30

IN DOWNTOWN KITTILÄ, what passes for our shopping district is decked out for Christmas. The main square has a tall tree, over-decorated with gaudy blinking lights and laden with thick snow. Store window banners say Hyvää Joulua, Merry Christmas, or some variation on the theme, and advertise special holiday offers. I hate the commercialization of Christmas. Maybe because when I was a kid, we were poor and couldn’t afford expensive gifts, maybe because it just sucks.

Last year, Kate and I spent our first Christmas together. I made a traditional Finnish Christmas Eve dinner: rosolli (a salad with pickles, beets, onions and herring), a fifteen-pound ham and three different casseroles made out of potatoes, turnips and carrots. She said we’d never eat it all, but it was gone in four days. It comes to me that Heikki was supposed to help out Kate, but he’s dead, and I don’t even know if she has anything to eat at home. This case has made me a negligent husband.

I feel like shit from the hangover, and whatever I do is wrong, damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I haven’t even considered how my insistence in pursuing my ex-wife’s murderer makes Kate feel. Judging by her reaction, I’ve already ruined her holidays. I don’t want to further destroy them by having nothing to eat but takeout pizza on Christmas. Luckily, I bought Kate’s gifts weeks ago, but on the way to work, I stop at the grocery and buy all the food for the holidays. I’m afraid if I don’t do it now, I’ll forget later.

I leave the supermarket and look around. Almost every small Finnish town has the same eight or ten chain stores, and Kittilä looks like all the rest, as if it had been stamped out of a sheet with a cookie cutter. Standing in the cold and dark, looking at my hometown done up in fake Christmas bullshit, I wonder what the fuck I’m doing, why I’m not at home with my wife. Finnish people are obedient, we do what we’re told. Maybe I’m as faceless as this community.

It’s too late now. I’ve made my choice. Like the chief said, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

No media vultures hover outside the police station. I guess since I wouldn’t talk to them, they gave up and went home for Christmas. I park in the police garage and leave my groceries in the trunk of the car. They’ll stay cold enough there without freezing.

Inside, I find Valtteri slumped over his desk, his head in his hands. “What the hell are you doing here?” I ask.

He’s a wreck. His appearance is so bad that I think he hasn’t eaten or slept, hasn’t done very much but cry, since he found his son dead in his basement a couple days ago. He fires my question back at me, his tone is sharp. “What the hell are you doing here?”

In seven years of working together, I’ve never heard Valtteri use a swear word before, even a mild one. “You heard about Heli?” I ask.

“I heard. Antti told me.”

“I’m not criticizing you. I just think you burying your son one day and coming back to work the next is too much. You should be at home.”

“To do what, sit on the couch with my wife and cry?”

That’s exactly what I think. “You should stay home with Maria for a few days. She needs you.”

“I can’t help her and she can’t help me. You told me to come back to work and here I am.”

I pull up a chair, sit down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m trying to be your friend. Have you looked in the mirror today?”

He brushes my hand away. “You should take a look in the mirror yourself. You look like a bucket of shit without the bucket. You saw Heli, a woman you spent years with, burned to death last night, and you’re here at work. If I shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t either. We both stay or we both go home.”

His behavior is strange but his argument is logical. Maybe work is the therapy he needs.

“Did Antti go home to sleep?” I ask.

“Yeah, and Jussi went out on a call, a car wreck. It’s just us for now.”

“You talk to Seppo yet?”

“No.”

“I’ll see if he wants to confess. If he doesn’t, we’re going to arrest Peter Eklund.”

Valtteri nods and stares down at the top of his desk again.

I go downstairs and open the port in the door of Seppo’s cell. He stares through it at me. “I guess you think you’re pretty goddamned funny,” he says, “having me dragged out of my house in the middle of the night and arrested again.”

“Stick your hands out so I can cuff you.”

He’s learned the drill, lets me put handcuffs on him and steps away as I enter. He’s wearing his own clothes, looks like less of a buffoon than the last time we met in this cell. “Why did you do this to me?” he asks. “I thought we’d settled things between us.”

“Me too, but that was before you killed your wife.”

He tilts his head, appears uncomprehending. “What are you talking about?”

I’ve still never figured out if Seppo is a good actor, smarter than he seems, or if he really is the complete dolt I take him for. I try to bait him into a confession. “Stupid to kill your wife five days after you murder your girlfriend. Even more stupid to use the same vehicle. You might just as well have hung a sign around your neck saying, ‘Send me to prison and throw away the key, I’m guilty of double murder.’ ”

He shakes his head back and forth like a wet dog. “I don’t get it.”

“Heli is dead. The spare tire from your BMW was filled with gasoline, hung around her chest and arms and set ablaze. She looked like a little blackened doll, her face and hair scorched off, sitting on the ice in a puddle of filth.”

He blinks, looks around, blinks again, looks around some more, then a quavering noise comes out of his throat and he launches himself at me. I’m so surprised that he gets his manacled hands around my neck and knocks me to the floor. If I weren’t so much bigger and stronger than him, I’d be a dead man. I manage to roll him over and pin his shoulders to the concrete with my knees. He bucks and writhes, tries to shake me off him. He can’t and gives up, just lays there with tears streaming, saying “Fuck you, fuck you,” over and over again.

I wait awhile. “Think you can control yourself now?”

He doesn’t say anything. I let him up anyway.

He wipes snot on his sleeve. “How could you hate her enough to kill her?”

It takes me a second to get it. “Why would you think I killed her?”

“It’s been thirteen years. I hurt you, but why would you wait all this time, then take everything away from me? First Sufia, now Heli. You want to send me to jail for life for something I didn’t do. It’s just not fair.”

He believes, or wants me to think he believes, that I committed two homicides to get back at him. I’m dumbstruck. “You can’t be serious.”

He sits on the edge of the metal cot, buries his face in his hands, bursts into tears again. “Don’t do this to me, it’s not fucking fair.”

Could anybody be this good an actor? I sit beside him, give him a cigarette. “I don’t hate you, and I didn’t hurt Heli. And if you didn’t do it, I’ll prove you innocent.”

He sniffs, looks up. “You promise?”

It’s like dealing with a three-year-old. “Yeah, I promise.”

“Tell me what happened to her,” he says.

I don’t know if he’s conning me, but watching him listen while I re-create the crime in graphic detail will give me an opportunity to gauge the effect it has on him. I tell him everything. He cries the whole time I talk.

“I don’t know why you think I would kill Heli,” he says. “Or Sufia. I’m not a violent person. Until I jumped on you, I’d never even been in a fight, even when I was a kid. I wouldn’t know how to hurt someone if I wanted to, like you just saw.”

I think about interrogating him and accusing him of sex cabals and homosexual love affairs, of murdering Heli to get out from under blackmail and cover up his murder of Sufia. He’ll only start crying again. I decide to investigate further before I press him harder. “Why did you marry Heli after all this time?” I ask.