SNOWY SARCOPHAGUS

BY JUKKA PETÄJÄ

Meilahti

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

No one could have predicted the course of the next several days. Everyone talked only of the heavily gusting snow and the snowdrifts that were burying the city and forcing the fleet of plows into action in the middle of the night. But more snow fell than could be plowed from the streets. Traffic was badly muddled, as were the city residents, particularly those driving cars. The Meilahti neighborhood on the western side of central Helsinki felt walled off, though it was only some five kilometers from the center of town. The snow rendered the distance great in a different way, at least insofar as what was close was now just as far away as the city’s remotest corners—the many faceless annexed areas that were more like human pens or snow dumps than actual parts of Helsinki. All of a sudden Meilahti had become a suburb forcibly separated from the city center, a suburb that led its own sleepy life and could just as well have been situated dozens of kilometers away on Helsinki’s eastern or northern border. Trudging home through the unbroken snow, the deaconess of the Meilahti parish church, the Church of the Good Samaritan, was the first to notice the snowmen—as would later become evident from the police report.

Two larger-than-life snowmen stood in the swirling snowstorm in the courtyard in front of the church’s main doors. The deaconess, panting in her bulky coat, wondered how the children had managed to reach so high. Perhaps adults had been helping them. The thought of grown-ups and children building snowmen together warmed her heart. The world was not all evil. Hope remained, if faith sometimes wavered, and fortunately you could lean on God. He had atoned for the sins of mankind with His own blood, the minister had said as he removed his clerical collar. One of the snowmen had an empty beer can for a nose. For the other, a newspaper was rolled up for the purpose. Their eyes were bottle caps and the mouths were made from cigarette butts. Their smiles would surely have exposed nicotine-yellowed teeth, had the snowmen been possessed of chewing equipment.

The sky stretched heavily over the church like a blackout curtain. Heavy snowflakes wafted down like white balls against a black velvet background. The scene could have been straight from a pointillist painting. Georges Seurat at the North Pole. Frozen points. Heavenly Morse code. The deaconess stood gazing up at the heavens which did not seem to belong to the everyday world but rather to some more perfect reality. A reality you couldn’t charge into wearing muddy boots. She felt as if she were in communion with something greater than herself, some mystical state of existence that could not be captured with words but produced a strong physical sensation. One’s soul was filled with light and warmth even though outside it was dark and cold. She thought again of the children and on her face appeared a smile scarcely visible behind the raised collar of her quilted coat. A burst of warmth surged through her heart. She thought of the minister’s languid eyes when he glanced at her in the vestry after the service. A lovely moist film sparkled from his eyes and his gaze was lingering, somehow penetrating, and she wanted to believe that the minister was slowly undressing her in his mind. The warmth traveled down her body. Snowflakes danced in her hair. She had forgotten her ski hat at home. She sank in over her knees in the deep snow, and her trip home to Pikku Huopalahti, a part of town which nearly merged into Meilahti, though it had only been built in the 1990s, did not go very quickly.

Where the different parts of town met, different time periods seemed to collide. Rent-controlled postwar Finland that had eked out a living under the war reparations stood side by side or, better, one behind the other with affluent postmodern Finland with its Nokia. Life, however, was such that the snow whirled evenly, democratically, through both neighborhoods.

The deaconess calculated that despite the weather she would probably make it home in fifteen minutes and could then open her well-earned bottle of red wine. She looked behind her one more time. The snow softened the outlines of the snowmen so that they didn’t seem to begin or end at any certain spot and the vanishing outlines slid in gradations into the misty landscape. The snow around them was untouched, pristine, without a footprint, or else new snow had buried any footprints long ago. The thought crossed her mind that the snowmen had been conceived from nowhere as if from the Virgin Mary. At least, that’s what she told the police at the questioning at the Pasila police station.

Hell broke loose four days later.

The temperature had climbed to nearly -4°F, the skies had cleared, and the snowstorm had subsided. Traffic had started to move again and the buses and streetcars were running almost on schedule. Life was returning to normal. The machine was working again. As if the collapsed grid had been erected anew. Only a few snowflakes drifted down. Two bare-handed boys were making icy snowballs in the churchyard; they’d tossed their wool mittens, heavy with crusted ice, into the snow. The boys had leaned a red plastic sled against the church’s frost-covered yellow brick wall. They stood next to each other, legs braced, and aimed their snowballs at the snowmen that were now cloaked with a sparkling coat of ice which reflected the cold sunshine directly into their eyes. It was only on the fourth hit that a chunk broke off one snowman’s side. When the piece crashed down and sent up a spray of white, the boys were still as mice for a second and then started to scream for all their worth. The snowman had a black arm that had frozen in a pleading position. It was the arm of a Nigerian woman—as later became apparent. There were two victims. Each had been buried in a snowy sarcophagus.

* * *

Two murdered Nigerian women in Meilahti. The frozen corpses had been transported to the Institute of Forensic Medicine located just a kilometer away from the crime scene—assuming that the young women had been murdered in the churchyard. What was behind this? Meilahti was not exactly a part of town where people were murdered. It was chilling how someone had made both of the bodies into snowmen. Was there some hidden message?

At the Pasila police station, Inspector Pekka Suokko of the Helsinki Criminal Investigation Department ran his hands through his increasingly thin hair, and his dry scalp snowed white on the keyboard. There were several grease spots on his shirt, and the cuffs had dirty edges, even though in his hurry he had thought he was choosing a clean shirt. That was meant to counter the chaos inside him. He did not want anyone peeking into his head. The crime scene inspectors were still working in the churchyard. He had no real expectations. They would only end up with buckets of water, melted snow, to bring to the Institute. The autopsy would probably reveal more.

As he turned his cell phone to silent, Suokko glanced at the old wall clock. The second hand no longer worked. You could still tell time by it, anyway. Not much else at the police station worked either. The Meilahti church deaconess would be in the questioning room any minute now. It was she who had summoned the police. The patrolman said that the frightened woman had hurried into the yard when she heard the boys scream.

Whores. That’s what the Nigerian women likely were. It would be the natural explanation. They’d hardly come to Helsinki to clean, Suokko thought as he rose with difficulty. His knees cracked under his weight; maybe they were protesting the pace he was keeping. Didn’t matter. His life was on track. At most a bit skewed, like his kneecap. His wife was vacationing in Madeira with her lover. Suokko knew he could do nothing about it. Their marriage was going through a phase that did not exactly make him feel light-hearted—quite the opposite.

Still, he had stayed dry, even though he had not attended an AA meeting for two weeks. When it came down to it, he was satisfied with the decisions he had made. A little over two years ago he had finally understood the advantages of a slower career and had requested a transfer from the position of assistant police chief to criminal investigator because his motivation, belief, and strength were at an end. He was no longer in control of his personal life and was not getting any satisfaction from his ever more administrative job. It had all become just routine. He had chased away low spirits with unrestrained drinking. The diagnosis was right, the medicine, wrong. Not many people could change an organization to fit themselves; they themselves had to change to fit the organization. It was shit. Not good for anyone.

Suokko tucked his shirt into the tight waist of his pants and stepped into the dimly lit corridor that smelled of the same cheap disinfectant used in all the government offices. At that moment, he stopped. Damn. Same empty head summer and winter. He remembered what he’d forgotten and he went back to get the photographs of the murdered women. He had received them from the Institute of Forensic Medicine fifteen minutes earlier.

He had known that at some point a Nigerian sex-trafficking ring would have to turn up in Finland too. But he had not been expecting murders. The first inkling had come over a week ago when he had received an e-mail from Brussels asking him to check on the situation of Nigerian women who had entered Finland, legally or illegally. Behind this was a just-completed investigation by Nigerian officials according to which as many as 40,000 girls or women had been smuggled to the closest West African countries to become sex workers. Simon Egede, executive secretary of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, reported that investigators had found slave camps in Mali, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya, Morocco, and Cape Verde, full of Nigerian women and girls. Nowadays, human trafficking was part of Finnish reality too. Nearly two hundred million homeless people were on the move in the world. Some of them were merchandise. Simon Egede had asked him to survey the situation in Finland and the other Nordic countries, because he suspected that there were many more Nigerian pimps and whores than the police thought. Egede wanted to expand his investigation from West Africa to also include the EU, so that EU residents would at least become aware of the miserable reality of the Nigerian women who had fled poverty to become victims of human trafficking, and also of the indifference of Europe’s national police forces and immigration offices.

The deaconess sat in the bleak room with her back straight, her hair in a tight bun, and her mouth a tight line. The woman could actually have been pretty if she had had even a touch of style. As he squeezed onto the narrow bench, Suokko cast a furtive glance at the woman’s breasts, which would have made many a woman in civilian life proud. Not bad, not bad at all. He cleared his throat when he realized he was gawking, raked his straggly hair, raised his chin, and stared at the ceiling as if something extremely important had just occurred to him. But his head was empty. The fluorescent light on the ceiling was on its last gasp. He saw in it a metaphor for his own life. Got to pull himself together or this won’t go anywhere. Suokko pulled his chair forward and sought a more natural position. He announced in a loud voice (keeping in mind the recording and the subsequent report he’d need to make) the topic of the questioning, his own name, his rank, those present, and the precise time at which questioning of the witness was beginning.

To the clearly terrified deaconess, he said as nicely as possible that she need not be scared of anything because she was there only as a witness, not a suspect. It did not help. The deaconess, white-faced, just looked more frightened. Her body crumpled like a balloon losing air. Suokko was sure that Lieutenant Kauko Mähönen, sitting behind the one-way mirror in the observation room, was snickering to himself. Fun for him. Suokko turned on the microphone and started the tape.

The deaconess, breathing heavily, was not able to answer even the simplest questions because she was not at all sure what she had seen and didn’t remember when she had first noticed the snowmen in the churchyard. She spoke in such a confused and incoherent way that Suokko was unable to construct an exact timeline for what she had done on the night she spotted the snowmen as she left for home. The deaconess nervously toyed with a loose curl on her forehead, winding it around her index finger. She got badly off track talking about barely related things and then she began to blather about the minister’s blue eyes that offered comfort in the midst of the deepest sorrow. Suokko tried to cover his irritation and requested as nicely as he could that the deaconess answer the questions posed. They were not here to talk about anything else. In the end he managed to extract a few morsels of valuable information from the woman. The deaconess had not seen any tracks in the snow, not even any snow-covered depressions suggesting that someone had walked to the yard to make the snowmen or left the spot after the job was done. The snow had been pristine, virginal—like the deaconess herself, thought Suokko.

Suokko spread the photographs on the table and asked the deaconess if she knew or had ever seen these Nigerian women. She shook her head firmly as she stared at the expressionless death masks, but she was too horrified to get a word out. Suokko believed her. He quickly removed the pictures because he did not want to cause any more anxiety for this woman who was clearly unused to violence and death. Strange, though. You would have thought she’d be accustomed to constant funerals and the continuous tolling of death bells. Didn’t the whole Lutheran church base its salvation doctrine on the crucifixion of Jesus, on the death of God’s son? Then he pulled himself up and resolved to banish heretical thoughts. The whole stupid session was just a waste of recording tape. Bending closer to her, he asked the deaconess if she suspected anyone of the murders. She was alarmed. She blanched white as snow.

“Lord the Father. The Devil.”

Suokko tried not to laugh. He suspected the woman did not mean that Lord the Father and the Devil were one and the same. He told the deaconess the interview was over and thanked her for her time. Once on her feet, she curtsied.

Suokko returned quickly to his office and only after sitting down did he realize he had left the photos in the interview room. The bitter cold could be felt inside too, insofar as the air in the room was dryer than ever and full of static electricity that made his thin hair stand on end.

Mähönen could drive him to Meilahti where he could do some honest footwork, thought Suokko. He wanted to talk with the minister and interview the residents of the nearby buildings, in case they had noticed anything unusual over these past days. An unexpected witness observation—he could use that right about now. The temperature had dropped and it was snowing again. He looked out the window, from where, beyond the rows of three-story buildings, he could make out Keskuspuisto, Helsinki’s Central Park, that wooded swath that ran through different parts of the city all the way to the Töölönlahti Bay. He stood rooted in place, staring into the distance. Dark window. Snow on a TV screen. White noise.

* * *

Seen from Mannerheimintie heading straight into downtown, the bell tower of the Meilahti Church looked like a chimney of some waste treatment plant. But no smoke came from it. Suokko fingered the dashboard nervously. He glanced around and waited impatiently for Mähönen to turn the car onto Kuusitie. The clock ticked. The tires spun. The drifts had been neatly plowed to the side of the road and several cars were buried in the snow. He knew that the bell that ended up in the bell tower had originally been meant for Vyborg’s old cathedral, but it was never installed there because Finland had to relinquish Karelia to the Soviet Union in the last stretch of World War II. They finally managed to smuggle the bell into Finland, despite the war, and it was eventually donated to the Meilahti Church in the early 1950s when the church was being constructed. A bigger problem than the installation of Vyborg’s old cathedral bell was the resettling of nearly a half million evacuees who had fled Karelia after the war. Displaced Karelians settled in Helsinki’s densely populated areas as well as its annexed areas, but some also landed in the old apartment buildings alongside Mannerheimintie Street, where more room was made by adding floors. Since then, the area’s ethnic balance had not changed. Instead, the socioeconomic map had been redrawn over the past decades. Studio apartments had been renovated into attic suites where interior decorators, designers, producers, and consultants lived. If this sort went dancing, they’d go to the city center or to Kallio and wouldn’t hang around their own neighborhood in the evening. Meilahti was a safe harbor for the Finnish bourgeoisie, even though it had its share of international schools and day care centers. The students came in from other places. For that reason alone, the murder of the Nigerian women spawned fear and confusion among the residents. The last murder, actually manslaughter, had occurred in the early 1960s when a group of drunks had knifed a guy to death for stealing a buddy’s bottle. In the past ten years the police had documented only two narcotics offences. With a deep sigh Suokko loosened his seat belt. Heartburn. Maybe he shouldn’t have eaten bacon earlier that morning.

He felt shitty even though untangling the fate of the Nigerian women had pumped a good shot of adrenaline into his system. If he had seen a shooting star in the sky he would have wished for his wife to finally leave the other man. But only snowflakes danced in the sky. No hope, no good omens that would give him a pretext to imagine the situation would draw to a close. He couldn’t even guzzle himself into a drunken stupor. That option was no longer open to him.

Snow-whipped Meilahti looked empty, deserted, as if people had been removed from the landscape because they did not fit into the elements of Finnish architecture. Most people were of course at work and others were inside because of the weather. Meilahti was not a sketchy part of the city—far from it. It didn’t have a single lively night spot, just some coffee shops. People here went to bed at ten p.m. or drank behind drawn drapes. The car came to an intersection and the back went into a skid. Mähönen stepped on the gas.

“Left here.”

“Gee, thanks. Wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“Enough.”

“Shall I also brake when we reach the church?”

“Yes. If it’s not too much trouble.”

Suokko shook his head and was about to add some personal barb, but he controlled himself, albeit with difficulty, because there was no point wasting his powder on Mähönen, who could be a real ass at times. But this wasn’t the time to niggle. Here they were. Mähönen engaged the parking brake and turned off the engine. The sound of flapping sails could be heard, but the sea was at least two kilometers away. The sound came from the wind crashing against the police tape that roped off the site of the crime to prevent outsiders from disturbing possible tracks and evidence. As he climbed laboriously out of the car, Suokko watched carefully where he set his feet so as not to slip. Just then his cell phone beeped. He was so busy concentrating on staying erect that he dropped the phone into the snow as he pulled it out. Shouldn’t have put on the goddamn leather-soled shoes after all, he fumed as he glanced at the screen, wet with snow.

The message from Europol revealed that the Nigerian women had come to Madrid six years ago from Ikeja, outside of Lagos. According to the border officials they were cousins, one twenty-two years old, the other, two years older. Suokko humphed. It might be that the women were only cousins on the officials’ papers, but it was absolutely certain that they were political refugees—the religious, political, and ethnic situation in Nigeria was that chaotic. Suokko was sure they’d already started whoring in Spain, though probably not completely voluntarily. And no doubt continued in Finland. This meant that either a pimp or competitor was behind the murders, or else a customer. But he could not imagine why they had been buried in the churchyard.

Was there some hidden message in that? Or had the murderer been forced to hurry? It was also possible that the murderer simply wanted to lead the police astray. Suokko did not believe it was a ritual murder, though the tabloid chatter was painting it that way. Maybe that was the best way to frighten the readers.

Right away came a second message. This was from the Institute of Forensic Medicine on Kytösuontie. The district forensic pathologist reported that preliminary examination showed that the women—or girls, as he referred to the corpses—had suffocated to death. Bits of plastic had been found in one girl’s mouth and throat, while the other’s neck had obvious signs of strangling that were strangely asymmetrical, as if the murderer had only partially used his right hand. The force had nonetheless been strong enough to crush her larynx.

He texted back asking the forensic pathologist to send the photographs of the wounds to him at his office. Nothing to do with any rituals or occult ceremonies, Suokko thought again, as he almost slipped on the slight incline. Luckily, Mähönen had stayed in the car and was not here to sneer. Damn. No question. This was clearly a sex murder. His socks were getting waterlogged. His shoes were wet from the snow. He raised his collar against the icy wind; he didn’t think people were at their best deep-frozen.

Once inside he began to perspire immediately. The body was not cold-blooded either. The church had been completely renovated ten years earlier. The minister received him in the congregation’s church hall with the Paavo Tynell light fixtures that called to mind Christ’s crown of thorns. The lanky minister shook Suokko’s hand and welcomed him. His voice was low, his eyes blue, his gaze somehow both feverish and penetrating. Suokko felt contrition at once. He wondered why the minister was wearing black gloves even though it was so warm inside. For a moment he imagined the deaconess in the room in just a bikini, but this image produced by his errant soul only heightened his burden of guilt. Damn, he thought to himself, and pulled himself erect. He cleared his throat and looked the minister right in the eyes. The minister returned his gaze. There was a strange feeling in Suokko’s hand. The minister’s grasp had been surprisingly limp, even timid, for such a tall man.

The questioning produced nothing, as Suokko had feared. The minister did not recognize the Nigerian women when Suokko showed him the now wrinkled pictures of the victims. He had never seen them at church events, where in fact he had only seen black visitors a few times. Twice, he had noticed a few black men on the second Sunday of Advent, when Christmas carols were sung at church. Otherwise it was only the congregation’s regular members who came to church, familiar people who lived in Meilahti. Nor had he noticed anything unusual in the church’s front yard at the time the deaconess had first noticed the snowmen. He himself had only heard about them the next day from her, because he had left the church through the low wing of the building instead of the main door. He recalled trying to dig out the ceramic relief by Armas Tirronen of the Good Samaritan from the snow plastered against the wall, but he had abandoned that effort after a few minutes of useless scraping. The snow had been packed hard against the wall. He also advised Suokko to take the deaconess’s stories with a grain of salt because she was slightly unbalanced mentally and her relationship with reality was at times very thin, although she was an extremely conscientious worker. The minister suspected some sort of sexual repression. Then he apologized that he had a lot of work, excused himself, and hastened off to prepare for a baptism. Suokko remained standing a moment in the aisle leading to the altar. Lord the Father! Not a single eyewitness. Nothing. Even the church’s own surveillance cameras were no help. The tapes just showed falling snow. White. As if the film were overexposed.

Suokko asked Mähönen to drive from Pihlajatie Street to Kuusitie Street. The names meant rowan and spruce; nearly all the streets around here were named for some stupid tree. He wanted to ring doorbells and question the people who lived in the apartment buildings in the area, though he didn’t think much would come of it. But experience had taught him that sometimes a trivial or seemingly unimportant remark, doubt, feeling, or phrase could be exactly what triggered a breakthrough in a murder investigation. This was why no stone could be left unturned, no matter how tedious it was.

Mähönen was silent, he would have liked to return to the Pasila police station and was tired of sitting in the car waiting. Suokko thought to himself that it would do the old chap good to sit a few more hours in the car. He asked Mähönen to contact Lyly, who worked in Internet-monitoring and might be able to do a quick search for horny men in Meilahti.

The end result was four liters of weak coffee and a stomachache. Pictures still flickered past his eyes from the family albums some of the elderly women had been determined to show him. No one had seen anything, but quite a few of them knew for sure who was guilty. He’d been advised to investigate the activity of some Indians and Japanese who had moved to Kuusitie Street, because the daily routine of that whole group was very strange, not to mention their customs. He would find the guilty party in that crowd, he was assured. No one else in Meilahti would fool around with black women. Suokko knew very well that nearly 80 percent of all murders in Finland occurred within the family or former family or group of friends. Police very rarely found any clear motives for these acts. They were often committed by someone drunk, in the grip of jealousy or rage. But he kept his mouth shut. One retired labor union activist suggested that Suokko should leave the Meilahti residents alone and head instead for Pikku Huopalahti to take it up with the folks there, where there were buildings full of Somalis.

It was cold in the car, even with the heater going full force. Mähönen was eating a greasy meat pie he’d picked up from a store around the corner. Suokko knew they had to find a client of the Nigerian women. He’d have to run through online sex ads and porn forums. Maybe he’d get some ground under his feet there, something solid. The windshield wipers cleared the snow from the car’s front window. Only sparkling streaks of water remained on the windshield from the snowflakes and then they, too, vanished beneath the wipers. No trace. Effect without cause.

* * *

His wet shoes were drying on top of the reports on the desk. Suokko had stuffed them with crumpled newspaper to dry the soles. He curled his toes, frozen from tramping around in the snow. His wife had just phoned from Madeira. Her voice sounded happy, which did not improve Suokko’s mood. The air in the room smelled like a wet dog was lurking in the corner. Even the window was fogged with moisture. Nor did it lighten his mood that he had bumped into Chief Raatikainen in the hallway just as he’d been opening the door to his office. On his way to meet with some trendy interest group, Raatikainen had expressed his hope that the case would be solved as quickly as possible so the evening tabloids and social media wouldn’t get the chance to mock police incompetence and spread unnecessary terror. Suokko had told a number of reporters that day that the police could not release any information about the investigation at this point. It would be interesting to see how many lines they could construct from that information-free statement.

Pulling his chair closer to the desk, Suokko dug out from under his shoes the photos of the victims that the forensic pathologist had sent him and began to study the strangulation marks. The women’s expressionless death masks made them look somehow inhuman, as if they were not flesh and blood but rather some sort of artifacts. Both had bloodshot eyes which brought to mind a coronal cloud on the sun. But nevertheless, there was no more life in them. Suokko imagined someone—if he only knew who—beginning rough sex games with the women, placing one woman’s head in a plastic bag and forcing the other to watch. Perhaps the first woman was suffocated by mistake? The shithead would have murdered the other on purpose because he wanted no witnesses alive.

Suokko felt like he was beginning to piece together the chain of events. A pimp would not up and kill two prostitutes who brought him money. Nor did Suokko believe in turf battles between pimps from different countries—that simply did not happen in Finland. Maybe in Germany or Denmark, okay. The problem was that he still had no evidence to support his theory. He picked up a magnifying glass and studied the strangulation marks on the neck of Temitope Oyelami—this was evidently the name of the younger prostitute. These marks bothered him, but he could not come up with a reasonable explanation for why they were lopsided. Bruises made by the thumb and index finger of the right hand were clearly visible. Then there was a sort of clean area that ended in what was presumably the pressure mark from a little finger. For some reason the force had not been distributed evenly. Haste? Alarm? Just then the phone, the landline, rang. Suokko grabbed the receiver with one eye still on the magnifying glass.

“Suokko.”

“Forgive me. Virtanen here.”

“Evening.”

“I really don’t know if I should even have called.”

“Well, tell me what’s on your mind, since you did call,” Suokko said, trying to hide his impatience.

It took a little while before Suokko realized it was the deaconess who was calling. Her slurred voice suggested she had uncorked a bottle of red wine some time ago. The deaconess, breathing heavily into the phone, was even more upset about the murders than she had been during the questioning. She could not comprehend how anyone could descend to such brutality. She lamented that she had been unable to help. She would have liked to help, with all her heart. After a few pointed comments from Suokko, the woman gradually caught on that he was in a hurry, and she let him continue his work. Suokko expressed his gratitude. The gesture was Jacob’s, the motive, Esau’s.

The snow had paused, the temperature dropped, and the pipes of the police station banged. Overhead, the sky spread out like a black shroud.

The motive? What was it? Bad question. Why had the bodies been left in the churchyard?

Suokko could not come up with any explanation for the murders other than self-defense and fear of being caught buying sex. That did not make the murders any less brutal. The right hand. He could not get that out of his mind. It wouldn’t leave him in peace. His shoes smelled of sweat. There they sat right under his nose. The summary from Lyly of local online sex purchasers before and after the murders listed only three men, two of whom Suokko knew by name. They couldn’t be murderers. Suokko signed into the police register to do further research. The third man also seemed very unlikely to be guilty, although someone had suggested chemical castration for him. Another dead end.

Suokko heaved a sigh and thought in frustration that the guilty party might not be caught for months or even years. That sometimes happened when no evidence was found right at the beginning of a criminal investigation. He kept turning it over in his mind. He was sure he had overlooked something important, something that could lead to a breakthrough, if he could only figure out what it was. He lifted his shoes from the desk, walked over to the radiator in his socks, and placed the shoes on it. They could dry there as long as necessary. He thought about Meilahti. It was a cocoon where murder had no place, because murder demanded feelings, anger at the very least, that clouded reason. He could not associate passion with Meilahti. In the northwest the big gray complex with the maternity hospital and children’s clinic, along with the university’s general hospital, cancer clinic, and medical research institutes, spread all the way to churning Humallahti Bay. In the middle of Meilahti was the church. The graveyard was cleverly situated the next neighborhood over. Meilahti was a closed, self-sufficient entity where people were born, lived, died, and were sent off on the final journey. He sought some metaphor but could not quite catch hold of it. But slowly it came to him. He thought of the sun. People who lived in Meilahti were like tourists clustered on a sunny beach. The sun did not burn them because they were careful to sit under beach umbrellas. No mark appeared on them, not even of life.

Something kept nagging at him. He went back to the police register and began skimming through it. He could not get comfortable on the chair, and after lifting and resettling his backside a few times, he realized what was wrong: he was sitting on the magnifying glass. On top of everything else. As if his ass weren’t big enough already.

The night progressed but he stayed where he was. No need to hurry home to toss and turn in bed and jealously imagine what his wife and her lover were doing in Madeira. All of a sudden a familiar name caught his eye and he stopped aimlessly perusing the register. Just for the hell of it he decided to see what the register had about the minister of the Meilahti church. He had realized, when the minister left to prepare for the baptism, that he did not like the man. Though friendly enough, the minister seemed somehow artificial, as if he were playing a role and was not even present. On the other hand, wasn’t being a minister purely a role anyway, Suokko thought, as he began checking the man’s record, which was irritatingly unblemished. Damn. The man had his doctorate and had even done ecumenical work in Africa. A good man, even for a minister. He’d also done well in the army and attended reserve officers’ training. Suokko swore. The minister had never wallowed in ditches, wasn’t even an alcoholic like Suokko.

Rubbing his eyes, Suokko was about to stop reading when his gaze, growing heavier and heavier, was suddenly arrested. Fatigue vanished. He had it at last. He couldn’t believe his eyes. An accident during shooting practice in the army had taken two fingers from the future church minister’s right hand. Suokko recalled the man’s limp and awkward handshake. Goddamn bastard.

He quickly ordered a patrol car for himself. It wasn’t more than a ten-minute drive from Pasila to Meilahti, with no traffic on the road at this hour. The minister lived next to the church, on Jalavatie. Suokko almost forgot his shoes on the radiator as he rushed into the hall. The moon had risen. It illuminated the snow, now an ugly gray from sand, dirt, and traffic exhaust. Suokko thought of the alb, a minister’s basic liturgical vestment, which no longer gleamed so white.