I remember the first time I went deer hunting. My oldest brother, Juha, and some of his friends took me. Hunting dogs cornered the deer, a six-point whitetail buck, and since it was my first time, they let me take the shot. The bullet went behind the shoulder and through the heart, a clean kill. Juha handed me a knife and told me what to do. I zipped the buck open from the sternum to the genitals and plunged my hands in to pull out the organs. The morning was bitter cold, and the heat inside the dead animal made me sigh with pleasure.
“Isn’t working with chilled bodies uncomfortable?” I’ve attended quite a few autopsies, but never thought of this before.
“You get used to it, like anything. Refrigerated flesh is easier to work with. Warm flesh is squishy, harder to cut.”
Esko goes back to work. He makes a Y-shaped incision from each shoulder to the bottom of her breastbone, then from the breastbone to her pubic bone. He pulls her skin away in flaps. The chest flap hangs over her face so that I can see her bones and muscles.
He removes her rib cage and detaches her esophagus and larynx by cutting arteries and ligaments. He cuts the attachments to the bladder, spinal cord and rectum, then flops out her internal organs in one go. He takes his bread knife and slices organs for tissue samples.
“How does her liver look?” I ask.
“Pure as the driven snow.”
“What about her lungs?”
“Pink as the day she was born.”
I try to see Sufia as she was. “I processed her cottage today, there were booze bottles and cigarette butts everywhere.”
“Unless she has new vices, they weren’t hers.”
“We get twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA. The evidence bags from her room are in the trunk of my car. When you get done, we’ll send them and your samples to Helsinki on the next plane. We might know whose they are in a day or two.”
Esko opens her stomach. The smell is less than pleasant. He dumps the contents into a container. Then he zips a scalpel around Sufia’s head, across her forehead and from ear to ear. He pulls her skin away in two flaps. “Blows to the head from the blunt instrument caused a fracture in the frontal cranium,” he says.
He cuts into her skull with an electric Stryker saw, then pulls off the top like he’s taking off her hat. He cuts her brain’s connection to the spinal cord and lifts it out, slices it with the bread knife for samples. When he’s done, Esko flops into a chair, exhausted. The diener starts sewing her back together.
“We’ve got this girl,” I say. “She appears to be a chain-smoker living in alcoholic squalor, but she doesn’t drink or smoke, so I think she has a boyfriend who does.”
“A fair guess.”
“She has sex she doesn’t enjoy. She’s sexually mutilated both in life and in death. There might be something to that, some kind of symbolism.” “Could be.”
I mull it over. “Paint me a picture of what you think happened.”
“That’s your department.”
“But I’m asking you.”
He takes a second. “I think he kidnapped her somewhere, used the knife to intimidate her and the noose to control her. Cut her to scare her into submission. Maybe raped her somewhere along the line.”
“The semen. You’re sure there’s no way to tell if it was his, if she was raped?”
He shrugs. “She’s so torn up, I can’t tell you more. I wish I could. I just don’t get it,” he says. “The way he butchered her suggests an agenda, but I can’t imagine what it was.”
“Let’s try to sort it out,” I say. “What do you think happened before he took her to the snowfield, and what did he do after he got there?”
“We know what he did there because of blood loss into the surrounding snow. He attacked her eyes, removed a section of skin from her breast, made a deep laceration in her lower trunk and inserted the bottle into her vagina.”
“She was awake at least part of the time,” I say, “because she thrashed around in the snow.”
Esko goes quiet for a minute, then covers his face with his hands. “I think I got it,” he says, lowers his hands and looks at me. “He abducts her using the knife and the noose. Maybe he rapes her, maybe forces oral sex on her, maybe he doesn’t do either. Anyway, he hits her in the head with the hammer and knocks her out. He drives her to the snowfield. When he drags her out into the snow, she’s still unconscious from the concussion, maybe he even thinks she’s dead, and he goes to work. He cuts off a flap of skin from her breast, gouges out her eyes with the bottle and inserts it into her vagina. Then he makes the deep incision in her abdomen, maybe intends on cutting her in half.”
I see where he’s going. “You can’t mean it.”
“Yeah, I mean it. He’s cutting her in half, and she wakes up, starts flailing around, screaming and making noise. It scared him, so he cut her throat to finish the job.”
“Jesus,” I say. “She woke up to find herself blind and being cut in half? That’s when she flailed around and made the snow angel?”
“I can’t be certain of the exact order of events, but it looks that way. Before he kills her on Aslak’s farm, he cuts off her clothes and strips her-that’s why she’s got the nicks on her body-and writes ‘nigger whore’ on her with the knife.”
“Then he drives her to the reindeer farm, drags her unconscious out of the car and kills her. Sounds premeditated,” I say.
“Yes it does. There weren’t any fragments of broken glass at the scene. He broke the bottle beforehand and brought it along.”
I try to take all this in. “There’s a lot of hate here,” I say.
Esko nods. “A lot of hate.”
The diener finishes sewing her up. Sufia’s next stop is the funeral home.
8
I get back to the station at nine P.M. Antti and Jussi are still at their desks. They’ve put in long days too. Antti is calling realtors, asking for occupant lists. Jussi stares at his computer screen with bleary eyes. He looks up at me. “I got something for you.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The tires on the vehicle used in the murder were Dunlop SP Winter Sport M3 DSST snow tires mounted on seventeen-inch rims.”
I clap him on the back. “That’s great.”
“There’s more. That particular make is a factory option on the BMW 3 Series sedan. Maybe Eero didn’t imagine it after all.”
There can’t be many new 3 Series sedans in a small town like this. The car will break the case. “Good work. The next thing is to get online with vehicle registration. Check out every 3 Series owner, both private and rental agency, in Kittila and Levi. Tomorrow, we’ll inspect each one and find out which of those BMWs have the same model Dunlops on them.”
“I’m already working on it,” Jussi says. “Oh yeah, and the footprints were size tens.”
The break with the tires is heartening, but this may still be a long haul and I don’t want them to burn out yet. “Listen guys,” I say, “I appreciate your hard work, but maybe it’s time to call it a day.”
Antti puts a hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. “In a little while.”
I go to my office. Before doing anything else, I figure I’d better pursue the possibility, unlikely though it may be, that Sufia’s murder is the work of a serial killer. I sit down at my computer and log on to the crime database, working from the nearest countries outward. Serial killers at large in Finland: none. In fact, we’ve only had one convicted serial killer in over a hundred years. Antti Olavi Taskinen killed three men by poisoning and was sentenced to life in prison in 2006.
Serial killers at large in Sweden: none. Again, only one convicted in recent history. Thomas Quick, a child molester, committed his first murder at age fourteen. Committed to closed psychiatric care in 1990, he confessed to thirty murders and by the year 2000 had been convicted of eight murders. At large in Norway: none. Denmark: none. Iceland: none. And also very few in the histories of those countries. Serial murders are a rarity in Nordic and Scandinavian cultures.