Lucifer's Tears

39

I start back to Helsinki and turn on the radio. The weather forecast announces that the worst snowstorm of the season is on the way. Given the severity of what we’ve already experienced, this seems near impossible, but within minutes, thick sheets of snow start to pound the landscape. Road visibility sinks to almost nothing. I drive slow.

Jyri calls. He says, “Ivan Filippov and Linda Pohjola are at Filippov Construction, and their vehicles are there, too. I got you sixteen detectives. Twelve are on-site, waiting for you to orchestrate the raid. Two detectives each have sealed off Linda’s and Filippov’s homes. They’ll wait for you and the other detectives before beginning the searches. Is that everything you need?”

“For the time being.”

He rings off, and I change direction toward Vantaa. I call Milo and tell him to meet me at Filippov Construction.

I get there before Milo. The other cops are hidden in their vehicles around the area. I park. They spot me and follow to the front door. I explain to them that we’re looking for video disks, which they’re not to watch but to hand over to me for inspection, for camcorders and cell phones, for any device capable of shooting video, for bloodied protective gear and a taser.

I assign three detectives each the task of searching Linda’s Mustang and Filippov’s Dodge Journey. Filippov must have been watching us on a security camera and sprints out of the building in a rage. He’s not even wearing a coat. “Inspector, who the fuck do you think you are, and what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“What does it look like? Search and seizure of your property.”

He screams. “This will not stand! Show me your search warrants!”

“In urgent cases,” I say, “any police officer can conduct a search without a search warrant. Additionally, I have verbal authorization from the national chief of police. Give me your car keys.”

He folds his arms, adamant. “Not a chance in hell.”

Jyri wasn’t joking, the detectives have brought crowbars with them. I borrow one and use it to snap open the Dodge’s passenger’s-side door, then take out my pocket knife and slash a seat open. The cushioning comes spilling out. “I can search your houses and vehicles like this if you want, or I can be a little more gentle. You pick.”

He’s near to foaming at the mouth from fury, calls me a fucking cocksucker. I hold out my hand. He slams a key ring into my palm.

“Do these open all the locks to your vehicle, home and business?”

“Yes, you motherfucker, they do. I’ll get you for this.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“Where do you expect Linda and me to go while you violate our property and privacy?”

I stamp my feet and rub my gloved hands together against the cold. “I couldn’t care less. Take a taxi somewhere. Have a couple drinks and something to eat. Enjoy yourselves.”

He’s already fringed white with snow, calms down, sees the wisdom of this. “When can we have our property returned to us?”

I shrug. “It depends. I’ve got a lot of manpower. Probably just a few hours.”

“And when will you release my wife’s body to me for burial?”

“When I’m done with it.”

He goes back into the building in a huff. I follow, repeat the routine with Linda, take her keys and both their cell phones.

The detectives begin to search in earnest, rip construction equipment from shelves, go through it, dump it on the floor.

Milo arrives. I usher him into Filippov’s office so we can speak in private, and we sit at his worktable.

Milo looks pissed off. “You’ve been hard to reach,” he says.

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been cutting me out of this investigation.”

“Now you’re back in.”

I fill Milo in on the deal Jyri offered me. I ask him formally, but, of course, I already know the answer. “Do you want to be part of a black-ops unit? Are you in?”

His smile is broad. The circles around his eyes gleam. He’s in heaven. “I want certain things,” he says.

“What?”

“An H amp;K machine gun. A. 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle. Flash-bang stun grenades.”

Milo, the boy and his toys. “We can arrange that. Maybe even get somebody to teach you how to use them.”

He ignores the slight. “Then I’m in.”

“First, we need to recover the evidence against Jyri.” I point at Filippov’s computer. “You can start there.”

“I’ve already been through the computers here. There’s no evidence in them.”

“How did you do that?”

“With intrusion software. I uploaded the hard drives to a server in Amsterdam and created mirrors of them. I found nothing related directly to Iisa Filippov’s murder, but turned up some financial discrepancies of some hundreds of thousands of euros. The money was deposited in numbered offshore accounts.”

I’m impressed. He’s the right guy for black-bag work. “Did you go through their home computers, too?”

“No, they weren’t booted up, and I couldn’t get it in. However, I got in touch with a staff member at Oulun Kotipalvelu, where Linda’s mother, Marjut, died. He’s worked there for twenty years and knew Marjut well. He checked the guest logs for me. Linda had visited semiregularly and saw her mother on September 9, 1998. Linda’s eighteenth birthday. After that, she never saw her mother again. Marjut had been in good spirits, but after Linda’s visit, went into a funk that lasted until she died. Marjut entered care in 1990, when Linda was ten. Linda was in foster care until she was sixteen, then disappeared and went off the radar until she came of age. Around the time that Marjut conceived Linda, she lived in Helsinki and worked as an escort or prostitute.”

“For Jonne Kultti?”

“Bingo. And Kultti offed himself three days after Linda visited Marjut, after which the mother and daughter were estranged. I think Marjut wrote to Kultti.”

“And the contents of the letter drove him to suicide. A viable theory.”

Milo lights one of his tough-guy cigarettes. “I also took your advice and Web-searched Bettie Page. A good call. It turned up some interesting stuff.”

He pauses. I’m afraid he’s going to sidetrack again. And a child was born in Bethlehem. But he doesn’t.

Milo says, “Bettie Page was placed in an orphanage at age ten, much as Linda was placed in foster care at the same age. Bettie Page’s father sexually abused her after she left the orphanage. I think it’s possible that Marjut bore Kultti’s child. She never told him, but she told Linda, and Linda went to look for him. Maybe Linda was afraid of rejection and never told Kultti he was her father. Maybe she thought the only way of having a relationship with Kultti was to work for him, and she re-created herself as Bettie Page to the extent that she had sex with her own father. She told her mother, who, consumed by grief, wrote to Kultti and let him know his own daughter was sucking his cock. Then he went to pieces and shot himself.”

“That would make Iisa and Linda half sisters and explain their close resemblance,” I say.

“We would need to run a DNA test to find out.”

I stretch out in Filippov’s chair. This line of inquiry feels right to me. If Linda and Iisa were half sisters, it might explain motivations for the murder that we’re as yet unaware of. “That’s a tough one. With half siblings, it’s hard to determine parentage without the cooperation of the potential parents, and in this case, they’re all dead. It could be done, but might take weeks.”

“I wonder if Iisa knew Linda was her sister?” Milo asks.

Then the lightning bolt hits me and I sit up straight. “I wonder if the dead woman in Rein Saar’s bed was really Iisa, or if it was Linda?”

The idea jars us both, and we ponder it in silence for a while. “Let’s split this team up,” I say, “and search all three places at once. We leave some guys here, you take some to Filippov’s house, and I take some to Linda’s, since I haven’t been there before. Maybe we can find some documentation to substantiate all this.”

Milo and I finish up at Filippov Construction, go through their phones and all the video disks we run across. We find nothing and leave to search Linda’s and Filippov’s homes.