“What’s your take on it?” she had asked. Somehow the question cut him to the core, and Lind tried to figure out why.
“What’s your take on it?”
To Lind it seemed like a neutral question that addressed the suspect’s angle on the case.
“Shit,” she said when it dawned on her. The question was neutral from the interrogator’s point of view, but not the suspect’s. The police had probably pressured Korpivaara, as was their custom, and now the attorney, who was supposed to be the guardian angel, showed up with the same attitude.
Lind cursed again. It made sense that Korpivaara, who was suffering from memory problems, would’ve believed Joutsamo’s account. He perceived that his attorney was only asking for his version of it, as if she assumed the suspect was lying, just like the police did.
Korpivaara’s confession wasn’t the result of the police pressuring him; she was the one to blame. This was the second time she was about to ruin Jorma Korpivaara’s life. Lind thought it was possible that Korpivaara was the killer, but she wanted to see the evidence, not just hear his confession. As his defense attorney, she needed to do her job perfectly.
* * *
Takamäki was reading a tabloid he had grabbed at the station. He sat at the dining room table with a towel around his waist. His dark hair was wet from the shower, and a few drops ran down his back. As he had promised Joutsamo, he’d gone for a five-mile run before he hopped in the sauna.
The paper had a story about how petty thieves were becoming bolder and more insolent since unpaid fines could no longer be converted into jail time. When a pickpocket was caught red-handed and given a fine, they could tear up the ticket and laugh about it to boot.
In Takamäki’s opinion, the change in the policy wasn’t due to the naïveté of the lawmakers, but rather to the former attorney general’s view that the poor shouldn’t be punished for being poor. Sending someone to jail for unpaid fines wasn’t punishing them for being poor, but for the original crime, like theft, Takamäki thought. But now, the deterrent to petty crime had been removed.
Another article in the paper was about a homicide by an outpatient in a Kuopio mental health hospital. A thirty-four-year-old man had stabbed his fifty-seven-year-old mother. Takamäki lamented that this was yet another example of how sending the mental health patient home with a bottle of pills didn’t work. He thought patients should stay in regular contact with their doctors, and someone-other than the police-should ensure that they stay clean. He wondered if the Salvation Army or perhaps the Red Cross could do something for local communities besides just chasing donations.
These were both examples of how accountants were increasingly at the helm. It was cost effective, at least on paper, to reduce the number of people incarcerated for unpaid fines or number of patients in mental health hospitals. The daily cost of an inmate had become astronomical at two hundred euros.
In reality, the savings was questionable as eighty percent of the expenses were fixed, including building operating costs and staff salaries. Incarcerating a hundred fewer prisoners didn’t actually save all that much in cash-even if on paper it was twenty thousand euros per day.
The continual attempts to save costs meant that more prisoners-and more hardened criminals-were getting transferred to low-security prisons, where it was easy for them to pursue their criminal ventures before they were even released.
In actuality, a first-time offender ended up serving only five years of a ten-year sentence, and of that the last third was usually in a minimum-security facility. The actual time inside a proper prison ended up being three and a half years rather than ten. Prison math was tough-for the victim.
And it became even tougher if the criminal, say, killed again after being clean for three years. The record was wiped clean after three years, and the killer was once again treated as a first-time offender. The rights of crime victims, and the safety of citizens at large, always took second place to offenders’ rights.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2011
CHAPTER 12
FRIDAY, 11:00 A.M.
DAGMAR STREET, HELSINKI
The elderly lady never stopped talking for even a second while Lind helped her with her fur coat. Mrs. Harju had come to her ten o’clock appointment, as agreed, to draw up her will. This was her third appointment, even though Lind could usually write up a simple will while the client waited.
Lind’s neat and conservative office was totally different from her modern, “organized chaos” apartment. The furniture looked majestic. While picking the set, she had wondered if she was trying to compensate for being female. She decided the ambience of the office was more important than her personal taste. Being an attorney required being trusted, and the furniture needed to be dignified.
She was renting the Dagmar Street office space. Having two rooms gave her the option of one day hiring someone else to work there, too. But she wasn’t ready for that yet.
The elderly lady was still hesitating about something, so Lind had set up another appointment for her. Mrs. Harju had assured her it had nothing to do with the fact that Lind was female. Her previous attorney had been a skinny man who, according to Mrs. Harju, was only after her money. Ms. Lind, however, seemed very trustworthy.
Lind thought the will was complete, but the lady wanted to think about it some more. Lind got her drift: Mrs. Harju just wanted someone to talk to. This time the conversation was about her grandson’s academic success and his university alternatives. Lind charged the woman two hundred euros for the hour, which the elderly lady gladly paid.
“Till next week, then,” the woman said from the door.
“Good-bye,” Lind replied, closing the door.
She had slept poorly, woken up early, and come to the office. Her apartment on Museo Street was only a few blocks away. She had picked up a pastry on the way and made some coffee in the office. The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper printed only a short piece about the homicide, and both afternoon papers gave the seemingly routine incident only two columns each.
The media saw nothing special about the case, since the perpetrator had been taken into custody. They hadn’t been told about the brutality of the killing. The police bulletin’s mention that the killer had confessed irritated Lind to no end. A direct statement of the man’s guilt or innocence wasn’t the police department’s job. They were merely to investigate; the prosecutor would prosecute, and the court would determine whether the suspect was guilty.
Lind kept thinking about the case. She couldn’t put her finger on what bothered her about it, but something was off. In the back of her mind she didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that Korpivaara was a killer. But it had been twenty years since their last meeting, and people changed-especially those who got into drugs, and Korpivaara definitely had.
Before Mrs. Harju’s appointment, Lind had searched the web for information about Korpivaara and the victim. She found nothing on either one-no Facebook pages, blogs, or anything else. She was perplexed.
Late the night before, she had sat on her sofa making a list of questions she wanted answered. The first was, “Is it possible for the perpetrator of a crime to lose his or her memory?”
The police seemed to think that memory loss meant the suspect was either unwilling or too scared to confess. But Lind found an article in a medical journal about dissociation, which discussed how dissociation, psycho-dynamically, is an automatic adaptive reaction to trauma that threatens one’s psychic balance, such as feeling shame or being horrified. As a result of the reaction, memory loss, disorientation, and hallucinations tend to cause a feeling of insecurity. Even though the original source of pain is gone from the conscious mind, the realization of not remembering one’s identity or what has happened is confusing.