Snow Angels

8

I get back to the station at nine P.M. Antti and Jussi are still at their desks. They’ve put in long days too. Antti is calling realtors, asking for occupant lists. Jussi stares at his computer screen with bleary eyes. He looks up at me. “I got something for you.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The tires on the vehicle used in the murder were Dunlop SP Winter Sport M3 DSST snow tires mounted on seventeen-inch rims.”

I clap him on the back. “That’s great.”

“There’s more. That particular make is a factory option on the BMW 3 Series sedan. Maybe Eero didn’t imagine it after all.”

There can’t be many new 3 Series sedans in a small town like this. The car will break the case. “Good work. The next thing is to get online with vehicle registration. Check out every 3 Series owner, both private and rental agency, in Kittila and Levi. Tomorrow, we’ll inspect each one and find out which of those BMWs have the same model Dunlops on them.”

“I’m already working on it,” Jussi says. “Oh yeah, and the footprints were size tens.”

The break with the tires is heartening, but this may still be a long haul and I don’t want them to burn out yet. “Listen guys,” I say, “I appreciate your hard work, but maybe it’s time to call it a day.”

Antti puts a hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. “In a little while.”

I go to my office. Before doing anything else, I figure I’d better pursue the possibility, unlikely though it may be, that Sufia’s murder is the work of a serial killer. I sit down at my computer and log on to the crime database, working from the nearest countries outward. Serial killers at large in Finland: none. In fact, we’ve only had one convicted serial killer in over a hundred years. Antti Olavi Taskinen killed three men by poisoning and was sentenced to life in prison in 2006.

Serial killers at large in Sweden: none. Again, only one convicted in recent history. Thomas Quick, a child molester, committed his first murder at age fourteen. Committed to closed psychiatric care in 1990, he confessed to thirty murders and by the year 2000 had been convicted of eight murders. At large in Norway: none. Denmark: none. Iceland: none. And also very few in the histories of those countries. Serial murders are a rarity in Nordic and Scandinavian cultures.

Russia has a few serial killers at large, but crime details don’t suggest connections. I check Germany and Japan, countries known for breeding sexual deviance with a murderous bent. Again, a few are at large, but the crimes don’t fit the profile.

I save the United States for last, because the list is so long. Around eighty-five percent of the world’s serial killers are Americans, and the rate in the U.S. has risen nine hundred and forty percent over the past thirty years. Of course, this may also reflect increased accuracy of crime statistics.

The most conservative estimates claim there are around thirty serial killers active in the U.S. at any given time. Some analysts claim as many as five hundred roam free. They base this on an average of ten to twelve murders per killer, five thousand unsolved murders per year, and they figure that a fair percentage of the hundreds or thousands of women and children that go missing every year are victims of serial killers.

I try to keyword-search and connect American crimes to Sufia, but there are so many murdered women in the States with their eyes gouged out or broken bottles stuffed into their vaginas that it’s a waste of time. It occurs to me that the U.S. has a tradition of this. The actor Fatty Arbuckle was accused of killing a woman by raping her with a Coca-Cola bottle in 1921. If any American tourists have crime sheets, I’ll search again by geographic location to narrow down the field.

Sufia’s cell phone and banking records for the past year arrive by fax. Antti comes in and lays them on my desk. Same-day service. This is the way an investigation is supposed to go. I take my time and sift through them. Sufia was well-connected. I find the numbers of Finland’s foreign minister, a high-ranking member of kokoomus, the Finnish Conservative Party, some other politicos and movie stars and, the biggest surprise of all, the phone number of Jyri Ivalo, the national chief of police. He failed to mention that he knew Sufia when we spoke this morning. I wonder why.

I keep looking through her records. Sufia received many calls from a particular cell phone while making few calls to the same number in return. She did, however, send a quantity of text messages to the number, and this suggests to me that she wasn’t supposed to call it directly.

She made only eighteen hundred euros from The Unexpected III, her last film, and she had no other source of earned income, no permanent residence. She’d been receiving injections of cash into her account for the past couple months from a private source, and hasn’t been paying the rent on her vacation cottage herself. Sufia Elmi was a kept woman.

I call Pine Woods Cottages and get the credit card number used for payment. I run checks on the credit card, bank account and cell phone. One name comes up. Seppo Niemi.

My ex-wife left me for Seppo thirteen years ago. Seppo is from Helsinki. He’s rich and owns an expensive winter cottage here, bought it before he intruded on my life. He doesn’t visit Levi often. We’ve seen each other in Hullu Poro a few times since then. We never speak, but when we make eye contact, he cowers. I suppose keeping the cottage is a way of trying to convince himself he’s not intimidated by me.

I check his vehicle registration myself. He owns a BMW 330i. I’m shaken. The irony is so great that I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

I call Jyri. “I have a suspect,” I say. “His name is Seppo Niemi. He funneled money into her bank account and paid her rent. Odds are good the car used in the crime was a BMW 330i, and he owns one. How do you want me to handle it?”

“You mean the rich guy from Helsinki?”

“Yeah.”

He considers it for a minute.

“Another thing,” I say. “She knew a lot of important people, including you.”

“So what? I have an active social life.”

“I just thought I should mention it.”

“I’ve heard a few things about Seppo Niemi,” Jyri says. “By all accounts, he’s an ignorant piece of shit. Bring him in, treat him as a dangerous suspect.”

“No interview first?”

“Nope. Fuck him. Arrest him first. And there’s no reason to mention Sufia’s more important friends to the press.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Let me know what happens.” He hangs up.

Given the nature of the crime, it’s within the boundaries of the law to drag Seppo’s ass to jail without checking his alibi first, but Jyri’s reaction makes me think maybe he has reasons of his own for handling the arrest like this. I apply for arrest and search warrants, and request subpoenas for Seppo’s phone records and financial information.

I go back out to the common room where Jussi and Antti are still hard at it. “Go home,” I say, “get some sleep and be back here at eight in the morning. We’re going to make an arrest.”

Antti brightens. “Who?”

My cell phone rings. “Vaara.”

“This is Dr. Jukka Tikkanen from Kittila Health Center Emergency Services. Your wife has had an accident.”

My heart pounds and the phone trembles in my hand. “What kind of accident?”

“She took a fall while skiing and fractured her left femur.”

“Is she all right?”

“All things considered.”

“I’m on my way.”

Jussi and Antti are staring at me, wondering what bad news I’ve received. “Kate broke her leg, I’ve got to go.”

I run to get my coat and then remember Antti’s question as I button it. “Oh yeah, we’re going to arrest a guy named Seppo Niemi.”

I pull up to the emergency room entrance and leave the Saab in a no-parking zone. An old man sits outside smoking a cigarette. I bump into his wheelchair and apologize. The automatic doors slide open too slow and pushing them doesn’t help. The admissions desk has a line. I’m supposed to take a number and wait my turn. I go to the window and flash my police card. “Kate Vaara. Where is she?”

The receptionist pretends like I’m not there and keeps talking to her current client. I slap my hand on the desk. “Now.”

She starts to get angry, then puts on a bureaucratic face and checks her computer. “Katherine Vaara is in room 207. Officer.”

I find Kate in a hospital bed, her left leg in a cast that goes from the bottom of her foot to high up on her hip. Her already pale skin is waxen, her lips are pursed tight. She holds out her arms for me to hug her. When I do, her mouth presses against my ear and I hear her suppress a whimper. “I want to go home,” she says.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Later.”

I can’t ask the next question, but she reads my thoughts and lets go of me. “They did an ultrasound.” She pauses, manages a demure smile. “There’s not just one baby, there are two.”

“Two?”

“We’re having twins, and they’re both fine.”

I lay a hand on her belly, overwhelmed by joy and relief. “Kate, that’s wonderful.”

She doesn’t say anything. I can’t tell if she thinks it’s wonderful or not.

I ask a stupid question. “Are you okay?”

Kate’s trying hard to keep herself under control. “No.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

She shakes her head. “Not now.”

“Are they going to let you go home?”

“I don’t know.”

I find her doctor. “She’s lucky,” he says. “She fractured her femur, but it’s not that bad. If it were closer to the hip or a deeper fracture, she’d have to stay here in traction for the next couple months. She already has a pin in that hip. If she’d broken it again, she might have been permanently disabled. I’m putting her on sick leave.”

“Can I take her home?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

They give Kate crutches and we get her checked out of the hospital. She has a hard time fitting into the back of the Saab with the cast. I try to talk to her on the way home, but she’s not ready.

When we pull up to the house, she won’t let me help her, says she has to learn to get around by herself. She pushes herself out of the car. I put an arm around her, but she shrugs it off and manages to hobble inside. Because of the cast, she can’t negotiate the couch and starts to tip over. I scoop her up and lay her down, take off her shoe.

She starts to cry. “I fell. I took a steep back trail down the mountain, full of rocks and trees, and I hit an ice patch and I fucking fell.”

This has to be traumatic for her. A reminder of how she shattered her hip as a teenager and had her dreams of becoming an alpine ski champion destroyed. I sit on the floor beside her so I can stroke her hair while I listen.

“I went ass over end and barreled into a big rock and broke my leg and I couldn’t move and I was afraid I killed the baby and I lay there for forty-five minutes before another skier came by and another thirty before they came with a snowmobile and got me.”

I try to hold her hand, but she shakes it free.

“And I got to the hospital and the nurses wouldn’t speak English to me and I didn’t know what was happening or if the baby was alive, and while they examined me they shoved me around like I’m an animal. And then I found out there are two babies.”

“Kate, they probably just don’t speak English.” In truth, they probably just deal with everybody that way. Sometimes Finns are like that.

“They shouldn’t have treated me that way.”

“You’re right, they shouldn’t have, but aren’t you happy about having twins?”

“Of course I am, but that’s not the point.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and tears of frustration slide down her cheeks.

“Damn it.” She slams the glass top of the coffee table with her fist. “Damn it.” She hits it again. The next time she screams. “Goddamn it!” Pound. “God fucking damn it!” Pound.

“Stop it Kate-that’s dangerous.”

Now she’s yelling for all she’s worth. “And now I can’t go skiing!” Pound. “And I can’t go to work!” Pound.

“Stop it Kate.”

“And I can’t speak Finnish!” Pound.

I don’t want to manhandle her, but I don’t want her to hurt herself, so I’m considering it. “Kate, stop it, goddamn it.”

She stops and bursts into tears. “I’m sorry Kari. I’m just so frustrated. I’m helpless and trapped in this house.”

With both hands, she lifts her broken leg up to rest it on the coffee table. She drops it too hard, and the cast shatters the glass tabletop. Glass flies. The weight of the cast going through the table makes her pitch forward onto the floor. She breaks her fall by jamming her right hand into the broken glass on the rug. When she holds it up in front of her, blood streams out of it down her arm.

I rip my white shirt down the front. I whip it off and wrap it tight around her hand, then take her in my arms. She presses her face into my shoulder. Her chest heaves and tears explode out of her in big racking sobs. We stay that way for a few minutes until she calms down. Blood has soaked through my shirt and drips on the rug.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” she says. She starts sobbing again.

I unwrap her hand. Some glass shards are stuck in it. She has about a dozen puncture wounds, but none of them need stitches. I get antiseptic, tweezers and bandages from the bathroom. She winces as I pick out the glass, but she doesn’t cry anymore.

I bind up her hand. “It’s going to be okay,” I say. “A couple weeks at home, then you can go back to work. In a few weeks, the cast comes off. A couple months after the babies are born, you’ll be back on the slopes.”

“But I can’t do anything. I can’t work, can’t take care of the house, can’t shop.”

“We’ll work it out. I’ll get somebody to help you.”

Before long, she passes out from exhaustion. I call a neighbor, wake her up, explain things and ask her to check on Kate in the morning. I clean up the glass and blood, rearrange the living room, then take our bed apart and bring it downstairs. Even the buzz of the electric screwdriver doesn’t wake her when I put the bed back together. We have a small bathroom next to the foyer, so at least she won’t have to worry about the stairs now.

The clock reads two A.M. I won’t get much rest again. I pick her up, put her in bed and crawl in beside her. Kate’s eyes open. “What happened with your murder investigation?” she asks.

“The case broke.”

“Who did it?”

It’s late, I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to upset her. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” I say.