Helsinki White

17

I went to physical therapy, got my knee tortured and went home. The surgery and therapy worked, though. My knee hadn’t had this much mobility since I got shot, and its range of motion increased daily. Pretty soon, I could say good-bye to the crutches.

Sweetness and I tossed Lisbet’s home and office. I went through her correspondence, looked for threatening letters. Her purse was missing, and her mobile as well. Her office was neat, orderly. It spoke of efficiency. I noted that there were no personal touches. No photographs. No awards or signs of achievement, and given her success, she must have received many. This told me she was private and modest.

Having processed hundreds or thousands of crime scenes, I’ve been in countless Finnish homes, and what has always struck me the most is their similarity. Almost everyone uses the same styles of cups and saucers, furniture. Most homes are nearly interchangeable, and hers was the same. I noted that she liked plants. There were almost two dozen plants of various kinds throughout her apartment. And she had a large temperature-controlled fish tank. The fish looked exotic—no goldfish—so I assumed they brought her pleasure. I fed them, and made a note to have them removed and cared for.

Her wardrobe was commonplace businesswoman boring. She had workout clothes. Shoes for aerobics and jogging. She took care of her physique. As with her office, she had few knickknacks or photos displayed. She believed in functionality.

Once home, I got her phone records, called every person she had called or had called her for the past couple months. She was single, had no romantic interests. Her work dominated her life. She was well liked, hadn’t spoken of threats or enemies, other than the website that wished her dead. She didn’t take it seriously. I spoke to her colleagues. They told me the same. She was last seen leaving work on the day of her death at about six p.m.

She used public transportation, owned no car. Officers were posted at the bus and tram stops she normally used. For several days, every person who used those stops would be queried and asked if they remembered seeing her. But if they didn’t, it meant nothing. Helsinki public transportation passengers seldom look around, avoid eye contact.

Milo and I worked from our own apartments. There was no need for us to be in the same building. Our computers were networked, the database set up, and we had split up the files to sort through them. We could videoconference with webcams if needed. I sat for a long time, thinking about a practical way to search for her body. In this large, metropolitan area, I could think of none. I could only hope that it turned up in a Dumpster or some such thing. In Helsinki, at this time of year, anyone with half a brain would weigh her down and give her a burial at sea.

“It’s good to see you being a detective again, instead of a thief,” Kate said.

“I like it better, too,” I said. And I did. I had no moral problem with taking down dope dealers. I was just more at home in an old and comfortable role. I couldn’t focus on the mountain of material detailing every racist in Finland, though. Kate and Aino talked on the phone. Their friendship was deepening. I kept picturing Aino’s blue eyes and blond hair. The way her sweater accented her breasts. Thoughts of fucking her were far more interesting than those of Lisbet Söderlund’s decapitated head. I couldn’t work until Kate hung up the phone and ended their conversation.

I sat at the table with my laptop for two more days. Katt slept in my lap or sat on my shoulder, dug his claws into my neck. The pain kept my mind from wandering. Yes, going through this morass of material, routine police investigation, and following up on hundreds of most likely possibilities would eventually lead to Lisbet’s murderer, but how long would it take? People were dying daily. Routine work wouldn’t do. I went through the Facebook pages given to me by the woman at the Finnish Somalia Network. I felt the answer lay inside them.

I joined every Finnish social networking hate group I could find. One, Auttakaamme Maahanmuuttajarikolliset Takaisin Kotiin— Let’s Help Send the Immigrant Criminals Back Home—had over twenty-six thousand members. Another needle in a haystack. But the group on Facebook that directly threatened her, I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund, had a member with a user name and picture of Heinrich Himmler who on multiple occasions expressed a desire to send all of Finland’s black immigrants to the gas chamber. And now two brothers were dead, murdered in a homemade gas chamber. Many members of the group went by Nazi user names: Goering, Ilse Koch, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, but the tone of the rhetoric of the member that called himself Himmler told me he was the man I wanted to locate. If he hadn’t himself murdered Lisbet Söderlund, I thought he knew who did. But how would I find him?

Saska Lindgren called me. The murdered young men were known low-level drug dealers. They sold everything from hashish to heroin. Their bank cards indicated they had taken a train to Turku on the day of their murder. Bought one-way tickets. They ate at McDonald’s in Turku. That was the last trace of them.

I watched the news. Assaults and beatings, white and black youth gang clashes. Attacks on apostate Finnish white women, converted to Islam because of their marriages to Muslims. Their mixed-race babies spat upon in their carriages. Close-ups of tears streaming into veils. The media used to bury these stories, often not reporting gang fights. Police often broke up clashes but made no arrests. A concerted group effort to hide racial tensions. Now the media is minimalizing and downplaying them, reporting them in the most neutral of tones, but they can’t be ignored.

On Friday night we pulled a heist, B&Eed both ends of a drug deal after the fact. It didn’t make sense to me, as we were in the public eye, but Jyri insisted, told me I’d be glad I did it. It was odd, though, because we were to steal over half a million euros, plus the drugs, then take them to another address and hide them in the apartment. We exercised extreme caution. Milo had their cars GPS tracked, their phones tapped. We drove around for an hour first, made sure we weren’t tailed. It went off without a hitch.

We went for a drink after the heist, as had become our habit. As we sipped our beers, paranoia and mistrust finally boiled over. One gangster finally killed another, stabbed him to death and left him in the trunk of his car. Milo learned of it when the killer called his boss to tell him what he had done. If a mafia war started and Helsinki Homicide investigated, everything would unravel and the trail would lead back to us. I decided we had to dispose of the body in the morning.