“My grandpa showed it to me while he taught me to shoot.”
My own words take me by surprise. My ukki, now an accused mass murderer, taught a child how to dum-dum bullets. I suppose a man from his generation-born just after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, and then later a combat veteran of the Second World War-must have thought the generation to come should be prepared for wars of its own.
“Your grandpa must have been a cool guy.”
“Yeah, he was.”
I fold up the knife and put it back in my pocket. I think about where I got it, and whatever amusement I feel at Milo’s expense disappears. Valtteri’s son used it to butcher Sufia Elmi. Valtteri said he hid the murder weapon by keeping it in his pocket, because no one would ever look for it there, and so he would have a constant reminder of his failures. After the inquest, I stole the knife from the evidence locker, and like Valtteri, I keep it in my pocket so I won’t forget my own failures.
“Are you going to tell anyone about my hobbies?” Milo asks.
“You realize that, even if you remain a policeman until retirement age, the odds of you having to fire your pistol in the line of duty are about a thousand to one.”
“You did,” he says.
Point taken. “Just stop doing it,” I say.
He nods.
With agile fingers, Milo reassembles the Glock in under a minute. He practices fieldstripping it. “What did the head honcho want?” he asks.
“Too much,” I say.
The visit from the chief intrigues him. I can see he wants to press the issue, but restrains himself.
“Any dead bodies to look at?” I ask.
“Yeah. Some.”
Helsinki homicide is a body factory. I check out three to four corpses during a normal shift. Always understaffed, the three teams in murharyhma, the homicide division, a total of around twenty-five detectives, look into about thirteen hundred deaths a year. Most of them, as homicide cops call them, are grandmas and grandpas, the natural deaths of the elderly. A fair share of the remaining deaths are accidental. About a dozen of those twelve hundred will be ruled homicides and investigated, down from about three dozen murders only a decade ago, due to improved on-site trauma care and response time. It’s saved a lot of lives. Also, I figure because of the massive volume of death investigations, some of the more subtle premeditated murders go undetected.
We also look into an average of a hundred and twenty-five suicides each year. Helsinki has a higher rate than the rest of Finland, partly because of sexual minorities. They come from all over the country to the nation’s largest city, seeking the acceptance and promise of happiness that they lacked in smaller communities. Since they have higher rates of depression and mental illness than the city’s norm, and hence a greater propensity toward selfdestruction, I presume many of them don’t find what they’re looking for. In the couple of weeks that I’ve been working in homicide, I’ve looked at twenty-seven dead bodies, but I’ve yet to investigate one as a possible murder.
Over the next hours, Milo and I examine an overdosed junkie, a middle-aged man who died of a heart attack while watching television, and a teenage girl who got drunk, passed out in the snow and froze to death. It’s eight thirty a.m. We should have gotten off work a half hour ago. My phone rings. It’s Arto, my boss. “I know your shifts are over,” he says, “but we’re shorthanded. I’ve got a murder for you if you want to take it.”
This takes me aback. I didn’t think he was prepared to trust either me or Milo with a murder and risk the precious murharyhma winning streak and reputation, unless we stumbled upon one in a normal death investigation and he couldn’t take it away from us.
“Do tell,” I say.