Her Enemy (20 page)

When I promised to return the papers, Annamari waved her hand dismissively.

“No need—just burn them. We don’t want them. It’s just more of Sanna’s scribbling. Sanna was gifted, yes, but why couldn’t she have just studied normal things like everyone else? Why did she have to drink and do all those other horrible things
and be with all those horrible men? Sometimes she was like a complete stranger, and once I even said to Henrik that maybe the nurses switched her by accident at birth in the hospital. She looked exactly like Henrik, though.”

“When is Henrik coming back to Finland?”

Annamari began shaking again. “Maybe next week. He shouted so much on the phone. He told me…” She stopped, as if to steel herself. “He told me…that this was all my fault, that I didn’t know how to raise our children. But maybe he will be able to get Kimmo out of prison.”

I realized that Annamari feared her husband, which brought me back to Mallu’s suspicions that Henrik Hänninen might have had something to do with Sanna’s death. The Hänninen patriarch was interesting me more by the minute, his shadow constantly lurking in the background behind the rest of the family.

My backpack was heavy as I biked over to retrieve my bus pass from Mr. Herman Lindgren, who lived south of Annamari Hänninen right next to the swimming beach and breakwater. When I rang the doorbell, a dog started barking with a sound like a bass drum with a loose head, but nearly a full minute passed before someone came to the door.

The man looked to be about a hundred, and the graying Labrador retriever next to him should have been in a doggy retirement home. Still, the dog sniffed me curiously, probably smelling Einstein and Hellström’s loaner dog on my legs. The old man got straight to the point, handing me my bus card after first glancing with a smile at the picture and then me.

“Yep, it’s the same girl.”

“You must have gone to a lot of trouble tracking me down, since the number for me in the phone book is old.”

“I got your number from the phone company. And it was no bother—I have plenty of time for tracking down pretty young girls. I found your pass over there on the beach. It was almost in the water,” the man stated with a question in his tone that made me feel as though he deserved an explanation.

“Monday night I was riding a little too fast and flew off the walking bridge into the water. The card probably fell out of my pocket during the fall.”

“Into the water? Well, thank goodness you weren’t hurt. Thank goodness you didn’t drown like that other girl.”

“What girl?” I asked, feeling my heart rate suddenly accelerate.

“The girl who drowned the winter before last out on the breakwater. I will always remember—it was the second of March. My wife died the same night.”

The elderly man seemed to withdraw backward in time, into his memories.

“It was a rainy night, as gray as autumn, no snow anywhere and no ice on the sea. I took Karlsson out here at around seven o’clock, and he ran off to the beach to sniff at something. I went to see what he was up to, and there on the beach lay a boy with blond hair. I was startled, worrying that he might be dead or sick, but his snoring and the smell of him told me he was just drunk. I couldn’t leave him there, as cold as it was, but an old man like me couldn’t do anything for him alone. Out on the breakwater I could see two people, and I shouted to them that a man was lying there and asked them to help.

“One of them—the woman—ran a little closer and shouted back that the man was her friend and she would take care of him; I could leave. When I arrived home, I found my wife on the kitchen floor. Her heart had given out, the doctor said later,
and she didn’t suffer. But I still wouldn’t have wanted her to die alone.”

The dog whined as if chiming in. The old man bent over to pat his companion.

“I ended up in the hospital myself then for a while, since my own pump was acting up too, and then I spent the following month living with my son. I didn’t hear from a neighbor until several months later that a girl drowned that same night. They said it was suicide. It was the same girl who ran toward me on the breakwater.”

“I knew that girl,” I said, unable to restrain my impatience any longer. “I didn’t know someone else was out there on the breakwater with her in addition to her boyfriend. Who was he? Or was it a woman? What did he look like?”

The old man simply shook his head apologetically.

“I couldn’t see very well in the fog, and it’s been such a long time. I do remember that the other one had an umbrella and a long, black coat. Maybe a man, maybe a woman. How should I know, when women are so tall nowadays.”

Suddenly the old man looked directly in my eyes as though searching for something small and valuable there and then said pointedly, “Besides, I’m not sure it was human at all. I think it was Death. He had come to take my wife and now he was coming to take that girl. Maybe you’ll say these are just the ramblings of an old man. I may be three times older than you are, but I’m not senile yet. Someone was out on the breakwater with that dead girl.”

“I believe you,” I said reassuringly. “But you didn’t tell the police what you saw. You didn’t tell them about the other person.”

“What difference would it have made two months after the fact? The neighbors said the police ruled it a suicide and closed the case. Didn’t she even leave a note?”

“Would you still be willing to come and tell this to the police if the need arose? Information has recently come to light that calls into question whether it was a suicide after all. You might be a key witness…”

“A key witness. That sounds like something from one of those strange American miniseries on television. But what do I have these days other than time? What do you say, Karlsson?” The man patted his dog again, obviously very much back in the present.

Thanking Mr. Lindgren sufficiently was difficult, and I decided to send him a bouquet of flowers the next morning. I was sure he was right: the figure he saw out on the breakwater was Death. But not the imaginary scythe-wielding phantom—Herman Lindgren had seen Sanna and Armi’s murderer.

On Friday night, I was sitting comfortably ensconced in an armchair in our living room reading snippets from a draft of Sanna’s thesis on Sylvia Plath. Abundant notations filled the margins of the pages, but they all kept strictly to the topic of the paper. The working title of the thesis was “Body Language and Images of Self-Destruction in the Work of Sylvia Plath.” At the very least, Sanna had chosen an appropriate subject for herself.

I was tearing through Sanna’s papers with a defiant determination after having words with Eki earlier in the day about my investigation into Armi’s murder. Eki told me flat out that I was wasting my time.

“In this job you have to learn to make judgments about what’s worth doing and what isn’t. Our job is to get the Hänninen boy, if not released, then sentenced as lightly as possible. Rummaging around in his sister’s unfortunate life isn’t going to help you in that task one bit.”

Since I disagreed, Eki thought I was losing perspective. Even so, I announced my intention to take Sanna’s file home with me. I assumed that if Eki didn’t trust my judgment, the chances he would continue my contract after my three-month probationary period were slim. On the other hand—if he didn’t trust me, I
wouldn’t want to work for Henttonen & Associates anyway. When I entered law school, my intention was to train for the bench, but I had put my court internship on indefinite hold. Placements in the Helsinki area district courts were few and far between, and I had no intention of going somewhere out in the sticks. I didn’t want to admit to myself that one of the most important things preventing my departure was Antti, now that our relationship had subsided from the initial giddiness to a fumbling process of working out a life together. Despite my weekly questioning of “whether this is really going anywhere,” we still wanted to be together. I just hated feeling dependent.

I decided to read the thesis more closely after inspecting the rest of the material. I had just finished sorting the papers and was starting in on the binder of files from our office when the phone rang. I rushed into the entryway, thinking that it might be Antti wanting to clarify something about our plans for the next day.

“Sarkela residence, Maria Kallio speaking.”

Complete silence. Then a strangely disembodied, husky voice: “Don’t go digging around in things that don’t concern you. Otherwise, you might be next…” The voice disappeared into the ether, and then came a click as the speaker hung up.

My old police instincts failed me this time, because I lowered the receiver before realizing that I could have tried to trace the call. When I returned to the living room, I was angry. Someone wanted to intimidate me. I knew in my heart that the person who sabotaged my bike wasn’t just a kid playing a prank—he was a double murderer.

People had threatened me before, and I’d had some close scrapes. But usually the threat had a face—when you were arresting someone, you knew what you were up against.

I watched as a motorboat docked in Otsolahti Marina. The rocks along the shore glistened from the recent rain. The living room’s large picture window no longer looked like a charming way to view the scenery—it was part of the threat. How easy it would be for anyone to come right in through the window.

I shook myself mentally. Sneaking up on me wasn’t easy, as Sebastian had learned at the Club Bizarre party. This murderer was an idiot if he thought he could get rid of me as easily as Sanna and Armi. Having thus laughed down my fear, I opened the binder and worked my way toward the end of Sanna’s life.

Hänninen family drama had kept Henttonen’s team busy, and Eki personally had done a considerable amount of work keeping Sanna out of jail. Two DUIs, both squeaking in below the standard for aggravated drunk driving, one charge for possession of marijuana, and a long list of citations for public intoxication.

The first drunk-driving arrest occurred at a sobriety checkpoint during Sanna’s second year in college. The car was full of drunk students, but Sanna claimed to have consumed only a single beer.

“Performed well in court. Dressed nicely. Schoolgirl,” Eki had written in his notes. I could imagine Sanna standing before the judge looking sweet, her big brown eyes scared, her voice even more childlike than normal. That was an easy case.

However, by the time of Sanna’s next DUI arrest, she had spent several nights in the drunk tank. One of these detentions was a result of a run-in with her boyfriend, whom Sanna threatened with a large folding knife. When Sanna ran her dad’s car into a lamppost, her with a blood alcohol level of 0.14, getting her off was a bit more difficult. Eki’s argument centered on Sanna’s grief over her boyfriend leaving her and the stress of school. Her broken leg was sufficient punishment. The result was just more fines and a suspended license.

“Works hard to save her own skin. Knows how to play innocent better than anyone I’ve seen. Criminal material?” Eki had written in the margins. I was starting to understand why he doubted Kimmo’s protestations of innocence.

Sanna’s marijuana possession charge came at the same time as Otso Hakala’s arrest for distribution. Eki managed to convince the judges that Sanna had been completely under Hakala’s influence, and the court dismissed the count against her of distributing a controlled substance due to lack of evidence. For possession, Sanna still took home a three-month suspended sentence.

This case lacked any notes. Was that what Eki had removed? Why? Would Martti or Albert remember what had been in the file? I was leafing through copies of the trial transcripts and Sanna’s deposition when the phone rang a second time.

Probably the same person trying to scare me again. This time I would leave the line open.

“Hi, it’s Angel. How was your head on Wednesday morning?”

“Not the best.” I didn’t know whether or not to be pleased by Angel’s call.

“Listen, I just remembered that our old member newsletters have some of Kimmo’s drawings in them. Would they be of any use? I was thinking they could be, since they all show women dominating men.”

“Maybe. Go ahead and put them in the mail.”

“You don’t want to come pick them up?”

“No time, not until early next week.” Why I didn’t really want to see Angel again was unclear even to me. What reason did I have to fear her?

“That policeman friend of yours asked Joke how long you’ve been involved in the club and didn’t seem to believe him when
Joke said you weren’t. He kept demanding to know whether you were a sadist or a masochist. Joke told him he was sorry he hadn’t had the chance to find out.” Angel’s voice had the same irritating tone of amusement as before.

“What category would you put me in?” I asked, to my own surprise.

“I don’t know. Dangerous, in any case. Is there any news on Kimmo’s case?”

I was almost disappointed at Angel’s change of topic, and, after our conversation ended, concentrating on Sanna again was difficult. I had never flirted with a woman before. People had called me a lesbian plenty of times—you have to get used to that as a policewoman. It never bothered me much, since the word “lesbian” was hard for me to take negatively. But Angel’s obvious interest bothered me almost as much as it flattered me.