THE KEYPAD BEEPS as Jessica turns off the alarm. She shuts the door and sets the system to Home, turning off the motion sensors inside the flat but leaving on the magnetic readers at the doors. Now Jessica can sleep in peace, knowing no one can break into the apartment without setting off the alarm.
Jessica steps across the room, casts a rapid glance at the long table, and goes into the kitchen. She turns on the electric kettle and reaches into the cupboard for a mug. The chrome sink is full of identical white mugs, their insides stained a pale pink by rose hip tea. Jessica looks at the mugs, the sink, and the counter surrounding it. Suddenly the fact that her kitchen is almost identical to the Koponens’ doesn’t seem like an uncanny coincidence. On the other hand, she can’t figure out why anyone would have gone through so much trouble just to get her attention. She opens the dishwasher, smells the funk of standing water and ingrained grease, and loads the dirty mugs onto the upper rack. They clink as she packs them in so they’ll all fit. The electric kettle starts to hum.
JESSICA IS SITTING at her kitchen table, looking at her computer screen. Her fingers are resting on the keyboard, but her police-issue gun lies within arm’s reach. It’s dark again. She brings up a photograph of a board crowded with notes and pictures of people and places somehow related to the case. Jessica tears a sheet out of her sketchbook and starts to trace out the mind map the unit devised as a team.
Jessica thinks about the conversation she and Erne had that morning. Are there really more murders to be expected? Or haven’t they just found all the bodies yet?
Jessica zooms in on the photographs. The hysterically laughing Maria Koponen, the utterly serene Lea Blomqvist. Laura Helminen’s image has clearly been culled from social media: she’s posing in a yellow top that shows off her cleavage, a glass of sparkling wine in her hand. She’s alive; she can still do what she’s doing in the photograph. Koponen and Blomqvist cannot. The more she studies the faces of the beautiful raven-haired women, the more plainly she grasps that she herself is one of them. They could all be sisters. The thought is simultaneously reassuring and rattling. Reassuring because Helminen, after being kidnapped and languishing in a cellar, could have easily mistaken the woman in the painting; there’s no way she can be sure it was a portrait of Jessica specifically. Even so, the thought makes Jessica nauseous. She feels like she’s involved in something she doesn’t want to be involved in, as if her identity and body have been thrust into some risk group forming on the fly.
Jessica’s thoughts wander to past centuries, to the arbitrarily defined reference groups from recent history persecuted in the name of truth that proves untrue. Heretics, infidels, subhumans, witches, warlocks. The nations and populations made targets through propaganda, whose origins, appearance, religion, or ideology predestined them to suffer a ghastly and utterly unjust fate. Of course genocide is a crime on an entirely different scale from individual instances of violence, but the psychological and societal effects of a rampaging serial killer can correspond to widespread persecution. Being hunted sparks uncertainty and fear, forces people to hide their identities. It makes people flee, seek safety, hope that things will one day return to normal.
Jessica glances at the large clock on her kitchen wall. Two long hands equipped with quartz mechanisms sunburst out from the center of a ring of dots glued to the wall. They show a time of five thirty.
The phone on the table starts to vibrate.
“I’m alive, Erne,” Jessica says into the phone, jumping in alarm when she hears faint pops in the depths of her walls. The structures of her old building are alive too.
“I’m sure you are,” Erne says. His voice has grown even raspier. “A couple of things . . .”
Erne clears his throat, and Jessica holds the phone away from her ear. His cough sounds like an ax striking frozen rock.
“Rasse is checking the hospital cameras. The medic handed your coat straight over at the nurses’ station where Yusuf picked it up. There are obviously blind spots the cameras don’t cover, but Yusuf spoke with the nurse, and she said she didn’t leave her station at any point.”
“And no one had access to it at the nurses’ station?”
“Highly unlikely.”
“But that text was written at some point. Because I still didn’t do it.”
“We started from the assumption that you’d remember if you’d written it yourself,” Erne says. Jessica isn’t able to discern the tiniest hint of irony in his words. Erne utters them as if that alternative was considered seriously and rejected as improbable but by no means impossible. Jessica hears Erne shut the door to his office and collapse in his chair, forcing the air out of his constricted bronchial tubes.
“Is it possible someone got into your apartment?”
Jessica feels a tingling in her calves. Even though Erne knows—he’s the only one who does—that she doesn’t live in a tiny studio, Jessica still finds discussing the matter with him awkward.
“You know my alarm system is always on. Night and day. Besides, I never leave my notebook at home. It’s either at the station or with me in the field,” Jessica says, fully aware it’s not necessarily the truth.
“Fine. Let’s not draw any hasty conclusions.”
Jessica hears her superior’s words, but his question remains smoldering in her head. The possibility has already occurred to her, despite knowing no one could have gotten into the flat without tripping the alarm—except, that is, the woman who has cleaned the place once a week for several years. But almost a week has passed since the cleaner’s last visit, and all her visits are recorded in the security system’s log.
“But what?” Jessica says to shake off the disturbing thought.
“Kai Lehtinen’s and Torsten Karlstedt’s cell phones didn’t budge from their homes in Vantaa and Espoo yesterday.”
“But we know for certain that at least Lehtinen was in Savonlinna.”
“In a car owned by Torsten Karlstedt, who potentially acted as the driver.”
“The assholes left their phones at home.”
“They know what they’re doing. Either that or they’re doing a masterful job avoiding beginners’ mistakes.”
“In the meantime, then, there is nothing to indicate Torsten Karlstedt was in Savonlinna yesterday?”
“No. Theoretically he could say he loaned the car to Lehtinen. And if Lehtinen confirms it, we don’t have anything on him.”
“Maybe it’s the truth.”
“What is?”
“Maybe Karlstedt let Lehtinen borrow his car. Maybe he wasn’t in Savonlinna.”
“Someone was driving.”
“More than one driver’s license has been issued in Finland, the last time I checked.”
“Good point, Saga Norén.”
“Isn’t there anything else?” Jessica asks as she zooms in on Maria Koponen’s laughing face. For some reason she can’t get enough of it; she stares at it as if she is trying to figure out an optical illusion. What the hell is so goddamn funny?
“Torsten Karlstedt talks on the phone a lot. Nothing incriminating has come up during the phone calls yet though,” Erne says, and coughs again.
“Fuckety fuck.”
“But Micke raised an interesting point. Karlstedt hasn’t mentioned a single word about the incidents, which have been all over the news today. To anyone. Which is pretty remarkable when you take into consideration that in all likelihood he himself—or at least his car, with Kai Lehtinen in it—was in Savonlinna yesterday listening to Roger Koponen speak.”
“That just proves he’s mixed up in this.”
“Karlstedt also made a call to Kai Lehtinen. Twenty minutes ago,” Erne says, and Jessica can hear him flip through the stack of papers on his desk. “Karlstedt asked Lehtinen if he left his cap in the car.”
Jessica sighs and rubs her forehead. “Well, did he?”
“Apparently he did. The whole conversation was brief and extremely casual. Damn it, if we could just get something concrete to grab hold of.”
“Let’s see how things play out.” Jessica notices a second incoming call and glances at the screen. An unrecognized number. “Hold on, Erne. Someone’s calling. I’ll call you back in a second,” she says, and hangs up. She stares at the unfamiliar number flashing on her screen. Are things playing out now? When she picks up, will she hear the voice she heard at the Koponens’ house the night before? She feels prickling in the pit of her stomach.
“Niemi,” Jessica answers, then holds her breath. The window frames rattle in the wind.
“A man just stepped into the stairwell.”
“Excuse me? Who is this?” Jessica snaps, rising to her feet. Her fingers wrap firmly around the gun that has been resting on the table.
“Uolevi, Security Police. We’re posted in a vehicle outside your building.”
“Right.” Jessica walks into the living room, gun in her hand.
“A man, about thirty, in a heavy coat . . . stood outside the door for a second and then slipped in when an older gentleman exited. Looked like he didn’t have a key to the downstairs door.”
“How do you know he’s coming to my—”
“We don’t. He rang the buzzer multiple times. Did it ring in your apartment?”
Jessica holds her breath. Fuck. She has no idea if the buzzer has rung in her studio, and she hasn’t prepared a lie for this contingency.
“I’m not sure. I was in the shower.”
“You mind if we stay on the line just in case the situation requires us to intervene?” Uolevi says mechanically.
Jessica stands in the middle of her living room, considering her next move. She’s safe here, but if the guys from SUPO follow the potential intruder to her studio, it won’t take long before they realize she isn’t there. And then everything will come out.
“Sure,” Jessica says, trying to sound self-assured. She presses the phone to her chest and thinks. She’s trained and armed. All she has to do is go back to her studio and look out the peephole if and when the guy who slipped in downstairs knocks on her door. That’s all. She knows how to defend herself if circumstances demand.
Jessica hurries into the hall, opens the door, shuts it behind her. She stands in the dark stairwell for a second. Her keys clink loudly in the echoing space. And then the entire bunch slips from her hand and drops to the floor at her feet. Jessica crouches down to pick it up, glancing both up and down the stairs. Anything could be hiding in the darkness. Anyone. The light switch is just out of arm’s reach. Damn it. She should have stayed in her alarm-sealed palace. Maybe the whole thing is a trap. Maybe the guy calling isn’t really from SUPO. Maybe—
“Hello?”
Jessica starts when she hears the voice on the phone. She finds the right key and feels shivers crawling up her spine.
“Hello? Niemi, are you there?”
Jessica holds her breath and fits the key into the lock. The door opens, and Jessica lunges into her studio.
At that instant, there’s a knock at the door.
“I’m here,” Jessica says softly into the phone as she takes aim at the door.
“Everything OK?” Uolevi asks. “If necessary we’ll be there in a minute. But we don’t want to blow the stakeout if it’s a false alarm.”
“There’s someone at the door,” Jessica whispers.
“Are you armed?”
“Yes.”
“Is he trying to get in?”
“He’s knocking—”
“OK. We’re coming up.”
Jessica hears the side door of a van slide back.
“No! Wait,” she says, stepping slowly over to the door. More knocking rings out, rhythmic but not insistent. “I have a peephole,” she whispers.
“Listen to me, Niemi. I want to hear the words A friend stopped by within the next thirty seconds. Otherwise we’re coming up.”
“Roger,” Jessica whispers, and lowers the phone to the armrest of the sofa.
She tiptoes over to the door in her stocking feet, holds her breath, and leans in to look through the peephole. And then she hears it: the familiar tipsy voice calling her name.
Fubu.