Darling (2 page)

Tall, square mirror tiles divided the left wall in half, and he noticed that one of the squares was broken. He carefully opened the door on the right to what he correctly assumed was the bathroom. It was empty.

Partio continued along the mirrored wall to the end of the hall. Past the bathroom, the door leading to a bedroom was
cracked. Partio told Nieminen to check it out.

“Anybody here? Police!” Partio yelled again. Finding someone
passed out on the sofa wouldn’t be a first.

On the rig
ht was the living room. A couch set against the wall was facing a TV, and a low coffee table was between them. Partio noticed a pool of blood on the floor. He walked closer, keeping to the wall, and saw a pair of feet. It didn’t seem like this call would have a happy ending—there was a lot of blood. He needed to check the victim without destroying any evidence. Walking along the wall, he stopped ten feet short of the body. A young woman, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, was lying on her back. Partio’s eyes fixed on her throat; it was slashed, leaving her head barely attached.

Partio thought he had seen it all in his line of work, but this was almost too much. He swallowed hard.

“There’s a body over here,” he told Nieminen. “Don’t touch anything.”

Partio glanced at his young, baby-faced colleague and watched him slowly push the bedroom door open with a pen.
Nicely done, he thought.

It
was critical to keep from touching anything so the Forensics team could extract as much uncontaminated evidence as possible. Nonetheless, Partio and Nieminen had to check the rest of the apartment in case the perpetrator was still there. In the kitchen, Partio half expected to see a man who had committed suicide.

The officer’s eyes stayed fixed on the woman. If he had suspected that she might still be alive, he would
have acted to save her life, not caring about preserving evidence. But there was no doubt she was dead: her gray shirt had dark-red stains on it, and had folded over a bit to reveal some of her abdomen. Her blonde hair was covered in blood.

Partio
noticed three teddy bears on the couch. A “mother” bear held a small, black teddy bear with a bow on its ear in her lap, while a “father” bear was propped up to hold hands with the “mother.” Above the couch was an unframed poster: the setting sun over a beach with palm trees. Partio wondered if that was what the woman had dreamed about. He sighed, and imagined that a beach vacation was exactly what he needed.

“Nobody in the bedroom,” Nieminen said.

“Okay,” Partio barked. “Go back to the front door and don’t touch anything.”

“Got it,” his colleague said, frustrated by Partio’s orders.

Partio walked from the couch to the other side of the room, staying close to the TV to preserve any possible footprints. The door to the balcony was in front of him. He peered out between the curtains and saw only a pile of junk on the balcony floor. It was still sleeting.

He glanced at the woman again. She looked grotesque amidst the partially dried blood.
Her heart, in panic, had pumped out a lot of blood onto the floor, so Partio concluded that she had been alive for some time after the slashing. Otherwise the apartment looked clean and undisturbed. The coffee table still had a bottle of wine and two glasses. He could see no signs of struggle—no items strewn about, no upturned furniture, nothing broken.

Partio peeked around the corner into the kitchen and saw a counter, a refrigerator, and a small white table with two wooden chairs. He noticed a
pungent smell and saw that the coffeemaker was on. The coffeepot was half full, and two empty cups sat on the table. Did someone have coffee here before the bloodbath? It definitely seemed like the killer and the victim knew each other. Partio touched nothing and left the coffeemaker on.

He pulled his phone o
ut of his pocket and called Dispatch. On-duty lieutenant Helmikoski answered quickly.

“Patrol 281,” the sergeant said grimly. “The
call at Nӓyttelijӓ Street in North Haaga.”

“What about it?”
Helmikoski asked tersely. Partio wondered if he was interrupting the guy’s coffee break. Instinctively, he glanced at the coffeemaker again.

“We’ll need the guys from Violent Crimes over here. There’s a body.”

“Homicide or natural cause?” Dispatch asked.

“Homicide.”

“Is it fresh?” Helmikoski asked calmly.

“I’d say it’s from this morning. A young woman’s throat was slashed from ear to ear.”

“Shit. Any sign of the killer?”

“No, nobody’s here.”

“Alright, don’t touch anything. I’ll alert Homicide. I think Takamäki’s crew is on duty; they like this kind of thing.”

“Well, let them like it, I don’t,” Partio said and hung up. He pulled out a pad of paper and
a pen and drew a sketch of the crime scene and the position of the corpse. It wasn’t a great picture, but it provided the basic facts. He always drew a sketch in homicide cases, just in case the body got moved before VCU or Forensics arrived. Of course there was no risk of that this time.

Partio returned to the hallway, avoiding the blood-stained rug. He stopped to examine it and could see a couple of small
dried-up drops of blood. He wondered if they belonged to the victim or the murderer. Sometimes killers accidentally cut themselves in the process of stabbing or slashing their victims. But it wasn’t his job; the homicide detectives would take care of it. The sergeant’s task list was simple: to do a preliminary check of the crime scene and then secure the premises to make sure no one touches anything.

The sergeant pulled his notepad back out of his pocket and glanced at his
watch. He wrote down the time: 11:33 A.M. He also wrote down his other observations, including the coffeemaker. He knew the guys from VCU would ask.

Next Partio would find the person who
called the police. Nieminen could guard the door.

* * *

Detective Mikko Kulta was driving an unmarked Volkswagen Golf, heading north on Nӓyttelijӓ Street. It was a gray Wednesday in December, and the wipers were lazily clearing the sleet off the windshield. A couple of inches of slushy snow covered the asphalt. The start of this winter didn’t seem to promise the idyllic snow banks seen on postcards—more like the typical Helsinki weather of 32 degrees and wet shoes.

The
car’s heater didn’t work properly, and the windshield kept fogging up. The Golf was a little worse for the wear anyway. The tires crunched against the pavement. A couple of Coke cans and a crushed Styrofoam coffee cup rolled on the floor in the foot well of the passenger seat. The undercover unit had used the car the night before to cover the President’s Independence Day Ball. Apparently guys called in from out of town had used it; they hadn’t even bothered picking up the trash. The smell of farmer’s sweat confirmed the husky blond detective’s suspicion.

The drive from
the station at Pasila to the crime scene took only five minutes. The North Haaga neighborhood sat at the intersection of the Hämeenlinna Freeway and the Ring One Beltway. Most of the box-like structures built in the 1950s had a stucco or brick finish.

Sergeant Anna Joutsamo sat next to Kulta. She
was about ten years his senior, and he had noticed a few wrinkles appear on her face. He wasn’t sure if they were due to her age or profession.

The two didn’t
talk much, but not because they didn’t get along; they were both focusing on the job at hand. The preliminary report didn’t give them much to go on. Twenty-six-year-old Laura Vatanen had been murdered in cold blood in her apartment. She was unmarried, had no children, and no criminal record.

Despite the fact that there was no husband, the
ir starting point was clear: in the majority of cases with a female victim, the perpetrator could be found among family or friends. Clues for possible boyfriends might be in the woman’s cell phone records, email, or calendar. Her whereabouts the night before would be investigated. Maybe she had met someone at a bar.

Kulta drove past a strip mall at the corner of
Nӓyttelijӓ Street and Ida Ahlberg Street. A blue city bus pulled into a stop right in front of them, blocking the lane. Kulta leaned forward to wipe condensation off the windshield and waited for the bus to pull out. It slowly chugged up the slight hill and veered to the left.

“
We’re headed to one of the city-owned public housing buildings, right?” Kulta asked.

“Yu
p,” Joutsamo replied. “Not the most peaceful neighborhood.”

Joutsamo lived in a studio apartment in
Töölö, an upscale neighborhood in the city. She knew that a few months ago Kulta had moved to Kannelmӓki, a mile north of here.

“So, is your apartment city
owned?” she asked.

“Actually
no, privately owned. My girlfriend thought it’d be nice to get some uninterrupted sleep and not have to listen to the brawls from the bar across the street. Other than that, our old place was nice…so close to the local pub.”

“So you
r new place is near that old strip mall?”

“Just a
few hundred feet away. No shortage of drunks in Kannelmӓki, either.”

Joutsamo
seized on Kulta’s mention of a girlfriend. “You two planning on getting hitched?”

Caught off guard,
Kulta’s head snapped right to look at his colleague. Joutsamo had a hard-line approach that often showed on her face; she didn’t talk about her own life and usually didn’t pry into others’ affairs, either. Anna went to the homicide unit’s parties and happy hours, but was always a little reserved.

“Why you askin
g?”

“No reason, just wondering.”

As far as Kulta knew, Joutsamo lived alone. He turned his eyes back on the road. The bus was inching along slowly and Kulta thought about digging the siren out of the glove box.

“I d
on’t know. But I’ll send you an invite if it comes to that.”

Kulta slowed the car down at the first seven-story brick building.
Behind it towered two more buildings, and beyond them spread a thicket of woods. Two or three smaller structures were on the other side of the street.

“It’s the middle one,” Joutsamo said.

Kulta drove slowly past the first building and turned right down the driveway.

A few cars sat in the parking lot. One of them, a rusty old Opel Kadett without a license plate
, looked like it would fall apart at the turn of the ignition. Behind the parking lot was a covered dumpster, into which a teenage girl was tossing a trash bag.

Kulta spotted a blue-and-white police Ford Mondeo by the fr
ont door and pulled into a parking space. He looked around, but couldn’t see a Forensics van. In a routine cause-of-death investigation, Kulta and Joutsamo would’ve handled it on their own; but since this was an obvious homicide, Kulta had called in the Forensics team. Kannas, head of Forensics, had told him that his investigators would be there shortly.

Grabbing their
kits, the pair got out of the car and half ran through the slush to the door. A rolled-up newspaper was wedged between the door and the jamb to keep the door from locking, so they didn’t need a code or a key. Kulta closed the door carefully, leaving the newspaper in place.

“Did you know that it’s a myth that men engage in more domestic violence than women?” Kulta asked Joutsamo in the stairwell.

“Is that right?”

“In the 1980s men
still owned the majority, but these days almost half of the perpetrators are women,” Kulta continued.

“And where did you get this information?” Joutsamo asked.

“From Takamäki.”

“Well, then it must be true.”

The stairwell smelled of cleansers, but looked dirty and shabby. The walls were all scratched up and dented from furniture being carried in and out during the frequent moves. Two baby strollers were corralled at the bottom of the stairs. From the tenant directory on the wall Joutsamo saw that Vatanen’s apartment was on the third floor. She proceeded slowly, looking for things that didn’t belong in the stairwell: blood, paper, trash, clothing, or anything that the killer might have tossed or dropped while leaving the building.

“
Take the elevator,” Joutsamo said to Kulta, continuing to the stairs. She climbed up at a deliberate pace, and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, like a trail of blood leading to one of the other apartments.

Kulta waited
for her upstairs, talking with a uniformed officer. Joutsamo recognized the veteran, Tero Partio.

“That’s the apartment,” Kulta said, though Joutsamo figured as much since another officer was guarding the door.

“You guys got here fast,” Partio said.

“Short drive,” Joutsamo replied.

She saw a fourth man, in overalls, standing on the landing. He was taller than she was, but much shorter than Kulta. It was hard to tell exactly under the blue-and-yellow overalls, but Joutsamo estimated the man to be five foot nine and stocky. His face was stern and angular, and something about him made her take a second look.