Wolves and Angels Read online

  “The dude probably thought we were slowing down to pull him over.”

  Sopanen squeezed the steering wheel.

  “And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do. Let’s see what he’s got on his record,” he hissed through his teeth.

  The street was deserted, and so he let the speedometer climb to sixty-five miles per hour. Still the motorcycle’s taillight had already reached the end of the street, and then disappeared to the right.

  “That ain’t your granny’s moped,” Sopanen thundered. “We need some help right now, or he’s gonna get away.”

  Saari grabbed the microphone and alerted dispatch about the fleeing motorcycle. Soon the radio traffic increased in a crackling exchange of words, and two patrol cars set off from downtown toward Hervanta.

  The motorcyclist turned right at the next intersection, and Saari broadcast the new direction over the radio. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man jogging and started wondering how Koskinen had made it this far already. However, he forgot all about him almost immediately as the front tires grazed the curb, and the car swerved dangerously. Sopanen had made the turn without barely lifting his foot off the gas. Saari knew it was pointless to try to rein him in. His prey drive had kicked in like a greyhound bolting after lure on a track—deaf to the shouting of the crowd.

  The Ford had only made it halfway down the street when the motorcycle was already at the next intersection. After that everything happened in one or two seconds, and the moment was recorded in each man’s consciousness like a piece of film advancing frame by frame.

  A white taxi coming from downtown arrived at the intersection at the same moment as the motorcycle. Sopanen and Saari didn’t hear the sound of the collision in their cruiser, but both saw how the motorcyclist catapulted spread-eagle over the Mercedes, high into the air. They didn’t see the fall. Saari’s eyes squeezed shut of their own accord. Sopanen turned his gaze away and lifted his foot off the gas.

  2.

  Koskinen heard the crash half a mile away. He had already been jogging for fifty minutes, and his runner’s high was peaking. His feet were moving by themselves, and even the continually intensifying rain wasn’t slowing him down. On the contrary, it was like the sweet icing on his masochism cake.

  He had noticed how the cruiser driving past had slowed down. Its crew obviously thought he was barking mad. Who cares! It wasn’t anyone’s business what time he went running. A moment later the car had passed him again going the other direction. It had been chasing a motorcycle that was speeding with insane recklessness. Both vehicles had shot to the end of the street in a matter of seconds, and the ghostly blue flashing had still been visible around the corner. At least the police car hadn’t been blasting its siren—they would’ve been crazy to wake up the entire neighborhood over something like that.

  Koskinen turned onto Opiskelija Street and saw the Ford, its emergency lights still flashing, at the other end of the street, but he couldn’t see anything else from this distance. He felt like running to see what had happened. But over-eagerness for the job was the most common subject of ridicule among police officers, so he veered off to the left at the next corner. He sped up a little and decided to continue on around the water tower.

  A late-night dog walker glanced at the lone runner nervously from the shadows of a nearby park. Koskinen knew full well how sick his jogging around the neighborhood at night in the rain looked. But he had a 10K run marked on his training schedule for Monday, and there was no way he’d skip it. His sea navigation course at the adult education center had happened to fall on the same night, and so he had to push his jog later than he had planned.

  Koskinen made a final sprint. He was passing the skateboard ramps at the park when he heard the yelp of a siren. The sound of the ambulance quickly receded toward the site of the accident. Apparently it was a matter of life and death; he doubted the ambulance driver would have made a racket like that in the middle of the night for anything less urgent.

  The apartment building Koskinen lived in at Kemianraitti 8 was six-stories tall. The Monday Night Movie had ended hours ago, and every window in the place was dark. Koskinen didn’t want to disturb the quiet of the building with the droning of the elevator, so he climbed the stairs two at a time up to the fifth floor. Lactic acid was squeezing into his thighs, and he had to pant for a minute before opening the door.

  He stripped down right in the entryway, stepped out onto the balcony naked, and hung up his jogging clothes to dry. In the bathroom he turned the faucet with exaggerated slowness, as if he could somehow muffle the gurgling of the water. He grimaced at the wall and stepped under the shower. He was sure someone in the building would be complaining again about someone showering in the middle of the night. In the old days he could bathe in his own sauna until dawn if he wanted. Not that he had hardly ever done that; he never jogged back then.

  A message had appeared on his voicemail during the shower. Koskinen put the phone to his ear and walked with a towel around his waist in the darkness of his one-bedroom apartment.

  It was a familiar, husky voice. “Evenin’, Pekki here. You must be out for a midnight run again, since you aren’t picking up. I’m calling because somebody found a body in Peltolammi an hour and a half ago, at twenty minutes to twelve to be more precise. You said yourself we could call at any time whatsoever if something even a little bit shady goes down. And this is definitely that. We don’t have a clue about the guy’s identity—he didn’t have any ID in his pockets. But we can chat about it in the morning if you’re back from your nightly jaunt by then.”

  The phone call ended there. Pekki hadn’t said anything about whether it was an accident or a possible homicide. Koskinen was torn for a moment about whether to call him back. His throat was dry from his run, so he went to the fridge. He’d have plenty of time to hear the details in the morning.

  3.

  Koskinen liked the dry, biting mornings of September, and his bicycle was moving easier than normal. His leg muscles pumped away, relaxed, and he wasn’t feeling the previous night’s jog even on the uphills.

  He changed his route every day. Today’s trek started with a stretch of gravel road that cut through an uninhabited patch of forest. The noise of traffic soon fell behind, and he could hear the happy twittering of the titmice from the fir trees. As his journey continued toward downtown, he rode along the streets of a sleepy neighborhood of single-family homes admiring the fall colors—the rust-colored hedges, the blood-red clusters of berries on the mountain ash trees in the yards.

  His brain rolled along nicely with his pedaling—the half-hour commute was plenty of time to plan out the whole day. He would flip through the crime reports from the last twenty-four hours right after their morning meeting. Then he could tackle his backlog of preliminary investigation reports. If those turned out not to be too convoluted, he might still have time before lunch to flip through some of the obligatory committee memoranda, working group reports, directives, and various queries that streamed in from the National Police Board at the Interior Ministry every day.

  This wasn’t the first time Koskinen would have to forget his schedule.

  He was about two miles from the office when the phone in the pocket of his windbreaker started ringing. He held on to the handlebar with his left hand and fumbled the phone out with his right. It was difficult to talk on a cell phone while riding in city traffic. There was a busy intersection ahead, and a long, accordion bus was turning in front of him. He almost dropped the phone, juggling like a circus acrobat to get his bike over the stone curb onto the sidewalk.

  “Hello!” he yelled. “Is anyone still there?”

  He heard Pekki’s voice, feigning petulance: “Barely… I was just about to go make some more coffee. My old cup got cold while I was waiting.”

  “What d’you want!”

  “Now, you don’t need to yell… I’m not deaf.”

  “Get to the point! I’m on my bike here in the middle of the sidewalk.”
r />   “Okay, okay,” Pekki answered quickly. “Tanse ordered us to push the morning meeting up. No rush, just so long as you’re in conference room numero dos in fifteen minutes.”

  The call ended. Koskinen shoved the cell phone in his pocket and got back in the saddle. Fifteen minutes! He set off pedaling furiously, blaming his ruined morning ride on Sergeant Pekki. His speaking style irritated Koskinen even more than usual; just Pekki’s numero dos had annoyed him to no end. Was it really that hard to just say “conference room two?” You would have thought he could have learned more than how to count on that trip to Majorca.

  He realized how childish his grumpiness was and started pushing even harder. He ran two red lights, although the lights had just barely turned, and for several blocks he cut in and out of traffic, even though there was a bike path right next to the road. The last part, a steep uphill on Sorin Street, he rode standing up with his butt off the bike seat. It was exactly eight o’clock when he locked his bicycle next to the wall of the police station.

  A crowd had already gathered in the lobby. All sorts of property had disappeared during the night, from cars and bicycles all the way to outboard motors and satellite dishes. Almost every night someone had lost their spouse, and other, more routine cases included vandalism—broken windows, slashed tires, etc. Walking past, Koskinen glanced to see if Sergeant Tiikko was taking reports. Usually he could calm even the most hysterical crime victim down just with his empathetic presence. However, there was no sign of Tiikko, but instead a young, nervous-seeming officer was standing behind the counter. Koskinen guessed that the man’s morning was going to be long and sweaty. But he had chosen his profession himself.

  Koskinen didn’t wait for the elevator, but loped up the staircase to the third floor and slipped into his office. Usually he started his workday with a shower in the gym locker-room, but today he didn’t have time. Dark gray cotton trousers, a small-checked button-down shirt, and a black, three-button sport coat were waiting on hangers in his closet.

  On the top shelf was a stack of paper towels taken from the restroom. Koskinen dried his armpits quickly and started dressing. Then he stopped in front of the mirror to comb his hair. Sweaty, it looked even thinner, and the pink crown of his head shone through.

  Conference room two was located one floor down. The buzz of conversation through the open door was audible all the way at the other end of the hall. Koskinen slowed his pace and leisurely stepped into the room, as if he had never been in a hurry in his life. He did a quick survey of the room. Four detectives had arrived so far: Sergeant Risto Pekki and his whole core group, Markku Kaatio, Ulla Lundelin and Antti Eskola. The fifth policeman was Risto P. Jalonen from Forensics.

  No one had made the mistake of sitting in the chair at the end of the oblong table—by virtue of his office it belonged ex officio to the head of the Violent Crimes Unit, Tauno “Tanse” Niiranen.

  Koskinen sat down next to Ulla. “Where’s Tanse?”

  Pekki answered for the others: “We’ve just been batting that around. Usually Tanse is the first one here staring at his watch. It’s already ten past now.”

  “What do we have up first?”

  “The body from Peltolammi,” Ulla managed to say before Pekki. “We still don’t know anything about it, not even the cause of death.”

  Pekki raised his voice: “We don’t have time to spend the whole morning waiting for one man. Eskola, go get the old man. Get in his face a little, and tell him what we think about dawdlers around here. As a former military man, that should come naturally.”

  Eskola was on the far end of the table, a little apart from the others. He looked at Pekki hesitantly, trying to decide whether the sergeant was serious.

  But then Pekki turned to Koskinen and smirked. “You got yourself all sweaty for nothing. Looks like there’s no rush after all.”

  “Sakari’s our fitness freak.” Ulla poked Koskinen in the side. “Galloping around the pasture like a young colt.”

  Koskinen felt uncomfortable. His forehead was starting to sweat again, even though he wasn’t hot anymore. The attention of the whole group around the table was directed at him, and that made the perspiration practically gush from his forehead onto his temples. Even Jalonen from Forensics was grinning and rubbing his large nose.

  Pekki slumped down in his chair as if emphasizing his words with his slovenliness. “Exerting yourself like that is just sick. You’d think you’d have better things to do these days.”

  Koskinen was already opening his mouth to ask Pekki whether by “these days” he meant the independence of a divorced man or the freedom afforded by his lieutenant position. However, he didn’t have time to say anything before Kaatio broke in.

  “At your age, you should start exercising a little more carefully.”

  Koskinen looked at Kaatio, dumbfounded. Kaatio was stretching his shoulder blades with his elbows bent at the level of his ears, and Pekki, sitting next to him, had to crouch off to the side. It was the final drop that made Koskinen’s sweaty cup overflow.

  “What the hell are you doing dragging age into it! We both have the same number of miles on the odometer and—”

  Pekki interrupted him in a heartfelt tone. “Kaatio just means that you shouldn’t start so aggressively, working up such a sweat right off. For example, you could have begun with a few light air squats. Two squats a day, and later add some weights, maybe a brewskie in your left back pocket and another in your right then when you start getting fit.”

  Today sure is starting congenially, Koskinen thought, and then tried to turn it into a joke. “Sounds like you boys only ever exercise your mouths. We’ll see next Sunday who’s got the goods and who’s all talk.”

  He pointed at Pekki and Kaatio in turn and, in a more serious tone than he intended, said: “I challenge you to race me on the Pirkka Trail Run.”

  Pekki and Kaatio stared at Koskinen in disbelief. Koskinen wiped his forehead, leaving an elongated wet blotch on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “The race is next Sunday. It’s just a little 30K jaunt. The starting gun is at exactly nine o’clock and we run from—”

  “We know, we know,” Pekki said, waving at the air. “Well enough that you wouldn’t catch me dead there.”

  “Not in a million years,” Kaatio chimed in. “I’d rather dance on hot coals than go prancing around the woods with a number on my chest.”

  Apparently Ulla had noticed Koskinen’s uncomfortable situation. She looked in her purse and pulled out a moist towelette wrapped in flowery plastic. She ripped the plastic open, spread the towelette out on her palm, and reached over to stroke Koskinen’s forehead with it.

  The wipe felt pleasantly cool, and its apple scent made Koskinen sigh. He stretched his legs out and slid down in his chair into just as relaxed a position as Pekki sitting across from him.

  “Let the boys beat their chests,” Ulla whispered. “They’re just jealous.”

  She shoved the crumpled towelette back into the plastic packaging and pushed it into Koskinen’s jacket pocket. The moisture on his forehead dried quickly, but it left behind a pleasant coolness, and the sweating stopped.

  Ulla’s sudden outburst of nurturing seemed to irritate Pekki and Kaatio as if they were jealous of the female officer caressing their lieutenant.

  “What the hell kind of brain malfunction makes a person voluntarily go jogging?” Pekki shook his head. “It should be classified as a public health hazard.”

  Kaatio’s shoulder rolling stopped for a second. “A while ago there was an article in the paper about this German doctor who wrote a dissertation about joggers. Apparently a genetic disorder makes people run; some protein deficiency gives them more pleasure from endorphins than regular people.”

  “I read that too!” Pekki exclaimed. “In the animal tests, rats who suffered from the same protein deficiency ran around their cages like crazy all day.”

  Kaatio started stretching his muscles again. “Joggers are just as messed up as alcoholics
… One difference: rather than hiding their bottles, you have to nail joggers’ sneakers to the floor.”

  Koskinen noticed that Ulla was uncomfortable with the talk about alcoholics. She lowered her eyes, and a bewildered flush spread over her cheeks. Koskinen stretched his leg under the table and kicked Kaatio in the shin with the toe of his shoe. But Kaatio still didn’t get what was wrong.

  “Why the hell did you kick me?”

  Tanse marched into the room with Sergeant Lepola on his heels. Koskinen and Kaatio were still staring at each other, and both sat up. Eskola, who was still sitting off to the side, had a hard time sitting still. It looked like his reflexes were ordering him to stand at attention.

  “I’m late,” Tanse said. “Lepola and I had to have an unexpected meeting. I couldn’t put it off.”

  He turned off his phone and set it in front of him on the table. Only then did he sit down and look around at everyone present in turn. His eyes stopped at Koskinen, and there was a detectable quiver in his nostrils. Koskinen cursed to himself. Of course he reeked of the smell left by Ulla’s towelette.

  Tanse straightened his tie with a quick movement. It was obvious from the gesture that it came more from a behavioral code recorded in his brain stem than any need to smarten up.

  “Let’s get down to business!” he rumbled, turning to Pekki. “Evidently you have the case materials in front of you.”

  Pekki opened his folder. It held only one sheet of paper, which he picked up pompously. Sitting across from him, Koskinen could sense a slight tension under his arrogant facade. He could remember well the dozens of similar situations in which he had had to present a fresh case to a team of detectives, when it had been his turn to be the lead investigator. With little time to prepare, he still had had to assemble whatever shreds of information they had into a clear enough picture that the others weren’t left with any doubts about his competence.

  “Last night a man’s body was found in the parking lot near a strip mall in Peltolammi. A bricklayer named Rosberg found it lying between two shipping containers. Rosberg had left the nearby Peltolammi Saloon, which is adjacent to the crime scene, at 11:30 P.M. Rosberg suffers from a chronic bladder condition, and so he had decided to make a stop between the containers to relieve himself. During the procedure in question, he saw the body, which apparently scared him enough that he got his shoes wet.”