Snow Angels

13

I don’t want to see her again, so I give Heli a couple minutes to get out of the building before going out to the common room. Antti and Jussi are sitting there with Esko the coroner. Items from Seppo’s house are bagged and spread out over two desks.

“I need to talk to you,” Esko says.

“I saw the new edition of Alibi. Yeah, we need to talk about it.”

“In private.”

“Give me a minute.” I look at the potential evidence. There’s a lot of it. “Anything good here?” I ask.

“Could be,” Jussi says. “We found two pairs of boots he could have worn, and a bunch of clothes. We figured they should all go to the lab.”

“Yep.”

“We got a hammer and a couple puukko and some knives out of the kitchen too.”

I pick up the bag with the puukko, Finnish hunting knives. They’re less curved than the skinning knife used to kill Sufia, so I don’t make too much of them, and besides, almost every Finnish home has at least one or two lying around. Statistically, they’re the nation’s most popular murder weapon. Twice, I’ve investigated murders in which a group of men got drunk together and passed out. They wake up and one of them is dead with a knife in his chest. All of them have fingerprints on the knife, but nobody remembers what happened. Neither case ended in a conviction.

Antti points at Seppo’s computer. “Seppo likes to look at porn.” If looking at porn were a crime, most men in this country would be in prison. “What kind?”

“I didn’t go through it all,” Antti says, “but I didn’t see anything violent.”

“Anything with Thai girls?” I ask.

Antti’s face goes red.

“And we got this.” Jussi picks up a bag with three half-liter Lapin Kulta bottles in it. “They were in the fridge. We figured we ought to check and see if they came out of the same lot as the one, you know, in her vagina.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” I look around. “Where’s Valtteri?”

“He said he had to go home,” Antti says.

I look at my watch. It’s a quarter after six. “Maybe you guys should go home too. This stuff needs to go to the lab. Could one of you take it to the airport and get it to Helsinki on the next plane?”

“I can,” Antti says.

“By the way, I processed the car and got a lot of forensics. I think this case should be over soon.”

Antti looks sheepish. “Think I’ll be able to go on vacation?”

“Odds are good. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

“Can we talk now?” Esko asks.

I motion toward my office. “About obstruction of justice, you bet.”

I shut the door and we sit down. I toss the magazine at him. “The fucking diener,” I say.

“I’m embarrassed about that but…”

“But nothing. The photos were irresponsible and disrespectful. Details were released that could impede the investigation. I’m going to charge him.”

“There’s no guarantee it was Tuomas. There are other workers, cleaners, it could have been any one of a dozen people.”

“You know goddamned well it was the diener.”

“Will you forget the fucking diener!”

I’ve never heard Esko yell before. It shuts me up.

“I’m not here to talk about that,” Esko says. “I got the DNA results from the crime scene and autopsy back from the lab.”

I feel like a jerk, light a cigarette. “What did you get?”

“Can I have one?”

To my knowledge, Esko doesn’t smoke. I slide the pack over and he lights one, takes a couple drags, collects his thoughts. “The lab results turned up semen samples in and around her mouth. DNA testing shows it came from two separate sources.”

I get a queasy feeling in my stomach that tells me the case has gone wrong. “How do you interpret that?”

“She had to have performed oral sex on two different men on the day of her murder.”

“So you’re saying Seppo had an accomplice?”

“I can’t say Seppo was involved at all. I don’t have a DNA sample from him for comparison.”

“I can’t force him to give one until I charge him. You can have a sample from the evidence collected from his house. It comes back from the lab tomorrow.”

“There’s more.”

I press the stress out of my eyes with my fingertips. “What?”

“There’s a third set of DNA from the crime scene. You remember the sample I took from her face? You asked me to collect it.”

I nod.

“Teardrops.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I didn’t know teardrops have DNA in them.”

“Well, they do.”

“If it’s minus forty and I spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Why didn’t the tears freeze and just bounce off her face?”

“I looked it up. Tears are a saline solution and depress the freezing point of water. They only have about a tenth or a twelfth of the salt content of seawater, depending, interestingly enough, on the cause of the tears. It was enough salt to keep the tears liquid while they fell, until they struck her face. They spattered and then froze instantly. The lowest possible temperature for a saline solution is minus twenty-one-point-one degrees. It was minus forty outside, so the salt crystallized out of the water. That’s how you were able to notice it. Your flashlight made the salt crystals sparkle.”

“No shit.” I don’t know what else to say.

“That’s not the real news. The tears don’t belong to either of the men she performed fellatio on.”

I hang my head in my hands. “That can’t be true.”

He stubs out the cigarette. “It’s true.”

I sit up straight, compose myself, chain another cigarette off the last one. “She performed oral sex on two men, who may or may not have murdered her, either individually or together. Then, a third individual, I presume male?”

“Yes, male.”

“A third man cries over her face while she’s being slaughtered, or maybe after.”

“Correct. There’s still more.”

This has gone so awry that I laugh. “There can’t be.”

“One of the men she performed oral sex on was identified from the sex offenders’ DNA database. I recognized the name, Peter Eklund. His father is one of the wealthiest men in Finland. He owns a bank.”

I know who Peter is, but I didn’t know he’s a registered sex offender. His residence is in Helsinki, so there’s no reason I would have been informed. He’s twenty-three years old and already drinking himself to death. He’s been a guest in our drunk tanks several times. I’ve also given him speeding tickets. He drives a BMW.

“What are you going to do?” Esko asks.

I want to scream out of frustration. This case should be winding down, but now it looks like this may just be the beginning. Too much has happened today. If I find Eklund and interview him tonight, I might make mistakes. “I’m going home.”