Copper Heart (23 page)

Earlier in the morning, I had parked my car out in the rain. Now when I turned the ignition key, it wouldn’t even click. I
swore. Old Soviet cars had a habit of acting up in rainy weather, and I knew I wasn’t going to get it started until the moisture that had penetrated the electrical system dried out. I felt like kicking the miserable piece of junk. There was nothing to do but get my keys to the sheriff’s Saab from inside and haul it out of the back of the station’s garage.

As I drove down the hill to Jaska’s mother’s house, I remembered how a mere two days before I’d gone down this same road looking for Jaska himself. Why had I let the sentimental human side of me push aside the police officer that night? I shouldn’t have let Jaska off the hook. Even though self-recrimination wasn’t going to bring him back to life, I indulged it. Maybe next time I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

Jaana came to the door, her speech unnaturally calm and slightly unclear. Probably the sedatives. “Mom is sleeping. Did you want to talk to her?”

“No, I just want to look around Jaska’s room a bit. I don’t have a warrant, but will you give me permission?”

“You can do whatever you want if it will stop all this dying. It’s there, on the left.”

Jaska and his mother lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The larger bedroom, next to the bathroom, was his. The door beyond the kitchen was shut, and the living room was overflowing with flowers.

A concert poster from his previous band hung on his door. In it Jaska glared angrily at the world, ever the defiant metalhead. Opening the door, I stepped into the stuffy stench of years of cigarette smoke. Was this really the bedroom of a thirty-year-old man? If I hadn’t known, I would have guessed the occupant was about fifteen.

The walls were plastered with posters of rock bands, motorcycles, and, especially, half-naked women—there were several posters of voluptuous blondes with their butts sticking out smiling on sandy beaches, and one of Madonna groping her crotch. Someone had obviously cleaned recently, but the stench of old ashtrays lingered. Jaska’s lesser electric guitar rested on the bed, his better one leaned against the wall in its case. The amplifier was stuffed between the chair and the desk. The bookshelf was crammed full of pornographic magazines, Jerry Cottons, and Stephen King. In contrast, all of the sheet music was neatly arranged in binders. On the spines Jaska had written in wide capital letters their contents: RAINBOW, RAMONES, ROLLING STONES…The best-kept binder said JASKA.

I opened it, finding dozens of handwritten songs, some on staffs drawn in pencil on graph paper and some just words and chords. Mostly three-chord songs utilizing a twenty-word English vocabulary.
Rock, baby, fuck
. Tears started dripping from my eyes onto Jaska’s papers, one drop smearing the words in the second verse of a song called “Avenger.” For the first two years of high school, Jaska had sat behind me, mostly sleeping but sometimes working on his music. Whenever he finished a song, he would tap me on the shoulder enthusiastically and ask me to give him feedback. If the song was bad, I talked it up and just corrected the spelling. If the song was even a little good, I made suggestions for improvements. I don’t think my help made Jaska’s work much better, since I knew even less about writing music than he did.

On the shelf was also an old box that said BAND PHOTOS. I grabbed a few at random. And there we were, Rat Poison fifteen years before, all of us wearing black leather jackets and
white T-shirts, with our hair done up. Jaska was trying to look as if he knew how to play the guitar and jump a hurdle at the same time, and I was pretending to vomit. I had heard the drummer, who was also in our class, now worked as the principal of an elementary school in Kuopio and that our backup guitarist was an unemployed electrician in Tampere.

Jaska’s stereo adorned the desk. I had to restrain myself from rummaging through his record collection. Instead I examined the dresser and closets. In the dresser drawers I found some hardercore porn and various articles of clothing. Running my hand between them, I didn’t find any boxes or other containers the key could have fit.

In the closet hung two pairs of jeans, two dress shirts, and the dark-blue suit purchased in honor of his graduation, which he clearly had not worn since. On the top shelf was a pair of soccer cleats. I peeked behind them. Nothing but dust bunnies. There wasn’t anything under the bed either.

I sat down on Jaska’s bed to think. Why had he left me a key but no idea what to do with it? I reread the note that came with it searching for a hidden message, but there was none. Neither the first, second, nor third letters spelled anything significant. I could have easily imagined Jaska doing something like that. He hadn’t used the old lemon juice trick from
The Famous Five
had he? Grabbing a lighter from the desk, I held the flame carefully under the paper. No brown letters appeared. And the envelope? Was it a hint about the employment center? Why would Meritta have hidden something there?

Bah. My mind was running in circles. Why wasn’t I Lord Peter Wimsey? The riddle of the key would be clear as day to a detective like him. Shoving the cursed letter back in my pocket,
I decided to leave this mausoleum to my dead friend’s shattered dreams before I started bawling again.

I didn’t want to go home and be sad and alone yet though. And I wasn’t going to be able to deal with my parents or their questions about the progress of the investigation right now. Glancing at the weight room schedule I had in my purse, I noticed that every Thursday night from seven to nine was ladies’ night. That was perfect. Maybe enough sweat would wash some of my grief and guilt away.

12

The weight room was empty except for two women who were apparently trying to figure out a new core-strengthening routine from a piece of paper. I spent about ten minutes jumping rope to get my muscles warmed up. In Arpikylä we didn’t bother with froufrou things like stationary bikes or stair-steppers. Lacking proper air circulation, the low-ceilinged basement room was dogged by the stench of wet sneakers and an occasional sickeningly sweet puff of perfume from one of the
Abs of Steel
ladies. The room had no windows to open, and the only light came from bulbs in metal cages.

So not a very pleasant environment for self-therapy, but I knew I just needed to exert some energy. Loading a bar with a moderate amount of weight, I started a bench press set.

If our original plans held, Antti would be returning to Finland in seven weeks. My job would finish at the end of October, and Antti had promised to stay with me at the farm until then. His teaching semester at Helsinki University wouldn’t start until early November.

Grimacing, I pushed out five more reps than usual. I probably needed to start actively looking for work now during the summer. Antti still had a couple of years left on his assistantship
at the university, so presumably I needed to find a job somewhere in the metro area.

Then a strange thought crept into my mind, and for the first time in my life I managed to think it all the way through: What if I got pregnant? The bar almost fell out of my hands when I realized what I had just considered.

A baby? Back in my twenties I was absolutely sure I would never get married and have kids. I was also just as sure that I would never own a suit or listen to classical music. Well, just so long as I didn’t own a set of curlers, at least some of my principles remained intact.

From the bench press I moved to the rowing machine. I couldn’t deny a little curiosity about how it would feel being pregnant and giving birth. But it would be a lifelong commitment. I could always get away from a spouse or a job, but a child would be mine for the rest of my life. Stupider people had survived it though, so why not Antti and me?

A tall, blonde figure opened the door. After sniffing the sweaty air for a second, she looked around for something heavy and propped open the door. Small doses of fresh air smelling of rain flowed in.

Kaisa was clearly accustomed to dealing with the unpleasant weight room. Why on earth did she accept such miserable conditions? Even though she detested the media clamor, she was a determined woman, not some shrinking violet. There were rumors that Kivinen was building her a winter practice facility in the Old Mine’s ore-milling building. Maybe that would also include a decent gym.

Kaisa said hi as she marched past toward the leg machines. Her face was already sweaty, her shirt plastered to her beautifully shaped back. Her frizzy hair was pulled back in a ponytail at
her neck. I wanted to chat with her about the details of how she had found Jaska’s body. She seemed calm. Apparently she had pulled herself together since the shock of the morning. But the focused way she started her workout made me decide she probably wanted to be left alone.

While I worked on the leg press, I admired Kaisa’s flawless technique. She probably would have done nicely in competitive weight-lifting too. Her loads were twice as heavy as mine. That was one damn strong woman. Dropping 110 pounds of Meritta off the Tower would have been a piece of cake. Jaska wouldn’t have stood a chance either.

The more heavily perfumed of the two aerobics women went and exchanged a few words with Kaisa before disappearing with the other aerobics woman into the dressing room, leaving us alone. Even though we were working on opposite sides of the room, some energy field seemed to run between us. We each seemed to be waiting for the other to break the silence.

When I went to get a drink from the fountain, which was almost right next to her, Kaisa lifted her eyes from her toes.

“You lift pretty regular, don’t you?”

“No pain, no gain, right? Congratulations on your win, by the way. You must have really good concentration to stay focused with everything that’s been going on.”

Kaisa smiled modestly and wiped the sweat from her neck. “I’ll admit I was relieved to get away from home for a while and think about something besides Meritta. Not that the reporters let me forget. And then this morning…Look, I gotta finish my workout. I can’t afford to compromise my training now. If you ain’t in a hurry, come to my place after we’re done. I got something I need to talk about.”

Of course that was fine with me since I had questions for Kaisa too. Maybe she would know about Meritta’s key and the mystery of the mine paintings. And I guess I would have to ask about Meritta and Johnny too, even though I remembered Kaisa’s pained expression last Friday night at the opening gala. And where the hell had Johnny disappeared to? If he was trying to escape a murder conviction, he would be running for the rest of his life. But did Johnny have it in him to commit a double murder? Would he really have beaten an old friend’s brains in, in cold blood?

Kaisa finished her workout with a full half hour of careful stretching. After watching for a second, I started mimicking her movements. It helped. That plus a hot shower afterward left me feeling relatively relaxed.

Even though the trip was only a few hundred yards, we went to Kaisa’s place together in my car. Kaisa lived in a fairly new row house smack dab between the sports field and the swimming pool. The first thing she did after walking into the house was dump the entire contents of her large gym bag into the washing machine. Then, from a pitcher in the refrigerator, she poured us glasses of a green sports drink that tasted like salty sweat.

“Are you hungry? I usually don’t eat until after my workout and I have an extra steak in the fridge. It was supposed to be for Johnny, but he decided to go home.”

“Was Johnny here today!”

Kaisa’s surprised look made me realize I was shouting.

“Yeah. Last night sometime around one he came knocking on the window, wet to the bone. He said he didn’t have nowhere to go.”

Kaisa sprinkled pink peppercorns and garlic powder on the beef tenderloins.

“Where is he now?”

“He left while I was out running. The note said he would be back in the afternoon, but I haven’t seen him since.”

“Why couldn’t he go to his parents’ house?”

“His dad accused him of murdering Meritta.” Kaisa dropped the steaks into a glowing-hot pan, poured a little olive oil over them and switched on the range hood fan. “They had a fight. And Johnny couldn’t go to Tuija’s house for obvious reasons.”

“So you and Johnny are pretty close?”

Kaisa put some whole-wheat pasta on to boil and started mixing a salad. As she sliced tomatoes, she continued. “I don’t have any siblings. Johnny is the youngest in his family, and I guess he thinks of me as his little sister.”

Adding chopped chives to the tomato and lettuce salad, Kaisa began to set the table. Somehow talking before dinner about finding a dead body seemed tactless, but tact had never been one of my strong points.

“How are you holding up, Kaisa? I’d think you’ve probably had enough pressure already without getting mixed up in two murders.”

“You’re telling me. The European Championships are in four weeks. I know everyone is expecting me to win a gold medal. I’m expecting it too. There ain’t no point trying to hide it. That’s why I want all this to get resolved as fast as possible. I just didn’t know how to talk to Detective Antikainen. He tried to be friendly, but it was like he wasn’t treating me like a person or something.”