Helsinki White (13 page)

“Yeah,” he said. Sweetness knocked reporters out of my way so I could get through them on crutches, and we left.

I
went to physical therapy, got my knee tortured and went home. The surgery and therapy worked, though. My knee hadn’t had this much mobility since I got shot, and its range of motion increased daily. Pretty soon, I could say good-bye to the crutches.

Sweetness and I tossed Lisbet’s home and office. I went through her correspondence, looked for threatening letters. Her purse was missing, and her mobile as well. Her office was neat, orderly. It spoke of efficiency. I noted that there were no personal touches. No photographs. No awards or signs of achievement, and given her success, she must have received many. This told me she was private and modest.

Having processed hundreds or thousands of crime scenes, I’ve been in countless Finnish homes, and what has always struck me the most is their similarity. Almost everyone uses the same styles of cups and saucers, furniture. Most homes are nearly interchangeable, and hers was the same. I noted that she liked plants. There were almost two dozen plants of various kinds throughout her apartment. And she had a large temperature-controlled fish tank. The fish looked exotic—no goldfish—so I assumed they brought her pleasure. I fed them, and made a note to have them removed and cared for.

Her wardrobe was commonplace businesswoman boring. She had workout clothes. Shoes for aerobics and jogging. She took care of her physique. As with her office, she had few knickknacks or photos displayed. She believed in functionality.

Once home, I got her phone records, called every person she had called or had called her for the past couple months. She was single, had no romantic interests. Her work dominated her life. She was well liked, hadn’t spoken of threats or enemies, other than the website that wished her dead. She didn’t take it seriously. I spoke to her colleagues. They told me the same. She was last seen leaving work on the day of her death at about six p.m.

She used public transportation, owned no car. Officers were posted at the bus and tram stops she normally used. For several days, every person who used those stops would be queried and asked if they remembered seeing her. But if they didn’t, it meant nothing. Helsinki public transportation passengers seldom look around, avoid eye contact.

Milo and I worked from our own apartments. There was no need for us to be in the same building. Our computers were networked, the database set up, and we had split up the files to sort through them. We could videoconference with webcams if needed. I sat for a long time, thinking about a practical way to search for her body. In this large, metropolitan area, I could think of none. I could only hope that it turned up in a Dumpster or some such thing. In Helsinki, at this time of year, anyone with half a brain would weigh her down and give her a burial at sea.

“It’s good to see you being a detective again, instead of a thief,” Kate said.

“I like it better, too,” I said. And I did. I had no moral problem
with taking down dope dealers. I was just more at home in an old and comfortable role. I couldn’t focus on the mountain of material detailing every racist in Finland, though. Kate and Aino talked on the phone. Their friendship was deepening. I kept picturing Aino’s blue eyes and blond hair. The way her sweater accented her breasts. Thoughts of fucking her were far more interesting than those of Lisbet Söderlund’s decapitated head. I couldn’t work until Kate hung up the phone and ended their conversation.

I sat at the table with my laptop for two more days. Katt slept in my lap or sat on my shoulder, dug his claws into my neck. The pain kept my mind from wandering. Yes, going through this morass of material, routine police investigation, and following up on hundreds of most likely possibilities would eventually lead to Lisbet’s murderer, but how long would it take? People were dying daily. Routine work wouldn’t do. I went through the Facebook pages given to me by the woman at the Finnish Somalia Network. I felt the answer lay inside them.

I joined every Finnish social networking hate group I could find. One, Auttakaamme Maahanmuuttajarikolliset Takaisin Kotiin— Let’s Help Send the Immigrant Criminals Back Home—had over twenty-six thousand members. Another needle in a haystack. But the group on Facebook that directly threatened her, I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund, had a member with a user name and picture of Heinrich Himmler who on multiple occasions expressed a desire to send all of Finland’s black immigrants to the gas chamber. And now two brothers were dead, murdered in a homemade gas chamber. Many members of the group went by Nazi user names: Goering, Ilse Koch, Joseph Goebbels,
Adolf Eichmann, but the tone of the rhetoric of the member that called himself Himmler told me he was the man I wanted to locate. If he hadn’t himself murdered Lisbet Söderlund, I thought he knew who did. But how would I find him?

Saska Lindgren called me. The murdered young men were known low-level drug dealers. They sold everything from hashish to heroin. Their bank cards indicated they had taken a train to Turku on the day of their murder. Bought one-way tickets. They ate at McDonald’s in Turku. That was the last trace of them.

I watched the news. Assaults and beatings, white and black youth gang clashes. Attacks on apostate Finnish white women, converted to Islam because of their marriages to Muslims. Their mixed-race babies spat upon in their carriages. Close-ups of tears streaming into veils. The media used to bury these stories, often not reporting gang fights. Police often broke up clashes but made no arrests. A concerted group effort to hide racial tensions. Now the media is minimalizing and downplaying them, reporting them in the most neutral of tones, but they can’t be ignored.

On Friday night we pulled a heist, B&Eed both ends of a drug deal after the fact. It didn’t make sense to me, as we were in the public eye, but Jyri insisted, told me I’d be glad I did it. It was odd, though, because we were to steal over half a million euros, plus the drugs, then take them to another address and hide them in the apartment. We exercised extreme caution. Milo had their cars GPS tracked, their phones tapped. We drove around for an hour first, made sure we weren’t tailed. It went off without a hitch.

We went for a drink after the heist, as had become our habit. As we sipped our beers, paranoia and mistrust finally boiled over.
One gangster finally killed another, stabbed him to death and left him in the trunk of his car. Milo learned of it when the killer called his boss to tell him what he had done. If a mafia war started and Helsinki Homicide investigated, everything would unravel and the trail would lead back to us. I decided we had to dispose of the body in the morning.

W
e met outside my apartment building at seven a.m. The media had honored Jyri’s wishes that they deal with him, as I dealt with the investigation and matters of national security. There were no reporters outside my home, no tagalongs as we drove around the city. The only calls and e-mails were from news agencies outside Finland, and I ignored them.

Body disposal fell into the category of subjects off-limits in front of Kate. My keen intuition told me she wouldn’t approve.

The thermometer was on the plus side now, and I noted that the series of grimy icebergs lining the street was shrinking. Not the result of global warming, but of spring. The first tiny buds were appearing on the trees.

We went to a kiosk around the corner and got coffee. A small high table meant for standing rather than sitting made for a good spot to converse, sotto voce.

“Ideas?” I asked.

“I ain’t cuttin’ up no fuckin’ bodies,” Sweetness said.

Milo and I agreed. None of us had the stomach for something that disgusting.

“The head and hands have to go,” Milo said. “I made a thermite bomb last night, and I have enough gunpowder from my reloading outfit to pack his mouth. We can put the bomb in his hands. It will burn at about three thousand degrees. His hands will disappear, along with most of the rest of him when the bomb goes off. When the gunpowder ignites, his teeth will be reduced to powder. The car will explode and there won’t be anything left but a smoking black frame.”

“How did you make the bomb?” Sweetness asked.

“It’s mostly just aluminum and iron oxides. Stuff you can get at hardware stores. I had some lying around.”

“Isn’t there a less dramatic way to get rid of him?” I asked. “We just need to make him disappear. No body, no murder.”

Sweetness takes some
nuuska
and jams it into his gum. “Dad worked as a welder at the shipyards. He got me a job there one summer. They got barrels of acid in shipping containers. They’re for industry, like paper and nuclear factories. We could just stick him in one and seal him up.”

Milo’s eyes sunk deeper into their black pits as he pondered. “Do you remember what kinds of acid?”

“Hydrochloric and hydrofluoric are two that I remember.”

Milo half grinned. The less-than-gentle giant knew such big words.

I tried to sip my coffee. It was still too scalding to drink. “There are workers around the shipyard. And we have to dump out part of the barrel so he fits in it. So we need an empty barrel. And those barrels are big and heavy. We need something to pick it up with so we can tip the full barrel and pour part of the acid into the empty one. And we need protective clothing, head to toe, in case we
slosh it and get it on us. The concept is right, but we can’t do all that at the shipyards.”

Milo slapped the table, slopped everyone’s coffee and burned Sweetness’s fingers. “Goddamn it,” he said.

Milo laughed. “I got it. Filippov Construction. Everything we need is there, and we have the privacy.”

Filippov Construction had been closed since Arvid murdered its owner, Ivan Filippov, a few weeks ago, and his wife, Iisa Filippov, disappeared. The business specialized in industrial waste disposal. Work there had ceased, the site stood empty.

“How do you know they have acid, and the right kind?” I asked.

“I read their inventory.” He looked at Sweetness and, for the sake of one-upmanship, because Sweetness knew big words, said, “I remember almost everything I read. They have sulfuric acid. It’s not as effective as hydrochloric or hydrofluoric for our purposes. The body will take some weeks to dissolve. It will turn to goo, then viscous liquid, and eventually just be gone. Not even a trace of DNA will be left.”

“And the other problems I mentioned?” I asked.

“There are six two-hundred-twenty-gallon barrels of sulfuric acid, and four empty barrels designed for storage. Closed-loop portable tanks that meet safety requirements. Reusable three-eighths-inch-thick stainless steel construction with extra protection for valves and fittings. Minimum one-hundred-psi pressure design meant to be handled with a forklift, so Sweetness can use one and tip the forks to pour acid from one container to another. And of course, all the protective clothing is there, too.”

“Maybe after, we should take the car to the woods and burn it up with your bomb,” Sweetness said.

“I can’t picture the place re-opening within the next few weeks while the gangster decomposes to goop,” I said. “Sounds like a plan.”

I
DROVE FOR THE FIRST TIME
since my surgeries. It was no problem. My knee was more than strong enough to depress the pedals without bad pain. We took my Saab and located the Ford with the body in the trunk. Milo has master keys that fit almost any vehicle. He and Sweetness took it—I was trying to make them spend more time together—and I followed them to Filippov Construction, in an industrial park in Vantaa.

Milo picked the gate lock. Sweetness hit his flask. The area was surrounded with a heavy chain-link fence topped with two strands of barbed wire and lined on the inside with corrugated green fiberglass, so no one could see in.

We drove into a spacious asphalt lot filled with small-grade heavy equipment. A couple Bobcat dozers, a cherry picker, a forklift and other machines, along with industrial waste, yet to be disposed of, and containers to hold it. I stayed outside in the morning sunshine while Milo and Sweetness suited up.

They came out looking like mad scientists from a bad sci-fi movie, covered head to toe in everything from respirators and goggles to rubber aprons. They carried tools to open the barrels and set to work. They decided the best method was to dump the gangster in the empty barrel and then cover him over with acid.

They backed his Ford up to the tank and popped the trunk. Lifting him out was no easy task. He had been dead just long enough for rigor mortis to hit its peak. He was ironing-board stiff.
Luck was with them, though, because he had lain in the trunk in a near fetal position. Otherwise, they would have had to break nearly every bone in his body to make him flexible enough to fit in the barrel. Luckily as well, Sweetness was with us. He lifted the gangster by himself from an awkward position, using only his arms, as there was no way to angle himself so he could get his back into it. Milo and I never could have accomplished it.

They opened the barrel of acid and the empty barrel, too. Sweetness fired up the forklift and, slow but sure, began drizzling sulfuric onto the gangster.

I wore no protection and leaned against my Saab, a good thirty-five yards away, to keep from breathing the fumes.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted you at an inopportune moment,” a quiet voice said to me.

It scared the shit out of me and I jumped.

Sweetness must have seen sudden movement in his peripheral vision. He kept cool and eased the forks back, stopped pouring. He gestured with a black-rubber-glove-covered hand to Milo and pointed in my direction. They came toward us, taking off their headgear and gloves as they moved. I saw Milo rip a hole in the back of his paper suit, and saw what was coming.

The man beside me waited without speaking. He wore a black cloth bomber jacket, jeans and boots. His head was shaved. He had large and ornate French paratrooper wings tattooed on the sides of his head. He looked like the devil incarnate.

Milo smiled as he neared, and reached into the hole in his paper suit. He drew down on Satan, but the man produced his pistol so fast that it seemed magical. “Deputy Dawg,” he said, “will never outdraw Yosemite Sam.”