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The driveway hasn’t been plowed for a couple days and has a few inches of powdery snow on it. Under the right conditions, tire tracks are as individual and identifiable as fingerprints. These look crisp enough to get the manufacturer and model, but maybe not the specific set of tires. The footprints are in deep snow and won’t yield much, but we might get a shoe size. Esko waits until we finish before he starts his examination.
Sufia is beautiful no longer. What’s left of her tells the story of an agonizing death. My first task is to describe this horror in detail. It makes me feel sad, and inadequate, because the only person able to describe such depths of suffering would have been Sufia herself. Valtteri starts shooting pictures. The flash pops every few seconds and lights up the blood and snow and Sufia, and I feel like I’m living in a grainy black-and-white photograph.
I start the tape recorder, and Esko takes out a notebook and pen. I’ll do a verbal description while he does a written one, for the same reason that Antti draws while Valtteri photographs, to rule out the chance of documentation being lost. I kneel down in the snow beside her. “Let me know if I miss anything.”
He nods. I run the beam of my flashlight up and down her body and start.
“General observations. A nude female body. The victim is black. A cord”— I take off my glove, reach over and touch it— “of silk or similar synthetic material, is around her neck, and ligatures suggest it was used as a means of control. The snow is disturbed in a five-yard line between the tire tracks and the location of her body. It appears she either crawled or was dragged from the vehicle to her present location.”
“Dragged, I think,” Esko says.
“The snow is unbroken outside the immediate vicinity of the body and drag line. Her arms are raised at forty-five-degree angles over her head. Her legs are spread, and the indentations in the snow indicate that she thrashed around as her killer assaulted her. Evidence such as other weapons or her clothing would be readily visible were they present. They’re not. The victim is mutilated. Her face is brutalized, but I recognize her. She’s the actress Sufia Elmi. The words neekeri huora, nigger whore, have been cut into her stomach.”
My worst fears are confirmed. This is a hate crime. It’s hard to believe anyone could have hated her so much. The question, despite the words carved on her stomach, is what could have inspired this kind of hatred? Was it her race, her beauty, or something else?
“A half-liter Lapin Kulta beer bottle has been broken off at the neck and inserted, broken end first, by means of twisting and cutting, into the victim’s vagina. No glass shards from the shattered bottle are evident. The victim was hit with a blunt instrument, which left a contusion on her forehead.”
Esko stoops down beside me. “She was struck twice. Probably with a carpenter’s hammer.”
I nod. “Probably with a carpenter’s hammer. Her eyes have been gouged out, maybe with the broken bottle. A superficial piece of skin from her right breast, about three by four inches, is sliced off and located beside the victim, near her left shoulder. There’s a long deep cut across her lower abdomen. Her throat is slashed. The clean cuts suggest the killer used an edged weapon, not the beer bottle, to inflict those wounds.”
“He left the piece of her breast,” Esko says. “Not a trophy taker.”
“At least three instruments appear to have been used to mutilate the victim, one blunt and heavy, as evidenced by the two blows to the head, and two sharp ones, one the beer bottle and the other an edged weapon.”
“I’d guess a serrated hunting knife,” Esko says.
“Have I missed anything?” I ask.
“I don’t think so.”
Something glints in the beam of my flashlight. I get down close to her. “What’s this stuff on her face?”
“Where?”
I point out three small streaks. “By her nose, on her cheek.”
“I don’t know,” Esko says.
“Think he spit on her?”
“It doesn’t look viscous enough for saliva.”
“It wouldn’t even be noticeable if she was white. Hard to see it as it is. Make sure you get a sample for testing. Anything else?”
Esko shakes his head no. He takes her hands, careful to keep from disturbing the snow lodged under her manicured fingernails, looks them over and puts plastic bags around them. He takes blood samples from various areas in the snow around the body, and a sample of the liquid on her face. “Listen,” he says, “I’m out of my depth, I’ve never handled anything like this. This is going to be international news and I’m afraid I’ll fuck it up.”
I appreciate his feelings. It’s been a long time since I conducted a difficult murder investigation. Plus, it’s near Christmas and four officers from our force of eight are on vacation. We don’t even have an evening shift— we’re taking turns being on call at night. Even our dispatcher is on vacation. It’s an ideal time to commit a murder. A local would know this, and it bothers me.
“We have tire tracks,” I say, “and the body will yield a lot of evidence. We’ll solve this.”
We kneel in the snow and look at each other for a few seconds, both at a loss for words. From the pen outside the barn, a pregnant reindeer looks on with indifference. Aslak stands not far away, rolling a cigarette. I want this not to have happened. I want to be at home with Kate, to lay my hand on her belly and imagine our child growing inside it. I look across the snowfield. Aslak’s house is a shadow in the distance. Almost a year and a half ago, Kate and I met in his backyard.
The Saame people, Laplanders, suffer a lot of prejudice here, like Eskimos in Alaska. Every year on midsummer, Aslak throws a lavish party, invites friends, neighbors and the more prominent members of the community. Maybe it’s a way of proving to himself and everybody else how much he’s achieved despite the odds against him. Maybe it’s his way of saying, “Fuck you, I’m Saame and I’m richer than you are.” He has his own midsummer tradition: roasting a whole reindeer on a spit like other people roast wild boar. I’ve never seen anyone else do that.
Kate and I met at Aslak’s party. It was getting late, but this is the land of the midnight sun and in summer, especially after a few drinks, it’s easy to lose track of time because of the constant daylight. It feels like early evening all night long. I heard a voice speaking English and saw it belonged to a tall redhead across the lawn. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Kate was standing in a crowd, talking to a girl named Liisa, an assistant manager at Levi Center. Liisa and I had gone out a couple times a while back, but it never amounted to anything. I walked over. They were drunk and giddy.
“Kari, this is Kate Hodges,” Liisa said. “She’s in Finland interviewing to be the new general manager of Levi Center. Kate, this is Kari Vaara. He’s the chief of police here. His name means Rock Danger.”
Kate burst out laughing. “Rock Danger, like a name in a bad movie?”
I had never thought about it. The idea made me laugh too. “It could mean that. Kari means rock, scar, shoal or reef. Vaara means hill, danger, risk or pitfall. So my name could be Reef Hill or Scar Pitfall. However you look at it, it sounds stupid in English. I promise it sounds better in Finnish.”
“You speak excellent English,” Kate said.
“Kari is a smart guy,” Liisa said. “He speaks Swedish and Russian too.”
“My Russian is weak,” I said.
“I was just telling Kate about midsummer,” Liisa said. “I explained that midsummer marks the summer solstice and is also Finnish Flag Day, that we have a tradition of going to sauna and having a big bonfire at midnight. Care to add anything?”
“Midsummer is the longest day of the year and a pagan festival of light,” I said. “It was Christianized into a celebration of the nativity of St. John the Baptist. That’s why in Finnish it’s called Juhannus. For pagans, it was a potent magical night, mostly for young women seeking men or wanting children or both. The burning of the bonfire is associated with beliefs concerning fertility, cleansing of the soul and the banishing of evil spirits.”
“Rock Danger,” Kate said, “you sound like an educated man.”
I smiled. “I’m a font of useless information.”
Kate pulled Liisa away a few steps. They whispered back and forth. I stood in the middle of a group of drunk people munching roasted reindeer and potato salad off paper plates, watched Kate and thought again how beautiful she was. She and Liisa finished their palaver and came back. “So this pagan thing,” Kate said. “Does it mean women can ask men out on midsummer?”
“I’m certain it does,” I said.
Alcohol had worked Kate’s courage up and, during their chat, Liisa had tried to teach her to speak a sentence in Finnish. “Komea mies,” she said, “lähtisitkö ulos ja pane minua syömään?”
Her pronunciation was strange, but what she said was clear enough. People around us burst out laughing. I felt my face turn red. She meant to say, “Handsome man, would you like to go out to dinner with me?” but what came out was something like, “Handsome man, would you like to go out and fuck me for dinner?”
Kate’s face turned red too. “What did I say wrong?” she asked.
Liisa whispered it to her.
Kate’s eyes fluttered like she was going to cry. She walked away from the people still laughing at her.
I went after her. She turned and looked at me, humiliated.
“I’d love to take you to dinner,” I said.
Then she saw the humor, managed a smile.
“They’re going to light the bonfire soon,” I said. “Want to go watch it with me?”
“That would be nice,” she said.
She took my hand, it surprised me. We started walking. “You limp,” she said. “How come?”
“Somebody shot me. How come you limp?”
“I fell.”
We held hands and watched the bonfire in silence. Afterward, I asked Kate if she would like to come over to my house for a drink.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“About a poronkusema from here.”
“How far is that?”
“A poronkusema is a Laplander measure of distance that means ‘reindeer piss.’ A reindeer can’t urinate when it pulls a sled, and it gets a clogged urinary tract if you don’t stop and let it pee once in a while. A poronkusema is about ten miles, around thirty minutes of riding on a sled.”
“You really are a font of useless information,” she said.
We went to my place. Six weeks later we were engaged. Nine months later we were married.
It’s hard to believe that this place, the site of an event that led to such happiness for me, is now the scene of such tragedy. I look down again at Sufia’s mangled corpse. “Esko . . . ”
“Yeah?”
I need to ask the question but I’m afraid to hear the answer. “How much of what happened do you think she was conscious for?”
“She’s such a mess that I can’t say without an autopsy. I’ve been wondering the same thing. Still, it could have been worse.”
“How?”
He stands up and brushes the snow off his pants. “She could have lived through it.”
I look down at Sufia the snow angel. Her face changes and I imagine Kate naked and slaughtered, dead in a snowfield. The wave of sadness I felt earlier renews itself, and for the first time in my life I’m sorry that Finland has no death penalty.
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