Snow Angels (11 page)

I leave Valtteri, still seeming reflective, thinking that even for him, it seemed like an odd thing to say.

THE DETENTION CELLS ARE in the basement. My timing is good. As I walk down the stairs, I hear Seppo screaming, “Hey! Hey! Somebody let me out of here!”

It took all of three hours to break him. The cell door is steel. I slide open the observation port and look in. His face is pressed against the inside.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“Please let me out. I can’t stand it in here.”

“Stick your hands out the window.”

He looks like he’s afraid I’ll rip them off, but he does it. I hand-cuff him. “Now move away from the door.”

I unlock it and step inside. He almost falls backing away from me. His piss-stained expensive suit is gone, along with his bravado. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both way too big for him.

“Where did you get the clothes?” I ask.

“The sergeant gave them to me. I was expecting an orange prison jumpsuit or something.”

“You’ve been watching too much American TV.”

Valtteri’s Christian charity applies even to psychotic murderers. They’re his own clothes. The T-shirt is tucked into the jeans and accents Seppo’s beer belly. His face is red from broken blood vessels. It takes years of hard drinking to acquire that look. I can bench-press two hundred and fifty pounds. Seppo doesn’t look like he could bench-press a vodka bottle.

“Want a smoke?” I ask.

“Are you going to hurt me?”

I sit down on a metal cot bolted to the wall and shake a cigarette out of the pack. “No.”

He reaches out to take it, his hands tremble. I try to light it for him, but he’s shaking so hard that I have to hold him by the manacles to steady him. He inhales and coughs. The cell is sixteen by twenty-four feet square. Former occupants have scrawled names and dates on the gray concrete walls.

“Drab surroundings compared to your winter dacha,” I say.

He sucks on the cigarette like he’ll never get another.

“Let’s talk about Sufia.”

He coughs again. “I don’t know any Sufia.”

“Sufia Elmi, murdered forty-nine hours ago in a snowfield. You were having an affair with her. If you’re going to murder someone, you shouldn’t leave documentation. You gave her money, paid her rent.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“I just spent a couple hours collecting evidence from your BMW. I found blood, hair and semen. Are you going to tell me they won’t connect you to Sufia?”

He purses his lips, like he’s trying to decide something. “Can I talk to you straight, without you hurting me?”

“If you want to get out of here, that’s the best thing you can do for yourself.”

“I didn’t kill anyone, and I think you know it.”

“I’m ninety-nine percent convinced that you did.”

“There’s been a murder, and you found a way to link me to it. After all this time, you’re getting even with me for my affair with Heli.”

“That’s not true.”

He starts to cry. “Can’t I just apologize? I’m truly sorry that Heli and I hurt you. I didn’t know you. All I knew was that I loved Heli.”

This note rings false. People have affairs all the time and I doubt he cares who he hurts. Seppo is a sack of shit. He’s begging, just spewing whatever he hopes will get him out of this mess. I don’t say anything.

He sniffles. “And I’m sorry for what I said about your wife. I was trying to be brave.”

“Ancient history has nothing to do with this murder investigation.”

“I know what Heli did to you was awful. I didn’t make her do it, I told her to decide for herself who she wanted to be with.”

“Let’s move forward in time thirteen years and talk about Sufia’s murder.”

He dries his tears. “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t think I should discuss it without talking to a lawyer.”

“You want out of here? Come upstairs with me. I’ll show you something that might change your mind.”

We go up to the common room. It’s empty. I give him my pack of cigarettes and lighter. “Keep them. Have a seat.”

He sits and smokes. I douse the lights and start the PowerPoint slide show of the murder scene. He watches Sufia, I watch him. He shakes, then sobs a little. After a couple minutes, he’s weeping like a child. Finally, he holds himself, rocks back and forth, mutters “No, no,” over and over.

I think he’ll confess now. I freeze the projector on a close-up of Sufia’s ruined face.

“Please charge me,” he says, “so I can have a lawyer.”

“Not yet,” I say. “After the DNA samples come back from the lab.”

“I’d like to go back to my cell now.”

He wanted out of the cell. I guess he didn’t enjoy his taste of freedom. I take him back downstairs.

“Thank you for the cigarettes,” he says.

I slam the steel door shut and the clang echoes through the corridor. “You’re welcome,” I say.

I GO BACK TO my office, write a detailed summary of events and e-mail it to the national chief of police. A photocopy of Sufia’s address book is in a plastic sleeve on my desk. I have coffee and a cigarette and browse through it again. I recognize more names familiar from the tabloids. Sufia must have liked to surround herself with famous people.

I start dialing numbers. I introduce myself and say I have a few questions concerning Sufia Elmi. The media picked up on the murder through the national crime incident database and word has gotten around. People express shock. The interviews are all the same. No one knew Sufia well. The men say they went out a couple times, had some fun. The women say they hung out in nightclubs, went dancing, had some fun.

Valtteri comes in. “I called Heli,” he says. “She doesn’t want to see you and asked if I could bring her the keys.”

“Tell her no. Seppo’s car is a crime scene and she had access to it. I have to talk to her.”

“She won’t come.”

“Then arrest her and lock her up.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

He hands me a magazine. “I thought you should see this.” He walks out.

The front page of
Alibi
is splashed with the headline: “MURDER! SOMALI SEX GODDESS SLAUGHTERED IN SNOWFIELD!” When I open the magazine, I’m outraged. Two photos side by side occupy a quarter-page each. One is a still from her last movie, a display of her beauty. The other is a photo from the morgue, her corpse on a gurney in an unzipped body bag. She’s nude and ravaged, once again violated. Smaller but no less grisly photos are underneath.

Jaakko has written an article that refers to Sufia Elmi as Finland ’s Black Dahlia. He’s managed to paint Sufia’s murder as both a race and sex crime and called to mind a legendary Hollywood murder. I wonder if Sufia’s murder will also pass into legend, if she will forever be Finland ’s Black Dahlia. I find this disturbing. It’s as if the tragedy of her death has been forgotten before it was even recognized, trivialized in favor of tabloid glitz and the terrible romance of celebrity murder.

I didn’t want details of the crime released. The fucking diener must have sold Jaakko the photos. I’ll charge him with obstruction of justice.

My cell phone rings-it’s Sufia’s father. We must have been looking at the morgue photos of her at the same time. I answer. “Vaara.”

“Inspector, this is Abdi Barre. My wife is in tears. Can you imagine why?”

I can imagine. “The photos.”

“Her friend called and told my wife that revolting photos of her murdered daughter were published in a filthy magazine. She went to a newsstand and bought that filthy magazine. She is devastated and humiliated.”

“I’ll press charges against whoever sold the photos to the magazine.”

“You have failed to protect my daughter.”

He has my pity, but I’m tired of taking shit from him. “You can’t expect me to be responsible for security at a government facility over which I have no control.”

“I hold you responsible for all matters relating to my daughter.” Once again, he’s treating me like I’m on trial for Sufia’s murder. I don’t know why and it’s not fair. “You have my sympathy for the pain the photos caused you and your wife. I’ll deal with it today. I can’t do anything more.”

“The Koran tells us Inspector Vaara, that ‘when the sky is rent asunder, when the graves are hurled about, each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.’ For my wife and I, the sky has been rent asunder. Do not fail in your duty.”

He hangs up. I feel like he just punched me in the head.

Before I can recover from Abdi’s accusations, Valtteri knocks on my door and enters. “Antti and Jussi are back”-he hands me Seppo’s house keys-“and Heli’s here.”

He walks out, she walks in.

Apart from this morning, we haven’t spoken since she left me so many years ago. I didn’t think it would, but being alone in a room with her makes my pulse quicken. I light a cigarette, try to hide my discomfort. “Thanks for coming,” I say. “Have a seat.”

She hangs up a chinchilla coat and matching hat. “You didn’t leave me much choice.”

She puts her hands on her hips and looks around, like she’s looking for something to criticize. If so, she can’t find anything. I have a polished oak desk, nice art on the walls, a Persian rug on the floor. I paid for them myself. One of my theories of life is that happiness is in part derived from a pleasant environment.

She comes over to my desk and picks up a photo of Kate. “Pretty,” she says. She looks miffed about it, takes a seat across from me.

“Want anything?” I ask. “Coffee, soft drink, water?”

“What are you, a stewardess? I told you before, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to see me. If you wanted to meet for coffee, you could have just called.”

She has a certain desiccated look. I often see it in wealthy female tourists. Fortyish, and making a desperate attempt to stop the aging process with overexercise and self-starvation, treatments, expensive lotions and makeup. It seldom works, and it hasn’t in Heli’s case. She looks older than her years and bitter. I can’t connect the woman in front of me with the girl I fell in love with.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” I say. “Your common-law husband butchered a girl he was having an affair with.”

She crosses her legs, folds her hands in the lap of her designer jeans and looks amused. “Yes, let’s cut to the chase. My ex-husband has a thirteen-year-old vendetta and concocted some half-assed attempt at revenge.”

I try to get this revenge theory she and Seppo have out of the way. “With your ego, you might find it hard to believe, but I’ve hardly thought about you for years.” I point at the picture of Kate. “I have a good life. You’re not worth wrecking it over.”

She smirks. “You’re right, I don’t believe it. When I call the newspapers and explain the history behind your investigation of Seppo, I doubt others will believe it either. What I did was for the best. You must realize that by now.”

I’m being dragged into a conversation I don’t want to have, but I can’t seem to stop it. “What you did was cruel. I didn’t deserve it.”

“Deserve,” she says. “Nobody gets what they deserve. If we did, we’d all burn in hell. We’re all fucking guilty.”

“You’re quite the philosopher.”

“Just admit that you hate me for what I did.”

I ask myself if this is true. “I don’t hate you. You want to know what I think? I’ll tell you. I don’t think about what you did to me anymore, but when I did, I used to remember when we were about fifteen. It was summer, you were in my folks’ house and I was doing something outside. I heard you scream and you kept screaming. I thought you were hurt. I ran in, and you had a sparrow in your hands. It had flown into the house and got tangled in flypaper hanging in the kitchen. It thrashed around trying to get loose and tore most of its feathers off. When I got there, you held it up to me. ‘Help it, help it,’ you said. I always wondered how you could have had so much pity for that bird, but so little for me.”

We sit in silence and look at each other. A good three minutes go by. I feel old pain resurfacing and try to suppress it. I have no idea what she’s thinking. She uncrosses her legs, crosses them again, smoothes an invisible wrinkle on her pants leg. “I’ve wondered that too, but I didn’t.”

I wait.

“I don’t remember. What did you do with the bird?” she asks.

It’s an ugly memory. I’m surprised she doesn’t recall. She followed me outside and watched me kill it. “I took it out to the front yard and stomped on it to put it out of its misery.”

Another minute passes. “I’ll take that water now.”

I pour it from a carafe on a sideboard and give it to her.

“Tell me what you want to know,” she says.

“Did you know Seppo was having an affair with Sufia Elmi?”

“No.”

“Not a clue?”

She sighs. “Seppo has affairs from time to time. I ignore them. They always blow over.”

“This doesn’t bother you?”

“That’s not your business.”

She’s right. I should keep the questions focused on Seppo. I know he has family money and that because of it, he used to sit on the boards of various corporations and institutions, but he seems to have gone off the radar. I don’t know what he does at present. “Does Seppo have any kind of work, any responsibilities?”

She shakes her head. “Not anymore. He’s rich, he doesn’t have to do anything.”

“Has Seppo ever been violent toward you?”

“Seppo is incapable of violence. The sight of blood makes him sick. If he cuts himself shaving, he cries.”

This is the man she left me for. Amazing. “He drinks a lot?”

“Yes, he drinks.”

“Does he exhibit psychotic behavior when he’s drunk?”

She puts on a facade of boredom. “He giggles and gets cuddly.”

“The murder occurred the day before yesterday, at about two P.M. It appears that your BMW was used in Sufia Elmi’s abduction. She may have been raped in the backseat. Do you know where Seppo and the car were at that time?”