“I don’t want a stranger in my home. You said Mirjami is a registered nurse.”
“If you recall, she’s in love with you. I doubt she’ll say no.”
I also recall she turns me on so much, I almost came in my pants when I met her. But sex is very low on my list of wants at the moment. “She doesn’t pay much attention to me. I think she got over it. Would you call her for me? Tell her I’ll pay her anything she wants.”
“Yeah. And I’ll stop by again in a while and take you out to smoke.”
That’s all I have to look forward to at the moment. “See you later.”
As he walks out, two SUPO detectives walk in to take my statement. I give it to them. They ask no interrogation-type questions, just tape-record it. Then they congratulate me on breaking the Saukko case, shake my hand, and wish me godspeed in my recovery. I find myself nodding off.
I wake up and Sweetness is sitting in a chair beside the bed. “Here,” he says, and hands me a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy. I don’t know if it’s a joke or not.
“It was supposed to make you laugh,” he says.
I put on the fake smile. “Sorry, everything hurts. Watch what you say. I’m sure the room is bugged. Everything OK with you?”
“Everything went as planned, and yeah, things are good. I’m dating Jenna now.”
“That’s great, you must be a happy man.”
“I had to bargain to get her. No more carrying the kossu flask.”
“That’s even better. Wise girl. The shit was going to kill you.”
He shrugs. “Something kills everybody. Just ask my brother.”
Milo wanders in. “Hey! The gang’s all here.”
“How are you guys?” Sweetness asks.
Milo says, “Fucked-up and permanently damaged, but alive. How is everything from your end?” meaning the money.
Sweetness gets the drift. “Under control.”
“Mirjami took a leave of absence to care for you,” Milo says to me. “They didn’t like it until she told them she was going to take care of the great fallen hero. She’ll be at your house as soon as you give her the word.”
“Then we can leave. Sweetness, would you do me a favor and take us all home in the SUV?”
“Get your stuff together. It’s parked outside.”
I’m a shot cop, get VIP treatment. I ask a nurse if they can dress my wife, get my child, and meet us in the lobby. She says give her half an hour.
We get outside, have a moment without listening devices monitoring us, and in turn walk, gimp on crutches, and are pushed in a wheelchair to the SUV. “I have a plan,” I say. “We’ll wrap these murders up in a couple days, and make some people unhappy along the way.”
40
The guys help us get our stuff into the apartment. Mirjami shows up, all business. She’s wearing jeans, no makeup and a plain gray sweatshirt. Kate walks to the couch and sits down. She shows no signs of cognition, but this, evidently, is where she wants to be. She holds out her arms. I put Anu in them. Kate’s eyes don’t so much as waver, but she seems satisfied. I ask Sweetness to go with Milo and get the anti-surveillance gear. They go through the house. Every room is bugged. They de-bug the house and leave to let us get settled in.
I call my former psychoanalyst, Torsten Holmqvist, explain about Kate and her condition. I tell him I have an opinion from the hospital, but I’d like a second opinion and follow-up care, and I’d like all this done in my home. I can almost hear him scoff, and then I tell him cost is no object. He’s the best money can buy and that’s what I want for my wife. He agrees.
Mirjami tells me she would like to examine my wounds and takes me to the bedroom. She unwraps them, spends a long time examining them, tut-tuts concern, and applies new dressings.
Torsten arrives. I don’t tell him the story, just that Kate’s been through a terribly traumatic experience. He diagnoses her with acute stress disorder, and cites the same symptoms as the first doctor. So the original diagnosis was correct. She responds only to Anu, whom she will hold and allow to nurse. He deems this a good sign.
The condition will probably last from two days to four weeks. He prescribes eighty milligrams of the tranquilizer Diazepam per day, spread out over four doses, for a few days, during which she’ll sleep most of the time, and then, depending on how things go, cut it back to sixty milligrams. He’ll check on her in a few days and tells me to let him know if anything requires his attention.
Within the day, I expect everyone from Heinrich Himmler/Saukko to Jyri Ivalo are going to call or pound on my door and tell me to give them that ten million euros. Even if it were true, they wouldn’t accept that I don’t have it. They want it too badly to allow themselves to believe it’s lost.
I think about calling Saukko myself. He would want to know about his son. Then I think, Fuck him, he’s a pig. And he never even bothered to call me to ask how his son died.
I decide I want to proceed with the investigation now, whether I can directly participate or not. I call Sweetness and ask him to go to Turku, to B amp;E the houses and business of the two former Legionnaires and find their heroin and the rifles used in the murders. I call Milo and tell him what we’re up to, and he wants to go too, shattered hand be damned. Unless they’ve been cleaned, the rifles used in the murders should be the only ones with gunpowder residue. They get to Turku and find both men in Marcel’s home, both dead.
Sweetness calls me over our encrypted phones. They ODed. One had a needle in his arm, the other a needle in his dick. As Moreau said, they died badly. Vomit everywhere. Face and bodies twisted from convulsions. Strychnine. They weren’t users. They bore other needle track marks, though, to give the impression that they were users, undoubtedly created by empty syringes, possibly after they were dead. Moreau murdered his old friends in one of the most painful ways imaginable. I say to leave them there for now to decomp. Mostly so I can rest for a couple of days before the denouement.
I tell Sweetness to find the rifles used in the race murders and leave them somewhere not too hard to find. To locate the.308 Winchester used to murder Kaarina Saukko, go to Malinen’s summer cottage, use print transparencies from his possessions and transfer his fingerprints to the rifle, then plant it somewhere semi-hidden in the cottage, along with a quantity of heroin. He orchestrated murder, he can pay for it. Morally, I can see no difference if he pays for the murder of Lisbet Soderlund, which he caused, or that of Kaarina Saukko, for which the weapon was used. I ask Milo if he’s capable of cleaning out Jyri’s bank account. He says consider it done. I tell him to wait until I give the word.
Mirjami does a good job. She’s attentive and, I discover, quite intelligent as well. Kate remains in a state resembling catatonia. Mirjami’s attention doesn’t waver from her, Anu and their needs. She also changes the bandages and cleans the wounds on my reconstructed knee, now deconstructed, and the wounds in my mouth and face. She sleeps in the spare bed in Anu’s room.
That first night at home, I’m doped up and exhausted. I fall into a deep sleep. I have a sex dream about Kate. It’s vivid, intense. It wakes me, but it’s not a dream. Mirjami has my dick in her mouth. The beautiful girl. The rush of pleasure amidst pain. The dope. I close my eyes and sigh. Then I hear Kate stirring in her sleep in the living room. It’s hard to remember what I would have done when I felt emotion, but I dig deep and try.
I twist Mirjami’s hair in my hand and pull her away from me. “No. Please.” My strength is sapped. I can muster only those two words.
She says nothing, makes her way up the bed. Her body is near mine, but not pressed against me. She puts an arm around me. It means nothing to me. I let it rest there and drift off to sleep again. When I wake, she’s gone from the bed, spoon-feeding Kate. I ask myself if it really happened. We don’t speak of it.