Lucifer King” were mimicked. “We shall overcome…all over your nigger faces.” “I have a dream…to see your faces burnt off with blowtorches.” And so on.
Hate congealed. Amoebas of hate divided and subdivided and renewed themselves in abhorrent mitosis. Almost all the countries in the European Union were faced with immigration problems. An interesting response to an editorial. “If we can’t kill them outright, could we re-institute slavery and sell them as chattel, and thus receive compensation, recoup the monies spent on their maintenance?” The most reasonable suggestion was to simply revoke the EU membership of those countries with low per capita incomes, and send their former inhabitants back where they came from. A thoughtful comment by a good hater.
I expected a call from Saska Lindgren, and my premonition proved correct. He asked if I could meet him at the same address as before. The entire black family there was now dead. I told him I’d like to bring the rest of my team, and a consultant I was working with. He said no problem. I called Milo, Sweetness and Moreau, and told them where to meet me. I didn’t need them, but Milo would want to take part, I had promised Moreau, and because of Sweetness’s unusual reaction at the murder scene of the soldier in the forest, I thought he needed to get accustomed to death investigations.
I put Anu in her crib and told Kate I was sorry to leave her in such a condition, but I had to go to a murder scene. She was ghastly pale and nodded acknowledgment without opening her eyes.
On the way over, I called Jyri and arranged to meet him later. He was less than pleased that I called at such an early hour the day after Vappu, but I assured him it was worth the pain of having his hangover disturbed. I promised he would be glad to see me, because I had a hundred fifty thousand euros for him. I usually skimmed ten percent off the top, but there was so much money, and the amount had such a nice ring to it, that I didn’t bother.
I arrived about ten a.m. The street was lined with vehicles. The press, cops, forensics people, curious citizens, all milled about. Police tape lined the whole of the property, meaning the house and its small front and back yards. Spring was here. The snow was all gone now, and likely wouldn’t be back for the next few months. The temperature was about the same as yesterday, but a wet breeze made it feel colder. Milo was already there, sitting on the front stoop, talking to Saska. Sweetness and Moreau hadn’t arrived yet.
“So they killed the rest of the family,” I said.
Saska nodded.
“How?”
“It’s too much to describe. Go out back and have a look if you want.”
“I’m in no rush. I’ll wait on the others.”
“I don’t like looking at it,” he said. “It’s just another murder in a sense, but this one is just so fucking disillusioning.”
Milo got up and motioned for me to follow him out of hearing distance of the crowd. “We took the body and dumped it like we planned,” he said.
“Good.”
“Well…it was weird. We opened the trunk and the guy wasn’t dead. Almost, but not quite. He didn’t move or say anything, but he looked at us and blinked. I wasn’t sure what to do. We could have dumped him in front of a hospital.”
“But,” I said.
“But Sweetness didn’t even want to talk about it. He took a pull off that flask of his, felt around the guy’s chest and found a spot between his ribs near his heart. Then he took that knife I gave him and just slid it into the guy’s chest. Killed him dead as a hammer. ‘Problem solved,’ he said. Then we suited up, dropped the guy in acid, sealed up the barrel and left.”
“What did you do with the car?”
“Took it to East Helsinki and torched it with a Molotov cocktail. I figured it would go unnoticed, since other cars were burned in the area.”
“Good plan.”
“That’s all you have to say? ‘Good plan’?”
I shrugged. “What should I say? What’s done is done.” I felt a little silly for thinking Sweetness needed to get used to murder scenes. Other than that, I had no other feelings about it, one way or another.
“Sweetness is a fucking psycho.”
“I watched you kill a man. Are you a fucking psycho?”
“The circumstances were different.”
“Semantics.”
He stared at me for a minute. “That surgery changed you,” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “I hired Sweetness in part because I recognized in him the ability to commit acts of violence without angst or upset. You enjoy violence because it makes you feel like a tough guy and reinforces your self- image. But your self-image is a lie you tell yourself. If you hurt someone, you feel guilty about it, suffer, have to unburden yourself and cry on my shoulder. You probably feel bad about wrecking that SUPO agent’s face. Sweetness couldn’t give a shit less if he hurts someone, just doesn’t care one way or the other, and I don’t have to listen to his sob sister boo hoo hoo remorse.”
I pounded Milo’s ego to dust. I didn’t mean to. He stared down at his muddy boots. “You can be really mean sometimes.”
I fake smiled and held up my cane. “I can also be nice. You be nice, or I’ll tell my lion to bite you.”
He just shook his head and wandered off.
Sweetness and Moreau showed up, I introduced them to Saska, and we all went back to view the murder scene. The racists who promised retaliation proved as good as their word. First, the young men were gassed to death, and now this.
Their mother and sister were laundry-line lynched, then set ablaze. The laundry poles stood opposite each other, and cords to hang up wet laundry were stretched between them. The poles weren’t high enough for a proper lynching, so the killers had tied their ankles and wrists, cinched them tight behind their backs so they only needed about three feet of clearance, and hoisted them up the laundry poles. One body lay on the ground. The other, miraculously, still hung. The rope hadn’t quite burned through.
The bodies were mostly burned down to the bone, the flesh reduced to soot hanging on it. And in the grass near them, the words
Milo shook his head in disbelief. “For God’s sake, why them?”
“It was likely the most repulsive thing the murderers could think of,” Moreau said.
Saska said, “I don’t know what they used, but it was a really powerful accelerant.”
Moreau did an impression. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like…victory.”
“Who’s that supposed to be?” Saska asked.
“Robert Duvall from
Everyone went silent. Except for Moreau and myself, I believe they resisted the urges to both cry and poke.
“But why the words burnt into the yard?” Moreau asked. “‘Whore’ is singular. There are two bodies.”
“That’s directed at me, as a taunt,” I said. “I worked a case in which a black woman was murdered. Those words were carved in her torso.”
Moreau chuckled and faked a different voice. “So this time it’s personal.”
I didn’t ask which movie he quoted. “But what’s the point?”
“It’s obvious,” he said. “To up the ante. To keep you enchanted and your enthusiasm high. The horror of the violence keeps the pressure up and the case top-priority. For some reason, the killers desire this. Probably for maximum media exposure.”
Milo, Saska and I lit cigarettes.
“Why are you here?” Saska asked him.
Sweetness had been staring at the hanging girl, mesmerized. Finally, he reached out and touched her with
