JESSICA NIEMI HAS replaced her black leather gloves with a pair made of thin elastic rubber. As she smooths out the wrinkles, her superior Erne’s words creep into her head: Gloves protect the evidence from the investigator, but they also protect the investigator from the evidence. It feels particularly apt in this instance. The cause of the woman’s death is impossible to determine by visual examination of the body. No external wounds, signs of strangulation, or other clues. The table—or, more likely, the entire room—may be contaminated by some toxin invisible to the naked eye.
“Tech is here.” The voice belongs to Yusuf Pepple, one of the investigative team’s senior detective constables. Jessica turns and sees Yusuf nod at the open front door. Jessica can’t see the street, but she hears an engine idling and the side door of a van being pulled shut. Yusuf is a couple of years Jessica’s junior, an athletic man with big eyes whose roots are evidently in Ethiopia. Not that Yusuf has ever set eyes on the country: he was born and raised in Söderkulla, an idyllic area in the Helsinki bedroom community of Sipoo. He has the demeanor of a sweet country boy, almost overly so.
“Has the husband been contacted yet?” she asks, shutting her eyes. The wind is making the large house moan; it sounds as if it is trying to tell its own story about what happened.
“The police in Savonlinna contacted him. Someone’s on the way to the hotel where he’s staying as we—”
A mobile phone blares out ringing, cutting Yusuf off. Jessica opens her eyes and scans the room.
“Where is it?” she mutters, and watches Yusuf approach a sofa set across the room.
“It’s here next to the remote; it slipped between the cushions. . . .”
“Wait!” Jessica says, unintentionally snapping at Yusuf. She strides over. The iPhone on the sofa is playing a vaguely familiar melody as a picture of a man flashes on the screen. Rouzer <3.
“Rouzer?”
“Roger. Roger Koponen,” Jessica says, huddling over the phone.
“He looks really familiar. . . .”
“Guess you’re not much of a reader?” Jessica asks laconically as she lowers her gaze to the floor. Yusuf studies the smiling middle-aged man on the screen for a moment before realization brightens his face. Jessica pulls down her mask, takes off her right glove, and answers with the middle knuckle of her forefinger. Then she turns on the speaker.
“Hello?”
After a brief silence, a firm but fearful voice speaks: “Maria?”
“Roger Koponen?” Jessica asks, bringing her face closer to the screen.
“Who is this?”
“This is Sergeant Jessica Niemi with the Helsinki police.” Jessica pauses for a few beats. The man at the other end of the line doesn’t say anything. But Jessica could tell from the tentativeness in his voice that the bad news has already reached him. “I’m sorry.”
“But . . . what happened?” Roger Koponen’s voice isn’t breaking, but it’s searching for its intonation.
“I’m sorry. It would be best if you came home.” Jessica feels her throat constrict in empathy. She hasn’t had to have many of these conversations over the course of her career; responsibility for informing loved ones has fallen on her shoulders on only a few occasions. Not that it necessarily matters: her colleagues assure her that the task doesn’t get any easier with repetition. How do you tell someone the words they dread hearing more than anything else in the world?
For a fleeting second, Jessica considers how and from whom she heard them herself the first time. Might it have been one of the ER doctors? Or her aunt Tina?
Jessica swallows to lubricate her dry throat and is on the verge of speaking again when the line goes dead; Koponen has ended the call. The wind conveniently stops wailing, and for a moment she and Yusuf can clearly hear the investigators talking outside the house.
“Did you say the husband is in Savonlinna?” Jessica asks without looking up. The screen of the phone goes black. Jessica tries to turn it back on, but her attempt is foiled by the request for a PIN. Suddenly the device is nothing more than a useless hunk of black metal.
“That’s what I was told.”
“Damn it,” Jessica mutters, prompting her colleague to prick up his ears. What a case. The wife of Finland’s current number-one export, the thriller writer Roger Koponen, has died in circumstances that are at the very least suspicious. The husband is conveniently halfway across the country, which eliminates the statistically most probable scenario. And there, right in front of their faces, is the phone from which the man who murdered Maria Koponen in all likelihood called the emergency number just a moment ago, before making his way into the frigid, blustery night. The perpetrator can’t be far. But then Jessica realizes she is rushing to conclusions.
“Was the call to the emergency center placed from this number?” she asks, feeling an irresistible urge to look over the back of the couch to where Maria Koponen is laughing hysterically. Or that’s what it would look like in a photograph, a burst of overacted hilarity. But it’s not a photograph. Everything else in the scene is living in this moment. The blue lights, the wind, Yusuf, and the leafless trees swaying outside. But Maria Koponen is stone-dead.
“I don’t know,” Yusuf says, unzipping his coat. Freezing air is flowing in through the open door, but the room is still hot.
“Could you please call and find out? Now.”
As Jessica speaks, three figures in white coveralls waddle slowly into the living room, as if trying not to wake the princess sitting at the table from her eternal slumber. Jessica watches the forensic technicians go about their business in such a routine fashion that they might just as well be engaged in some mundane chore, like emptying the dishwasher. By any standard, these protective-suit-wrapped human burritos have seen plenty; it takes a lot to throw them off. Even so, Jessica can’t help but notice how each one stops in turn to eye the corpse and the configuration of its pretty face, which is more reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s Joker than anything else.
“That’s it for the first one,” one of the techs mumbles from under his hood and mask. Based on the footfalls echoing from the hallway, he has just come downstairs from the second floor, and he stands there in front of Jessica, scanning the room as if he has nothing better to do. The three other techs are working at the body, deep in concentration. Jessica looks at the tech and narrows her eyes to indicate that she doesn’t grasp his meaning. She has a hundred percent confidence in these people’s competence; not once has she had to intervene in crime scene practices over the course of her career.
“What?” she says, but the tech is already turning around; she sees him disappear into the hallway.
Jessica steps past the table and toward the bookshelf burdened with LPs. She walks past the long row of records, allowing her rubber-skinned fingertips to dance across the album covers’ slender spines. Dozens and dozens of albums; the couple must really love music in its analog form. An author’s bookshelf full of music. Jessica stops in front of the record player and registers that it’s a brand-new piece of equipment and presumably connected to the home’s wireless sound system. The needle has risen from the surface of the record, and the PVC disc is resting, motionless, on its overlarge platter. It’s a forty-five. A single. The cover is there on the wooden side table next to the player: a black-and-white image of John Lennon, eyes hidden behind round sunglasses, looking at the camera. “Imagine.” Released as a single for the first time in the UK. Jessica picks up the cover and turns it over. Two sides. Two songs; one per side. “Imagine.” Jessica feels a cold wave shudder through her as she remembers what Koivuaho told her when she first showed up. That damn music. If the song was still playing when the patrol arrived, someone must have lowered the needle to the record just before the police entered the house.
Jessica lets the cover fall to the side table and slips her hand under the bottom of her coat before she has time to register the true significance of her insight. She wraps her hand around the polymer grip of her Glock and turns to look at the white angels tending to the body. There are three of them. There have been only three this whole time, and none of them ever went upstairs.