Helsinki Homicide: Vengeance

by Jarkko Sipila

  “Will you please let us inside? This is an important matter.”

  The door moved no further than the end of the chain. “What is?”

  Suhonen’s patience was beginning to wane. Given Karjalainen’s background with drugs, the woman’s conduct was making her look very suspicious. Her listless eyes vouched for that, too.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry. Vesa Karjalainen was found dead this morning in a bathroom in downtown Helsinki. That’s why we’re here to search the apartment.”

  The woman closed the door, but the noises inside indicated she had left the entryway. Suhonen guessed what was happening. “Open up,” he said.

  The caretaker bent down in front of the doorknob. His hands were trembling and the keys clattered to the floor. Strand shouldered the man aside and swung the battering ram into the lock. The door splintered ajar, but required one more blow near the security chain before it burst open.

  “Esko! Go!” Strand commanded. The dog shot inside, barking.

  Inside, the woman shrieked and shouted, “Call off the dog or I’ll kill it!”

  Strand went first, a Glock pistol at the ready, and Suhonen took up the rear. The dog was barking and snarling.

  The entryway was about ten feet long, and strewn with jackets and bags of garbage.

  “The bathroom,” said Strand, and Suhonen ducked inside to check it out while Strand went ahead. He noticed some blood on the sink, but no people.

  Suhonen heard the dog barking in the kitchen and Strand’s bellowing voice, “Please put down the knife.”

  “Get the hell out of here!”

  Suhonen glanced into the bedroom. Stuff was strewn everyone, but nobody there either.

  “Drop the knife!” Strand commanded again.

  “I’ll kill that dog!”

  Suhonen came into the kitchen and stood next to Strand. The woman was wearing black sneakers and a hoodie. Her hair was greasy and knotted. Suhonen revised his estimate of her age to 35—drug use had left its mark, making her appear older than she really was.

  “Call off the dog,” Suhonen said calmly. He saw an opportunity. She was no career criminal, just scared.

  Strand kept the Glock leveled at the woman. “Esko. Heel.”

  The dog barked once more, then backed up ten feet and sat at his handler’s side.

  She clutched the knife for a moment longer before it clattered into the sink.

  Strand worked fast, twisted her arms behind her back and clapped the cuffs on her wrists. Suhonen pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat her down on it.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid of dogs,” she stammered. “Is Vesa really dead?”

  “Yes,” he said, sitting down opposite her. “Overdosed and died in a train station bathroom stall.”

  Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mari. Mari Simola,” she managed to say.

  “Mari, are there any drugs here?”

  “N-no.”

  Suhonen glanced at Strand. “Search the place.”

  The woman burst into tears.

  “You can probably guess that Esko’s not just a

  K-9, but a drug-sniffing dog as well.”

  Strand commanded the dog to search. His training had involved a game in which the dog received a reward for finding drugs. He was taught to identify hash first, then other narcotics.

  The dog went eagerly to work and soon began clawing and barking at one of the base cabinets in the kitchen.

  “What’s in there?” Suhonen asked the woman.

  “Vesa’s speed. I don’t know where he gets it, but a couple days ago he got a big shipment. I don’t do that shit.”

  Strand slid open the bottom drawer, and using latex gloves, removed a Ziploc bag of white powder and set it on the table. Suhonen guessed it to be one to two ounces of amphetamines.

  “What’s your drug of choice?” Suhonen asked.

  “Just weed. Can’t handle the other stuff.”

  Suhonen glanced around the filthy apartment. “Where’s your stash?”

  “There’s a couple joints in the bedroom nightstand. Nothing else.”

  Suhonen and Mari stayed in the kitchen while Strand and the dog continued the search. The woman seemed to be realizing the gravity of the situation.

  “Who has Vesa been hanging out with lately?”

  “Uuh,” she said, staring at the table. “I don’t know their names.”

  “Try to remember.”

  She looked at Suhonen. “He’s really dead?”

  Suhonen nodded. “Yes.”

  Mari thought for a moment. “One of ’em was an ex-junkie named Juha… Saarinen, Saarnivuori or something like that.”

  “Saarnikangas,” Suhonen answered. “Who else?”

  Mari looked up at Suhonen. “I told Vesa he shouldn’t be hanging out with the Skulls, but he didn’t care.”

  “Where’d he get the speed?”

  “I know he went to Tallinn—could’ve bought it over there. Was it a bad batch? Is that why he died or did someone kill him?”

  Suhonen shrugged. “We don’t know yet. Is that there from Tallinn?”

  “Must be. He didn’t have the money to buy it anywhere else. He owed everybody something.”

  Suhonen was still thinking. “The Skulls that Vesa hung out with. You know their names?”

  “I saw ‘em once from the window when they picked him up in some American muscle car…it was black. A fat guy and a couple younger ones. I don’t know their names.”

  “Okay,” said Suhonen. That was enough—the description matched Niko Andersson’s crew. “One more thing. This Juha Saarnikangas and the Skulls. You ever seen them together?”

  Mari thought for a moment. “No. Definitely not.”

  “You know someone by the name of Eero Salmela?”

  “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “About my age. Wears a brown leather jacket with a lambswool collar all the time.”

  “I don’t know him. Vesa probably did.”

  Strand returned to the kitchen with his dog. There were three joints in the Ziploc bag.

  Suhonen tried to comfort her, “Esko would protect you in a heartbeat. He’s actually a sheep in wolf’s clothing: nice to nice people.”

  “Or nasty to nasty people?” Mari said, trying to force a smile.

  Strand commanded the dog to stay and followed Suhonen into the hallway.

  Suhonen spoke in a hushed voice. “This was partly my fault—I didn’t know she lived here too. I figured this was Karjalainen’s pad and we’d just search it for drugs.”

  “Yea-ah,” he whispered. “No big deal.”

  “We could get her for resisting arrest and drug possession, but as far as I’m concerned, we should just call it post-traumatic stress syndrome, you know, considering her man just died and all.”

  Strand could see where Suhonen was headed. “She gave you some good intel?”

  “Yes… But the truth is she only threatened Esko, so it was more like resisting a canine. We’ve been trailing Karjalainen and I know those drugs were his. The joints are probably hers, but let’s just have the dead guy take the rap for that.”

  Strand shot him a look as though Suhonen was just trying to get in her pants, but the undercover officer read his mind.

  “Come on, are you serious? Honestly, I’m more interested in Esko.”

  Strand laughed aloud. “Okay. Works for me, but you’ll have to court Esko with some nice treats. He likes cheese pizza, and he can’t eat that at home. Too much pizza is bad for police dogs too.”

  “Okay, I owe you one. If Esko ever needs dog-sitting sometime, call me.”

  “You can be sure I won’t.”

  They went back into the kitchen. Strand took off the cuffs and left with the dog. Suhonen stayed to ask more questions and fixed a pot of coffee for Mari.

  CHAPTER 15

  SATURDAY, 5:00 P.M.

  VIHTI HIGH
WAY, HELSINKI

  “I’m tired…and hungry,” Eero Salmela complained from the passenger seat.

  “Not cold though?” Suhonen asked. He was driving an unmarked squad car southbound along the Vihti Highway. They went through a roundabout and stopped at a red light. The rain had started again and the Peugeot’s wipers were hard at work. Headlights from the oncoming traffic glared off the wet asphalt.

  “That I could’ve helped with,” continued Suhonen, pointing to the switch for the seat-heater.

  The light changed and the car moved on.

  About a half-hour earlier, Salmela had called his friend and asked to be picked up at a bus stop along the Vihti Highway. That had worked for the Suhonen.

  “Let’s go for coffee at the Teboil station,” Salmela suggested as they approached the new Hakamäen Avenue. The hundred-fifty-million-dollar road and tunnel project had been completed a year ago. It had gotten off to a catastrophic start when a multi-car pileup had shut it down on opening day. Despite the new tunnel, the road was plagued by congestion even more than before. The newspapers called Hakamäen Avenue “Finland’s most expensive parking lot.” Now, on a Saturday, there was little traffic.

  “No coffee shops. We can get you some grub from a drive-thru or something.”

  “What’s wrong with the Teboil? I like that place.”

  “I wanna talk in the car where it’s private,” Suhonen explained. He switched to the slow lane. Two other cars continued onward to the tunnel, but Suhonen veered southward onto Mannerheim Street.

  “You smell like detergent,” Suhonen remarked.

  “New job.”

  “Congrats,” said Suhonen, though he was already wondering how that might affect the plan they had in store for him. “Somewhere north?”

  “Yeah,” he hedged.

  “You selling soap or cleaning?”

  “Cleaning.”

  Continuing past the Teboil station toward downtown, they passed the lofty office buildings of Ruskeasuo and the residential districts of Pikku-Huopalahti.

  “What company?”

  “None of your business,” he shot back.

  The trip continued in silence. Suhonen turned on the radio. Radio Rock was on commercials so he changed the station. He let a classic hit from the Rolling Stones play quietly in the background. Suhonen had only been asking about Salmela’s work so he could steer the conversation toward the job they’d been planning for him.

  “Where can we get some food?” Salmela asked. “I’m fine with anything but burgers. My stomach can’t take those additives.”

  Suhonen drove past a Hesburger and a McDonalds to the Töölö section of Helsinki. Nestled in an old streetcar station was a Turkish kebab place that would do the trick.

  “You okay with kebabs?”

  “Sure.”

  The lights turned green and the car lurched ahead. Suhonen figured he could hint at the job opportunity before the restaurant, but he wouldn’t get into the details until afterwards.

  “How much is your debt now?”

  “Fifty less than yesterday.”

  Suhonen wondered what that meant, but decided not to pry—at least not yet.

  After a few minutes, he spotted the Turkish place, situated on the corner of Topelius Street, near the Töölö library. There were no parking spots, but the street was wide enough that Suhonen was able to double-park in front of the restaurant.

  “Now’s your chance to take that nap,” Suhonen said stepping out of the car. Above the windows of the restaurant were thick yellow letters, spelling “Pizza.” Functional sign, he thought. Even if the owners change, the sign can stay.

  Ten minutes later he returned with two kebabs wrapped in foil and slid back into his seat. He handed the food and plastic forks to Salmela and pulled a bottle of water out of his pocket.

  Suhonen started the car and put it in gear. He decided to drive to the soccer fields on the north end of the Hietaniemi beach. Salmela unwrapped his kebab and immediately began forking it into his mouth. The sweet smell of the dressing filled the car.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Jaakko Nykänen was sitting in his cramped office at the NBI bunker. His left hand massaged his whiskers, and his right rested on the mouse. He was skimming through intelligence reports, which had been uploaded into the database throughout the day. Some of them were just routine police reports. A criminal flagged for surveillance had been stopped for speeding, or say, drunk driving.

  Some had more valuable intel: who met whom, for example, or who called whom. Every day, the Finnish police had dozens of ongoing phone-tapping operations. Not every piece of information ended up in the database, of course, but the bulk of the most important ones did. The bigger problem was that they didn’t always know which criminals they should have under surveillance, and when.

  Nykänen knew—by name—at least a thousand outlaws tied to organized crime. Of those, a couple hundred were hardened criminals. When needed, he could create a computerized diagram of the connections and contacts between selected individuals. The computer was a wonderful tool.

  One report in particular had caught Nykänen’s attention. He had read it once already, but returned to it again.

  According to the report, black market operator Mika Konttinen, aka Mike Gonzales, had met Ilkka Ranta that afternoon. The encounter had been observed in Tampere, at the restaurant in the Ilves Hotel. Working on another case, NBI investigators had followed a different suspect into the same restaurant. They had spotted Ranta and a man, later identified as Gonzales, together.

  Ranta was an exceptionally interesting character. The man had made his money during the recession of the early ’90s, and even more after the tech stock bubble burst in 2000. During rough economic times, the situation for men of money was even easier than in good times. The fundamental rule for getting rich still applied—buy low, sell high.

  That morning, Suhonen had mentioned Gonzales’ connections to the Skulls and to some Russian-Estonian man. Nykänen had forgotten the name and was unable to check it in the computer. Why couldn’t Suhonen enter his leads into the database, Nykänen brooded. The police employed too many old-school cops who didn’t grasp the importance of sharing information.

  In any event, Gonzales-Konttinen could be the key to nabbing Ranta.

  Ranta’s business practices were known to be tough, and there was plenty of intel on his shady deals. The police had never found anything illegal, even though financial crime detectives and internal revenue agents had combed through his businesses and contracts. Now approaching sixty, the man understood the importance of staying out of the public eye so as not to arouse envy, which always spawned accusations. He drank his expensive whiskey inside his granite-walled home, and his villa in Spain never appeared in the home decorating magazines. Ranta was also connected to state government.

  His activities had never met the probable cause threshold, so the police couldn’t tap his phone or search his home. Because of his status, the state prosecutor’s office was always involved from the get-go in any investigation concerning him. Prosecutors had a much higher threshold of probable cause than the police did. Both at the NBI and at the prosecutor’s office, the bosses, who were closer to the political establishment, made all the final decisions on big cases.

  Gonzales and the Skulls might just be the Trojan horse they needed to nab the millionaire, thought Nykänen. Damn. If only they’d managed to plant a microphone at the table of the Ilves Hotel. From a technical standpoint, it would have been easy. The hotel had wireless internet, which could pick up a signal from a small mic hidden in an object on the table.

  Surveillance could take a while, but if they could use Gonzales to build a connection between the Skulls and Ranta, it would present an opportunity to put the man under closer scrutiny. If they could show probable cause for, say, incitement to felony extortion, the surveillance could spawn leads on his other activities as well.

  Nykänen took a swig of lemon sparkling water from the bottle on h
is desk.

  They could launch the case as a joint effort between the NBI and Helsinki police, but it would gradually shift to the NBI, especially if Ranta wound up in the crosshairs. If the case pertained only to the Skulls, the Helsinki PD would take the lead. Most of all, Nykänen wanted Ranta behind bars.

  The end game was beginning to look a lot better now, thought Nykänen. But the NBI would have to oversee Suhonen’s informant so they could more easily shift the target from the Skulls to the millionaire. Small-time drug smuggling didn’t interest Nykänen in the slightest—Ranta would have to be the ultimate target.

  * * *

  Salmela blew a plume of cigarette smoke through a gap in the Peugeot’s passenger side window. The smell of smoke lingered in the car, but Suhonen didn’t mind. The remains of the kebabs, the jalapenos Salmela had picked out, and the garbage from the meal were in a plastic bag at his feet.

  On any summer night in Hietalahti, scores of people would be about, but now the place was deserted. Rain pattered on the car roof and the wet windshield scattered the light from the street lamps. It would probably pass for modern art at the Kiasma museum if some artist came up with the idea to build a dark room where people could look at a couple of street lamps through a car’s sprinkler-doused windshield.

  “I thought maybe I’d rob a bank,” Salmela said.

  “It’d never work. You won’t get twenty Gs out of it, anyway. They keep a total of ten grand in the tills and you wouldn’t get access to the vault.”

  “Two banks, then.”

  Suhonen shook his head.

  “Armored truck?”

  “Won’t work. You’d need a bunch of guys for that.”

  “Diamonds? We gave it a good try a few years back, anyway,” said Salmela.

  Suhonen remembered it well. Salmela’s gang had intended to hit several jewelry stores in various parts of the city simultaneously, but the scheme fell flat in the planning stages. Preparing for robbery was not a crime, but the NBI had nailed the perps for drug trafficking. As a member of the gang, Salmela wound up in prison too.