Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Let’s go to your office,” he said.

  “Koivu, be ready in fifteen minutes! We’ll take my car,” I said and then marched after Taskinen to my office, which strangely transformed from my domain to his as soon as he walked in. I almost sat down on the sofa instead of in my chair behind the desk, but Taskinen chose his place first.

  “If Ström cooked up this bribery thing, he could also be charged with perjury!” he said.

  “I got the impression they were just vague rumors, not anything directed at a specific individual. Ström denies knowing anything about it.”

  “You asked him? Of course he would deny it. Don’t be so gullible, Maria. Ström is never going to get over you stealing this job from him. He knows his career in this department is over, and he wants to try to pull you down with him.”

  “Are you suggesting he bribed Väätäinen to accuse me of bribery? I don’t see it. Ström really hates that guy. He’d never do a deal with him.”

  Whereas a lot of career cops became friendly with criminals to learn to think the way they did, Ström had always worked hard to separate us from them, cops from crooks. It troubled him that criminals these days weren’t playing on the same chessboard as the police and seemed to be able to turn the rules to their own advantage.

  “Maybe Agent Suurpää just wanted to see how we would react. Apparently someone they interviewed made it clear Ström’s exit would only be a good thing for the department,” I said in a tone that made Taskinen glance at me in confusion.

  “Are you saying you don’t want him to go?”

  “I don’t know!” I said in disgust. “Excuse me, but I have to check a few things before we leave for Merivaara Nautical.”

  Taskinen stood up, looking hurt. When the door closed behind him, I thought that the world was turning awfully strange. I had just had an argument about Pertti Ström with a boss I loved and respected and who had always supported me. Ström had claimed that I was promoted because Taskinen and I had a romantic relationship, which wasn’t true. Sometimes I wondered whether Taskinen would have had anything against it, though, and I had to admit there had been times when I had considered it.

  Koivu had confirmed that Halonen and Anne Merivaara were at work. Koivu could interview Halonen, and I would try to get Anne to open up with some girl talk. Once again I wondered at her ability to work, even though her husband had been killed and her son was being charged with arson.

  At the Merivaara offices, the receptionist downstairs asked Koivu to wait. The chief financial officer would be with him in a moment. Juha Merivaara’s assistant, Paula Saarnio, came to escort me upstairs. A fax machine was humming away in the corner of her office, but she didn’t even glance at what it was printing. Anne Merivaara had moved into the CEO’s office and was currently speaking German on the phone.

  “Ja. Sehr gut. Vielen Dank, Herr Doktor Schubert. Auf Wiederhören!” Anne smiled faintly as she hung up and then stood to shake my hand. Her thin, pale skin shone, pulled tight over cheeks and temple bones. Makeup couldn’t conceal the dark circles and bags under her eyes.

  “Paula, please book a room for two people under Dr. Schubert’s name for the nights before and after Juha’s funeral. Preferably at the Tapiola Garden. Please hold my calls and bring us some tea. Would you like anything to eat, Lieutenant?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “How is the investigation proceeding?”

  “We’re making constant progress,” I lied without hesitation. Anne nodded and said that was a relief. She spoke in measured tones, but it felt as if she were a glass balanced on the edge of a table, poised to fall at any instant and shatter on the tile floor. Still, I didn’t bother with small talk. I just sat down and got to the point.

  “I want more information about your company shareholders, especially Mare Nostrum. Who owns it?”

  Anne’s eyes wandered the room for a few seconds. Since my last visit they had indeed hung a picture of Juha Merivaara next to his father and grandfather. There wasn’t a plaque with his name and dates under the black-and-white portrait yet, though. In the picture Juha wore a skipper’s cap and stared into the distance with his chin thrust forward. His stance made me think of Jiri.

  “Isn’t that in the financial documents? That sergeant took all of them.”

  “No, strangely enough. The company’s address is just a post-office box on a known tax-haven island. But as a shareholder and member of the company board, you should be able to tell me who owns Mare Nostrum.”

  “It’s a Lithuanian company . . . I imagine they moved their registry abroad because conditions have been so unstable at home.”

  “Mare Nostrum purchased its holdings in Merivaara Nautical in the spring of 1991. That was before Lithuania gained its independence,” I said coldly. “I doubt corporate acquisitions like this were very common with the Soviets. What’s going on here?”

  Anne’s face looked even more harried, with wrinkles lining her forehead and circling her eyes.

  “I guess it was a Finnish company originally but then got sold to some Lithuanians. Things were hard back then. Juha didn’t have the money to buy Mikke’s shares, but he also didn’t want to share the company with anyone outside the family. We couldn’t convince the Enckells to invest. Juha met the Mare Nostrum people on his sailing trips to Gotland. I wasn’t with him.”

  “How is it possible that the stock contract isn’t with the other company papers?”

  “I imagine they’re at the bank in a safe-deposit box. Ask Halonen. He’ll know!” Anne’s serenity began to crumble, and she was visibly relieved when Paula Saarnio came in with the tea tray. This time the tea smelled like chamomile.

  “As a major shareholder and member of the board, you should know who is behind Mare Nostrum too. Or didn’t Juha tell you?”

  Anne cradled her teacup in both hands as if to warm them.

  “Our board meetings were never very momentous. Heikki, I mean our CFO Heikki Halonen, did exactly what Juha told him, and Marcus Enckell only participates out of some sort of loyalty to Juha because he didn’t have the money to buy those shares and help his cousin’s son when he needed it. For the past few years I’ve been handing our public image, not the finances.”

  “Are you trying to say that you really don’t know who owns Mare Nostrum? That you weren’t even interested?”

  A shadow fell over Anne’s eyes, but she still lifted her gaze to meet mine when she said yes.

  “The recession was hard for us. Maybe I was having some sort of midlife crisis. I started thinking about what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. Whether I really wanted to spend it smelling paint fumes and smoothing over Juha’s collisions with the world, or whether I might have other options. I tried a lot of things to find myself. I read self-help books. I started meditating. Around the same time Riikka started getting interested in environmentalism and vegetarianism. I also thought a lot about whether I wanted to keep living with Juha or whether I needed to leave. I decided to stay, and that included the decision to ignore certain things, like parties at brothels for business associates.”

  Anne’s voice was quiet and cold, but I had a hard time believing her. Had she really been able not to care at all who owned stock in her family’s company? Or maybe she was just in the same kind of denial you saw with the parents of teenagers mixed up with drugs: if you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

  Why not? Maybe I was guilty of the same thing with Ström’s alcoholism.

  “So Marcus Enckell is just as in the dark as you are?” I asked, realizing that Puustjärvi was probably wasting his time interviewing the old man.

  “Marcus has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past two years. I doubt he’ll even be able to come to Juha’s funeral.”

  Enckell wasn’t even necessarily legally competent. Anne claimed that the CFO would know exactly what was going on, though. He had been Juha Merivaara’s right-hand man.

  “I’ve been planning to ask Halonen to step in as acting CEO
after Juha’s funeral. I don’t have the energy to run this company myself. We’ll have to negotiate with the children. I would prefer to keep Rödskär but sell all the rest.”

  “Rödskär Island is the property of Merivaara Nautical, so Mare Nostrum owns twelve percent of it too. Isn’t it about time to dig up these other shareholders?” I stood up to leave and join Koivu in his conversation with Halonen, but Anne grabbed my wrist.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m a complete idiot. But Juha was . . .” Anne squeezed my wrist as if to ask me to sit back down. I was surprised how much strength there was in her grip. She didn’t let go until I was sitting again.

  “Living with Juha was easiest when I just overlooked some things. He was terribly stubborn. There was always only one right way to do things. His way. And Jiri is the same as all the other Merivaara men,” Anne said, motioning to the portraits hanging on the wall. “He’s just like his father and his grandfather, even though he doesn’t want to admit it. Katrina couldn’t stand Martti’s high-handedness, which was why she left him. Sometimes we’ve wondered if Juha’s mother Fredrika fell ill because she lost so much of her own free will in her marriage. Juha grew up to be just like his father and expected me to be a substitute for his mother and someone he could control. When the children were small, he called me ‘mom’ a lot and didn’t understand why I didn’t like it. He didn’t stop until Jiri was six and one day he said, ‘She’s our mom, not yours.’”

  “So you trusted Juha so much that you let him run the company however he wanted.”

  “In business matters, yes, I trusted him. What are you getting at? Is there something wrong with Mare Nostrum?”

  “Concealing the names of the owners definitely points that way. Anne, if you know something, you have to tell me now.”

  “I don’t know anything but what I’ve told you!” Anne’s voice went up at least half an octave. “Juha is dead and I’m trying to keep this company running so we can fill our existing orders! Jiri has turned into some kind of terrorist, and Riikka has suddenly decided she doesn’t want to see Tapio anymore.”

  “What?” I remembered Riikka saying yesterday that she wanted to be alone. “Are they having a fight?”

  “I don’t know what happened. Riikka is so extreme. Maybe she’s mad at Tapio because he hit Juha. Riikka is still a child in many ways, though, so it’s probably good if she and Tapio part ways. But I can’t handle her troubles in addition to everything else.”

  Anne poured herself more chamomile tea and threw back a shot as I had with my whiskey the day before. The effects were the same too, since Anne seemed to relax and her voice returned to normal.

  “I’ve had a hard time accepting that Juha was murdered, but I’m slowly starting to wrap my head around it. There was something destructive about him, and Jiri has the same disease. I don’t intend to defend Jiri anymore. I can’t approve of endangering people’s lives. Better that he learn his lesson now before . . .”

  Anne sipped some more tea as if to prevent words from escaping her mouth. Before he really kills someone. But Anne feared Jiri had already done that.

  “What about Mikke Sjöberg? Is he just as stubborn as his father and brother?” I asked, as if in passing.

  “Mikke is a Sjöberg, more Katrina’s son than Martti’s. Maybe he’s found the negative Merivaara traits in himself, the selfishness and stubbornness, and that’s why he spends half the year living as a hermit on his boat. I don’t know Mikke. He doesn’t let anyone get close to him.”

  This time when I stood up, Anne didn’t try to stop me. As I left, Paula Saarnio entered.

  “This message just came from the funeral home with prices on the casket and flowers. Do you have time to look it over?”

  Anne nodded, and I left to look for the CFO’s office. Once in the hall, I realized I should call Puustjärvi, who was currently sitting with Markus Enckell at his private nursing home. His report confirmed what I already knew: the old man didn’t remember anything from the past few years. Apparently he had given an enthusiastic account of Martti Merivaara’s wedding to his cousin Fredrika, though.

  “Come over here with us. We’re going to put this Halonen guy through the wringer.”

  Heikki Halonen was a few years shy of thirty, one of those up-and-coming yuppies who had crammed into the business schools before the recession in hopes of a glamorous career and easy money. While they were in school, the world collapsed just as precipitously as the value of the stocks they bought with their high school graduation-present money. The tailoring and the wool of Heikki Halonen’s suit weren’t quite as good as they should have been to match the image of a hotshot young businessman, but his dark-blond hair was cut skillfully to cover his incipient baldness and his physique was trimmer than the company’s late CEO’s had been.

  Halonen had a hard time admitting that he didn’t know anything more about Mare Nostrum than that it was a foreign company with an address in the Channel Islands. The stock sale had taken place a couple of years before he joined the company, and Juha Merivaara had never accepted any questions about it, even from his chief financial officer. This hadn’t bothered Halonen much, since the shareholders never showed up to disturb their general meetings and never demanded anything.

  “According to Juha, the records of the sale are in our safe-deposit box. They should tell you whoever signed on behalf of Mare Nostrum,” Halonen said as he loosened his tie. He knew he was in hot water. “Anne probably has the keys.”

  “OK, enough,” I said. “Koivu, take Mr. Halonen and Puustjärvi and get those keys. Then round up someone from White Collar who has contacts with Scotland Yard. We can’t wait around for Kantelinen to decide to grace us with his presence again. Go find that safe-deposit box and then let me know when you find something.”

  With that I headed back to work, but I was increasingly uneasy. I felt like I was trying to catch a fish barehanded in moving water. Back at my office, I absentmindedly looked up the report on Juha Merivaara’s boating accident six years earlier. The name Aaro Koponen didn’t mean anything to me, and he didn’t have a criminal record. I moved over to the population register and searched for his personal information. Koponen, Aaro Juhani, born June 15, 1947. Divorced 1989, son Ari Juhani, born April 23, 1972.

  Could Ari Juhani Koponen have held a grudge against Juha Merivaara? According to these records, he lived in Turku.

  Then my eyes noticed the name of Koponen’s ex-wife: Saarela, Elvi Seija Johanna.

  The name Elvi threw me off for a second, but when I looked at the woman’s social-security number, I knew I was on to something. Seija Saarela had been married to the man who died in the accident, Aaro Koponen.

  Seija Saarela had said she would be working at the health-food shop at the Flagship Center mall. Driving down the corkscrew ramp into the mall parking structure, I felt as if I were on an amusement-park ride. The Flagship Center was actually a bit like a giant amusement park with its restaurants, gambling machines, and children’s play areas, although here the fun was emptying your wallet, not getting sick on rides. The rain showers pelting southern Espoo meant the mall was filled with teenagers hanging out and elderly people trading gossip. The health-food store was located on the second floor next to a sporting-goods shop. I actually needed some new running shoes. I glanced at the new fall models, but I didn’t stop to try any on, even though the specialized top-of-the-line air-shock runners did look tempting. Would Antti buy them for me to celebrate our three-year anniversary?

  The Age of Aquarius health-food store sold everything from nutritional supplements to organic vegetables, baking goods, and cosmetics. On one wall was a case with books on various esoteric subjects including astrology, tarot reading, and meditation. A woman of about forty was flipping through a thick volume about finding the meaning of life through numerology. Seija Saarela’s jewelry was on display next to a table with a bowl of large, nicely arranged semiprecious stones. I recognized rose quartz, amethyst, and normal quartz.

&nb
sp; “Hello, Lieutenant,” Seija said, looking up from a silver earring she was decorating with tiny pieces of turquoise.

  “Can you talk?” I asked, nodding at the customer.

  “I don’t have any secrets,” Seija said brightly. Did she really think the police wouldn’t discover her connection to Juha Merivaara? I walked closer to the table. The gemstones glittered in the light like a storybook pirate treasure. On one corner of the table was a chest two feet long full of little rocks. They cost ten marks a piece. I couldn’t resist the temptation, so I plunged my hand into them.

  “Just pick one at random and let’s see what your hand chooses for you,” Seija said.

  I pulled my hand out. I didn’t want to play games.

  “You had something to tell me about Harri Immonen.”

  Seija’s short stubby fingers attached a wire to the earring and then bent it into a hook with a tiny pair of pliers.

  “From the very beginning I thought it was strange that Harri died. I didn’t believe he killed himself like Juha always implied, and the police decided it was an accident. I was sure that the island had a negative energy from all the bloody battles there, and of course the restless spirits of the dead would wander.”

  “Does this have something to do with Harri?” I asked. People who believed in supernatural phenomena put me on edge. If things like that did exist, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

  “Yes, or really more with all the dead ducks and clams.”

  “What dead clams?”

  “Harri died in early October. It was probably the middle of September when Mikke dropped me off on Rödskär. He wanted to test out the Leanda’s new rudder alone. The weather was supposed to be fantastic, and I knew that the Merivaaras wouldn’t be going to the island in the middle of the week. It didn’t occur to me that Harri would be there, but we didn’t bother each other. We just went about our own business. On the second evening we were sitting having tea. Suddenly I jumped when I saw a dead duck in the corner of the kitchen. I scolded Harri for bringing it inside. It could have been diseased, for all we knew.”