in the unopened packages?”
“Yes.”
“Are they anything special?”
Milo grinned. “Extra special.”
“Do you know how to use them?”
Milo laughed. “Not a fucking clue.”
“I’m probably familiar with them. Why don’t we drop off the others and have a look at them together.”
Kate was off in her own little world, admiring her gifts, expensive and precious things that, when she was younger, brought up poor, she could never have conceived of possessing. She looked up at us. “Is this what comes of being a criminal’s wife?” she asked.
Moreau answered. “No. This is what comes of being the wife of a powerful man.”
Milo had thrown a hell of a party. Once the others were out of the house, we got Anu to sleep and made love again.
22
Milo came over the next day to finish his last “synthesizable VHDL model of exact solutions for a three- dimensional hyperbolic positioning system.”
We sat at the dining room table. Kate lay near us on the couch, reading a book. I continued wading through files, a policeman’s nightmare drudgery. I was firm in my belief now, though, that the identity of Lisbet Soderlund’s murderer was an open secret, and the way to solve this case was through the application of intimidation and pressure, or maybe through the application of biographical leverage—blackmail—until someone ratted out the killer.
I viewed these files with a different eye now, deciding who to approach. I agreed with Moreau, and I was now looking for someone who not only was capable of decapitating a woman but was also an accomplished marksman. This narrowed down the field a great deal. The shooter likely had considerable military experience, well beyond that of a typical Finnish conscript.
It occurred to me that Moreau would fill the bill as the murderer. I made some calls, checked with the French police. They refused to provide details, but he wasn’t in Finland at the time of Kaarina Saukko’s murder. However, he was a policeman on a diplomatic passport, listed as an attache at the French embassy.
The disappearance of Antti Saukko troubled me. It was entirely possible, given his relationship with his family, that his kidnappers released him and he chose to simply change his identity and disappear. Pursuing a missing person, unless there is some reason to indicate that said missing person is the victim of a crime, is trampling on that individual’s rights. We have the entitlement to abandon our lives at will, hence the policy of no body, no murder. The fate of the three missing children of kidnapper Jussi Kosonen concerned me, but it wasn’t my case.
My cane leaned against the table beside me. Milo nodded toward it. “You know, you could poison the teeth on that thing if you wanted to. Did you enjoy your party yesterday?”
“Yeah, I really did. And I meant what I said. The cane you gave me is my favorite possession. Do we have any money left after your spending spree?”
“Oodles. Robbing dope dealers is so lucrative, I’m not sure why more people like us don’t take up the occupation.”
“I’m sure some do, but have short-lived careers. Your sawed-off was a good idea. If you load it with something non-lethal, it could get us out of jams if we got stuck, say, pulling a heist and a few guys walked in. Just don’t do anything weird, like load it with bee-hive rounds or rat-poisoned buckshot.”
The dark circles under his eyes deepened. Always a sign of trouble. Milo was both obdurate and rambunctious, an often annoying, even dangerous combination. Now he wanted a fight. “Well, would it be fucking OK with you if I just fucking carry lethal ammo, should fucking necessity arise?”
I tamed him with the unexpected and then switched gears to disengage his temper.
“Sure. Did you spend much time with Moreau?”
I noticed Kate’s eyes drift from her book to us.
“We dropped off Arvid and Sweetness. I don’t know why he thinks he’s fooling anyone hiding his drinking.”
Now we had Kate’s full attention. She hadn’t caught on to Sweetness’s drinking. It can be hard to tell someone is drunk if you never see them sober.
Milo fired up his machine and fiddled with it for a minute. “Goddamn it. These work, but not well enough. They pick up the cell phones but can’t track enough at one time and the range is too short.”
“What do you need?”
Asking was a mistake. Prolix Milo kicked into gear. “I can’t get my hands on one because of its military-grade sales status, and I couldn’t fake my way through it, and even by our standards, they cost a fortune. A GSM A5.1 Real Time Cell Phone Interceptor. It’s undetectable, can handle twenty phones in quad band and four base stations.”
It meant nothing to me and I wasn’t interested. “What did you do after you dropped off the others?”
Milo doesn’t have a raconteur’s bone in his body. “We went to my place and looked at the weapons. A Remington 870 tactical shotgun to handle ballistic breaching lockbuster shotgun rounds. A Heckler & Koch UMP machine gun. It’s much like the MP5 but state-of-the-art and made from the latest in advanced polymers. And a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. It’s like something out of
He went on. Kate hated this kind of rambling constantly disturbing her tranquillity. This was what she had complained about. It made her feel as if she lived in a police precinct instead of a home, and she had also sacrificed a great deal of privacy having the team ginning around like they lived here.
Milo would have continued but I cut him off. “What do you think of Moreau?”
“He’s a really cool guy. He told me he would teach me how to use the .50 Barrett. Why did you shoot down his idea about selling the heroin?”
“It’s tricky and dangerous. We just keep ripping off dealers. Keep them beaten down.”
Milo switched to Finnish, so Kate wouldn’t understand. “So long as they don’t start a drug war and we have to hide it by dissolving any more bodies in acid. That really skeeved me out.”
But Kate
I explained to her what had happened. That one gangster killed another and we had to cover it up, or gangsters would start gunning each other down in the streets, Helsinki Homicide would get involved and inevitably would trail the murders and the reasons behind them back to us.
“We really had no choice,” I said.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, because of its geographic location, Helsinki has been awash in spies. Out of survival instinct, these spies had made an unspoken agreement many years ago, early in the Cold War. Helsinki would be holy ground, a sacred city to which secret warriors could travel without fear. Even after the Cold War, Helsinki remained a city in which both its inhabitants and fringe dwellers existed in relative safety. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying that tradition.
“Apparently,” Kate said, “I’ve been kept in the dark about some details, but it’s gone something like this. You’ve committed a number of thefts, maybe dozens, I don’t know. But because you didn’t know what you were doing, you stole too much, and a lot of people have died because of it. You incited someone to murder, and you left the body to dissolve in a vat of acid. Am I correct here?”
“Yes.”
Milo was already putting his boots on, making his escape. He needn’t have. She wouldn’t be angry at him. I gave the orders. I was her husband. And he had given her, among other things, a two-thousand-euro bottle of perfume yesterday, as an act of friendship and to make up for her inconvenience. I was alone on the gallows. He shut the door behind him with a soft click.
