To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

by Joanne Pence

  Reading between the lines—the type of questions asked, the cross-reference to Turunen’s folder—gave the appearance the investigators were speculating that Turunen killed Vanse, and then, in retaliation, was himself killed. The case remained open pending further developments.

  Paavo’s skin was chilled. Could his own father have been a murderer?

  If so, why the two gunshot wounds, and why had Mika driven Sam to a hospital? The investigation gave no answers to those questions.

  Paavo turned to photographs of the death scene. The body had moldered in the parking lot for almost two days before being discovered. Paavo knew that lot well, because of Aulis. It was enormous, with cars coming and going twenty-four hours a day, and a number of them remaining for several days.

  He shut the folder, not wanting to look at any more photos or the autopsy report.

  Slowly, tentatively, he reached for the next binder, the file on the investigation of Mika Turunen’s death.

  He had handled plenty of old homicide investigation case binders, but this was not any old case. This was…this man had been his father. As he touched the black cover, his hands trembled and his chest felt as if a tight band were around it, constricting the air from his lungs.

  He cracked open the faded and stiff cover, and then skipped over the yellow, dusty pages of the Chronological Report and Preliminary Report, preferring to form his own conclusions from the base material. He turned to the first report and began to read.

  The report had been filed by the patrol officers called to the scene by a motel owner. It began:

  Victim, Mika Turunen, age 30, found Room 8, Cypress Motel, 6321 Bayshore Boulevard, at 0717. DOA multiple gunshot wounds.

  Next came the Death Investigation Report. The motel owner, Victor Duggin, provided most of the information. Mrs. Turunen was in the office checking the family out, and the children were making him nervous playing with the ice machine outside. He wanted to get the family on its way, but he was having trouble accessing a phone line to verify the credit card.

  Suddenly he heard a barrage of gunshots so loud he ducked behind the counter. Mrs. Turunen ran outside. He assumed she went to her children.

  When the shooting stopped, Duggin lifted his head to see a black Cadillac tearing out of the lot. He didn’t see the faces—only that two men were inside. The door to Room 8 stood open, and some of the other motel guests were peeking from their rooms. The man from Room 5 ran into the office to tell him the guy in 8 was dead.

  Duggin phoned the police and then searched for Mrs. Turunen and her children, but he never saw them again. She never even came back to pick up her credit card.

  Under next of kin, the investigators had written:

  Spouse—Cecily Turunen, age 33

  Stepdaughter—Jessica Campbell, age 9

  Son—Paavo Turunen, age 4

  Paavo turned to the supplemental reports. The motel guests were all interviewed. No one saw the shooters. One person thought he saw the victim’s wife and children outside the motel room after the shooters left, but he wasn’t sure.

  Twenty rounds of 160-grain hollow-points had been fired into the room; five hit the victim’s chest—heart, lungs, and stomach penetrated, death instantaneous. The remaining shots were fired into the closet and bathroom, as if in search of anyone hiding there and killing them as well. Several shots penetrated the walls into Room 7.

  Paavo leafed through reports investigating the victim himself. There were essentially two sets of reports—one immediately after Mika’s murder, and another set after Sam’s body was found with Mika’s fingerprints in his car.

  Turunen was on a work visa, and had nothing negative at all on his record. Co-workers gave him high marks for job knowledge and productivity. Reference was made to Mika being part of a group of Finns working to help anti-Communists in Finland and the USSR. Speculation centered around a falling-out between members of this group, since Vanse was also implicated in it, but no proof could be found. Joonas Mäki and Okko Heikkila were interrogated, but both had good alibis.

  Cecily and her children abandoned their apartment and disappeared after the murder. None of the neighbors, including Aulis Kokkonen, had any idea where they had gone. No one mentioned Cecily’s job with the FBI.

  Suspicion immediately turned to Turunen’s wife, even speculation that the deaths were the result of a romantic triangle—that Cecily could have ordered a hit on Mika after he killed her lover.

  The next page in the file caused him to sit up abruptly. A week after the murder, Cecily Turunen’s car was found, upside down, in the Pacific just below Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County—not S.F.P.D jurisdiction. No body was retrieved.

  The investigation basically ended there, although more questions were asked and more leads followed, but nothing new turned up, and the case remained officially open.

  Twice in the following year the case had been picked up and reworked without consequence. Since the victim’s children were still missing and the wife’s body had never been recovered, the unsubstantiated conclusion within Homicide was that after having her husband killed, she faked her death and ran, taking her children with her.

  FBI help to find Cecily Turunen and her children was sought, but they, too, failed. Eldridge Sawyer had worked as the prime contact for the S.F.P.D. on the case.

  Mika’s autopsy report came next. Paavo skimmed it, not wanting the details. Even flipping through the thick report, though, his head felt a little light.

  Included in the binder was a brown envelope, ten by twelve. He knew what it contained—the crime scene and autopsy photos. He couldn’t look, and set it aside.

  Next in the file was an inventory of the evidence. Fingerprints lifted from the crime scene and their CSI IDs; lists of slugs and their CSI numbers; the clothes Mika wore, and clothes and belongings left behind in the motel room by the family.

  No clear prints other than the family’s and motel employees’ were found. If it had been a professional hit—no matter who ordered it—they wouldn’t have touched anything. Probably kicked the door open, or knocked on the door with some innocuous request, stepped inside, and started shooting.

  Paavo closed the file and ran his hands over his mouth, nose, and eyes. As much as he’d tried to read the file purely as a cop, at times the enormity of what he was learning after a lifetime of questions shook him to the core.

  He took the stairs back down to Archives, glad for the chance to move, and searched for the San Mateo County’s investigation of Cecily’s death. Often, complete files were copied and stored in cases clearly connected like this; if not, he would have to contact San Mateo.

  He was in luck; a copy existed.

  Back at his desk, he read through it. It was small and incomplete by big-city standards, but he could see that the police who took the case had been thorough with their contacts and their questions. They simply weren’t given good answers.

  Passersby had spotted Cecily’s car at low tide and reported it. Her seat belt had not been fastened and the driver- and passenger-side windows were both open. It was assumed the tides had washed the body out of the car and out to sea. Some strands of the victim’s hair had snagged onto the window, and tests showed blood on the windshield consistent with a face or head injury to a driver.

  Tide currents showed that the body should have washed up within a couple of weeks just north of the Golden Gate. It did not.

  When the connection between the missing victim and San Francisco’s two murders was discovered, the case was basically turned over to the S.F.P.D., who added little to it.

  He shut Cecily’s folder, his mind filled with more questions than the reports answered.

  The envelope with photos of Mika’s autopsy still sat, unopened, on his desk.

  Homicide remained empty. He hadn’t even noticed that three hours had passed. A couple of guys would be dropping in soon. Some of the skanks they dealt with could only be found after the sun went down. Much later, eleven or midnight, the on-call in
spectors would probably show up because that was when most of the city’s murders happened.

  As if he were moving in slow motion, he lifted the envelope, bent the metal clasps forward, opened the flap, and slid out the photos.

  A black-and-white eight-by-ten showed a man lying on his back, on a carpeted floor, his plaid-shirt-and-jeans-clad body riddled with bullet holes.

  He’d seen plenty of photos like this one before, but never had bile risen in his throat. He kept his eyes riveted to the photo. Despite the carnage, the thing that struck him the hardest was that the victim looked so very young. He was a thin man. His long hair, almost black in the photo, had spilled thickly around his head onto the carpet. His eyes were shut. No bullet marred the narrow, highcheekboned face with a broad brow and high, straight nose. His eyebrows were dark, not particularly thick, and arched. He wore a mustache and a short, trimmed beard. Except for the last, it was Paavo’s own face.

  The photo blurred. His hand shook as he lowered it. Mika, in death, was younger than Paavo was now. He didn’t feel like he was looking at a father—more like he should be a brother, or even a son.

  The shock, the grief, gradually faded, leaving emptiness inside him. Although the office was well heated, he was filled with an incredible cold. Then he remembered the feel of Angie’s arms circling his neck last night as he sat out on the chilly deck, remembered her warmth and sunniness, her compassion. He drew in a deep breath, and continued.

  He quickly leafed through other crime scene shots, all taken from different angles. Lamps, the headboard, the walls, the bed, the closet, and the dead man.

  He stopped when he reached the first autopsy photo. He didn’t want to look at those. He didn’t think he ever could. As he gathered the photos together to put them back into the envelope, he saw a five-by-eight white envelope.

  He knew what was in it—a photo of the victim in life. Homicide inspectors often used them to talk to people when they tried to find out more about a victim. It was too unsettling for people to be asked what they knew about a person and to be handed a photo from the morgue, or even worse, the scene of the crime. Only police should ever have to see victims in such poses.

  So here was the photo the homicide inspectors thirty years ago had used to ask people if they remembered Mika Turunen. Paavo opened the envelope and removed the photo.

  If homicide inspectors had asked him their question, he would have answered, “Yes. I remember him.”

  They weren’t precise memories, not sharp or definitive, but more of a blur. Yet, he knew.

  Suddenly he had an odd sense of vertigo, of being lifted high in the air by sure but gentle hands, and looking down into the big, blue eyes of the man in the photo. Echoes of laughter, adult and child, wafted in his ears. Another fuzzy memory came of a zoo, the strong musky scent of animals in his nostrils, and climbing onto a railing to look down into a pit where Siberian tigers were kept, and the feel of someone’s large hand on his shoulder, holding him, ready to grab him if he started to tumble over. He couldn’t quite remember the face that went with those hands…maybe not even the hands, exactly. Yet it wasn’t an unfamiliar touch. It was one he’d known. One he’d felt safe with.

  Then it was gone, and he never felt safe that way again.

  How could he have forgotten? And why hadn’t Jessica and Aulis talked about him?

  The vague sense of knowing his father had been a part of him for years, but they had assured him that he was wrong. As he grew older, the perception faded, and he came to believe them.

  Why had they wanted him to forget the father who had played with him, and loved him? He grew up thinking the man didn’t care that he existed, that his father walked away and never looked back. Why had they done that not only to him, but to the loving man who had been his father?

  Nausea roiled in his stomach, and once more his vision blurred.

  “Hey, Paav! Can’t believe you’re still around when you’ve got a woman waiting for you.” Homicide Inspector Bo Benson came in carrying a tall cup of coffee. Paavo glanced up at him.

  “What’s wrong?” Benson asked. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe so,” Paavo said. He slid the photo back into the envelope, carefully locked everything away inside a desk drawer, then picked up his jacket and left.

  Chapter 19

  “Make sure you leave me out of your freaking videos, kid.” Cousin Richie punctuated the air with his steak knife. Angie swiveled her camcorder away from his glistening head and toward unsuspecting diners in the Bella Rosa restaurant. “Why don’t you want to be on TV?”

  “I got my reasons. Hell, I’m surprised none of these customers punches you out.” He took a big bite of his New York steak. Richard Amalfi, the son of her father Sal’s older brother, wasn’t one for delicate veals and sauces as his main course. At age forty-four, he was speeding toward the age when men fight middle age with a vengeance. He was overweight and the expanding sand trap in the back of his head was beginning to give him a complex. What was left of his hair was shiny blue-black and curly. His hands were thick, with hairy knuckles on short fingers. He wore a Rolex the size of a pancake on his wrist, plus enough gold against his deeply tanned, black-haired chest to fill all the teeth in a small city.

  They had already finished a minèstra of swiss chard and cannelli beans, rigatoni with mussel and basil sauce, and were into the main course. “So, when you going to tell me why you asked me here?” he asked, taking a long swig of Krug’s cabernet sauvignon.

  “How suspicious! I wanted to thank you for the house, that’s all,” Angie said between bites of veal roll stuffed with tomato, anchovy, and parmesan. “We’re loving it.”

  “Yeah, and I didn’t say a word to Sal or Serefina, just like you asked.” He gave her a wink. “If they ever find out, I’ll deny everything.”

  “Absolutely. Oh, I almost forgot, but since you brought it up, I do have one teensy little favor I wanted to ask of you.”

  “Uh-huh.” He smirked.

  “Don’t give me that look! This is important. Paavo’s been trying to find a guy, an ex-FBI agent named Eldridge Sawyer.”

  “Eldridge? What the hell kind of name is Eldridge?”

  “I have no idea. Anyway, the guy seems to have gone into hiding.” She handed him a piece of paper. “Here’s his last address. He owned the place and sold it. Paavo tried state records, but there was nothing.”

  “What do you think I am, some freaking private eye?”

  Now it was her turn to smirk. “I think a pack of bloodhounds would have nothing on you, cousin. You’re someone who has sources in real estate, who has friends who can see where this guy was when the title documents and other papers were sent long after he left his house, and who can, somehow, track him from place to place after that.”

  Round, innocent brown eyes gawked at her. “What makes you think realtors keep records like that?”

  He was innocent as a retriever in a duck pond. “A lot don’t, I’m sure,” she said, adding more wine to his glass. “Your friends are special. That’s all I know. I don’t know anything else. Nothing at all.”

  He chortled. “That’s my girl.”

  “You’ll give it a try, then?”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “No problem.”

  He leaned way back, raising his hip in order to stuff Sawyer’s address into his pants pocket. “An ex-special agent trying to hide? It’ll be like taking candy from a baby.”

  A squatty two-story building designed to look like a Spanish hacienda with chipped stucco walls and a row of red tile edging a tar and gravel roof bore the sign CYPRESS MOTEL in neon letters. Below it, the single word VACANCY. The rooms all faced the center parking lot, and the motel office guarded the entrance.

  Paavo studied the motel from his car a moment, then walked into the parking lot. It was half-filled. From inside the lot, the motel looked even seedier than from the street. He focused on the door to Room 8, then abruptly turned back toward the o
ffice. A small alcove, built between the office and the first rental, caught his eye.

  As if against his will, he moved in its direction and stepped inside.

  The alcove had an ice machine and several vending machines for soda, candy, cookies, and crackers. The vending machines were new…but this alcove…right next to the office…

  “Looking for someone?”

  Paavo spun around to see a middle-aged man warily frowning at him. He took out his badge. “I’m checking up on an old case. About thirty years ago a man was shot in this motel. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Thirty years ago?” The man scoffed. “You kidding me? I don’t give a damn about that. I only bought this flea trap ten years ago. Worst thing I ever did. They was supposed to put a shopping mall ’cross the street. Upgrade the area. Then it fell through. This area’s getting worse than ever.

  “I had a guy OD last year. A suicide three years ago. But no murder. Not yet, anyhow. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. After being in this business, seeing the customers, nothing surprises me no more.”

  Paavo glanced again at the alcove with the ice machines—the children were playing with ice—then at the door to Room 8.

  “You being a cop,” the motel owner said, hands on hips, “I guess you know what I mean about the public being for shit. That nothing they do surprises you anymore, right?”

  “You’re right,” Paavo replied after a while. “Nothing surprises me much at all anymore.”

  He left the motel in a fog, his usual dogged clarity blurred and distorted by the past. His life had been nothing but a house of cards, and he was now in a game of fifty-two pickup. He couldn’t say he remembered having been at the motel as a child, but an eerie familiarity about it haunted him.

  As much as he wanted to see Angie, he needed a little time to digest all he had learned and seen. He drove, not paying attention to the streets.