Wolves and Angels (30 page)

Two men dressed in black came in through the front door. One of them had a folded-up wheeled stretcher under his arm. The men nodded curtly at Koskinen
; he
had met the men before in similar situations
. He pointed
them t
oward Salmi
’s room, even though it would have been easy to find with a uniformed officer standing guard at the door.

The two undertakers disappeared into the hallway without a word. Soon a man with a glum face appeared from the same direction. Kaatio walked into the lobby
with the bow-legged gait common to soccer players.

“Figured anything out?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Same here,” Kaatio said, groaning. “Not a single
fricking
thing. The first thing any of the residents heard was around the time when the security guy showed up. Before then nobody heard or saw anything…not even the sound of Laine’s taxi.”

Kaatio ran his eyes around the intersection between the wall and the ceiling.

“Why don’t they have a security camera here?”

“Who would’ve ever believed anyone would try to force their way in here?” Koskinen said, bouncing his keys in his palm. “I’m going to the station. My desk is full of unfinished paperwork, and I think the prosecutor is starting to get his panties in a bunch.”

He traded a few more words with Kaatio about how to proceed. They would gather at the station at five o’clock at the latest to recap, and the meeting had to be over by seven. Koskinen omitted the fact that
this
was when he had a date with an occupational health psychiatrist. He doubted Ulla would have broadcast it either.

In the hallway the wheeled stretcher rattled
,
and he guessed that they were already bringing out
Salmi
. Strapping the body to the stretcher could not have taken long. Even one of them could have managed it easily. Koskinen doubted that Rauha
Salmi
weighed more than a hundred pounds.

Koskinen waved at Kaatio and slipped out. He jumped in the Toyota, and was so deep in thought that he
started driving the wrong way. He drove around the nearby cramped residential streets for a while before finding his way back to the main road.

Instead of heading directly for the station, he turned toward the Prisma superstore and parked the car right next to the front door. He marched straight to the clothing department, and, after briefly looking over the selection, he selected a black dress shirt. Emilia had said once that he looked his most handsome in black, and he still trusted that.

After going through the checkout, he stopped at the flower shop in the vestibule. He picked a pink bouquet of roses—ten for ten euros. He threw them with the shirt in the back seat of the Toyota and continued on his way.

Kuparinen was in the garage to meet him and looked at the bouquet of flowers swinging in Koskinen’s hand. His expression revealed his thoughts about the use an official state vehicle for a personal shopping trip. Koskinen slipped into the elevator before Kuparinen had time to say anything.

Koskinen looked at himself in the mirror and practiced his carefree playboy smile: “I just brought you a little something.” But almost as quickly he turned serious—was it even classy to give flowers on the first date? Ursula Katajisto might take it as a breach of etiquette or, who knows, maybe even some sort of Freudian innuendo, psychiatrist that she was.

Koskinen stepped into the corridor, thinking about leaving the flowers on the windowsill in the elevator alcove. Someone without anything important going on could investigate where they had come from. But then he got another idea. He marched into his secretary’s cubicle and tossed the flowers on her desk.

Milla
shrieked
with
joy.
“Flowers!
What
are
these for?”

Her unexpected exuberance surprised Koskinen.

“Well, for this morning,” he said, unable to come up with anything else. “I was being a pretty big ass. You couldn’t have known how important that picture of the sailboat was to me.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” Milla said, shaking her antenna hat. She ripped the packaging open and let out another scream of joy. “Roses! What a cool bouquet.”

Koskinen had to laugh. He swung the Prisma bag in his hand. “Don’t come into my office for a few minutes. I bought a new shirt, and I’m going to go strip again.”

He walked off
toward
his office, thinking along the way whether that had just gone wrong again. How could he know Milla, who dreaded sexual harassment so much, wouldn’t take his words the wrong way? She might take them as having a double meaning, and then the roses would just look like bait from a philanderer.

Once again the old familiar thought came to mind:
w
ould he ever learn how to act around people?

18.

Koskinen ate the
s
age
c
hicken. The meat was tender and was complemented by the herb
-
roasted potatoes. The
portion was not particularly large, but it nonetheless filled his belly; he had enjoyed a Greek salad and several slices of wheat bread before the main course.

He poured more
dafnes
—he had ordered authentic Greek wine—
into Ursula’s glass and received a vivacious smile
in return
. Ursula Katajisto was not an outright beauty, but she was good looking
nonetheless
. Her face was clear and smooth, her nose was slightly hooked, and her jaw was angular. Dark eyes sparkled vividly behind the lenses of her large, squarish glasses. Her shiny, naturally brown hair was parted on the crown of her head to the sides and curled from her earlobes down to her neck.

“Zorbas” was playing in the background, plucked out on a
bousouki
lute
, and
Koskinen didn’t feel at all like dancing. The place was
called
Knossos
, and it was
located on the second floor of the Koski Shopping Center
,
a modern mass of
steel and glass surrounded by the red brick of Tampere’s industrial past.

The
restaurant
was clean and cozy, the doors and window shutters painted turquoise blue to emphasize the Greek theme.

However, the mood was far from that of the taverns o
n
the small islands of the Aegean Sea the restaurant was trying to imitate. Where the originals were filled with black-mustached Greek men leisurely downing
ouzo
aperitifs, the clientele of Knossos was made up of middle-class Finns who had obviously dressed up for the evening. Koskinen felt out of place in his black dress shirt and gray sport coat. Even though the shirt was brand new.

He was furiously trying to come up with topics for conversation. He could chat all night about
the
upcoming
Pirkka T
rail
R
un and
his
bike rides, not to mention fishing and sailing. But what to talk about with a female companion on a first date? It was probably also tactless to start with whose place they would head to for the night. While waiting for their meal, they had not talked about anything beyond the quotidian conjectures about the weather and the requisite few disparaging words about the city’s street engineering.

Koskinen’s date had turned out to be a vegetarian. From the menu, she had chosen the house specialty: Eggplant Imam Bayildi. It looked like it must have been delicious. Nothing remained on her plate but a shred of baked tomato skin.

Ursula dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “I was listening to the news on Radio Tampere today. Last night there was another homicide of a disabled person in Kissanmaa.”

Koskinen lowered his fork to his plate. “
Yes
.”

Ursula picked up a toothpick and cocked her head curiously.

“Are you working on the investigation?”

“We’re all involved. It’s number one priority for the
entire
Violent Crimes Unit.”

“Do you have any suspects?”

If only, Koskinen thought. What he wouldn’t give for one person who stood out from the rest? He didn’t want to show how blindly they were wandering in the dark, so he replied evasively. “We have a few people of interest, but this early in the investigation we haven’t compiled enough evidence against anyone to make an arrest.”

“I understand.” U
rsula
said, snorting at Koskinen’s
stock answer. “You can’t talk about work. It’s the same for me too, of course. Even though we’ve probably shared more than a few clients.”

Ursula’s teeth looked strong and a healthy white. He doubted the toothpick would find a hole big enough for it. Ursula lowered it to her plate, and her eyes flashed mischievously behind her glasses.

“Let’s talk about something else then.”

“Okay.”

“Are you interested in politics?”

“I vote.”

“And horoscopes?”

“Don’t believe in them.”

“Never mind. Neither do I.”

“That was the first plus on your record.”

“Just the first?” Ursula pouted coquettishly. “And what sort of record are you keeping on me?”

She
was dressed in a light blue poplin shirt and slightly darker lace jacket. She wore ecru pearls around her neck, and the top buttons of her shirt were open. Koskinen felt restless. He couldn’t exactly boast about his female relationships post-Emilia. He had seen someone a few times, but it was easy to over-romanticize a relationship born in the exotic surroundings of the Mediterranean. A woman on the hot sands of a Greek beach isn’t the same back in Finland dressed in a black snowsuit in November sleet.

The conversation petered off again, and Koskinen felt uncomfortable. He had to come up with something quick. Knossos was just a restaurant, without a bar for
continuing an evening of socializing. Koskinen didn’t feel like going dancing either. Actually, he would have preferred to get straight to the point without the obligatory mating rituals. In fact, he was starting to want that more and more by the minute.

However, he couldn’t suggest going
to
his place. That was out of the question. Koskinen had been hard pressed to get out the door after
his early morning wakeup call. There were
clothes
draped
on the backs of the chairs, dishes lying unwashed in the sink
, and he never made his bed even on a good day
.
And of course his
fridge was completely empty.

Ursula looked at Koskinen with her head cocked appraisingly. “You’re a very quiet man.”

Words stumbled out of Koskinen’s mouth: “Well, I’m so full and…”

“From that?” Ursula snorted. “I would
’
ve
thought
that a little portion like that would have just made a big man like you more hungry.”

“Oh, there was plenty to eat. At least more than in a French
escargot
. “

“Do you travel much?”

“Who, me?” This question made Koskinen more lively. “I used to drive back and forth across Europe in the family car, but now I travel less. But at this time last year I was sailing in Greece.”

“Aha!” Ursula’s thinly plucked eyebrows rose. “Now I know why you chose this place.”

“Otherwise we could have had Chinese.” Koskinen laughed and poured more wine in
her
glass.

Ursula sampled a drop of it and then started to finger
her pearls pensively. “It would be nice to know more about you.”

“Even more?”

“Yeah. Tell me something about yourself! Anything at all.”

Koskinen rotated the salt shaker in his hand and thought about where to start. Should he first tell about his divorce and the house he had lost, about how pointless it had all been? Should he reflect out loud about how Emilia had wanted something new out of life while all Koskinen needed beyond his work were the herb garden and his rowboat? Or should he speculate once again about how they could still have fixed their marriage had
they
been able to address the issues early enough?

However, he hadn’t managed to begin on any of these topics before Ursula had already grown tired of waiting.

“You certainly are chatty,” she said, laughing. “You could at least tell me if you have any children.”

Koskinen realized that he had been shaking salt out onto the table cloth. He furtively slid the napkin holder over the pile.

“One son.”

“How old?”

“Twenty.”

“Student?”