Wolves and Angels (41 page)

“Howdy,” Mäkitalo said, raising his head. “There was nothing here. Except a smashed wheelchair. I put it in the van, and I’ll take prints down at the station.”

“No need.”

Mäkitalo looked at Koskinen in surprise, and he explained the situation. They didn’t need to look for a guilty party anymore. Tapani Harjus himself was behind
what had happened.

“Okay then,” Mäkitalo said calmly and started collecting his tools back into his metal-sheathed case. He snapped the latch shut and then pointed at the wall. “That’s where he hit.”

Koskinen looked at the place Mäkitalo was indicating. On the white concrete wall there was a brown blood stain
,
and the floor held a larger puddle of dried blood.

“He was lucky,” Mäkitalo said. “Not many people would have made it through that alive.”

They started up the stairs, and Koskinen remembered what Harjus had just said at the hospital about his good luck.

Lea Kalenius had already managed to round everyone up. Pekki and Kaatio were looking at Koskinen with expecting eyes. The two other nurses
,
Anniina Salonen and Kaarina Kauppila
,
stood next to Kalenius. Koskinen could also see a group of residents through the open door of the dayroom. They were sitting motionless in their wheelchairs like half-finished statuary.

Koskinen cleared his throat and then reported on his visit to the hospital. He described Harjus’ relatively good condition and ordered the police to cease the investigation of the incident. The residents could set their minds at ease, and go to sleep. This time there hadn’t been any foul play involved.

He beckoned Pekki and Kaatio off to the side with a finger and made a quick summary of his visits to Ketterä’s parents and ex-wife.

“Childhood friends?” Pekki was dumbfounded. “And Ketterä stole
Timonen
’s girl? It’s a regular love
triangle.”

“But does that move the case forward at all?” Kaatio rubbed his neck. “If Ketterä would
’
ve died first, I’d get it, but this way around it doesn’t make any sense.”

Koskinen agreed. They stared at each other for a moment with furrowed brows until Koskinen remembered to ask, “Have you found Pirkko-Liisa Rinne?”

Pekki shook his head.
“Nope, not a single trace of the broad.”

“That seems strange.”

“Strange?” Pekki snorted. “I’d say it stinks to high heaven.”

“Of what?”

“She’s on the run.”

“But from what? The killer or her own guilt?”

“Whichever…in any case, she’s mixed up in this somehow.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Just suppose that she lied about losing her key and started plotting something during the summer. She palmed the key for later use.”

Could that be right? Koskinen thought. “In that case we have to find
her
as soon as possible.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I put Ulla in charge of the search.”

Koskinen moved on to another topic. “And Ketterä’s room? Have you searched it?”

“Every nook and cranny. Nothing of any use.”

“I’ll still take a look.”

Pekki walked in front of Koskinen. Ketterä’s room was exactly like those of the other two victims. The only striking feature was the piano standing against the wall. It took up much of the room, and, not counting the bed and table, there wasn’t much space for any other furniture. Not even a piano stool—Ketterä had supplied that himself.

Koskinen looked for any pictures of the children. He was curious to see if Ketterä had any mementos of his family, maybe just a drawing from one of the kids. But he found nothing, which made the framed picture of his dog, Lucky, sitting on the nightstand look downright grotesque.

“Let’s go. But first seal the door.”

“What if Ketterä comes home?” Pekki asked. “We still haven’t found a body.”

“Then he can break the seal.”

They returned to the lobby. The patrol officers had already left. All except one. One man, barely twenty
years old, sat on the couch. Koskinen realized from his uniform that he was
a
trainee from the police academy, doing his field
training
.

“You were the guard here?”

He jumped up. “Yes, sir. It was me.”

Koskinen made a wide arc with his finger around the lobby all the way to the stairway leading down to the lower level.

“Where were you at the moment when one of the residents of this facility went racing through here, rolled his wheelchair across the lobby as fast as he could and
dove down those stairs?”

The young cadet’s large Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “In the kitchen.”

“What were you doing there?”

“One of the nurses invited me for a coffee.”

“Kaarina?”

The cadet nodded, Koskinen took a sudden step forward. “From this moment on you stay right here! You don’t go anywhere even if a flock of naked Playboy models try to seduce you.”

“Yes, sir,” he squeaked. “I won’t go anywhere.”

“When is your relief coming?”

“At ten.”

“And is he going to be another cadet?”

“Yeah. We’re getting hours for our field
training f
rom this.”

Koskinen didn’t
h
ave the energy to be angry anymore, instead directing his frustrations in a different direction. He yanked his
cell phone
out of his pocket and walked to the other side of the lobby.

Patrol Sergeant Lepola was just warming up his sauna at home. Maybe he had even already popped the cap on a cold one, because his voice was more jovial than normal. “How’s it hanging, Haile?”

Even though Koskinen had just decided to present his displeasure very matter-of-factly only a few seconds earlier, Lepola’s ribbing wrecked his good intentions right out of the gate. Koskinen railed at him. He had asked for a police guard at Wolf House and instead he had gotten a pimple-faced kid. How could they send a
police academy trainee on such an important assignment? Luckily this time the result had only been a concussion and some bruises, but it just as easily could have been a corpse.

When Lepola finally got a chance to speak, his voice was no longer relaxed. “We’ve used cadets for these jobs before. Don’t you dare try to shift the blame to Patrol for every little thing that goes wrong!”

Koskinen could guess what Lepola meant: Monday night, Patrol 341, and the wheelchair left unchecked in the bushes. Koskinen didn’t say anything, and Lepola continued even more fractiously. “We don’t have enough men to be guarding one single building night after night. It’s one less pair of boots on the street. The public already complains that they never see any police presence anywhere, even with knives and tire irons swinging on every other street corner.”

“I know, I know,” Koskinen said with a resigned sigh.

Lepola’s voice came down a notch too: “I’ll arrange a patrol there for the night. I still think some of that outsourcing shit could actually work in these situations, though. Even now we could have hired a guard from a security firm to sit there at that nursing home.”

“It’s an assisted living center, not a nursing home,” Koskinen corrected and then hung up. Lepola’s comments bothered him—he wasn’t really in support of outsourcing, was he?

Koskinen noticed a large figure moving at the door to the dayroom. Apparently Anniina Salonen had been standing there for some time listening, and Koskinen had to rewind quickly in his mind what he had said to Lepola. It hadn’t included any police secrets, and
Salonen’s snooping was probably just the usual insatiable female curiosity.

He walked to her and asked, “What are you doing here so late, and on a Saturday night?”

“The whole day has been just terrible,” Salonen said. “Kaarina wouldn’t have been able to manage alone here. The three of us together just barely got everything done that needed to get done. Lea’s nerves are on the verge of snapping again. It was a close
call
that she didn’t kill anyone.”

This last sentence made Koskinen wonder whether she had let it slip on accident or on purpose. But he didn’t dig for an explanation and let Salonen continue.

“Police have been wandering around since the morning, and we keep having to answer the oddest questions. They couldn’t understand how it was possible that we didn’t know what Hannu was wearing when he left yesterday. And where he could have gone. And we were even supposed to know about his finances. Like how much Hannu had in the bank and how much was in his wallet. How is that any of our business?”

Salonen’s heavy breasts were trembling under her shirt as she flailed both of her arms to add drama to her account.

“On top of all the work I had to do, I was still expected to trot around all over the building after these policemen. We had to go over everything in Hannu’s room down to the last little bolt on the bed. How am I supposed to know what’s missing, and what he took with him? This is just appalling.”

Despite her large size, Anniina Salonen suddenly looked weak and vulnerable. Koskinen rushed to
comfort her. “It will all be over soon. Nothing more will
happen here. A police
patrol
will
be coming for the night to guard the building.”

Salonen stared at Koskinen without the slightest shred of relief, so Koskinen tried again. “We’ll catch whoever did this sooner or later. We always do.”

“Hopeful
ly,” Salonen said. “I’m leaving,
and I’m staying at home until Monday and not moving a muscle.”

She turned toward the staff lounge. The sound of her footsteps had barely faded when Lea Kalenius appeared from the dayroom. Koskinen got exactly the same feeling as a moment before, as if she had been right behind the door listening in.

“What did our little Anniina have to say?” Kalenius asked casually. “Unloading her heartaches?”

She walked closer, and Koskinen saw that her lack of concern was not genuine. The face behind her smile was tense.

“Nothing in particular,” Koskinen answered in the same casual tone. “Just the usual.”

Kalenius looked like she had lost even more weight over the last few days. The dark bags under her eyes and her chapped lips told of sleepless nights. Her voice rasped like hard metal. “
You don’t have
to take everything that honey buffalo spouts too seriously.”

Koskinen was startled by Kalenius’ behavior and confused by the strange epithet. But he just chalked it up to the tense situation. No wonder that everyone’s nerves were stretched thin under the circumstances.

“You can go ahead and
take off
too,” Koskinen said.
“I’m sure you could use a good night’s sleep.”

Kalenius turned her large brown eyes on Koskinen. Her full lips were parted as if on the verge of asking a question, and her chest was heaving. It looked like she had something on her mind that she wasn’t able to unload.

Koskinen took another step closer and touched her upper arm. “You can tell me, whatever it is,” he said supportively.

“I’m afraid,” Kalenius sighed. “I’m so afraid.”

“There’s no reason to be. We’ll have policemen on guard.”

“I’m not afraid here, but out there. I don’t even dare to go home. I’m sure he’s waiting for me somewhere out there to attack me on a dark street.”

“He who?” Koskinen said, tensing again in anticipation.

The question made Kalenius even more agitated: “The murderer, of course! What did you think?”

Koskinen thought about Kalenius’ previous nervous breakdown and extended sick leave. In the context of that he could understand her state of mild hysteria verging on outright dread. Kalenius seemed to be more sensitive than average.

“Where do you live?”
Koskinen asked.

“In North Hervanta on Kanjonin Street.”

“I can take you home then.”

She sighed with relief and went to change. In the meantime Koskinen traded a few words with the cadet. In faltering, roundabout terms, the boy expressed his
concern about how the day’s events might affect his field training evaluation and his police academy diploma. Koskinen comforted him, saying that if it was up to him, then it wouldn’t. Koskinen went outside, leaving behind a much relieved and presumably much more vigilant guard.

He sat in the car and stared at Wolf House, lost in thought. The long, squat wooden building looked defenseless in the darkened evening light. Besides the tall windows of the lobby, the drapes were all tightly drawn. All of the window hangings in the residents’ rooms were different colors and different patterns, but the fear behind them was the same. It was the common terror of an unknown danger.

After five minutes the
nurses
came out
;
Kalenius
hopped into Koskinen’s
car and Salonen drove off in her Fiat.