James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

Milo and his stories of biblical length. I wish, just this once, he would cut to the chase.

“So anyway, I bought a hunting knife in there. My disguise was a baseball cap and sunglasses I got at a gas station. The gas stations are weird, too. Huge. They stock like a hundred different kinds of energy drink. Why the fuck would you need a hundred different kinds of energy drink?”

I’m resisting the urge to yell at him.

“John’s daily routine consists of going out early, buying eight balls of heroin and cocaine, flogging most of it, and using the rest to support his habit. I followed his dealer, B amp;Eed his house, and stole an ounce of each. The next morning, I met John on his way out to buy dope. I told him Kate was leaving with me. He got all indignant and threatening until I put the knife to his throat and showed him the dope. I told him I would trade him the dope for Kate. The price: he could never, ever, have contact with her again. And I lectured him, told him he could either put the shit up his nose, or sell it and pay for rehab. He snatched the drugs out of my hands and told me to come pick up Kate later in the day. He sold me his sister.”

“No surprise there,” I say.

“So I showed up in the afternoon, she was half in the bag, and I told her to start packing, that she was going home now. She got haughty and told me to make her. I showed her the knife and said if she didn’t, I would kill John on the spot. He played his role, backed me up, told her she belonged with her husband and child and he was kicking her out.”

“How did she take it?”

“Badly. But, as you can see, she did it.”

“What do you think will happen to him?” I ask.

“He has a laptop on a table facing his couch. It has a webcam in it. I infected the computer, so we can watch him with his webcam and find out.”

I didn’t take Milo’s voyeuristic obsessions into account. Of course he has to know what happens to John. His life wouldn’t feel complete without it. In giving John the drugs, he played a game. Sell them and detox and live. Put them up his nose and die. Speeedball freaks have short life spans. Play for blood. Milo spun the roulette wheel and played for John’s life.

“I have hard things to tell you,” I say.

I start with Mirjami and work through the murder of the Russian diplomat to the poker game and The Shit List to the harassment and discovering Captain Jan Pitkanen was behind it.

He doesn’t say a word while I talk. I watch fury course through him, see veins in his neck and forehead pumping harder and harder as his heart races from adrenaline. When I’m finished, he says, “People will die for this.”

“Who? We’ve made so many enemies that we can’t kill them all.”

“You realize,” Milo says, “that they burned up Kate’s car. Your wife was the target and my cousin, Mirjami, was just collateral damage.”

I’m pretty sure he’s right, but think we should make sure before we let our emotions run high and go on some half-cocked revenge spree. In the end, we could wind up behind bars, and prisons aren’t the nicest places for anyone to live, but especially not for cops. “We should find out the cause of the fire before doing anything,” I say.

“Fine. Let’s go look at it.”

“I can’t. I want to be here when Kate wakes up.”

I also want to find Loviise Tamm again and parade her in front of Kate to prove the sanctity of my mission. I hear the trumpets sounding again.

Milo snickers and talks to me like a child. “Kate hasn’t slept in two days, she’s got more alcohol than blood coursing through her system, and I just doped her with enough tranquilizers to knock down a horse. She’s not waking up today. Maybe tomorrow.”

I call her therapist. Torsten asks how I got her home. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, “but now that I have, I need to know how to best take care of her.”

He asks me to bring her to his office tomorrow at eleven a.m. And he would like to talk to both of us, not just Kate. I agree.

Sweetness and Jenna are still in bed. I ask Jenna if she minds looking after Anu for a while. She says she will, and asks if I’m pissed off at her. I say no. I ask Sweetness if he can clean up any blood left over from last night, because it might upset Kate to see it. He promises.

I go to the bedroom to get dressed. Kate snores like a chain saw. Milo is right, she’s dead to the world. As he said, “Maybe tomorrow.”

Milo drives his Crown Victoria, the cliche of all police cars, and we go to the National Bureau of Investigation garage. A forensic mechanic is underneath the Audi when we enter. We announce our presence, he slides out from underneath the chassis, and we introduce ourselves.

“I heard people got hurt,” he says, “are they going to make it?”

“Two girls got burned,” I say, “one very bad, somebody close to us, but she’ll make it.”

“I’m sorry for her,” he says. “I can picture the fire from the state of the vehicle.”

Milo and I nod thanks for his sympathy. “What happened?” I ask.

He wipes grease off his hands with a filthy rag. “To be honest, I’m stumped. You guys know cars?”

We both say yes.

The hood is up, some parts under it disassembled. He points at them as he explains. “You got two of the fuel injectors clogged by carbon, like you were using cheap petrol, but the others are clean. So you had two pistons not working and fuel spraying onto the engine. That could start a fire, but it would take a few minutes until the temperature reached combustion level, and the fire broke out almost as soon as she started the car. Plus, it’s a new car, has only seven thousand kilometers on it. Not enough mileage for that dense carbon buildup. And why only those two? And how did the fire make it to the gas tank? The fuel line would have had to lose pressure for the fire to travel backward and ignite there. It’s not easy to start a gasoline fire. You can throw a cigarette into a bucket of gas and like as not it will just go out. It’s the fumes that ignite, and a little oxygen helps. The gas cap is gone. I guess it blew off when the tank exploded. And last, why the fire inside the car? It came up out of the floor like it had fuel there, like the gas line sprayed it up there. The line is burned up. It’s hard to tell what happened with it.”

“The car has only been driven a few times in the past few weeks,” I say, “and for short distances. I filled it last, and I’m sure the tank was almost full. And no way the injectors were clogged. It’s just not possible.”

The mechanic raises his hands in frustration, apologetic. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t picture the scenario that led to a fire like that.”

Milo says, “Picture this. The car was stolen and taken to a garage where it could be worked on. Two good fuel injectors were replaced with clogged ones. The car was driven back, running on four cylinders. Then petrol was siphoned out of it and replaced with a hot fuel mix, like in race cars, to make the remaining pistons work on overdrive and heat up the engine fast. They probably didn’t put a lot of fuel in the car, because a full tank might hamper the combustion with lack of oxygen, just enough to get the car started and travel a short distance, in case it took that long for the car to heat up and the fire to start. The gas cap was left off to provide the oxygen and help the tank blow when the fire hit the fumes. Some holes were punched into the gas line, to spray up under the driver’s floorboards. Some volatile accelerant, maybe ether in plastic containers, was placed in the engine compartment and under the driver somewhere. The plastic melted, the ether or whatever accelerant ignited, and then the injector nozzles were spraying fire. The squirting fuel line lost pressure and the fire traveled backward. It shot out of the fuel line and spewed flame into the combustible under the driver, which ignited, and back into the gas tank, which then blew.”