Wolves and Angels (24 page)

“Morning. It’s Niininen, from the station.”

Koskinen croaked back a good morning with his dry mouth and went into the kitchen. He filled a glass with cold water from the tap while listening to what Niininen had to say.

“I was already starting to think you were out for another nighttime jog somewhere, but it looks like you just sleep abnormally well.”

“Just the opposite.
H
a
d
a nightmare
.”

“Pekki thought we should wake you up.”

“What happened?”

“Some old lady just rung down the curtain and joined the choir.”

Niininen was one of the dispatchers. He was a former freestyle wrestler and known for his inability to conduct even the smallest piece of business without larding it with some more or less light-hearted banter.

Koskinen, however, was in somewhat less of a joking mood at four thirty in the morning.

“What does that have to do with me?” he snapped into the telephone. “Somebody’s grandmother dies almost every night.”

“I asked Pekki the same thing. When did Koskinen turn into the reaper?”

“Where did she die?”

“An assisted living center called Wolf House.”

Koskinen flinched. Now he was
totally
awake. “Send someone to pick me up. I’ll be on the street in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll set up the ride,” Niininen said in his rumbling bass. “
We j
ust might
have
a
free
car or two
.
”

Koskinen rinsed his face with cold water and started dressing. He grabbed the first things that happened into his hands from the hangers in his sparse closet: black corduroy pants, a green plaid flannel shirt, and a gray
sport coat. The whole time he was dressing he refused to think about homicide. People died all the time in nursing homes. After the
Timonen
case, the nurses at Wolf House were just overreacting and…

Koskinen’s thoughts cut off midstream. The
Wolf House hadn’t had any night
nurses
since the cutbacks, which sm
ashed to pieces his wishful thoughts about a natural death.

It was dark and humid outside. A cold wind hit his face immediately, and Koskinen decided to go back up to his apartment to get an overcoat. But then he saw the police car waiting down the street. He ran through the parking lot, his legs still feeling painfully stiff.

The numbers 341 were painted in a large, black font on the back of the cruiser. Koskinen suspected the worst. He opened the back door and squeezed his long legs into the seat. His fears were confirmed once again:
it was
the SS Patrol
.
Sopanen and Saari were sitting in the front.

“Morning,” Koskinen said with artificial ease and received a low grunt in response.

“Where to?”

“Wolf House in Kissanmaa. Didn’t Niininen say?”

“He just said that Koskinen needed a taxi.”

“Of course.”

And with that the conversation petered out. From the rigid necks of the officers sitting in the front seats, it was easy to guess that they hadn’t yet forgotten Koskinen’s dressing-down of the previous morning. Sopanen, sitting behind the wheel, didn’t open his mouth until they reached the highway.

“
E
ver thought about buying
your own
car?”

Koskinen mumbled something evasive from the back seat, which Sopanen could have failed to hear.

“You a
i
n’t going green on us, are you, Koskinen? Word has it your son’s a civvy
…
”

Koskinen decided not to lose his temper no matter what came from the front seat. They weren
’
t going to upset him
about
Tomi
’s choice of not serving in the military.

Sopanen glanced at him confrontationally in the rearview mirror.

“I know you bicycle types. You’d probably raise the price of gas to ten euros in a heartbeat if you could.”

It looked like his partner’s trash talking was starting to make Saari uneasy. He stared out at the early morning landscape from under the long brim of his cap. The street was glistening with moisture, and the asphalt reflected the yellow blinking of the traffic lights. There wasn’t a soul in sight. An early morning newspaper delivery van zipped past them
toward
the northeastern parts of town, and a lone taxi made its way back toward downtown.

Saari cleared his throat. “
So…w
hat’s going on in Kissanmaa?”

“A body in a
disabled
assisted living center”

“Is it connected to the wheelchair case from Monday night?”

“Hopefully not.”

Saari rubbed his neck in embarrassment.
“
Not good.
With better luck
we
could
’ve already had a suspect
in custody.”

“Probably not,” Koskinen said, loosening his seat belt and leaning forward. “The chair hasn’t been any help at all yet.”

He waited for
Sopanen to
comment, but, surprisingly, he stayed silent without ev
en glancing in the rear
view mirror.

They had already made it to the lights at University Hospital, and Koskinen guided them the rest of the way to Wolf House.

Four vehicles were parked in front, and lights shone from the tall windows of the lobby. Nothing else revealed the drama that had touched this quiet weekday night. The neighbor
hood
w
as
asleep, and even the wind had died down momentarily.

Koskinen climbed out of the car and thanked Sopanen and Saari for the ride. Both waved in response, and the Ford wheeled back the way it had come. Koskinen felt like the needless quarrel between them was already fading.

The sudden presence of death made many things seem insignificant.

Koskinen looked at the cars as he walked past. Pekki’s shapeless Corolla was parked at the curb behind a Saab patrol car. A fire department ambulance was blocking the entire walkway, and a white Ford Escort stood in front of the main doors. Its front door read Tampere Security in red letters.

The front doors were locked. Koskinen rang the bell, and a uniformed officer came to open it. He was a familiar face, an officer they called Rummy Rantanen.

“Morning, Koskinen,” Rantanen said, pushing back his old-style side cap. “They woke you up for this?”

“They did indeed. I guess they thought a guy like me doesn’t have anything going on in middle of the night anyway.”

“You should be resting up.”

“Why?”

“We wouldn’t want to give Kangas and Havukainen any undue advantage by ruining your conditioning
by
working nights. The Pirkka Trail Run isn’t just a traipse down to the sauna.”

Another great start to a day,
Koskinen thought as he pushed past
Rantanen into the building. Pekki met him in the lobby. The gray pallor of his face spoke of shock, and the left corner of his mouth was twitching restlessly.

“Female
in
her
seventies.
Died
a
couple
of
hours ago.”

Koskinen’s blood went cold.

“Is it…”

“Yes.” Pekki
gave a
nod to the side. “
They
th
ink she was suffocated.”

Koskinen looked in the direction Pekki had indicated. Three men were sitting on the lobby sofa group. Two of them were paramedics in white coveralls, and the third was a youngish man dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket.

“How do
they
know?”

“
Do
n’t even need a basic course in pathology.” Pekki shook his head dejectedly. “It’s
pretty
hard for a quadriplegic to fill her own mouth with feathers. Her mouth was the only
part of her body
that still worked. Apparently she managed to sink her teeth into the pillow
before suffocating. We found the ripped pillow on the floor.”

“Who found
her
? I was told there wasn’t anyone on duty at night.”

“There isn’t,” Pekki said and glanced at his notes. “The victim’s name is Rauha
Salmi
. She managed to sound the alarm using her alert phone. Wolf House has a contract with a first response service called Tampere Security, and that guy in the leather jacket is from the
re
. He uses the title ‘safety assistant.’”

“So he found her?”

“Yes. He realized what had happened and called an ambulance and the police. Rummy was the first one here. He connected this to the
Timonen
case and called me at home.”

Koskinen walked over to the safety assistant
,
introduced himself and sat down on the next sofa, kitty-corner from him.

“So you found her?”

The man nodded, looking past Koskinen. Apparently the effects of what he had seen hadn’t worn off yet.

“You have a key to the building?”

He took a white plastic card out of his breast pocket and showed it to Koskinen. On the upper edge was a long string of numbers and below it a magnetic strip.

“Will that get you into all of the rooms?”

Again a silent nod. Koskinen was starting to wonder if he had lost the power of speech. You would think that working as a first responder
,
he would have become hardened enough that seeing a body wouldn’t shock him
enough to render him mute.

Koskinen swept his eyes from the police officers to the ambulance men and then spoke to everyone all at once: “Sergeant Pekki just told me that the deceased passed two hours ago. How were you able to make such a specific determination?”

Surprisingly, the safety assistant began to speak. “I decided that.”

“How?”

“That was when the call came in to Helsinki.”

“Helsinki?” Koskinen’s brows went up. “Calls go all the way there?”

“Yes. Alarms go straight to the Red Cross emergency dispatch. If they can’t contact the person who sounded the alarm, they forward the request on to the local safety assistant.”

“In this case you?”

“Not directly,” he said. “Helsinki calls the service center here in Tampere. There are a couple of operators on duty around the clock, and they contacted me. It was 3:15 then, and even though I was sleeping with my clothes on, I still didn’t get here for half an hour.”

Koskinen shook his head silently. He could imagine how long half an hour was for a person in need of help. For someone having a medical emergency or for someone who couldn’t move and had fallen out of bed, that could be an agonizing eternity.

The security assistant must have misinterpreted Koskinen’s dark expression. He hastily began explaining himself.

“I left home right when I got the call, but I couldn’t get here any earlier. I live all the way on the other side of the town.”

Koskinen raised his palms to calm him. “You did exactly what you should h
ave. I don’t think anyone could’
ve gotten here fast enough to do anything, even if they had been here in five minutes.”

In his mind Koskinen was blaming other parties entirely. Who could know whether the savings of one employee’s salary had once again cost a priceless human life. The killer probably wouldn’t have even tried if there had been a night nurse on duty.

A memory from two days ago popped into his mind: Rauha
Salmi
sitting in her wheelchair in a stiff position, her head twisted in a painful-looking way and her hands withered, lifeless stumps. She would not have been able to press the alert button of the phone.

Koskinen turned to the security assistant again. “How did she sound the alarm? According to our information she was a quadriplegic.”

“With cases like her, we use an auto-alert system,” the man explained. “
Salmi
had what we call a smart bracelet that reports changes in the vital signs of the host individual.”

The word “host individual” must have sounded off to him too. He swallowed deeply and continued in a gravelly voice.

“In this case the device reacted to a rapid pulse and an increase in blood pressure.”

“And at that point it activated and contacted the security call center?”

“Yes.”

“And of course the operator didn’t receive a response, so they called you.”

“That’s what happened.”