The market was closed, and Salmela was eyeing the grim view. Everything was gray. Couldn’t they put a fountain in here or something? Salmela clearly remembered the days twenty years ago when he and his buddies used to roll drunks in the area.
Salmela leaned forward far enough to check the giant Pepsi-logo clock on the building to the left: 3:02 p.m. The asshole was late, even though Salmela had sworn him to be on time.
The criminal eyed the cars in the vicinity, looking for any indications of a police presence. An overly curious, circling gaze, a man sitting alone in a parked car, or a supposedly random loiterer were danger signals.
An old woman dressed in a black fake fur was walking her little Dachshund at the edge of the square. Salmela wondered whether she could be a police officer. Did the female undercover officers take theater classes or something to teach them how to act? He’d have to ask Suhonen about it someday in a nice roundabout way.
Goddammit, Salmela laughed to himself. Had he really gotten that paranoid? Oh well, better paranoid than in prison.
The Pepsi clock now showed 3:04 p.m. Salmela would wait two more minutes, and then he was out of there. At that instant there was a knock on the passenger window, and Salmela immediately regretted having stuck around . He could tell from the man’s eyes that he was on something stronger than booze. The door was locked, and Salmela didn’t feel like letting the emaciated junkie into his car. He gestured for him to come around to the other side.
Juha Saarnikangas looked like he was in pretty bad shape as he circled around the front of the van. His brown hair reached down to his shoulders and probably hadn’t been washed in a week or more. His green army jacket looked foul. He also had a nasty-looking scar on his cheek that Salmela hadn’t seen before.
Salmela rolled down the window. “What’s up?”
Saarnikangas’s heroin-decayed teeth turned his smile into a grimace. “Hey, man. Good to see you.”
“No, it’s not. What’s so urgent?”
“I’ve got some really good stuff for you,” Saarnikangas said, trying to maintain the smile.
“Sorry,” Salmela said tersely. “I’m not buying anything. Shop’s closed.”
Saarnikangas’s expression grew serious. “Hey, hey, come on, man! You don’t even know what I’m selling.”
Salmela pulled a cigarette from his pack and listened, mostly out of pity. He used to buy all kinds of stolen goods from Saarnikangas, but not anymore.
The junkie continued his spieclass="underline" “I’ve got a Compaq 6220 right out of the box. Retails at more than a grand! I’ll give it to you for a hundred.”
Salmela blew smoke into Saarnikangas’s face.
“All right, fifty. Please.”
“I’m not buying.”
“Come on, thirty… Fuck, man, I need some dough.”
Salmela’s interest was actually piqued by the time they got down to thirty, because that was almost nothing for a laptop. Juha must be really desperate.
“Look, asshole, you said you had something important to tell me. Not that you wanted to unload some junk.”
Salmela started up the Toyota.
“Come on, man, at least give me a smoke,” Saarnikangas begged.
Without saying a word, Salmela rolled up the window and drove off. He heard a thunk as Saarnikangas kicked the side of the van, and he could see the junkie giving him the finger in the rear-view mirror. If there hadn’t been any bystanders nearby, he would have stopped the van, gotten out, and beat Saarnikangas’s ass. Instead, he just flicked on his blinker and turned south out of the parking lot. The ugly complex belonging to the Federation of Trade Unions rose up at the end of the street.
Salmela was annoyed that he had wasted his time on Saarnikangas. The question crossed his mind of whether his son, who had been shot a year ago, would have been in the same condition if he had lived. The prognosis had been similar.
* * *
There were no windows in the conference room. Takamäki, Suhonen, and Kulta had mugs of coffee; Joutsamo had tea. Kohonen wasn’t there, she was busy writing up a report for an old case. The team had reviewed the original Repo file and concluded that the exercise hadn’t been very productive. They had invested a decent amount of effort in the process but had achieved nothing. Tracking an escaped prisoner was clear cut-you either succeeded or failed, and this time the results were pretty evident.
“The guy’ll get caught in some raid sooner or later,” Suhonen said. “It’d be nice to get a real case, so we could do some real work.”
“All right, now,” Takamäki said. He wasn’t sure how serious Suhonen was, but he could sense a level of frustration. The danger was that it would spread to the others.
“Looks like all we have is this Saarnikangas,” Kulta said. “It’s the only name in this case. I talked again with the guard who allowed Repo to escape, but he didn’t have anything new to give me.”
“Has anyone been back to the father’s house?”
Takamäki asked. “He’s got to be sleeping somewhere… If he doesn’t have any friends, then let’s check the old places one more time.”
“We can go by there again,” Joutsamo said. “But this looks like it’s headed for passive investigation pretty fast. No point dedicating much more effort to it.”
Takamäki tried to drum up enthusiasm. “We’re not giving up just yet. There’s one trick we haven’t tried yet.”
“Give it to the papers?” Joutsamo guessed.
Takamäki nodded and read from a handwritten draft. “The headline reads ‘Helsinki Police Seek Tips on Escaped Murderer.’”
Kulta smiled. “Not likely to make it to press in that format.”
“It’s not supposed to,” the lieutenant retorted. “The rest goes more or less like this, ‘On Monday morning, Timo Repo, serving life for murder, escaped from his father’s funeral…’”
Joutsamo interrupted, “Do we have to say that he fled from the funeral?”
“Let me respond with another question,” Takamäki said. “Why should we keep it a secret? It’s not significant in terms of our investigation, and we have to give them some details. If we send out a press release with no details, the papers will ignore it, which means we won’t get any response.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, this goes on to say that Repo left the Restaurant Perho and headed toward downtown Helsinki. Since then, police have not received reports of any sightings, and are now asking the public for help. Then there’s a description of him.”
“Aren’t you going to send a photo?” Joutsamo asked.
“Not yet,” Takamäki said.
“Why not?”
“It might get us another round in the media a couple days from now if this one doesn’t work. I did put here at the end that Repo was convicted of murdering his wife in Riihimäki in 1999. The police do not consider Repo particularly dangerous.”
“Why does it say ‘particularly dangerous?’” Kulta asked.
“Should we put ‘completely harmless?’” Takamäki retorted.
“Somewhat dangerous, potentially dangerous, a smidgen dangerous?” Kulta mused.
Takamäki grunted. “I can drop the ‘particularly’ if we all agree that the guy isn’t dangerous.”
“Yeah,” said Suhonen. “The thing that still gets me about this case is, why did he check out? He’s already got eight years behind him. There’s gotta be some reason, and that’s still the big mystery here.”
“The reporters will probably ask that, too,” Kulta reflected. “And don’t tell them ‘No comment,’ either.”
Takamäki chuckled. “I won’t. I’m perfectly capable of saying, ‘We don’t know.’”
“And then their next question will be, how do you know he’s not dangerous if you don’t know the motive for his escape?” Joutsamo added.
“Well, that’s why I have ‘particularly dangerous.’”