Vengeance (9 page)

    
Suhonen said nothing. Just wait until we adopt a law like Estonia’s, where a change in testimony expunges all previous statements. Then Narcotics will be in real trouble, he thought.

    
“Take Toukola with you to the harbor. Technically, he leads your little troop and this is my case. You can sit in on the interrogations with the woman. I assume Takamäki knows about this.”

    
“Yeah,” said Suhonen. “Let’s just hope we find her.”

CHAPTER 6

THURSDAY, 9:45 P.M.

HOTEL KALASTAJATORPPA, HELSINKI

The room was dark. Tapani Larsson lay on his back on the hotel bed, watching the flicker of the television on the white plastered ceiling. Sara was still staring at the blaring TV, but Larsson didn’t hear a sound.

    
In prison, he had had to learn to block out the noise from his ears and mind.

    
He had lain the same way on the bunk in his cell. This one was just softer.

    
The thick walls of the pen had smelled of pain.
That
he hadn’t been able to shut out. Now he smelled the sweet scent of champagne in a half-empty glass on the nightstand.

    
Larsson recalled a line from the film
Deer Hunter
where a Frenchman named Julien remarked, “When a man says no to champagne, he says no to life.” In the film, Julien recruited players for Russian roulette.

    
He had had plenty of time in prison to watch movies.

    
The prison psychologist had wanted to meet with him. Larsson wondered why he had consented. Maybe just for something new. The shrink had asked about his childhood and adolescence. She had been especially interested in his relationship with his parents. Larsson had fed her a lot of crap, but he really hadn’t known what to say about his parents. He remembered them as cold and distant, though he recalled that his dad had slapped him on the ear when he was ten. Some years later, he hit back. But that episode was minor compared to the stories of other inmates.

    
If he was wronged, he always took vengeance—maybe sooner, maybe later, but without question. He saw no alternatives, though he didn’t tell the shrink that.

    
The psychologist had done her homework. She knew Larsson had gone to the Helsinki School of Economics and wondered why he had become a career criminal when he had the opportunity for honorable work.

    
Larsson had ended the conversation then and there, and had asked the guard to escort him back to his cell. Honorable work. What was honorable about raking in five grand a month as the VP of some company? He didn’t want to be like his father. Damned middle-class dreams of a house and car. Larsson was interested in money and power, both of which he obtained through violence.

    
Of course, her next question would have been what it feels like to commit a crime. That was just a stupid question. It didn’t feel like anything. Was it supposed to feel like something? It just happened—nothing special about it. He could have proved it with a few left hooks, but that would just have lengthened his sentence.

    
Larsson had never regretted the choices he had made. His fellow business students had been good customers of his small-time marijuana operation. At its peak, he had earned about twenty grand a month. Larsson had hunted down the guy who had ratted him out to Narcotics. His first stretch in prison lasted a year. After that, Tomi had paid for his betrayal in cash, and received two broken arms as a bonus. Say you fell on your rollerblades, Larsson had barked as he left Tomi groaning on the floor of his apartment.

    
The rat hadn’t dared to go to the cops again.

    
Maybe he should pay another visit to Tomi, just out of principle. Maybe the guy would have a wife, two kids, a house and a nice car. He could repo the car as additional compensation for the old offense. Interest was always accruing. At least it would be fun to see the look on Tomi’s face when he rang the doorbell.

    
Tomi was sound evidence that nobody could be trusted. The guy had bought some weed and got busted soon after. Of course, the chump squealed on the spot. The Skulls were different, though. Trust was sacred within the brotherhood.

    
Larsson laughed. Just look at Niko Andersson. The guy was fat, ugly and stupid. Years ago, when he was standing trial for a bank robbery, the prosecutor had asked him why he had robbed the bank. Niko said simply, “Because that’s where the money was.” The prosecutor had no further questions.

    
Niko would never betray him, nor would any of the Skulls’ men. They wouldn’t dare. Tomorrow he’d see his brothers again.

* * *

The ship’s hull was neon green, with a giant ribbon pattern woven through the middle. It reminded Suhonen of the flames that biker gangs used to decorate their leathers. As it neared the wharf, the dull yellow floodlights of the West Harbor softened the bright paintwork on the ship.

    
The undercover cop had heard from Estonia that the woman had boarded the ship alone. She had been wearing a dark red coat, a skirt and black leather boots.

    
Suhonen and Toukola ducked out of the walkway into a small control room, which was equipped with numerous CCTV monitors that displayed security footage from the passenger gangway. The room was also fitted with tinted glass, through which they could observe the passengers leaving the ship. The control room was situated so that travelers approached straight toward the window, and then curved left to the Customs checkpoint.

    
Toukola was a small forty-year-old man whose quick movements evoked those of a weasel. Suhonen had heard that Toukola played bass in the Narcotics department’s band. The man’s brown hair just touched his shoulders and he was wearing a black track jacket and jeans.

    
Suhonen and Toukola were sitting on two office chairs, observing the monitors. Nothing moved on the screens.

    
The Tallink Star could accommodate 1,900 people, and 450 vehicles on the car deck, but according to the shipping line, only 600 people were on board. That was good news, since it would be easier to pick out the mule in the exit rush. Of course, she might disembark in a car, but that was a risk they had to take.

    
There was a time when finding this woman would’ve been easy. The police would have simply instructed border officials to stop the woman at the passport checkpoint. But the EU’s Schengen Agreement, which removed passport checks when traveling within the EU countries, had wiped out the practice.

    
“We’ve been here in the same room once before,” Toukola began. “Looking for a heroin mule, wasn’t it? That one was an easy case. Remember we nabbed a guy about five-foot-seven, wearing size 15 shoes? Found almost two pounds of smack in them.”

    
Suhonen didn’t respond—he was focused on the monitors. Toomas hadn’t known where the woman had stashed the dope. Four pounds was enough that she wouldn’t be able to swallow the bags. They would probably be hidden in her clothing or taped to her body. That would rule out skinny types in skin-tight clothing, then. Of course, at this time of year everyone wore a coat.

    
“Well, here we go,” Toukola muttered as the first passengers came into view. The ship was moored at the port’s southern end, so the walk to the terminal amounted to several hundred yards. The security cameras showed footage of the entire walk.

    
The first passenger was a man in a suit who nearly ran down the gangway. Suhonen wondered why he was in such a hurry. Maybe to catch a taxi, but where to then?

    
Next was a group of women in their sixties, each of whom had a pull cart filled with ten cases of beer and cider. A few were also carrying six-packs of one-liter vodka bottles. Many Finns happily paid the twenty-euro roundtrip fare in order to buy as much cheap Estonian booze as they could carry.

    
Both Toukola and Suhonen followed the footage with intense focus. People trickled off the boat in sporadic clumps. Several women in red coats appeared, but their ages didn’t match.

    
A man in his thirties wearing an old army jacket caught Toukola’s attention. “You know him?”

    
“Yeah. Karjalainen.”

    
“We should stop him. I busted him once for a couple pounds of hash. Apparently he’s out of jail again.”

    
The man’s gait was a little wobbly. “Too smashed to be a mule,” Suhonen remarked.

    
“You never know—this is just a small-time job. The big loads are trucked in along with legal cargo, unpacked quickly and then stashed somewhere in the sticks. It’s an old trick already, but it still works.”

    
“There,” Suhonen cut in. The woman walking past the camera was wearing a dark red coat, and Suhonen recognized her attractive face from the photo. She walked off the screen shortly.

    
“You sure?” Toukola asked.

    
Suhonen nodded.

    
Toukola picked up his phone and sent word that the target had been located. “Let’s be ready,” he said.

    
Half a minute later, the woman in boots appeared on a second monitor. Her pace was casual, and her appearance didn’t show any stress, worry, furtive glances or the like. Not once did she look at the security cameras.

    
The woman had made it to the third monitor when Suhonen and Toukola slipped out of the control room and drifted along with the crowd past Customs to the terminal’s concourse. They pulled to the side but kept their eyes on the doorway where the passengers were exiting. Some stayed and waited on the concourse. The numerous beer carts made a mess of traffic.

    
The woman in red came in following two men closely. Nothing indicated that they knew each other.

    
Neither Suhonen nor Toukola wanted to make an arrest on the crowded concourse, so they let her exit.

    
Once outside, she veered right and the officers did the same. The covered ramp descended toward the taxi line and the Helsinki city bus stop. Up ahead was a parking lot packed with cars and inter-city buses. The signs advertised their destinations: Forssa, Hämeenlinna, Kouvola.

    
Maybe her ride was already waiting, Suhonen thought.

    
About fifteen yards up was a police van, which Toukola had arranged. A large male uniformed officer stepped out of the passenger’s side and a female officer got out of the driver’s side.

    
The red-coated woman spotted the cops and glanced both ways, looking for an escape route, but there was none.

    
They approached the woman, who stopped.

    
“Good evening,” the big cop said. “We have an issue we’d like to clear up with you.”

    
The woman didn’t respond.

    
“We’ve received a complaint from the ship about a shoplifter and you match the description,” he continued.

    
Suhonen followed the events at a distance. With dozens of passengers around, it wasn’t the most discreet arrest, but at least they could tell Toomas that some attempt at a cover-up had been made. Had she been arrested in the terminal, it would’ve revealed that the cops had been tipped off. This way, at least, they wouldn’t directly jeopardize Toomas’ informant in Tallinn. Their other alternative would have been to station a drug-sniffing dog at the Customs checkpoint, but on short notice they hadn’t been able to find an available dog.