The Healer (3 page)

I carried my bag into the kitchen, took out the papers and the laptop, and put them on the table. I warmed up the vegetable casserole Johanna had made over the weekend and sat down to eat. Somewhere a couple of floors up lived some devoted music lovers. The beat was so low, steady, and repetitive that it was easy to believe it would carry on forever—nothing short of massive intervention would ever stop its progress.

Everything I saw on the table and tasted in my mouth and thought in my head confirmed my fear that something bad had happened. An outsized lump rose in my throat and made it difficult to swallow, and I felt a squeezing around my chest and abdomen that suddenly forced me to concentrate entirely on breathing.

I pushed my plate aside and turned on Johanna's computer. The hum of the machine and the glow of the screen filled the kitchen. The very first thing I saw was the desktop image: Johanna and I on our honeymoon ten years ago.

More swallowing.

The two of us in the foreground, younger in many ways, above us an almost palpably blue southern European sky, behind us Florence's Ponte Vecchio, beside us a patch of the uneven, ancient wall of a house and the gilded sign of a riverside café, half illegible from the dazzle of sunlight.

I looked at Johanna's laughing eyes, aimed straight ahead—reflecting green as well as blue in the bright light of April—her slightly wide mouth, her even, white teeth, the very beginnings of tiny wrinkles, and the short, curly hair that bordered her face like spring petals.

I opened the folders on the computer desktop.

In the folder marked “New” I found a subfolder “H.” I realized I had guessed correctly: “H” was for Healer. I went through the documents. Most of them were Johanna's text files, some were news videos, links, and articles from other papers. The most recent text file was from yesterday. I clicked it open.

The piece was nearly finished. Johanna would certainly be using most of it in her final article. As soon as she writes it, I reminded myself.

It began with a description of the multiple murder in Tapiola. A family of five had been killed in the early morning hours, and someone using the pseudonym “the Healer” had announced himself as the perpetrator. According to the police investigation, the father of the family was the last to die: the CEO of a large food company and an advocate for the meat processing industry, he'd had to look on, with his hands and feet tied and his mouth taped, as his wife and three small children were each cold-bloodedly executed with a gunshot to the head. He was murdered last, with a single bullet to the center of his forehead.

Johanna had interviewed the police investigator, the interior minister, and a representative of a private security company. The piece ended with an extended plea from Johanna, directed as much at the police and the public as it was at the Healer himself.

I also found a map of Helsinki and a chart Johanna had made of the date and location of each murder, the times she received the e-mails, and the main contents of the messages. This had to do with the sticky note I'd found. I looked at it again: West–East or North–South. The map clearly showed that the murders had progressed chronologically, first from west to east, then from north to south.

Based on Johanna's summaries of the contents of the messages, the e-mails had grown darker as the murders reached the south side of the city. Some of the messages also had a surprisingly personal tone: Johanna was addressed using her first name and praised for her “truthful and uncompromising” journalism. The writer even seemed to believe that she would understand the necessity for this kind of extreme action.

The second-to-last message had come the day after the murders in Punavuori. A family of four—a father who owned and operated a large chain of car dealerships, his wife, and their two sons, aged ten and twelve—were found dead in their home. Without the e-mail message, the deaths would probably have been classified as another of the murder-suicides that were occurring weekly. The suicide theory was supported by the fact that the large-caliber weapon the murders were committed with was found in the father's hand, as if he were handing it to the police as proof.

Then the Healer's message arrived. The address was given in the e-mail—Kapteenikatu 14—with an admonition to investigate the matter more thoroughly.

This was duly done, and it became clear that although the gun had been in the father's hand, someone else had helped him aim and shoot. So he had felt each shot in his hand and body and seen and heard his own children die from bullets that came from a gun he was holding.

The last message was hastily and poorly written—stilted in both grammar and content. It didn't defend the crimes in any way.

I got up from the table, walked to the balcony, and stood there for a long time. I breathed in the cool air, trying to blow away the invisible stone on my chest. The stone lightened, but it didn't roll away completely.

We'd moved into our place almost immediately after we married. The apartment had become a home and the home had become dear to us; it was our place in the world—a world that was completely different ten years ago. Of course it was easy to say afterward that all the warning signs were already visible then—the summer stretching out long and dry into autumn, rainy winters, increasingly high winds, news about hundreds of millions of people wandering the world, and exotic insects appearing in our own yards, on our own skin, spreading Lyme disease, malaria, sandfly fever, encephalitis.

Our building was on a high hill in Herttoniemi, and on a clear day you could see across the bay from the living room and balcony all the way to Arabianranta, where most of the houses were continuously flooded. Like many other neighborhoods that suffered from flooding, Arabianranta was often dark. They didn't dare let electricity in because of the water that remained in the badly damaged buildings. With the naked eye, from two and a half kilometers away, I could see dozens of fires along the shore. From where I stood they looked small and delicate, like just-lit matches that could easily be blown out. The reality was otherwise. The fires were as much as a meter and a half in diameter. People used all kinds of things they found on the shore and in abandoned buildings as fuel. There were rumors that they used dead animals, even people.

It was strange how I'd got used to seeing the fires. I couldn't have told you when the first ones appeared or when the evening ribbon of flames they formed became a daily sight.

Farther off, beyond the silhouette of the buildings on the shore, were the modern towers of Pasila, and the blaze and glow to the left told me where the city center was. Over it all lay a dark, boundless night sky that held the whole world in its cold, sure grip.

I realized that I was looking for connections between what I'd just read and what I was now seeing.

Johanna.

Out there somewhere.

Like I'd told Lassi, there was no point in my going to the police. If they didn't have the time or the resources to look for the murderer of these families, how would they have the time to look for a woman missing for twenty-four hours, one of thousands of missing people?

The Healer.

West–East or North–South.

The night didn't seem to hold any answers. The music thumped upstairs. The wind moved through the trees on the slope of the ridge below, singing through the bare branches as well as it could but able to prevail against the barrier of human and machine-made sound only for brief moments. The cold of the balcony's cement floor on the soles of my feet prompted me to seek warmth.

I returned to the kitchen table, read through all of Johanna's documents on the Healer one more time, made some coffee, and tried to call her again. It was no surprise when the number could not be reached. It was also no surprise that a hint of panic and desperation was beginning to splash through my worried mind.

There was one thing I could be sure of: Johanna had disappeared on a job investigating something connected with the Healer.

I pushed all other thoughts aside, drank my coffee, and read the printouts of the e-mails the Healer had sent to Johanna, in the order they were received. As I read them, I sorted them into two piles. In the first, I put messages where the necessity of the crimes was defended, sometimes at great length, and Johanna's previous articles were mentioned, sometimes with the implication that her work was something like the Healer's—to uncover lies and to liberate. The other pile contained the messages that directly stated where the murder victims could be found and contained only a few hastily and poorly written lines.

I leafed through the piles again and came to the same conclusion that I had the first time. There were two authors. At least in theory. At least that's what I thought.

I opened the map Johanna had made again. It was like a pocket guide to hell. I moved through the red points marking the murders, went through the dates and Johanna's figures. There were two or three days between the murders. Johanna had added a question mark to each of the four points of the compass and calculated possible locations of future murders.

As I stared at the map, the icon for Johanna's e-mail program caught my eye. I hesitated. Reading another person's e-mail is undoubtedly wrong. But maybe this situation was an exception. Besides, we didn't have any secrets from each other, did we? I decided that I would open her e-mail only if the situation absolutely demanded it. In the meantime I would get by strictly on what related directly to the article Johanna was working on now.

I remembered the phone call I'd recorded, turned on my own laptop, and plugged my phone into it.

I copied the last conversation I'd had with Johanna onto the computer, searched a moment for the right program, downloaded it, and opened the audio file with it. The audio editing software was easy to use. I separated the sounds, removed my and Johanna's voices, and listened. I could hear the noise of cars, a rumble, and the same murmuring sound I'd heard before. I listened to it again and again, then separated out the rumble and the sound of cars until I was able to make out the tone of the murmur by itself. With a hopeful feeling I seemed to hear something regularly repeating, not wind or the brush of coat sleeves but something with a much more even rhythm: waves. I played the file again and shut my eyes, trying to listen and remember at the same time.

Was it the sound of waves, or was I just hearing what I wanted to hear?

I let the sound play in a loop and looked at Johanna's map and calculations. Maybe this murmur, its regular repetition, really did indicate the sea or the seashore. Assuming that the murders occurred over a two- or three-day cycle, then the points set apart by dates and question marks, following the Healer's crimes from north to south—however roughly—would converge somewhere around Jätkäsaari, on the southwest shore of the city.

Furthermore, assuming that Johanna had come to the same conclusion, then that would have been the area she called me from the last time we spoke.

 

5

The taxi driver, a young North African man, didn't speak Finnish and didn't want to use the meter. That suited me. We agreed on a price, half in English, half using our fingers, and the meter was left glowing four zeros in the dark car as he accelerated away from my apartment and onto Hiihtomäentie, past the metro station and the abandoned shopping center and across the overpass toward Itäväylä. He avoided the potholes and cracks in the road as skillfully as he did drivers who made dangerous passes or swerved out of their lanes.

The waterfront homes at Kulosaari were, with a few exceptions, among the first houses left empty by their owners and were now filled with new arrivals. Those who had the means had moved north: those with the most means to northern Canada, the rest to Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian Lapland. Dozens of high-security, privately owned small towns had been established in the north in recent years, both on the Arctic coast and in the interior, with self-contained water, sewage, and electrical systems—and, of course, hundreds of uniformed guards to keep out undesirables.

Now the majority of those living in the dark houses of Kulosaari were refugees from the east and south. A string of tents and campfires lined the shore. The coexistence between the refugees and the tenacious original inhabitants defending their houses and shoreline wasn't always peaceful. The Healer would no doubt have had an opinion about that, as well.

As we drove I looked through the news videos in Johanna's H file. The closer they got to the present, the more exasperated the reporters were in their questions, and the more exhausted the police were in their answers. The statements of the red-eyed police inspector in charge of the investigation were, in the end, confined to the comment “We will continue to investigate and let you know when we have any new information.” I moved his name from the screen to my phone memory and looked up his number. Chief Inspector Harri Jaatinen.

I leaned back in my seat.

When had I known for certain that something had happened to Johanna? When I woke up at four in the morning and heard a dog barking? Making coffee two hours later, after it became obvious that getting up would be less trouble than continuing to try to go back to sleep? Or did the doubt change to fear over the hours of the day as I mechanically did my work, checking my telephone every other minute?

The young cab driver was good at his job—he knew where the roads were out and proceeded accordingly. When we got to Pitkäsilta we stopped at the intersection and a stretch SUV pulled up beside us with its rear window open. I quickly counted eight young men inside—their expressionless faces, their forward-focused lazy-lidded eyes, and their tattooed necks told me they weren't just gang members but also probably armed. As the SUV pulled into traffic, not one man's expression faltered.

There was a fire in Kaisaniemi Park. Judging by the height of the flames, it must have been a car or something. The massive column of flame was like the mark of a bacchanal in the otherwise lightless night. At the corner of Vilhonkatu and Mikonkatu I heard gunshots and saw three men running toward the park. They disappeared before the echo of the shots had faded. People were kicking a man lying prostrate in front of the Natural History Museum. Then someone, apparently the strongest of the group, started dragging him by his filthy clothes toward the metro tunnel entrance, perhaps planning to throw him down the shaft.