Snow Angels

7

Esko hands me a cup of coffee and tells the morgue attendant, the diener, to bring him Sufia’s body. We wait in the examination suite, and I look around to pass the time. Photos of Esko’s family hang on the walls: his daughter’s wedding, one of him and his wife at a summer picnic. I browse through a tray of surgical tools. Among the saws and scalpels, chisels and forceps, I find a set of garden shears. “What are these for?”

“This place runs on a tight budget,” he says. “A pair of rib-cutters from a surgical-supply company costs three times as much. It’s not like my patients bleed to death if they get a nicked artery from a less-than-perfect instrument.”

He comes over to the table and picks up a piece of cutlery from the collection of scalpels. “Discount stores are great. This is a bread knife I picked up on sale at Anttila. Perfect for making thin organ slices. It’s got way more cutting surface than a scalpel and does a better job at a fraction of the cost. You gotta think of this stuff if you want to run a backwater government facility.”

The diener, Tuomas, wheels in Sufia’s body on a gurney. “Want me to do anything?” he asks.

Esko scratches at his gray beard. “Break the seals on the bag and photograph the body while I finish my coffee.”

The diener unzips the body bag. Sufia is exposed, naked and violated, swathed in shiny black plastic, like an offering to an angry god on the glittering steel altar of the gurney.

Esko has dark circles under his eyes. “I guess you didn’t get much sleep either,” I say.

“I’m knackered,” he says.

An interesting choice of words, given that Sufia was knackered, like a farm animal, with a hammer.

“I’ve been province coroner for seventeen years,” Esko says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this, let alone autopsied a body so mutilated for a murder investigation. Like I told you yesterday, I’m scared I’ll fuck it up. I stayed up most of the night reading forensics journals because I was afraid I’ll forget something.”

“You won’t,” I say.

The diener finishes snapping photos. He sits down on a stool in the corner, pulls off his surgical cap. Lank blond hair falls in his face. He starts reading a magazine. I don’t bother to say hello. When I’ve spoken to him in the past, he never answered, just nodded and went on with what he was doing.

Esko examines the body while it’s still in the bag, before it’s cleaned up. He turns on a tape recorder. He states that he’s positively identified the victim as Sufia Elmi from dental records, then notes her race, sex, hair color and length and her age. He takes the bags off her hands and scrapes under her fingernails, enters the scrapings and the bags themselves into evidence. He takes samples for DNA analysis from her lips and inside her mouth with swabs, and continues.

“There’s a cord with a simple slipknot around the neck, located above a laceration in the throat.” He lifts her head and removes the noose. “The ligatures aren’t deep, the esophagus isn’t crushed. Asphyxiation wasn’t the cause of death.”

He looks the body over for hair and fiber samples, for any kind of foreign materials. The only hair samples he finds most likely belong to her, unless the killer is of African descent, and we don’t have many black people in Kittila, neither locals nor tourists. He picks up some fibers, maybe from her own absent clothing.

He goes over the body with a UV light to make secretions fluoresce, then draws blood samples with a syringe for toxicology. Although he’s done it once already, he takes blood samples from various areas on the corpse. A single drop of the killer’s blood might expose his identity. He doesn’t find anything else and starts looking at her injuries.

“I’ll start with her eyes,” Esko says. “Puncture wounds have penetrated the cornea, iris, sclera and vitreous humor. Little ocular fluid remains. Rough, irregular intrusions suggest an imprecise instrument, and corresponding circular wounds around the eyes suggest he used the broken beer bottle, still embedded in the subject’s vagina, as the instrument.”

I stand up and look into Sufia’s eye sockets. Yesterday, she could see through those bloodstained maws. I find myself wishing I had taken the national police chief’s advice and bowed out of the investigation. I sit down again, and Esko goes on.

“Upon examining the scalp, there’s ecchymosis in the right and frontal areas, a subarachnoid hemorrhage on the right side and small hemorrhagic areas in the corpus callosum.”

Meaning the two hammer blows to her head caused heavy bruising and internal bleeding.

“The throat is incised. The esophagus, internal carotid artery and superior laryngeal nerve are severed. Aggressive compression and shearing from one cut resulted in a wound that reaches to the spine, which was nicked by the blade.”

Esko is saying he nearly cut her head off.

“To go so deep and through cartilage without sawing, the instrument must have been sharp and of some length, and so not a scalpel. He used a knife with a curved blade. A skinning knife comes to mind. I see an irregular laceration and superficial loss of skin from the right breast. The tissue loss is more or less square in outline and measures three and one-eighth inches transversely and three and a half inches longitudinally. The manner in which this skin from her breast has been removed, with two unidirectional slashes rather than with a sawing motion, reinforces my opinion about the cutting instrument.”

I want Esko’s examination to tell me the story of her death. “Can you give me the order of attack?”

“Hang on until I finish, I’m trying to figure it out.”

“The words ‘nigger whore,’ ” Esko says, “have been written, one below the other, with a series of cuts on the body’s midsection, between the breasts and the umbilicus. Each letter is approximately three inches transversely and one and a half inches longitudinally. The writing is precise and the wounds are shallow. If a curved blade were used, it would have been awkward to use the tip to cut the words into the body while holding the knife by the handle. I think he held the knife by the tip, like a pen. The words are intersected by a light cut, interrupted by other wounds, that runs from the throat to the pelvic area.” He turns her over. “The body is nicked in other places, on the thighs and buttocks, and once in the center of her back, by a blade with similar characteristics.”

“How long do you think it took him to cut ‘nigger whore’ into her belly?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Grab a scalpel and a pad of paper and try it for yourself.”

I take a scalpel from the instrument tray and paper from a shelf, hold the blade like a pen and time myself while I scratch out the letters. “Forty-nine seconds.”

Esko moves on. “The trunk is lacerated by an incision that travels almost straight through the abdomen, severing the intestine at the duodenum and through the soft tissues of the abdomen. The incision is deep and nearly reaches the intervertebral disk between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.”

“It almost looks to me like he tried to cut her in half,” I say.

He considers it. “Maybe.”

He examines her pubic area and tries to remove the broken Lapin Kulta bottle from Sufia’s vagina. It doesn’t want to come out. He uses both hands, gives it a jerk, and it comes free. He examines her vagina and the wound inflicted by the bottle. “Mita vittua?” What the fuck? “Come over here and look at this,” he says.

I go to the other side of the gurney. All I see is a mutilated vagina. “What?”

“Her vagina is damaged,” Esko says, “but not just in the way you think. Look again.”

I get down close to look and feel embarrassed, but now I see. Her clitoris and part of the labia minora are missing. “You think the killer is a surgeon?”

“No, I think her family had it done.”

I overlooked the scar tissue because Sufia’s vagina is smeared with dried blood and damaged by the beer bottle. I’m shocked, but I shouldn’t be. Back in the nineties, when we took thousands of Somali refugees into Finland to help them escape genocide, I made an effort to learn a little bit about Somali culture. The vast majority of Somali women have undergone clitoridectomy as a rite of womanhood.

“You ever see one of these before?” I ask.

“Only in pictures. This is what they call a Type II clitoridectomy. Because of the absence of the labia minora and clitoris, the anterior perineal structures have an unusual contour.”

“It looks ungodly painful.”

“In my medical opinion, it hurt like screaming fucking hell. They dug her clitoris out at the root, down to the bone.”

I think about her cottage and the semen-stained sheets and panties. “Could she have derived enjoyment from sex?”

“Not the kind of physical pleasure usually associated with it.”

“Learn anything about the sexual assault with the bottle?”

“Not much, he pushed it into her while twisting and cutting. There’s semen present, but that doesn’t prove anything. The killer did so much damage with it that I can’t tell if she was raped or not. Makes me wonder if he’s as smart as he is brutal. She could have had intercourse a day or two before her murder.”

The external examination is complete. The diener finishes an apple, throws the core in the trash and puts down his magazine. He weighs and measures the body. “Five feet and eight inches, ninety-six pounds,” he says.

Dieners are an odd lot, tend to stay in their low-paying jobs for decades. They live in the cool quiet of the morgue, moving and washing bodies. Makes me wonder about them. The diener moves Sufia’s corpse while Esko takes a break. He and I drink more coffee. He looks lost in thought, so I stay quiet to let him sort things out.

The diener moves Sufia to a slanted aluminum autopsy table. It has raised edges, faucets, gutters and drains to rinse away blood and drek. The diener washes the body. If there was any evidence left on her, it’s gone down the drain. He places a body block, a rubber brick, under her back, to make her chest protrude. It will make it easier to cut her open.

I remember the first time I went deer hunting. My oldest brother, Juha, and some of his friends took me. Hunting dogs cornered the deer, a six-point whitetail buck, and since it was my first time, they let me take the shot. The bullet went behind the shoulder and through the heart, a clean kill. Juha handed me a knife and told me what to do. I zipped the buck open from the sternum to the genitals and plunged my hands in to pull out the organs. The morning was bitter cold, and the heat inside the dead animal made me sigh with pleasure.

“Isn’t working with chilled bodies uncomfortable?” I’ve attended quite a few autopsies, but never thought of this before.

“You get used to it, like anything. Refrigerated flesh is easier to work with. Warm flesh is squishy, harder to cut.”

Esko goes back to work. He makes a Y-shaped incision from each shoulder to the bottom of her breastbone, then from the breastbone to her pubic bone. He pulls her skin away in flaps. The chest flap hangs over her face so that I can see her bones and muscles.

He removes her rib cage and detaches her esophagus and larynx by cutting arteries and ligaments. He cuts the attachments to the bladder, spinal cord and rectum, then flops out her internal organs in one go. He takes his bread knife and slices organs for tissue samples.

“How does her liver look?” I ask.

“Pure as the driven snow.”

“What about her lungs?”

“Pink as the day she was born.”

I try to see Sufia as she was. “I processed her cottage today, there were booze bottles and cigarette butts everywhere.”

“Unless she has new vices, they weren’t hers.”

“We get twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA. The evidence bags from her room are in the trunk of my car. When you get done, we’ll send them and your samples to Helsinki on the next plane. We might know whose they are in a day or two.”

Esko opens her stomach. The smell is less than pleasant. He dumps the contents into a container. Then he zips a scalpel around Sufia’s head, across her forehead and from ear to ear. He pulls her skin away in two flaps. “Blows to the head from the blunt instrument caused a fracture in the frontal cranium,” he says.

He cuts into her skull with an electric Stryker saw, then pulls off the top like he’s taking off her hat. He cuts her brain’s connection to the spinal cord and lifts it out, slices it with the bread knife for samples. When he’s done, Esko flops into a chair, exhausted. The diener starts sewing her back together.

“We’ve got this girl,” I say. “She appears to be a chain-smoker living in alcoholic squalor, but she doesn’t drink or smoke, so I think she has a boyfriend who does.”

“A fair guess.”

“She has sex she doesn’t enjoy. She’s sexually mutilated both in life and in death. There might be something to that, some kind of symbolism.” “Could be.”

I mull it over. “Paint me a picture of what you think happened.”

“That’s your department.”

“But I’m asking you.”

He takes a second. “I think he kidnapped her somewhere, used the knife to intimidate her and the noose to control her. Cut her to scare her into submission. Maybe raped her somewhere along the line.”

“The semen. You’re sure there’s no way to tell if it was his, if she was raped?”

He shrugs. “She’s so torn up, I can’t tell you more. I wish I could. I just don’t get it,” he says. “The way he butchered her suggests an agenda, but I can’t imagine what it was.”

“Let’s try to sort it out,” I say. “What do you think happened before he took her to the snowfield, and what did he do after he got there?”

“We know what he did there because of blood loss into the surrounding snow. He attacked her eyes, removed a section of skin from her breast, made a deep laceration in her lower trunk and inserted the bottle into her vagina.”

“She was awake at least part of the time,” I say, “because she thrashed around in the snow.”

Esko goes quiet for a minute, then covers his face with his hands. “I think I got it,” he says, lowers his hands and looks at me. “He abducts her using the knife and the noose. Maybe he rapes her, maybe forces oral sex on her, maybe he doesn’t do either. Anyway, he hits her in the head with the hammer and knocks her out. He drives her to the snowfield. When he drags her out into the snow, she’s still unconscious from the concussion, maybe he even thinks she’s dead, and he goes to work. He cuts off a flap of skin from her breast, gouges out her eyes with the bottle and inserts it into her vagina. Then he makes the deep incision in her abdomen, maybe intends on cutting her in half.”

I see where he’s going. “You can’t mean it.”

“Yeah, I mean it. He’s cutting her in half, and she wakes up, starts flailing around, screaming and making noise. It scared him, so he cut her throat to finish the job.”

“Jesus,” I say. “She woke up to find herself blind and being cut in half? That’s when she flailed around and made the snow angel?”

“I can’t be certain of the exact order of events, but it looks that way. Before he kills her on Aslak’s farm, he cuts off her clothes and strips her-that’s why she’s got the nicks on her body-and writes ‘nigger whore’ on her with the knife.”

“Then he drives her to the reindeer farm, drags her unconscious out of the car and kills her. Sounds premeditated,” I say.

“Yes it does. There weren’t any fragments of broken glass at the scene. He broke the bottle beforehand and brought it along.”

I try to take all this in. “There’s a lot of hate here,” I say.

Esko nods. “A lot of hate.”

The diener finishes sewing her up. Sufia’s next stop is the funeral home.