A TALL NURSE is pushing an old patient almost entirely swathed in bandages down the corridor. The metal sides of the hospital bed shudder as the wheels hit the seams in the floor.
Jessica is pacing the corridor. Yusuf has returned to Helminen’s room to sort things out with Dr. Kuznetsov and the nurse who rushed in.
“Everything all right, Jessica?” Teo asks, arms crossed over his chest.
“I don’t know.” Jessica presses her back against the wall. She’s going to have to try to calm down despite the dozens of questions ricocheting through her head.
“That woman has clearly been through a lot. Whatever happened in there—”
“Stop. Please just stop.” Jessica raises a hand in a gesture of rejection. “I don’t need to be fucking consoled all the time.”
“OK,” Teo says in a subdued voice, adjusting his earbud. Maybe because the fit is off, but more likely because the abrupt end to the conversation has made him fidgety.
For a little while, the corridor is completely silent. Then Jessica shakes her head and looks up from the floor. “Sorry, Teo. Everyone’s nerves are pretty shot.”
“I understand. Compared to your job, this guard dog gig is pretty low stress.”
“You know that’s not true. I know it too.”
Teo grunts. “It depends on the case, I guess. They’re all different.” The elevator doors open, and suddenly Teo is on the alert. The nurse pushes the bed into the elevator.
“It’s been a while, Jessie.”
Jessica avoids eye contact. “It has. How have you been?”
Teo turns his head from side to side, as if making sure no one will have time to run from the elevators to the door of Helminen’s room, at least during the sentence that’s to follow. “Fine, fine,” he says blandly, raising his banded ring finger. “Wife and twin daughters, five months old.”
Jessica takes a deep breath. “That’s . . . that’s great.”
Teo sighs and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “It’s pretty exhausting, to be honest. And I’m not just talking about the babies. Not that they don’t know how to . . . But this job. It’s not enough. I have to take the occasional bouncing gig. Last week I was shoveling snow from roofs in Eira. You probably know what I’m talking about.”
Jessica starts making a sympathetic comment when she’s overcome by a strange sensation: it’s as if Teo knows something. Who knows? Maybe there’s a strange but persistent rumor going around the ministry about a millionaire police officer who does everything she can to keep her wealth a secret, to hide the fact that she could pay not only her own but the entire department’s wages for the next fifty years. All it would take to start a rumor like that would be one loose-lipped tax officer, asset manager, attorney, or shrink. “The more mouths there are to feed, the—”
“Looks like I’m going to have to start playing the lottery again.” Teo smiles bitterly.
Jessica frowns. Deep down, she knows her intuition is right. “Tell me about it.”
“Do you have any?”
“Kids?” Jessica’s laugh catches even herself off guard. Now, that’s a question she hasn’t heard in a while. “No, no, I don’t.”
Teo nods and rolls his shoulders back, pulling himself up straighter, a habit Jessica was once fond of.
Jessica glances at her watch again, then waves and heads toward the elevators. “Listen, tell my colleague I’m waiting for him downstairs in the cafeteria.”
“Take care of yourself, Jessie.”
“You too.”
And while you’re at it, take care of your family, and leave me the hell alone.