Wolves and Angels (4 page)

Today sure is starting congenially, Koskinen thought
,
and then tried to turn it into a joke. “Sounds like you boys only ever exercise your mouths. We’ll see next Sunday who’s got the goods and who’s all talk.”

He pointed at Pekki and Kaatio in turn and, in a more serious tone than he intended, said
:
“I challenge
you
to
race me on the Pirkka Trail Run.”

Pekki and Kaatio stared at Koskinen in disbelief. Koskinen wiped his forehead, leaving an elongated wet blotch on the sleeve of his jacket.

“The race is next Sunday. It’s just a little 30K jaunt. The starting gun is at exactly nine o’clock and we run from—”

“We know, we know,” Pekki said, waving at the air. “Well enough that you wouldn’t catch me dead there.”

“Not in a million years,” Kaatio chimed in. “I’d rather dance on hot coals than go prancing around the woods with a number on my chest.”

Apparently Ulla had noticed Koskinen’s uncomfortable situation. She looked in her purse and pulled out a moist towelette wrapped in flowery plastic. She ripped the plastic open, spread the towelette out on her palm, and reached over to stroke Koskinen’s forehead with it.

The wipe felt pleasantly cool, and its apple scent made Koskinen sigh. He stretched his legs out and slid down in his chair into just as relaxed a position as Pekki sitting across from him.

“Let the boys beat their chests,” Ulla whispered. “They’re just jealous.”

She shoved the crumpled towelette back into the plastic packaging and pushed it into Koskinen’s jacket pocket. The moisture on his forehead dried quickly, but it left behind a pleasant coolness, and the sweating stopped.

Ulla’s sudden outburst of nurturing seem
ed to irritate Pekki and Kaatio
a
s if they were jealous of the female
officer caressing their lieutenant.

“What the hell kind of brain
malfunction
make
s
a person
voluntarily
go jogging?” Pekki shook his head. “It should be classified as a public health hazard.”

Kaatio’s shoulder rolling stopped for a second. “A while ago there was an article in the paper about this German doctor who wrote a dissertation about joggers. Apparently a genetic disorder
makes people run; s
ome protein deficiency gives them more pleasure from endorphins
than regular people
.”

“I read that too!” Pekki exclaimed. “In the animal tests, rats who suffered from the same protein deficiency ran around their cages like crazy all day.”

Kaatio started stretching his muscles again. “Joggers are just as messe
d up as alcoholics… One difference:
rather than hiding
their
bottles, you have to nail joggers
’
sneakers to the floor.”

Koskinen noticed that Ulla was uncomfortable with the talk about alcoholics. She lowered her eyes, and a bewildered flush spread over her cheeks. Koskinen stretched his leg under the table and kicked Kaatio in the shin with the toe of his shoe. But Kaatio still didn’t get what was wrong.

“Why the hell did you kick me?”

Tanse marched into the room with Sergeant Lepola on his heels. Koskinen and Kaatio were still staring at each other,
and
both sat up. Eskola, who was still sitting off to the side, had a hard time sitting still. It looked like his reflexes were ordering him to stand
at
attention.

“I’m late,” Tanse said. “Lepola and I had to have an unexpected meeting. I couldn’t put it off.”

He turned off his phone and set it in front of him on the table. Only then did he sit down and look around at everyone present in turn. His eyes stopped at Koskinen, and there was a detectable quiver in his nostrils. Koskinen
cursed
to himself. Of course he reeked of the smell left by Ulla’s towelette.

Tanse straightened his tie with a quick movement. It was obvious from the gesture that it came more from a behavioral code recorded in his brain stem than any need to smarten up.

“Let’s get down to business!” he rumbled, turning to Pekki. “Evidently you have the case materials in front of you.”

Pekki opened his folder. It held only one sheet of paper, which he picked up pompously. Sitting across from him, Koskinen could sense a slight tension under his arrogant facade. He could remember well the dozens of similar situations in which he had had to present a fresh case to a team of detectives, when it had been his turn to be the lead investigator. With little time to prepare, he still had had to assemble whatever shreds of information they had into a clear enough picture that the others weren’t left with any doubts about his competence.

“Last night a man’s body was found in the parking lot near a strip mall in Peltolammi. A bricklayer named Rosberg found it lying between two shipping containers. Rosberg had left the nearby Peltolammi Saloon, which is adjacent to the crime scene, at 11:30 P
.
M. Rosberg suffers from a chronic bladder condition, and so he had decided to make a stop between the containers to relieve himself. During the procedure in question, he saw the body, which apparently scared him enough that he got his shoes wet.”

Pekki drew a breath and stared at the paper in his hands as if there were something more important on it.

“Rosberg ran back to the saloon and called the police. Within ten minutes, a patrol car had arrived on the scene and immediately sealed off the area. The forensic technician on call, Sweetpea... I mean Risto P. Jalonen, arrived fifteen minutes later, at 12:05 A
.
M. He can tell us more now.”

All eyes turned to Jalonen. He rubbed his nose self-consciously, not looking at all pleased about Pekki’s slip.

“I don’t have much to add. The body belongs to an approximately forty-year-old male. There are no external signs of violence, and we found no indications of a struggle in the vicinity. It was difficult to do a detailed investigation in the dark, but at six this morning, Mäkitalo went over there straight from home to finish the job. Two uniformed patrols stayed overnight to keep away any curious bystanders.
”

“Do you have the pictures yet?” Pekki asked, and Jalonen opened his folder.

“Here are a few fresh shots,” he said in a tired voice. “Mäkitalo promised to snap some more in daylight.”

He divided the stack in two and distributed the pictures, starting with Ulla and Eskola. Tanse glanced at his wristwatch.

“What do you think?” he demanded.

No one replied. Koskinen noticed how everyone around the table sat up a little straighter, like a school class getting a talking-to from the principal, and he was once again struck by Tanse’s authority. It hadn’t weakened at all over the years. To the contrary: the more
his temples had grayed, the more weight his words had.

Lepola, from Patrol, seemed to take it as his duty to open his mouth before the others, like some sort of guest star. “Unfortunately, our boys don’t have any more information.”

Pekki stared at Lepola with a sour expression that left no question about what he was thinking—all he would
have
needed was for Patrol to have more information than Violent Crime.

Lepola didn’t seem to care about Pekki’s scowling. With his fingers spread, he swept back his thick Elvis hairdo and continued with his projecting voice. “We had a busy night last night. Car 341 had an ugly incident in Hervanta. Around midnight the patrol noticed a motorcycle behaving suspiciously. They tried to pull it over, at which point the driver tried to
escape
. The chase continued around Hervanta until the motorcycle ran into the right-front corner of a taxi coming from downtown.”

Koskinen remembered the pursuit:
during his late-night run
the police car and motorcycle had sped past him. Now, he also realized why Tanse had so uncharacteristically arrived late to the meeting. He and Lepola had obviously been thinking about how to inform the media about the incident. Accidents during hot pursuits were always a thorny issue. The media always tried to find a way to blame the police, especially if the incident ended in a serious injury or death.

There was a slight discomfort audible in Lepola’s voice when he continued. “The taxi driver and passengers were unharmed, but the motorcyclist was taken unconsciou
s to University Hospital ER... A
nineteen
-
year-old kid.”

Tanse interrupted impatiently. “Let’s get back to the
dead body in Peltolammi. Do we know the identity of the victim yet?”

Pekki’s eyes fell back to his one and only piece of paper. He shook his head and said, “No.”

“Has anyone been reported missing?”

“No. I just checked the computer.”

A meaningful cough came from the other end of the table, and everyone turned to look. Eskola’s words marched out with military precision: “Have all of the open missing person reports been analyzed? I mean that the body found last night might be someone who disappeared long time ago.”

Pekki sighed deeply, like a finance minister being interviewed on Sunday morning on
Studio A
. “Good observation, Eskola. Very good. But this new body just happens to be as fresh as yesterday’s farm cheese.”

Eskola realized his blunder. His face flushed completely red, and his mouth locked shut in a way that not even a crowbar could open it again.

Tanse cleared his throat. “Well, now. Let’s get to work! Koskinen will head up the investigation, and Pekki will be lead detective. And don’t forget that Taru’s new replacement is starting today.”

He walked to the door and banged it shut harder tha
n
necessary. A long, oppressive silence fell over the room.

Ulla broke it first. She started stretching her arms and yawning. “I think I need another cup of coffee.”

4.

Sergeant Lepola from Patrol had left the meeting immediately after Tanse, lamenting how busy he was. Jalonen, who had pulled an all-nighter, had gone home to sleep, and the others hadn’t hung around long in the conference room either. They had all crammed into Koskinen’s office. Pekki and Kaatio sat in the guest chairs, Eskola stood by the door like a sentry, and Ulla had taken the corner of Koskinen’s desk, cooling her hot coffee.

Koskinen liked how this felt—it reminded him of the times before his promotion to lieutenant. Co
-
workers had had the habit of dropping in all the time to unload their worries or share their joys, whether they were work
related or personal. A long cool season had followed, but that had passed, little by little, and now at times i
t
felt like no one even remembered Koskinen’s supervisory position.

He spread the photographs out on his desk and began to think out loud on behalf of the group. “There’s something strange about these.”

Ulla smiled in amusement. “Isn’t there always something strange about pictures of dead people?”

Koskinen looked absentmindedly at her round knee in front of him. Ulla was leaning her right leg on the floor and resting her left buttock on the edge of the table. The hem of her beet
-
and
-
carrot salad-striped wool skirt had slid four inches above the knee.

“Nothing in them tells anything about how he was killed,” Koskinen said
,
in a voice that was strangely plaintive even to himself.

“We don’t even know if it is a homicide,” Pekki said. “It could have been a heart attack. Maybe the guy was just walking in the parking lot and keeled over mid-step.”

“No one goes out dressed that lightly at night this late in the fall if they can help it,” Kaatio said, pointing at one of the pictures. “Except for some idiot joggers.”

Koskinen bypassed Kaatio’s comment by partially agreeing. “And he doesn’t even have shoes on. That makes this reek of homicide.”

“As does his position,” Ulla said. “Not many people are going to die like that on their own.”

The pictures were black and white, high contrast, and in sharp focus, and the position of the man lying in them was oddly rag doll-like. As if the man had been whipped around in the air and then thrown down on the ground. The arms lolled this way and that, and the left leg was turned strangely under the right thigh. Still, he bore no visible external signs of violence. His eyes were open, their gaze empty.

Koskinen took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer
,
wait
ing
for the others’ sarcastic comments about how quickly people age. However, none came, and he inspected the face of the man lying in the picture for a long time.

“He died by asphyxiation.”

Pekki reacted immediately. “Now you’re a regular Nostradamus. How’d you figure that out so easily?”

“There’s something strange about the face,” Koskinen said thoughtfully. “And in the eyes. The pupils look a little dilated...”