I sat at the table with my laptop for two more days. Katt slept in my lap or sat on my shoulder, dug his claws into my neck. The pain kept my mind from wandering. Yes, going through this morass of material, routine police investigation, and following up on hundreds of most likely possibilities would eventually lead to Lisbet’s murderer, but how long would it take? People were dying daily. Routine work wouldn’t do. I went through the Facebook pages given to me by the woman at the Finnish Somalia Network. I felt the answer lay inside them.
I joined every Finnish social networking hate group I could find. One, Auttakaamme Maahanmuuttajarikolliset Takaisin Kotiin— Let’s Help Send the Immigrant Criminals Back Home—had over twenty-six thousand members. Another needle in a haystack. But the group on Facebook that directly threatened her, I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet S?derlund, had a member with a user name and picture of Heinrich Himmler who on multiple occasions expressed a desire to send all of Finland’s black immigrants to the gas chamber. And now two brothers were dead, murdered in a homemade gas chamber. Many members of the group went by Nazi user names: Goering, Ilse Koch, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, but the tone of the rhetoric of the member that called himself Himmler told me he was the man I wanted to locate. If he hadn’t himself murdered Lisbet S?derlund, I thought he knew who did. But how would I find him?
Saska Lindgren called me. The murdered young men were known low-level drug dealers. They sold everything from hashish to heroin. Their bank cards indicated they had taken a train to Turku on the day of their murder. Bought one-way tickets. They ate at McDonald’s in Turku. That was the last trace of them.
I watched the news. Assaults and beatings, white and black youth gang clashes. Attacks on apostate Finnish white women, converted to Islam because of their marriages to Muslims. Their mixed-race babies spat upon in their carriages. Close-ups of tears streaming into veils. The media used to bury these stories, often not reporting gang fights. Police often broke up clashes but made no arrests. A concerted group effort to hide racial tensions. Now the media is minimalizing and downplaying them, reporting them in the most neutral of tones, but they can’t be ignored.
On Friday night we pulled a heist, B&Eed both ends of a drug deal after the fact. It didn’t make sense to me, as we were in the public eye, but Jyri insisted, told me I’d be glad I did it. It was odd, though, because we were to steal over half a million euros, plus the drugs, then take them to another address and hide them in the apartment. We exercised extreme caution. Milo had their cars GPS tracked, their phones tapped. We drove around for an hour first, made sure we weren’t tailed. It went off without a hitch.
We went for a drink after the heist, as had become our habit. As we sipped our beers, paranoia and mistrust finally boiled over. One gangster finally killed another, stabbed him to death and left him in the trunk of his car. Milo learned of it when the killer called his boss to tell him what he had done. If a mafia war started and Helsinki Homicide investigated, everything would unravel and the trail would lead back to us. I decided we had to dispose of the body in the morning.
18
We met outside my apartment building at seven a.m. The media had honored Jyri’s wishes that they deal with him, as I dealt with the investigation and matters of national security. There were no reporters outside my home, no tagalongs as we drove around the city. The only calls and e-mails were from news agencies outside Finland, and I ignored them.
Body disposal fell into the category of subjects off-limits in front of Kate. My keen intuition told me she wouldn’t approve.
The thermometer was on the plus side now, and I noted that the series of grimy icebergs lining the street was shrinking. Not the result of global warming, but of spring. The first tiny buds were appearing on the trees.
We went to a kiosk around the corner and got coffee. A small high table meant for standing rather than sitting made for a good spot to converse, sotto voce.
“Ideas?” I asked.
“I ain’t cuttin’ up no fuckin’ bodies,” Sweetness said.