Sohlberg and the White Death (26 page)

“Anything else?”

“I’m pretty sure that the license plates on the jeeps were from Finland.”

Goosebumps ran down Skrautvol’s arms. “Did you see the numbers?”

“No.”

The detective recovered instantly from her disappointment—an inevitable component of a murder investigation. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Here’s my business card. Please . . . please call or e-mail me if you remember anything else.”

After shaking hands with the clerk Skrautvol met with the manager in a closet of an office in the back.

“I got bad news . . . those people you’re interested in . . . they paid cash.”

“For the gasoline
and
the snacks and drinks they bought inside?”

“Yes. Cash. No credit cards. Nothing else.”

Skrautvol again recovered from her disappointment. She briefly thought about calling in a forensic team to collect fingerprints and other evidence from the bathrooms. But she dismissed the thought. Too much time had passed. The manager confirmed that the bathrooms had been thoroughly cleaned on a daily basis.

~ ~ ~

Skrautvol drove to the edge of town. She took the E-8 Highway which headed southeast to Finland. After a 10-minute drive she pulled off the road and parked on a grassy knoll.

A somber wind rushed through the void of the Skibotnelva River Valley. The valley was known for its dry micro-climate and alkaline chalky topsoil which gave rise to trees and plants with long and thin and waxy leaves. The detective scanned the harsh landscape and marveled at how the Sami People had survived and thrived in such a difficult world. The Sami reminded Kristina Skrautvol of her own history—surviving and thriving despite a toxic family environment and hostile workplace.

Skrautvol called her new boss in Tromsø.

“Hello?”

Skrautvol said nothing. She was shocked. The head of the Troms police district caught her completely off guard when he answered his own phone at headquarters. The obnoxious Ivar Thorsen never answered his own phone or e-mails as the Commissioner of the Oslo Police District.

“Hello?” said Troms Police Superintendent Tor Einar Eilertsen.

“It’s me . . . Skrautvol. . . . I’m out here in Skibotn. . . . I’m following some promising leads that I found at the Statoil gas station. . . . The clerk saw seven of our victims arrive in two cars with Finnish license plates. . . .Yes . . . it seems that our victims came from Finland. . . . I’m going to need three or four constables to come out to Skibotn and Furuflaten and thoroughly canvass the area. . . . I also want them to ask the locals if they saw any of our nine victims board a ship at either town’s marina. . . . It’ll maybe take two days.”

“I can’t spare three or four . . . but you’ll get two constables for two or three days. Okay?”

“Thank you!” Skrautvol meant it. She was used to her incompetent old boss denying every single request she ever made for any assistance. Troms looked much more inviting without Ivar Thorsen.

~ ~ ~

“Time to go sightseeing,” said Skrautvol as soon as she ended the call with her new boss. “Let’s see what’s down there in Finland.”

The rented Volvo station wagon handled well even after she reached 80 mph. The Troms Police department had no unmarked vehicles for her that day. But she didn’t mind because she wanted to sneak a peek over the border. She dressed in plainclothes so that she could snoop around in the panhandle of northwest Finland as a tourist.

Snooping. That’s my favorite part of police work.

Snooping almost always produced results for Chief Inspector Skrautvol. She usually got closer to the truth whenever she knew a lot about her murder victims and suspects. Unfortunately the need to work on other homicides always reduced the amount of time available for snooping.

Her snooping destination was the little town of Kilpisjärvi—population 111.

Skrautvol entered an expanse of broad swelling hills. She sped past a lonely rock cairn that marked the border with Finland. No border guards or buildings or checkpoints stood at the spot. Skrautvol was surprised at how easy it would have been for any one of her nine victims to have crossed the border.

Where are the two Range Rovers? Are they in Norway . . . or Finland? Who owns them? . . . Is someone hiding them? . . . Or did someone junk them . . . in a lake . . . or a fjord . . . or at a scrap metal yard?

The undercover detective arrived less than 40 minutes later at the town of Kilpisjärvi by the shores of an immense lake with the same name. The most northwestern town of Finland was—incredibly enough—a tourist town with three hotels, several restaurants, an RV park, ski facilities, and rental cabins for the summer and winter. Tourists came to hike in the wilderness of the nearby Malla National Park Reserve in the summer and to ski and watch the Northern Lights during winter. The town also housed a research station of the University of Helsinki.

“Where should I go?”

Skrautvol had a hard time deciding between the Haltinmaa Guesthouse Cottages, the Tundrea Holiday Resort, and the Lapland Hotel Kilpis. She went to all three hotels and spent time at the front desks asking a ton of questions about the area and the type of tourists who passed through Kilpisjärvi. Most of the hotel staff spoke decent Norwegian and excellent English and for those who didn’t Skrautvol understood them thanks to her grasp of the rudimentary basics of the grotesquely complex Finnish language.

Although she ordered a light lunch Skrautvol felt her weight ballooning because she had lunch at each of the three hotel restaurants. She chatted with the waiters and waitresses and desperately wished that she could’ve shown them and the front desk personnel the picture sheet with the nine victims. But that line of questioning would have attracted suspicion and perhaps a visit from Finland’s
Poliisi
.

If Skrautvol’s tourist cover was blown she knew that she would be in very serious trouble with Finnish authorities and in far worse trouble back home in Norway.

Intuition and experience and innate cleverness led Skrautvol to pose a promising line of questions to the hotel workers at the front desks and at the restaurants:

“This looks like a very nice place . . . I may come back and go hiking . . . but is it safe for a single woman like me?”

Every employee gave Skrautvol the usual “
It’s very safe!
” answer until the waitress at the Kilpis Hotel restaurant. The woman came back at the end of the lunch with Skrautvol’s credit card and payment receipt which included a large tip.

“I really like it out here . . . this looks like a very nice place . . . I may come back and go hiking. . . . But is it safe for a single woman like me?”

“It is . . . but . . . last week . . . some hikers found two dead men up near the border with Norway.”

“Really? . . . Where?”

“Just south of the big lake on the Norwegian side. The bodies were dumped in a dirt road less than a quarter mile from the border.”

 Skrautvol remembered that immediately after she passed the border on the E-8 Highway a strange unpaved road had veered off to the left in the middle of nowhere. “Really?”

“Oh yes. If you don’t believe me you can read about it . . . the newspaper from Tornio down south had an article about the murders.”

“Murders?”

“Both men shot in the head.”

~ ~ ~

Excitement surged through Skrautvol’s body. She could barely keep from running to her car in the hotel parking lot. As soon as she got inside the Volvo she dialed Jon Kirkvaag on her cell phone and was grateful that Finland had one of the world’s best cell phone systems—even in the most remote wilderness.

“Hello! I’m in a rush and heading back to the office. But I need you to do me a quick favor so we don’t lose valuable time.”

“Of course.”

“Please call the police in Finland and set up a meeting with me today.”

“Oh. . . .”

She could almost hear Jon Kirkvaag groaning to himself over the amount of extra work he was going to have to undertake in finding the right phone numbers and names. But Chief Inspector Skrautvol was—if anything—obsessively thorough and prepared. “Don’t worry. I already have the numbers.” She would have directly called the police herself but they would not have recognized her cell phone number as an official police phone number.

“But how did—”

“A little Internet research goes a long way.”

Skrautvol gave him the numbers for the municipality of Enontekiö where the Peräpohjolan Police Department had jurisdiction over the little village of Kilpisjärvi and surrounding areas. The detective also gave Kirkvaag the phone number for the area’s Police Chief who worked out of the main office in Tornio.

“Chief Inspector . . . what do I tell them you want to discuss?”

“Recent suspicious deaths and homicides near the border. As soon as they agree to see me please tell them that I came out to Skibotn and can meet them in Kilpisjärvi . . . at the Hotel Kilpis. Please tell them I’m in an unmarked car and in plainclothes. I’ve got my badge with me.”

Two hours later Sergeant Sofia Jannok pulled into the parking lot. The younger woman instantly got along with Chief Inspector Skrautvol. The detective snuck in a discrete glance at the sergeant and was sure that the exotic woman was Sami. They found a suitably private area with Adirondack chairs set on a grassy mound that faced the lake.

“I understand you’re interested in suspicious deaths near the border.”

“Yes,” said Skrautvol.

“Can you tell me why?”

“We have nine homicides. All killed together . . . at the same time . . . near the town of Hansnes on Ringvassøy Island . . . that’s north of Tromsø. All but one shot to death . . . all had their hands cut off. Two of the men were shot in the head at close range.”

Jannok whistled. “Little Tromsø makes it into the big crime leagues.”

“Awful ain’t it? . . . The times . . . the crimes . . . they are a-changing.”

“That’s the case everywhere.”

“We think that some or all of the nine victims might have come through Finland. We know for a fact that two of them ate
pulla
bread . . . a typical dish of your country. We also know that one of the ingredients of the bread could only have come from Finland. So that’s why we’re interested on what’s going on in the border. Now . . . what can you tell me?”

“A group of hikers found two dead men dumped by a gravel road . . . shot dead . . . each with two bullets in the head at point-blank range. I was first to respond. Not a pretty sight.”

“Motive?”

“No apparent reason for their execution.”

“Slugs . . . shells . . . were you able to get good ballistics?”

“Oh yes. But not the guns.”

“We also have slugs and shells. . . . Let’s compare ballistics. I’ll send you the information later today.”

“Do you have a weapon?”

“No,” said Skrautvol. “But your department and mine need to compare records and see if the slugs and shells from our crime scene match the ones in your crime scene.”

“Good. This is a big break. . . .”

“Do you know the identities of your victims?”

“Yes. We had fingerprints for one of them in the system . . . Jouni Lukkari. He’s from eastern Finland. Lived near the border with Russia. We kept investigating and found out that his son Olav was the other victim.”

“What’s the father’s history?”

“Minor stuff. Assaults. Drunk driving. Theft. We spoke with family and friends . . . seems he specialized in smuggling people and stolen goods out of Russia. Diamonds from Siberia. They’re pilfered from mining companies. Weapons . . . stolen from military arsenals.”

“Sounds lucrative.”

“Crime pays. We even had a tip. We got it from one of my people . . . the Sami People. Lukkari is . . . was . . . Sami. . . . One of his clan members . . . a park ranger . . . tipped us off about Lukkari’s illegal activities
before
Lukkari left the town of Salla with his human cargo . . . it seems that Lukkari had to stop in Salla with his clients and human cargo to make repairs to his vehicles . . . the ranger gave us the license plate numbers for some of Lukkari’s transport vehicles. Seems he owns trucks for the larger stuff and an S.U.V. fleet for human cargo. But we never found the vehicles.”

“Did Jouni Lukkari own a Range Rover or two?”

“Yes. Two. They’re missing. How did you know?”

“Video caught two old . . . white . . . Range Rovers at a store’s closed circuit camera. But we haven’t found the Rovers in Norway.”

“Where were they filmed?”

“At the Statoil gas station in Skibotn.”

“Interesting.”

“Where did Lukkari and his group stay when he was fixing his vehicles in Salla?”

“At his brother-in-law’s garage . . . and at a small warehouse next door that’s unused.”

“Did your forensics people process those buildings for fingerprints?”