Fatal Headwind (3 page)

Riikka and Tapio stood up. They were headed to bed too. I didn’t want to leave the stars and the bottle of whiskey, which was still a third full. Pouring myself and Antti more, I looked to Mikke, who held my gaze and extended his beer glass. I dumped in a generous shot.

“Where did you two know Harri from?” Mikke drained his glass quickly—he seemed to have the same taste for whiskey I did.

“I didn’t know him. Only Maria did. They had some kind of fling a long time ago,” Antti replied.

I had always appreciated that Antti wasn’t the jealous type. He didn’t pry when I went out for beers with male friends or gripe about past boyfriends. Now it irked, though. “Some kind of fling” sounded so horribly banal.

Mikke took another swig and looked right at me.

“Oh, so you’re
that
Maria . . . Yeah, Harri mentioned you. You’re a cop.”

I nodded. I wasn’t ashamed of my job, but I wasn’t in the habit of announcing it to random people I met. Plenty of interesting pub companions had clammed up after hearing about it, and one had even started mashing out the joint he had been smoking in a panic.

“The police investigated Harri’s death, but there wasn’t anything suspicious about it. It was just an accident,” Mikke said and extended his glass again. He had started to pour the Laphroaig down his throat like beer.

“To Harri,” I said and raised my glass, even though I knew how ridiculously sentimental it was. I felt a lump in my throat and washed it away with another swig. “So he slipped more or less where we were sitting today?” I asked as I poured Mikke another shot. He leaned in, and I smelled a mixture of pipe smoke and seawater.

“That was why I warned you about the rocks. I don’t trust that cliff. There’s a bad vibe there.”

A cargo ship passed far to the south; only the lights fore and aft revealed its movement. The night wind didn’t even touch Antti’s hair as he stood up.

“I’m going to take a piss and check on Iida. Don’t drink all the whiskey.”

The beam of the lighthouse swept across the sea—otherwise it was dark except for the dying fire in the grate and the glow of Mikke’s pipe. The fortress seemed to lurk behind us, and as I turned I was almost frightened seeing its massive silhouette with bats circling around. I wanted to know everything about this man sitting here, sharing this August night with me. Antti had said Mikke had sailed around the world. Who was he really? How old was he? What did he do besides sailing? These questions appeared in my mind the same way they did when I started an interrogation: name, social security number, profession. I wanted to ask Mikke all these questions, but there was one question I didn’t want to let into my mind: Why the hell was I so interested in this man?

But Mikke sat silently, and I didn’t fall into my normal chattering, even though that would have been an easy way to hide. When Antti returned, the men started trading sailing stories again. Antti had spent half of his summers on a boat as a kid, but compared to Mikke, he was a rank amateur. Mikke really had sailed around the world, twice—first on the crew of a racing boat and then solo, just for the adventure. He was leaving for another extended voyage in October.

“You must not have a family.” The statement—really a question—was easy to throw in after his explanation of his plans.

“Who would be interested in a drifter like me? And I still haven’t met anyone I’d be able to share a ten-meter boat with for months on end.” Mikke’s smile had an edge to it that made it easy to guess that this comment concealed more than one story.

After my fourth malt whiskey, I realized I was drunk enough that if I had even a drop more, I was sure to get seasick the next day. Part of me still wanted to stay up until the stars went out, though, to see their brilliance pale next to the light of the sun.

In the morning my head was fuzzy until my second cup of coffee. Nursing after drinking didn’t worry me: the family mathematician, Antti, had established that the amount of alcohol expressed in my milk was negligible.

“The wind has turned to the southeast. We’ll have a following sea to Inkoo, so there’s no hurry leaving. Let’s climb the lighthouse and check out the view,” Antti said.

After her long sleep, Iida was energetic and insisted on climbing up the stairs herself. She had taken her first steps on her own just a week ago. The sky was clear, and we could imagine that the dark area discernable to the south was Estonia. A few sails were visible in the channel to the north, and a lone barge glided toward Poland. A rumbling came from the northeast as a lightweight Buster motorboat approached the island.

“I’m going to go for a swim. Let’s have some sandwiches before we leave,” Antti suggested. The trip to his parents’ cottage in Inkoo would only take half the day with this wind, and it would be good to time Iida’s nap to coincide.

The Buster docked and a brawny man jumped out. Juha Merivaara had made it to the island to spend Sunday with his family. I packed our things and was making sandwiches in the kitchen with a suddenly attention-hungry Iida in one arm when Merivaara came to say hello.

“So who’s the little mother?” he asked so unctuously that I had to hide my expression in Iida’s hair. “Little mother” was just about the last description I thought fit me.

“Maria Kallio, lieutenant with the Espoo PD,” I said and extended my hand. “Great island you have here.”

“Thanks. Lieutenant, is it?” Juha Merivaara gave me an appraising look.

While Mikke Sjöberg’s intense gaze the previous night had felt like a friendly challenge, Juha Merivaara’s stare just irritated me. Of course I didn’t look like much of a police lieutenant in my jeans, oversized red cotton sweater, and windblown copper-wire hair. My freckled snub nose, green eyes, and small stature—I was actually almost three inches below the official police standard—often made people think I was younger than I was, which was a regular annoyance of mine.

I gawked back at Merivaara. About five foot eleven, sandy-brown hair, eyes the gray of the autumn sea, tight mouth that he had trained to sport a friendly smile. Expensive, practical sailing clothes. His whole bearing communicated that Juha Merivaara was a real man, a steady hand at the helm of a boat or the family company he had inherited.

“I heard from my wife that your husband was here before, back when all the military’s ‘no trespassing’ signs were still up. I like that. Islands like this should be open to everyone with the skill to sail to them.”

I wanted to ask why a wealthy person like him with so much admiration for sailing went around in a motorboat, but I didn’t bother. Juha Merivaara wasn’t the kind of person with whom I felt like sharing anything more than the obligatory pleasantries. Antti returned and exchanged some idle chitchat with Juha. Then we went to the dock to pack the boat.

Everyone from the previous night except Jiri came to see us off. Riikka and Tapio had their arms tight around each other, and Anne Merivaara thanked us for the company, while Mikke silently untied the lines and handed over our gear.

“About Harri,” Anne suddenly said once we had already boarded. “I’ve been so bothered . . . I heard you’re a police officer. They never told us what really happened. It wasn’t—I mean . . . he didn’t do it on purpose, did he?”

“You didn’t find anything to indicate that, like maybe a letter?”

Anne shook her head. “But what if there were something at Harri’s apartment?”

“I’ll be back at work tomorrow. I’ll take a look then,” I said reassuringly.

Anne pulled a business card out of her back pocket.

“If you wouldn’t mind . . . I’m still having nightmares about it.”

Mikke was getting anxious because the wind was pushing on our boat, moving it toward the rocks and making it difficult for him to use the aft line to prevent a collision. Antti started the motor, and as I waved to everyone, I felt relief as much as melancholy over the last day of my vacation. After clearing the harbor, we set course for Inkoo and normal life. In the stiff wind, Rödskär dwindled to a point on the horizon after only fifteen minutes of sailing.

2

“Do I look like a boss?” I asked Antti on Monday morning. I wore a cement-colored safari-style blazer and matching pants. This was accompanied by my best police-lieutenant ponytail and subdued makeup.

“Kind of a sexy boss,” Antti said with a laugh. “Get going already. It’s obvious how much you want to get back to work!”

The drive from our house to the station didn’t take long, and I was there ten minutes before the regular start of the workday. In practice I didn’t have set hours, because violent criminals didn’t either. The reforms that had been going on over the past few years in the Espoo Police Department were going to affect my work too. The department’s neighborhood policing program had been receiving a lot of praise, and the police trading cards that officers had been handing out at the schools were a hit. Our unit had made strides too, mostly in breaking down the old rigid hierarchies. So despite my position as the commanding lieutenant of the Violent Crime Unit, I would still be visiting crime scenes and interviewing suspects and witnesses.

The hallway smelled as it always had—like dust and coffee that had been sitting in the pot too long. I saw Puupponen in the break room.

“Howdy, ma’am, welcome back! Where do we start?”

“At our normal Monday meeting at nine thirty,” I managed to get out before Puupponen squeezed me in his arms. Next in line for a hug was Koivu.

“Let’s take the lieutenant to her office. Don’t you try to wriggle away now, Maria.”

The quiet in the hallway had just been a ruse. The whole unit was assembled in my new office. There were coffee cups and a raspberry cake on the table in front of the couch and a huge bouquet of white and dark-red roses on the desk. My predecessor, Jyrki Taskinen, who had moved up to direct the entire Criminal Division, was smiling in the front row.

“The department bought you a new office chair,” he said, indicating a handsome red swivel chair. “The old one was sized for me and Ström. Notice the adjustable footrest.”

“Ha, ha. Because my feet don’t reach the floor, right?” I said, laughing, even though what I wanted to do was cry. Apparently they really did want me back at work.

Except Ström. There was no sign of him that morning.

“Ström is sick. Stomach bug,” said Lähde, Ström’s only friend in the unit.

“Poor little Strömy has always had a weak stomach,” I replied, receiving a raucous chorus of laughter. Then they made me cut the cake so everyone could have a slice.

“Ström will pick up his boxes when he gets back. We tried to air out the room too,” Puupponen said apologetically. “He smoked like a chimney in here, even though it’s against policy.”

“The roses cover the smell nicely. Now go ahead and eat your cake so we can get to work,” I said, trying to make it sound like a command. Ström’s absence wasn’t a surprise. Our competition for this job had been bruising. According to Ström I was only chosen for my gender, so he appealed the decision. The appeal was denied, but when the position opened up in the middle of last October, only seven weeks after Iida’s birth, Ström was asked to fill in for me while I was on maternity leave. Everyone was sure he would refuse on principle, but he accepted, and now I was taking over a unit he had been leading for nearly a year.

I had heard rumors about the state of things. Koivu, Puupponen, and Taskinen had visited occasionally, and the others called sometimes. Ström hadn’t been an easy boss. Anu Wang, whose family originally came from Vietnam, had received the worst of it, with Ström actually saying out loud that she had been hired to fill a quota. “That slant-eyed bitch” had just been too much for him, but according to everyone else, Anu had been doing fine. She was the first ethnic-minority woman to graduate from the police academy, so she was used to standing out from the crowd.

Challenges aside, we could have used Ström in the morning meeting. He had been the lead investigator on all of the current cases and had the best grasp of the overall situation. So my first meeting back at work consisted of hearing disjointed bits of cases and making assignments according to notes Ström had left. Fortunately the open cases were all simple crimes: a drunken brawl between a group of friends in a pub and an assault outside a shopping center with a dozen witnesses watching. The previous week, Ström had completed the pretrial investigation of a stabbing at a beach over the Midsummer holiday, which had been the summer’s most complicated case.

My first few days at work were mostly taken up with paper pushing and meetings, which were an exasperatingly common part of my new position. Ström came back to work on Wednesday and settled back into his old office, which he shared with Lähde. He didn’t stop in to say hi, so when his file boxes were still darkening the corner of my office at one that afternoon, I marched over to talk to him.

Ström looked pale. His skin, usually ruddy with acne scars, hung pallid from his face, and his snuff-brown hair was mussed. His aviator sunglasses concealed his eyes, and a cigarette smoldered in his hand.

“Howdy, Ström, good to see you’re feeling better. We should have a sit-down. There’s a ton we need to review. What’s your schedule like tomorrow?”

“Who knows? Depends on whether someone gets killed tonight,” Ström said.

“How about a long lunch tomorrow? At a real restaurant instead of the cafeteria. My treat,” I said, trying to sound friendly.

Ström shook his head. “I have a meeting with the prosecutor on the beach-stabbing case at twelve. If you want a meeting, you’ll have to wait until Friday afternoon. Would three o’clock work?”

Frigging Ström. He was doing this on purpose! He wanted to test whether I would still be willing to work crazy hours after having a baby. Just handling our most important business would take at least three hours, and Ström knew it.

“Yeah, that works,” I said calmly. “You’re tied up with that fraud case over in White Collar, right?”

“Yeah. Goddamn mess. But I don’t really want anything bigger right now. I’m ready for a break after having to babysit the boys and that slant-eyed chick all year. I’ve had to explain everything to her and Puupponen in single syllable words.”

“Don’t you ever let me hear you call her ‘slant-eyed’ again!” I hissed before I realized that Ström had been trying to get me to lose my cool on purpose. That had been easy for him ever since we were in the academy together.

Ström just snorted, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another.

“Did you have anything else or can I get back to work?” he said, indicating his computer screen, which had already gone dark. I could have sworn he’d been playing Tetris before I came into his office.

“Friday at three in my office,” I said pointedly, emphasizing my right to the boss’s office and position. I wasn’t going to let Ström smoke there anymore, even though I knew he would become increasingly difficult as the level of nicotine in his blood fell.

By Friday my stylish safari pants were dingy, so I decided to head to work in an old black sports coat and jeans. In the pocket of the pants, I felt something stiff. Anne Merivaara’s business card. I had completely forgotten my promise to call her about Harri.

After my routine morning tasks, I pulled up the report on the investigation into Harri’s death. It was short and to the point. As Koivu had said last October, it had been a simple slip-and-fall accident. Nothing had turned up in Harri’s things at the scene of the accident or in his apartment to indicate suicide.

I read the report through a couple of times, and when I ran into Koivu in the break room, I quizzed him about the case. It had been ten months since the investigation, so it took him a minute to snap to, but the name “Rödskär” kicked his memory into gear.

“Yeah, I got to take a ride in a real helicopter. There wasn’t anything suspicious, though. Just an accident. I even went to his apartment and didn’t find a suicide note or anything.”

“Did you look at his computer?” I asked, remembering a case in which a kid who only ever spent time with his computer had left a suicide note open on the screen and then hung himself right there. The leg of his swinging corpse pulled the plug out of the wall, and no one thought to look for a message on the machine until someone bought it and found the note on the hard drive.

“It was an Olivetti laptop, and he had it with him on the island. We didn’t go through every file, since it was obviously an accident, and it seemed all it had were lists of birds and marine biology mumbo jumbo. Why can’t they call a seagull a seagull instead of using some crazy Latin name?” Koivu asked.

I patted him on the shoulder. “And you think it’s less ridiculous calling someone ‘Eagle Two’ during a stakeout? People use code names all the time to make themselves feel more important or like they’re in control. Maybe we try to turn our job into a game of Cops and Robbers so we can forget how dangerous it is.”

Back in my office I called Anne Merivaara with the news.

“Anne Merivaara’s phone, Juha Merivaara speaking.”

“Hello, this is Lieutenant Maria Kallio from the Espoo Police. Is Ms. Merivaara available?”

“I believe she’s in a meeting. Can I help?”

“Actually, it’s a personal matter,” I said sternly.

“Anne Merivaara happens to be my wife. Didn’t we meet on Rödskär last weekend, Lieutenant?”

On the island, Merivaara hadn’t stood on ceremony, but apparently on land different norms applied.

“Yes. Could you leave your wife a message to call me back? She can get hold of me through the Espoo Police switchboard. Tell her that I found the information she was looking for. Thank you. Good-bye,” I said with as much honey in my tone as I could muster.

Only after hanging up did I realize that Juha Merivaara had been there when they found Harri’s body. Would he be able to tell me anything I hadn’t already heard? But Koivu had handled the case with his usual care, so he surely had gotten everything important out of Juha Merivaara.

Anne Merivaara called at three fifteen, just as Ström finally arrived, fifteen minutes late, for our meeting. Briefly I told her that there was no ambiguity about Harri’s cause of death. Anne sounded strangely thankful, as if before Harri’s death she had been concerned about his emotional equilibrium. Because Ström was waiting on the other side of the desk looking impatient, I didn’t start asking him questions about the investigation, which he had led. The case was closed after all. That definitely wouldn’t be a good way to start out our new working relationship.

The meeting turned out long and muggy, since Ström was in no rush to get home and there was no breeze outside. He and his wife had divorced four years earlier, and their kids, Jani and Jenna, stayed over at Ström’s studio apartment every other weekend, but they were with his ex-wife this weekend.

After the meeting I felt reasonably up to speed on all of the open cases and the approaches Ström had taken. The previous night there had been a run-in between a Finnish gang and a Somali gang in downtown Espoo. I had felt pretty important as I assigned Puupponen and Wang to investigate. This was the third clash between the gangs, and we needed to defuse the state of war before there were more confrontations and tensions amplified. From what Wang said, I got the idea that Ström had been firmly on the Finnish gang’s side. Ström held an obvious disgust for any and all immigrants, unless they were white and brought home gold medals.