Authors: Jarkko Sipila
“Sounds good.”
“One more thing,” said Gonzales. “You know a guy named Eero Salmela?”
An oncoming car had its high-beams on and Juha flashed his brights back. “Why?”
“A friend asked me to check on him.”
“Can I ask what friend?”
“No. Obviously you know the guy.”
“Sure… I know him. I actually just heard something a little disturbing about him.”
“What?” Gonzales asked eagerly.
Juha pictured Salmela’s face. There was something pitiable about the guy, especially after his last prison term. The blow to his head had been another to his IQ. But Juha still remembered how, when he was in the depths of his heroin addiction, Salmela had treated him like trash. And now the asshole had squealed to Suhonen about the amphetamine shipment. He deserved to eat shit for it.
“Kind of a touchy subject,” said Juha. “But according to my info, Salmela’s been in touch with the police.”
“Dammit,” Gonzales hissed. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Not just gossip?”
“No. It’s for sure. With a Helsinki cop named Suhonen.”
Gonzales thanked him. “You’ll be paid well for this. This is important info.”
Juha slipped the phone back into the breast pocket of his green jacket. Tough luck for Salmela, but he’d been asking for it. Just like Suhonen.
* * *
The room was dark, and the display on the cell phone lit up before it rang.
Lying on the bed beneath the covers, Suhonen slowly became aware of the ringing. As he awoke, he wasn’t sure whether he had been sleeping for a while, or had just dozed off. Then, realizing the noise was the ringer of his number-two phone, he groped for the lamp and snatched the phone off the nightstand. He glanced at the clock on the display: 1:37 A.M.
“What’s the matter?” he answered, having seen the caller already.
“Did I wake you up?” asked Eero Salmela.
Suhonen felt like cussing him out, but only managed to repeat, “What’s the matter?”
“Actually… It’s nothing, but…”
“But what?”
“I have a bad feeling about this gig.”
He sounded relatively sober. “How so? Something happen?”
Suhonen sat up in bed.
“Just nervous. I can’t sleep.”
Shit, watch a skin flick and fall asleep to that, thought Suhonen, but he bit his tongue.
“That’s normal. I’ve been nervous too.”
“I’m pretty much convinced they’re gonna see right through me tomorrow.”
“They won’t know a thing. You’ve already been there a couple of days—you’re like a piece of furniture.”
Salmela laughed. “Speaking of furniture. Did you know they brought a headstone in there?”
“A headstone?”
“A big slab of granite with a bunch of names on it.”
“Uuhh. What names?”
“Pretty sure they were dead gangsters, but I didn’t want to stare. Jyrkkä, Kahma and Korpela were on there. Tomorrow I can dust it and look closer.”
Suhonen remembered the names well. All three were Skulls who had been killed in firefights with the police.
“Those are gangsters. No need to worry about it,” said Suhonen, though he wondered why they had a headstone at the house.
“But what the hell is with the gravestone?”
“They want a memorial for their dead and it suits their sense of humor.”
“I’m not sure I wanna know what they come up with next.”
“Listen, your case is in good hands at the NBI. You’re in no danger. Tomorrow, just do the same thing you’ve been doing, and things will take care of themselves. This is routine stuff.”
“That so?”
“Yes, of course. I think I know what kind of info these agents want—you don’t need to rush.”
Salmela paused briefly. “I’d rather be working with you. That dry-ass suit with the NBI scares me. He doesn’t know a thing about this stuff.”
“Yes, he does,” said Suhonen, surprised at his own impulse to defend Aalto. But assuring Salmela was important for the success of the operation. “They’re professionals. Just do as they say.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“This is your chance to get out of your mess. Take care of your job and the NBI will take care of you. Everything will go just fine,” said Suhonen. “Catch a few hours of shuteye. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Promise?”
Suhonen didn’t really know what he was promising, but answered nevertheless, “Of course.”
MONDAY,
OCTOBER 26
CHAPTER 19
MONDAY, 9:15 A.M.
SKULLS’ COMPOUND, HELSINKI
Salmela dumped the contents of an ashtray into a plastic wastebasket. He considered whether he should sneak the butts out, as the NBI agents had instructed, but recalled Suhonen’s advice and decided against it.
Salmela’s gait was calm, much like it had been in prison. There, it had been best to blend in with the masses so as not to attract attention. The zipper on his sweater was pulled all the way up and he wore a pair of jeans. Standing in the middle of the bar room, he glanced around, but nobody seemed to pay him any attention.
The janitor went from one table to another, gathering ashes. There were less butts than yesterday, and no doobies, at least not yet.
In five minutes, the job was done. Next, he decided to wipe the tables. He grabbed a rag from the bar, rinsed it under the tap and began wiping the nearest table.
His eyes returned occasionally to the headstone behind the bar. The granite slab gave him goose bumps.
The bull-like Roge and the goateed Osku stepped out of the office and closed the door behind them. They didn’t even look at Salmela.
“Where’d he say the car was?” asked Roge as they walked toward the stairs.
“Weren’t you listening? The Käpylä ball fields. In the gravel parking lot on the north end.”
“And what time we gotta pick it up?”
“Three!” You better pay attention or Larsson is gonna whack you.”
Roge’s expression was serious. “I remember the dope is in a beige Opel.”
“Betcha it’ll have some fuzzy dice,” said Osku.
“You drive it outta there, then,” said Roge as they reached the stairs.
Osku shook his head and Salmela heard them settle the matter with a game of “key, file, and bars”. The file wins over bars, but loses to the key. And the key doesn’t work on bars.
Salmela moved on to the next table and wondered what car the men were referring to. He repeated it in his head: a beige Opel with dope on the north end of the Käpylä ball fields at three.
He looked at the clock: 9:30. Cleaning would take another couple of hours. After that he could call.
* * *
Suhonen was sitting at his workstation studying a spreadsheet of Vesa Karjalainen’s phone records. He didn’t know whether the junkie had had any other phones—he had found out about this one from the man’s common-law widow.
The date, time, cell tower, and of course, the callers’ and recipients’ phone numbers were in columns on the spreadsheet. On suspicion of drug-trafficking, the District Court had allowed Takamäki’s team access to all of Karjalainen’s phone records from October 15 until October 25. The data began a week before Karjalainen had left for Tallinn. The cut-off date, as requested, had been yesterday, but the last recorded call was on the day of his death.
Suhonen was no fan of fiddling with computers, but he couldn’t really ask the other detectives to help. They had plenty of their own cases. Had it been a homicide, he would have just gotten someone else to do it. Joutsamo was good with computers, but even Suhonen knew the basics of spreadsheets. If he needed to create a graph, though, he’d have to ask for help.
Suhonen quickly scanned the data. Initially, there had been about ten calls a day, many of them to his common-law wife’s phone.
Apparently, Karjalainen hadn’t brought his phone to Estonia, since the data had a one-day hole on the date that Suhonen had seen him at the harbor. After that, the calls resumed, as before, at a rate of about ten per day.
Suhonen had checked a few of the numbers in the police database, but they were all pre-paid cards, which were inherently anonymous.
The last call on the list had been placed three days ago, on the day of Karjalainen’s death. The time was 9:20 A.M. and the call was fielded by a cell tower in northern Helsinki. The recipient had been downtown, which didn’t help him identify the owner of the phone.
Suhonen suspected that this just might be one of Juha Saarnikangas’ numbers, though it wasn’t one that he knew about. Maybe Karjalainen had called the ex-junkie to say he was running late for the meeting. Saarnikangas had called about the death a little after ten.
Suhonen found four more calls between the same two phones. Of those, one was dated before the trip to Estonia, and three after. All of them, with the exception of the last, were initiated by the phone that Suhonen suspected was Saarnikangas’.