Lucifer's Tears (4 page)

I start recording. “The victim, identified as Iisa Filippov, is located in the bedroom of a man identified as Rein Saar. The bedroom itself is about a hundred and thirty square feet and unexceptional. It contains a standard queen-size bed in a corner, headboard and left side of the bed against walls. The victim’s body lies on the right side of the bed. Other furnishings include a dresser, a single wooden chair, and a nightstand with a reading lamp and a woman’s purse on it. There’s one closet, not yet inspected. About halfway up, the closet door has an approx two-inch hole bored through it. The room shows no damage to indicate struggle.”

I open her purse and rifle through it. “The purse contains a Finnish passport issued to Iisa Filippov. From the photo, I believe the victim is indeed Filippov. It also contains a wallet, makeup and related cosmetic accessories, a pack of Belmont cigarettes and orange Bic lighter, a cell phone and a compact Samsung camcorder.” I unfold a sheet of paper. “And a copy of Rein Saar’s work schedule.”

I give Milo a moment to write and catch up, then continue.

“Filippov appears to be a woman approx age thirty, five foot five inches tall, athletic build, about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

I’m careful about what I say, because the recording may be entered into evidence, but before being beaten to a pulp, she must have been damned good-looking. Tanned. Long black hair cut in bangs. One eye is burned through, I guess by a cigarette, but the other is open and also nearly black in color. Great figure, something like 36-23-36.

“She’s nude and lying face-up on the bed. Her feet are bound tight with several wraps of duct tape. Her hands are behind her back, underneath her. I kneel down and look. They’re bound in the same manner. The remainder of the roll of tape is on the nightstand. Her mouth is stuffed with women’s socks. Her clothes-jeans, sweater, panties and bra-are wadded up in a pile on the chair, but I don’t see her socks there, so I think the ones in her mouth belong to her.”

“Care to add anything?” I ask Milo.

He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

Although this murder scene is gruesome, Milo doesn’t seem fazed by it, shows no sign of coming unglued, like he did last night when we investigated Rauha Anttila’s death.

“Filippov has been struck multiple times with a blunt instrument. Her forehead is split open. Her left arm is broken just above the elbow. Bone protrudes through the skin. Her chest, on the right side, is flattened, suggesting that multiple ribs are caved in. Nothing in the room seems heavy or hard enough to have inflicted this kind of damage.”

Milo takes a look around. The place hasn’t been dusted for fingerprints yet, so with one gloved finger, he opens the closet door. We look in. I see only men’s clothing and shoes on the floor. A stool is inside, a closet seems a strange place for it. “Nothing here either,” he says.

Then I notice equestrian clothing on the shelf overtop the clothes rack: shirts, breeches, a jacket and helmet. Interesting.

We go back to Iisa’s body. “Filippov has in the neighborhood of fifty burn marks on her body. Most are located on her abdomen, her genital area, her nipples, her face, and one through her left eye. The diameter and circular shape of the burns indicate she was burned with lit cigarettes. The wounds could have been inflicted after death, but I think they were probably used as a method of meting out pain. She voided her bowels either while being murdered, from fear or pain or both, or maybe upon death. Feces and urine are on the sheets between her legs.”

“It’s enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon,” Milo says.

I point at the audio recorder, press a warning finger to my lips and continue. “The blood pool pattern around the victim indicates that another body lay next to her while she bled. The outline of a head, arm and torso are clear. The resident of the apartment, Rein Saar, claims to have woken up next to the victim and found her dead. This lends some credence to his story. Most unusual is that Iisa Filippov has been struck dozens, perhaps more than a hundred times, with a light instrument at high velocity. It’s notable that her face around the lips was beaten with particular severity.”

The tone of my description is neutral, but the scene reeks of torture, horror and agony. Iisa’s face is nearly destroyed by cigarette burns, whipped to pieces, scored by marks and welts. Deep and wide-open wounds that ooze.

“She was struck on the same surface areas, mostly on the face and torso, multiple times. It appears that the first lash abraded flesh, and that subsequent strikes deepened the wounds. This resulted in significant blood spatter. The walls and ceiling are misted with patterns of thousands of blood droplets that I estimate are an average of two millimeters in size.”

I hear the front door open, then voices. The forensics team is here.

Milo points. “Look at this little spot on the wall,” Milo says. “Whatever the killer used to hit her smacked it and left a small tongue-shaped bloodstain. Given the clothes in his closet, I’d say Rein Saar beat her to death with a riding crop.”

“A good guess,” I say.

I go to the closet, get down on my knees and look at the floor. A bloody crop is propped up against the inside wall. I don’t touch it, leave it in place for the forensics team to photograph it. “Found it.”

Milo comes over and takes a look.

I speak into the tape recorder. “In the bedroom closet, we discovered the probable weapon used in the lashing attack. A riding crop, a little over three feet in length, with a leather tongue on the end. It appears to be made of fiberglass, has a leather-wrapped handle, and a loop on the end to secure grip.”

We return to the bedside. Both of us stare down at her for a moment. Milo asks me, “What do you think was the cause of death?”

“She took a terrible beating, but there’s no arterial spurting. I doubt if it was blood loss. She’s got those socks stuffed in her mouth. I think he beat her with the horse whip until he got bored with it, then maybe just held her nose until she suffocated and died.”

“I tend to agree,” Milo says.

“Maybe we should call Saska Lindgren and have him come take a look,” I say. “He’s the bloodstain-pattern expert.”

Milo shakes his head. “No fucking way.”

“Why not?”

“This is my first big homicide case and I’m not sharing it with anybody.”

I raise my eyebrows.

He flushes, embarrassed at his gaffe. “Except you, of course. Listen, I’m going to tell you something personal.”

Not again. I wish he wouldn’t. I wait.

“You’ve probably heard that I have a high IQ. People make a big deal about my being in Mensa.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I have advanced development of spatial relations and mathematics. The forensics guys are going to come in here, make detailed measurements and photographs, then enter it all into a computer program that will more or less re-create the attack. I don’t need the computer program. I can do it in my head.”

I don’t quite believe him. “Then do it.”

Somebody knocks on the bedroom door frame. I look. A member of the forensics team says, “Sorry we’re late. You guys want to let us in there?”

“Give us a couple more minutes,” Milo says. “Can you loan me a viewing loupe magnifier and a measuring tape?”

She brings them.

Milo looks close up at blood droplets at various points on the walls, measures distances. He stands on the chair and examines the ceiling. This feels silly, like I’m Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

My phone rings. It’s Kate. “Where are you?” she asks.

“At a murder scene.”

“The weather is so bad, I was worried.”

I made a mistake taking this case. I want to be at home with Kate right now and I could be. A fuckup. “I’m fine. I should have called, but I got caught up in this.”

“John and Mary will be here this evening. How are you going to be able to spend time with them if you haven’t slept?”

She sounds peeved, doesn’t realize I seldom sleep. I haven’t told her. While she sleeps, I lie in bed beside her and think. “I’ll be fine. We’ll have a nice evening, and I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

“Please try. I miss you.”

I ring off. Milo is waiting, smiling and expectant. I guess I’m supposed to share his joy.

“Okay,” he says. “I got it.”

“I’m bursting with anticipation.”

“Trajectories are three-dimensional and so have three angles of impact. I calculated gamma, the easiest angle, which is the angle of the blood path measured from the vertical surface and extended angle. Then I calculated alpha, the angle of blood spatter moving out from the surface. Then finally beta, the angle of blood pivoting around the vertical. The three angles are connected through trigonomic equations that determine the major and minor axes and angle of impact.”

I interrupt. “Please get to the point.”

“The tangential flight path of blood droplets is determined with the angle of impact and the offset angle of the blood spatter. They converge at the intersection of two blood-spatter paths, and the stains come from opposite sides of the impact pattern. The area of convergence is formed by the intersection of stains from opposite sides of the impact pattern.”

“Get to the point.”

“I’m trying to. The area of origin is the area in three-dimensional space where the blood source was located at the time of the attack…”

The dark circles around his eyes seem to have taken on a dull shine. I’ve noticed this happens when he gets excited. “Milo, please. The goddamned fucking point.”

He purses his lips, frustrated. I’ve ruined his fun. “The killer didn’t beat her at random. He chose small points on her body, hit the target areas repeatedly to cause maximum pain and damage, resulting in the great number of blood-spatter patterns, then chose a new area of flesh to whip.”

I sigh. “Thank you.”

He’s miffed. “And in case you didn’t know, most of the blood spatter isn’t the result of the riding crop striking her. When the whip recoils away from the body at the bottom of the striking arc but still at high velocity, that’s when the blood really flies.”

I did know, but I’m still not certain if I believe he can work it all out without a computer. I’ll talk to Saska Lindgren after we get photos and data from forensics, and see if he confirms Milo’s version of events.

“He hit her with the riding crop a hundred and twenty-six times,” Milo says.

I’m curious about the extent of his capabilities. “What’s your IQ?” I ask.

He’s embarrassed, flushes again. “A hundred seventy-two.”

“Let’s go talk to Rein Saar,” I say.

We turn the crime scene over to the forensics team. We didn’t inspect the other side of Iisa Filippov’s body, because the front of it hasn’t been photographed yet. I ask them to let us have a look when they flip her over.

Rein Saar’s elbows rest on the kitchen table, his chin on his hands. I sit across from him, start the audio recorder and lay it between us. Milo remains standing. “Mr. Saar, how are you holding up?” I ask.

“My head hurts,” he says. “You can call me Rein.”

“All right, Rein. You can call me Inspector Vaara.” He blinks, nonplussed by my cold manner, which was my intention. “Tell me what happened,” I say.

I see a handsome man beneath his bloody face. Athletic medium build. Swarthy and dark-headed. On the tall side.

“Iisa agreed to meet me at seven thirty this morning. When I walked in, I was attacked from behind. I blacked out and don’t know anything else. Somebody hit me on the head. When I woke up beside her, she was already dead.”

“Where were you this morning, prior to coming home?”

“I spent the weekend in Estonia, in Tallinn, at my sister’s wedding. I came home on a ferry with some friends and family. We partied the whole way, and kept the party going all night in Helsinki.”

“So you haven’t slept and you came home drunk.”

He nods. “I’m still drunk. Thank God.” He points at a cabinet. “There’s a whiskey bottle in there. Can I have it?”

His hangover will kick in soon and it might make it harder to interview him. Besides, some truth serum might not hurt. I nod to Milo. He gives Saar the bottle and a glass. Saar pours a healthy drink and slurps. A pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights is on the table in front of him. He lights one. I note that there’s a carton of them in the cabinet where Saar keeps his whiskey. The killer had to go through at least a few cigarettes to inflict that many burns. I get up and check the kitchen and bathroom trash cans. No cigarette butts. The killer took them with him.

I sit down again. “And the purpose of meeting Iisa Filippov was what?” I ask.

He lifts his face from his hands. He folds them in front of him on the table, looks into my eyes and sighs.

“You may think it’s a stupid question,” I say, “but all information pertinent to this case must be directly stated.”

“We were meeting for the purpose of engaging in sex,” he says.

The Finnish and Estonian languages are closely related. So much so that even if he spoke Estonian, I could understand some of what he said. His Finnish is good, but his Estonian accent makes him sound silly, like a child in the process of learning how to speak.

“Tell me about your relationship.”

“I met Iisa about two years ago at the Equestrian Academy. I was her teacher. She is-was-married. We started an affair almost right away. You should be questioning her husband, not me. He’s the only one who would want to do something like this.”

“Trust me, I’ll speak with him, but that’s not your concern. Right now, I want to give you my undivided attention. You should know that it looks bad. She’s dead, in your bed, and she was beaten with a riding crop I found in your closet.”

According to the nonexistent police handbook, I shouldn’t have related this nugget of information, but I wanted to see the look on his face when I said it.