The Nightingale Murder (The Maria Kallio Series Book 9)

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “OK, that’s enough for now. Interview terminated at four fifty.” Koivu switched off the recorder, and Nordström gave me a confused look.

  “That was the official interview. Now let’s move on to the unofficial part, between colleagues.” Giving Nordström a crooked grin, I set my feet up on the table with the soles of my shoes facing him. Koivu thought for a second, then stood up and asked if we wanted any coffee. We both did.

  “So, are you really claiming you didn’t know Lulu Nightingale, even though you’re a lead investigator on sex trafficking at the NBI? You all must have had Lulu under surveillance.”

  Nordström sighed and leaned forward so he could reach the tips of my shoes. “Maria, Maria.” He shook my shoes, but I didn’t move my legs away. “I said I knew who Lulu Nightingale was. We weren’t tracking her, but the Helsinki PD was. After that one procurement case, Lulu never hired anyone else and tried to stay inside the law.”

  Koivu arrived with the coffee. Nordström glanced at his suspiciously and then tasted it.

  “Is your department cutting back on coffee appropriations too?” he asked. I thought the coffee was remarkably weak too, but I still poured a splash of milk into mine.

  “You said the life of a prostitute is cheap. Who would have wanted to take Lulu’s life?”

  Nordström quickly finished his coffee but sat in silence for a long time. Fortunately, when the coffee came he’d let go of my foot.

  “You must know what the situation is like all over the metro area. Girls come and go. Some are junkies, some are just coming over the border looking for a better life, and some . . . some are just children sold into slavery by evil bastards in the former Soviet states. There’s something for every taste, if you know where to look. I’d start looking for Lulu’s murderer among the people who are threatened by a woman working independently and therefore might serve as an example to other girls.”

  “Names?”

  “If I had those, they’d already be behind bars.” Suddenly Nordström stood up. “I have to pick up my car from the garage. I’ll let you know if my sources hear anything about Lulu. And Maria, you look tired. Put your subordinates to work and go home and get some rest. Aren’t your kids still pretty young?”

  “Their dad is watching them. What about you?”

  “The twins are with my wife. I mean, my ex-wife. Next week I get to play daddy again for the weekend.”

  Nordström gave a handshake just as crushing as when he arrived, then turned and opened the door. When he was halfway through, he turned back.

  “Oh yeah, and Kristian says hi. He’s working as a consultant for Europol. He said he can’t believe a girl as smart as you is slaving away for peanuts in Espoo. He said he expected more of you.” Nordström closed the door hard after him. I couldn’t help but smile. Even after twenty years, Kristian hadn’t forgiven me for doing better than him in school. We were just like so many valedictorian girls and unindustrious boys: two decades after graduating, the good-for-nothing boys enjoyed high-paid positions and the girls worked themselves to death for next to nothing.

  “What’s he hiding?” Koivu’s question interrupted my thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was watching his gestures. His hands fidgeted, and he was generally tense. I don’t think it was just irritation about being interrogated.”

  “Are you thinking that maybe after his divorce he started paying for it?”

  “Or before. He’s a cop, and you know that sometimes the job can offer certain benefits.”

  “Tell me more.”

  To my surprise Koivu blushed. “Think about it. A girl gets caught soliciting on the street or in a bar. What would be better than making a deal with the police? And Nordström could have visited Lulu without breaking any laws, just to question her, and still be worried about how that looks.”

  “The thing that confuses me is that he refused to give us any names. Surely he knows who runs the meat markets in the city. We’ll have to figure it out ourselves, since he won’t tell us. Let’s have Puupponen and Ursula dig into it.” I stretched my shoulders. A session on a rowing machine would do them good. “Will you call Pastor Pihlaja? Let’s try to talk to her tomorrow right after Saarnio. Send me a text when it’s scheduled, OK?”

  Koivu nodded. I told him to go home, then went to have a chat with IT. Haapio hadn’t even cracked the passwords yet.

  “What about the disks?”

  Haapio grinned. “This little tart of yours knew what she was doing. These are all protected with a PGP program. Maybe they were only in those tampon boxes to keep them from getting destroyed by accident.”

  “What’s PGP?”

  “Encryption. We’ll have to try to crack the keys, and there’s no guarantee they’re the same as the passwords on the computer. How many hours of overtime do I have budgeted for the weekend?”

  “Six,” I pulled out of thin air, since I hadn’t even thought about that yet. Kaartamo was going to have my head for this, but there wasn’t another option. We had to get Lulu’s computer open.

  When I arrived home, Antti was reading to Taneli. Iida was playing with her Barbies on the living room floor. Everything was normal and peaceful, and a shaft of light from the kids’ room fell on the entryway floor. Antti had left me a little salmon lasagna, which I ate and washed down with buttermilk. Then I took the laundry from the clean basket, folded it, and put it away, and I even ironed a couple of Iida’s shirts. It was a nice change of pace after a day of nonstop talking.

  “Mom, what’s a whore?” Iida asked from the floor, still immersed in her doll play.

  I froze. One of our parenting principles was that we would always answer our children’s questions, no matter how uncomfortable that made us. But how could I explain this in a way that an eight-year-old would understand?

  “A whore is a person who has sex with other people for money. And sex is the thing men and women do together to make babies.”

  “Oh, like sleeping together,” Iida said, apparently satisfied with my explanation. Her game continued, but after a few moments, she said, “Can kids be whores?”

  The true answer would have been yes, unfortunately, but I lied and said that they couldn’t, though I disliked bending the truth. It seemed as though someone at school had been talking about Lulu’s death. In the headlines, she had been referred to as a sex worker or an owner of an escort service, but how people were talking about her was something else entirely.

  “Let’s go read now too. You have practice tomorrow at ten, so you need to be asleep by nine. Dad’s taking you. I have work.”

  “Boring! Why can’t you both ever be home at the same time?” Iida grabbed Poor Iris from the shelf. She loved Anni Swan’s books for young girls. Reading with her curled up on her bed, we came to the part about the death of Iris’s friend Ulla, which I cried over simply because Iida did.

  After the children fell asleep, I started getting ready to go out.

  “Where are you off to now?” Antti asked over the top of his book.

  “Work.” I wanted to watch the tape of Tero Sulonen’s interrogation, read the autopsy report, and prepare for the press conference in the morning.

  Antti gave me a long look.

  “Don’t you have working hours at all? Or are you really this bad at organizing your time? You have to sleep sometime too!”

  I didn’t have the energy to fight or even to slam the door behind me. And I didn’t want to disturb the children and the neighbors. But I was angry, and because of this I drove faster than I should have and in the garage nearly managed to hit the wall in front of my parking spot. How many resolutions had I made about working nights and weekends, and how many times had I broken them? I tried to convince myself that I had a right to be away from home for work too, just like Antti was more and more all the time. But something inside nagged at me, telling me my logic was flawed.

  Although it was the weekend and therefore Patrol was busy, the rest of the building was qui
et. Only the most urgent cases kept anyone working: serious drug offenses and homicides. The upper floors were dark, and in our unit’s hallway only one light burned.

  Ursula had left a copy of Sulonen’s interview tape and the autopsy report on my desk. First I glanced at the latter. Kirsti Grotenfelt, who in the parlance of our unit was still “that new pathologist,” even though she’d been in the position for more than two years, was a better writer than her predecessor. The lab results hadn’t come in yet, but Grotenfelt was already sure we were dealing with cyanide simply based on the color of the blood.

  There had been bruising on Lulu’s chest that was consistent with Nordström’s attempt at CPR. On the right clavicle was a bite mark and there were welts on the inner thighs, the source of which I tried not to contemplate. Lulu’s medical history included two broken ribs, both within the past two years, a tubal ligation the previous year, and two abortions when she was a teenager. After that she’d taken birth control pills. There were no indications of sexually transmitted disease in her official health records.

  I remembered what Autio had said about Lulu’s childhood home. Had the little girl who grew up surrounded by cross-stitch on the walls found her dream job? Why had Lulu chosen to sell her body? Why had she chosen a profession that now made her just one more dead whore in so many people’s minds? Why had she chosen to be someone a lot of people were glad to be rid of?

  6

  “You receive a lot of benefits from your job: room and board, a car. And what else?” Ursula Honkanen asked intently. Tero Sulonen stared at her like a stone statue. His face was covered in sweat, and he kept dabbing it with a paper napkin.

  “That was all . . . It’s all in my contract.”

  Ursula snorted, and her red fingernails tapped the tabletop. The video captured them sitting in Interrogation Room One, a cramped cellar room where the interrogators and their subject were so close to each other that they fit in the same camera frame and could have hit, or kissed, each other. The table was less than two feet wide. Ursula was the more active questioner, as usual, since she enjoyed interrogations and presumably the power that went along with them. She didn’t know about the poems he wrote. We’d found them at the same time the video was being made. Ursula was going to rake Sulonen over the coals.

  At twenty-eight, Tero Sulonen was younger than I’d imagined. He was from the Vantaa suburbs north of Helsinki, from one of the drearier housing projects. His parents had moved south from Iisalmi in the 1970s, and his mother was the child of a family of Karelian evacuees. After finishing the required years of comprehensive school at the standard age of sixteen, he’d spent a couple of years unemployed before taking a security guard course and beginning work as a guard at a warehouse. Then followed a few gigs as a bouncer before he ended up at the Mikado. Ursula listened with a look of amusement as Sulonen explained his background, and Puupponen recorded the main points.

  “I’m going to ask you again, because I don’t think you fully comprehend. Did you and Lulu Nightingale have a sexual relationship?”

  Sulonen’s blush was visible even on the grainy, washed out image.

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “Did you want one?”

  Sulonen’s head began to sink and his lips pursed as he wiped his brow again.

  “Why are you asking that?”

  “Did you lust after Lulu Nightingale?”

  The water running down Sulonen’s face was no longer just droplets of sweat.

  “I offered to marry her and support her so she wouldn’t have to do it anymore . . . But she just laughed and said she liked her work and the freedom it gave her.” Now Sulonen wept openly, shaking and sobbing. I fast-forwarded the tape because no one said anything for a while.

  Once Sulonen calmed down, Ursula returned to the events of the night of Lulu’s death. According to Sulonen, Lulu had been in a good mood all day. She didn’t have any clients and had slept in until noon before going to the gym and having a massage. Then she started her makeup.

  “Lulu was so thorough. I don’t understand how dolling yourself up can take three hours, but that’s how long Lulu spent because she didn’t want to rush.”

  “Women,” Puupponen could be heard saying with a sigh, presumably trying to take the good-cop role, but Ursula’s glare silenced him, and Sulonen didn’t seem to be listening anyway.

  “She sang to herself and said that this was going to be the show of her life, that people were going to remember this for a long time. That a sex bomb was going to set off a news bomb on live TV.”

  I tensed at the same moment as Ursula did on the tape. Don’t screw this up! I found myself screaming at Ursula in my mind.

  “What did Lulu mean by that?” Ursula continued calmly, but I could see that the tapping of her fingernails on the tabletop had grown feverish.

  Sulonen stared for a long time and then shook his head. “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me everything. I’ve learned that I shouldn’t be too curious.”

  Ursula tried to press for more. “Did Lulu intend to out one of her important clients? Was she planning to strip or something?” Sulonen didn’t have an answer. He just repeated that Lulu was in a good mood and that he didn’t believe for a second that she’d committed suicide.

  “Not Lulu . . . She loved life. And when I find out who did this to her, I’m going to do the same thing to them . . .” Sulonen had to wipe the tears away again.

  Puupponen changed the topic to Lulu’s clients. Sulonen claimed he didn’t know much about them. They’d set the studio up so that the customer wouldn’t realize that anyone was on the premises besides himself and Lulu. When someone came over, Sulonen would sit in his room watching movies with headphones on, watching for the light alarm, hoping that Lulu wasn’t getting into any trouble.

  “I wasn’t interested in them. I’d seen enough at the Mikado. Why would I have wanted to see a bunch of horny guys getting off anyway? That seems kind of perverted.”

  “How could you not be interested? Didn’t you realize you could make money by getting information on Lulu’s customers? I’m sure they would have been only too happy to pay to keep their little adventures at your establishment secret from their wives or bosses,” Ursula said, taking over the conversation again. Puupponen closed his mouth and didn’t ask whatever question he’d had ready. Sulonen believed Lulu’s customer records were on her computer, since he’d seen her looking at them before, but he’d never tried to see for himself.

  “What would I have needed money for? I had a job and everything I wanted.”

  I thought of his servant’s room at the back of a sex studio. Maybe that was the peak of Sulonen’s life up to this point.

  “Since she had you, Lulu apparently thought she needed protecting. Why?”

  “Sometimes clients got difficult. It didn’t happen often, though, because Lulu was careful about who she took on, and she had a lot of regulars she trusted.”

  “What happened when someone got difficult?”

  “Then Lulu pressed the panic button, and I intervened.”

  “The cavalry arrived, is that it?”

  “No, just me. What cavalry?”

  Puupponen snorted and then tried to stifle his laughter, but Ursula’s face was still steely.

  “Forget it,” Ursula said with a sigh.

  “There were a couple of clients she needed me for. One wanted me to put on a uniform and watch while Lulu disciplined him. That turned him on. I didn’t like it. Once he asked for me to kick him. He paid extra, and Lulu gave me a bonus. And then there was another one who wanted me to wrap him and Lulu up like mummies and tie them together. But I wasn’t involved otherwise.” Sulonen wrung his hands as he talked, but Ursula’s eyes radiated a genuine curiosity.

  “Did Lulu really keep a full-time bodyguard just because of a few clients? That can’t be the whole truth.”

  “I’m not lying! Of course the mafia threatened Lulu, tried to make her work for them. Fucking Russians. As if Lulu was just
some cheap street whore stealing their business. Every time someone new came on the scene we had to negotiate with them all over again. And I couldn’t even get a concealed carry permit because of my convictions. We had to be careful. And now they finally got her. They must have followed us . . .”

  “So you suspect that the Russian mafia killed Lulu?” Puupponen and Ursula asked at nearly the same time. Sulonen just nodded and swallowed his tears.

  They gave him some time to calm down before continuing the questioning. I paused the tape for a minute and got myself some coffee. My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway differently than they did during the daytime, and the air smelled of cleaning fluids. The custodian had already been through and wouldn’t come again until Monday night. There were no cookies in the break room, just old, soft crispbread. When Lähde had been around, the cookie supply never ran out. That was the only reason I missed him.

  Once I had my sad little snack, I returned to the video. “What kind of threats did Lulu get? And who threatened her?” Ursula asked. Sulonen talked about anonymous phone calls and slashed car tires. Once someone had dropped a bag with a bloody heart in it through the mail slot.