Darling (8 page)

It was
obvious who was at fault, but this was Rome and you didn’t anger the tourists. The manager felt that in this internet age, the customer was more right than ever. He didn’t want to see comments about the restaurant’s rude service on travel review websites. Restaurants abounded in Trastevere, and travelers, especially the Americans, would read reviews on their smart phones right in front of the restaurants. The overweight Finn had been appeased by profuse apologies and, after a flood of cursing, grunted what Alberto interpreted to be his acceptance of the apology.

The busiest tourist season had ended a couple of months earlier, but the
outdoor terrace was still open. At nearly sixty degrees, it was a warm evening for December. The gas heaters were placed outside in October. Alberto was carrying a basil salad and instinctively slowed down on the stairs. He didn’t see anyone and stepped down. Alberto smiled as he approached the four-person table where a woman sat alone. While this wouldn’t have been possible in August, there were only a dozen people on the terrace—all tourists, because the locals wouldn’t dine
al fresco
in this cool weather.

The woman fascinated Alberto. In the summer, the tourists
dressed according to their home countries’ standards—mostly shorts and T-shirts in the daytime and loose-collared shirts and jeans in the evenings.

This
Basil Woman—Alberto named his customers by the food they ordered—didn’t fit the tourist mold. Even though she wasn’t Italian, she was dressed in the latest fashion. The waiter tried to figure out what gave the woman her classy look, and he finally realized it was her shoes.

The lady looked to be in her mid-thirties. She had straight, dark hair to her shoulders. She was slightly overweight, but Alberto found himself wanting to flirt with her
—he was interested in her. What was this shoe woman about? She spoke fairly fluent Italian when she ordered her food.

Alberto approached the table and the woman noticed him. Alberto figured that with the slightest effort he could end up spending the night in one of Rome’s four-star hotels. She wasn’t flirty, so it was up to him to make the move. Complimenting her Italian skills was the easiest way to approach her.

“Your meal, beautiful lady,” he said, and the woman granted him a warm smile. He wouldn’t sit down, of course, but if he kept coming back and rendering service, he could get her to agree to meet him that evening. Now he had to come up with the first step.

“Where did you study Italian? You speak so…” Alberto began, but just then the woman’s cell phone rang, and she pulled it out of her designer purse. She made an apologetic face and answered the phone. Alberto studied the purse and saw it was a
Luis Vuitton
. That made the woman even more interesting; a woman like that wouldn’t walk around Rome carrying a knock-off.

The woman spoke into the phone and Alberto thought it sounded like the language the fat man had spoken earlier.
Strano lingua finlandese.
The strange Finnish language.

Alberto realized the person on the phone had the woman’s full attention. The language sounded strange, but somehow Albert
o recognized from her tone that she was asking if the caller was the police. At least that’s what it sounded like. If the woman had shown interest in Alberto earlier, she wasn’t the least bit interested after the phone call.

Alberto gave it one more effort, but the classy Finnish lady ate her food, finished her white wine, and asked for the check. Alberto saw on the credit card that the woman’s name was Nea Lind. It was a beautiful name, but he didn’t think it sounded particularly Finnish.

After paying the bill, the woman left without looking back, which disappointed him greatly.

CHAPTER 6

LATE WEDNESDAY TO EARLY THURSDAY

JAIL AT HELSINKI POLICE HEADQUARTERS

Jorma Korpivaara woke up and for a minute didn’t know where he was. He was lying on something hard, and he had to take a piss, badly. He felt a backache first, and then realized his head was killing him. He opened his eyes and saw a dim light in the corner. The room was narrow, and its walls were bare and green. What the hell, he thought as he scrambled up. What time was it? Where was he?

Korpivaara
walked to the iron door. It wouldn’t open; it didn’t even have a handle. He panicked. Shit, he was locked in some closet. He pounded the door and yelled, “I want out! Goddammit, I want out!”

The iron door thundered from the pounding.

A small hatch opened and a guard in a blue uniform said in a bored tone, “Be quiet.”

“I fuckin’ want out.”

“You can’t get out.”

“Why
the hell not?”

“The door’s shut
, and I have no intention of opening it.”

“Where am I?”
Korpivaara asked in tears.

“This is the jail and you’ve been arrested
. You’re being suspected of a crime,” the guard said and closed the hatch with a clank.

Korpivaara
’s shoulders slumped as he stood behind the door. Drained of strength, he tried to pound the door one more time. He turned and saw a toilet in front of the bed, which was bolted to the wall. Two seats were attached to the opposite wall and some sort of a legless table was bolted between them.

He walked to the toilet and urinated.

Goddammit, what happened? He sat down on the bunk and buried his face in his hands. His mind was fuzzy like a TV screen with static.

His throat
was parched. The previous day’s events were a blur and they came to him in a reverse order. At the police station he was stripped and handed overalls a size too big. He was riding in the back of a police van. He was arrested in the Alamo Bar. Beer and more beer. He unlocked the apartment door for the police.

“Oh, shit,”
Korpivaara cursed. He tried to see what time it was, but he didn’t have his watch. And of course his phone wasn’t in his pocket. Rubbing his head, he tried to remember what had happened. He felt miserable. He had a headache and his skin was clammy.

Korpivaara
walked to the small window at the end of the bed, but the frosted glass only let him see that it was dark outside. He lay down on the bunk, breathing heavily…in…out…in…out. He folded his arms on his chest like a body awaiting burial. Maybe that’s what he was.

Thinking about death made him think of his father. He was glad Rauno wasn’t
around to see this. He had been a big enough disappointment to his dad already. He closed his eyes and could see his dad lying in the hospital bed, breathing in and out slowly, just like he was doing now. Inhale slowly and exhale a little faster. His eyes are almost closed, his mouth open under the oxygen mask. The mask is different from those in airplanes; its see-through profile is shaped like a hawk’s nose, with a tube coming from an oxygen tank. Korpivaara covers his mouth with his hand.

His father has an IV in his
arm for fluids to keep his body hydrated. But the nurses couldn’t give him too much, because his body can’t process it. He gets morphine in his left shoulder at regular intervals to keep the pain at bay. That’s hospice care—to give a person a chance to leave this world gracefully and without too much pain. The nurse comes in to turn his dad. Rauno isn’t capable of doing that on his own.

There was no hope
of recovery. The nurse just told the family to stay strong. Jorma held his father’s warm hand, feeling his pulse.

Why wasn’t anyone here to hold
his hand now? Oh, how Jorma wished that someone would.

* * *

It was close to 2 A.M. Kulta, wearing white paper overalls and blue plastic shoe covers, opened the bedroom closet, yawning. The guy obviously didn’t bother folding his T-shirts or matching up his socks. All his clothes were in jumbled piles on the shelves. He did have some order to the mess—his dirty laundry was in a heap on the floor and the clean clothes piled in the closet—unlike some of the drug holes Kulta had seen.

Apparently
, Jorma Korpivaara didn’t make his bed or change his sheets very often. The floor was sticky with stains, and trash was scattered all over.

Korpivaara
’s apartment was the fourth place they searched. It was in the building the farthest back from Nӓyttelijӓ Street. Kulta and Kohonen had looked through the apartments of the other three suspects but hadn’t found much. No blood-stained clothing in the trash, no knife, or anything else directly linked to the case. Each was just as sloppy as Korpivaara’s, though. They all lived alone—probably why they had time to hang around at the Alamo Bar.

Kulta checked th
e bathroom first, looking for blood stains someone might’ve left while washing their hands. He noticed pale stains in the sink—blood or something else? Forensics would have to find out.

“Come here and look,” Kohonen yelled from the living room.

Kulta noticed a stack of crime novels next to a pile of porn DVDs. Empty beer cans littered the floor. Color photos were scattered around the printer and laptop. The photos were of a woman posing in various sexual positions, and the face belonged to Laura Vatanen.

“Look at her face,” Kohonen urged.

“The photos are fakes,” Kulta said. The pictures were clumsy attempts of attaching Laura Vatanen’s face to bodies of different women.

“I wonder if he posted these online or just kept them for his own
pleasure,” Kohonen said.

“Let’s take the laptop to the pro
s.”

Kulta found a photo album under some junk in t
he closet. On the first page was a black-and-white photo of a young couple holding a baby dressed in a christening gown. The parents looked solemn. Kulta thought the man even looked angry. The caption under the photo read
Jorma’s
Christening August 17, 1969.

On the next few pages were pictures of a smiling child playing in the snow and on a beach. Some of the photos showed a mother or father, others the whole
family. The colors had faded. One photo was of Jorma standing square-shouldered and proud next to a red bicycle in front of a green house. The last one was of him as an eighteen-year-old on a camping trip. Two more pictures had been glued on the pages, but later torn off.

Kulta stared at the
camping photo trying to pinpoint what was wrong with it. Korpivaara was older, but his face looked different somehow—perhaps softer. Kulta could compare the photo to Korpivaara himself at the station. Hoping to find a current picture of him, Kulta rummaged through the closet but had no luck.

He looked through the rest of the closets quickly and went into the living room.

“Check the kitchen,” Kohonen ordered.

It was more of a kitchenette, with a stove, a sink, and a fridge. Half a dozen dirty plates sat i
n the sink, one of them with leftover pasta. A bread knife with a long blade lay on the cutting board—it fit the profile of the murder weapon. Kulta didn’t see any blood on it, so he left it alone. He remembered Korpivaara saying that he had cut his hand while slicing bread. That hadn’t happened here, since there were no traces of blood. Crumbs were scattered on the table.

Kulta looked in the fridge and saw
a quart of milk, half a bottle of Coke, a stick of butter, sausage, and Koff beer cans—it must have been this week’s special at the neighborhood grocery store. It occurred to him that the inside of his fridge used to look just like this before his girlfriend moved in. And his clothes used to be a muddled mess. Kulta peeked into the cabinet under the sink and saw an empty trash container.

“He took the trash out,” he hollered to Kohonen.

“Shit!” Kohonen cursed in the living room. “Dumpster diving—that’s all we need.”

* * *

Kulta stepped into the dumpster shed, and the dim motion-sensor light came on. The detective’s Maglite cast a beam around the space, and he saw four black trash containers, a blue one for cardboard, a green one for paper, and two smaller brown cans for compost.

Kulta checked under the containers
and the spaces between them. He quickly rummaged through the cardboard and paper containers.

“Yep, yep,”
he said. “Now the real fun starts.”

Kohonen was only a little over five
foot two, so her job was to hold the lid open. Kulta, who was six three, could easily reach inside.

“One question,” Kulta said. “How do I know which one is
Korpivaara’s trash bag?”

“Skip the
fancy white ones with a Stockmann logo and focus on the Alepa yellow. We’re not interested in common household trash but possible clothes and such that would’ve been thrown in.”

“Yeah, the soft packages,” Kulta agreed. He was still wearing the paper coveralls and now slipped work gloves over
the rubber ones. Kulta handed the Maglite to his colleague, and she lifted the first lid.

“Have at it.”

Kulta scowled at Kohonen. The trash bags filled half of the container. He turned and felt each bag carefully before opening it. The stench was nauseating. His bachelor pad had never smelled this bad, even with trash bags piled in the kitchen corner for weeks and sweaty basketball gear adding to the aroma.