burning up a clip from my silenced Colt works as a key on the bottom lock. The door swings open a fraction. The Gemtech silencer I’m using, courtesy of Milo, really is a gem. I hear little more than the slide cycling and the used casings pattering on the floor as I’m firing. No waking the neighbors. Sweetness picks up the spent brass for me. The top, heavy-duty lock is usually meant for extra security when leaving. It’s unlocked, which suggests someone is inside.
We enter, and I push the door closed behind us. The reason we weren’t buzzed in becomes apparent. A man has his knees on the floor, his head and torso on a couch, as if trying to push himself to his feet. The butcher knife in his back, planted deep between his shoulder blades, prevented it. He’s dead.
Sweetness looks at me. “Fuck,” he says.
I agree. “Yeah, fuck. We need to take our shoes off, and for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”
We don’t have any latex gloves to keep us from contaminating the crime scene with our own fingerprints. It’s a big apartment, with the doors to all the rooms shut. We both pull jacket sleeves down over one hand and use the cloth to turn door handles, hold pistols in the other, not easy with my cane. We split up and go through the place. It has three bedrooms, I suppose necessary for multiple girls turning tricks at the same time.
I hear Sweetness scream, “Jesus Fucking Christ!”
I would have come running if I could, but can only call out and ask if he’s hurt.
“No,” he answers, his voice calm now. “Come here.”
I follow his voice and enter a bedroom. He’s staring up into the shelf space over a closet. I look and see a waif of a girl. She’s folded herself into the tight space. Her eyes radiate terror. Loviise Tamm.
I doubt if she speaks anything but Russian. “Talk to her,” I say. “Tell her we’re police, here to help her, and ask her if she can get down from there.”
She seems to take our stated good intentions at face value. She pushes her hands against one wall, feet against the other, faceup, and shimmies down, spiderlike. It reminds me of a circus trick. “Can you make her feel comfortable and try to find out what happened here? Ask her to please not sit or touch anything, and tell her we’ll take her away from here very soon.”
They go back and forth for a few minutes. Some of it I understand, some of it I don’t.
When they’re done, Sweetness explains. “It’s like her mom said, she was promised a job in Helsinki. Then, when she got here, the men who brought her talked about her owing them money for arranging her work and the cost of the trip over, and took her passport. They locked her in this apartment. Other people, including some girls, came and went. They kept her fed, but wouldn’t talk to her. Just told her to wait and all would become clear. She was frightened the whole time. Then a man came just a little while ago. He was angry because she was going to leave, and he said he was going to get something from her first. He sat on the couch and told her to take out his ‘thingy.’ She said it was big and hard, she didn’t know what to do, and he told her to get on her knees and put it in her mouth. She froze, it seemed icky and wrong. He started to yell and he slapped her, but the doorbell rang. He answered it and a woman was at the door. She saw Loviise and looked furious. He told Loviise to get up, go to a bedroom and shut the door. She heard him talk to the woman, but their voices were low and she didn’t understand what they said. Then she heard him shout and everything went quiet. She was afraid of him and his anger and his ‘thingy,’ and crawled up into that space to hide. When I came in, she had a blanket pulled over her and I couldn’t see her, but I saw the blanket move from her breathing, I jerked it away and found her. That’s when I yelled. She scared the shit out of me.”
“Ask her what the woman looked like.”
He asks and translates. “She looked like a magazine.”
“What does that mean?”
She clarifies. “She was very beautiful, like a woman in a magazine.”
Her case of Down syndrome appears to be as mild as her mother claimed. She seems largely functional, but her naïveté likely saved her from a worse fate than she suffered. If she didn’t even know how a penis functions, she needed to be broken in, accomplished by raping her on a regular basis until she gave up hope and just succumbed to it. No one had gotten around to that yet. “Thank her and ask her to wait right here.”
I go over the rest of the house quickly. There’s little to see. Cheap furniture. More IKEA stuff. Some microwavable food in the fridge. A case of Stolichnaya vodka and a crate of beer, I suppose for the clientele. I find some yellow latex cleaning gloves in a closet along with cleaning supplies, and a roll of masking tape in a kitchen drawer. I use it to hide the bullet holes in the front door.
I put on the gloves and rifle through the corpse’s pockets. I find two passports, Loviise’s and his own. If he had her passport, but no others besides his own, it indicates that he meant to turn her over to me. Something went wrong first, and he was murdered. I also take the corpse’s credit card. He was one of those dummies who keeps his bank codes on him with the user number sequence written on it. I take it, too. If he were alive, I couldn’t ask him for anything more.
He’s a Russian named Sasha Mikoyan and his passport is diplomatic. So he’s a spy or an attaché or both, and the Harper brothers didn’t lie. People from the Russian embassy are taking part in the slave trade.
The Russian diplomatic mission, given the circumstances of his death, whorehouse, kidnapping et al., will probably exercise their right to keep Finnish law enforcement out of this. I put his passport back in his pocket but take his wallet and iPhone, so I can carry out an investigation of my own. I’ve developed quite a collection of gadgets tonight.
“Let’s go,” I say. I check the time, now three fifty-five.
Loviise has a traveling bag. Sweetness carries it for her as we walk to the car. I want to discuss this situation with Sweetness, but don’t know if our abductee in the back can understand Finnish. I jam cigarette butts deep in his ears, cover them with duct tape, and put shooting-protection earphones on top of that. He couldn’t hear a bomb drop.
We all get in the Wrangler. I sit up front with Sweetness. Saukko’s man hasn’t made a sound. Apparently, he’s smart enough to know it won’t help, and he’s just waiting, pondering how to get through this, preparing himself for the worst. This marks him as a cool professional. Sweetness hits his flask.
“This may rank as one of the longest nights of our lives, but we’re going to have to make this a murder of opportunity,” I say.
He doesn’t catch the double entendre. “What do you mean?”
I’m rattled and overwrought, exhausted and in pain. I haven’t had this much physical activity since I was shot. I rub my knee. “Saukko said he had nothing to do with knocking out my windows and harassing me. I believe him, do you?”
I start chain-smoking, try to clear my mind with nicotine.
“Pomo, that evil fuck is ten times smarter than I am. I don’t know.”
“Pitkänen isn’t doing this alone, that leaves the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, and our new parliamentarian and Finland�
�s best hater, Roope Malinen. I don’t think Malinen has the stones for it, but the minister and the chief do.”
“What about Adrien Moreau? He was after the ten million and we killed him. Maybe somebody associated with him?”
I shake my head. “He was a self-sufficient loner. I don’t believe he would have involved anyone else.”
“It could be hate groups as well. We really put the fucks to those neo-Nazis for selling strychnine-laced heroin. And all the groups are interconnected.”
Over thirty people died of strychnine poisoning before dealers figured out what they were selling and pulled the bad smack off the streets. “But they don’t have a SUPO agent on their side, or if they do, it’s because the minister ordered him to work with them. I think we need to interrogate the minister and the chief, and that crime scene is the place to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I told the chief if he didn’t fuck off about the money, I’d frame him for a crime and kill him in the process of arresting him. It’s late on a weeknight. They’re probably in their beds. We should abduct them.”
Sweetness chuckles. “Cool. You really gonna kill the chief?”
“No, not cool. Crazy. And I don’t want to hurt anybody. But Saukko and his Shit List and his threats, plus the attacks and other threats against my family, have me scared shitless. I’ll murder whoever I have to and sit my jolt in prison before I’ll let anyone hurt my family. Later, we’ll interrogate the guy in the back, and I hope before we go home we’ll know where the truth lies and who our enemies are and aren’t. We can’t protect ourselves and ours until then. That includes Jenna and even your mother.”
That possibility seems to have not struck him yet, and when it does, as it did for me, it carries fear with it. He nods his head slow, shakes a cigarette out of a pack and lights it. “You’re right,” he says. “We deal with this now.”
I feel sorry for whoever Sweetness decides is to blame. He’ll kill them—after punishing them—and if we can’t discover who is guilty, he’ll take the position of the crusader leader, a bishop who, when asked by his troops how to tell who was Catholic and who wasn’t, answered, “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”
17
Lay out the plan for me,” Sweetness says.
I picture the map of Helsinki and think of the most expedient way to do this. “Go to my house so I can grab my crime kit. Then to Milo’s. I need something there. I want to at least minimally process that apartment before the Russians claim diplomatic privilege and shut it down. “Maybe you could ask your mother if Loviise can stay there until we can make arrangements for her to safely return to Estonia. They have a common language. Loviise could have someone to talk to.”
“Mom will probably help, but she’ll be furious if I call at this hour and ask to bring a stranger to her house. It has to wait until a decent hour. And she could be in danger. We’ll have to stash them both somewhere.”
We have no time to waste. Sweetness pulls out onto the road. “How do you know Loviise isn’t lying? She could have killed that Russian.”
I just want Kate to see me save the girl. I can’t get over the idea that it will redeem me in her eyes, and in some small way, my own. “I don’t think Loviise is clever enough for that, but I’ll lift prints off the knife and print her just in case. Even if she did, it was justifiable and I don’t want her prosecuted. We send her home anyway.”
“What do we do with her for tonight?”
I chain one smoke off the other, flick the end of the last one out the window and watch in the passenger-side mirror as the cherry-red end smacks off the street and bursts like a little firework. “Keep her with us. They know we have her. We offended important people. They might try to snatch her back, just to put us in our places.”
“They might decide to put us in our places by killing us,” Sweetness says.
“True. First, we snatch the minister and the chief and force the truth out of them about the harassment against us. If they pass inspection, we let them go home, if not . . .” I raise my hands, palms up, and shrug, as if to say the situation is beyond my control. “Then we go to Vantaa, to Filippov Construction, and interrogate Saukko’s man there.”
The construction company specialized in toxic waste management. It’s been closed since its owner, Ivan Filippov, was shot dead while I investigated him for murder. The site has served us well in the past. It has privacy, and we’ve dissolved the bodies of two gangsters in acid there, to cover up their murders and prevent a gang war.
“And then?”
“And then we make Loviise safe with your mom and go home. It’s Mirjami’s birthday, and remember, we have to shop for a gift for her when the stores open.”
“I could just give her all the money I won. Wrap it up with a card that says it’s from both of us.”
“That’s generous. You cheated, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I’ll buy you a book of card tricks and teach you. But that’s why I asked for a fresh deck, so I knew where each card was when I started shuffling.”
This gets a laugh out of me. “You’re not afraid of anyone or give a shit about anything, do you?”
He looks at me, solemn. “Not much. I’m careful where I place my affections and concerns. I don’t have room for many.”
Wisdom from the baby-faced behemoth.
• • •
WE RUN the errands fast. I have a fishing tackle box with basic crime-scene processing equipment in it. I dump all my newly acquired electronica on the dining room table, grab the box, some other odds and ends, and some photos featuring the minister and chief. I’ve way overdone it and I’m fading. I scarf some painkillers and tranquilizers to keep me propped up. Then we shoot over to Milo’s, and I take the sperm samples connecting the men we’re about to abduct to the crime scene of Mrs. Filippov. Both the chief and minister live in apartments in Eira, not far from the scene of tonight’s murder.
I check the time. Five ten a.m. I do it the easy way, ring their door buzzers, wake them, and announce that I have business concerning Saukko’s money and it can’t wait. The greedy fucks both think I’m acquiescing, returning the money, and let us in. I make Jyri Ivalo use his cell phone to call mine—to create the illusion of a phone conversation—and keep the phones open for five minutes, and to fetch his service pistol, which I take. We force them to get dressed and into the vehicle at gunpoint. Back to the crime scene we go.
Loviise is frightened, doesn’t want to go back, but Sweetness reassures her that everything is for her own good, that we’re trying to stop the people who were bad to her, and we show her our National Bureau of Investigation ID cards, which she can’t read, but she seems reassured. Probably more by our demeanors than IDs.
We escort them all up to the apartment. Sweetness and I slip on paper shoe covers and surgical gloves, but don’t allow them to do the same. I ask Loviise if she would mind to wait in another room while we men talk. She’s nervous to be back in the apartment but complies. The minister and chief view Sasha Mikoyan’s corpse with surprise and bemusement. Jyri Ivalo speaks first. “What the hell are you doing, Vaara? This makes no sense.”
First things first. I make them stand on each side of the corpse. “Sano muikku”—Say whitefish. They don’t smile. I have Sweetness snap pics of them and the corpse together with his cell phone camera.
I keep my .45 leveled at Jyri with one hand, my cane in the other. As with everyone else tonight, I confiscate their electronics to keep from being recorded. I’m aware, though, that some of them will have GPS tracking devices in the event of their auspicious owners’ disappearances. Then I think, So fucking what, they all know I took them and where I live.
“On the contrary,” I say, “it makes perfect sense. I’ve suffered damage to my property and threats against the lives of my family because of your imagina
ry ten million euros. I warned you if you didn’t let the matter drop, I would frame you for a crime, then kill you when you turned violent resisting arrest. The matter hasn’t been dropped. The butcher knife in that man’s back—incidentally, he’s a Russian diplomat, or more than likely a spy on a diplomatic passport named Sasha Mikoyan—is your sword of Damocles.”
I’ve confused him. “How so?”
I toss a pile of photos on the coffee table. “Have a look, both of you.”
They both flip through them. Osmo Ahtiainen, the minister, says, “OK, you got me. I’m not photogenic when I fuck. So what?”
Jyri Ivalo gets the message but pretends otherwise. “So we’ve fucked some of the same women. Big deal.”
“And here we are in a house of prostitution, an administrator of said house is dead, you’re both drunk, and your fingerprints are on the murder weapon.”
“No we aren’t, and they aren’t.”
“But they soon will be, and you’ll be very drunk. Too drunk to recall what happened here.”
I pull plastic freezer bags from my fishing tackle crime-kit box. “These are semen samples that you were both stupid enough to deposit in the mouth of Ivan Filippov’s mistress.” I take out the syringes Jari left at my house. “Your semen samples will be found in Mikoyan’s various orifices.”
Both of them go pale and reflect shock. The ramifications of what I can do to them hits them like slaps to the face.
I take the samples to the kitchen and put them in the freezer so they don’t thaw and deteriorate. I return with beers and bottles of vodka. “Start drinking. Fast.”
“Conclude,” Osmo says.
“As I’m an officer close to him, even known to socialize with him, Jyri called me and begged me to extricate him from a jam. He was very drunk. You two—given your voracious sexual appetites and lack of choosiness when it comes to your sexual partners, tag-teaming a man won’t really surprise anyone—but you had some kind of quarrel. You don’t even remember what about, but Mikoyan ended up dead. I came here after Jyri’s call, saw the corpse and informed you both that I can’t protect you from this. Jyri, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve his freedom, drew down on me and I had no choice but to kill him. Osmo, I haven’t decided what to do with you yet. Shooting you as well would be the most expedient. You’re not drinking. Chug-a-lug. Mikoyan’s DNA, by the way, will be found in your mouths and on your genitals.”
Helsinki Blood Page 10
