Before I Go Read online

  Tommi Laitinen didn’t seem surprised when we followed him inside. The house was dark, but he didn’t turn on any lights. When Koivu starting looking for a switch, I shook my head. We walked through the entryway into a large living room. Laitinen sat on the couch, which was a soft burgundy leather, and Koivu chose a matching easy chair. I remained standing next to a narrow bookcase.

  “We’d prefer not to leave you alone. Who could we call to come keep you company?”

  Laitinen sat motionless, staring at the floor. The light outside was a gossamer blue. This was a time for reverie, but the atmosphere in the room was bereft of hope.

  I repeated my question.

  “I don’t want anyone but Petri,” Laitinen said, then burst into tears.

  On the coffee table was a half-finished glass of juice and the latest Donald Duck comic book. The walls were painted a pale lemon yellow, and through a doorway I could see that the kitchen cupboards were the color of dandelions. The dark steel appliances and severe gray of the floor were a carefully studied contrast to the brightness of the yellows. The kitchen table and chairs were steel, as was the paper-towel rack. I was surprised to see a pet turtle glaring at me from under a chair.

  I went into the kitchen and got a paper napkin and a glass of water, which I brought out and set on the coffee table in front of Laitinen. Then I sat down next to him on the couch and asked who his best friend was. The only response I received was a shake of his head.

  “Or Petri’s best friend,” I continued, unperturbed, even though Koivu was shuffling his feet, looking as though he wanted to leave. This aggravated assault had turned into a homicide, and the first twenty-four hours were likely to be crucial in solving it. Koivu would want to get back to the station to compile all the information we had so far.

  The sound of a telephone ringing cut through the silence, and when Laitinen made no move to answer, I grabbed it.

  “Ilveskivi and Laitinen residence, Maria Kallio speaking.”

  “Hello. This is Eila Honkavuori,” a confused-sounding female voice said. “Is Petri at home?”

  “Unfortunately he isn’t available now.”

  “I was just worried that something might have happened to him, since he didn’t come to the committee meeting. Is Tommi there?”

  “Just a moment. Let me see if he can come to the phone.”

  The phone was the same model as mine, so I quickly found the mute button and pressed it.

  “It’s Eila Honkavuori for you.”

  I received another shake of the head. Honkavuori had mentioned a committee meeting, so she must have been one of Petri’s political colleagues. If she wasn’t very close to Petri, I could give her the bad news over the phone. But I hesitated, since I didn’t really know anything about her.

  “I’m sorry, but Tommi isn’t available either. Can I give him a message?”

  “Who are you?” Honkavuori asked dubiously. “What’s going on there? Why wasn’t Petri at the meeting?”

  Suddenly Laitinen put out his hand. I handed the phone to him, and he took a deep breath.

  “This is Tommi. Petri is dead. Someone beat him to death on his way to the meeting.”

  Even though Laitinen was holding the phone close to his ear, I could still hear the cry from the other end, and then the agitated tone of voice that followed.

  “I would give anything to be lying,” Laitinen said. “We don’t know yet, but probably those skinheads . . . Yes, you can come over. The police were hoping someone could be here anyway. What about Turo?” Laitinen asked just as the line went dead and an empty beeping began to echo in the room.

  “Eila will be here as soon as she can get a cab. You can leave.” Laitinen hung up the phone, then tore off a piece of the paper towel and used it to dry his eyes. Then he gingerly felt around in his jacket pocket and pulled out his glasses. One earpiece was bent, and he straightened it with fingers that seemed accustomed to tinkering.

  “Is Ms. Honkavuori coming from far away?”

  “No, just a few miles.”

  Laitinen stood up and walked out of the living room, apparently headed for the bathroom. While he was gone, I glanced at the books on the shelves: mostly art and architecture. One shelf had a number of gay classics, including Armistead Maupin, E. M. Forster, Pentti Holappa, and Uuno Kailas. The painting above the couch depicted a young man standing with an erect penis. Would I be accused of sexual harassment if I hung something like that on my office wall?

  Hearing Laitinen banging around in the entryway, I glanced over to see what he was doing. He was shoving coats and shoes into a black trash bag. What a strange time to be packing winter clothes for storage, I thought before I realized that he must be putting Petri Ilveskivi’s things into the bag. I went into the entryway.

  “Shouldn’t you think this over first? You might regret it later if you throw everything away,” I said to him.

  “I can’t stand to look at his things,” Laitinen replied, but he stopped what he was doing.

  I took the trash bag out of his hand and put it aside. The entryway was almost entirely dark now, but I didn’t turn on the light. Maybe Laitinen wanted the darkness to soften the outlines of the world, to somehow conceal the fact that Petri was never coming home. In the silence I heard the rumbling of a stomach, and it wasn’t mine. Koivu’s phone rang, and he had a terse conversation. Apparently Lähde and Mela had discovered something new.

  We stood in the entryway for another few minutes, and then there was the sound of a car pulling up outside. It stopped and then left again, and footsteps on the front walk were followed by the ring of the doorbell. Laitinen opened the door. When he and the woman standing outside saw each other, they burst into tears and fell into each other’s arms. I retreated to the living room.

  “Mela called. We already have three more drivers who saw the motorcycle. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day,” Koivu said with a sigh. “We can leave now, right?”

  “Yes. Let’s just say good-bye.”

  Eila Honkavuori was one of the most imposing women I’d ever seen. She was tall, almost six feet, and weighed a good two hundred pounds. Black curly hair cascaded down her back, and jewelry sparkled at her neck, ears, and wrists. Her floral-print batik dress had a particularly feminine flow. Her beautiful round face was swollen from crying, and her long eyelashes were wet.

  I introduced myself and Koivu and gave them my contact information. Then we shook hands with both of them and left. The spring night now smelled intensely of fresh earth, and birds sang, each competing for the world’s attention.

  “You handle the delegating assignments in the morning meeting, OK? I have a joint drug task-force negotiation in Pasila. Keep looking for witnesses and send someone to Ilveskivi’s work. We’ll probably have to hold a press conference in the afternoon,” I said as I dropped Koivu off in the parking lot at the station. “I should be out of my meeting in Pasila by noon, so I’ll call then to see where we are.”

  I don’t usually believe in premonitions, but when a black cat nearly ran under my car on the way home, it rattled me. Luckily I was able to brake in time, and luckily no one was behind me. Still, I needed a big cup of chamomile tea and a couple of chapters of a Kinky Friedman book I had borrowed from Puupponen before I could fall asleep.

  3

  I woke up to Iida padding into our room. The morning sun shone directly onto her bed—we would have to get a blackout curtain or resign ourselves to these early-morning wake-up calls. Iida crawled over Antti to get between us and started playing with my hair. She had done that ever since she was a baby, tugging on tangles in my usually tousled red curls.

  In the fall Antti had started working for a pollution-monitoring project at the Meteorological Institute. That meant we needed to find somewhere for Iida to be. We had been lucky to find a woman named Helvi who ran a small day care out of her home. She was a sensible person with a good sense of humor, and when I picked up Iida we would frequently get caught up in conversations about how to save the
world.

  We ate an unhurried breakfast. The licorice-black winter mornings when no one felt like getting out of bed and one mitten was always missing seemed like distant memories. I chose a light-gray pantsuit and then set about doing my hair and makeup more carefully than usual. I needed to look competent for my meeting. Once again I would be the only woman present.

  Iida wanted to put on lipstick too, and managed to spill the contents of my earring box on the floor. I counted to ten three times to stop myself from yelling. My patience had never been great, so living with a child had taken some getting used to. But we were able to make it to the day care without a catastrophe.

  “Antti’s going to pick her up. This is going to be a long day for me,” I said to Helvi with a sigh.

  “The bicycle murder? I read about it in the paper.”

  “That’s the one,” I replied. Over the course of the winter, Helvi had learned not to ask about the cases I was working, and fortunately she wasn’t one of those people who liked hearing about the details of violent crimes.

  After kissing Iida good-bye, I set off toward Pasila, where the Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa joint drug-crime prevention task force meeting was being held. There were also a few other violent-crime detectives involved, since most of the violent crimes in the metro area involved drugs.

  As I drove past the bay, I admired the meringue surface of the Baltic Sea. The ice was already so thin that you could almost make out the movement of the waves beneath it. It wouldn’t be long before it was gone entirely. The winter had been long and the snow deep, and spring had seemed to come out of nowhere during Easter week. Suddenly it was fifty degrees out and the snow drifts were shrinking before our very eyes. Skylarks cried in the fields, and both my cat, Einstein, and I waited for the first wagtails. On Good Friday I had found the first coltsfoot on a sunny shoulder of the road. Then spring stalled for a while. It had taken until now, a week before May Day, for summer’s arrival to start looking like a possibility again.

  As I was parking in the Pasila police station lot, my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but the caller’s name was familiar when she introduced herself. Johanna Rasi was the chair of the Green Party in Espoo. She asked how the investigation into Petri Ilveskivi’s murder was going. I didn’t have any comment to offer and used my meeting as a pretense for wriggling out of the conversation.

  The police station smelled the same as it had when I worked there one summer years ago. The damage from the explosion a few years back had been repaired. The floor was freshly polished, and I nearly slipped as I walked in my heels toward the conference room.

  We agreed on a tougher strategy, which included stepped-up prisoner monitoring. Getting drugs on the inside was ridiculously easy, which chafed the police and the prison administration. Everyone suspected that there were officers acting as couriers—unfortunately that was the only reasonable explanation.

  In the fall I had nailed a drug kingpin in Espoo. He had tried to send a mule who had cheated him to the bottom of a pond. A police patrol found the man unconscious and took him to the hospital. After coming to, he requested a police guard. Eventually we convinced him to talk. The result had been a whole slew of convictions. After receiving his sentence, Salo, the drug lord, had promised to kill me and the prosecutor. That had meant installing an expensive alarm system at our house.

  Salo would be locked up for eight years, but he had connections. That was why I was extra cautious. I chose my jogging routes more carefully than before and had moved Antti’s and my bed to avoid a clear line of sight from outside for any would-be shooter. Death threats had become routine for our narcotics detectives. Few of them thought of themselves as heroes, and they kept doing their jobs despite the danger.

  In typical Espoo fashion, the sergeant from Narcotics and I drove back to our station separately, each in our own cars. My office was on the fourth floor. The windows faced south, toward the Turku Highway, and in the summer it was hot and noisy.

  I removed my jacket and wiped off my lipstick. Aulikki Heinonen, the City Council chairwoman, had left a call-back request. I was just sitting down and reaching for the phone when it rang.

  “Kallio,” I said, expecting to hear Koivu’s baritone.

  “Is this the detective lieutenant?” asked a male voice.

  “Yes, this is Detective Lieutenant Maria Kallio.”

  “Hello. This is Reijo Rahnasto. I’m a member of the City Council. Are you the one investigating the Petri Ilveskivi murder?”

  “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the term “murder” with “homicide.” Although the perpetrator’s use of a knife and another weapon certainly pointed to premeditation. Who had notified Rahnasto about the case when the identity of the victim hadn’t even been made public yet?

  “Shocking affair. Have you caught who did it yet?” Reijo Rahnasto had a deep voice, at once dry and throaty, as if he had a bad cough.

  “Do you have something that might assist in our investigation?” I asked. I didn’t have time to waste shooting the breeze with every random person who happened to be curious. How had Rahnasto convinced the switchboard to connect his call to me in the first place?

  “I’m the chairman of the City Planning Commission. Petri Ilveskivi was on the way to our meeting last night when he was attacked.”

  Even though I followed local politics relatively closely, I could never remember all of the City Council members’ names and faces. Rahnasto’s name sounded only vaguely familiar.

  “Do you have any idea who could be responsible for such a brutal act?” Rahnasto continued.

  “Our investigation is ongoing. We’ll be holding a press conference at two o’clock this afternoon. Unfortunately that’s all I can say at this point,” I said.

  “Both as a member of the City Council and as an ordinary citizen, I truly hope the police are able to solve this case quickly!” Rahnasto said bombastically.

  Just then there was a knock at the door, and Koivu came in.

  “We’ll do our best,” I said in as friendly a tone as I could manage and then hung up without waiting for a reply. The chief of police had pointed out my lack of finesse in terms of public relations on numerous occasions—hopefully Rahnasto wasn’t one of his good-old-boy pals.

  Koivu collapsed in a chair, and I could see that he hadn’t slept. When I first met him, he was twenty-four and resembled a tame bear cub. As the years had accumulated, he had gone from cute to handsome. Laugh lines suited him.

  “What’s new?”

  “Here’s the important stuff.” Koivu plunked down a stack of interview reports. He knew I would rather read printed versions than look at a computer screen.

  “Give me a summary.”

  Koivu stretched, and his blue collared shirt tightened across his chest.

  “We have three motorcycle sightings, but they’re all contradictory. One witness said that the bike’s chain clicked like a Kawasaki he used to own. Another one was certain it was a Harley, and the last one kept calling it a moped but describing a motorcycle. The rider was wearing a black leather jacket and pants, and a black helmet and boots, which suggest a motorcycle, not something smaller. According to one witness, the rider was small and slim, but the other two say medium size. No one was sure about the gender, because women have broad shoulders in motorcycle leathers too. The visor was down on the helmet, so they couldn’t make out any facial features. The only thing we know about the license plate is that it either started with an A or an H. Like the dog walker said, apparently something was smeared over it.”

  I considered how accurately a random eyewitness could estimate the size of a motorcycle rider with thick clothing, a helmet, and the crouched riding position distorting the visual.

  “So it looks like an individual perp, not a gang?”

  “So far, yes. All the evidence points that way. But we still pulled in the guys who attacked Ilveskivi a few years ago. Two of the three were easy to find. One had an alibi, and the other said he was a
t home asleep. I didn’t bother holding him. Pirinen is his name, and he’s as tall as I am and weighs about two forty. The witness who said the rider had a small build seemed really sharp.”

  “And the third skinhead?”

  “Jani Väinölä? Still looking. He wasn’t home at eight this morning when Patrol went by his place. They didn’t go in, since they don’t have an arrest warrant. They’re camped out in front of his building now.”

  “Good. Have you notified the next of kin?”

  “Ilveskivi’s parents live here in Espoo, and his sister’s in West Pasila. Anu and the police chaplain went to see them. Apparently no one ever told them that Ilveskivi lived with a man.”

  In the interview I’d read in Z, Ilveskivi and Laitinen had talked about how proud they were to have been together so long and said they wanted to get married. Perhaps Ilveskivi’s parents hadn’t wanted a son-in-law.

  “The medical examiner thinks there was a metal pipe used in the attack in addition to the knife. You’d think someone would notice somebody running around with something like that. I’ll probably ask for witnesses during the press conference. We could put a notice on Police TV too,” I said half to myself. “When is the autopsy?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Koivu replied dryly. One of the benefits of being unit commander was that I didn’t have to go to autopsies anymore. I could send whatever sergeant was heading up the investigation. Koivu didn’t like autopsies any more than I did, but someone had to do the job.

  Sometimes we wondered together why we had gone into policing, especially murder investigations, which constantly tested our faith in the basic goodness of humanity. In this case, having a clear motive for Ilveskivi’s attack would have made things easier, even if it was just the skinheads’ grudge. The creepiest thought was that some random passerby in a drugged-out haze had beaten him to death. That happened all too frequently.

  “If this was just a random attack, what could have set off his attacker? Could he have recognized Ilveskivi?”