To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (10 page)

There was more, and as soon as she found it, all hell would break loose.

When Serefina Amalfi opened the front door the next morning, Angie threw her arms around her and hugged her hard. Angie’s mother was short and heavy, her black hair pulled straight back into a bun.

“Angelina,
che fai?
” The startled woman asked.

“Nothing, Mamma,” Angie said. “I’m just happy to see you.”

“Come inside. It’s that burglary, isn’t it?” Serefina asked. Angie followed the dancing red polka dots of her mother’s rayon dress through the house to the family room. “It has you nervous. That’s why you’re never at home when I call.”

Angie still hadn’t told her mother she was staying in one of Cousin Richie’s houses, and definitely not that Paavo was staying with her. Her parents would worry if they knew about the break-ins at Paavo’s and Aulis’s homes, and if they heard Aulis had been shot besides, they’d insist Angie move in with them. “I’m not nervous,” she said. She’d passed nervous days ago and was hurtling toward frantic. “Anyway, a locksmith put great new locks on the door. It’s just that I’ve been busy with my video restaurant reviews.”

Serefina sat down at a new computer. “I’m online. Can you stay for lunch?”

Angie’s eyebrows popped up high to see her old-fashioned, won’t-program-a-VCR mother sitting in front of a high-powered Pentium. “I’ve got a reservation for lunch at a new Basque restaurant for another video review. Bianca’s joining me. Would you like to come, too?”

“You know I don’t like restaurant food,” Serefina said, staring at the screen.

Angie knew it. She also knew her mother would have been insulted to death if she hadn’t invited her. Angie had failed to once, and the fallout, which the family dubbed Restaurant-gate, had had more whispering, hurt feelings, and innuendo than any political scandal. “What is this?” she asked, glad to change the subject. “I didn’t know you owned a computer.”

Serefina pushed a few keys. “Caterina brought it over. You know your sister thinks everyone needs the latest of everything. She says everybody shops this way now. You push the button and things you want show up at your door. No work at all.”

Angie sat down and watched her mother study the screens and navigate her way through a Neiman-Marcus site.

“Hah! Look at that!
Dio!
” Serefina threw up her arms, then reached under the desk and yanked out the plug. The monitor went black and the computer made a whirring death rattle.

“That’s not how to turn it off.” Angie gasped. “You’ve got to shut it down step by step.”

“
Basta!
I don’t care.” Serefina stood up and glared at the expensive system. “What nerve! I’m not going to use it again.”

“What happened?”

“I’ve heard how people steal things off these
computers, and that once you put some information in, it’s there forever. No way am I going to tell them what size dress I wear!
Ma che schifo!
” She smoothed her hands over her round waist and hips. “And anyway, I’m on a diet, so I won’t be this size much longer.”

Angie suppressed a smile. Serefina was always on a diet. “I don’t think anyone cares—”

“I care!” As Serefina lumbered toward the kitchen, she called out, “Let’s have some coffee. Your cousin Gina sent some of her biscotti.
Buonissimo!
Like butter, they are!”

A short while later, Angie sat in the sunrcom across from Serefina, munching cookies and talking the way they had done, time and again, over the years. She couldn’t imagine not having this warmth in her life, not having this security and place to come home to. Thoughts of all Paavo had missed swept over her—the mother’s and father’s hugs never given, tears of joy and pride never shed, hands never clasped doing something as simple as helping a child to cross a street.

“Why are you looking so gloomy all of a sudden, Angelina?” her mother asked.

“I was just thinking of someone who isn’t as lucky as I am.”

“Lucky?”

“To have you and Papá, and to know that you both love me, no matter what I’ve done.”

An eyebrow arched. “How much money do you need?”

Angie was taken aback. “No, really. I was just thinking of my childhood, with all the family around, with Frannie to play with, and our older sisters to look up to. I was very happy.”

“You used to torment Frannie. She was so sweet natured and you were such a little devil!”

“Mamma! I’m trying to tell you how much I love you!”

Serefina studied her a long moment. “Angelina, are you pregnant?”

Paavo waited until the lull after most inspectors headed for home around five-thirty to pull the files out of his drawer and set them on his desk. They’d been on his mind all day, even as he attended an autopsy for a drowning victim whose death investigation he’d been assigned, even as he testified at a prelim for a murder case he’d investigated.

When he’d first arrived at work that morning, he’d done what he should have done yesterday—he’d looked for records on Mika Turunen and Cecily Campbell Turunen. He’d found death certificates for both of them. Cecily had died in a car accident one week after Mika’s death.

Mika had been murdered. He’d died of gunshot wounds.

So now he knew, and the knowing left him drained and empty.

When he’d requested the homicide book on Mika, he found an annotation on the system to the investigation of Sam Vanse. Sam…Professor White had mentioned someone named Sam. He’d called for that book as well. Several hours passed before Archives contacted him to say the files were ready for pickup.

The casebooks were old and dusty, and the clerk at Records had handed them to Paavo with all the reverence of giving him the Holy Grail. He pulled out Vanse’s file. He wasn’t yet ready to look at a report on his own father’s death.

The reports were, for the most part, in chronological order. Paavo read quickly through the Prelimi
nary Report. Vanse had been found in his car in the parking lot of San Francisco General Hospital, dead from a bullet wound to the back of the head. He had a second, nonlethal wound to his shoulder. The second wound had been inflicted some minutes before the first.

Vanse had been pulled to the driver’s side of his car in an unsuccessful attempt to make it look like he had driven himself to the hospital. His condition and blood on the passenger seat showed this was not the case. Fingerprints found on the steering wheel and elsewhere belonged to Mika Turunen.

Mika Turunen was murdered the day after Vanse’s death. The two men were friends and co-workers at the Omega Computing Corporation.

A number of people were interrogated—Paavo saw an Okko Heikkila, Joonas Mäki, and Aulis Kokkonen among them, but no leads developed, and although there were references made to Vanse’s activism in anti-Soviet groups, no conclusions as to why he was killed were made.

Reading between the lines—the type of questions asked, the cross-reference to Turunen’s folder—gave the appearance the investigators were speculating that Turunen killed Vanse, and then, in retaliation, was himself killed. The case remained open pending further developments.

Paavo’s skin was chilled. Could his own father have been a murderer?

If so, why the two gunshot wounds, and why had Mika driven Sam to a hospital? The investigation gave no answers to those questions.

Paavo turned to photographs of the death scene. The body had moldered in the parking lot for almost two days before being discovered. Paavo knew that lot well, because of Aulis. It was enor
mous, with cars coming and going twenty-four hours a day, and a number of them remaining for several days.

He shut the folder, not wanting to look at any more photos or the autopsy report.

Slowly, tentatively, he reached for the next binder, the file on the investigation of Mika Turunen’s death.

He had handled plenty of old homicide investigation case binders, but this was not any old case. This was…this man had been his father. As he touched the black cover, his hands trembled and his chest felt as if a tight band were around it, constricting the air from his lungs.

He cracked open the faded and stiff cover, and then skipped over the yellow, dusty pages of the Chronological Report and Preliminary Report, preferring to form his own conclusions from the base material. He turned to the first report and began to read.

The report had been filed by the patrol officers called to the scene by a motel owner. It began:

Victim, Mika Turunen, age 30, found Room 8, Cypress Motel, 6321 Bayshore Boulevard, at 0717. DOA multiple gunshot wounds
.

Next came the Death Investigation Report. The motel owner, Victor Duggin, provided most of the information. Mrs. Turunen was in the office checking the family out, and the children were making him nervous playing with the ice machine outside. He wanted to get the family on its way, but he was having trouble accessing a phone line to verify the credit card.

Suddenly he heard a barrage of gunshots so loud he ducked behind the counter. Mrs. Turunen ran outside. He assumed she went to her children.

When the shooting stopped, Duggin lifted his
head to see a black Cadillac tearing out of the lot. He didn’t see the faces—only that two men were inside. The door to Room 8 stood open, and some of the other motel guests were peeking from their rooms. The man from Room 5 ran into the office to tell him the guy in 8 was dead.

Duggin phoned the police and then searched for Mrs. Turunen and her children, but he never saw them again. She never even came back to pick up her credit card.

Under next of kin, the investigators had written:

Paavo turned to the supplemental reports. The motel guests were all interviewed. No one saw the shooters. One person thought he saw the victim’s wife and children outside the motel room after the shooters left, but he wasn’t sure.

Twenty rounds of 160-grain hollow-points had been fired into the room; five hit the victim’s chest—heart, lungs, and stomach penetrated, death instantaneous. The remaining shots were fired into the closet and bathroom, as if in search of anyone hiding there and killing them as well. Several shots penetrated the walls into Room 7.

Paavo leafed through reports investigating the victim himself. There were essentially two sets of reports—one immediately after Mika’s murder, and another set after Sam’s body was found with Mika’s fingerprints in his car.

Turunen was on a work visa, and had nothing negative at all on his record. Co-workers gave him high marks for job knowledge and productivity. Reference was made to Mika being part of a group
of Finns working to help anti-Communists in Finland and the USSR. Speculation centered around a falling-out between members of this group, since Vanse was also implicated in it, but no proof could be found. Joonas Mäki and Okko Heikkila were interrogated, but both had good alibis.

Cecily and her children abandoned their apartment and disappeared after the murder. None of the neighbors, including Aulis Kokkonen, had any idea where they had gone. No one mentioned Cecily’s job with the FBI.

Suspicion immediately turned to Turunen’s wife, even speculation that the deaths were the result of a romantic triangle—that Cecily could have ordered a hit on Mika after he killed her lover.

The next page in the file caused him to sit up abruptly. A week after the murder, Cecily Turunen’s car was found, upside down, in the Pacific just below Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County—not S.F.P.D jurisdiction. No body was retrieved.

The investigation basically ended there, although more questions were asked and more leads followed, but nothing new turned up, and the case remained officially open.

Twice in the following year the case had been picked up and reworked without consequence. Since the victim’s children were still missing and the wife’s body had never been recovered, the unsubstantiated conclusion within Homicide was that after having her husband killed, she faked her death and ran, taking her children with her.

FBI help to find Cecily Turunen and her children was sought, but they, too, failed. Eldridge Sawyer had worked as the prime contact for the S.F.P.D. on the case.

Mika’s autopsy report came next. Paavo skimmed it, not wanting the details. Even flipping
through the thick report, though, his head felt a little light.

Included in the binder was a brown envelope, ten by twelve. He knew what it contained—the crime scene and autopsy photos. He couldn’t look, and set it aside.

Next in the file was an inventory of the evidence. Fingerprints lifted from the crime scene and their CSI IDs; lists of slugs and their CSI numbers; the clothes Mika wore, and clothes and belongings left behind in the motel room by the family.

No clear prints other than the family’s and motel employees’ were found. If it had been a professional hit—no matter who ordered it—they wouldn’t have touched anything. Probably kicked the door open, or knocked on the door with some innocuous request, stepped inside, and started shooting.

Paavo closed the file and ran his hands over his mouth, nose, and eyes. As much as he’d tried to read the file purely as a cop, at times the enormity of what he was learning after a lifetime of questions shook him to the core.

He took the stairs back down to Archives, glad for the chance to move, and searched for the San Mateo County’s investigation of Cecily’s death. Often, complete files were copied and stored in cases clearly connected like this; if not, he would have to contact San Mateo.

He was in luck; a copy existed.

Back at his desk, he read through it. It was small and incomplete by big-city standards, but he could see that the police who took the case had been thorough with their contacts and their questions. They simply weren’t given good answers.

Passersby had spotted Cecily’s car at low tide and reported it. Her seat belt had not been fastened and
the driver- and passenger-side windows were both open. It was assumed the tides had washed the body out of the car and out to sea. Some strands of the victim’s hair had snagged onto the window, and tests showed blood on the windshield consistent with a face or head injury to a driver.