My First Murder Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1993 by Leena Lehtolainen

  English translation copyright © 2012 Owen Witesman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612184371

  ISBN-10: 1612184375

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012941209

  Drifting on the tide, along this endless road we glide

  Surges battering bow and keel

  But what is man?

  A restless will-o’-the-wisp, a restless will-o’-the-wisp

  Rocks scraping underfoot we walk

  One born to pleasure and another born to pain

  But within each heart the tick of a clock

  Which when it stops, ’tis time for death to reign

  Drifting on the tide, along this endless road we glide

  No man, not one, its length may know

  Sea and sky and land—all, all shall fade away

  How shall the soul be saved from woe?

  But in dreams how dear it is to say

  That spring will come again and a new dawn yet will break

  That from atop the fells, come winds of days soon to wake—

  Or have they lied?

  Drifting on the tide.

  —Eino Leino, music by Toivo Kuula

  CONTENTS

  PRELUDE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  FINALE

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PRELUDE

  Riku woke up to a vicious call of nature. His mouth tasted like it usually did after whiskey, beer, garlic, and too many cigarettes, and he hoped he’d be able to find some blood orange Jaffa soda in the house. That was his drink of choice whenever he was hungover—assuming, that is, that he wasn’t in such bad shape that he had to resort to beer.

  The morning was beautiful. Tuulia and Mira sat on the porch, consuming a leisurely breakfast. Riku was amused by their friendly sounding chatter about different varieties of cheese—the fact was the two women couldn’t stand each other. However, since one of them was the best soprano and the other the best alto in EFSAS—the Eastern Finland Student Association of Singers—they had to make the best of it. Heavyset and somber looking with dark hair, Mira was the classic archetype of an alto. She would have been perfect as the gypsy woman in Verdi’s Il Trovatore—what was her name...?

  When the bright sunlight hit his eyes, Riku’s head exploded. He popped two extra-strength Burana tablets for good measure, even though he was basically immune to ibuprofen at this point and even the whole bottle might not have helped.

  There was no soda of any kind to be found, so he settled for fresh juice. The world felt oppressively vibrant: the sea was shining, seagulls were screeching down at the dock, and there was already a hint of the warmth the afternoon would bring. Singing in this heat wouldn’t be easy.

  “Feeling a little fuzzy, Riku?” Tuulia asked. She looked as pale as Riku. None of them had slept much. But it wasn’t like it really mattered since it was Sunday and they didn’t have to be back at work until the following day.

  “Are the others still asleep?” Riku asked, looking around.

  “Pia was going for a swim, and I haven’t seen the others. Hopefully they’ll show some signs of life soon so we can get something done.” Mira’s tone was bitter—she didn’t care for slackers. In her opinion, EFSAS had sent their best double quartet lineup to Tommi’s parents’ villa to practice for their upcoming concert, not to carouse into the wee hours. As far as she was concerned, it was high time they get up, chug some coffee, and start warming up their voices.

  Riku stood up. A swim might not be a bad idea, especially since the seawater was a perfect seventy degrees. So he set off for the boat dock. Pia was on the shore over by the sauna, modestly covered with a bikini. Riku lacked the energy to drag himself that far. He couldn’t be bothered with swim trunks, so he just pulled off his clothes and plunged into the water naked.

  Tommi was in the water too, lounging against some rocks in the shallow area by the dock. He must have had a devil of a headache, judging from the bloody mess on the back of his head. He didn’t look very lively otherwise either. Suddenly, Riku’s stomach lurched. He fell to his knees and vomited into the reeds.

  It was a full two minutes before he could stand up. When he did, he staggered back up to the veranda, where several more people had gathered. Riku’s clear first tenor, the envy of so many, was unable to form a single word.

  “Well, aren’t we the cock of the walk in our birthday suit?” Tuulia said.

  “Tommi...down at the dock. Oh, fuck...he’s dead! Drowned!” Riku screamed.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Antti charged down to the shore, with Mira trailing after him. Moments later she raced back up to the house and ran inside to the telephone. The emergency numbers were written neatly beside it. Everyone on the porch listened as Mira’s low, breathless alto summoned first the police and then, only afterward, an ambulance.

  1

  Drifting on the tide, along this endless road we glide

  When the telephone rang, I was in the shower rinsing the salt off my skin. I heard my own voice on the answering machine and then a colleague’s urgent message to call him back. I had been able to enjoy a surprisingly long part of my Sunday off without being called into work, but even on the beach I had been unable to relax. Though I generally hated lying around and loathed the scene at the beach, I had, for some reason, felt compelled to spend my first warm summer day off worshipping the sun. I had gone to the gym regularly over the winter, so my body was in more tolerable swimsuit shape than it had been in years—though at the rate I’d been drinking beer, I was never going to get rid of my love handles. I turned off the answering machine and dialed the number for the station. The switchboard connected me to Rane.

  “Hey, Kallio! I’m going to be at your door in fifteen. Everything is already packed. There’s a body over in Vuosaari. The boys from Patrol called it in half an hour ago. You don’t need anything from your office, do you? See you soon!”

  Here we go again, I thought, as I looked in the closet for something decent to put on. My uniform skirt was down at the station in Pasila, so my best jeans would have to do. My hair was wet, but the blow dryer would just whip it into a tangled red mess. I dabbed some makeup on my flushed face and frowned at my reflection in the mirror. The face that stared back was quite simply not that of a respectable female police detective: my greenish-yellow eyes looked like they belonged to a cat, and my coarse hemp-rope curls had been intensified with a bottle of red dye (“Everyone will notice, but no one will know...”). The feature most likely to provoke contempt was my snub nose, which was mottled with freckles by the sun. Someone had once called my lips sensual, referring, I think, to my full lower lip.

  A hastily thrown-together girl of a woman, I fleetingly wondered whether I was really up to the task of defending law and order in the boondocks of East Helsinki.

 
Rane’s sirens were audible in the distance. Like half of the police officers in Finland, he loved running them at every opportunity. The dead don’t exactly run away, but the public didn’t need to know that.

  “Forensics went on ahead,” Rane said matter-of-factly as I clambered into the passenger seat of the Saab. “So, body in Vuosaari, drowned, but it sounds like there’s something off about it. Dude about thirty; I think his name was Peltonen. There were about ten people spending the weekend out there at a summerhouse, a choir of some kind, and this morning they found this Peltonen guy in the water.”

  “Did someone push him in?”

  “Don’t know. We haven’t gotten a whole lot of detail yet.”

  “What’s this choir thing about?”

  “Some kind of singers, I guess,” he said. Rane swerved so hard onto the East Highway that I lurched and hit my elbow painfully against the door of the patrol car. With a sigh of resignation, I buckled the seatbelt, an obnoxious contraption that chafed at my neck because it was designed with taller male officers in mind.

  “Where’s Kinnunen? And all the others? Weren’t you supposed to have the day off today?”

  “The rest of the guys are still tied up with that stabbing from yesterday. And I’ve been trying to get hold of Kinnunen for the last half hour, but you know how Sundays are. He’s probably nursing a hangover on some pub deck.”

  Rane sighed. Neither of us wanted to talk about our boss. It was common knowledge that our section head, Sergeant Kalevi Kinnunen, was an alcoholic. Period. Since I was next in the chain of command, I would take over the case until Kinnunen recovered from his latest drinking jag.

  “Listen, Rane. I might know this dead guy. Or used to know him...”

  “My vacation starts tomorrow, and I intend to take it. This case is yours whether you like it or not. You don’t get to pick and choose in this job.”

  It was obvious from Rane’s tone that he thought I should have continued studying to be a lawyer, since then I could have chosen my cases. He had always regarded me with a certain degree of suspicion, as did many others in the department. Not only was I young, and a woman, but I also wasn’t a permanent career police officer like they were; to them, I was nothing more than a fly-by-night substitute with a couple more months to endure on the force.

  After my matriculation exams, and to the astonishment of everyone around me, I had applied to and been accepted by the police academy. I had always been a quasi-rebel in school, a punk in a leather jacket who still graduated summa cum laude. The other punk—and the worst truant in our class—went on to become an elementary school teacher. But my head was full of idealistic notions of social justice. I imagined that as a police officer, I would be able to help both victims and criminals. I thought I could change the world and decided to specialize in vice work so I could help all the women and children caught up in prostitution and pornography.

  The police academy had proved a disappointment, however, though I had held my own surprisingly well among the men. I had long since gotten used to being one of the guys; in school I had strummed bass in a testosterone-rich garage band and always played soccer with “the guys.”

  At school I had become accustomed to being at the head of the class, and I felt compelled to do nothing less at the academy. But the actual work of a police officer had been too much for me in the end. After two years of writing reports, doing body searches on female reprobates, and sifting through the social histories of shoplifters, I had had enough. I was using only one part of who I was—the most boring and officious part. No one wanted my compassion, and there was little use for my mind—which I had always made a habit of keeping fit.

  Those two years of police work reawakened my desire to pursue higher education, and I quickly worked my way through two officer candidate courses. There was a shortage of women, and it’s possible that I rose through the ranks more quickly than usual as a result. This caused no end of jealous grumbling among the boys. But the thing that seemed to rankle my colleagues the most was that I didn’t actually think much of the job. When I was accepted to law school, I thought that I had finally found the right fit. I was still interested in the application of the law, and at twenty-three years old, I believed that I knew what I wanted out of life.

  While I was in school, I continued to do summer temp work and other ad hoc jobs for the city police department, and now, five years later, I was a police officer again. I had gotten bored with studying, and a six-month substitute posting in the Helsinki Police Department’s Violent Crime Unit had seemed like a good idea, especially since I was specializing in criminal law. I had thought that a few months off would give me some distance from my coursework and a new perspective on my life. So far, I seemed to be wrong about this too. As a criminal investigator, I did not have the energy to think about anything but work. Every now and then I’d go out for a beer, but I hardly ever made it to the gym anymore.

  Further complicating things, my immediate supervisor did only a small fraction of his work. He spent the rest of his time drinking—or nursing a hangover. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been put out to pasture years before. Kinnunen’s work almost always fell to other people, and now, especially during the summer, the situation had become intolerable. The budget appropriations for bringing in extra staff, such as myself, had run out in April, and the vacations everyone had scheduled to recover from being overworked were looming on the horizon.

  In addition, I wasn’t nearly as hard-boiled as I had been when I was young, but admitting that would have been a big mistake. My male colleagues kept a close eye on my nerves and eagerly monitored my reactions when inspecting evidence—like the rotting, vomit-sodden, eviscerated corpse of a wino who had been drinking water mixed with sulfuric acid. It wasn’t as though that didn’t turn everyone’s stomach, but I was the one who wasn’t allowed to show it—because I was a woman. But I was tough and made far and away the most callous wisecracks in the police cafeteria afterward, even though spooning the chicken fricassee into my mouth almost made me gag.

  When it came down to it, there was nothing I could do about my appearance: I looked hopelessly female. I kept my hair long because my curls would have frizzed up all over my head if I had cut it any shorter. And I was short. My height had actually almost prevented my acceptance into the police academy, but a doctor I knew had added the two missing inches to my medical certificate. My body was an unlikely combination of feminine curves and masculine muscles. I’m strong for someone so small, and I know my own strength well enough that dangerous situations don’t generally frighten me. However, right at this moment, I could have done with the self-confidence that came with a tight hair bun and a police uniform.

  Until now, all of my cases, both homicides and otherwise, had been strictly business. But the words “choir” and “Peltonen” sent a stab of fear through me. If my sinking feeling was right, I was about to see several people who knew me in an entirely different capacity than that of a police officer.

  During my first year of law school, I had lived in a cramped student apartment in Itäkeskus, near the mall on the east side of the city. My roommates had quarreled constantly because one of them spent half of her time at home singing. At times a whole quartet could be found harmonizing in Jaana’s room, with Jaana’s boyfriend singing bass. Tommi Peltonen was a dreamboat—eyes like Paul Newman and a face deeply tanned from many yachting excursions. Jaana had spent many a long night agonizing over whether to move in with him, sometimes inviting me into her room to talk it through over a bottle of red wine.

  After the years I had spent surrounded by nothing but dull police bodybuilder types, Tommi had been a feast for the eyes. Jaana’s vocalizing never bothered me much, both because she sang pretty well and because I could always put on my headphones and crank up some Dead Kennedys or homegrown Popeda if I got tired of listening to classical.

  Then my great-aunt died and the family didn’t want to sell her studio in Töölö until real estate prices went u
p. So I moved in and kept up the apartment, paying only the maintenance fees. When the value of the unit eventually went up, I was afraid I would lose it, but my greedy relatives decided to wait for square footage rates to balloon even further and were left out in the cold when the recession hit and real estate crashed. So there I was, still living in a nicer neighborhood than I deserved, surrounded by restaurants I couldn’t afford. I bumped into Jaana now and then at the university and heard that she and Tommi had broken up. Jaana had fallen in love with the son of a host family she stayed with while the choir was on a trip to Germany and ended up becoming a hausfrau. These days, I maintained the typical Christmas card relationship with most of my old roommates.

  As I tried to recall that period of my life, the names and faces of Jaana’s other friends came rushing back to me. There had been some other eye candy in addition to Tommi; I had even finished off a bottle or two with the EFSAS crowd a few times. Since I knew that many of the choir members had difficulty moving on with their lives, I figured it was quite likely I was about to come face-to-face with several of them. Choir singers were their own breed: a gang of masochists who got off on singing forgettable ditties while standing beside people with worse voices than their own, all being led by a tormentor waving his arms around incomprehensibly.

  The road leading to the villa wound through green summer meadows. Although Rane was no longer running the sirens, he was still speeding, which was perfectly legal. I read him the driving directions, and we managed to turn off at the correct spot. It was so damn embarrassing when the police got lost—it had happened to me a couple of times, and I had taken the blame. The sea glinted silver beyond the fields. A hare loped lazily across the road. A wasp tried to fly in through the open car window.