My First Murder (2 page)

Rane sighed. Neither of us wanted to talk about our boss. It was common knowledge that our section head, Sergeant Kalevi Kinnunen, was an alcoholic. Period. Since I was next in the chain of command, I would take over the case until Kinnunen recovered from his latest drinking jag.

“Listen, Rane. I might know this dead guy. Or used to know him...”

“My vacation starts tomorrow, and I intend to take it. This case is yours whether you like it or not. You don’t get to pick and choose in this job.”

It was obvious from Rane’s tone that he thought I should have continued studying to be a lawyer, since then I could have chosen my cases. He had always regarded me with a certain degree of suspicion, as did many others in the department. Not only was I young, and a woman, but I also wasn’t a permanent career police officer like they were; to them, I was nothing more than a fly-by-night substitute with a couple more months to endure on the force.

After my matriculation exams, and to the astonishment of everyone around me, I had applied to and been accepted by the police academy. I had always been a quasi-rebel in school, a punk in a leather jacket who still graduated
summa cum laude
. The other punk—and the worst truant in our class—went on to become
an elementary school teacher. But my head was full of idealistic notions of social justice. I imagined that as a police officer, I would be able to help both victims
and
criminals. I thought I could change the world and decided to specialize in vice work so I could help all the women and children caught up in prostitution and pornography.

The police academy had proved a disappointment, however, though I had held my own surprisingly well among the men. I had long since gotten used to being one of the guys; in school I had strummed bass in a testosterone-rich garage band and always played soccer with “the guys.”

At school I had become accustomed to being at the head of the class, and I felt compelled to do nothing less at the academy. But the actual work of a police officer had been too much for me in the end. After two years of writing reports, doing body searches on female reprobates, and sifting through the social histories of shoplifters, I had had enough. I was using only one part of who I was—the most boring and officious part. No one wanted my compassion, and there was little use for my mind—which I had always made a habit of keeping fit.

Those two years of police work reawakened my desire to pursue higher education, and I quickly worked my way through two officer candidate courses. There was a shortage of women, and it’s possible that I rose through the ranks more quickly than usual as a result. This caused no end of jealous grumbling among the boys. But the thing that seemed to rankle my colleagues the most was that I didn’t actually think much of the job. When I was accepted to law school, I thought that I had finally found the right fit. I was still interested in the application of the law, and at twenty-three years old, I believed that I knew what I wanted out of life.

While I was in school, I continued to do summer temp work and other ad hoc jobs for the city police department, and now, five years later, I was a police officer again. I had gotten bored with studying, and a six-month substitute posting in the Helsinki Police Department’s Violent Crime Unit had seemed like a good idea, especially since I was specializing in criminal law. I had thought that a few months off would give me some distance from my coursework and a new perspective on my life. So far, I seemed to be wrong about this too. As a criminal investigator, I did not have the energy to think about anything but work. Every now and then I’d go out for a beer, but I hardly ever made it to the gym anymore.

Further complicating things, my immediate supervisor did only a small fraction of his work. He spent the rest of his time drinking—or nursing a hangover. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been put out to pasture years before. Kinnunen’s work almost always fell to other people, and now, especially during the summer, the situation had become intolerable. The budget appropriations for bringing in extra staff, such as myself, had run out in April, and the vacations everyone had scheduled to recover from being overworked were looming on the horizon.

In addition, I wasn’t nearly as hard-boiled as I had been when I was young, but admitting that would have been a big mistake. My male colleagues kept a close eye on my nerves and eagerly monitored my reactions when inspecting evidence—like the rotting, vomit-sodden, eviscerated corpse of a wino who had been drinking water mixed with sulfuric acid. It wasn’t as though that didn’t turn everyone’s stomach, but I was the one who wasn’t allowed to show it—because I was a woman. But I was tough and made far and away the most callous wisecracks in
the police cafeteria afterward, even though spooning the chicken fricassee into my mouth almost made me gag.

When it came down to it, there was nothing I could do about my appearance: I looked hopelessly female. I kept my hair long because my curls would have frizzed up all over my head if I had cut it any shorter. And I was short. My height had actually almost prevented my acceptance into the police academy, but a doctor I knew had added the two missing inches to my medical certificate. My body was an unlikely combination of feminine curves and masculine muscles. I’m strong for someone so small, and I know my own strength well enough that dangerous situations don’t generally frighten me. However, right at this moment, I could have done with the self-confidence that came with a tight hair bun and a police uniform.

Until now, all of my cases, both homicides and otherwise, had been strictly business. But the words “choir” and “Peltonen” sent a stab of fear through me. If my sinking feeling was right, I was about to see several people who knew me in an entirely different capacity than that of a police officer.

During my first year of law school, I had lived in a cramped student apartment in Itäkeskus, near the mall on the east side of the city. My roommates had quarreled constantly because one of them spent half of her time at home singing. At times a whole quartet could be found harmonizing in Jaana’s room, with Jaana’s boyfriend singing bass. Tommi Peltonen was a dreamboat—eyes like Paul Newman and a face deeply tanned from many yachting excursions. Jaana had spent many a long night agonizing over whether to move in with him, sometimes inviting me into her room to talk it through over a bottle of red wine.

After the years I had spent surrounded by nothing but dull police bodybuilder types, Tommi had been a feast for the eyes.
Jaana’s vocalizing never bothered me much, both because she sang pretty well and because I could always put on my headphones and crank up some Dead Kennedys or homegrown Popeda if I got tired of listening to classical.

Then my great-aunt died and the family didn’t want to sell her studio in Töölö until real estate prices went up. So I moved in and kept up the apartment, paying only the maintenance fees. When the value of the unit eventually went up, I was afraid I would lose it, but my greedy relatives decided to wait for square footage rates to balloon even further and were left out in the cold when the recession hit and real estate crashed. So there I was, still living in a nicer neighborhood than I deserved, surrounded by restaurants I couldn’t afford. I bumped into Jaana now and then at the university and heard that she and Tommi had broken up. Jaana had fallen in love with the son of a host family she stayed with while the choir was on a trip to Germany and ended up becoming a hausfrau. These days, I maintained the typical Christmas card relationship with most of my old roommates.

As I tried to recall that period of my life, the names and faces of Jaana’s other friends came rushing back to me. There had been some other eye candy in addition to Tommi; I had even finished off a bottle or two with the EFSAS crowd a few times. Since I knew that many of the choir members had difficulty moving on with their lives, I figured it was quite likely I was about to come face-to-face with several of them. Choir singers were their own breed: a gang of masochists who got off on singing forgettable ditties while standing beside people with worse voices than their own, all being led by a tormentor waving his arms around incomprehensibly.

The road leading to the villa wound through green summer meadows. Although Rane was no longer running the sirens, he
was still speeding, which was perfectly legal. I read him the driving directions, and we managed to turn off at the correct spot. It was so damn embarrassing when the police got lost—it had happened to me a couple of times, and I had taken the blame. The sea glinted silver beyond the fields. A hare loped lazily across the road. A wasp tried to fly in through the open car window.

“There are a few old summerhouses out here that rich folks have fixed up for themselves,” Rane explained.

We finally crossed a narrow stretch of land about thirty feet wide onto what felt like an island and drove under a high arched gate. A brass nameplate announced that we had arrived at Villa Maisetta. A narrow, overgrown road led to the yard of an idyllic summerhouse, exactly the sort of place I would have loved to live in. The two-story villa had white window frames and was adorned with intricate woodwork on the eaves. A patrol car was parked on the lawn next to the old, beat-up Volvo used by Forensics.

“The guys were quick today. What exactly are we supposed to do here?” I asked, forcing myself to take on a cynical, almost aggressive posture. No tears for the corpses of old roommates’ cute ex-boyfriends.

A patrol officer approached with a morose-looking dark-haired girl. They both eyed me suspiciously as Rane and I introduced ourselves. Though I had braced myself for this kind of reaction, it still rankled me. The girl looked vaguely familiar, and her name, Mira, called to mind Jaana’s less-than-complimentary comments about the choir’s worst tightass. I suddenly remembered that Mira didn’t even drink hard liquor, which, five years ago at least, had been an unforgivable sin in these circles.

Mira led us down the lawn to the shore, where the boys from Forensics were photographing a body sprawled against the rocks. The medical examiner was also on-site. I guessed they had been waiting for us for a while because everything was done. It struck me as stupid that they had all waited for me to look over the corpse before pulling it out of the water. I had no desire to see the carcass at all, to recognize it as Tommi, or to see what someone had done to him.

“How does it look?” I asked the medical examiner who stood nearby puffing on a thin cigar. At least a hundred pounds overweight, he despised me almost as much as I despised him. The difference was that I knew he was a real pro at his job, while he did not think as highly of me.

“Where’s Kinnunen?” Salo asked suspiciously.

“Wherever he is, we can’t stand around waiting for him,” I replied antagonistically. “Let’s get the ball rolling. What would you say about the cause of death?”

“Judging from his face, I’d say he died by drowning. But that depression in his skull looks interesting enough that I don’t quite know what to think. I’ll have to get him on the table.” Salo spoke to the tips of Rane’s shoes instead of to me.

“Is it possible he was whacked on the head and then dropped in the water?” Rane asked.

“Very possible. Whatever hit him certainly didn’t
improve
his chances of survival. It looks strange, though. I’m curious to know what he was hit with.”

“What about a rock?” Rane scanned the boulders on the shoreline. All sorts of smaller stones were strewn among them, some of which would fit nicely in a person’s hand.

“Yeah, it’ll certainly keep the boys busy if you put them to work checking every rock on this beach,” said the ME with a snort.

I gave the paramedics permission to lift the body out of the water. They carefully turned it over. The face looked grotesquely familiar, the blond hair clotted with blood and salt. Even the bloating could not remove the expression of horror in the open eyes, which shone like blue warning lights, surrounded by the mottled violet skin of his face. Strands of seaweed adorned his white pullover windbreaker, and his shoeless legs, tanned as far up as I could see, were covered by a pair of jeans.

An image of the handsome Tommi from a few years before flashed painfully through my mind. Tommi was probably a couple of years older than I was, but still not quite thirty. I had seen younger dead bodies, but those had always been ravaged by booze or chemicals. I swallowed my tears and tried to clear my throat. Then I took a deep breath and started snapping instructions to the forensic investigators: Where could the dent in Tommi’s head have come from? Could he have slipped off the dock? And so on. I knew my terse tone made me look jumpy, but there was nothing I could do to cover it up. Though we had seen a female defense minister muster the courage to cry in public, I still couldn’t.

“Let’s go find out what those folks in the house know,” I said to Rane, turning toward the ornate villa. It was only then that I noticed the group sitting on the porch on the sea-facing side of the house. Though they must have heard my peevish outburst, none of them was looking in our direction. It was as though they were trying to block out the presence of the police altogether.

Upon closer inspection, the villa looked like a fake: maybe it was a reproduction of an older villa that had once stood on the lot. The paint had had a good twenty years to fade, but the house could not have been much older than I was.

The sun shone on the porch, and I cursed my hot jeans. As I expected, some of the seven people sitting on the porch looked familiar.

“Maria!” a clear, bright voice rang out in confusion. “Are you a policewoman now? Do you remember me? I’m Tuulia.”

I remembered Tuulia well. She had been in our apartment frequently, and we had hung out together at the university café as well. I liked Tuulia, and I recalled that we’d had a similar sense of humor back then. She was prettier than I remembered, with the stately poise of a grown woman comfortable in her tall frame.

“I do.” I couldn’t bring myself to smile. “Yes...These days I’m Detective Maria Kallio. I work in the Violent Crime Unit. And this is Officer Lahtinen. Let’s start by having you all introduce yourselves and tell us what you know about last night’s events.” I sounded ridiculous even to myself and didn’t dare look anyone directly in the eye.