Snow Angels

30

In downtown Kittila, what passes for our shopping district is decked out for Christmas. The main square has a tall tree, over-decorated with gaudy blinking lights and laden with thick snow. Store window banners say Hyvaa Joulua, Merry Christmas, or some variation on the theme, and advertise special holiday offers. I hate the commercialization of Christmas. Maybe because when I was a kid, we were poor and couldn’t afford expensive gifts, maybe because it just sucks.

Last year, Kate and I spent our first Christmas together. I made a traditional Finnish Christmas Eve dinner: rosolli (a salad with pickles, beets, onions and herring), a fifteen-pound ham and three different casseroles made out of potatoes, turnips and carrots. She said we’d never eat it all, but it was gone in four days. It comes to me that Heikki was supposed to help out Kate, but he’s dead, and I don’t even know if she has anything to eat at home. This case has made me a negligent husband.

I feel like shit from the hangover, and whatever I do is wrong, damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I haven’t even considered how my insistence in pursuing my ex-wife’s murderer makes Kate feel. Judging by her reaction, I’ve already ruined her holidays. I don’t want to further destroy them by having nothing to eat but takeout pizza on Christmas. Luckily, I bought Kate’s gifts weeks ago, but on the way to work, I stop at the grocery and buy all the food for the holidays. I’m afraid if I don’t do it now, I’ll forget later.

I leave the supermarket and look around. Almost every small Finnish town has the same eight or ten chain stores, and Kittila looks like all the rest, as if it had been stamped out of a sheet with a cookie cutter. Standing in the cold and dark, looking at my hometown done up in fake Christmas bullshit, I wonder what the fuck I’m doing, why I’m not at home with my wife. Finnish people are obedient, we do what we’re told. Maybe I’m as faceless as this community.

It’s too late now. I’ve made my choice. Like the chief said, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

No media vultures hover outside the police station. I guess since I wouldn’t talk to them, they gave up and went home for Christmas. I park in the police garage and leave my groceries in the trunk of the car. They’ll stay cold enough there without freezing.

Inside, I find Valtteri slumped over his desk, his head in his hands. “What the hell are you doing here?” I ask.

He’s a wreck. His appearance is so bad that I think he hasn’t eaten or slept, hasn’t done very much but cry, since he found his son dead in his basement a couple days ago. He fires my question back at me, his tone is sharp. “What the hell are you doing here?”

In seven years of working together, I’ve never heard Valtteri use a swear word before, even a mild one. “You heard about Heli?” I ask.

“I heard. Antti told me.”

“I’m not criticizing you. I just think you burying your son one day and coming back to work the next is too much. You should be at home.”

“To do what, sit on the couch with my wife and cry?”

That’s exactly what I think. “You should stay home with Maria for a few days. She needs you.”

“I can’t help her and she can’t help me. You told me to come back to work and here I am.”

I pull up a chair, sit down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m trying to be your friend. Have you looked in the mirror today?”

He brushes my hand away. “You should take a look in the mirror yourself. You look like a bucket of shit without the bucket. You saw Heli, a woman you spent years with, burned to death last night, and you’re here at work. If I shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t either. We both stay or we both go home.”

His behavior is strange but his argument is logical. Maybe work is the therapy he needs.

“Did Antti go home to sleep?” I ask.

“Yeah, and Jussi went out on a call, a car wreck. It’s just us for now.”

“You talk to Seppo yet?”

“No.”

“I’ll see if he wants to confess. If he doesn’t, we’re going to arrest Peter Eklund.”

Valtteri nods and stares down at the top of his desk again.

I go downstairs and open the port in the door of Seppo’s cell. He stares through it at me. “I guess you think you’re pretty goddamned funny,” he says, “having me dragged out of my house in the middle of the night and arrested again.”

“Stick your hands out so I can cuff you.”

He’s learned the drill, lets me put handcuffs on him and steps away as I enter. He’s wearing his own clothes, looks like less of a buffoon than the last time we met in this cell. “Why did you do this to me?” he asks. “I thought we’d settled things between us.”

“Me too, but that was before you killed your wife.”

He tilts his head, appears uncomprehending. “What are you talking about?”

I’ve still never figured out if Seppo is a good actor, smarter than he seems, or if he really is the complete dolt I take him for. I try to bait him into a confession. “Stupid to kill your wife five days after you murder your girlfriend. Even more stupid to use the same vehicle. You might just as well have hung a sign around your neck saying, ‘Send me to prison and throw away the key, I’m guilty of double murder.’ ”

He shakes his head back and forth like a wet dog. “I don’t get it.”

“Heli is dead. The spare tire from your BMW was filled with gasoline, hung around her chest and arms and set ablaze. She looked like a little blackened doll, her face and hair scorched off, sitting on the ice in a puddle of filth.”

He blinks, looks around, blinks again, looks around some more, then a quavering noise comes out of his throat and he launches himself at me. I’m so surprised that he gets his manacled hands around my neck and knocks me to the floor. If I weren’t so much bigger and stronger than him, I’d be a dead man. I manage to roll him over and pin his shoulders to the concrete with my knees. He bucks and writhes, tries to shake me off him. He can’t and gives up, just lays there with tears streaming, saying “Fuck you, fuck you,” over and over again.

I wait awhile. “Think you can control yourself now?”

He doesn’t say anything. I let him up anyway.

He wipes snot on his sleeve. “How could you hate her enough to kill her?”

It takes me a second to get it. “Why would you think I killed her?”

“It’s been thirteen years. I hurt you, but why would you wait all this time, then take everything away from me? First Sufia, now Heli. You want to send me to jail for life for something I didn’t do. It’s just not fair.”

He believes, or wants me to think he believes, that I committed two homicides to get back at him. I’m dumbstruck. “You can’t be serious.”

He sits on the edge of the metal cot, buries his face in his hands, bursts into tears again. “Don’t do this to me, it’s not fucking fair.”

Could anybody be this good an actor? I sit beside him, give him a cigarette. “I don’t hate you, and I didn’t hurt Heli. And if you didn’t do it, I’ll prove you innocent.”

He sniffs, looks up. “You promise?”

It’s like dealing with a three-year-old. “Yeah, I promise.”

“Tell me what happened to her,” he says.

I don’t know if he’s conning me, but watching him listen while I re-create the crime in graphic detail will give me an opportunity to gauge the effect it has on him. I tell him everything. He cries the whole time I talk.

“I don’t know why you think I would kill Heli,” he says. “Or Sufia. I’m not a violent person. Until I jumped on you, I’d never even been in a fight, even when I was a kid. I wouldn’t know how to hurt someone if I wanted to, like you just saw.”

I think about interrogating him and accusing him of sex cabals and homosexual love affairs, of murdering Heli to get out from under blackmail and cover up his murder of Sufia. He’ll only start crying again. I decide to investigate further before I press him harder. “Why did you marry Heli after all this time?” I ask.

“She had wanted to get married for a long time. She said if I married her, it would make me look better if I had to go to trial for Sufia’s murder. She said I owed it to her for having an affair and humiliating her. Mostly, I did it to make her happy. I loved her. I didn’t realize how much until this thing with Sufia happened and she stuck by me. Most women would have left.”

It crosses my mind that, if he was going to murder Heli, it would have simplified matters to do it before getting married, rather than burning to death his bride of two days. “Do you have any idea why someone would kill Heli?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t think she had an enemy in the world. Heli could be a bitch sometimes, but she wasn’t the kind of person that made people hate her. Except for you. Do you swear you didn’t kill her?”

“Yeah, I swear.”

He goes silent and thoughtful. “Do I have to stay in here?”

“For the time being.”

“How am I supposed to take care of her?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m her husband, I have to see to her funeral.”

“I’ll bring your cell phone.”

He starts crying again in big sobs, puts his head on my shoulder. In my years as a police officer, I think this is the most ridiculous moment I’ve thus far experienced.

“You used to love her, didn’t you Kari?”

I don’t like him using my name. “A long time ago.”

“Would you do this for me? I’m not strong enough. If not for me, for her, for the way you used to love her?”

Again, I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Do what?”

“Make her funeral arrangements.”

“You serious?”

“Please, I’m begging you. Get her the best of everything, it doesn’t matter what it costs.”

My sense of the ridiculous multiplies itself. He took my wife away from me in life, wants to give her back in death. “Sure, no problem.”

He lifts his head off my shoulder, gives me a soulful look, like we’re brothers sharing the loss of a family member. “Thank you,” he says.

I leave him alone to his grief.

I go to my office and call Esko the coroner. “Tell me about the autopsy.”

He hesitates, maybe trying to think how to spare my feelings. Having people try to spare my feelings is getting tiresome. “How much do you want to know?”

“As much as I need to.”

“As far as forensics go, I didn’t find anything that will help you.”

“Was she too badly damaged to gather evidence?”

“No. Given her external appearance, the body was in good condition. Her internal organs, in relative terms, were unscathed.”

“She looked burned to a cinder. How could that be?”

He clears his throat. “The intense heat from the gasoline melted her subcutaneous layers of fat. The fat leached out of her body and soaked out into her clothes, which acted as a wick. That’s why the fire smoldered for so long after Antti put it out. Rubber fires are hard to extinguish as well. In any case, her organs were well-preserved.”

“So you’re certain the fire killed her, it wasn’t an attempt to cover up another murder method.”

“She had soot from the burning tire inside her trachea. She was alive when the killer lit it.”

I had hoped she was already dead, had suffered less torment. I’m tempted to thank Esko for his efforts but don’t feel like it. “Her husband asked me to check into funeral arrangements. When will you release her body?”

“There’s nothing more to learn from it, he can take possession at any time.”

I ring off and call Jorma the undertaker. I don’t mention I’m calling about burying my ex-wife, so he doesn’t offer condolences, for which I’m grateful.

“Funeral arrangements are difficult this time of year,” he says, “even grave diggers want to stay home over the holidays. If her family wishes to put this behind them, if it would help with their grief, I could make funeral arrangements for tomorrow. Otherwise, I suggest waiting a few days.”

I tell him I’ll check with her husband.

“Did you know that Sufia Elmi’s funeral is tomorrow?” Jorma asks.

“Here in Kittila? I would have thought her parents would want to take her home to Helsinki. Why did they wait so long?”

“Her father insisted that her funeral be here and in accordance with Islamic tradition. I had difficulty seeing to all the preparations. There was a ceremonial washing of the body to be performed by the family, certain burial shrouds I had to order, things I’d never dealt with before. Mr. Barre was insistent that everything be done in a most precise way, and it took me a few days.”

I say thanks and hang up.

Antti bagged and tagged the contents of Heli’s purse. I retrieve them from the evidence locker and sort through them. Just the usual stuff. Makeup, wallet, dirty Kleenex, a hairbrush and her cell phone. I take the phone out of the plastic bag and scroll through the menu. Received calls and dialed numbers, received and sent messages. I find nothing noteworthy.

The phone is a new Nokia N82, which does just about everything and costs as much as a month’s rent for an average apartment. It has a Global Positioning System, an MP3 music player, a digital camera and Internet-access capability. I check the downloaded files, mostly a bunch of useless crap from diet and exercise websites, and then finally I find the connection I’ve been hoping for: the download from the true-crime website in Heikki’s computer, about the murder of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

Maybe I should be surprised, but I’m not. Ever since I found Heikki’s suicide note, my instincts told me that Heli put him up to murder. Not because I wanted to vilify her, but because I thought that she, more than anyone else involved, possessed the requisite tools-her sexuality and knowledge of Heikki’s religious beliefs-to turn him into a killer. It makes me sad, because now I’m convinced someone I once loved committed an act so evil.

The question remains, if Heli and Heikki killed Sufia, who killed Heli? The field is narrowing and the chief was right. If I arrest everybody, someone will talk. I send the chief a text message, ask him to have Heli’s and Seppo’s residence in Helsinki searched with an eye for true-crime material. I don’t tell him I’m investigating Heli and not Seppo, so he won’t think I’m off on a wild, grief-stricken tangent. The evidence is provocative but not damning. I decide to keep my suspicion of her guilt to myself for the time being, to keep from being accused of chasing ghosts.

My case notes are in a pile in front of me. I browse through them, look for something I’ve forgotten that could explain why Seppo or Peter, or both of them together, might want to kill Heli. I run across my note to check out Abdi Barre. I never did it.

Things Abdi said come back to me. He claimed he can’t pass the Finnish medical boards because his language skills are insufficient. Yet his Finnish is excellent, more proper than mine. He feared Sufia’s death would go unavenged, asked me if I believed twelve years in prison was adequate punishment for what was done to his daughter, warned me that I had to find her murderer. I more or less told him Seppo was guilty, then Seppo walked free and married Heli. Abdi had called me, angry, distraught.

I remember reading that in Somalia and Rwanda, filling a tire with gasoline and burning the victim alive has sometimes been used as a form of execution. The method was popularized in South Africa by the African National Congress during the eighties. They called it a tire necklace, the verb is necklacing. It was also used in the Mogadishu area during the early years of the Somali civil war. Abdi has a potential source of knowledge about how to commit the crime. I know nothing about his activities during the conflict. He could have seen it done or even necklaced others in the past. Abdi has motive: an eye for an eye. He could have taken from Seppo as he believed Seppo had taken from him.

We have minority populations in Finland-Lapps, Gypsies and Swedish-speaking Finns-but they’re all of a long-standing and homegrown kind. Between five and six thousand Somali refugees poured into the country in the early 1990s, our first major experience with foreigners. A lot of us had never seen a black person before the Somalis arrived.

At first, popular feeling was benevolent. Most Finns were pleased to have an opportunity to help the downtrodden. Then we realized the refugees had to be supported by our rather generous welfare system. They got apartments, televisions, an income, all on the public dole. They often wear more expensive clothes than our working class can afford, because most Muslims don’t drink up their money like we do and can use it for other things. Public resentment grew and has never abated.

I remember what I’ve read about the Somali civil war. The Somalis who took flight during that time were mainly Daarood clan members, escaping violence at the hands of the Hawiye clan. As Somalia disintegrated, the Daarood residents of Mogadishu became the objects of revenge killings. In Somalia there was chaos, clan warfare, genocide, a mass exodus. Few people had passports. It would have been easy to steal an identity and go undiscovered in the flood of refugees. If Abdi had never been a doctor in the first place, it would explain his inability to practice medicine here.

The problem is how to investigate him. Somalia has had no government worthy of the name for the better part of twenty years. The country is ruled by regional warlords, has no infrastructure. There’s no one I can call to request a background check or crime sheet. Then it comes to me. Abdi said he studied at the Sorbonne. They should have a yearbook or at least some kind of student photo. Maybe they even keep up with alumni, can tell me something about what happened to Abdi after he graduated. All this is contingent upon whether the man who calls himself Abdi Barre committed identity theft. Maybe he really is Dr. Abdi Barre. Maybe there never was a doctor with a practice in Mogadishu by that name.

I call Interpol and get lucky. I talk to a cop who tells me he’s seen what a beating I’m taking from the world press. He’s sympathetic and anxious to play a part in a glitzy homicide investigation. I explain what I need, tell him I’m in a hurry. He promises to help me out. Then I call Finnish passport control, ask them to e-mail me a photo of Abdi. It occurs to me that maybe I should even just question Abdi about his past myself. I call him and ask him if he would allow me the privilege of attending his daughter’s funeral. I say I’d like to pay my final respects. This is true.

“Are you a Man of the Book Inspector?” he asks.

“What do you mean by Man of the Book?”

His tone suggests I’m an uneducated moron. “According to the Koran, the term describes non-Muslim peoples who received religious scriptures before the time of Muhammad. The Koran completes these scriptures and is God’s true and final message to the faithful. However, because People of the Book recognize the supreme Abrahamic God, as do Muslims, they practice revealed faiths based on Divine ordinances. As such, a certain level of tolerance is accorded them under Islamic law. If you are a Man of the Book, I will allow you to attend Sufia’s funeral. If you are not, I must regard you as unclean and will not permit you to defile her last rites.”

At first I excused it because of his grief, but with every interaction I’ve had with him, Abdi’s arrogance and superior attitude have grown more tiresome. “You may consider me a Man of the Book,” I say. “I’m a baptized Lutheran and I’ve read the Bible.”

“Very good then, you may attend.” He gives me the time and place and hangs up without saying thank you, fuck you or good-bye.