Antti Tuomainen: The Healer

I realized that I was looking for connections between what I’d just read and what I was now seeing.

Johanna.

Out there somewhere.

Like I’d told Lassi, there was no point in my going to the police. If they didn’t have the time or the resources to look for the murderer of these families, how would they have the time to look for a woman missing for twenty-four hours, one of thousands of missing people?

The Healer.

West–East or North–South.

The night didn’t seem to hold any answers. The music thumped upstairs. The wind moved through the trees on the slope of the ridge below, singing through the bare branches as well as it could but able to prevail against the barrier of human and machine-made sound only for brief moments. The cold of the balcony’s cement floor on the soles of my feet prompted me to seek warmth.

I returned to the kitchen table, read through all of Johanna’s documents on the Healer one more time, made some coffee, and tried to call her again. It was no surprise when the number could not be reached. It was also no surprise that a hint of panic and desperation was beginning to splash through my worried mind.

There was one thing I could be sure of: Johanna had disappeared on a job investigating something connected with the Healer.

I pushed all other thoughts aside, drank my coffee, and read the printouts of the e-mails the Healer had sent to Johanna, in the order they were received. As I read them, I sorted them into two piles. In the first, I put messages where the necessity of the crimes was defended, sometimes at great length, and Johanna’s previous articles were mentioned, sometimes with the implication that her work was something like the Healer’s—to uncover lies and to liberate. The other pile contained the messages that directly stated where the murder victims could be found and contained only a few hastily and poorly written lines.

I leafed through the piles again and came to the same conclusion that I had the first time. There were two authors. At least in theory. At least that’s what I thought.

I opened the map Johanna had made again. It was like a pocket guide to hell. I moved through the red points marking the murders, went through the dates and Johanna’s figures. There were two or three days between the murders. Johanna had added a question mark to each of the four points of the compass and calculated possible locations of future murders.

As I stared at the map, the icon for Johanna’s e-mail program caught my eye. I hesitated. Reading another person’s e-mail is undoubtedly wrong. But maybe this situation was an exception. Besides, we didn’t have any secrets from each other, did we? I decided that I would open her e-mail only if the situation absolutely demanded it. In the meantime I would get by strictly on what related directly to the article Johanna was working on now.

I remembered the phone call I’d recorded, turned on my own laptop, and plugged my phone into it.

I copied the last conversation I’d had with Johanna onto the computer, searched a moment for the right program, downloaded it, and opened the audio file with it. The audio editing software was easy to use. I separated the sounds, removed my and Johanna’s voices, and listened. I could hear the noise of cars, a rumble, and the same murmuring sound I’d heard before. I listened to it again and again, then separated out the rumble and the sound of cars until I was able to make out the tone of the murmur by itself. With a hopeful feeling I seemed to hear something regularly repeating, not wind or the brush of coat sleeves but something with a much more even rhythm: waves. I played the file again and shut my eyes, trying to listen and remember at the same time.

Was it the sound of waves, or was I just hearing what I wanted to hear?

I let the sound play in a loop and looked at Johanna’s map and calculations. Maybe this murmur, its regular repetition, really did indicate the sea or the seashore. Assuming that the murders occurred over a two- or three-day cycle, then the points set apart by dates and question marks, following the Healer’s crimes from north to south—however roughly—would converge somewhere around Jätkäsaari, on the southwest shore of the city.

Furthermore, assuming that Johanna had come to the same conclusion, then that would have been the area she called me from the last time we spoke.

The taxi driver, a young North African man, didn’t speak Finnish and didn’t want to use the meter. That suited me. We agreed on a price, half in English, half using our fingers, and the meter was left glowing four zeros in the dark car as he accelerated away from my apartment and onto Hiihtomäentie, past the metro station and the abandoned shopping center and across the overpass toward Itäväylä. He avoided the potholes and cracks in the road as skillfully as he did drivers who made dangerous passes or swerved out of their lanes.

The waterfront homes at Kulosaari were, with a few exceptions, among the first houses left empty by their owners and were now filled with new arrivals. Those who had the means had moved north: those with the most means to northern Canada, the rest to Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian Lapland. Dozens of high-security, privately owned small towns had been established in the north in recent years, both on the Arctic coast and in the interior, with self-contained water, sewage, and electrical systems—and, of course, hundreds of uniformed guards to keep out undesirables.

Now the majority of those living in the dark houses of Kulosaari were refugees from the east and south. A string of tents and campfires lined the shore. The coexistence between the refugees and the tenacious original inhabitants defending their houses and shoreline wasn’t always peaceful. The Healer would no doubt have had an opinion about that, as well.

As we drove I looked through the news videos in Johanna’s H file. The closer they got to the present, the more exasperated the reporters were in their questions, and the more exhausted the police were in their answers. The statements of the red-eyed police inspector in charge of the investigation were, in the end, confined to the comment “We will continue to investigate and let you know when we have any new information.” I moved his name from the screen to my phone memory and looked up his number. Chief Inspector Harri Jaatinen.

I leaned back in my seat.

When had I known for certain that something had happened to Johanna? When I woke up at four in the morning and heard a dog barking? Making coffee two hours later, after it became obvious that getting up would be less trouble than continuing to try to go back to sleep? Or did the doubt change to fear over the hours of the day as I mechanically did my work, checking my telephone every other minute?

The young cab driver was good at his job—he knew where the roads were out and proceeded accordingly. When we got to Pitkäsilta we stopped at the intersection and a stretch SUV pulled up beside us with its rear window open. I quickly counted eight young men inside—their expressionless faces, their forward-focused lazy-lidded eyes, and their tattooed necks told me they weren’t just gang members but also probably armed. As the SUV pulled into traffic, not one man’s expression faltered.

There was a fire in Kaisaniemi Park. Judging by the height of the flames, it must have been a car or something. The massive column of flame was like the mark of a bacchanal in the otherwise lightless night. At the corner of Vilhonkatu and Mikonkatu I heard gunshots and saw three men running toward the park. They disappeared before the echo of the shots had faded. People were kicking a man lying prostrate in front of the Natural History Museum. Then someone, apparently the strongest of the group, started dragging him by his filthy clothes toward the metro tunnel entrance, perhaps planning to throw him down the shaft.