Death Spiral (33 page)

I shook my head and looked into Rami Luoto’s blueberry-colored eyes. They glittered almost black in the dim light of the arena. The laugh lines of his boyish face were clearly visible this close up, and frost-colored hairs grew on his ears.

“The last time we met, I asked you about Noora’s boyfriends. She was so infatuated with Janne, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. The autopsy indicated that Noora may not have been a virgin. Do you know who she might have had a sexual relationship with?”

Rami’s gaze lowered.
Place Your Bets!
proclaimed one of the advertisements on the boards. And I did.

“It happened two years ago, didn’t it? In the winter, around the time Noora’s mother started dating Vesku Teräsvuori. You’ve always liked little girls, haven’t you?”

“Did Noora write about it in her diary?” Luoto asked. Then he shivered.

I nodded. What did it matter whether I was lying or not? Luoto opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He had done that a lot when I was interviewing him. Maybe he had wanted to admit to killing Noora before, but he couldn’t do it, and I hadn’t known to ask.

“Noora wasn’t even fourteen. She was a child and you were her coach. How did it happen?”

I didn’t believe Luoto had forcibly raped Noora. It must have at least started voluntarily.

But Luoto wasn’t willing to talk. So we just looked at the white surface of the ice broken by hockey markings and the blue-and-red letters of the advertisements. Karjala Beer. Sisu Salmiakki. Rautaruukki Construction.

“I barely even suspected you. You didn’t seem to have any kind of motive for killing Noora. I’m sure you realize the situation is very different now.”

“Has anyone else read Noora’s diaries?” Luoto’s voice had turned almost unrecognizable, low and tense.

“Police investigations are group work,” I said, lying again because I was the one getting nervous now. If Luoto had lost control with Noora, he might be capable of the same kind of outburst now.

“Of course I knew it was wrong. It was the greatest mistake of my life,” Luoto forced himself to say. “It was at a camp. Janne and Silja had brought some wine and gave some to Noora too. Too much. Things like that don’t usually happen. When she was drunk, Noora had a fit of jealousy about Janne. I took her to my room to calm her down. And . . . and . . . she was so beautiful. It just happened.”

I remembered the picture of the adolescent ballerina on Luoto’s wall and Noora’s diaries’ repeated entries about Rami harping on her for gaining weight.

“So you play gay so no one will wonder about your lack of relationships with adult women,” I said.

“People think men like me are gay anyway.” Luoto tried to laugh without success.

“As far as that goes, I don’t think you’ve been able to fool everyone, at least not Elena,” I said, remembering the way Elena had pulled her daughter out of Luoto’s reach. “And that’s why you like coaching little girls. You get to touch them legally. That’s why you were perfectly willing to give up coaching the seniors.”

Luoto didn’t reply. I was beginning to lose my temper. Rami Luoto had been so easy to like, which was probably why the other adults on the team had closed their eyes to his tendency.

“Luckily for you, Noora was so ashamed of what happened, she couldn’t tell anyone about it for years. Did you tell her no one would believe her? Or did you make her believe Janne would hate her?”

Luoto looked at me as if I were a total stranger. “I’m not that kind of person. I asked her forgiveness. Over and over again. I thought she’d already forgotten it.”

“Forgotten? Because you weren’t interested in her sexually anymore? Maybe she had tried to put it out of her mind, but then it came back to her when she saw how you were treating Irina. Now there’s a girl you must really like.”

Luoto swallowed. He was shaking and he opened his mouth, but no sound escaped his throat. I was having a hard time talking too. I was the last to condemn anyone for their sexual proclivities, but meddling with children was the line where my sympathy ended. Luoto wasn’t even some pathetic flasher lurking in the bushes; he was an adult into whose care children were entrusted.

“Noora probably thought it was all her fault, that she had been dirty somehow and that was why you came after her,” I said. “But then in Edmonton she met another one of your old students, a young Canadian woman, and she realized she wasn’t the only one and that the fault was really in you. And then she started to see your interest in Irina with new eyes. Which was why she decided to expose that you had molested her.”

Imagining the events of Noora’s last day alive wasn’t difficult. Everyone said that Noora had a penchant for the dramatic. The argument over the commercial had made her mad, and maybe in her rage she had screamed at Rami and said she was going to tell everyone what he’d done two years ago.

“So you didn’t walk home at all,” I continued. “It was raining, so you had your sister’s car. You weren’t lying when you said you don’t own one of your own. You just failed to mention that you just borrow your sister’s Renault Clio.”

Luoto rubbed his upper lip with his left hand. Even though his body was shivering with cold, beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. It would be easier if he just told me what had happened. Described how he picked Noora up. I still didn’t know where he’d killed her. Had he stopped the car in the parking lot near the forest and then followed Noora to where her bag was found? Or had he beaten Noora to death in the car? Why had he decided to take the body to the parking garage at the shopping center?

Maybe he would explain during his interrogation. He had already admitted enough through his silence. There wasn’t any point continuing this conversation.

It crossed my mind that leaving him alone for the night wasn’t the best idea, that he might try to do something to himself. But what did I care? Luoto had already managed to ruin so many lives. I knew I shouldn’t think that way, but I was too exhausted to feel any empathy for Rami Luoto.
Rami, that bastard
,
Noora had written, and now I thought exactly the same thing.

Standing, I picked up my bag and started to leave. Luoto grabbed me by the arm.

“What’s going to happen to me now?” he asked in the same tense whisper. “I didn’t kill Noora on purpose. Do you understand? It was an accident. I didn’t know that . . . that a person could die so easily.”

Luoto had to force the last words out of his mouth. His eyes stared into mine like two hollow, bottomless chasms. Then I saw my own face in them, full of anger and disbelief. I don’t know how Luoto interpreted my expression.

Suddenly his grip on my arm tightened. “Tell me what happens now. Did you come to arrest me?”

“Let me go!”

But Luoto didn’t obey. I realized that he must have stared at Noora with exactly the same eyes. Like a cornered dog. The only option was to attack.

“You didn’t come to arrest me. You don’t have enough evidence yet. You lied about the diary too. Noora told me she never wrote about it. That what I did to her was too horrible to write down.”

“I’m not the only one who knows you killed Noora,” I said as calmly as I could. “Let me go. You’re under arrest.”

I had never imagined that Luoto would really attack me. I started trying to shake myself free, but Luoto wouldn’t let go of my arm. On the contrary. Suddenly he wrapped his other arm around my neck and tried to get me in a headlock.

Of course they taught us how to get out of that at the police academy. And under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been any trick at all. Normal circumstances, meaning I wasn’t in my twenty-eighth week of pregnancy and my opponent wasn’t a professional athlete. So now I just thrashed. I felt my lungs bursting for lack of air and imagined the Creature struggling as the umbilical cord no longer brought it oxygen. That thought made me struggle just enough that Luoto’s grip failed.

As fast as I dared in the darkness, I charged down the stairs. Falling would be catastrophic. As soon as my lungs had enough air again, I started screaming. The arena couldn’t be empty yet. At least the janitor must still be around. My bag contained at least my keys and a small knife, which I could have used to defend myself, but it was lost somewhere in the darkness. Along with my phone.

Hearing steps clacking behind me, I tried the impossible, climbing over the six-foot fence that separated the stands from the lobby area. But that was a mistake. Luoto was on me in a second and pulled me down off the fence. I thudded to the ground, and Luoto collapsed on top of me. The impact was tremendous, but the pain I feared didn’t come, at least not yet, and I didn’t feel blood running from between my legs.

Luoto tried to sit on top of me, but I managed to roll out from under him. I had almost made it to my feet when a glint of light on metal cut through the gloom.

Rami had slipped the guard off of his right skate and was trying to kick me with it. Not in the face, in the stomach. At the last instant I dodged, but I didn’t manage to run before he dove at my legs to try to bring me down again.

I knew what he intended, and it made me shriek in a way I had never dreamed I could. He was going to stomp me to death with his skates. As another kick aimed at me, I just had time to lift my arm to protect my belly, and the blade only hit the loose sleeve of my jacket. The punch I aimed at his face hit him in the nose, but it didn’t even start bleeding.

I had to get out of here! The easiest way would be through the concessions door. Luoto wouldn’t be able to keep up on the concrete steps with bare skates.

Bolting up the stairs into the stands, I succeeded once again in awkwardly rolling myself over the railing between the D and C sections as I sobbed. Now I just had to get down the stairs and I would be at the door. It had to open from the inside.

I didn’t hear Luoto’s steps behind me. I don’t know what I’d thought. Either that he would put the guards back on or take his skates off entirely. But instead, he jumped on the ice, sped across it, and attacked me again just as I grabbed the glass door. It didn’t open.

Luoto’s foot came up for a kick, and I dove to the floor. The dressing room doors were my only hope—maybe they would be open. I wriggled under the railing to the stairs for section F like an overfed snake. With his skates Luoto was slower than me, and I made it all the way up to the guest box where I’d sat with the Taskinens during the performance of Snow White before he caught up with me again.

Dodging the furious right kick that came at me, I ran into a chair and staggered. I was sandwiched between the railing and Rami Luoto.

The drop to the ice wasn’t huge, maybe ten feet. In a normal situation I would have tried to jump even at the danger of breaking a leg. Now the risk was too great. I could kill myself and the Creature. I lifted my hands to protect my belly and waited for the next kick. I had to get him off balance. I heard my own panting, felt how my breath steamed even as I smelled Rami Luoto’s sweat.

But the kick didn’t come. When I lifted my eyes from Luoto’s skates, I saw his face quivering.

“I . . . I can’t . . .” he groaned and dissolved into tears.

At first I couldn’t believe the danger had passed. When Rami Luoto collapsed in the nearest chair and hid his face in his hands, I realized he didn’t have it in him to kill me and the Creature. Then I must have broken down too, because a few minutes passed before either of us said anything.

“It just happened,” Luoto finally said, coughing and blowing his nose on the sleeve of his coat. “I drove to the parking lot at the elementary school and tried to talk sense into Noora. I promised her I wouldn’t touch Irina or anyone else ever again. Noora just kept cursing, calling me a pervert, and then she spat in my face. She had her bag open in her lap, and she was fidgeting with the laces of her skates. So I grabbed a skate and hit her. Noora opened the car door, and I hit her again, and she fell and hit her head on a rock . . . I can’t even remember it all.”

Rami’s story was confused, as if by forgetting what had happened, he’d hoped to undo what he’d done. Noora lay in the rain at the edge of the parking lot, and Rami tried to wipe the blood from her face. Then he thought he should try to cover her. He opened the trunk of the car where there was usually a blanket and found a black garbage bag. He crammed Noora’s body into it, apparently thinking the girl was one hundred and ten pounds of household waste. Then he stuffed the garbage bag in the trunk of the car.

“I don’t know why I went to that parking garage. I guess at first I thought I’d abandon the car and say it was stolen. Then I wanted to get rid of the body. When that woman came in her Mercedes, I realized she’d left her trunk open. I just carried the bag over and slipped Noora out of it into the other car. I don’t think I really thought about what I was doing.”

With his face red from crying, Rami Luoto didn’t look like a Ken doll, but it was easy to see why Jussi Järvenperä had made the connection. Luoto’s haircut and the shape of his face were just like an aging Ken. As it turned out, that had been one of the important clues in identifying the murderer. But this hadn’t been a carefully planned, complex crime. Luoto had just had amazingly good luck. His sister had been on vacation, so he’d had plenty of time to take the car to the nearest gas station to clean it after throwing Noora’s equipment bag into the forest. The skate guards were still in the car, so Luoto had taken them to the construction site near the bus stop a couple of days later.

“The whole time I was waiting to be caught. And I tried to tell. I wanted to . . . but I couldn’t do it. Not even when Hanna killed Teräsvuori.”

I listened to Luoto’s story and his intermittent sobbing in a daze. I couldn’t feel anger anymore, or even disgust. Actually Luoto was irrelevant to me now. I wasn’t even thinking about Noora.

My Creature and I had survived, even though I’d acted like an idiot and endangered both of our lives. The time for idiocy was over now, at least for a few months. I really wasn’t responsible only for my own life anymore. If something had happened to the Creature, I would’ve been no better than Rami Luoto.