Takamäki could hear Aho tapping at his computer.
“Nope, the images haven’t been picked up. I mean, no one has even requested them.”
“So you have the footage?”
Aho backtracked. “I’m not sure about that. I’m just saying it hasn’t been turned over.”
Takamäki began to see why the guy hadn’t made it into the police academy and probably never would. Nevertheless, he kept his voice as steady and relaxed as possible.
“You think you might have a minute, buddy, to check and see if you guys have the footage there? It happened around 7 p.m. yesterday on the railroad side of the mall. Of course I’d be particularly interested in any shots of the car.”
“Of course. It’ll take me a second, though. I can call you back.”
Takamäki gave Aho his cell phone number, thanked him, and ended the call.
“What footage are you looking for?” Suhonen asked from the doorway. Takamäki hadn’t noticed him. Suhonen stepped in.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with this Repo case.”
“With what, then?” Suhonen continued. His curiosity was piqued, because it wasn’t every day that a lieutenant called and asked for surveillance camera footage himself. That was a job for subordinates.
“Jonas got hit by a car over at Sello yesterday. I’m just making sure they hold on to the shopping center’s surveillance cam images.”
“Hurt bad?”
“Nah,” Takamäki answered. “Not too bad. Broke his arm. But the driver fled the scene.”
Suhonen thought for a second. “Isn’t that an Espoo police case? Or I mean, at least not yours?”
“Yeah, it’s Espoo’s,” Takamäki admitted, before deciding to change to a less-awkward subject. “Why isn’t Repo back behind bars yet?”
Suhonen smiled at his lieutenant’s clumsy attempt to change the subject. “’Cause we haven’t found him.”
“You think you might want to do that?”
“Do you remember when you ordered me to attend that class given by the Security Police last summer?” Suhonen asked, sitting down in his favorite spot on the windowsill across from Takamäki’s desk.
“What does that have to do with this?”
“There was this one army intelligence officer lecturing about military intelligence, and he had a PowerPoint slide that he flashed up on the screen. It was this matrix that said that the most important task of military intelligence is to determine the other nation’s capability and intentions. That’s what helps you assess threats.”
“And?”
“Well, I’ve been trying to apply that matrix to Repo. Does this Repo have the capacity for wrong-doing? Okay, he killed his wife years ago, so theoretically the potential exists. Still, I’d estimate his capability as being pretty minimal.”
Takamäki tried interjecting, “I wouldn’t.”
“Let me finish. What about his intentions? That’s a trickier thing, because we don’t know why he fled. It’s still pretty hard to see it as a particularly planned escape. It seems to have been more of a momentary impulse. Repo doesn’t belong to a criminal gang, so we can’t conclude, for example, that he’s off on some vendetta he was ordered to handle. That being the case, I would also assess his intent to commit wrong-doing as pretty minimal. And since both factors are low, the threat assessment is also pretty low. The guy’s a sheep .”
Takamäki looked at Suhonen. He tried to keep his face serious, but a smile crept into his eyes.
“But guess what. You’re not some major from military intelligence, you’re a…”
Takamäki held a brief pause, and Suhonen stepped into the trap.
“I’m a what?”
“You’re a shepherd. So get that lost sheep back into the fold, pronto.”
Suhonen stood and saluted, raising a hand to his nonexistent cap.
“Yes, sir!”
At that moment, Joutsamo walked up to the door. “I’m headed up to Riihimäki now,” she said, before registering the scene. “All riiight. No need to explain.”
CHAPTER 7
TUESDAY, 11:20 A.M.
RIIHIMÄKI POLICE STATION
Joutsamo was sitting in a small, windowless interrogation room. The preliminary investigation report for the Repo case lay open on the brown tabletop. Someone had etched the word “Fuck” into the table. The stack of papers was surprisingly slight, not even half an inch’s worth. She’d been reading the interrogation transcripts for an hour and was almost done.
The case appeared relatively simple. Repo had been drinking at home with his wife. The next morning the police had found Repo sleeping in his bed and his wife sprawled out on the floor next to the kitchen table. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear. There was a ton of blood in the photos. That detail alone told Joutsamo that the woman had lived for some time after the deed, because the heart had kept pumping blood out of the carotid artery.
Joutsamo jotted down Cruelty = Murder? in her notebook. She could of course verify from the verdict whether it was cruelty that tilted the sentence from manslaughter to murder, but it wasn’t a priority.
In the first interrogations, Repo had vehemently denied the act. He claimed he had passed out in bed and didn’t remember anything about what had happened. A week later he had changed his tune, when his lawyer had been present at his questioning. According to the transcript, at that juncture Repo had said, “I consider it possible that I killed my wife, because evidently no other alternatives exist. I do not consider the act murder, but manslaughter. There was no way it was premeditated, and the act was neither exceptionally brutal nor cruel.”
It was plain as day from the statement that the lawyer had gotten Repo to confess to the deed. Joutsamo made a note of the lawyer’s name: Mauri Tiainen. Repo had not offered any motive.
The Repo family had lived in an apartment building. The neighbors had been interrogated, of course, and said that occasionally loud arguing could be heard coming from their apartment. Yet no one had heard anything of the sort on the night of the murder. No one had seen anyone else entering or exiting the apartment, either.
Repo’s fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. The photo docket contained a photo of a serrated eight-inch bread knife with a black handle. The blade was bloody. Powdered fingerprints could be made out in the close-ups. Looking from behind, they were on the left side of the handle. Joutsamo paused to work out how Repo had been holding the knife. Based on the fingerprints, he’d been gripping it the way you would normally hold a knife when you’re carving wood. Had the throat been slashed from the front or the back? There was no indication in the report. No DNA analysis had been conducted on the weapon, but the blood found on the blade matched the wife’s blood type.
The court-ordered evaluation of Repo’s mental health had also been appended to the papers. That gave Joutsamo pause, because a psychological evaluation was a confidential document, and the police didn’t need it to do their work. Yet someone had delivered it to the police, and of course Joutsamo read it.
Repo had not been diagnosed with any mental health problems. His father, Erik, had been a career military officer, and the family had moved frequently from base to base. The mother had worked in the base kitchens as a cook. Timo had told the doctor about his parents’ alcohol use, strict discipline, and corporal punishment, as well as continuous competition with his big brother, who was two years older.
“When discussing childhood memories, the subject often mentions soccer, which appears to have been of significance to him. This indicates that, as a child, he looked outside the home for approval he was lacking.
“The subject says that in the 1960s, his father was suspected of causing the death of a serviceman in a hazing incident. Even though Erik was found not guilty, the matter had caused substantial friction within the family. The subject describes his father as having increased his alcohol consumption and grown more withdrawn.”