Copper Heart (19 page)

“Cappuccino in Arpikylä. Unbelievable,” I said, smiling at Barbro. “Fifteen years ago you couldn’t even get artificial sweetener in your coffee here. So how have you been settling in?”

“I have to admit it is quite strange, having lived my whole life in Helsinki. I do visit there almost weekly though. Our son Mikael lives in our apartment downtown, so I always have a place to stay. Especially last winter I found myself longing for the theater and the opera, and decent places to eat lunch.”

“Not Tokmanni?”

Barbro laughed. She knew what I meant. That spring a new discount big-box store had come to the county. Tokmanni was a sort of doggerel of the storied Stockmann department store
and its café that stood at the center of cultural life in Helsinki. Somehow this captured perfectly the difference between Helsinki and Arpikylä.

The foam decorating the cappuccino left a mustache on my upper lip, which I tried to lick off quickly. Why wasn’t Barbro Kivinen having the same problem?

“But life here is just as dramatic as in a big city, even without any murders,” Mrs. Kivinen continued. “How is the investigation progressing, by the way?”

“Bit by bit. We still don’t really know whether it was an accident or a homicide.”

“I met Ms. Flöjt several times, since she painted at the mine quite often. A very unique woman, very determined.” Barbro gave a tight-lipped smile, and I wondered whether her husband had been able to keep his relationship with Meritta a secret after all. I was sure that Barbro Kivinen was a determined woman too. But would she be prepared to murder to keep her husband to herself?

After coffee I wandered over to the ticket booth, but there was no sign of Jaska, so I stopped to look at souvenirs—forged copper miniatures of the Tower and small copper hearts. Where had I seen a copper heart like that?

On impulse, I picked up the dime-size earring, turning it over in my palm. Its color was warm, almost the same color as my hair.

“Copper is the metal of love,” the salesgirl said. “The hooks are gold though, so they won’t turn your ears green. Genuine Arpikylä artisan craftsmanship.”

I decided to buy a pair of earrings and send one to Antti. Maybe it was sappy, but I didn’t care.

By the time I left work for Joensuu, it had started to rain. The Lada’s windshield wipers worked well enough, but the back
window fogged up almost instantly. After trying the heater, I finally opened the front windows and within a few miles I could see behind me again.

I had always hated the Joensuu Central Hospital. Whereas the Arpikylä Tower watched over the surrounding landscape mysterious and castle-like, this building was simply cold and sterile. When I was fourteen, I had my tonsils removed, but the wound refused to heal. I lay in a bed on the eighth floor of the hospital for nearly two weeks before the doctors managed to patch my throat back together properly. The taste of blood in my mouth still unnerved me, making me imagine that my scars had reopened and I would have to be hooked up to all those tubes again.

Uncle Pena was lying in his bed with his eyes closed. He looked completely different from how I remembered him. My dad was waiting for me, but Mom had already left to see her baby grandson. Pena’s room was filled with various machines, one of which monitored his heart. The wave pattern was beautifully regular. An oxygen machine pumped air into his lungs and a tube connected to his arm provided a nutrient solution. Presumably the blanket concealed a catheter. The paralyzed side of his mouth was strangely twisted.

Looking at my uncle, suddenly I had an almost uncontrollable desire to rip out all the tubes and end his life once and for all. Maybe that’s what he wanted. But I had seen the bright expression in his unparalyzed eye when he had been conscious and had seen how his healthy hand moved as if in a petting motion when I talked to him about his cat. How could I know for sure what he wanted?

“Just before you came he was awake for a few minutes,” my father said.

“Did you tell him that Mikko caught two mice?”

“No, I forgot. Look at that bouquet of flowers. From the town council.”

The white roses and blue irises were elegantly arranged, vaguely reminiscent of a Finnish flag dotted with splashes of bright yellow. It would have been perfect as a funeral arrangement; all it needed was a ribbon with an appropriate patriotic line from “Oh Dear Finland, Precious Fatherland.” The vase was too small for the bouquet, making it look as though it might tip off the narrow table onto the floor.

“That reminds me. Who will take Meritta’s seat on the city council? Do you know?” I asked.

My father’s brow furrowed. “As I remember, the Greens only had three candidates in that race, including Meritta, who received almost all the votes for the party. The others I remember were Matti Virtanen and a recent high school graduate who doesn’t even live in town anymore. I think he moved to Helsinki. So I guess it would be Matti, seeing as he’s the only person on the Green party list in town.”

I didn’t think a seat on the town council could be sufficient incentive to murder someone, and imagining Matti wanting it that badly was beyond impossible. But now I had one more important reason for interviewing the Virtanens. I really couldn’t put it off past tomorrow.

We waited for a while, but Uncle Pena didn’t wake up. A nurse came by on her rounds and assured us all was well, so well in fact that they were even considering taking him off assisted breathing. She looked at me a little funny when I asked her to tell him about the mice Mikko had caught, but she promised she would.

“Pena and Meritta did have some scheme in the works before his stroke,” my dad said thoughtfully as we drove toward
my sister’s house. “I don’t know whether Meritta was trying to get the Dems on board with one of her environmental issues or what, but they were talking a lot. Sometimes I would even see them at the Copper Cup together.”

“Meritta was working on a series of paintings of the mine, so maybe she wanted Pena to tell her about what it was like to work down there,” I suggested.

“Maybe. I think Pena was a little infatuated with her too. I’m sure that did him good. He was always a little afraid of women. Our eternal bachelor.”

I had always gotten along great with my uncle, but growing up Eeva and Helena were a little shy around him. Perhaps Uncle Pena had put them in the “women” category but hadn’t done the same with me. I had always been willing to cut hay and listen to his stories even longer than my aunt’s sons who were about the same age as me.

At my sister’s place I played cars with Saku for an hour until he started getting hungry. While the others tried to feed him—it seemed as though food ended up everywhere but in the little man’s stomach—I tried to call Koivu. At his home no one answered, and the police station said he was at the hospital questioning Somalis and skinheads. Judging from that, Anita’s birthday probably hadn’t panned out too well. For a second I considered whether I could stand going back to the antisepticsmelling hospital, but I decided I couldn’t bother Koivu while he was doing work.

As I drove back through the rain-drenched forests, I thought of Uncle Pena. What if I tried to smuggle Mikko into the hospital? Maybe feeling his cat’s smooth coat one more time would do him good. Bryan Adams’ voice pouring out of the radio as he bleated about forgiveness didn’t do anything to improve my mood.

The single, small copper heart dangling from my earlobe was strangely heavy. I had mailed Antti’s heart immediately, knowing I would hesitate if I didn’t act on my romantic impulse right then. Touching my own heart earring, I remembered where I had seen one just like it—on Meritta’s ear. But one of her earrings was also missing. Had the killer taken it?

10

As I went out to retrieve the newspaper from the mailbox, I discovered a giant puddle at the foot of the front stairs when my foot squelched into an ankle-deep mixture of mud and water. It had been raining all night. After my morning coffee, I pulled on some rubber boots and set out into the yard to see whether I could do anything about the new pond in front of the house. With the heel of my boot, I started scraping a shallow trench in the dirt to the yard drain thirty feet away.

Mikko appeared on the steps as if pondering whether to go out in the rain at all. In the end, he jumped off the side of the stairs and in a streak of gray bounded under the sauna, where apparently a family of voles had nested.

I watched with pleasure as muddy brown water began trickling down the waterway I made, first slowly and then flowing in a little stream, quickly filling the entire trench and gurgling happily down the drain. I cleared the worst of the stones from the mouth of the channel, and when I came back outside after grabbing my purse, the puddle was noticeably smaller.

At the police station a report on drunk driving arrests that I had asked Järvi to write up the week before Meritta’s murder was waiting on my desk. Glancing over it for a while, I discovered
that his calculations were completely off. According to Järvi, three plus twelve was eighteen.

I hollered for him to come in from the break room. “This whole statistics section is full of mistakes. Which of these is right, the counts or the totals? They don’t match.” My good mood from successfully draining the pond was gone. And, of course, I knew pointing out the problems in the report wasn’t going to help my reputation as a nagging bitch.

Järvi ran his eyes over the table of numbers, his ears growing red. Finally he had to confess to his poor addition skills.

“Redo this table, and in the meantime I’ll read the text,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “We need to send these papers to the county by the end of the day.”

Järvi closed the door with exaggerated caution, so as to clearly demonstrate what he thought of me. I sighed. All these statistics and reports were nothing but pointless bureaucracy, which seemed to be getting worse every year. The new statistical software that the police district ordered was a bear too, and it was probably the original source of the calculation errors. But getting money for machines was easier than securing funds to hire additional manpower.

I had just finished slogging my way, with much sighing, through Järvi’s report when he appeared at my door again.

“Um, Maria…” he began, as if expecting to get yelled at. “Our guys just called from the Sump. They found…well…a body. Floating in the pond.”

“What the hell?” I was halfway through the door before he even finished his sentence. “Where are Lasarov and Antikainen? Call county forensics and Koivu and send Car 2 over. I’m driving out.”

As I backed our other cruiser out of the parking lot without looking where I was going—luckily the street was empty—Järvi ran up with a phone in his hand.

“Did they say who it is?” I asked him.

“No. Some jogger reported it. She ran to the nearest house to make the call and then collapsed. Antikainen left to take her to the health center and question her on the way. All she was able to get out was that someone was floating in the pond.” Järvi’s voice was shaking, but I knew it wasn’t from excitement. He was afraid. He knew the whole city. Whoever had died would at least be an acquaintance…

I drove the Saab as far as I could to the end of the road. The tailing pond at the base of the Sump shone a deep burgundy. At its edge a body lay oddly sprawled, half in the water and half out. I hoped the person was just passed out drunk, maybe after deciding to go for a swim. But as I ran down the loose wall of yellow sand, I knew that hope was in vain. The jogger had probably already checked to see if the person was alive.

I didn’t want to see who was lying at the edge of the wine-colored pond. Johnny? Ella? Kaisa? Forcing myself to approach the heap sprawled on the ground, I looked at the face, its temple a bloody mess. A trail of blood ran into the water as if it were giving the entire pond its crimson cast.

Jaska Korhonen was never going to be a big rock star. But the tabloids would take note of his death, and maybe
Sound
would give him a few lines too. Jaska’s never-say-die rocker’s uniform looked tragicomical, the leather jacket sopping wet, his sneakers covered in the copper sand of the mine hill. There was dirt under the nails of his right hand, which were significantly longer than those on the left. A guitarist’s hands.

Beside me, Järvi’s breath was raspy. “This isn’t going to be easy for Meeri. First a daughter and now her only son…Should we check to see if he’s maybe still alive?”

“He’s been here all night. He’s soaked through. But yeah, check his pulse. Carefully.”

But of course there was nothing to feel for. As Järvi checked the wrist, I saw a tear drip from his cheek onto the sleeve of Jaska’s jacket.

“Rope off the area,” I said, avoiding looking at Järvi again. Fortunately Officer Lasarov and Detective Antikainen turned up and started the routine. Unsolicited, Lasarov said he would go visit Jaska’s mother.

Järvi and Antikainen set up barricades and tape around the pond. While they worked, I looked out past the hole where the second mine tower had once stood beside the lake and shivered. Goddamn it, Jaska. You knew something. Why the hell didn’t you tell me? You just had to go playing Marlowe. But Jaska wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing. He would have been as bad a private investigator as he was a guitarist. Even after all these years, he still couldn’t play anything with more than three chords.