Fatal Headwind (30 page)

Before I went I called Antti. Iida was outside on the porch napping in her stroller, and I interrupted Antti playing the piano.

“Tell me some poisons that kill birds.”

“How should I know? I’m a mathematician. Ask a biologist. But why are you asking?”

“Harri found a dead duck on Rödskär. Could there be poisonous compounds in some paints that would kill birds? The kinds that would build up in the food chain so that by the time they reached birds, they would be deadly?”

“Old paints had all kinds of things in them. Lead for one, but Merivaara Nautical doesn’t make that kind of thing. What are you thinking?”

I sighed. “I don’t really know yet.” Until I had better information about Peders and Ramanauskas, all I could do was guess.

Antti suggested going to his parents’ cabin in Inkoo for the weekend. They were traveling, so the house was empty. The boat was still in the water, and we could even go out sailing if the weather allowed. I knew that Antti wanted to get my mind off of work and Ström, and I guess I wanted that too. Some mushroom hunting with Iida in the baby backpack. Gliding over frigid waters in the boat.

“Good idea. Let’s go tonight. I promise to leave my phone at home.”

I had to hurry to make the meeting. I fixed my hair and refreshed my lipstick. New lines had appeared under my eyes, and my gray hairs seemed to be multiplying. When I walked past the office Lähde now occupied alone, I couldn’t help glancing at the door. Seeing the empty nameplate slot tore at my heart. I realized it was pointless trying to erase every reference to him.

The biggest enticement of the lunch meeting had been the free meal. But it was a disappointment. I picked at the rubbery rainbow trout. Over the summer we had stopped buying farmed fish after reading that rainbow-trout farming was one of the culprits in the spread of algae blooms. Maybe Antti’s environmentalism was rubbing off on me, because I found myself wondering what kind of fertilizer had been used to grow the potatoes in front of me too. Thinking about that irritated me less than this meeting.

“Catching these vandals is a high priority for maintaining the city’s image. Just think what kind of impression foreign visitors get when they come in from the airport and see the freeway noise barriers covered in graffiti. It doesn’t create an impression of a modern technology hub. It makes this look like some kind of slum,” said one of the urban-planning engineers.

“Well, speaking for the police, I can tell you we’re doing our best. The city could try to influence the national budget to increase our appropriations for more staffing,” our new chief of police replied.

My trout tasted so bad I pushed the plate aside. An officer from Patrol who was in charge of community policing talked about an education campaign they were conducting in the schools and the importance of young people having places to gather, but anything that would have required financial investments from the city seemed to be going nowhere. I found myself requesting a turn to speak.

“I’m not the slightest bit surprised to see our teenagers competing with the city government to see who can destroy the environment faster. Those sound barriers practically scream to be painted. As long as we keep chipping away at green space, with even Central Park at risk now, the city doesn’t have any room to complain about people screwing up the place we live in,” I said.

“So the police are going to start rewriting the criminal code now?” one of the city council members said coldly. “The city follows the law in all its construction work, unlike these vandals.”

I could feel the irritated glances of the police chief and my other colleagues. Which just made me even angrier.

“You politicians are the ones who make the laws. If the point of this meeting is to come up with a wish list of how to spend taxpayers’ money, then maybe you could lower the curbs on the bike paths so they aren’t a problem for bikes. One of these days someone’s going to break their neck in a fall, which will actually cause our Violent Crime Unit some work. Graffiti artists haven’t been causing any deaths lately, so I think I’m going to leave now. One of my officers killed himself the day before yesterday, so we’re a little swamped.”

I stood up and my chair clattered to the floor. I knew I was acting stupidly, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. As the door closed behind me, I could feel Taskinen’s disappointed gaze. Maybe he was starting to think it had been a mistake to appoint me unit commander. Taskinen had had to fight to get his proposal through. Some in the hierarchy had thought I was suspect because I belonged to organizations like the Finnish Feminist Association and LGBTI Rights Finland. What I had just said would probably start rumors that I not only supported animal-rights activists but also graffiti vandals.

I flew up the stairs to my office at record speed. Just as I thought, there was a bag of
salmiakki
licorice in my top drawer, which would help my irritation.

“Someone’s waiting for you,” Lähde said as he passed me in the hall.

“Yeah?” I didn’t have any meetings scheduled, but I could see Jiri Merivaara with his green hair leaning against my door. Had he come to the police station voluntarily?

“Hi, Jiri. How’s it going?”

The boy shrugged and then followed me into my office and slumped on the sofa. The green of his hair had faded since I saw him last, and a bare knee protruded from his ripped jeans. His jam-packed backpack hung open.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked.

“I’m never going back there! I turn eighteen in February. When I get Dad’s money, then I can do like Mikke and go traveling around the world.”

I remembered Anne Merivaara talking about Jiri’s desire to go to college. Had that just been a mother’s wishful thinking?

“And I missed three tests, since the SIS kept us in jail for days, even though we didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you? Didn’t a few of you finally confess to lighting the fire? Did you know about that?”

“No,” Jiri said, and I was sure he was lying. The girl who had interned at the meatpacking plant, her big sister, and another girl in the same high school as Jiri were going to be charged with arson. Jiri was probably looking at aiding and abetting. The fines were going to be huge, and Jiri was almost certainly going to need his inheritance to pay them.

Jiri sat on the couch, silent and sullen as if he had been dragged into the police station instead of coming on his own volition. My phone rang and Puupponen asked about something routine, so I answered as if Jiri hadn’t been in the room. He stared at his backpack and the toes of his canvas shoes, biting off the nails of his right hand and then pulling them out of his mouth as if they tasted bad.

After I ended my call, Jiri remained silent. I opened the Juha Merivaara case file on my computer and read through it backward and forward. Pulling the
salmiakki
out of my drawer, I put two in my mouth and offered the bag to Jiri. He glared at it suspiciously—the product label included three artificial additives—but then took some anyway. After chewing a couple of times, Jiri started to talk.

“I lied about the night Dad died. I wasn’t sleeping the whole time. I went out for a piss and had a hard time getting back to sleep. That fight between Dad and Tapio was bugging me. How was it any of his business who Riikka sleeps with? Dad was always bossing everybody around!”

Jiri’s eyes glowed almost as hot as his cheeks. “In that little room where I was, you can hear what everyone else is doing. Mikke went outside, or at least out in the hall. I heard him talking to his mom.”

“Katrina Sjöberg?” I asked. I was a bit surprised, since neither mother nor son had mentioned anything about a nighttime encounter.

“They were talking Swedish, so it had to be Katrina.”

“What time did that happen?”

“I didn’t look at the clock. It was totally dark, though. But I don’t know . . . I don’t think they went outside. I mean I don’t think they . . . you know . . . killed Dad . . .”

Jiri blushed and tripped over his words. He clearly didn’t want to blame Mikke or Katrina directly, and I wondered if he had made the whole thing up to turn our attention away from someone else. Was he that afraid his mother was a murderer?

“There’s another thing. Riikka and Tapio were sleeping in the room next to me. Mom always put them as far away from herself as possible, like she was afraid she would hear something horrible from their room. Anyway, one of them was awake, and based on the footsteps the one who went outside was Tapio. The only ones I absolutely didn’t hear going outside were Mom and Riikka.”

I had expected something like this. Changing the topic, I asked about Harri Immonen’s connections to Animal Revolution.

“Harri an AR member? No way. He was so old. I’ve never seen anyone over thirty at our events.”

I nodded. Animal Revolution’s direct-action approach didn’t fit the image I had of Harri the lonely pacifist. But he had had some contact with the organization, because he ended up on that Security Intelligence Service list. I asked Jiri to think about it again, but he seemed more interested in the contents of his backpack than in Harri. He started digging around for something, first removing a sweater and some carrots in a mesh bag. He seemed to find what he was looking for but didn’t pull it out.

“Harri was a nice guy. He left people alone. He didn’t approve of everything AR stands for, but he at least tried to be part of the conversation. A lot of times I’ve wondered why Dad couldn’t be more like Harri or Mikke, why he didn’t ever listen and just ran right over people.”

Jiri’s flood of words and apparent desire to cooperate mystified me. Had the SIS managed to scare him? Or was it that the fire at the meat plant almost turned them into murderers? Perhaps compared to the SIS agents, I seemed gentle and understanding.

“Oh, Harri came to a demonstration against animal testing once,” Jiri suddenly recalled. “He was passing out fliers with me and some clowns in business suits started yelling at him about a grown man playing with little girls and their fluffy animals,” Jiri said with a grimace. “As if defending animals was some kind of female privilege. Dad was a little surprised when I told him I knew Harri. He tried to quiz him about his politics, but Harri wouldn’t argue with him. Maybe he was afraid Dad would fire him.”

Jiri shoved his hand in his backpack again. I wondered what had changed about him. The intensity of his speech was still there, as was the aggressive reserve, but in the aftermath of his father’s death, the boy seemed less distressed than before.

Then I realized that even though the eyes beneath his green shock of hair still flashed, they weren’t alive with the same anger. That had disappeared completely. I didn’t have time to think about whether he had just stopped hating me or had made peace with some larger slice of humanity, because just then he opened his backpack wide and pulled out a gallon of paint.

“I don’t know if this has anything to do with Dad’s death, but . . .” Jiri hesitated for a second and then handed me the can. It was covered in rust. The label colors were the same as on the Lithuanian paint cans I had seen in the Merivaaras’ garage, but the words on this one were in Russian, which I only knew enough of to identify the letters. The skull painted on the side with a red circle around it didn’t leave much to the imagination. I took the can carefully as if it might explode in my hands.

“What is this? Where did you find it?”

“Last fall on Rödskär. Harri was there watching the bird migration.”

Harri had caught a bad cold and came down with an ear infection, so Mikke had gone to get him so he could see a doctor. Juha encouraged Harri to take some sick leave over the weekend, but Harri didn’t want to take a break because his research was already behind schedule.

“Dad said directly that he had some visitors coming to the island that weekend and that he wanted to be alone with them. I don’t know who they were. On Sunday morning Mikke called and asked if I wanted to go with him to take Harri back to the island. It was a great day, as warm as June.”

Jiri explained that he had decided to go because Mikke would be leaving soon for his winter sailing trip. From a distance they had made out what looked like a military vessel in the harbor at Rödskär, and they started to have doubts about whether they should go to the island before Juha’s guests had left. So instead they took a spin around the end of Porkkala Peninsula, and on their return to Rödskär they passed the same boat. It was flying a Lithuanian flag. Juha Merivaara hadn’t been the slightest bit pleased that Harri had returned to the island earlier than arranged.

“Dad had a massive hangover. He had had a real throw-down with his guests. The kitchen was full of Russian vodka bottles. I got ready to go heat the sauna, but Dad got all upset when I said I was going out there. Mikke asked if he was hiding a girl, and Dad almost hit him. Then he said one of the dudes had puked in the sauna and that he was going to clean it up himself. I was pissed, so I went out for a walk and noticed that someone had been digging at one of those grass patches on the south shore. My imagination started running away with me.”