Jarkko Sipila - Against the Wall

Forty-five-year-old Takamäki wore a gray sport coat, blue tie, and a white shirt. He had short brown hair, which he combed to the left, an angular face, and slightly sunken cheeks. His straight nose was straddled by piercing blue eyes. VCU cops had a saying that seeing a hundred corpses made your eyes callous. Takamäki had doubled that number a long time ago.

“Okay, let’s run through the case first, so everyone’s on the same page.”

Kohonen interrupted, “Just the five of us working on this?”

“Don’t you trust my detective prowess?” Kulta joked.

“I don’t. This is a homicide, not a property crime,” Joutsamo shot back. She had already done some preliminary work on the case.

Takamäki was puzzled by the exchange, but decided to get back on course. “We’ll get help later on, I’ll brief them when they get here. Suhonen, you want to start?”

Suhonen nodded. “Yeah… One of my informants brought the case to my attention last night. He told me that a certain Jerry Eriksson was rumored to have been killed and gave me a lead on a possible location.”

“How’d he know about it?” Joutsamo asked.

“Good question,” Suhonen said. “I asked, but he didn’t say.”

“Okay,” Joutsamo jotted down some notes.

“Jerry?” Kulta said, curious about the English name. “What Jerry?”

“Baptized as Jerry, toe-tagged as Jerry,” Suhonen said, paused, and then continued. “Anyway. The coordinates I got were pretty vague. After the meeting, I decided to search the area around the Pakila Teboil station. According to the tip, it was possible the body was in an abandoned house. It took a few hours, but by about three in the morning, I stumbled on the right garage. There was a body there alright.”

“Was it Eriksson?” Kohonen asked.

“Presumably, but no positive ID yet. I only had my flashlight, but I was able to determine it was a corpse, not a mannequin.”

Kulta interjected, “Those flashlights can come in handy.”

“What?” Takamäki furrowed his brow.

“Nothing,” Kulta said. “Go ahead, Suhonen.”

Suhonen took a sip of coffee. “Anyway, the body was lying there, so I checked it to make sure he was dead. I tried to disturb the area as little as possible so Forensics would have a clean crime scene. I called in for a cruiser to seal off the garage, and Kannas’ techies got there around six in the morning, isn’t that right?”

Takamäki nodded.

“What kind of place was this?” Joutsamo asked.

“It’s an old abandoned one-story farm house with a separate garage. There’s all kinds of junk in the yard, and walls full of graffiti. I don’t know who owns it, but clearly nobody has lived there for a while,” Suhonen said.

“Was he killed there in the garage, or moved from someplace else?” Kulta asked.

Suhonen shrugged. “My guess is he was killed there, but Forensics can make the final call.”

“We have confirmation from Kannas that the guy was dead, and that nobody was in the house,” Takamäki said. “He thought he’d have more info by noon.”

“Sounds like they’re using a slow approach. Good,” Joutsamo remarked. In forensics, a slow approach meant that the investigators don’t just bolt over to the body. Instead, every inch of the floor is studied systematically as they approach the body, so that all evidence in the room is recorded without contamination.

Takamäki let Joutsamo continue.

“Okay, for now we’re going to presume that the victim is, in fact, this Jerry Eriksson. I took a look at his record.”

Joutsamo took several printouts of Eriksson’s mug shot from her stack of papers and passed them around. His face was narrow, his hair tousled. His gaze was vacant, as in most police photos.

“This Eriksson seems to be one of these fast money guys. Twenty-seven years old and lived in Helsinki. We even found an address in Kannelmäki. He was a typical modern con man who knew how to use technology to his benefit. Back in 2000 or so, he had his own cluster of companies involved in charity fraud, as well as some other businesses, like selling cellphone games and ringtones. I’m not sure whether Eriksson was fronting for somebody else or if those were actually his own deals. At any rate, the charity frauds earned him a year and a half in the spring of ’06.”

“That kind of guy usually has plenty of enemies,” Kulta interjected.

“I haven’t had time to check on any of his known associates yet,” Joutsamo added. “We also found some older, minor drug charges, and a few fraud convictions. Then there’s this tidbit from Suhonen’s source about the possibility of Eriksson being a Customs nark.”

“Aha,” said Kulta.

“That would constitute a motive for murder. He was shot, wasn’t he?” Joutsamo looked at Suhonen.

Suhonen nodded. “Bullet hole in the forehead, not sure from how far away. Forensics or the medical examiner will give us an estimated time of death. It wasn’t a very fresh kill, though, I’d say two or three days ago, max.”

“Okay,” Joutsamo said. “This garage doesn’t seem like the kind of place where one ends up accidentally. We can assume that Eriksson plus the shooter, at a minimum, were in the garage. Seems reasonable to assume that Eriksson was either lured there on purpose or then they had some deal that went bad all of a sudden.”

“How reliable is this ‘nark’ allegation?” Kulta asked.

“Just word on the street, though it came from the same source as the one about the body.”

Kulta nodded. “Why did the killer leave the body there?” he wondered. “Obviously, if you leave it someplace like that, sooner or later someone’s going to find it.”

“Good point,” Takamäki said.

Joutsamo continued, “On top of that, how did word get out so quickly? Maybe the body was supposed to be found…like someone wanted to send a message. Suhonen’s source could be complicit in that.”

“I don’t think so. He’s not at that level,” said Suhonen.

“Plus, why would he have come to the police himself?” Kulta pointed out.

Takamäki cleared his throat. “Right, we can speculate endlessly on these issues, but first we need some hard facts,” he said.

“Never assume,” Kulta said, smiling. He had heard that from Takamäki dozens of times.

“Well said, Mikko. You’ve got the mind of a true cop-a traffic cop,” the detective lieutenant grinned. “Let’s start by digging up everything we can about Eriksson. I want a comprehensive background check. Anna, dig deeper into his history and track down his phone numbers so we can determine his friends and contacts. Stay in touch with Kannas, too. I’d think Jerry would’ve been carrying a cellphone.”

“Okay,” said Joutsamo.

“Mikko, check out Eriksson’s apartment in Kannelmäki.”

Kulta nodded.

“And Kirsi,” Takamäki turned toward Kohonen. “You take Pakila, see if any of the residents or businesses there have seen or heard anything. Suhonen, if you’re not too tired, try to figure out who Eriksson has been hanging out with lately.”

They stood up.

“I’ll go talk to Customs,” Takamäki said. “Our next meeting is at two P.M. By then we should have more information from Kannas, too.”

“Kind of a tough case,” Kulta added.

“Naah,” Joutsamo grinned. “These murder cases just solve themselve, right? Just wait for a cruiser to drop off the killer for a confession.”

Usually that wasn’t too far from the truth, she thought. Finland was home to one of the top per capita homicide rates in Western Europe, but most slayings were the result of intoxicated drug and alcohol addicts solving their disputes with whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Sometimes the perpetrators called the police themselves to blubber a confession. At other times, they were too intoxicated to notice the death until morning.