Fatal Headwind (23 page)

We continued tacking between Pentala Island and Stora Herrö Island. Mikke turned the helm over to me again and went to get the jib from the cabin for the return trip. We sailed in silence for about ten minutes, drinking in the colors the fall weather had splattered across the shore. The deep red and wild yellow of the trees stood in sharp relief with dark clouds towering in the western sky behind, making the whole scene somehow unreal. Finally Mikke scrambled to the bow to untie the spinnaker. I adjusted the helm and trimmed the mainsail according to his instructions. He gave his commands in a calm, firm voice anyone in police-command school could take a lesson from. The
Leanda
’s rhythm was sharper now but she still moved softly, taking the occasional taller waves so easily that I no longer doubted her ocean worthiness. Mikke stuffed the spinnaker into a bow hatch and started rigging the jib.

“Turn a little more into the wind! Good! You’ve spent a lot of time on the water, haven’t you?”

I wasn’t really much of a sailor, so the compliment meant a lot. Mikke raised the jib and let it flap, then we turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

“And now it’s just back to the marina,” he said in a resigned tone as he flopped back down on a bench. “Too bad we can’t take more trips like this. You’re a good deckhand.”

“Madeira sounds awfully fun,” I said with a laugh, happy that the wind had already turned my cheeks red.

“Yes, it does. Maybe I would have run away if you hadn’t come on this outing with me. What would have happened then?”

“I would have sent the Coast Guard after you. And if you keep saying things like that, I’ll confiscate your passport.”

“And what if you can’t solve Juha’s murder? Do you intend to keep me here all winter?”

“Oh, we’ll solve it,” I said with as much self-assurance as I ever dared. I needed to pee, so I headed into the cabin. Inside the rocking was unpleasant, but nothing on the shelves had budged. Before our departure Mikke had stowed his laptop and put the books back away. The thought of living for six months in a ten-meter boat was at once fascinating and horrifying. You definitely wouldn’t drag anything unnecessary along with you. The boat began swaying more angrily, so I went back on deck.

“Let’s go around Mies Island and in past Iso Vasikka Island. That’ll be easier with this wind. Will you trim the jib a bit?”

When I yanked the rope, I felt the jerk all the way in my back muscles.

“After Mies Island we can really tack. Are you up to it, or should we use the motor?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” I replied, even though it was already late and nothing had come of this ridiculous sailing outing other than my increasingly confused heart and the growing feeling that Mikke Sjöberg was hiding something. But how was I going to wring it out of him? The only person I couldn’t imagine Mikke protecting was Tapio Holma, and Holma wasn’t even in the picture when Harri died.

Despite the gusting wind, hauling the ropes made me break out in a sweat. I looked at the villas on the islands and at the Temple of Neptune Antti and I had cross-country skied to the previous winter. Then my policewoman’s eye noticed something strange.

“Do you have binoculars onboard?”

“In the cabin.”

“Grab them, quick!”

Without a question Mikke shoved the rudder into my hands and jumped down the stairs. Precious seconds passed before I could get the binoculars adjusted to my eyes, but looking through them confirmed my observation.

A body was floating in the water off the southeast corner of Iso Vasikka Island.

“Strike the sails! Look!” I pushed the binoculars at Mikke, who looked and then went pale. He thrust the rudder at me again and moved forward to lower the jib while I used my other hand to dial the station to request a boat patrol.

Mikke took the mainsail down too and started the motor. Even though his movements were practiced, I noticed his lips trembling.

“Check the sonar. Our draft is one-point-six. Damn it. I wish we had the dinghy!”

We found an appropriate landing spot about fifty feet from the body. I jumped ashore before realizing that I wouldn’t be able to get to the body floating on its stomach in the reeds without getting my feet wet.

“Do you have rubber boots?”

“Yes, size forty-four.”

“Good. They’ll go higher on me. Throw them here!” I said, tying the boat to a pine tree.

“They’re way too big for you. What if I go . . .”

“No! Stay in the boat.”

Mikke looked sick enough that I hoped the patrol boat would get here in record time. Civilians were the last thing you wanted around when you found a body.

I pulled the boots over my walking shoes so they would be more stable. Then I started wading through the rocks and got a grip on the body’s jacket. I hauled the corpse far enough up the shore that the waves wouldn’t carry it away. There was nothing more I could do for now.

“Can I help somehow?” Mikke yelled.

“Just stay there. Do you have any rubber gloves?” Mikke shook his head. I climbed back up the shore and called our unit, where I reached Koivu.

“What was the description of that missing high school kid?”

“One hundred and seventy-nine centimeters, slender build. Straight dark hair, shoulder length, brown eyes. Tattoos . . .”

“What was he wearing when he disappeared?”

“Brown corduroy jacket and green cotton pants, Adidas running shoes and—”

“That’s enough. He’s floating right here. Off Iso Vasikka Island.”

The patrol boat arrived, along with the forensic photographer. Once he had taken his pictures, we donned our protective gear, lifted the body out of the water, and turned it over. I had spent some time trying to remember the picture I had seen of Arttu Aaltonen, and when I saw his drowned young face, I was sure I recognized it. Patting down the body, I found a wallet in his jacket pocket. The pimpled face of a boy stared back from his laminated driver’s license. Arttu Henrikki Aaltonen, born October 21, 1979.

“He disappeared Friday night. Suspected suicide,” I explained to the patrol officers. I couldn’t detect anything that indicated foul play, but the autopsy would be more definitive.

Mikke had disappeared from the deck. When I climbed back aboard to return the rubber boots, I found him lying down in the fore cabin staring through a hatch at the sky. There was still no color in his face.

“You can head back to the marina. I’m going in the police boat. Thanks for the outing,” I said.

Mikke sat up and took the rubber boots.

“How do you get used to that?” he asked hopelessly. “Don’t the dead haunt your dreams?”

“Sometimes. But if you want to do this job, you have to get used to it, or at least cope with it. You aren’t a professional, and this was your second body in less than two weeks. Remember that you don’t have to shoulder this experience alone.”

“He was so young. Was it murder?”

“Probably suicide,” I said, even though I shouldn’t have said anything about the case.

Mikke groaned. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he rested his cheek on my arm. I stroked his hair, and suddenly he squeezed me so tight it hurt. We held each other until I heard the photographer shouting for me. He wanted more instructions.

“I have to go. Do you want me to untie the rope?” I asked. Mikke nodded and followed me up on deck.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then I saw the ambulance boat coming around the island and went to meet it. From the rocks I watched as Mikke started the motor and began chugging slowly along the channel toward the marina. As he rounded the island, he turned to glance back, but when I waved, he didn’t respond.

12

Delivering the bad news to Arttu Aaltonen’s parents fell to Puustjärvi and me. Even though I forced myself to approach it just as work, the parents’ grief was infectious. Their son had threatened to kill himself before, and the mother had tried in vain to get him to see a psychologist. In the next morning’s paper, there was a brief report that a missing young man had been found dead, and its simple matter-of-fact tone left me feeling utterly empty.

While I’d been worried Puupponen was going be out sick, on Tuesday morning it was Lehtovuori who called in to say that he had pneumonia and a fever of 102. The doctor had ordered three days of sick leave. I would have to assign another officer to investigate the mystery of the missing mushroomer with Wang.

“Take care of yourself,” I said, trying to conceal my irritation. Koivu and I were both going to be tied up all afternoon at the National Bureau of Investigation dealing with Ström’s mess. I had planned for someone else to handle Riikka Merivaara’s interview, but there wasn’t anyone other than me.

Kantelinen’s report on the Merivaara Nautical financial situation had finally appeared on my desk. I quickly flipped through it before the morning meeting. The company’s finances were stable, and they hadn’t needed to make any large investments in recent years. The balance sheet looked good. The company board consisted only of Juha and Anne Merivaara, the CFO Heikki Halonen, and Marcus Enckell, who, based on his name, I suspected must be related to Juha Merivaara’s late mother. The only thing Kantelinen had noted with a question mark was the 12 percent of Merivaara Nautical stock owned by Mare Nostrum. No information about that organization’s ownership appeared in the Merivaara Nautical reports or in the Trade Register. The trail ended at a post-office box on Guernsey Island.

Tax evasion was the first thing that came to mind, so I dialed Kantelinen’s number to ask his opinion, but he wasn’t available. I set off to the morning meeting in a bad mood, which wasn’t helped at all by Koivu and Wang whispering like two infatuated eighth graders. I assigned Lähde to partner with Wang on the missing person case mostly because Koivu had to come with me to the NBI in the afternoon, and I needed someone to interview Riikka Merivaara with me.

“How did you happen to be out there to find Aaltonen’s body? Were you out at the lighthouse again?” Lähde asked suddenly.

“No. It was a complete coincidence,” I said abruptly and tried to move on to the next topic.

“So you weren’t out with a patrol just to look for the kid?” Lähde continued stubbornly.

“No. I was working the Merivaara case.” The fact that Lähde’s questions embarrassed me was irritating. “One of our main lines of investigation on that case is going to be financial. Everything looks aboveboard on the surface, but there is something fishy about one of the shareholders. Koivu and Puustjärvi are going to continue interviewing witnesses with me. Lähde, you can track down all of the company board members. We’ll meet up again as soon as Kantelinen sees fit to grace us with his presence. Koivu, ten thirty in Interrogation Room 2.”

I almost fled the room. I wanted to be alone for a few seconds, behind closed doors. I had turned my phone off during the meeting, and now the voice mail told me I had six new messages, four of which were from home. Antti must have some emergency.

“Hi,” he answered, out of breath. In the background I could hear Iida screaming. “I just called because I couldn’t find the car keys. Iida banged her eye on the edge of the piano and we need to go to the clinic.”

“Oh God! Are you going to be OK?” I asked in a panic, even though of course Antti would be fine. Still the bad-mother complex reared its head: I should have dropped my work and rushed to the clinic to comfort my poor wounded child. But I couldn’t do that.

“Call me when you know more. I’ll leave my phone on,” I said. Antti wanted to end the call so he could get moving.

One of the other calls was from the Security Intelligence Service, which I returned solely to get the images of Iida screaming from her car seat with a swollen eye out of my mind. That the SIS wanted to talk about Jiri Merivaara was no surprise. They had started thinking about the same thing I had: Could the son have killed his father as some sort of strange initiation ritual to ensure him a prominent place in Animal Revolution? The SIS didn’t consider the theory very likely either, but it was possible, and they also thought it was quite a coincidence that Harri Immonen, another AR member, had died exactly one year earlier in exactly the same place as Jiri Merivaara’s father. We argued about how to interrogate Jiri about Harri. Fortunately I was able to cut the argument short, because I had to go interview Riikka Merivaara.

Koivu waited in the conference room, looking sullen.

“The lab called. The glass in the flashlight isn’t the same as the glass they found in Juha Merivaara’s head, and the injury doesn’t match up either. The flashlight isn’t the murder weapon.”

I sighed. “Of course it isn’t. Anything else?”

“The fingerprint from the collar of Juha Merivaara’s coat is Anne Merivaara’s. They also found fibers from Mikke Sjöberg’s wool sweater, but those could have come from when he was pulling the body ashore.”

“Crap,” I said in frustration. Nothing seemed to be going anywhere.

“Bad mood today?” Koivu said, more as a statement than a question as we reached the stairs.

“I don’t imagine you’re thrilled about going to the NBI later today either.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? We’re getting rid of Ström. The guys and I spent all last winter praying that you wouldn’t take your full maternity leave or have another kid. Anu was probably praying the hardest, even though she’d never worked with you.”

“Is she a Christian?”

“Who?” Koivu’s face was confused, then he caught on. “Oh, Anu. Actually, I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that.”

“A Buddhist wedding could be really interesting, or is her family Taoist, since they’re originally from China?”

“Maria!” Koivu tried to look resentful. “Anu is pretty interesting, though. You have this culture that tells women to keep quiet, but then she’s a cop . . .” He stopped talking when we saw Tapio Holma and Riikka Merivaara waiting in the hall.

Holma had escorted Riikka here. Maybe he thought a police station was too oppressive a place for Riikka. Or had he come to keep an eye on Riikka for some other reason?

“Wait in the hall or go have a coffee,” I told Holma. “This is going to take at least an hour.”

“Can’t Tapio come with me?” Riikka asked, wringing her hands like a soprano singing a difficult aria might.

“Riikka has the right to have someone with her to support her during her interview,” Holma argued.

“Not someone suspected of the same crime,” I said firmly, and Holma didn’t object. He sat down in the hall to wait while we went into Interrogation Room 2.

As she answered the initial routine questions, Riikka was stiff and kept swallowing, as if being interrogated by the police was just the most awful thing. I imagine it would be difficult for a girl used to such a mellow life, but this wasn’t even the first time. We retraced the events on Rödskär Island, confirming my belief that Riikka couldn’t have killed her father. Her tall, slender frame seemed strong enough to produce the physical power, but she definitely lacked the mental strength to conceal an act like this.

“Mom is working like a crazy person. She says Dad would have wanted it that way. They have to get the fall orders out.”

“How well do you know the company’s business? Who owns the shareholding company Mare Nostrum?”

Riikka shrugged. She didn’t know and barely even recognized the name. Business had never interested her. She only wanted to sing.

“Now you’re going to inherit half of your father’s shares, though. I think you’re going to have to care. Weren’t you the one who got your father excited about environmentalism and changing the company’s business concept?”

For some reason Riikka blushed.

“No, it wasn’t like that. There was never any way to get Dad excited about anything unless he decided to be excited. Mom says my vegetarianism and stuff opened her eyes and made her see things in a different way, but Dad . . . his motto was always, ‘Just do well in school and leave saving the world to us adults,’” Riikka said, imitating her father.

“How did your father react to the attempted rape this spring?”

“Do I have to talk about that? I wish I could forget the whole thing,” Riikka said, but I couldn’t leave it alone. “Of course Dad was furious. He wanted to go find the guys and beat them up. And he yelled at me for getting in their car instead of taking a taxi. It was typical Dad. That wasn’t the first time he said women were to blame when things like that happened to them.” Riikka’s lips trembled. “I feel so empty now that he’s gone. He was so big and loud and always knew everything . . .” Riikka fished a handkerchief out of her bag.

“Even though, Dad was never interested in me. Sometimes he made fun of me because I didn’t have a boyfriend. He said no guy was going to want a girl who dressed like his aunt and knew what a coloratura was. Guys were only going to go for a classical artist if she posed in
Playboy
and played rock violin like Linda Brava. As if it were still a father’s responsibility to marry off his daughter!”

My phone rang, and I answered because Antti’s number came up. Apologizing to Riikka, I stepped outside where Holma was sitting, still looking as if he was supposed to be protecting Riikka from the big bad policemen.

“She needed three stitches in her eyebrow, and they had to sedate her. Her eye is fine, though.”

“Thank goodness! How did Iida manage to hit her head like that?” It wasn’t until I said it that I realized how accusatory my tone sounded.

“I was playing the piano and she was playing with a ball. She just slipped somehow and hit the corner of the piano.”

“We’ll have to put some padding on that. Is she sleeping now?”

“She’s in recovery. We’re at the hospital. The clinic sent us over here. I should go so Iida doesn’t get scared if she wakes up. Can you come home at all early today?”

“I’ll try, but I have to go to NBI headquarters this afternoon. I’m in the middle of an interview right now too.”

It took me a while before I could calm down, even though I wasn’t the hysterical type. Sometimes I felt like a monster, leaving Iida screaming in her crib instead of sitting with her until she fell asleep. I wasn’t worried about her choking on cat hair, and I hadn’t taught her to be afraid of wasps. The helmet my sister Helena had given us for protecting her head while she learned to sit and walk had gone unused too.

“Did your father ever have any visitors you didn’t know while you were on Rödskär this summer?” I heard Koivu asking Riikka as I came back into the interrogation room.

“Yes, there were plenty of people in sailboats over the summer, but they weren’t Dad’s friends usually,” Riikka answered after a moment’s thought. “Most people ended up there by accident. I guess there were some old business acquaintances. I wasn’t on the island the whole time either, since I was studying for exams in the city, and I took a couple of singing classes. Ask my mom.”

Riikka threw back her hair, which shone like ebony. Her black polo shirt, black skirt, and thick black tights made her look even more angular and long-limbed, and suddenly I realized how much she reminded me of Mikke.

“How did your mother react to Jiri’s arrest?”

Turning to me, Riikka almost laughed.

“What do you think? I don’t understand how Mom is coping with all of this. Thank God Mikke promised to handle the funeral arrangements, and Seija keeps trying to help even when we don’t want her to. But those people in that meatpacking plant could have died! Jiri claims he didn’t know the fire would be dangerous, but I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Have you had any involvement with Animal Revolution?”

“I went to a couple of antifur rallies last year, and that big algae bloom protest that a lot of the environmental groups participated in. I don’t approve of everything AR does, though.”

Koivu asked another question about the night of Juha Merivaara’s death, presumably hoping to find some sort of contradiction in Riikka’s replies. But it was to no avail. She assured us that she and Holma had slept straight through the night.