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  WOLVES AND ANGELS

  A DETECTIVE KOSKINEN MYSTERY

  SEPPO JOKINEN

  Translated by

  Owen Witesman

  Ice Cold Crime LLC

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, incidents, and situations depicted in this work are wholly the creation of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author, the translator, or the publisher.

  Originally published in Finnish as Hukan Enkelit by Karisto, Hämeenlinna, Finland. 2001.

  Translated by Owen Witesman

  Published by

  Ice Cold Crime LLC

  5780 Providence Curve

  Independence, MN 55359

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover by Ella Tontti

  Copyright © Ice Cold Crime 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

  Ice Cold Crime LLC gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of:

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938092

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9824449-5-5

  ISBN-10: 0-9824449-5-8

  WOLVES AND ANGELS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Sakari Koskinen………………......Detective lieutenant

  Risto Pekki………………..…………….VCU sergeant

  Ulla Lundelin………………………......VCU detective

  Antti Eskola…………………….............VCU detective

  Markku Kaatio……………………........VCU detective

  Tauno “Tanse” Niiranen……...……….....VCU captain

  Risto P. Jalonen.……..………......Forensic

  investigator

  Sopanen and Saari………..……….…….Patrol officers

  Milla………..……...………..…...….....Temp secretary

  “Raymond” Timonen………..Aggressive Fallen Angel

  Hannu Ketterä.…....………….Redheaded Fallen Angel

  Tapani “Tappi” Harjus.....……..Muscular Fallen Angel

  Rauha Salmi…...………..……......Wolf House resident

  Lea Kalenius...………..…….............Wolf House nurse

  Anniina Salonen...………..……...........Heavy set nurse

  Kaarina Kauppila………..…….......Evening shift nurse

  Pirkko-Liisa “Pike” Rinne.......................….Fired nurse

  Ilmari Laine…………..……...……...…..….Taxi driver

  Taru Eskola…………….Former secretary, Antti’s wife

  Tomi Koskinen………….....……...……....Sakari’s son

  Emilia Koskinen…………....…….......Sakari’s ex-wife

  Riipinen..…………..……..............Night shift detective

  Ursula Katajisto…………..…….......Police psychiatrist

  For Leena

  Prologue

  Two motorcycles raised a dust cloud over a country road. Two teenagers sat on each bike—a boy in front with a girl in back, each with her arms tightly wrapped around the boy’s waist. It was June, 1986.

  They had left the city half an hour earlier. The girls had wanted to leave much earlier, but the boys had insisted on watching the end of the soccer match on television. Maradona had made two goals against England within a matter of minutes. The boys thought the first was a hand ball. But the referees had still counted it. They couldn’t know then that people would still be talking about the “Hand of God” decades later. There were a lot of other things they didn’t know yet either. But the Hand of God would come to occupy both of their minds.

  The motorcycles turned onto a narrow forest road at a red barn, bumping along a little way and finally coming to a stop in the yard of a green summer cottage. The driver of the second motorcycle ran to the shore, pulling his clothes off as he went. He sped up as he hit the dock, jumping high in the air, executing a beautiful pike and diving headfirst into the water.

  He registered the blow to the crown of his head and felt a brief, electric pain run down the back of his head into his spine. Then everything went black.

  1.

  Tuesday, September 26, 2000, had just begun, and at one minute past midnight, Saari yawned for the first time.

  It irritated Sopanen. He had been working the graveyard shift for more than twenty years and had never yawned, not even in the quietest hours of the early morning. Unlike these newly-hatched chicks from the academy, who didn’t even know how to stay sharp. But Sopanen kept his mouth shut; it wasn’t his job to raise other people’s children.

  Saari knew full well how much yawning galled his patrol partner. That was why sometimes he stretched his jaw just for fun, even if he didn’t really feel the need. Everybody at the station called them the “SS Patrol.” Their squad car number was 341, and their beat was Hervanta, the most densely populated urban neighborhood in Tampere. It was an odd mixture of sleepy residential streets, blighted prefab tower block farms, and raucous university housing. A densely populated area of over 25,000 combined with a large infusion of immigrants and refugees made interesting times for the cops during weekend nights.

  But the night between Monday and Tuesday was one of the slowest of the week. No reason to expect much from this shift. At least not before Hervanta’s half-dozen bars closed their doors. After that they might get a few sporadic house calls and have to cart some member of the family, usually the father or an adult son, downtown to cool off.

  At the Shell station, Sopanen turned the car east toward an industrial area, still without saying a word. Saari could sense his partner’s crankiness. He swallowed his next yawn and sneaked a glance to his left. Sopanen’s angular face was still tense, its lack of humor emphasized by his spiked black hair. But early on, Saari had learned a few tricks to modify his senior partner’s state of mind.

  “At night like this you notice how slow this piece of shit Ford is.”

  Saari felt a gentle jerk in his neck as Sopanen suddenly accelerated. A sign that his sullenness was letting up, at least momentarily.

  “This will always beat that old Saab piece of junk. Don’t have to hold onto the wheel with both hands even at a good clip.”

  Sopanen paused for a moment, and Saari knew that what was coming next would be a heartfelt tribute to the old warhorse.

  “Although, the Saab wasn’t all that bad,” Sopanen said affectionately. “Never left you in the lurch.”

  Saari tried to guess what memory was next in the queue. He had heard dozens of them, all several times over.

  Sopanen chose an old standby—the fish story. He described the details as if it had just happened yesterday, although it had actually been back in the early eighties. It had also been late in the fall. Dawn had just broken, and he was finishing up a night shift with his partner at the time. They were driving toward the station from the southern part of town, and stopped at the lights at the Viinikka roundabout. Sopanen had been the first to notice a delivery van behaving strangely. The vehicle was approaching the city from the south, swaying from one side of the road to the other. It started around the roundabout going clockwise, but made a full extra circuit before cutting to the right toward downtown. Sopanen switched on the lights and set off in pursuit. However, the vehicle did not obey and pull over, taking off instead. The chase ran through the waking city, continuing all the way to Piispala on the northwest side of town. The van had drifted side-first onto the highway that went toward Nokia, and the centrifugal force had ripped the back doors open. When the vehicle accelerated, its whole load tumbled out onto the road right in
front of the police Saab.

  “It was a fisherman who had left the coast earlier that night,” Sopanen said. “All that blasted herring made the road slicker than the slickest black ice. But our old Saab got through it. We turned a few pirouettes in the fish slush and skidded from side to side for a ways. But we still got the delivery van forced over to the side. Then we gave the driver a ride in for a blood test. He had an easy 0.2 running through his veins. He said he’d been hauling fish to the old market hall and had just had two beers while he was sorting out the nets.”

  Sopanen ended his story with a sad shake of his head. It hadn’t been very many months since the old Saab had reached the end of its road and been taken to the wreckers. He sighed nostalgically. “She was quite a ride.”

  The Rusko industrial area was a thicket of workshops, warehouses, and repair shops that had sprung up on the east side of Hervanta between the residential areas and the forest. In the dark autumn night, the place looked even more desolate than usual. There was just enough rain drizzling that the windshield wouldn’t stay dry without the drowsy wipers. The asphalt shone in the pale light of the street-lamps, and the wind danced the yellow birch leaves around on the sidewalks.

  They saw motion in the parking lot of a bakery built of white-painted cinder block. A dark figure walked along the side of the building, and soon the lights of a car switched on in the parking lot. Sopanen slowed down, and a tense Saari squinted in hopes of it turning out to be a donut thief. The car pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward Hervanta. It was a black VW Golf with a security company’s dog logo adorning its side. As he drove past, the driver gave a friendly wave, just like any other of their colleagues.

  The SS Patrol did not respond to the greeting.

  Sopanen continued on, driving through the parking lot of a vehicle inspection station. He then made a U-turn and looked at his watch. “The night bus should be coming soon. Should we go have a look?”

  Saari didn’t say anything, and Sopanen set off driving back west. Their Ford Mondeo sedan crawled along the deserted street at about twenty miles an hour. Sopanen guided the patrol car into the lot of the Shell station and parked facing the main road. It was a good place to wait for the last bus arriving from the city. It was a weekday night, and the bus left downtown at ten minutes past midnight.

  The service station’s hamburger joint had just closed. Saari watched in the rearview mirror as a nimble girl wiped down the tables. The strap of her baseball cap lifted her ponytail up so it bounced pertly, and suddenly Saari was hungry. But it was still too early. If he munched a burger now, it would be a long night. He had a habit of not eating until three o’clock at the Hervanta Grill just before it shut its window. His diet varied from burger with a fried egg to the Tampere Tech Take-out Special. The latter contained everything you could imagine, fried on a grill, with double relish. The French fries had been dunked in boiling fat. Sopanen, on the other hand, made it through the night with just a thermos of coffee and the sandwiches his wife made. She filled them with thick slices of garlic cheese, and after their break the whole car stank for the next two hours.

  The bus wouldn’t come for another five minutes, so Sopanen opened his door, stretched his left leg out, and lit a cigarette. He blew the smoke out toward the sky.

  “We’ll see how the Axes do against Turku on Thursday,” he said, without turning his head.

  “Yep,” Saari mumbled evasively, but Sopanen was in a talking mood.

  “With the defensive game they showed against the Blues last night, they’re sure to screw it up. They looked like a bunch of peg-legged line dancers. The centers were standing around like they had a trouser full and Ojanen looked like he had forgotten how to skate backwards.”

  Saari felt like sticking his fingers in his ears. Just a few years earlier he had been a defender on the Tampere Battle Axes in the Finnish Elite League. He had been paired up with Timo Jutila for a few years after Timo had returned to Finland from the Buffalo Sabres. The peak of Saari’s career had been an invitation to the national team’s training camp, but that was it. And there was the subtle difference: a few games for the national team and from there to the NHL, Sweden, or Central Europe, and he would have been set for life. But a little over-enthusiasm and a couple of mistakes at the camp had made the coaches turn their back on him. And because of that he had to stay up all night being paid peanuts to guard sleeping citizens from crooks and malcontents. Was it any wonder he didn’t want to talk hockey?

  The 23 saved him from having to listen to Sopanen’s commentary. The bus was already crossing the canyon bridge. It turned right at the traffic lights and drove past in front of them. There were only a handful of passengers onboard. But Sopanen still tossed his cigarette butt onto the wet grass, closed the door, and started the car. He set off following the bus about sixty feet back. It didn’t stop for the first time until Opiskelija Street, a third of a mile later. Only one passenger got off, a young Asian woman, who took off running with her head hunched, trying to get out of the intensifying rain as quickly as possible.

  Passengers continued trickling off the bus every now and then. The residents of Hervanta had only just barely recovered from the weekend, so the night between Monday and Tuesday wasn’t luring them out to their usual nocturnal pursuits.

  A man running down the street caught Saari’s attention. Dressed in a green-gray tracksuit and black baseball cap, he was pushing against the wind and rain, bent over forwards, and didn’t seem to notice the police car.

  “Hey!” Saari exclaimed, turning to look through the back window after the jogger. “Did you see who that was?”

  “Somebody from Finland’s Most Wanted?” Sopanen let off the gas. “Should we pick him up?”

  “No, it was Koskinen.”

  “Koskinen who?”

  “The lieutenant from Violent Crime.”

  “Oh, that Koskinen,” Sopanen said with a sneer. “What the hell’s he doing outside in this weather at this time of night?”

  “Looks like he’s jogging.”

  Sopanen turned onto Arkkitehti Street and accelerated to catch up to the bus, which had already made it a way down the street. He snorted as if to punctuate his previous sentence. “Lunatic.”

  It felt odd to Saari too. But he thought it was wise to keep his mouth shut. Day by day, or more like night by night, his goal was looking clearer and clearer. Someday he was going to work on Koskinen’s team.

  As soon as he racked up enough courses and credits at the police academy, he would apply for Koskinen’s team in the Violent Crimes Unit. He wasn’t going to waste his life listening to a partner who stank of tobacco and garlic telling hockey stories night after night.

  A bearded bear of a man got off the bus at the next stop. He threw a large bag over his right shoulder and took a few meandering, stumbling steps. It looked like the weight of the bag would pull him over. He managed to stay upright, though, and turned with staggering but purposeful steps toward the sidewalk. Sopanen didn’t bother following him any farther; even in that condition, he should be able to find his way home.

  The night bus continued on its way. Following it seemed like a waste of the state’s gas, so Sopanen turned left at the next intersection, toward the center of Hervanta. They could lurk at the corner by the Cupola Pub for a few minutes, since sometimes the boys from Tampere Tech still had enough energy left to party on Mondays too.

  He hadn’t even managed to really step on the gas before Saari yelled, “Stop!”

  “What now?”

  “There was some shiny contraption in those bushes.”

  Sopanen glanced at his partner with suspicion. “Contraption? What the hell do you mean, ‘contraption?’”

  “It was shiny, and it had wheels,” Saari said, scratching his neck hesitantly. “Like a wheelchair or something.”

  “Not a rocking chair?” Sopanen guffawed, irritating Saari.

  “Let’s turn back and check it out.”

  Sopanen shook his head
in disgust. “Not worth the trouble. How about being content believing it’s a shopping cart lifted from the corner store. Drunk kids always ride them around the neighborhood.”

  They argued for a few more seconds, until Sopanen sighed with demonstrative condescension. “Well, let’s go look then, so you don’t lose any sleep tomorrow.”

  He lifted his foot off the gas pedal and glanced in the rearview mirror. “We’ll flip a U-ey here as soon as that bike passes.”

  Saari could also see the motorcycle in his own mirror.

  The rider was slowing down in sync with Sopanen, and then suddenly swung back the way he had come.

  “Uh-oh, is he heading back to take a look at your mysterious beer cart too?” Sopanen laughed dryly. The tires squealed as he made a sudden U-turn on the wet asphalt.

  Saari didn’t bother responding to Sopanen’s ribbing. He looked bitterly at the bike in front of them—it looked like a 500cc. At that same moment, the motorcycle accelerated, and Sopanen forgot about his role as wise-ass.

  “Why’s this dude in such a hurry all of a sudden?”

  “How do you know it’s a dude?” Saari was still sulking. “It could be a girl in that helmet just as easily.”

  “It’s a dude. Mark my words...”

  Sopanen left his sentence unfinished when the motorcycle swung onto Arkkitehti Street. The driver crouched down over the motorbike and accelerated aggressively.

  “Tell me that guy isn’t trying to get away,” Sopanen exclaimed, bending his own neck forward. “These punks never learn.”

  Saari’s back pressed into the seat as the Ford shot into a greedy pursuit. Sopanen switched on the roof strobes, and soon blue light was blazing in the windows of the buildings on both sides of the street.