Authors: Harri Nykanen
Nights of Awe (2 page)
The Rabbi didn’t respond, he just looked at me. My mobile began to ring again. Liebstein shook his head and smiled, albeit wanly.
“Have to go, busy busy busy… some day the spring will snap and all the little gears will ricochet off and people will go mad and start killing one another… Yamim Noraim
.
Remember Yom Kippur, Ariel…”
.
Remember Yom Kippur, Ariel…”
Liebstein was right: I had to remember. Being born a Jew brought along with it certain responsibilities other than refusing to eat pork. It was almost impossible to skip out on celebrating the Jewish New Year altogether. It began with ten days of repentance, the last of which, Yom Kippur, was the most important. It was then that the entire congregation prayed together and asked for forgiveness for all of their conceivable sins, starting from masturbating and malicious talk.
The Rabbi spread out his hands to illustrate all of the whirling, twirling gears, springs and wheels in the universe being hurled outwards into eternity, and then he followed Kordienski into the shop.
I gave a sigh of relief, and as I passed the van, I checked my reflection in the tinted side window. Short hair, slightly thinning at the crown, sideburns that reached halfway down my ears, a narrow, introverted face and a high, domed forehead.
I hiked up the collar of my brass-buttoned pea coat and took a few hurried steps to ensure my getaway before calling Huovinen.
“Where are you, Ari?”
“Downtown, on my way to Linnunlaulu.”
“By car?”
“No, but I’ll get there just as fast by tram.”
“You know that bridge that crosses the railway tracks?”
I conceded that I did.
“You’ll find two very lifeless bodies there. Kind of an unusual case, you’ll see what I mean. One of them is in the rail yard beneath the bridge. Just kick things into gear and inform me as soon as something comes up. You can bet the media’s going to have a field day with this one… That bad timing: were you at one of your people’s celebrations where we pagans aren’t allowed?”
I told him I’d been investigating a corpse that had been found in a recycling dumpster.
“Someone else can take that. Shalom!” Huovinen said, ending the call.
I knew Huovinen so well that I found it impossible to be offended. We had graduated from the academy at the same time. Huovinen had been the best in the class, and I was only the fourth best, which had aroused a general sense of bewilderment among my relatives. Everyone remembered how my brother Eli had been number one in his class and had been accepted to study law on his first try and how my sister Hanna’s matriculation papers had been the best in the history of our school.
At that time, the burden that Einstein and Oppenheimer had left for less brilliant Jews like myself had weighed heavily on me.
The bridge was cordoned off with police tape, but the officers who were patrolling the site, radios crackling, recognized me and let me through.
I stopped in the middle of the span and gazed towards downtown.
Beyond the rock face, a maze of train tracks immediately began; it looked like a bunch of ladders had been toppled over in the same direction, stopping at the wall of stone and glass formed by the station and a few other buildings. Above the tracks ran a confusing jumble of electric wires; here and there you could see bright-red warning lights.
A large, ornamental pink wooden villa teetered perilously close to the edge of the high rock face.
A double-height express train approached from downtown; its roof swept past only a couple of yards beneath my feet. I could feel the bridge sway from the mass of the carriages.
On the other side of the bridge’s railing hung a six-foot-wide flange of corrugated metal. Yellow danger signs had been attached to it. I glanced over the edge of the railing and saw several uniformed policemen on the tracks. A tent had been erected over the rails, so that the tender morning sensibilities of the commuters on passing trains wouldn’t be offended by the sight of the body.
“Kaf… Ari!”
Detective Mika Simolin was approaching the crime scene from the direction of the Linnunlaulu villas.
“I went and had a look down below.”
Simolin was ten years younger than me. He had only been in Violent Crime for six months and still treated me with a respect that bordered on bashfulness.
“The shooting took place here,” Simolin said, indicating a bloodstain on the ground. “Afterwards the killer shoved the body down the slope and jumped or fell from the bridge onto the roof of a train and died instantaneously. I mean the presumed killer,” Simolin corrected himself.
The body lay on the slope that descended from the bridge, almost up against the steel mesh fence running above the rails. A green tarp had been draped from the fence to block the view. A CSI named Manner in white overalls was standing next to the body.
“All right if I come over there yet?” I asked.
Manner glanced up.
“Be my guest.”
I climbed down with Simolin at my heels and positioned myself a little awkwardly next to the fence. The body was lying on its back, partially hidden in the tall grass. It took a second before I understood what had happened to it. The face was like a mutilated stump from some pagan sacrifice: its nose and ears had been sliced off, and what was left was covered in blood.
2
From day one as a rookie cop, I had prepared myself for my first encounter with a corpse. I learnt how to look in such a way that I skipped over the most disgusting details. I also learnt how to breathe through my mouth. Relying on these techniques, I made it through my visits to the pathology department and the cabinet of horrors that was the police crime museum.
My first body was, nevertheless, an easy case. It was New Year’s Eve, and the evening had started out with a hard freeze. Later that night it had started to warm up and lightly snow. The body was found by a late-night partygoer, and the desk officer ordered me and my partner to the scene.
The deceased, a man of about forty, was lying under a large oak. He was blanketed by driven snow, as if he had pulled a freshly laundered comforter over himself and dozed off to the rustle of the wind in the branches. His eyelids and hair were dusted with powder.
The sight was almost beautiful.
Later I came across much uglier corpses, but I learnt to accept death as part of my job, and violence as part of death.
Although the face of the body lying on the embankment was mutilated, you could still tell that the man it belonged to was young and foreign. He had on black jeans, grey running shoes and a black leather jacket. The Adidas ski-cap he was wearing had hiked up far enough to reveal three small holes in his forehead, a few centimetres apart from each other. The blood trickling from them had converged with the gory mess that was his face.
Simolin pulled on a pair of disposable gloves and squatted next to the body. He pointed at the bullet holes.
“Twenty-two?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Manner nodded. “What about this?” He opened the leather jacket, revealing two stab wounds in the upper torso. “Plus one more bullet hole here in the chest. Someone wasn’t taking any chances.”
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
“When did the call come?”
“Eight-fifteen,” Simolin said. “First they said something about a man jumping under a train; they thought it was a routine suicide. Then we got the call about the second victim. There was only five minutes between calls. The first one was from a woman out walking her dog; she noticed a human ear in her pooch’s mouth. At almost exactly the same moment, the body was spotted from a passing train.”
“You check the pockets yet?” I asked Manner.
“Yup. Nothing.”
“Take another look.”
Manner searched the pockets of the tight jeans, front and back. The leather jacket had side pockets plus two more pockets inside. Nothing in them either.
“A whole lot of empty,” Manner said.
“You’d think there’d be some keys at least.”
“But it’s still clear it wasn’t a robbery.”
“Everyone carries something on them… keys, mobile phone, bus pass, money.”
“If you shoot someone three times in the head and then stab them twice in the chest, you’re going for the kill. If you’re just robbing them, intimidation or a blow to the back of the head will do the trick.”
“What’s the deal with cutting off the nose and the ears?” I asked, looking at Simolin questioningly.
I knew perfectly well that Simolin already had a theory, as did I. All I had to do was tease it out of him. Besides, a wise superior always listens to his subordinates first.
“They did it to make identification difficult.
Gorky Park
,” he deduced. “The victim’s face was slashed so that the victim wouldn’t be identified.”
Gorky Park
,” he deduced. “The victim’s face was slashed so that the victim wouldn’t be identified.”
“Pretty risky business, giving your victim a nip-tuck in a spot like this,” I said.
“It wasn’t fully light yet,” Manner reminded me. “And it wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds… the nose and ears were cut with a sharp knife or shears.”
“Have the other ear and nose been found?”
“Not yet.”
“But one of the ears got left behind up there, why?”
“Maybe the killer was in a rush and dropped it. It was still semi-dark, and in a situation like that, you’re not going to be very eager to start poking around, even though the perpetrator must have pretty steady nerves. Ice in the veins, as my father-in-law would say.”
“So where are the shells then? He probably wouldn’t have had time to gather them up.”
“Maybe the shooter used a revolver. Or else they just haven’t been found. We haven’t gone over the embankment with a metal detector yet. A twenty-two shell would be pretty hard to spot in terrain like this.”
A red-and-white Pendolino clacked northwards under the bridge. On the next track over, a local train approached from the opposite direction. I waited for the noise to die down.
“What else do we have?”
Manner glanced over his shoulder.
“The victim was coming from Töölönlahti Bay, in other words he was headed towards Kallio.”
“How do you know?” Simolin enquired. He was an avid student and eager to learn all the tricks of the trade.
“There’s no sand in the treads of the victim’s running shoes. On the Kallio side, the path is covered in crushed rock, which has sand in it, while on this side of the bridge, it’s paved. If you came from Kallio, take a look at your shoes. Now, the guy who was hit by the train approached from the opposite direction. There was crushed rock and sand from the path in the soles of his shoes.”
“How do you know?” Simolin repeated.
“Ever heard of a mobile phone? Siimes is over examining the train body, but we just consulted each other. Amazing what technology can do, isn’t it?”
“Has the other victim been identified?”
“No, he wasn’t carrying any papers either, just a map of Helsinki and a mobile.”
I bent my right knee to take a look at the bottom of my shoe. Manner was right. There was grit in the sole. There were also a few bigger chunks of crushed rock between the grooves.
“Any sign of a third person?”
“Not yet, but the bridge and the path haven’t been examined yet. I’m not sure we’ll find much; it’s going to be tough, or at least time-consuming. Hundreds of people go through here every day.”
“But why here, in this exact spot?” I wondered. “If the point was to kill this guy, you’d think there’d be better places to do it.”
“Maybe a jealous spat between two gay guys,” Manner suggested. “Those cases can get bloody, and all rational thinking flies out of the window. The suicide also fits that scenario.”
“But the mutilation doesn’t.”
Manner considered for a moment. “It could be some sort of revenge ritual, an ex-lover… or the desecrating of an enemy’s body. That would fit the foreigner aspect. On the other hand, one thing I’ve learnt over thirty years is that you never know with crazy people, the motivation can be just about anything, like orders from God or some little green man… I called in a medical examiner just to be sure. Hand me that case?” Manner asked Simolin.
I sought a firmer stance with my left leg.
“Send the fingerprints to be checked as soon as possible. I’ll go see how things look down below.”
I left Manner to examine the body and went to see if I could find the easiest way down. Simolin watched Manner work for a moment but then followed me. I stopped at the bridge and waited for him to catch up.
“Call in as many patrols as can be freed up to scour the terrain on both sides of the bridge. We also need to search the tracks; something might have been carried along with the train. I’ll call Stenman and Oksanen.”
Vuorio, the medical examiner, was huffing as he climbed the path to the bridge. He was overweight, and the exertion was a strain. He nodded at me but didn’t acknowledge Simolin.
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