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  Snow angels

  ( Inspector Kari Vaara - 1 )

  James Thompson

  Snow angels

  James Thompson

  1

  I’m in Hullu Poro, The Crazy Reindeer, the biggest bar and restaurant in this part of the Arctic Circle. It was remodeled not long ago, but pine boards line the walls and ceiling, like an old Finnish farmhouse. Nouveau rustic decor.

  Even though it’s early afternoon, a couple hundred people are here. The bar is crowded and noisy. It’s minus forty degrees Celsius outside, too cold to ski. The rush of wind from racing downhill would cause instant frostbite on even the smallest patch of exposed skin. The lifts are closed, so people are drinking instead.

  My wife, Kate, is the general manager of Levi Center, a complex of restaurants, bars, a two-hundred-room hotel and an entertainment arena that holds almost a thousand people. Hullu Poro is only part of a massive operation in the biggest ski resort in Finland, and Kate runs it all. I’m proud of her.

  Kate is behind the bar, talking to Tuuli, the shift manager. I’m eavesdropping on their conversation because I’m a cop, and Kate may want to have Tuuli arrested.

  “I think you played with the inventory on the computer,” Kate says. “You transferred liquor to other sales points, made it look like it disappeared from other bars, but you brought the bottles here, sold them out of this bar and pocketed the money.”

  Tuuli smiles and replies in Finnish. In a calm voice, she unleashes an eloquent stream of vicious invective. Kate has no idea of the ways in which Tuuli has insulted her.

  Kate is five foot ten and slim. She’s wearing jeans and a cashmere sweater. Her long cinnamon hair is swept up in a chignon. Men around the bar sneak glances at her.

  “Please speak English so I can understand you,” Kate says. “If you can’t explain where the liquor went, you’re fired. I’m considering pressing charges against you.”

  Tuuli’s face is unreadable. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Kate is an expert in ski resort management. The owners of Levi Center wanted to expand the resort, so they brought her here to Finland from Aspen a year and a half ago to oversee the changes.

  “I checked the dates and times on the computer system,” Kate says. “The inventory transfers are consistent with times you were on duty. No one else could have done it. Six hundred euros worth of liquor went missing last month. You’ve been working here for three months. Want me to check the other two months?”

  Tuuli mulls it over. “If you give me a week’s pay and a letter of recommendation,” she says, “I’ll resign without protesting to the union.”

  Kate folds her arms. “No severance pay, no letter. If you file a protest, I’ll prosecute.”

  Tuuli fingers a bottle of Johnny Walker on the shelf. The dull shine of her eyes tells me some of the stolen booze has been going down her throat. I know drunks. She’s considering bludgeoning Kate with the bottle. She glances at me and I shake my head. Tuuli takes her hand off the bottle and tries the conciliatory approach. “Let’s sit down and talk about this.”

  Kate signals to the bouncer at the front door and he comes over. “This conversation is over,” she says. “Take Tuuli to get her things, then escort her out. She’s banned from the bar.”

  “You’re a cunt,” Tuuli says.

  Kate smiles. “And you’re unemployed. You’re also banned from every bar in Levi owned by this firm.”

  That’s most of them. In effect, Tuuli is ostracized. She clenches her teeth and fists. “Vitun huora.” Fucking whore.

  Kate looks at the bouncer. “Get her out of here.”

  He puts a hand on Tuuli’s shoulder and guides her away.

  When Kate turns to me, she looks ice-calm. “I have to do a couple things in the office, I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  I lean on the bar while I wait for her. A tourist asks Jaska, the bartender, “Just how far north are we?”

  Jaska puts on the condescending face he reserves for foreigners. “You Australians aren’t too good with… ” he can’t find the word and reverts to Finnish. “ Maantiede. Drive that way for one day and you reach the Barents Sea, the end of the world.” He’s pointing west.

  “Some Finns aren’t too good with geography either,” I say. “That way is toward Sweden.” I turn ninety degrees. “The North Pole is that way.” I point east. “Russia is over there. We’re a hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle.”

  “Inspector Vaara and I went to high school together,” Jaska says. “He got better grades than me.”

  “Thanks for the lesson,” the Aussie says. “It’s hard to get oriented when it’s dark all the time. You’re a policeman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have one on me officer. What are you drinking?”

  “Lapin Kulta.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Beer. We had a gold rush in the Arctic a little over a hundred years ago, and the brand name means ‘The Gold of Lapland.’ ”

  Jaska makes drinks for the tourists and chats about skiing conditions. It’s supposed to warm up to minus fifteen tomorrow, still bitter cold, but safe enough so that with proper clothing skiers can hit the slopes again.

  It’s good for me to make my presence felt here, to discourage locals whose idea of a good time is to get drunk and beat up or otherwise harass tourists. I look to the other side of the room. The Virtanen brothers are here, prime candidates for such behavior. By the end of the night, like as not, they’ll pull knives on each other. One of these days one will kill the other, and the survivor will die of loneliness.

  Jaska hands me my beer. “Jotain muuta?” Anything else?

  “A ginger ale for Kate.”

  While Jaska gets it for her, I go over to the Virtanen brothers’ table. “Kimmo, Esa, how’s it going?”

  The brothers look sheepish. My presence makes them nervous. “Fine Kari,” Esa says. “How’s your gorgeous American wife?”

  My marriage to a foreigner causes suspicion and consternation among the less progressive thinkers of our small community, but also envy, because of Kate’s success and good looks.

  “She’s good. How are your mom and dad?”

  “Mom can’t speak since the stroke, and-you know how he is-Dad is Dad,” Esa says, and Kimmo nods drunken agreement.

  Esa and Kimmo and I grew up in the same neighborhood. Esa means their father has been drunk for weeks. Every winter he stays tanked on cheap Russian medical alcohol through kaamos, the dark time, until spring, and even then his sobriety is measured only in relation to his alcohol-induced winter coma. I wonder if their mother can’t speak, or if she’s so worn out that she has nothing left to say. “Give them my best. You two stay out of trouble tonight.”

  Kate comes out from the back room. I get our drinks and we go to a table in the nonsmoking section.

  I set her ginger ale on the table in front of her.

  “Kiitos. ” Thank you. She can’t speak Finnish yet, but she tries to use the few words and phrases she knows. “I could use a beer right now,” she says, “but I guess I’m going to have to wait seven months for my next one.”

  Kate is pregnant with our first child. She told me two weeks ago while we celebrated our birthdays. We were born two days shy of eleven years apart, on opposite sides of the world.

  Kate has put away her tough facade. She’s trembling. “Tuuli,” she says, “is not a pleasant person.”

  “She’s a thief. Why didn’t you have me arrest her?”

  “Recovering the small amount she stole doesn’t balance against the bad press associated with theft by an employee. Word will get around. That’s why I fired her in front of Jaska. If anyone else is stealing, they’ll stop.”

  “You ha
ve the day off tomorrow?” I ask. “You could use one.”

  Kate manages a coquettish smile. “I’m going skiing.”

  I don’t want her to, but can’t think of a reasonable objection. “Do you think you should?”

  She takes my hand. Before I met Kate, I didn’t like public displays of affection, but now I can’t remember why. “I’m pregnant,” she says, “not crippled.”

  In fact, we’re both slightly crippled. Me from a gun shot, Kate from a skiing accident that shattered her hip. We both limp. “Okay, I’ll go ice fishing.”

  She closes her eyes for a second, stops smiling and rubs her temples.

  “You feeling all right?” I ask.

  She sighs. “When I first came to Finland to interview for my job, it was summer. The sun was up twenty-four hours a day. Everyone here seemed so happy. I met you. They offered me a lot of money to run Levi, a great career opportunity. The Arctic Circle seemed exotic, an exciting place to live.”

  She looks down at the table. Kate isn’t given to complaining. I want to know what’s on her mind, so I prod her. “What changed?”

  “This winter, I feel like the cold and dark will never end. I get it now that people weren’t happy, just drunk. It makes me depressed. It’s terrible. Being pregnant in Finland seems scary, makes me homesick for the States. I don’t know why.”

  It’s two thirty P.M. on December sixteenth. We won’t see daylight again until Christmas day, and then only a glimmer. She’s right. That’s the way things are here in winter. A bunch of depressed hard drinkers freezing in an endless night. Kaamos is tough on everyone. I can see how being pregnant here would make her feel vulnerable and frightened.

  My cell phone rings. “Vaara.”

  “It’s Valtteri. Where are you?”

  “In Hullu Poro with Kate. What’s up?”

  He doesn’t speak.

  “Valtteri?”

  “There’s been a murder, and I’m looking at the body.”

  “Tell me who and where.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s Sufia Elmi, that black movie star. It’s bad. She’s in a field on Aslak’s place, about thirty yards off the road.”

  “Anybody there with you?”

  “Antti and Jussi. They were the responding officers.”

  “Anything that requires immediate attention, like a suspect?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then seal off the crime scene and wait for me.” I hang up.

  “Problem?” Kate asks.

  “You could say that. Somebody’s been murdered in a snowfield on Aslak Haltta’s reindeer farm.”

  “You mean where we met?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looks at me and I read pain in her eyes. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she says.

  I didn’t realize how much she needs me right now, and I don’t want to leave her. “Me too. Can we talk about this later?”

  She nods but looks sad as I kiss her good-bye.

  2

  I step outside into the dark, and the cold makes my face burn. I take a deep breath to clear my mind, feel the hair in my nostrils freeze, check my watch. It’s two fifty-two P.M. I call Esko Laine, the provincial medical examiner, tell him there’s been a murder and to meet me at the crime scene. He’s getting ready to go to sauna, sounds a little drunk and less than pleased.

  The car skitters on the ice as I pull out of Hullu Poro’s parking lot. I light a cigarette and crack the window, despite it being minus forty. Nicotine and cold are a good combination for thinking.

  Finland has a population of only five and a half million people, but a lot of violent crime. Per capita, our murder rate is about the same as most American big cities. The overwhelming majority of our murders are intimate events. We kill the people we love, our husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and friends, almost always in drunken rages.

  This is different. In a country as sensitive to insinuations of racism as Finland, the murder of a black, female public figure will explode across national headlines. It’s never happened before. If the actress, Sufia Elmi, has been murdered, I’ve got a big problem.

  Finns are sensitive about race relations because by and large we’re closet racists. As I once explained to Kate, it’s not the overt racism of the American kind she’s accustomed to, but a quiet racism. The passing-over of foreigners for promotions, a general disregard and disdain. I compared it to politics. Americans ramble on about politics but have a low voter turnout. Finns seldom talk about politics, but around eighty percent vote in presidential elections. We don’t talk about hatred, we hate in silence. It’s our way. We do everything in silence.

  I’ve heard jokes about Sufia, local rednecks snickering over their beers, talking about how they’d like to do it with the knockout nigger movie star, but never anything threatening. If we’re lucky, Sufia’s killer is a tourist and we can avoid cultural implications. I hope it’s a German. Germans are a petty hatred I inherited from my grandparents, who despised them for burning down half of Finnish Lapland during World War II.

  During the war, my grandmother found a German soldier frozen to death on a mountainside and dragged him down to show her friends. She told me it was the happiest day of her life. In my work, I find them a terrible annoyance. German tourists will steal anything. Silverware, salt and pepper shakers, toilet paper.

  I know a little about Sufia from the newspapers. Looks as much as talent have earned her a minor career as a B-movie starlet in Finnish film, and she’s wintering here in Levi. The first time I saw her, I found myself staring. I was embarrassed at first, but then I noticed she inspired that reaction in everyone, even women.

  Sufia wore a cocktail dress that didn’t do much to conceal spectacular breasts. Her waist was so small I could have wrapped my hands around it, and high heels accented the slender legs of a gazelle. Her black skin was flawless and her angelic face bore a combination of youth, beauty and innocence. She had obsidian eyes and a look of perpetual amusement that charmed everyone around her.

  Sufia is, or was, a physical anomaly, so beautiful that it didn’t seem possible for a creature like her to exist. What seemed a gift may have drawn the wrong kind of attention and gotten her killed. The first inclination of so many people in this world, when confronted by beauty, is to destroy it.

  I pull off the road onto the drive leading into Aslak Haltta’s reindeer farm, park next to Valtteri’s squad car and get ready for the hours I’m going to spend in the cold processing the crime scene. A winter field uniform is wadded up in the backseat of my Saab. Marine-blue police coveralls, they’re lined and heavy, should keep me warm enough to do my job. I pull them on over my jeans, sweater and a layer of thermal underwear.

  The neighborhood I grew up in starts on the other side of the road, about two hundred yards away. It will have to be canvassed during the investigation. No doubt my parents will enjoy acting like they’re being accused of murder.

  All I can see from here is snow. Valtteri’s headlights are on to illuminate the crime scene, so I leave mine on too. They cut a swath through the darkness, and I see Valtteri standing twenty yards ahead of me with Jussi, Antti and Aslak. I leave the comfort of the heated car and take the two fishing-tackle boxes I use for a crime kit from the trunk.

  Valtteri wades toward me through the snow. It’s deep, frozen hard on the surface but powdery underneath, and trudging through it makes him lurch until he reaches the driveway. “Don’t go over there yet,” he says.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Just take a second and brace yourself.”

  Valtteri is a devout Laestadian and to my mind overobsessed with his strict, revivalist version of Lutheranism, but he’s a good man and a good officer. If having eight kids and going to church every Sunday and most evenings makes him happy, it’s okay by me. I turn on a flashlight and start toward the crime scene.

  When I get about five yards away, I see a naked corpse embedded in the snow. I’m certain it’s Sufia Elmi. Wh
en I see what’s been done to her, I understand why Valtteri warned me. I’ve investigated more than a few homicides, but never seen anything so cruel. I set down the fishing-tackle boxes and take a moment to steady myself.

  Judging by the indentations in the snow, it looks like the killer parked, then either dragged Sufia or forced her to crawl away from the car. The snow is about three feet deep and she’s sunk about half that distance into it. She managed to thrash enough to make a snow angel. Her black body is ensconced in white snow stained with red blood. In places, blood has spattered and sprayed two yards away from her. Her corpse is starting to cool, and silver frost is forming on her dark skin, making it shimmer.

  A car pulls off the road and I figure it’s Esko the coroner. The responding officers, Antti and Jussi, are standing there shivering, even though, like me, they have on heavy winter field uniforms and thick hats and gloves. They’re looking useless and might pollute the crime scene tramping around, moving to keep warm. I tell Jussi to walk back up to where the driveway meets the road and look for discarded evidence. If there is any, it will be easy to find with the glare of his flashlight on unbroken snow.

  Antti is our best artist. I take graph paper and a pencil from a tackle box and tell him to make sketches of the crime scene, not an easy task in this bitter cold. He puts chemical hand warmers inside his gloves to keep his fingers from getting stiff and starts drawing.

  Esko comes over and nods hello, doesn’t speak. I tell him to take a look around.

  I get two cameras out of the tackle boxes, one film and one digital, a couple external flash units and a tape recorder. Winter here is an endless night, but the snow reflects what little light there is and casts everything a dim murky gray. I use a Leica M3 to shoot film photos of the surroundings. Old Leicas are well made and don’t use batteries, so they almost never fail because of cold-weather conditions.

  Snow photography isn’t easy. If you use lights or flashes at more than a forty-five-degree angle, everything disappears in the glare. It has to be done with polarizing filters and lights at the level of the snow. I give the cameras to Valtteri. “You know what to do, right?” I ask.