He recovers his aplomb, tries to regain the offensive. “Everyone-except maybe you, which annoys me-has peccadilloes. I like cooze. That’s not a crime. Sufia Elmi was fine quiff. Exceptional. I would have recommended fucking her to anyone, and I don’t appreciate your superior tone.”
“I don’t care if you fucked Sufia Elmi, but the realization that you did and suppressed it told me you have a habit of being disingenuous, and that habit is impeding my investigation. Iisa Filippov had a history of being, shall we say, generous with her favors. I think you fucked her, too, before Linda Pohjola. You fucked both of Ivan Filippov’s women, and I doubt he appreciated it. You know something about this murder. It’s time to tell me about it.”
An angry suck of air. “Fuck you, Kari. I don’t know anything about it.”
“You’re implicated. You’re now a suspect.”
He swears under his breath, goes silent and waits.
“Where did you and Linda have your encounter?” I ask.
I can almost hear him considering the ramifications of truth versus further duplicity. Seconds tick by. “I had never been there before. Some apartment in Toolo. I was drunk. She took me there and sucked my dick. Then she wanted me to leave. I wandered around, found a taxi stand, went home and passed out.”
Jyri is normally so arrogant that I find myself enjoying his humiliation. “Did your sexual encounter include the employment of a green vibrating double-donged dildo?”
I think she stuck it in his ass, and after he knows that I know it, he’ll tell me anything I want. He doesn’t answer. I picture him on the other end of the phone, wanting to cry.
“I think I know where you were, and I want you to verify it.” I give him Rein Saar’s address. He gives no indication that he recognizes it. I tell him to meet me there at eleven, and hang up without waiting for him to accept or decline.
36
My theratist, Torsten Holmqvist, has on his outdoorsy look this morning, like L.L. Bean laid out his clothes for him. Brown brushed-twill pants, a houndstooth shirt with a lamb’s-wool cardigan, moccasins on his feet. The rugged Torsten, a man of contrasts. His various facades still amuse me, but the enmity I felt toward him is gone.
He’s in a good humor, and mine is better today. We sit in his big leather chairs. He offers me coffee. His morning tea of choice is chamomile. We smoke, relax. He looks out the window toward the sea. I follow his gaze. Snow is thick on the ground. The ice in the harbor is solid. The sun is rising, the sky is clear. “It’s a beautiful day,” he says.
I agree.
“I saw you on the news,” he says, “stopping a school shooter at Ebeneser School. It’s quite a coincidence that you assaulted a man and saved a child at the same location only days apart.”
“It was no coincidence. They were the same man.”
He raises his eyebrows, sucks his pipe. “Do you think those incidents are related?”
I wish he wouldn’t treat me like an idiot. “Of course they’re related. My beating him sparked his attack.” I haven’t said this aloud before, haven’t wanted to think about it.
“Do you believe you caused his death?”
“Yes.”
He crosses his legs and tugs at the perfect crease in his trousers, strokes his chin-psychiatrist cliche-style-with his fingers. “It’s reasonable to think that your bad judgment played a part in his actions, but in my professional opinion, he was a time bomb and would have gone off sooner or later. Don’t take too much upon yourself. Could you tell me about the incident?”
I give him a brief account. Tell him I think Legion had no intention of hurting anyone, just went there to die. Describe putting a gun to my own head. Describe Milo’s cowboy behavior.
“Your fellow detective seems to admire you,” Torsten says, “to the point that he’s proud of killing a man so he can be like you.”
I hadn’t thought of this. “Are you saying I turned Milo into a killer?”
“Milo probably did the right thing, but his false bravado speaks of an unhealthy relationship between you. But like Vesa Korhonen, he was more than likely a time bomb, and your influence upon him lit his fuse.”