Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  12

  Delivering the bad news to Arttu Aaltonen’s parents fell to Puustjärvi and me. Even though I forced myself to approach it just as work, the parents’ grief was infectious. Their son had threatened to kill himself before, and the mother had tried in vain to get him to see a psychologist. In the next morning’s paper, there was a brief report that a missing young man had been found dead, and its simple matter-of-fact tone left me feeling utterly empty.

  While I’d been worried Puupponen was going be out sick, on Tuesday morning it was Lehtovuori who called in to say that he had pneumonia and a fever of 102. The doctor had ordered three days of sick leave. I would have to assign another officer to investigate the mystery of the missing mushroomer with Wang.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said, trying to conceal my irritation. Koivu and I were both going to be tied up all afternoon at the National Bureau of Investigation dealing with Ström’s mess. I had planned for someone else to handle Riikka Merivaara’s interview, but there wasn’t anyone other than me.

  Kantelinen’s report on the Merivaara Nautical financial situation had finally appeared on my desk. I quickly flipped through it before the morning meeting. The company’s finances were stable, and they hadn’t needed to make any large investments in recent years. The balance sheet looked good. The company board consisted only of Juha and Anne Merivaara, the CFO Heikki Halonen, and Marcus Enckell, who, based on his name, I suspected must be related to Juha Merivaara’s late mother. The only thing Kantelinen had noted with a question mark was the 12 percent of Merivaara Nautical stock owned by Mare Nostrum. No information about that organization’s ownership appeared in the Merivaara Nautical reports or in the Trade Register. The trail ended at a post-office box on Guernsey Island.

  Tax evasion was the first thing that came to mind, so I dialed Kantelinen’s number to ask his opinion, but he wasn’t available. I set off to the morning meeting in a bad mood, which wasn’t helped at all by Koivu and Wang whispering like two infatuated eighth graders. I assigned Lähde to partner with Wang on the missing person case mostly because Koivu had to come with me to the NBI in the afternoon, and I needed someone to interview Riikka Merivaara with me.

  “How did you happen to be out there to find Aaltonen’s body? Were you out at the lighthouse again?” Lähde asked suddenly.

  “No. It was a complete coincidence,” I said abruptly and tried to move on to the next topic.

  “So you weren’t out with a patrol just to look for the kid?” Lähde continued stubbornly.

  “No. I was working the Merivaara case.” The fact that Lähde’s questions embarrassed me was irritating. “One of our main lines of investigation on that case is going to be financial. Everything looks aboveboard on the surface, but there is something fishy about one of the shareholders. Koivu and Puustjärvi are going to continue interviewing witnesses with me. Lähde, you can track down all of the company board members. We’ll meet up again as soon as Kantelinen sees fit to grace us with his presence. Koivu, ten thirty in Interrogation Room 2.”

  I almost fled the room. I wanted to be alone for a few seconds, behind closed doors. I had turned my phone off during the meeting, and now the voice mail told me I had six new messages, four of which were from home. Antti must have some emergency.

  “Hi,” he answered, out of breath. In the background I could hear Iida screaming. “I just called because I couldn’t find the car keys. Iida banged her eye on the edge of the piano and we need to go to the clinic.”

  “Oh God! Are you going to be OK?” I asked in a panic, even though of course Antti would be fine. Still the bad-mother complex reared its head: I should have dropped my work and rushed to the clinic to comfort my poor wounded child. But I couldn’t do that.

  “Call me when you know more. I’ll leave my phone on,” I said. Antti wanted to end the call so he could get moving.

  One of the other calls was from the Security Intelligence Service, which I returned solely to get the images of Iida screaming from her car seat with a swollen eye out of my mind. That the SIS wanted to talk about Jiri Merivaara was no surprise. They had started thinking about the same thing I had: Could the son have killed his father as some sort of strange initiation ritual to ensure him a prominent place in Animal Revolution? The SIS didn’t consider the theory very likely either, but it was possible, and they also thought it was quite a coincidence that Harri Immonen, another AR member, had died exactly one year earlier in exactly the same place as Jiri Merivaara’s father. We argued about how to interrogate Jiri about Harri. Fortunately I was able to cut the argument short, because I had to go interview Riikka Merivaara.

  Koivu waited in the conference room, looking sullen.

  “The lab called. The glass in the flashlight isn’t the same as the glass they found in Juha Merivaara’s head, and the injury doesn’t match up either. The flashlight isn’t the murder weapon.”

  I sighed. “Of course it isn’t. Anything else?”

  “The fingerprint from the collar of Juha Merivaara’s coat is Anne Merivaara’s. They also found fibers from Mikke Sjöberg’s wool sweater, but those could have come from when he was pulling the body ashore.”

  “Crap,” I said in frustration. Nothing seemed to be going anywhere.

  “Bad mood today?” Koivu said, more as a statement than a question as we reached the stairs.

  “I don’t imagine you’re thrilled about going to the NBI later today either.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? We’re getting rid of Ström. The guys and I spent all last winter praying that you wouldn’t take your full maternity leave or have another kid. Anu was probably praying the hardest, even though she’d never worked with you.”

  “Is she a Christian?”

  “Who?” Koivu’s face was confused, then he caught on. “Oh, Anu. Actually, I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that.”

  “A Buddhist wedding could be really interesting, or is her family Taoist, since they’re originally from China?”

  “Maria!” Koivu tried to look resentful. “Anu is pretty interesting, though. You have this culture that tells women to keep quiet, but then she’s a cop . . .” He stopped talking when we saw Tapio Holma and Riikka Merivaara waiting in the hall.

  Holma had escorted Riikka here. Maybe he thought a police station was too oppressive a place for Riikka. Or had he come to keep an eye on Riikka for some other reason?

  “Wait in the hall or go have a coffee,” I told Holma. “This is going to take at least an hour.”

  “Can’t Tapio come with me?” Riikka asked, wringing her hands like a soprano singing a difficult aria might.

  “Riikka has the right to have someone with her to support her during her interview,” Holma argued.

  “Not someone suspected of the same crime,” I said firmly, and Holma didn’t object. He sat down in the hall to wait while we went into Interrogation Room 2.

  As she answered the initial routine questions, Riikka was stiff and kept swallowing, as if being interrogated by the police was just the most awful thing. I imagine it would be difficult for a girl used to such a mellow life, but this wasn’t even the first time. We retraced the events on Rödskär Island, confirming my belief that Riikka couldn’t have killed her father. Her tall, slender frame seemed strong enough to produce the physical power, but she definitely lacked the mental strength to conceal an act like this.

  “Mom is working like a crazy person. She says Dad would have wanted it that way. They have to get the fall orders out.”

  “How well do you know the company’s business? Who owns the shareholding company Mare Nostrum?”

  Riikka shrugged. She didn’t know and barely even recognized the name. Business had never interested her. She only wanted to sing.

  “Now you’re going to inherit half of your father’s shares, though. I think you’re going to have to care. Weren’t you the one who got your father excited about environmentalism and changing the company’s business concept?”

  For some reas
on Riikka blushed.

  “No, it wasn’t like that. There was never any way to get Dad excited about anything unless he decided to be excited. Mom says my vegetarianism and stuff opened her eyes and made her see things in a different way, but Dad . . . his motto was always, ‘Just do well in school and leave saving the world to us adults,’” Riikka said, imitating her father.

  “How did your father react to the attempted rape this spring?”

  “Do I have to talk about that? I wish I could forget the whole thing,” Riikka said, but I couldn’t leave it alone. “Of course Dad was furious. He wanted to go find the guys and beat them up. And he yelled at me for getting in their car instead of taking a taxi. It was typical Dad. That wasn’t the first time he said women were to blame when things like that happened to them.” Riikka’s lips trembled. “I feel so empty now that he’s gone. He was so big and loud and always knew everything . . .” Riikka fished a handkerchief out of her bag.

  “Even though, Dad was never interested in me. Sometimes he made fun of me because I didn’t have a boyfriend. He said no guy was going to want a girl who dressed like his aunt and knew what a coloratura was. Guys were only going to go for a classical artist if she posed in Playboy and played rock violin like Linda Brava. As if it were still a father’s responsibility to marry off his daughter!”

  My phone rang, and I answered because Antti’s number came up. Apologizing to Riikka, I stepped outside where Holma was sitting, still looking as if he was supposed to be protecting Riikka from the big bad policemen.

  “She needed three stitches in her eyebrow, and they had to sedate her. Her eye is fine, though.”

  “Thank goodness! How did Iida manage to hit her head like that?” It wasn’t until I said it that I realized how accusatory my tone sounded.

  “I was playing the piano and she was playing with a ball. She just slipped somehow and hit the corner of the piano.”

  “We’ll have to put some padding on that. Is she sleeping now?”

  “She’s in recovery. We’re at the hospital. The clinic sent us over here. I should go so Iida doesn’t get scared if she wakes up. Can you come home at all early today?”

  “I’ll try, but I have to go to NBI headquarters this afternoon. I’m in the middle of an interview right now too.”

  It took me a while before I could calm down, even though I wasn’t the hysterical type. Sometimes I felt like a monster, leaving Iida screaming in her crib instead of sitting with her until she fell asleep. I wasn’t worried about her choking on cat hair, and I hadn’t taught her to be afraid of wasps. The helmet my sister Helena had given us for protecting her head while she learned to sit and walk had gone unused too.

  “Did your father ever have any visitors you didn’t know while you were on Rödskär this summer?” I heard Koivu asking Riikka as I came back into the interrogation room.

  “Yes, there were plenty of people in sailboats over the summer, but they weren’t Dad’s friends usually,” Riikka answered after a moment’s thought. “Most people ended up there by accident. I guess there were some old business acquaintances. I wasn’t on the island the whole time either, since I was studying for exams in the city, and I took a couple of singing classes. Ask my mom.”

  Riikka threw back her hair, which shone like ebony. Her black polo shirt, black skirt, and thick black tights made her look even more angular and long-limbed, and suddenly I realized how much she reminded me of Mikke.

  “How did your mother react to Jiri’s arrest?”

  Turning to me, Riikka almost laughed.

  “What do you think? I don’t understand how Mom is coping with all of this. Thank God Mikke promised to handle the funeral arrangements, and Seija keeps trying to help even when we don’t want her to. But those people in that meatpacking plant could have died! Jiri claims he didn’t know the fire would be dangerous, but I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “Have you had any involvement with Animal Revolution?”

  “I went to a couple of antifur rallies last year, and that big algae bloom protest that a lot of the environmental groups participated in. I don’t approve of everything AR does, though.”

  Koivu asked another question about the night of Juha Merivaara’s death, presumably hoping to find some sort of contradiction in Riikka’s replies. But it was to no avail. She assured us that she and Holma had slept straight through the night.

  Continuing the interview was pointless. When I let Riikka leave, I heard her conversation with Holma through the open door.

  “Let’s go to my place. We haven’t been able to be alone for a long time,” Holma complained.

  “I can’t right now. I have to be by myself for a little while,” Riikka replied evasively.

  “I need you, Riikka. I have to decide by tomorrow morning if I’m going to take the risk and go for that operation. I need you to help me decide.”

  “I don’t want to! I can’t take responsibility for your voice and your future!” Riikka exclaimed. “Take me home. Or I can take the bus.”

  Based on the clicking of her heels, Riikka started walking away, and a moment later Holma followed.

  “Let’s get going. We can grab some food on the way to the NBI,” I said to Koivu, who had rewound the tape and was beginning to transcribe the important notes.

  “How about McDonald’s?” Koivu said.

  “No hamburgers, thank you very much!” Koivu looked confused at my response. “I want to eat something that isn’t going to make me feel guilty. Let’s go hit the cafeteria for some mashed potatoes.”

  Taskinen was there too, sitting with Laine from Organized Crime next to some large potted ferns. I joined them, but Koivu said he preferred eating with his equals and went to a table with some officers from Robbery.

  “Orion received another threat,” Taskinen said. “If the company doesn’t release its test animals, it’ll be hit soon. The message was signed by Animal Revolution.”

  “Those kids are quick. I thought some of them were still in custody over at SIS.”

  “Come on, Kallio, this isn’t a laughing matter,” Laine said, wiping a smear of mashed potatoes off his dark-blue silk tie.

  “Why would we start guarding a rich corporation’s lab when we don’t even have the resources to protect victims of domestic violence?” I said pointedly, thinking both of Ari Väätäinen’s wife and another case from the previous weekend in which a woman almost died. The violence had been going on for some time in that family too.

  This comment gave Taskinen an opportunity to turn the conversation to Ström.

  “Ström’s situation looks pretty bad, since he already has so many marks on his record. He’s going to have to stay on administrative leave at least until the trial. It might be permanent too.”

  “What kind of statement do you intend to give?”

  I looked into Taskinen’s serious blue-green eyes. I knew he didn’t like Ström any more than I did.

  “Ström has his good aspects, but he could never be a leader here. He solves his cases but never for free. Last winter half of your unit was on the edge of burnout, and it was mostly caused by interpersonal tensions.” Taskinen looked back into my eyes, and if Laine hadn’t been sitting at the table, he probably would have taken my hand.

  “I could have punched Väätäinen in the mouth too,” I said in exasperation.

  “Me too. But we wouldn’t have.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. I stood up, motioned to Koivu, and we headed to our interviews at the National Bureau of Investigation several miles north in the city of Vantaa. As we were passing Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport, I called home. Antti and Iida were back. Iida had woken up normally from the sedation and was now eating leftover carrots au gratin as if she hadn’t seen food in a week. I promised that I’d try to be home by four at the latest.

  I had been interviewed by the NBI before, most recently when an escaped prisoner kidnapped one of my partners and both of them died in the ensuing standoff. Even so, c
hanging from interrogator to interrogatee felt strange. There were only two interviewers, Supervisory Agent Suurpää and Senior Special Agent Peltonen, who stayed quiet throughout. Agent Suurpää was at least six foot two, with a heavy build and thick hair. Gray strands had appeared among the black, and Suurpää seemed like the type whose hair would be completely white long before his sixtieth birthday.

  “Cases like these are unfortunate,” Suurpää began as if wanting to give the impression we were on the same side.

  “The county prosecutor is obligated to press charges, especially since the case has received so much bad press. Let’s talk first about Lieutenant Ström’s background. You’ve worked together for three years, I believe, which is plenty of time to get to know someone.”

  “Actually we were in the same class at the police academy too, and we’ve bumped into each other now and then otherwise as well.” I smirked to myself at my choice of words, since Ström and I spent most of our time on a collision course.

  “Ström has received complaints before about violent behavior toward individuals in custody. Do you have any experience with that?”

  I had to tell them about Kimmo, a murder suspect I had helped about four years earlier when I was working for a short time in a local law office. Ström had arrested Kimmo in the middle of a sex game and dragged him down to the police station in nothing but a rubber suit. And then there was Joona Kirstilä, whom Ström had goaded into a fight. Ström had demanded Kirstilä be charged with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest, even though Kirstilä had received by far the worst of the exchange.

  But Ström’s list of sins wasn’t that much worse than plenty of other cops. And there had also been other kinds of situations. Ström had jumped in an icy lake to save a woman who was trying to drown herself and saved her life. I told Agent Suurpää about that too, although he said it didn’t have any bearing on this situation.

  “Now let’s move on to the particular incident in question. You and Officer Koivu were not in the room when the fight started, but you heard it from the hall?”