Wolves and Angels (18 page)

Koskinen turned to his computer and logged in to the social security database. The quickest way of getting the interview was to go to her, even at the risk of her not being home. Pirkk
o
-Liisa Rinne’s contact information appeared on the screen, and Koskinen nearly knocked the keyboard off the desk. The address was Säästäjä
n Street
5, in Peltolammi. He checked on the map just to be sure, and it was true. She lived right next to where
Timonen
had been found.

He picked up the phone and punched in the number for the garage from memory.

“Kuparinen.”

“Koskinen here. I need a car.”

“Aha,” Kuparinen said in his relaxed style, and Koskinen heard as he leafed through his vehicle log. “For what day?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Koskinen replied and hung up the phone. He retrieved his sports coat from the closet, put it on as he walked, and then stopped at the department secretary’s door.

“I’ll be away for an hour or two.”

“Where?” Milla asked without turning her head from the computer screen.

Do you really have to know? Koskinen
cursed
to himself. He turned back into the hallway and said over his shoulder, “I have a little interview I need to do.”

“Can I tag along?”

Koskinen stopped and walked backwards to the door.
“What would you do?”

“I
’d
watch your back.”

“What?”

Milla swiveled her office chair around. Her face was glowing with eagerness. “If the crook does a runner, then I can watch where he goes. He won’t think I’m a cop.”

“No, he definitely won’t.” Koskinen started to laugh. “You should mayb
e watch a little less TV
.”

Milla’s suggestion was still making him smile when he reached the basement, and Kuparinen eyed him with suspicion.

“So, a car.”

“Yeah. I’m popping over to Peltolammi.”

“
What about y
ou
r
bicycle, and I hear it has more gears than four Russian Ladas put together.”

Kuparinen noticed that Koskinen’s smile had faded, and he raised his grease-blackened hand.

“Take that Toyota. I was about to change the oil in it, but I reckon it’ll make another trip just fine.”

Koskinen thanked him and started walking
toward
the vehicle. Kuparinen followed him for a few steps. “What was that dust-up this morning about?”

Koskinen stopped and turned to look at Kuparinen. “Didn’t the SS Patrol tell you?”

“They wouldn’t say anything.”

“Really?” Koskinen grinned. “It wasn’t really anything worth talking about anyway.”

Kuparinen was left to sulk as he watched Koskinen
walk away. His expression said it all: no one ever tells me anything!

Koskinen glanced at Kuparinen one more time in the rearview mirror and then drove off cheerfully. His mood had suddenly ticked up a few notches. It looked like his outburst of that morning might not be spreading all over the station after all. Sopanen and Saari were decent guys. And certainly knew their
jobs
.

Koskinen remembered his own years as a uniformed officer. Sleeping during the day had always been hard.
The n
ight shifts had been particularly hard during Emilia’s maternity leave, when
Tomi
was an infant. Even though Emilia did everything she could to let him get his sleep, it had been almost impossible with a small baby.

Thinking about those years brought back a torrent of warm memories. Although he’d never forget how overwhelming leaving for work had felt at times. Sometimes the lack of sleep hit him as a wave of nausea in the middle of the shift, and he knew that he would’ve forgot the wheelchair just like Sopanen and Saari.

Thinking about this made something occur to him. Sopanen had described the sequence of events in detail. The men had just noticed an object that looked like a wheelchair in the brush at the side of the road when the motorcycle captured their attention with its sudden U-turn. So far they had found no reason for the rider to flee—no alcohol, much less drugs, in his bloodstream.

Koskinen drummed on the steering wheel as he ruminated. The boy had been cruising around in exactly the same area where the SS Patrol had seen the wheelchair. Could it just be a coincidence? Or was he tangled up in
Timonen
’s violent death in some way and
that was why he had fled from car 341?

Angry honking snapped Koskinen back to reality, and he looked up to see a red, white, and blue Express Bus in the rearview mirror. He was stopped at a roundabout, and the light had already been green for who knew how long. He made a snap decision and jumped the median to the left, turning
toward
University Hospital instead of Peltolammi.

12.

The Tampere University Hospital parking lot was known as a paradise for parking enforcement. It was a more effective snare than a fishing weir. The lot was entirely too small for the hospital’s needs and was always full to the last spot. People who came for exams or to visit loved ones ended up having to leave their cars wherever they could. Koskinen parked the Toyota half on the sidewalk half on the street, near the main doors and left the police parking emblem on the dash board to cool the meter maids’ hunting instincts.

The route to the ICU had become familiar over the years. Koskinen walked through the main lobby straight to the elevators and rode up to the fifth floor. On the way he turned off his mobile phone. They didn’t belong in hospitals.

There was a buzzer on the jamb of the glass door.
Koskinen pressed it as he extracted his badge. But there was no need; he knew the nurse who came to open the door.

“Hi Pauliina.”

The woman looked at Koskinen for a few seconds. Then her face broke into a bright smile.

“Hi, Sakari, what are you doing here?”

“Work…” Koskinen said, smiling back. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Pauliina said, bobbing her blond ponytail. “Just the same game of roulette: work, taking care of the kids, cleaning, work…and my husband’s off seeing the world. In fact, right now he’s on a three
-
week business trip to Burundi. He’s setting up some telephone exchange there.”

Koskinen looked at Pauliina, wondering when they had last seen each other. It must have been years. Pauliina was one of Emilia’s good friends; they had first met at an amateur theater group. Koskinen even still remembered
the play
; he and
Tomi
had watched it together.
It
had
been at
the old Hervanta Library, and Pauliina had gotten the lead role. She had played Sleeping Beauty, and Emilia had been the witch. Eight-year-old
Tomi
had been indignant. For days he had moped around complaining about why Mom couldn’t have been the
princess; no one wanted to be the witch’s
son.

After that the scripts and roles had changed many times, but the core group had hung together. Every now and then they had all assembled at the Koskinens’ house for a sauna evening. A mental image flashed through Koskinen’s mind of Pauliina wrapped in a bath towel
roasting a sausage in the fireplace. He even remembered the color of the towel. It was bright blue, and the color had enhanced the milky whiteness of her skin.

Pauliina blushed, and Koskinen realized that he had been staring again.

“Yes, of course.” He scratched his nose sheepishly. “Um, I think you have a young man here who was injured in a traffic accident on Monday night.”

“Mika Makkonen,” Pauliina replied immediately.
Koskinen wondered if there could be a more ordinary sounding name.

“Any chance I could ask him about a couple of things?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Poor kid’s in such a deep coma that he
can’t
understand a
thing. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all.”

Pauliina looked at Koskinen sadly for a moment, and then listed off from memory: “His helmet split, causing a transverse fracture in his skull. In addition, his left lung was punctured and his thoracic vertebrae were damaged. The secondary injuries are small in comparison: broken jaw, clavicle, and several ribs. One ulna was completely shattered.”

Koskinen shook his head. The collision had been violent, and he underst
ood
Sopanen and Saari better by the minute. The accident had happened right before their eyes. And when accompanied by the unavoidable self-accusation following a high-speed chase, it would have been strange had they not been shaken. Even
cops
c
an’t
train
themselves
to be that callous and thick
-
skinned.

Pauliina stepped closer to Koskinen and whispered confidentially. “He isn’t going to make it through the night. I’m sure of that.”

Koskinen nodded sympathetically. He couldn’t even be annoyed, even though the visit to the hospital had been a wild goose chase. He decided to head over to Peltolammi, but then it occurred to him to ask whether anyone had stopped in to visit the patient.

“Only his mother. Riitta Makkonen has been sitting in there the whole time. More than two days straight. She doesn’t even go the family lounge, even though we’ve offered her a bed there.”

“Could I come exchange a few words with her?”

“Of course.” Pauliina nodded and pointed behind her. “She’s in seven.”

Koskinen walked to the end of the hallway and stepped into room seven. Riitta Makkonen sat there with her back to the door. She was dressed in a faded jean jacket and wine-red sweatpants. She had obviously left for the hospital in a rush.

She turned her head, and Koskinen told her his name and profession in a low voice. He didn’t even offer his hand. He had forgotten to wash them, and bacteria were a constant blight in the hospital. No reason to make the boy’s situation any worse.

He noticed shock on the woman’s frail, tired face. Her
thin
lips
opened
slightly.
“What
are
you
doing
—
”

“I came to see Mika.”

“Really?”

She rested her hand on the side of her son’s bed, smoothing the poison
-
green blanket with her palm and
then whispering as if she were afraid he would wake up: “My husband died three years ago, and now Mika is being taken from me too. I don’t have anything left anymore.”

To Koskinen, the woman’s strangled words sounded like she felt she had something to defend. He turned to look at the young man lying on the bed. He was covered in bandages, straps, and tubes. One tube fed liquid in at regular intervals, and the other gurgled it out. The LEDs of the anesthesia machine blinked rhythm
ically, and an EK
G machine monitored his pulse. A green line moved across its display like a rollercoaster car.

“He’ll wake up yet.”

Koskinen was ashamed at his ham-fisted attempt at consolation and tried to patch it up. “Medical science can do miracles these days.”

Riitta Makkonen shook her head silently. All signs said that she had given up hope. Apparently the doctors had told her the facts without
any
sugarcoating, and even her mother’s instincts weren’t holding out false hope anymore.

The room only had one chair. Another one wouldn’t have fit anywhere with all of the instruments and machines. Koskinen crouched down next to the mother.

“I know how hard this is, but I still have to ask you a few questions.”

He saw the unfathomable suffering in her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned down, her cheeks were sunken from not eating, and her skin was white from lack of sleep. It sounded as if the simple act of whispering two words demanded an enormous effort.

“Ask away.”

“What was Mika doing in Hervanta that night?”

She turne
d
he
r
head from Koskinen back to her son and answered quickly. “He probably just wanted to ride. He hadn’t done anything else since he got that motorcycle. He just rode.”

Those final words dissolved into a deep sigh, and her head bowed once again.

“Did he have friends in Hervanta?” Koskinen asked. “Schoolmates or a girlfriend?”

“No. Mika always told me everything. I know all his friends. None of them are in Hervanta.”

Koskinen thought he heard a strange emphasis on the word “Hervanta.” Usually he hurried to correct people’s misperceptions, but this time he let it go.

Posing the next question was difficult. “There were no traces of alcohol or drugs found in Mika’s blood.”