Cold Trail (4 page)

“S
orry,” she said to the grouchy driver, flashing a card in front of some sort of reader that Repo didn’t recognize. “Have to pick up my kid from daycare.”

The driver didn’t respond, just looked at
Repo, who was clueless. “You wanna pay so we can get out of here?”

Pay! He didn’t have any
money. His hand reached into the pocket of the trench coat, where at least there was a comb.
He fished deeper and felt coins. Repo pulled them out, but they looked strange. He had heard of euros, of course, but he had never held one before. The prison store worked on credit.

“S
orry,” he said, trying to act the yokel. It didn’t take much effort. “How much is it?”

“W
here are you headed?” the driver asked.

Repo
didn’t even know what bus he was on. “Umm... End of the line.”

“T
hree sixty,” the driver snapped.

Someone yelled from the back
, “Hey, asshole! Why don’t you pay so we can get out of here!”

Repo
fumbled with the coins, trying to see how much they were worth, but they all looked the same to him. He slapped them down on the driver’s little tray. “You mind? Eyesight’s bad,” he said.

“
So get some glasses,” the driver retorted, picking through the coins for the fare. Repo took his ticket, swept up the remaining coins, and moved farther back into the bus. He kept his eyes on the floor and found a seat up front, on the left. The woman in the red coat was sitting next to him, but she didn’t so much as glance
in his direction.

The
bus backed up and Repo stole a glimpse outside. The police car that had approached from the
Helsingin Sanomat
headquarters had stopped fifty yards away.

Repo
examined the coins in his hand. One was bigger than the rest and had a big 2 on it. The second-biggest one was yellow and it was worth 50. Repo counted his funds and came to the conclusion that he had 4 euros and 70 cents. He noticed the woman in the red coat eyeing him, and he slipped the change into his coat pocket.

The bus
drove past the police car. It passed the newspaper’s offices on the left and some new hotel on the right as it continued down the street, following the railroad. Up at the front of the bus, red lights formed what appeared to be the numbers 194. Repo didn’t have the faintest idea where he was headed.

CHAPTER 2

MONDAY,
4:50 P.M.

HELSINKI
POLICE HEADQUARTERS, PASILA

Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamäki was in his office browsing through his copy of Finland’s statutes, which was marked with colored
Post-it notes cut into narrow strips. Written on the Post-its in tidy, tiny stick letters were words such as MURDER, ARSON, TELESURVEILLANCE, POLICE LAW.

T
he detective lieutenant had a problem. A thirty-two-year-old redhead, Jana Puttonen, was being held in a cell at police headquarters.

The
detainee, who originally hailed from central Finland, was a teacher at a North Helsinki elementary school. A few hours ago she had been arrested on suspicion of blackmail.

Detective Sergeant
Anna Joutsamo had interrogated the suspect and then briefed her sharp-featured, close-cropped lieutenant. Three separate police reports had spurred the investigation. In each instance, Puttonen had sent dubious photographs to the homes of three separate individuals. The North Helsinki precinct had connected the dots between the incidents, and the case had been transferred to the Violent Crimes Unit, which handled blackmail cases.

In and of themselves, t
he photos were relatively innocuous. One was of a kiss; in another, a woman had her arms around
a man’s neck; and in the third, a woman’s hand was placed provocatively on the man’s thigh. There was a different man in each photo, but the woman was the same. In the pictures, Puttonen was wearing heavy makeup and a black wig.

During the investigation
, the police had quickly figured out that all the men were fathers of students in Puttonen’s class. The photos had unexpectedly arrived at the men’s homes in the mail, the envelopes addressed to their wives. The fingerprints had matched Puttonen’s, and she didn’t deny having sent the letters. The problem in terms of a criminal investigation was that Puttonen wasn’t demanding anything from the men or their wives. She had simply sent the photographs.

T
he teacher had revealed her motive during Joutsamo’s interrogation. The children of the families had harassed her at school, and Puttonen wanted to get back at them. She had tried changing schools, but new bullies always surfaced. Puttonen had claimed she had no problem dealing with the thumbtacks left on her chair, but the sexist slurs and the vandalism, like the gum in her car lock, were too much. She had even arranged special parent-teacher nights on the theme, but the parents of the problem children never showed.

S
o she had wanted to get back at the parents. She had figured out who the fathers of the bullies were, and, at an opportune moment, had flirted her way into their company. Finding someone to take a photo with a cell phone was never a problem. Puttonen had told Joutsamo that she didn’t have any demands as far as the men were concerned. Getting back at them was enough.

Takamäki
had initially opened the green-covered book at the Post-it marked “EXTORTION.” In order to meet the description of the crime, the perpetrator had to be guilty of coercing the other party to relinquish assets under a force of threat. The photographs could be interpreted as a threat, but no assets were at stake.

The photo
graphs could also be interpreted as causing suffering or slander, but the disseminating of information infringing on one’s privacy required that the photos be made accessible to a number of people. That had not occurred.

Libel
was not an option, because no false statements were involved, nor did the images degrade the men. Their expressions indicated that they had been perfectly happy to appear in them.

Disturbing
the domestic peace? Puttonen hadn’t entered anyone’s home or caused any sort of public disturbance, and she had only sent one photograph to each family.

Vandalism
? Nothing had been broken. Fraud? No financial loss was involved. Violating a restraining order? No restraining orders had been filed in the case. They wouldn’t be able to wring any kind of sex crime out of it—the prosecutors would laugh in their faces.

Takamäki
couldn’t come up with a crime, which didn’t actually disappoint him. To tell the truth, his sympathies were with the teacher. If families didn’t keep their brats in line, why should teachers have to? Especially when they had been stripped of all means of
doing so. Not that Takamäki missed those days. He remembered his own detentions all too well, which during the 1970s had meant standing on the school’s tile floor: your feet had to stay within one twelve-by-twelve-inch square.

T
his was one of the more bizarre cases to come to the Violent Crimes Unit. Still known colloquially as Homicide, the unit got all sorts of incidents to investigate, from improperly installed electric stoves to beached boats to missing persons.

Takamäki’s
cell phone interrupted his reverie, but it didn’t matter anymore. He had already decided that they’d release Puttonen for the simple fact that no crime had been committed. One-time harassment was not a punishable offense.

“H
ello,” Takamäki answered. He never offered his name unless he recognized the caller’s number.

“T
akamäki?” asked a male voice.

“W
ho’s this?”

“
Helmikoski, EOC.”

Takamäki
remembered the broad-shouldered lieutenant from the Emergency Operations Center. If Takamäki’s memory served him correctly, he had transferred there from the department in the neighboring city
of Vantaa.

“Y
eah, it’s me. What is it?”

“H
ave a case for you.”

Takamäki
glanced at the clock on his computer screen. A few minutes past five. Theoretically the day shift had already ended, but the Puttonen case had demanded some extra time. No other VCU lieutenants were around, or at least available.

“W
hat kind?

“E
scaped convict.”

Wow,
Takamäki thought. At least it wasn’t a violent standoff between motorcycle gangs or a headless corpse.

“W
ho?”

“T
imo Repo.”

“W
ho is he?” Takamäki asked, writing down the name.

“F
ifty. Doing life for murdering his wife.”

“D
oesn’t ring any bells,” Takamäki replied. The crime had probably taken place somewhere outside greater Helsinki, because Takamäki remembered all the local murders.

“W
as at his old man’s funeral at Hietaniemi. The prison guard let him go to the bathroom at Restaurant Perho and the guy never came back.”

“O
f course not,” Takamäki said, already planning how they should organize the search. “Any sightings since the restaurant?”

“P
ossible but not definite sighting near the railway station twenty minutes ago. I’ve got several units looking for him, and the security companies have been alerted, but there are a lot of directions you can head from the central train station.”

“Y
ou guys are still keeping an eye on it, though, right?”

“O
f course.”

“G
ive me a little more on Repo. Gang member, or what’s his background? I’m mostly looking for an assessment of how dangerous he is.”

Helmikoski
thought for a moment. “We don’t know much about him. A photo and some details of what he’s wearing, but that’s it. The guard who called in the escape was alone and not totally coherent.”

“R
i-ight,” Takamäki said. Like all prison escapes, the incident was already starting to frustrate him. The police had done their part: investigated the crime and gotten the perpetrator behind bars to sit out his sentence. But as soon as some other department screwed up, the case was tossed back in their laps.

“A
nyway, the guard let him go to the bathroom by himself. So in all likelihood he’s not some hard-core gangster.”

“
Just a murderer, tops,” Takamäki replied.

* * *

A couple of minutes later, Takamäki rose from his desk. He had printed out a few pages’ worth of background info on Repo. One was his photo.

Takamäki
stepped into the room shared by Joutsamo, Kohonen, Suhonen, and a couple of other detectives. It was clearly larger than Takamäki’s cubbyhole, but had less space per occupant. Dividers decorated with photographs and papers separated the workspaces. From the window you could see the old courthouse. It was going to be renovated into Police HQ II, but Homicide wouldn’t be moving there.

Anna Joutsamo
was at her computer, typing with her headphones on. The thirty-four-year-old brunette was wearing jeans and a sweater. There was no one else in the room. She hadn’t heard Takamäki enter and didn’t realize her supervisor was there until he was standing right next to her.

“W
hat is it?” she asked, pulling off her headphones.

“T
he Puttonen interrogation, huh?”

“Y
eah.”

Takamäki
tossed the papers onto Joutsamo’s desk. “Forget Puttonen. Got a new one for you.”

Joutsamo swore.
“What the hell? What do you mean, forget it? Little Red Riding Hood is right over in that cell. I can’t just drop it.”

“Y
es, you can,” Takamäki said. “I’ve been thinking about the case. There’s no crime there. Doesn’t meet the description.”

Joutsamo
was silent.

“B
elieve me. There’s no way to get a case out of it. If you ask me, society would be better off if it concentrated its resources on the twerps who were harassing her.”

“S
o which one of us is going handle that? You or me? There’s no one else here,” Joutsamo said laconically.

Takamäki
chuckled. “Let’s release her. She’s probably got a school day tomorrow. Transcribe the interrogation later when you have some time, and I’ll write up a report closing the investigation, citing no crime.”

Joutsamo
turned to the papers Takamäki had tossed onto her desk. The photo was on top. “And who’s this winner?”

“
Prisoner Timo Repo, serving life. Killed his wife a few years back, but what most interests me now is his current whereabouts.”