“How did you do that?”
“With intrusion software. I uploaded the hard drives to a server in Amsterdam and created mirrors of them. I found nothing related directly to Iisa Filippov’s murder, but turned up some financial discrepancies of some hundreds of thousands of euros. The money was deposited in numbered offshore accounts.”
I’m impressed. He’s the right guy for black-bag work. “Did you go through their home computers, too?”
“No, they weren’t booted up, and I couldn’t get it in. However, I got in touch with a staff member at Oulun Kotipalvelu, where Linda’s mother, Marjut, died. He’s worked there for twenty years and knew Marjut well. He checked the guest logs for me. Linda had visited semiregularly and saw her mother on September 9, 1998. Linda’s eighteenth birthday. After that, she never saw her mother again. Marjut had been in good spirits, but after Linda’s visit, went into a funk that lasted until she died. Marjut entered care in 1990, when Linda was ten. Linda was in foster care until she was sixteen, then disappeared and went off the radar until she came of age. Around the time that Marjut conceived Linda, she lived in Helsinki and worked as an escort or prostitute.”
“For Jonne Kultti?”
“Bingo. And Kultti offed himself three days after Linda visited Marjut, after which the mother and daughter were estranged. I think Marjut wrote to Kultti.”
“And the contents of the letter drove him to suicide. A viable theory.”
Milo lights one of his tough-guy cigarettes. “I also took your advice and Web-searched Bettie Page. A good call. It turned up some interesting stuff.”
He pauses. I’m afraid he’s going to sidetrack again. And a child was born in Bethlehem. But he doesn’t.
Milo says, “Bettie Page was placed in an orphanage at age ten, much as Linda was placed in foster care at the same age. Bettie Page’s father sexually abused her after she left the orphanage. I think it’s possible that Marjut bore Kultti’s child. She never told him, but she told Linda, and Linda went to look for him. Maybe Linda was afraid of rejection and never told Kultti he was her father. Maybe she thought the only way of having a relationship with Kultti was to work for him, and she re-created herself as Bettie Page to the extent that she had sex with her own father. She told her mother, who, consumed by grief, wrote to Kultti and let him know his own daughter was sucking his cock. Then he went to pieces and shot himself.”
“That would make Iisa and Linda half sisters and explain their close resemblance,” I say.
“We would need to run a DNA test to find out.”
I stretch out in Filippov’s chair. This line of inquiry feels right to me. If Linda and Iisa were half sisters, it might explain motivations for the murder that we’re as yet unaware of. “That’s a tough one. With half siblings, it’s hard to determine parentage without the cooperation of the potential parents, and in this case, they’re all dead. It could be done, but might take weeks.”
“I wonder if Iisa knew Linda was her sister?” Milo asks.
Then the lightning bolt hits me and I sit up straight. “I wonder if the dead woman in Rein Saar’s bed was really Iisa, or if it was Linda?”
The idea jars us both, and we ponder it in silence for a while. “Let’s split this team up,” I say, “and search all three places at once. We leave some guys here, you take some to Filippov’s house, and I take some to Linda’s, since I haven’t been there before. Maybe we can find some documentation to substantiate all this.”
Milo and I finish up at Filippov Construction, go through their phones and all the video disks we run across. We find nothing and leave to search Linda’s and Filippov’s homes.
40