He shook his head. “You’re back in the spotlight, and having a murderer you arrested as a houseguest will be hard for you to explain away.”
He was right. “Thank you for all you’ve done,” I said.
“It was good for me.” He extended his hand and I shook it.
“Have you said good-bye to Kate?” I asked.
“She’s asleep. Tell her I’ll see her again soon. I’ll call, and come to your party.”
He left. I called Milo. “You hear about the S?derlund murder?” I asked.
“Of course I did. Why didn’t I get a look at her fucking head?”
I lied. “Sweetness was here and I was in a hurry. Trust me, before it’s over, you’ll know more about her head than you can possibly imagine. Right now, I need info. There was a Facebook site dedicated to murdering her. Are you able to hack Facebook and ID the site members?”
“No. And nobody else is, either.”
“Haven’t you told me any site can be hacked?”
“Give me a year, and if I dedicate my life to it for that time, there’s a small possibility I can get in.”
“My feeling is this,” I said. “Whoever killed her did it for prestige, to brag to his hate buddies, and it’s an open secret among that group. We have to find out what circle the killer moved in and apply pressure until somebody rats out the murderer. Our best bet is the members of that site.”
“Probably so. We find one, scare the shit out of him, he gives up the others. It might not be that hard.”
“Maybe, but until then, we have to do police grunt work. Plan on devoting your life to looking at rap sheets until something turns up.”
I told him I’d call in the morning and rang off.
Next call, Jyri Ivalo. “I need you to use your superpowers to get me sheets on every known racist in Finland. That includes anybody who’s committed or been accused of committing a hate crime in the past few years, and the membership rolls of every racist organization in Finland.”
“Since you’re calling me, apparently you own a fucking phone. Get off your lazy ass and make the calls yourself.”
“I would if I could. If I call, racist sympathizers on the force may suppress information or drag their feet. If the national chief of police calls and says jump, they just ask how high.”
“Anything else I can do, Your Highness?”
“I’ll have to look at thousands of people. If I have paper files, it will be almost impossible. Get it all scanned so I can build a database.”
“So you want an army of secretaries.”
“No, the president wants the case solved.”
“Fair enough. You think it’s going to be a tough one?”
“Depends.” I explained it to him the way I put it to Milo. “I need somebody to roll over. I can’t do that if I play nice.”
“In my experience,” he said, “playing nice rarely accomplishes much. You’ll start receiving the files tomorrow morning. I’m starting to see your reasoning behind hiring the oaf.” He rang off.
14
At five thirty the following morning, I got a call from Colonel Alexander Nilsson of the Finnish Defence Forces. He was instructed to call me because one of his soldiers had been murdered while on guard duty. The killing might be related to the murder of Lisbet S?derlund, and although, as he emphasized, the murder fell under the jurisdiction of the Finnish military police, as a courtesy, I could examine the crime scene if I wished. It was in a wooded training area near Vantaa. I thanked him and told him I would be there as soon as possible.