While he explained, Kate unbuttoned her blouse and, at a discreet angle to the rest of us, began breast-feeding Anu. While I admired the cane, I noticed Moreau admire my wife in a way I wasn’t fond of. He picked up on my disapproval.
“Forgive me,” he said. “You have a most lovely family. Your wife calls to mind someone I once knew, and she too had an infant.”
I didn’t know if I liked him or detested him, but was sure that if my emotions were as they once had been, my feelings toward him would be nothing in between.
I opened the lion’s mouth and smacked the edge of the coffee table. Anu yelped. It bit so deep I couldn’t pull it free, had to depress the eyes to make it let go. Kate looked at me with disapproval. I had disturbed the child and damaged the table.
My knee would be fully recovered soon. I would limp, but it would be almost unnoticeable. “Milo,” I said, “this is the most wonderful toy I’ve ever owned. Thank you. It makes me almost sad I won’t need it for long.”
“You can always use it,” he answered. “A man doesn’t walk with a cane, he wears it.”
Moreau turned to Milo. “I think everyone is tired, perhaps we should make our exit. Are there more weapons in the unopened packages?”
“Yes.”
“Are they anything special?”
Milo grinned. “Extra special.”
“Do you know how to use them?”
Milo laughed. “Not a fucking clue.”
“I’m probably familiar with them. Why don’t we drop off the others and have a look at them together.”
Kate was off in her own little world, admiring her gifts, expensive and precious things that, when she was younger, brought up poor, she could never have conceived of possessing. She looked up at us. “Is this what comes of being a criminal’s wife?” she asked.
Moreau answered. “No. This is what comes of being the wife of a powerful man.”
Milo had thrown a hell of a party. Once the others were out of the house, we got Anu to sleep and made love again.
22
Milo came over the next day to finish his last “synthesizable VHDL model of exact solutions for a three-dimensional hyperbolic positioning system.”
We sat at the dining room table. Kate lay near us on the couch, reading a book. I continued wading through files, a policeman’s nightmare drudgery. I was firm in my belief now, though, that the identity of Lisbet S?derlund’s murderer was an open secret, and the way to solve this case was through the application of intimidation and pressure, or maybe through the application of biographical leverage—blackmail—until someone ratted out the killer.
I viewed these files with a different eye now, deciding who to approach. I agreed with Moreau, and I was now looking for someone who not only was capable of decapitating a woman but was also an accomplished marksman. This narrowed down the field a great deal. The shooter likely had considerable military experience, well beyond that of a typical Finnish conscript.
It occurred to me that Moreau would fill the bill as the murderer. I made some calls, checked with the French police. They refused to provide details, but he wasn’t in Finland at the time of Kaarina Saukko’s murder. However, he was a policeman on a diplomatic passport, listed as an attaché at the French embassy.
The disappearance of Antti Saukko troubled me. It was entirely possible, given his relationship with his family, that his kidnappers released him and he chose to simply change his identity and disappear. Pursuing a missing person, unless there is some reason to indicate that said missing person is the victim of a crime, is trampling on that individual’s rights. We have the entitlement to abandon our lives at will, hence the policy of no body, no murder. The fate of the three missing children of kidnapper Jussi Kosonen concerned me, but it wasn’t my case.
My cane leaned against the table beside me. Milo nodded toward it. “You know, you could poison the teeth on that thing if you wanted to. Did you enjoy your party yesterday?”