Snow Angels

22

The next plane from Kittila to Helsinki leaves at four forty-six. If I’m right, and Heikki participated in Sufia’s murder, the DNA samples I’m sending to the lab will prove it. Kate and I drive straight from Valtteri’s house to the airport. I tell her about the suicide note and what I think it might mean. She looks distraught. We don’t discuss it further. It starts snowing, and the monotonous slap of the windshield wipers destroys the quiet I need to mourn the death of the son of a trusted colleague and dear friend.

I keep picturing Heikki crying over Sufia, his tears freezing and spattering on her battered face. Possible scenarios flicker through my mind like different edits from the same film. Maybe the boy was a sociopath: he stole Seppo’s car, abducted and murdered Sufia alone. I see him hit her in the head with a hammer. He cuts her clothes off and carves “nigger whore” on her belly in the parked car, drags her naked and unconscious into the snow and brutalizes her, twists a broken beer bottle into her vagina. She wakes up blind, writhing and screaming. He cuts her throat and cries at the sight of his fantasy become reality.

Or perhaps Seppo held some kind of power over Heikki and forced him to become an accomplice. They parked in Aslak’s driveway. Heikki stood by while Seppo sodomized, maybe raped Sufia in the car, and then dragged her into the snowfield and committed atrocities. Heikki knelt over her and cried while witnessing the aftermath.

I imagine it the other way around. Heikki and Seppo are in the car together, but Heikki commits the brunt of the crimes. I see the same things over again, except Peter Eklund replaces Seppo. This scenario seems implausible. A Laestadian like Heikki and hedonistic scum like Peter would likely detest each other and everything the other stood for.

Then I picture Heli orchestrating the murder. She could have met Heikki at church. She could have been behind the wheel and relied on Heikki’s size and strength for the abduction and murder. She could have motivated him in some way, given him the keys to Seppo’s BMW and been absent during the commission of the crime. I consider the sexual forms her encouragements may have taken. If he had been true to his faith, Heikki was inexperienced, vulnerable.

These visualizations make me shudder. Whatever Heli may have done to me, I once loved her and want to think of her as good. The idea that she might be capable of such evil hurts me in deep places, makes me remember the way I felt about her when we were young. My gut reaction is that it’s not possible, but then I remember what I said not long ago: I can’t picture anyone committing such a murder, but someone did. I could never have imagined the way she betrayed me either, and I ask myself if, on a subconscious level, I’m skewing the investigation to punish her for that betrayal.

I don’t think so. Seppo’s affair with Sufia gave Heli motive. Valtteri was right. Overexercising combined with dieting have left Heli a skinny bag of bones, too small and weak to have carried out the murder by herself. The addition of Heikki to the picture gives her means and opportunity. Maybe Kate was right, maybe I should cite conflict of interest and recuse myself from the case. I can’t though, and I’m not sure why.

By the time we get home, it’s five thirty in the morning. I take Heikki’s computer from the trunk of the car, then bring it and the car battery inside. Kate sits down on the couch, throws her crutches on the floor. She hasn’t taken her shoe off. Snow melts on the rug. I don’t say anything, sit down beside her. She stares straight ahead. A few minutes go by, then she buries her face in her hands and starts sobbing. I wonder if I should hold her and comfort her, but I have the feeling she doesn’t want me to, so I wait.

“I can’t do this,” she says without looking up.

This night has been hard on her, maybe harder than I realize. I put an arm around her. “What?”

“Did you see that boy?” she asks.

She had seen him on a gurney as the EMTs took him out. I cut him down. “I saw him.”

“I spent the night comforting a woman I had never met before. We don’t even speak a common language. I’m glad I was there for her, but where were her family, her friends?”

I can’t explain the Finnish concept of privacy. When we grieve, often we can’t talk about it. Maria may have been more comfortable with a stranger. “You’re the best friend she could have had.”

“That boy, Heikki, I told you he was creepy, and now he’s dead. I feel so awful that I said those things about him.”

“You don’t need to.”

“The note he left. He killed Sufia Elmi, didn’t he?”

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced of the likelihood. If he murdered Sufia, I ask myself again if Valtteri and Maria knew. He might have confessed to them. Talk of the Bible and deserving punishment, of fire and brimstone, could have driven him to suicide. My hands start to shake. He was alone in the house with Kate, and I brought him here. “Probably.”

“Even I noticed he was strange. How could his parents not have known there was something wrong with him?”

“They have eight kids. In a family that size, children don’t get much individual attention. Things go unnoticed.”

She starts to cry harder. “I want to leave this place. I want to go home.”

I equate “leaving this place” with leaving me. I don’t fear much, but this scares me. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to live here anymore.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Back to the States, to Aspen.”

In my mind’s eye, I see Kate every moment of the day. Her cinnamon hair, dove-gray eyes so light they’re almost without color. Since we met, our relationship has been something self-contained, both a beginning and an end, like I picture death must be. I thought nothing could ever come between us. I get the same feeling I had when Seppo threatened her. My heart pounds, my ears ring, my vision goes blurry.

“In the States,” she says, “I never met anyone who committed suicide, never even knew anyone who had a suicide in their family. In this little country, it seems like someone does it every day. Finns are like lemmings rushing off a cliff.”

It’s true. Most years, Finland has the world’s highest suicide rate. Last year, it was twenty-seven out of a hundred thousand citizens. If I lost Kate and the twins, I would feel like joining the statistics.

Kate looks at me and reads the panic in my face. “Oh God. Kari, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I want you to come with me. I would never leave you.”

I start to calm down. She puts her arms around me and kisses me. “We could leave here,” she says. “You speak and write almost perfect English. You’re educated and a decorated officer. Any police department in the U.S. would be privileged to have you on its force.”

Her opinion of me is higher than my own. “Why do you want to leave?” I ask.

The sadness in her face tells me she’s going to speak from the heart. “When I first arrived here, my picture of Finland was different. Nature and the environment seemed wild and beautiful, life seemed orderly. I thought people were happy.”

“You were mostly right,” I say.

“No, I was wrong. This is an ugly place. The silence, the misery, the months of darkness. It’s too extreme, like living in a desert made of snow instead of sand.”

Sometimes I think this too.

“When I talk to people,” she says, “they hardly ever laugh or even smile unless they’re drunk. Finns are inscrutable. I have no idea what they’re thinking or feeling. Sometimes I feel like people hate me for being a foreigner, like the nurses at the hospital when I broke my leg. I’m uncomfortable. Worse, I’m terrified because I’m pregnant. I’m at the mercy of people I don’t and can’t understand.”

I didn’t know how deep her cultural alienation had become. I try to explain. “What you perceive as silence, we view as peaceful solitude. Most of us aren’t miserable, but our approach toward life is serious, maybe because of our extreme environment. People don’t hate you, they respect you because you’re successful. Finns are afraid of making mistakes. If we can’t do something perfectly, it’s hard for us to try to do it at all. The people that work for you speak fluent English and are proud of it, but a lot of people are too scared to try.”

“That’s no excuse for the way they treated me at the hospital.”

“You were in pain. Sometimes, people here ignore suffering so the sufferers can maintain their dignity. When you give birth, your medical care will be excellent, for the same reason the nurses wouldn’t speak to you. Health care professionals expect themselves to excel at their work. Our educational system is one of the best in the world. There’s no better place for our children to grow up.”

I’ve given a speech that sounds like an advertisement selling the Finnish way of life. Hearing the words come out of my mouth, even I don’t buy it.

She looks frustrated. “Are we living in the same country? We just watched a teenage boy, probably turned psychotic murderer, be carted off to the morgue after hanging himself. I run places that sell booze. Do you think I don’t see how rampant alcoholism is here? People are drunk because they’re depressed. They get so depressed that they become mentally ill and kill themselves. You say this place is safe? You want our kids to grow up in this environment?”

Almost everyone in Finland knows a suicide. The normal way of dealing with it is to allow ourselves to grieve, to speculate about why and talk about our love for the departed. Then we bury the dead and seldom mention them afterward. I don’t know if it’s because of our pain at their loss, or because of guilt, the feeling that we didn’t give them the help they needed to stay alive. Suicides get only a tiny obituary in the newspaper, a minimalization of our loss, a form of denial. The minuscule death notices speak of our shame.

“There’s a lot of truth in what you say. I can’t defend life in the north against its flaws, and there are many, but this is my home and I love it. If you stay here long enough and learn the language so you can understand the culture, you may come to love Finland for some of the reasons you hate it now-the silence, the solitude, even the melancholy-like I do.”

She’s getting angry. “The language! I don’t speak Finnish, but I know enough about it to see that it’s a reflection of the culture. In colloquial speech, you refer to other people as ‘it.’ That tells me a lot.”

“Kate, I’m a cop in early middle age with a bad leg. I don’t know if I could get a job in the U.S. or not, but I’m pretty sure that even if I did, I wouldn’t be any good at it. I speak English, but I don’t understand your culture. I can’t catch crooks if I don’t know how they think. Those few months I spent in the States working on my master’s thesis, I felt like a fish out of water, just like you do now.”

“My income is six figures. It doesn’t matter if you work or not.”

“It matters to me. Besides, after the twins are born, you’ll be on maternity leave. We could figure it out then.”

“What difference does my maternity leave make?”

“It’s a hundred and five workdays, that’s a long time.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not going on maternity leave for months.”

“Why not? Everyone does.”

“Does that mean I’m required to?”

As much as I love Kate, sometimes the cultural differences between us mystify me. “I guess not, I just never heard of anyone not wanting to before. What do American mothers do?”

“We take a few weeks, get child care and go back to our careers, and that’s what I’m going to do. Are you saying no to moving? Won’t you even think about it?”

My automatic reaction, when someone tries to make me do something, is to do the opposite. I try to stay reasonable. “This feels like an ultimatum.”

“Kari, it’s not an ultimatum. I would never leave you, I just want to know if you’ll consider it or not.”

I don’t want to say it, but Kate’s happiness is more important to me than my own. “I’ll consider it.”

We drop the subject and get ready for bed. Kate always goes to sleep with her head on my shoulder, our arms wrapped around one another. We do the same now, but I can still feel the tension between us, like magnets forcing each other apart instead of pulling each other together. I’ve never felt that way with Kate before, and it worries me.