Fresh snow is every cop’s investigative dream. Even the smallest objects, unless white themselves, leap out and announce themselves. Trampled snow, the policeman’s nightmare.
This area, in a stand of birch, had been stamped on by hundreds of soldiers for the past couple days. The snow was gray, most of it mashed up, and full of pockets created by footprints beside the main walking paths. Even a detailed, thorough search would yield only the most obvious evidence. A squad had occupied this small area. After the murder, they had been ordered to vacate it, with the exception of a soldier who was on guard duty when the attack occurred. Only their empty tents and a rifle rack made of crossed tree branches remained. Two rifles remained on the rack.
This was all new to Sweetness. He’d exercised his right to choose civil service over military duty. After he graduated from high school, while most of his male classmates were performing their mandatory nine months in the army, he spent a year working in a kindergarten. He preferred crayons to hand grenades, even if it meant an additional three months’ service for being—in the eyes of most men—a sissy. The victim was a young man with his throat cut. The corpse seemed to mesmerize Sweetness. He couldn’t stop staring at it.
Milo knelt down and examined the wound. “Nothing special,” he said. “The throat was cut from left to right with a single motion. The weapon had a long, sharp blade. He was probably grabbed from behind, and it was all over before he knew it even happened.”
The remaining soldier sat on the trunk of a felled tree, chain-smoking. He flicked ashes and put extinguished cigarettes in his coat pocket, so as not to further contaminate the crime scene.
I was right. Sweetness had to pretty much carry me around. It was a bit on the humiliating side. The military pathologist told me to have a look at the body. His preliminary examination was complete. The murder was self- explanatory, he said. The victim had been placed faceup on a stretcher. His arms crossed. They were only waiting for me to view him before taking him away. The cut across his throat was deep, nearly to his spine. His tongue flopped out through the laceration.
I sat down on the tree trunk beside the soldier, introduced myself and the others. Milo and Sweetness stood in front of us, listening.
“What’s your name,” I asked.
“Harri.”
“Can you relax and tell me what happened? We’re not here to judge or blame you for anything. We just want to find out who did this.”
We all lit cigarettes except for Sweetness. He hit his flask and injected
Harri pointed at the corpse. “Me and Rami were taking our turn at guard duty. Everybody else was asleep in their tents. I got tased and everything after that is blurry. I guess I got hit with a lot of volts and a couple times, because the burns on my back and neck are bad. When I got my senses back, I was duct-taped to a tree, and Rami was dead.”
He pointed at the tree. Much of the tape was still hanging from it in tatters, where he’d been found and cut free.
“My mouth was taped shut. Two men were dressed in black military clothing and balaclavas, but they were definitely black. I could tell from the areas around their eyes. The squad’s rifles were stacked on the rack. They packed all they could into duffel bags. There are two left, so they took ten. One of them got up close so our faces almost touched. He had a thick accent and really bad grammar, but I guess he knew it and spoke slow to make sure I understood. He said, ‘I allow you to live so you will deliver this message. We pray that Allah gives us the strength to use these weapons to do His will.’ Then they just walked off, and about half an hour later, somebody got up to take a piss and found us.”
“What kind of unit are you in?” Milo asked.
“A mortar squad.”
Milo walked over to the rack and picked up one of the two remaining rifles, gave it a once-over. “This is an Rk 95 Tp,” he said. “Most people just call it the M95.”
A Kalashnikov AK-47-style rifle made by Sako, the Finnish arms manufacturer. “And the significance is what?” I asked.
“There aren’t that many of them. A lot of them went to mortar units. Most soldiers are still carrying the old Rk 62. That means if we come up with a suspect in possession of an M95, as compared to an Rk 62, the odds of him having stolen it from here are quite high.”
I asked Harri, “Is there anything else you think I should know?”
He shook his head. “Just that I feel responsible. Safeguarding this area was my duty, and now Rami is dead.”
He wasn’t still a kid. His uniform was almost new. He’s probably only been in the army since the last cycle, in January.
“I’ve been a cop for twenty-two years,” I said, “and my experience is that when a man turns predator and you’re the target, you don’t know you’re being hunted and you don’t stand a chance. There was nothing you could do.”
His face said my pep talk, which was a simple truth, made him feel no better.
A reasonable assumption was that black immigrants had taken the murder of Lisbet Soderlund as a declaration of war and begun arming themselves. Somalis have a semblance of political organization and gangs that occasionally commit violent race crimes against whites, and vice versa, so their desire to acquire arms wasn’t entirely surprising, especially given the threats and violent rhetoric that were now daily directed against them. But blacks armed with AK-47s would terrify many Finns. The extremist Real Finns preached the inevitability of a race war between Finns and immigrants. I had an ominous gut suspicion that it might be coming true.
This lent a new sense of urgency to the Soderlund murder, and I wondered how many would die before I solved it.
15
It was almost noon by the time we got back to Helsinki. I figured Jyri Ivalo would have put out the nationwide call to police forces, and also to SUPO, requesting that all information concerning racists be sent to me. I asked Milo to come over to my house so we could start the sorting process and begin looking for potential suspects in the murder of Lisbet Soderlund.
We stopped at his house, around the corner from mine, to pick up his laptop, and set up shop on my dining room table. My Outlook in-box was jammed and more e-mails were coming in by the minute. We networked our computers and set up a database. In 1977, the differences between towns, cities and municipalities were removed, and we now have a hundred and nine municipalities. This makes things a little easier in a nationwide search, as previously there were between four and five hundred towns that we would have to deal with separately.
We created a method, tried to sort groups with racist beliefs from moderate to extreme, and then members of those groups from moderate to extreme, red flagging any person accused or convicted of committing a race crime. Sweetness passed the time looking over our shoulders, trying to learn police work. He played errand boy, brought us coffee. Kate ignored us so we could work in peace.
Real Finns, despite the anti-immigrant stance of many of its members, was the most moderate of our target groups, and also the hardest to investigate. In the 2008 municipal elections, they took around a hundred fifty thousand votes. Those records are of course sealed. They have their own magazine, published every three weeks. The circulation is twenty-five thousand. There were insufficient grounds to subpoena the list of recipients. The list would have been valuable, as this murder was political, and I could have cross-checked against known racists. They had around five hundred municipal councillors in office, but in fact, only seven or eight people were the true organizers of the movement. Most of them were from the other end of the country, but I could at least have them questioned. Not that I thought that any of them were likely murderers, but their known associates could have been.
I got an e-mail that contained compiled statistics of crimes committed by and against foreigners. It interested me.
Two point five percent of the population is foreign or naturalized.
