Three men are passed out on sofas, all in their early twenties. One opens an eye and looks at me. I tell him to go back to sleep. Peter looks queasy. “Bad hangover?” I ask.
“Y-y-es.”
A half-empty crate of Koskenkorva, Finnish vodka, sits in the middle of the floor. I pull out a bottle. “Got a place where we can talk?”
We go to the kitchen. It’s better equipped than some gourmet restaurants, although clearly unused. Empty bottles cover every surface and remind me of the bottles littering Sufia’s cottage. I open the Koskenkorva and hand it to him. “Drink it. I need to talk to you.”
He pours vodka and orange juice, fifty-fifty, in a glass and downs it, pours another. I make coffee while he gets drunk enough to communicate. He lights a cigarette, a Marlboro Light.
He finishes the second drink, makes a third. I pour myself coffee. We sit at an oak kitchen table. It has traces of white powder on it. I doubt Peter is much of a baker. It’s probably not flour.
“Feeling better?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about you and Sufia Elmi.”
“I saw the paper yesterday.”
“Then you should have called me.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“The autopsy turned up your semen in her mouth.”
I expect this to shock and frighten him. He shrugs. “She blew me that morning.”
“You’re pretty casual about it.”
“It’s no big deal. I met Sufia about a week ago, in Hullu Poro. I fucked her that night.”
“Where?”
He laughs. “Everywhere. In the women’s bathroom of the bar, in my car, in her cottage.”
“You don’t seem too sad that she’s dead.”
“Well, it’s not like I really knew her. I like to drink and fuck. Sufia doesn’t drink, but she likes-liked-to fuck. After the second time, she asked me if she could borrow some money. I knew what was up. Every time after that, I gave her one or two hundred. We always called them loans. I guess I met her to fuck like five times, stayed over at her place two or three times. It’s hard to remember.”
“You’re stating that you paid her for sex.”
He looks pleased with himself. “Inspector, she was worth every penny. She had this weird pussy, and Jesus, she loved to give head.”
“I take it you’re referring to her missing labia minora.”
“Her what?”
“Her vaginal lips. They’d been removed.”
“No shit?” He laughs again. “Whatever.”
Peter has to be the most worthless piece of garbage I’ve ever met. “Where were you at two P.M. on the day of her murder?”
He gestures toward the front room. “My buddies came in from Helsinki and their plane arrived about noon. I picked them up at the airport and we’ve been hanging out ever since. We were in Hullu Poro all afternoon.”
“How did you get to the bar?”
“In my car.”
“Do you know Seppo Niemi?”
“A little. I’ve met him in nightclubs in Helsinki and talked to him in Hullu Poro a couple times. Sufia was with Seppo when I met her. He got too drunk and left. Sufia told me she’d been seeing him. It didn’t bother me any, he’s a fucking dumbass.”
“Her room had a lot of empty liquor bottles in it. Were they all yours?”
He puts on a grin like a five-year-old. “Most of them anyway.”
“I have to take your car.”
The alcohol makes him overanimated. He stands up and raises his voice. “Hey, come on, I told you what you want to know!”
“Shut up and sit down.”
He does it.
“Since you had sex with Sufia in it, the car is a potential crime scene. I’ll give it back in a day or two.”
He gives me the keys. “It’s not fucking fair.”
“I might be saving your goddamned life by keeping you from driving, you drunk fucking bastard. Go back to sleep, I’m done with you.”
In the front room, I shake his friends awake. They won’t move, so I yell at them. They sit up and look at me like I’m insane. I point at one of them. “What time did your plane get in on Tuesday?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a pissed-off cop who’s going to arrest all of you for the cocaine dust on the kitchen table if you don’t answer my goddamned question.”
The kid grimaces. Peter registers fear. I would take them all in, but the chief said no arrest without probable cause for murder. I figure I should trust his judgment on this.
“Yeah dumbfuck,” I say. “I saw it. You’re lucky I’ve got other things to do right now.”
“We got in at eleven fifty-eight,” the kid says.
“How did you get here from the airport?”
“Peter picked us up.”
“Were you with him all afternoon?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“In Hullu Poro.”
I check all their IDs and write down their contact information.
Their boots are in the foyer. “Which of these are yours?” I ask Peter.
He points.
I pick them up. They’re size tens, the same as the prints at the crime scene and the same size Seppo wears. He and Seppo also both smoke Marlboro Lights. “I’m taking the boots.”
He starts to say something, thinks better of it.
I open the front door. “By the way, you’re a registered sex offender. Who did you rape?”
“Nobody. She wanted it.”
“How old was she?”
He doesn’t even flinch. “Fifteen.”
I stare at him for a minute.
“I did my community service,” he says.
16
Peter is a waste of humanity, breathing air somebody else could be breathing. He could have killed Sufia. If so, his friends were probably accomplices. Peter and one of the others could have forced her to perform oral sex, accounting for the two sets of sperm in her mouth. One of them, not inclined toward rape, could have been upset by the spectacle and shed the tears that provided the third set of DNA. I wouldn’t put it past them, but I don’t consider it likely either.
Peter was already getting what he wanted from Sufia, but maybe Sufia wanted more from Seppo than he was willing to give her. Fear that she might destroy his relationship with Heli provides him with one motive. Sufia’s affair with Peter gives him another. Seppo remains the most likely suspect.
Valtteri calls. Seppo wants to talk to me. I go to the police station. News vans from Finland’s three major television channels are parked in front of it. Reporters and cameramen pile out into the cold, surround me, shine lights in my eyes and start filming. Altogether, there must be twenty of them, and print journalists too. I see Jaakko from Alibi in the crowd. They shout questions. I decline to comment and push my way through them.
Valtteri is in the doorway. “They wanted to wait inside,” he says, “but I wouldn’t let them.”
“Don’t. Except for Jaakko Pahkala. After I talk to Seppo, go get him and bring him to my office.”
The three major Helsinki newspapers, all morning editions, are scattered around the common room. Sufia is on the front page of each. I take a few minutes to read them. Two of them specialize in yellow journalism. Thanks to Jaakko, they pick up on the Black Dahlia theme and compare Sufia’s murder to that of Elizabeth Short, the Hollywood starlet murdered in 1947, whose gruesome killing still remains a source of fascination for murder buffs today.
Only Helsingin Sanomat, a more sober publication, takes a more thoughtful line and focuses on the fact that Sufia is the first prominent black woman to have been murdered in Finland. Even their treatment is confusing. It leaves me unsure if, in some twisted way, they consider her murder an advancement of black women in our society. I check my messages.
Nine Finnish newspapers request interviews, plus STT-the Finnish News Service-and Reuters. At some point, I’m going to have to talk to the press. The story is going international, and if I don’t, they’ll invent something to keep steam behind it. I had hoped that by the time we got to this point, I could tell them the case was solved.
I go down to the lockup to talk to Seppo. I open the port in his door. “I hear you have something to tell me.”