Another minute passes. “I’ll take that water now.”

I pour it from a carafe on a sideboard and give it to her.

“Tell me what you want to know,” she says.

“Did you know Seppo was having an affair with Sufia Elmi?”

“No.”

“Not a clue?”

She sighs. “Seppo has affairs from time to time. I ignore them. They always blow over.”

“This doesn’t bother you?”

“That’s not your business.”

She’s right. I should keep the questions focused on Seppo. I know he has family money and that because of it, he used to sit on the boards of various corporations and institutions, but he seems to have gone off the radar. I don’t know what he does at present. “Does Seppo have any kind of work, any responsibilities?”

She shakes her head. “Not anymore. He’s rich, he doesn’t have to do anything.”

“Has Seppo ever been violent toward you?”

“Seppo is incapable of violence. The sight of blood makes him sick. If he cuts himself shaving, he cries.”

This is the man she left me for. Amazing. “He drinks a lot?”

“Yes, he drinks.”

“Does he exhibit psychotic behavior when he’s drunk?”

She puts on a facade of boredom. “He giggles and gets cuddly.”

“The murder occurred the day before yesterday, at about two P.M. It appears that your BMW was used in Sufia Elmi’s abduction. She may have been raped in the backseat. Do you know where Seppo and the car were at that time?”

“No, I was in church all afternoon.”

“Church?”

“That’s why I’m in Kittilä, to rediscover my religious roots.”

I try to hide my surprise. Heli’s antagonism toward religion used to be extreme. That was a long time ago. I remind myself that I don’t know her anymore.

“What makes you think she might have been raped in our car?” she asks.

“Blood and semen.”

She looks at me like I’m stupid. “Have you stopped to consider that maybe he fucked her and she wanted it?”

“I have, but thanks for your input.”

She stands up. “I’m leaving now. Can I have my house keys?”

I toss them to her.

“What about the car?”

I might want to sit in the garage and listen to Miles Davis again.

“In due course.”

“My advice to you,” she says, “is to release Seppo before you make things any worse for yourself. Good luck with your snipe hunt and with the media. I’ll be giving interviews soon. You’ll be hearing from our lawyer. I’ll see to it that Seppo sues you for fabricating a case against him.”

“That’s your prerogative.”

“Good-bye Kari.” She leaves, shuts the door behind her with a soft click.

13

I DON’T WANT TO see her again, so I give Heli a couple minutes to get out of the building before going out to the common room. Antti and Jussi are sitting there with Esko the coroner. Items from Seppo’s house are bagged and spread out over two desks.

“I need to talk to you,” Esko says.

“I saw the new edition of Alibi. Yeah, we need to talk about it.”

“In private.”

“Give me a minute.” I look at the potential evidence. There’s a lot of it. “Anything good here?” I ask.

“Could be,” Jussi says. “We found two pairs of boots he could have worn, and a bunch of clothes. We figured they should all go to the lab.”

“Yep.”

“We got a hammer and a couple puukko and some knives out of the kitchen too.”

I pick up the bag with the puukko, Finnish hunting knives. They’re less curved than the skinning knife used to kill Sufia, so I don’t make too much of them, and besides, almost every Finnish home has at least one or two lying around. Statistically, they’re the nation’s most popular murder weapon. Twice, I’ve investigated murders in which a group of men got drunk together and passed out. They wake up and one of them is dead with a knife in his chest. All of them have fingerprints on the knife, but nobody remembers what happened. Neither case ended in a conviction.

Antti points at Seppo’s computer. “Seppo likes to look at porn.” If looking at porn were a crime, most men in this country would be in prison. “What kind?”

“I didn’t go through it all,” Antti says, “but I didn’t see anything violent.”

“Anything with Thai girls?” I ask.

Antti’s face goes red.

“And we got this.” Jussi picks up a bag with three half-liter Lapin Kulta bottles in it. “They were in the fridge. We figured we ought to check and see if they came out of the same lot as the one, you know, in her vagina.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” I look around. “Where’s Valtteri?”

“He said he had to go home,” Antti says.

I look at my watch. It’s a quarter after six. “Maybe you guys should go home too. This stuff needs to go to the lab. Could one of you take it to the airport and get it to Helsinki on the next plane?”

“I can,” Antti says.

“By the way, I processed the car and got a lot of forensics. I think this case should be over soon.”

Antti looks sheepish. “Think I’ll be able to go on vacation?”

“Odds are good. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

“Can we talk now?” Esko asks.

I motion toward my office. “About obstruction of justice, you bet.”

I shut the door and we sit down. I toss the magazine at him. “The fucking diener,” I say.

“I’m embarrassed about that but…”

“But nothing. The photos were irresponsible and disrespectful. Details were released that could impede the investigation. I’m going to charge him.”

“There’s no guarantee it was Tuomas. There are other workers, cleaners, it could have been any one of a dozen people.”

“You know goddamned well it was the diener.”

“Will you forget the fucking diener!”

I’ve never heard Esko yell before. It shuts me up.

“I’m not here to talk about that,” Esko says. “I got the DNA results from the crime scene and autopsy back from the lab.”

I feel like a jerk, light a cigarette. “What did you get?”

“Can I have one?”

To my knowledge, Esko doesn’t smoke. I slide the pack over and he lights one, takes a couple drags, collects his thoughts. “The lab results turned up semen samples in and around her mouth. DNA testing shows it came from two separate sources.”

I get a queasy feeling in my stomach that tells me the case has gone wrong. “How do you interpret that?”

“She had to have performed oral sex on two different men on the day of her murder.”

“So you’re saying Seppo had an accomplice?”

“I can’t say Seppo was involved at all. I don’t have a DNA sample from him for comparison.”

“I can’t force him to give one until I charge him. You can have a sample from the evidence collected from his house. It comes back from the lab tomorrow.”

“There’s more.”

I press the stress out of my eyes with my fingertips. “What?”

“There’s a third set of DNA from the crime scene. You remember the sample I took from her face? You asked me to collect it.”

I nod.

“Teardrops.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I didn’t know teardrops have DNA in them.”

“Well, they do.”

“If it’s minus forty and I spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Why didn’t the tears freeze and just bounce off her face?”

“I looked it up. Tears are a saline solution and depress the freezing point of water. They only have about a tenth or a twelfth of the salt content of seawater, depending, interestingly enough, on the cause of the tears. It was enough salt to keep the tears liquid while they fell, until they struck her face. They spattered and then froze instantly. The lowest possible temperature for a saline solution is minus twenty-one-point-one degrees. It was minus forty outside, so the salt crystallized out of the water. That’s how you were able to notice it. Your flashlight made the salt crystals sparkle.”

“No shit.” I don’t know what else to say.

“That’s not the real news. The tears don’t belong to either of the men she performed fellatio on.”