Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Most of the people who kept boats at the marina had already taken their crafts out of the water because the weather was getting too cold for boating. A few motorboats still floated at the dock, but there were only two sailboats. The all-wood Leanda was easy to pick out among all the white fiberglass. The sun was shining pleasantly, so it wasn’t any surprise Mikke Sjöberg was sitting on deck reading.

  “Hi, Mikke!” I yelled and found myself smiling much more broadly than I intended.

  Mikke got up and came to open the gate in the chain-link fence that controlled access to the docks.

  “Hey.” He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  “I’ve been trying to call, but you haven’t been answering your phone,” I said as I hopped onto the deck of the Leanda.

  “Nope, I haven’t been. Is it something important for you to come all this way?”

  “Yes and no.” I climbed along the boat and we sat next to the helm. Had Mikke been out sailing in the morning? The mainsail was on the mast, although lowered.

  “Want some coffee? There’s probably some left in the thermos.”

  When I said yes, thank you, Mikke got up and opened the hatch to the cabin.

  “Welcome to my floating palace,” he said with a crooked smirk and motioned for me to enter. I climbed down the ladder into the main cabin. It appeared surprisingly roomy, with a collapsible navigation table big enough for full-size charts. Right now an Olivetti laptop and a couple of books were out on it. It was an older laptop model that didn’t have much battery life, so I wondered what Mikke was doing with it on the boat.

  “The sleeping berth is in the fore cabin,” Mikke said calmly, as if I were any old visitor. “Do you take milk or sugar?”

  “Milk, please.” I glanced into the fore cabin, which had one wide bed. A toilet and an open closet were between the cabins. On the right-hand side of the main cabin, in the aft corner, was a compact kitchen with a range and water filter. The shelves lining the main cabin were full of books, including fiction, travel books, and guides to birds and plants.

  “Leanda. Doesn’t that come from an old thriller?” I asked, grabbing the coffee mug Mikke offered. His fingers brushed against mine.

  “Have you read it?”

  “I have, although that was years ago,” I said, thinking that Mikke must really be a romantic at heart if he had named his boat after the idealistic heroine of Andrew Garve’s novel.

  “A Hero for Leanda is still one of my favorite books.” Mikke grabbed an old book off the shelf. The green binding of the books from the long-running detective series was easily recognizable.

  “I prefer to read in Finnish when I’m traveling. Otherwise I get rusty. Sometimes I get mixed up about what language I’m supposed to be using in different countries. Would you like some chocolate cookies?”

  I was never one to turn down chocolate. Mikke sat down on a couch in the main cabin, and I lounged on the other side of the navigation table. I wolfed down half a cookie, which was more chocolate than anything else. So much for my healthy lunch.

  “Did you come to talk about Jiri?” Mikke asked, licking chocolate off his upper lip.

  “Not really. Have you seen him since they let him go?”

  “I visited the house yesterday because Anne asked me to. Jiri was a very quiet young man after sitting in jail for two days. He wouldn’t say anything about his part in the fire. What happened out there anyway?”

  I gave a brief account, and Mikke’s expression hardened. He looked pensively out the window. Then his face suddenly relaxed into a smile.

  “I probably shouldn’t, but I was thinking about going for a little spin after coffee. Maybe out to Hirsala and back. Come with me.”

  “Bad idea,” I said, looking at my coffee mug and not Mikke.

  “Why? You know how to sail. You can make sure I don’t run away.” Mikke’s smile contained a challenge, and I found myself blushing.

  “Actually I wanted to talk about Harri Immonen. He was also in Animal Revolution.”

  “Harri? That’s hard to believe. He was so—well, you know. Gentle.”

  “I doubt he participated in any riots or arsons. Maybe he just went to their protests. That would be enough for the SIS to put him on their list. So Jiri and Harri didn’t seem to know each other from anywhere else?”

  Mikke said no. Harri had been nothing to Jiri, although Jiri once had said to Mikke that at least Harri was interested in birds as a part of nature, unlike Tapio Holma, who thought bird-watching was some kind of competitive sport.

  “It is kind of crazy that guys go driving hundreds of miles to stare at some little skylark. Not very environmentally friendly, burning all that gas chasing them,” I said with a nervous laugh, and Mikke laughed back. Then he suggested the sailing outing again.

  And stupid me agreed.

  “Just let me rig the spinnaker. At first we’ll just use the mainsail, but once we get moving east we’ll have a fair wind. Are you wearing enough? I have some sweaters and long underwear.”

  I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket because I had biked to work. I pulled my earmuffs out of my pocket.

  We started the motor, and Mikke criticized his own laziness. “And if I mess up the sails, I’ll never live it down in your eyes,” he joked. After we left the harbor we raised the mainsail and went into a close haul.

  “Tapio was furious with Jiri yesterday. Jiri gave it back to him, though. He even accused Tapio of killing Juha!”

  “What?” The wind threw my hair in my eyes, and for a moment I couldn’t see Mikke’s expression.

  “No, it’s ridiculous. I know Juha and Tapio fought that afternoon in the sauna, but that probably blew off most of the steam.” Mikke pulled his pipe out of his jacket pocket and asked me to hold the helm while he lit it.

  “If someone killed Juha, which is hard to believe, I wouldn’t suspect Riikka or Tapio.” Mikke took back the helm, and again his hand brushed mine. The touch slid through my whole body. Flecks of light danced in the sea, and the east wind had stripped the birch trees onshore of their leaves. My eyes began to water.

  “Did you say you heard Jiri go outside that night? Are you sure he was only gone a minute? I know you don’t think you fell asleep between when he went out and came back, but what if you did?”

  “I didn’t.” Mikke’s voice was sure. “I was as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve about leaving, and I was too restless for any kind of real sleep. It’s always that way when I’m setting sail, which makes it hard and wonderful all at the same time. And then the first night on the boat I always sleep like a log. Here I’m home.”

  Mikke turned his eyes to mine. “Jiri is pretty fanatical, but he isn’t a murderer. He’s like his dad, despite it all. I’m worried about the kid, though. He’s probably going to do something really stupid one of these days.”

  “I think he might have already done it.” I tried to put my hair under the band of my earmuffs so it wouldn’t keep flying in my face. My hands were stiff. The rain at the soccer game had ruined my gloves. I should have borrowed some from Mikke.

  “Sometimes I think I should stay for the winter, no matter what happens. But I can’t. I have to leave. I can’t go for that many months without sailing.”

  The sun brought out the blue in Mikke’s eyes, making them look deep and sad. Then he sucked on his pipe and veiled himself in a cloud of smoke, giving me a good reason to cough and look away.

  I had to focus to collect myself so I wouldn’t be the next one to do something really stupid. During my ten years as a cop, I had interviewed a lot of different types of people. Powerful executives, moronic petty criminals, mothers who had killed their children, psychopathic bastards.

  Never before had I felt such a draw to someone I was interviewing, though, not to Antti and not even to my teenage crush, Johnny, who had been a suspect in a murder case a few years earlier back in my hometown. There was something about Mikke Sjöberg that put me off balance. Few would have called him handsome. His muscu
lar body was trim to the point of being bony, his face hard, and his gaze furtive. Still I seemed ready to forget that I was happily married and that I suspected Mikke of murdering his half brother.

  But I couldn’t forget my work for anything more than a few fleeting seconds of daydreaming.

  “Animal Revolution demands direct action from its members. Over the weekend I read their platform documents. Could Jiri have killed his father in their name?”

  Mikke’s face quivered, though he tried not to let it show. He didn’t reply, but shook his head. I couldn’t stand the silence that drew me toward Mikke.

  “Not Riikka, not Tapio, not Jiri. So what about you? What did you think of your brother?”

  Again another cloud of smoke in which Mikke’s eyes disappeared. Then he stood up and spoke quickly.

  “Time to change course. Take the wheel. I’ll raise the spinnaker. Turn west when I tell you to.”

  I grabbed the helm, cursing myself for coming out on this stupid sailing trip. My work was already complicated enough without being infatuated with one of my suspects. Mikke cranked the spinnaker up and loosened the sheet on the mainsail.

  “Jibe-ho!”

  The boat turned to catch the wind with the spinnaker billowing, and the mainsail swung around. The wind wasn’t making very big waves, so the Leanda sped forward steadily. We were headed toward the Porkkala Peninsula, and Rödskär was also visible as a ruddy spot off to the south. When Mikke sat down again, I continued my questions.

  “Could your brother have killed Harri?”

  Mikke’s eyes went wide.

  “No one killed Harri!”

  “What if they did?”

  “Hell no. Why?”

  “You tell me.”

  Mikke stared toward the horizon. “I thought we agreed Harri was a gentle man. Who would want to kill someone like that?”

  “Did Seija Saarela know Harri?”

  “They both sailed with me a couple of times. But this is insane. You can’t think that Seija . . .” Mikke sighed, his face twisting into a white mask as his hand squeezed the helm. It looked like his knuckles might break the skin.

  We continued tacking between Pentala Island and Stora Herrö Island. Mikke turned the helm over to me again and went to get the jib from the cabin for the return trip. We sailed in silence for about ten minutes, drinking in the colors the fall weather had splattered across the shore. The deep red and wild yellow of the trees stood in sharp relief with dark clouds towering in the western sky behind, making the whole scene somehow unreal. Finally Mikke scrambled to the bow to untie the spinnaker. I adjusted the helm and trimmed the mainsail according to his instructions. He gave his commands in a calm, firm voice anyone in police-command school could take a lesson from. The Leanda’s rhythm was sharper now but she still moved softly, taking the occasional taller waves so easily that I no longer doubted her ocean worthiness. Mikke stuffed the spinnaker into a bow hatch and started rigging the jib.

  “Turn a little more into the wind! Good! You’ve spent a lot of time on the water, haven’t you?”

  I wasn’t really much of a sailor, so the compliment meant a lot. Mikke raised the jib and let it flap, then we turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

  “And now it’s just back to the marina,” he said in a resigned tone as he flopped back down on a bench. “Too bad we can’t take more trips like this. You’re a good deckhand.”

  “Madeira sounds awfully fun,” I said with a laugh, happy that the wind had already turned my cheeks red.

  “Yes, it does. Maybe I would have run away if you hadn’t come on this outing with me. What would have happened then?”

  “I would have sent the Coast Guard after you. And if you keep saying things like that, I’ll confiscate your passport.”

  “And what if you can’t solve Juha’s murder? Do you intend to keep me here all winter?”

  “Oh, we’ll solve it,” I said with as much self-assurance as I ever dared. I needed to pee, so I headed into the cabin. Inside the rocking was unpleasant, but nothing on the shelves had budged. Before our departure Mikke had stowed his laptop and put the books back away. The thought of living for six months in a ten-meter boat was at once fascinating and horrifying. You definitely wouldn’t drag anything unnecessary along with you. The boat began swaying more angrily, so I went back on deck.

  “Let’s go around Mies Island and in past Iso Vasikka Island. That’ll be easier with this wind. Will you trim the jib a bit?”

  When I yanked the rope, I felt the jerk all the way in my back muscles.

  “After Mies Island we can really tack. Are you up to it, or should we use the motor?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” I replied, even though it was already late and nothing had come of this ridiculous sailing outing other than my increasingly confused heart and the growing feeling that Mikke Sjöberg was hiding something. But how was I going to wring it out of him? The only person I couldn’t imagine Mikke protecting was Tapio Holma, and Holma wasn’t even in the picture when Harri died.

  Despite the gusting wind, hauling the ropes made me break out in a sweat. I looked at the villas on the islands and at the Temple of Neptune Antti and I had cross-country skied to the previous winter. Then my policewoman’s eye noticed something strange.

  “Do you have binoculars onboard?”

  “In the cabin.”

  “Grab them, quick!”

  Without a question Mikke shoved the rudder into my hands and jumped down the stairs. Precious seconds passed before I could get the binoculars adjusted to my eyes, but looking through them confirmed my observation.

  A body was floating in the water off the southeast corner of Iso Vasikka Island.

  “Strike the sails! Look!” I pushed the binoculars at Mikke, who looked and then went pale. He thrust the rudder at me again and moved forward to lower the jib while I used my other hand to dial the station to request a boat patrol.

  Mikke took the mainsail down too and started the motor. Even though his movements were practiced, I noticed his lips trembling.

  “Check the sonar. Our draft is one-point-six. Damn it. I wish we had the dinghy!”

  We found an appropriate landing spot about fifty feet from the body. I jumped ashore before realizing that I wouldn’t be able to get to the body floating on its stomach in the reeds without getting my feet wet.

  “Do you have rubber boots?”

  “Yes, size forty-four.”

  “Good. They’ll go higher on me. Throw them here!” I said, tying the boat to a pine tree.

  “They’re way too big for you. What if I go . . .”

  “No! Stay in the boat.”

  Mikke looked sick enough that I hoped the patrol boat would get here in record time. Civilians were the last thing you wanted around when you found a body.

  I pulled the boots over my walking shoes so they would be more stable. Then I started wading through the rocks and got a grip on the body’s jacket. I hauled the corpse far enough up the shore that the waves wouldn’t carry it away. There was nothing more I could do for now.

  “Can I help somehow?” Mikke yelled.

  “Just stay there. Do you have any rubber gloves?” Mikke shook his head. I climbed back up the shore and called our unit, where I reached Koivu.

  “What was the description of that missing high school kid?”

  “One hundred and seventy-nine centimeters, slender build. Straight dark hair, shoulder length, brown eyes. Tattoos . . .”

  “What was he wearing when he disappeared?”

  “Brown corduroy jacket and green cotton pants, Adidas running shoes and—”

  “That’s enough. He’s floating right here. Off Iso Vasikka Island.”

  The patrol boat arrived, along with the forensic photographer. Once he had taken his pictures, we donned our protective gear, lifted the body out of the water, and turned it over. I had spent some time trying to remember the picture I had seen of Arttu Aaltonen, and when I saw his drowned young face, I was sure I re
cognized it. Patting down the body, I found a wallet in his jacket pocket. The pimpled face of a boy stared back from his laminated driver’s license. Arttu Henrikki Aaltonen, born October 21, 1979.

  “He disappeared Friday night. Suspected suicide,” I explained to the patrol officers. I couldn’t detect anything that indicated foul play, but the autopsy would be more definitive.

  Mikke had disappeared from the deck. When I climbed back aboard to return the rubber boots, I found him lying down in the fore cabin staring through a hatch at the sky. There was still no color in his face.

  “You can head back to the marina. I’m going in the police boat. Thanks for the outing,” I said.

  Mikke sat up and took the rubber boots.

  “How do you get used to that?” he asked hopelessly. “Don’t the dead haunt your dreams?”

  “Sometimes. But if you want to do this job, you have to get used to it, or at least cope with it. You aren’t a professional, and this was your second body in less than two weeks. Remember that you don’t have to shoulder this experience alone.”

  “He was so young. Was it murder?”

  “Probably suicide,” I said, even though I shouldn’t have said anything about the case.

  Mikke groaned. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he rested his cheek on my arm. I stroked his hair, and suddenly he squeezed me so tight it hurt. We held each other until I heard the photographer shouting for me. He wanted more instructions.

  “I have to go. Do you want me to untie the rope?” I asked. Mikke nodded and followed me up on deck.

  We looked at each other for a moment, and then I saw the ambulance boat coming around the island and went to meet it. From the rocks I watched as Mikke started the motor and began chugging slowly along the channel toward the marina. As he rounded the island, he turned to glance back, but when I waved, he didn’t respond.