Death Spiral (13 page)

“Did the reporters leave? Well, good. I was afraid Janne would punch one of them. Since that arrest he’s been a completely different person,” Luoto pointedly said to me. “What did you do to him at the police station?”

“Just talked. That’s all.”

“I hear you have his car too. Is he really a suspect?”

“Everyone is a suspect,” Koivu shot back.

We had been promised preliminary results on Janne’s car by tomorrow and would also have to go see Noora’s body, along with the equipment bag the lab had returned.

It was four weeks until Midsummer and the start of my maternity leave, although you wouldn’t have thought so based on the weather. There was no use talking about how light the nights were getting, because the sun couldn’t force its way through the damp gray that blanketed the sky. I wondered if the suicide statistics were up this year with spring not keeping its promises again.

Without any particular agreement, we had moved into the building, Rami and Elena leading, Koivu and I following as if we actually knew what we were doing there. Janna and Silja were sitting in the hockey players’ box, Janne talking excitedly. Silja’s hand was on his shoulder and her expression was surprisingly similar to Lieutenant Taskinen’s when he was listening to a subordinate’s woes. Even if Silja and Janne weren’t dating, they were obviously good friends. I could sense Koivu shifting next to me, and I felt like giving him a sympathetic clap on the shoulder, but of course I didn’t. I wasn’t concerned about the skaters—Elena Grigorieva was the one I wanted to talk to.

“Janne, if you want time on the ice, get to it,” Grigorieva said sternly. “And Silja, start warming up. We don’t have any time to waste before Canada.”

“I don’t think I feel like skating today,” Janne said evasively and brushed his hair off his forehead. A small gold ring seemed too thin for his large, nicely shaped right ear.

“You don’t feel like it? Sitting around wallowing in self-pity isn’t going to move you forward. Get up and into the dressing room, or are you intending to throw away years of work just like that? You know your skating career doesn’t have to end with Noora’s death. So get moving!” Elena spoke so quickly that the echo off the arena walls muddled her orders.

Elena’s words worked on Janne, who stood up, threw his large sports bag over his shoulder, and started off toward the dressing rooms. Rami Luoto was rapidly sorting through a stack of CDs, apparently looking for warm-up music for Silja.

“Hi, Maria,” Silja said, walking over in her skates. The blade guards made her movements awkward. “Hi, Pekka. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. We just came to sniff the air,” Koivu said, trying not to gawk at Silja.

“Did you arrest Janne because I told you he said he wanted to kill Noora?”

“No, absolutely not,” I said. “But have you thought of anything else? What about at school? Did Noora have any enemies there?”

“At school? We were in different grades, so I don’t really know. I don’t think Noora had many friends, though. She spent most of her time skating. She was the only one who didn’t complain about showing up to practice at six o’clock in the morning to practice in this freezer. She was so fanatical. I guess she kind of thought she was a little better than everyone, that she always knew everything. Sometimes that was a little irritating.”

Silja stretched as she spoke. Placing her right leg up on the boards of the rink, she bent her upper body toward her foot. I’ve never been particularly flexible, and I couldn’t imagine doing the splits even before I was pregnant, but Silja seemed to bend every direction. If I remembered right, she even did a Biellmann spin in her free skate.

“How would Noora have reacted if someone she didn’t know attacked her?” I asked. “Would she have tried to defend herself or run away?”

“Oh, so you’re thinking Noora pulled the skates out of her bag herself and tried to hit her attacker with them?” Silja asked, completing my thought. “Yeah, Noora could have done that.”

“Silja, on the ice!” Elena Grigorieva shouted from the north end of the arena. A terrible instrumental version of a Queen song, which had been playing in the background, grew louder. Silja shrugged, swept the guards off her skates, and stepped onto the ice.

Quickly leaning over to us, she said, “Elena knows no mercy. She would keep us skating even if the sky was falling in.”

Then she accelerated across the rink. At first she just warmed up, getting a feel for the ice. Crossovers, rocker turns, three turns—Silja made the basic figure-skating steps look dulcet. I glanced at Koivu standing next to me as his eyes wistfully chased Silja in her gray tights and sweatshirt around the ice. Poor Koivu’s heart was in serious danger yet again.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said gently.

“Amazing. But I swear I’ll kill you if you even hint about this to anyone at the station,” he croaked.

I’ll kill you
. How easily those words came, and they didn’t mean anything more than “please keep your mouth shut.” Janne had said he could kill Noora, but he probably hadn’t meant anything by it either.

It would be best to go chat with Grigorieva while Silja was still just warming up. Janne appeared on the ice too, sliding along alone, tentatively at first. He probably hadn’t skated since Thursday. What was he going to do? Try his luck as a singles skater? Or were they already looking for a new partner for Janne?

Koivu and I edged our way over to Grigorieva, who was leaning on the boards. Her thick brown overcoat was very necessary in the eternal winter of the skating arena. The grandiloquent string music accompanied the hissing of the skates on the ice, with the occasional stop sending ice crystals flying.

“Mrs. Grigorieva, we’d like to speak with you regarding Wednesday night . . .”

“Go away! Can’t you see I’m working?”

“As are we. You said you went to the store with your husband and then home. However, according to a witness statement, your husband was still at his gym just prior to seven o’clock Wednesday night.”

Having stared at the ice until now, Elena angrily turned toward us.

“When did I say that?”

“Thursday, when Officer Pihko and I visited you.”

“Thursday! That was when you came to tell me Noora was dead. I was upset. I could have said anything.”

“So you admit you didn’t tell the truth?”

“I didn’t lie on purpose, if that’s what you mean! You can’t hold me responsible for anything I said then. Think about it. Did I seem rational to you?”

And she was right. I remembered the crying fits, the thrown vase, and the stubborn impression that Noora had been run down by a car. She had even said as much to Rami Luoto, as if she didn’t understand what we had told her. But was that all just a well-planned smoke screen?

Rami was out on the ice now too, skating the same sorts of warm-up steps as Silja and Janne. He still moved as smoothly as a younger person, and it was sort of funny seeing this gray-haired man out there, since skaters were usually in their teens and twenties. All three built up tremendous speed with their skates, seeming to fill the ice even more completely than two full hockey teams. Maybe they found the gelatinous version of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” playing over the loudspeakers inspiring. I would have preferred to listen to Freddie than these tremulous violins.

“Janne! Head up!” Grigorieva yelled at Janne as he flitted past. The right head position was critical in figure skating, determining not only the general character of the skating but also the success of jumps and pirouettes. Silja stopped at the edge of the ice to stretch, opening her shoulder blades and upper body, then flexing her fingers like a pianist might. This winter the music for Silja’s free skate had been a medley of old blues standards. Hopefully their choices would be as successful next year—the wrong music ruined a lot of programs. Although on the surface Silja looked like a cool blond perfectly made for classical music, there was a pizazz to her skating that demanded more of a rock ’n’ roll sound.

“What really happened Wednesday night?” I asked Elena, who seemed to have completely forgotten us as she concentrated on her skaters.

“Tomi took me and Irina to the store and then home. Then I guess he stopped by the gym, but he wasn’t long. Half an hour, maybe an hour. When he came back, the fish
solyanka
was already done.”

Elena’s eyes followed Silja, as did Koivu’s, who I doubted was even hearing what I was saying to Grigorieva.

“Did your husband drive to the gym?”

Grigorieva just nodded. Apparently she thought she had already said enough to us, because she started briskly walking away. And what else did she have to say to us? Elena Grigorieva had been at home making soup when Noora was killed. I would have to ask Tomi Liikanen about his movements himself.

Elena turned off the Queen song. For a moment the only sound under the dome of the arena was the hissing of skates cutting the ice, but then a new tune started echoing from the speakers. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat Minor. They weren’t going to make Silja skate to that old rag, were they?

But this was just more warm-ups. And Janne was getting into the rhythm now too. Sometimes skating alone called attention to the angularity of some of his movements, and he looked too big for a figure skater, an impression that was only strengthened when he stopped next to Rami to ask something. If Rami looked like a former ballet dancer, beside him Janne was like a sprinter. When he skated with his partner, you didn’t notice the awkwardness because quick, temperamental Noora had been the half of the pair who drew the attention, even though Janne was more than enough eye candy for anyone with a taste for masculinity. Alone, Janne was unlikely to be anything but part of the anonymous mass that was cut from the big competitions after the short program.

As Elena stepped out onto the ice to speak with Silja, Rami circled over to us. Janne followed, looking reluctant. Fortunately I wasn’t twenty anymore; back then I was powerless against men with Janne’s brand of morose charisma. Now I could just admire without my heart lurching.

“Do you still need me and Janne?” Rami Luoto clearly wanted us to see he was treating the police with respect. Maybe he believed we were doing our best to catch Noora’s murderer. Or at least I hoped he thought so. Next to Silja, Rami seemed to be the most sensible of the figure skaters. He could be useful in profiling Noora, although we had to remember he was one of the suspects.

“You’ll probably get your car back tomorrow,” I told Janne.

“So you haven’t found anything in it you can use to convict me of Noora’s murder?” Janne said.

“It’s too early to say, so don’t start celebrating.” Koivu’s voice was too brusque, and I almost had to laugh. We were veritable paragons of objectivity in law enforcement: one of us was jealous of a suspect, and the other kept confusing suspicion with likeability.

“We don’t want to disturb your practice too much,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, Janne, you can return to the ice. We’ll contact you when the forensic investigators are finished with your car.”

Janne pushed back out onto the ice, seeming relieved. Silja had just begun practicing a combination jump. First came a Lutz: Silja slid backward in a wide arc then sort of squatted on her right leg and pulled her left leg and arm back. The tip of her left skate struck the ice, and she took off.

“Left shoulder down,” Rami said just before Silja came down, not quite making three revolutions in the air and collapsing nastily on the ice. She slid for a long way on her rear end before standing up.

“That must have hurt,” Koivu whispered next to me.

I knew a few people who didn’t dare watch figure skating or ski jumping because they were always afraid someone would fall. To me, the attraction of skating was precisely that the tiniest mistake could ruin a whole jump: the wrong arm position, a head held down, poor timing of the takeoff. Even when it looked like skaters threw triple axels as if they were child’s play, every jump was preceded by years of relentless work.

Silja stood up, shook out her legs, skated around for a moment, and then started again. Again the preparation: weight on the outside edge of the skate, free leg back, and up! Now she took off in a completely different way than before, flying high and long, and Silja even followed it up with a double toe loop.

“She’ll get the third one soon,” I heard Rami say to himself. Then he noticed Koivu’s expression. “She’s good, isn’t she? Good technique and fantastic lines. Once she learns to really get everything out in terms of her expression, she’ll be in medal contention, at least in Europe. Although Silja could use some of Noora’s drama. Noora never held back her feelings. Her problem was keeping them in check.”

According to the DMV, Rami Luoto didn’t own a car or motorcycle. I hadn’t checked whether he had a license or not. What if he had rushed out into the rain after Janne and Noora, let them have their fight, and then went to comfort Noora, killing her instead? But how would Luoto have transported Noora’s body to the parking garage? I didn’t have a clue.

Rami had heard about Teräsvuori going free and expressed his surprise that the King of Karaoke wasn’t guilty.

“If Noora hated anyone, it was that man. I could definitely imagine Noora attacking him and him hitting back too hard in self-defense. Hanna moving out was a hard time for Noora, even though she tried not to let it show. All of us had to pitch in to make sure Noora could keep up with skating and with school. There aren’t many girls who could have done that, but Noora—Noora was a skater!”

I didn’t have anything else to ask Rami. His story about leaving the ice rink and going home had been simple enough. I nudged Koivu to signal that we should leave, but he just kept staring at Silja. Rami suddenly grinned at me conspiratorially; he must have realized where Koivu’s surprising interest in the finer points of the triple Lutz–triple toe loop combination was really coming from. He looked Koivu up and down curiously, registering the wide shoulders, dimples, and general appearance of a tame teddy bear. A dark-blue police uniform actually suited Koivu, but he didn’t look so bad in jeans either.