Helsinki White

16

The following day, Sweetness and I set out early and went to post offices to see if any postal workers remembered the person who mailed the box that contained Lisbet Söderlund’s head. The box was uninsured and required no receipt signature, so we knew only, from the ink stamp, that it was mailed in Helsinki. We began at the neighborhood post office that services Kuninkaantie 38 and so the Finnish Somalia Network. No luck.

However, after receiving the pig’s head in the mail just before Christmas, a worker there invented a Finnish pseudonym and set up a Hotmail account. Fearing a more violent attack, she joined every anti-immigrant Facebook group she could find, including I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund, in order to gather evidence in the event that the Finnish Somalia Network was targeted again. She printed out all the posts daily. She made me copies of all of them. A valuable gift for the investigation. No criminal justice authorities had done the same.

We moved on to the main post office downtown and got a copy of the work roster for March sixteenth, the day the package was mailed. The place is a madhouse, always busy. We interviewed every worker who had been on duty that day in person if they were on-site, or by telephone if they weren’t. Too many customers. Just faceless cattle in long lines. We got zilch.

We stepped outside, I lit a smoke and my phone rang. The caller was Detective Sergeant Saska Lindgren, from Helsinki Homicide. He was at a crime scene investigating the murder of two black men. A note at the scene, the letters clipped and glued to a sheet of printing paper, read, “For Rami Sipilä,” the soldier whose throat had been cut the day before.

I’d consulted with Saska before, and he’s sharp, considered one of the best policemen in the nation.

The murder scene was in East Helsinki, a district with a bad reputation and a high immigrant population. Sweetness grew up there, and so knows the area like the back of his hand. We headed over. It was a little below zero, but we had twelve hours of sunlight a day now.

We arrived at a single-family home with a yard. There weren’t many around here. The area is dominated by apartment buildings, most of them built in the 1970s, when functionality was the style and ugly was the result. The area was cordoned off. Television news vans and reporters lined the street. They waved microphones and shouted. Saska and I exchanged greetings and ignored them. I introduced Sweetness. He usually takes people aback because of his massive size, but Saska appeared not to notice. Half-Gypsy, he’s taken a lot of racial shit in his life, and I’ve noticed that he’s non-judgmental about people, or at least reserves judgment until given cause to form one. “Have a look,” he said.

Two young black men had been poisoned in a makeshift gas chamber. They were taken to their garage and made to lie on the floor under the rear of a station wagon. A blanket was draped over the exhaust pipe, the bumper and the men. The engine was left running until they died of carbon monoxide poisoning and the car ran out of gas.

“They’re brothers,” Saska said, “Dalmar and Korfa Farah. Somalis. They lived here with their mother and sister. Their father was killed in Somalia. I don’t know anything about them yet.”

Milo, Saska and I went to the front lawn to smoke. Sweetness tagged along, looking back over his shoulder. Corpses have a strange effect on him. I notice he can’t stop staring at them. “I called you because of the note,” Saska said. “Some blacks and whites are playing tit for tat. White racists murdered Lisbet Sönderlund. Angry blacks stole rifles and murdered a soldier. The same racists probably killed these guys. It won’t stop here. Reprisals are inevitable. I’d like for us to stay in touch, share relevant information.”

“Yeah,” I said, “let’s do that. This country is already in a hate frenzy. It could lead to places we never thought possible.”

He ground out his cigarette. “That’s my fear.”

“Where are the mother and sister?” I asked.

“Hiding in the house. They’re afraid to come out. They were asleep, didn’t hear a thing.”

“How’s the Saukko case going?” I ask.

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. The case is a kidnap-murder involving Finland’s richest family. It went wrong. Almost a year has passed and it’s gone unsolved. A source of embarrassment. The case belongs to Saska.

“It isn’t going,” he said. “I’m going to have to start from the beginning, re-read every document and report. I’ve missed something.”

I tried to commiserate. “The Söderlund case isn’t going any better.”

Of course, I’d been working on my case less than a week, and he was coming up on a year, but he knew I was just trying to be politic. “Let me know when you get some background on those guys, will you?”

“Yeah,” he said. Sweetness knocked reporters out of my way so I could get through them on crutches, and we left.