Helsinki Blood

23

Milo drives his Crown Victoria, the cliche of all police cars, and we go to the National Bureau of Investigation garage. A forensic mechanic is underneath the Audi when we enter. We announce our presence, he slides out from underneath the chassis, and we introduce ourselves.

“I heard people got hurt,” he says, “are they going to make it?”

“Two girls got burned,” I say, “one very bad, somebody close to us, but she’ll make it.”

“I’m sorry for her,” he says. “I can picture the fire from the state of the vehicle.”

Milo and I nod thanks for his sympathy. “What happened?” I ask.

He wipes grease off his hands with a filthy rag. “To be honest, I’m stumped. You guys know cars?”

We both say yes.

The hood is up, some parts under it disassembled. He points at them as he explains. “You got two of the fuel injectors clogged by carbon, like you were using cheap petrol, but the others are clean. So you had two pistons not working and fuel spraying onto the engine. That could start a fire, but it would take a few minutes until the temperature reached combustion level, and the fire broke out almost as soon as she started the car. Plus, it’s a new car, has only seven thousand kilometers on it. Not enough mileage for that dense carbon buildup. And why only those two? And how did the fire make it to the gas tank? The fuel line would have had to lose pressure for the fire to travel backward and ignite there. It’s not easy to start a gasoline fire. You can throw a cigarette into a bucket of gas and like as not it will just go out. It’s the fumes that ignite, and a little oxygen helps. The gas cap is gone. I guess it blew off when the tank exploded. And last, why the fire inside the car? It came up out of the floor like it had fuel there, like the gas line sprayed it up there. The line is burned up. It’s hard to tell what happened with it.”

“The car has only been driven a few times in the past few weeks,” I say, “and for short distances. I filled it last, and I’m sure the tank was almost full. And no way the injectors were clogged. It’s just not possible.”

The mechanic raises his hands in frustration, apologetic. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t picture the scenario that led to a fire like that.”

Milo says, “Picture this. The car was stolen and taken to a garage where it could be worked on. Two good fuel injectors were replaced with clogged ones. The car was driven back, running on four cylinders. Then petrol was siphoned out of it and replaced with a hot fuel mix, like in race cars, to make the remaining pistons work on overdrive and heat up the engine fast. They probably didn’t put a lot of fuel in the car, because a full tank might hamper the combustion with lack of oxygen, just enough to get the car started and travel a short distance, in case it took that long for the car to heat up and the fire to start. The gas cap was left off to provide the oxygen and help the tank blow when the fire hit the fumes. Some holes were punched into the gas line, to spray up under the driver’s floorboards. Some volatile accelerant, maybe ether in plastic containers, was placed in the engine compartment and under the driver somewhere. The plastic melted, the ether or whatever accelerant ignited, and then the injector nozzles were spraying fire. The squirting fuel line lost pressure and the fire traveled backward. It shot out of the fuel line and spewed flame into the combustible under the driver, which ignited, and back into the gas tank, which then blew.”

The mechanic ponders this. “It’s possible, but so complicated that it’s not probable. Most murder attempts by tampering with vehicles are conducted in a simple way. Cut brake lines, things like that. But I can look for melted plastic, take residue samples from the engine, fuel line and gas tank and have them analyzed. It’s as good as any theory I can come up with.”

We thank him and get on our way. I want to run the prints I lifted from the murder scene when we found Loviise Tamm, to find out who visited the apartment and intervened in her intended sexual abuse after the ambassador made his call. We go to NBI headquarters. It’s the first time I’ve been there since I was moved from Helsinki homicide to NBI employ, some months ago. As an inspector, I should have an office. Out of curiosity, I ask where it is. I find it. It’s barren, except for a chair and desk with a computer on it.

I log in to the computer and check the database to see what’s come of the killing of Sasha Mikoyan and the two Russian spooks. I could have just as easily done this from my apartment. My computer is networked in to the database for a home workstation. There’s been nothing in the news, and I think crime scene investigators would have been surprised to find a bullet-riddled door and black fingerprint powder everywhere. The killings are unreported, so the Russians must have spirited the corpses away, replaced the door and covered it all up.

The fingerprints from the butcher knife, though, are on record. They belong to Yelena Merkulova, wife of the Russian ambassador. How could this be? Diplomats and their families aren’t subject to arrest and booking. I call the arresting officer. He tells me she’s a kleptomaniac who likes to shoplift from the downtown boutiques and Stockmann department store. She was arrested and processed because she had no identification and refused to say who she was for several hours. He also states that she’s possibly the most beautiful woman alive.

And she almost certainly murdered Sasha Mikoyan. Interesting.

It strikes me that the Russian ambassador and whatever spooks are in on the prostitution ring might think Sweetness and I murdered Mikoyan. We were on our way there. He must have been told to meet us. Why would they think anything else?

Then it comes to me, the answer that explains the appearance of the spooks at the apartment and their re-kidnapping of Loviise Tamm: because the ambassador’s wife Yelena called someone at the embassy-as the ambassador at that point had no phone-and explained what she had done. And the troops were called in to protect her and make it all go away.