Cold Trail (10 page)

“W
ell, he didn’t remember anything about it, so I guess we’ll never know.”

Joutsamo
rose. “Do you mind standing up?” she said, picking up a twelve-inch ruler from the desk. “This is the knife. Based on the fingerprints, Repo was holding it the way you would if you were slicing bread.” She circled around behind Leinonen. “Look, if you’re holding a bread knife like this, then your hand isn’t naturally going to twist into a position where you could slit someone’s throat from behind.”

The
lieutenant turned around and looked Joutsamo dead in the eye. “Well, it must have been from the front then.”

Joutsamo
raised the ruler and made a slashing movement at Leinonen’s throat. “Pretty harsh way to kill your wife, eye to eye,” she said.

“I
’m sure there’ve been
harsher ones.”

“B
ut the photos didn’t show any injuries on her hands from blocking the knife.”

“H
e probably surprised her,” Leinonen said.

“A
ccording to the witnesses, they didn’t hear any shouting coming from the apartment, and Repo wasn’t mentally ill.”

“W
ell, it was a cut-and-dried case anyway. Repo was the perpetrator. Appeals court confirmed it too, so there’s no point trying anything,” Leinonen said, annoyed. “Was there anything else? I’ve got some real work to do here.”

* * *

The red walls of Helsinki Prison rose up before Suhonen. A bald guard in a blue uniform was walking in front of him. Suhonen knew the way, since he had been to the “Big House” dozens of times. He had left his gun and phone behind at the entrance.

The guard opened the door and turned right
, toward a narrow stairwell. The administrative offices were upstairs. The second-floor corridor had been painted light gray and was lined by rooms on either side. Fifty feet ahead loomed the iron door that led into the prison proper.

The bald guy knock
ed on the door marked Warden.

“
Come in.”

The guard
remained at Suhonen’s side as he entered. The room was big—thirty feet long and fifteen wide. Most of it was taken up by a long wooden conference table that butted up against the warden’s desk. Behind it sat a dry-looking forty-year-old in a gray suit. Saku Ainola, who had been promoted from assistant warden to warden a year ago, was an old buddy of Suhonen’s.

“H
ey there,” Ainola said. “Give me a sec. I still have to deny a couple more leave applications.”

“N
o worries,” Suhonen said. There was a thermos on the table. Suhonen pumped coffee from it into a paper cup. Prison coffee contended in the same league as police coffee, gas station coffee, and hockey arena coffee.

It took Ainola three minutes
, and after that he came over and helped himself to coffee, too.

“Annoying, this
Repo incident,” he began.

“P
rison escapes always are.”

“W
e didn’t see this one coming. No indication at all that the guy was a flight risk. Several years of a life sentence behind him. Probably would have been allowed to take unescorted leaves in a year or two.”

“W
hat kind of guy is Repo?” Suhonen asked.

“H
armless. Caused no problems for years.”

“B
ut before that there were?”

“N
ot for us, exactly.”

Suhonen
knew that Ainola knew all the lifers. He read the court papers on all incoming convicts.

“W
ell,” Ainola began. “Repo admitted manslaughter in district court but still got life for murder. Then in appellate court he denied the whole thing, but of course the sentence didn’t change at that point, nor did the Supreme Court grant permission to appeal. After that, he began a massive but obviously futile round of appeals.”

“Huh
,” Suhonen said.

“H
e sent appeals just about everywhere: the attorney general, parliamentary ombudsman, even to the European Court of Human Rights. Pretty surprised he didn’t send one to the UN. Some reporter came here to meet him, but I don’t think she ever wrote about it.”

“W
hat was his complaint?”

“T
hat he was innocent and had been unjustly sentenced.”

“Y
ou read the verdict. Was there anything to his appeal?” Suhonen asked. Ainola had graduated from law school.

Ainola
shook his head. “Not a chance. The case was clear cut. And none of the appeals ever went anywhere. Bottom-of-the-stack stuff, the kind no one even takes a second look at.”

“B
ut the issue was specifically his innocence?”

“Yes, and then about the conditions here too, but once he had been labeled a habitual complainer, no one took those seriously either.”

“S
hould they have?”

Ainola
grunted dryly. “Of course. Conditions here are nowhere near to what the law dictates. A civilized nation is judged according to how it treats its prisoners, and on that measure, we’re not a Western country.”

“N
ot many are, if that’s the criteria we’re judging by.”

“D
id you read the interview with Fredberg, the new chief justice of the Supreme Court, in Sunday’s paper?”

“S
canned it,” Suhonen said.

“H
e’s absolutely right that prison sentences don’t do any good. At least if we have to keep working with the same amount of resources and an increasing load of customers,” Ainola said.

Suhonen wasn’t parti
cularly interested in getting into a discussion on criminal justice policy. “Let’s get back to Repo. How long did he keep up the appeals?”

“
For a couple of years after the verdict.
Then he suddenly stopped.”

“W
hy?” asked Suhonen.

“I
don’t know. He just stopped. Maybe he realized it wouldn’t lead to anything, anyway. Gave up or got tired of it. Beats me.”

“W
hat kind of meds was he on?”

“T
hat’s stepping into confidential territory, but he popped sedatives, like just about everybody else here,” Ainola said.

Suhonen
thought activists would have their work cut out for them if they tackled prison conditions
,
but evidently animals were a more sympathetic cause
than criminals.

“W
ho did he hang out with?”

“H
e wasn’t in any of the gangs. Mostly kept to himself. When you said you were coming, I also asked over in his block. They told me then that he talked to a dealer named Juha Saarnikangas. He got four years for possession of amphetamines, but was released in August, if I remember correctly.”

Suhonen
wrote down the name, even though he had heard of the guy before.

“W
hat about Repo’s phone calls or letters?”

“I
checked the logs. No calls in months, years actually. Some record of letters being received. Probably had to do with his dad’s death, for the most part.”

Suhonen n
odded. Another strikeout. “Let’s go have a look at the cell.”

“N
o problem, if you have a warrant.”

“A
re you serious?” Suhonen asked, but then dug out a search warrant from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. The only part that had been completed was Takamäki’s signature—a lieutenant’s approval was sufficient under Finnish law. Suhonen quickly filled in the rest of the information right there. For the crime, Suhonen wrote down “prisoner escape,” since that was what they were investigating.

“H
andy,” Ainola said.

* * *

Takamäki knocked on the door of the Sello shopping center surveillance room. The person to open it was a short, uniformed guard with a moustache. He also had a big nose, and his heavy-framed glasses completed the Groucho Marx impression.

“
Aho?” Takamäki asked.

Groucho
nodded.

“T
akamäki from Violent Crimes Unit.”

“S
ure. I’ve seen you on TV before, too. Come on in.”

Takamäki
followed the security guard, who had called him back about the surveillance camera photos. Aho had offered to send them via email, but Takamäki didn’t think that was secure enough.

The
room, which was lit by fluorescent lights, contained a few lockers, a coffee machine, a microwave, and a fridge. A random selection of magazines
was strewn
across the table.

“L
et’s go into the surveillance room,” Groucho Aho said.

The back room contained
a dozen TV screens for the surveillance cameras. In some, the image changed every few seconds. Takamäki suspected that staring at them would give him a massive headache in no time flat.

Aho
sat down at the computer. “You have a flash drive?”

Takamäki
handed over his stick, which had more than 500 MB free, enough space for at least 200 premium-quality shots.

“I
already went through and picked out the best ones,” Aho said. “There’s no video. It’s one of those cameras that takes a shot a second.”

The
first image showed a boy in a helmet approaching the crosswalk on his bike. The wet asphalt gleamed; there was no one else in the picture. The pedestrian light was red. In the next shot, the light had turned green, and now the front tire of Jonas’s bike was in the intersection.

“I
n this next one, you can see the collision,” Aho said, clicking on to the third shot.

Looking at the
photo turned Takamäki’s stomach. Jonas was blurry in it, because he was toppling over onto the asphalt, but you could see his arm breaking the fall. A gray car that looked like a Toyota had come from the right, and the front bumper was dead on top of the bike’s front wheel.

“T
his last one is probably the one you’ll find the most interesting.”

In the fourth shot,
Jonas and the bike are on the asphalt, and the car had continued about five yards from the place of impact.

The brake lights weren’t
on.

“I
focused on the license plate,” Aho said, showing the fifth photo to Takamäki. The letters and numbers were clearly visible, and Takamäki wrote them down in his notebook.

Aho
copied the photos onto the flash drive and ejected it from the computer. “Good thing you came to get these today. They wouldn’t have been here anymore tomorrow. These external camera shots are recorded over every twenty-four hours.”

“Y
ou don’t save them even if they capture incidents like this?”

“O
f course we do, if we see something. I don’t know why the guy on duty yesterday didn’t notice the sequence on his cameras. The ambulance showed up pretty quick, too.” Aho handed the flash drive to Takamäki. “Here you go.”

“T
hanks for your help,” the lieutenant said, adding that he’d show himself out.

* * *

Ainola and Suhonen entered the third floor of the east cell block, where most of the murderers were housed. The latest cycle of remodels at Helsinki Prison, which was originally built in 1881, had lasted for years. With the shrubs and other improvements, the block was almost pleasant now.

The
corridors were quiet, because the majority of prisoners were elsewhere. That suited Suhonen, because he had no interest in showing his face to criminals in a context where he could be directly connected to the authorities.

Ainola
greeted the guard and said they’d be entering Repo’s cell. Ainola fit his own key into the lock. As always in prisons, the iron door opened inwards. That way the prisoner couldn’t use the door to blindside a guard.

“B
e my guest,” Ainola said, letting Suhonen enter first.

Suhonen
immediately caught the distinct scent of old prison cell. It was impossible to eradicate, even if you washed and painted the walls and floors. The little cell reeked of sweat, shit, and suffering. Over the past century and a quarter they had been hopelessly ingrained.

The cell was six feet
wide and ten feet long. High up on the back wall there was a tiny window. The bed was on the right and the desk to the left. A TV, an electric water kettle, and a few books were on the table. Suhonen’s eye immediately registered one detail—not a single girlie pic. As a matter of fact, the walls were spotless—not a single stroke of graffiti, either.