Snow Angels

“Yes.”

“Then you do it. Give me your phone number.”

I give him my work and cell phone numbers.

“My wife and I will drive from Helsinki and be there tomorrow, to see our daughter. And you.”

I call Jaakko Pahkala. I’ve known him since I was a cop in Helsinki. He’s a freelance writer for the Helsinki daily newspaper, Ilta-sanomat, and also for the gossip magazine Seitsemän Päivää and the true-crime rag Alibi. There’s little about the goings-on of our celebrities that Jaakko doesn’t know.

“This is Kari Vaara. Sufia Elmi is vacationing in Kittilä. Do you know where she’s staying?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you if you tell me why you’re asking.”

“Because she’s dead.” I didn’t mean to be so gruff. This day isn’t going the way I had hoped.

“Jesus,” he says, “I’m sorry. How?”

He doesn’t sound sorry, he sounds itchy for details. Jaakko loves his work. “She was murdered yesterday. I’ll give you the scoop and fax you the police report before I enter it into the crime database if you help me out.”

“Sure. She’s at-she was at-Pine Woods Cottages.”

I know the place. It’s walking distance from the main ski slopes. I thank him and get his fax number.

“I’ll come up on the evening flight,” Jaakko says.

“You don’t need to, I can keep you informed.”

“See you soon.” He hangs up.

I have the feeling Jaakko is going to be a pain in my ass, but at least now I know where Sufia was staying. I make some phone calls, get a search warrant for her hotel room and subpoenas for her bank and phone records, then head off to see what I can learn from Sufia’s cabin.

I’M TIRED, so I stop at a gas station and get a big takeaway coffee to sharpen up. The gas station is in the middle of a snowfield with a two-lane road ru

My next stop is Pine Woods Cottages. It may be that Sufia was abducted from her room, and good investigative work could solve her murder here and now. I go to the manager’s office and get the keys, tell him Sufia’s place is a crime scene and no one else can enter until I say otherwise. He tells me the maid hasn’t cleaned it for five days, Sufia didn’t want anybody in her room.

I take the crime kit fishing-tackle boxes from the trunk of my car, stop and look around. It’s not a cottage, more like a motel. Twelve units are housed under one roof with a log facade. It’s a nice-looking place. A ski vacation in Levi is expensive. Even a place like this runs a few hundred euros a week. The lift pass and ski rental is about a hundred euros, a beer is five. If you want to do something like go on a dogsled run around a reindeer farm with lunch included-exotic if you don’t live here-it’s a hundred and fifty for three hours. At those prices, tourists expect things to be done right.

It’s warmed up to minus fourteen now, and the ski runs are open again. Blazing lights cut through the dark and illuminate them, and from Sufia’s door, I have a good view of the slopes. Hundreds of black dots rush down the mountain. Still, there’s a degree of privacy here. An abduction could have been carried out if she was subdued, not kicking and screaming. A knife and the noose around her neck could have sufficed.

There aren’t any footprints in the snow leading up to her door. The last snowfall ended yesterday around noon, so she was away from here for at least two hours before she was murdered. My hope is to find a bloody mess, signs of a violent struggle. If I can type the killer’s blood and get a DNA sample, I’ll have gone a long way toward solving her murder.

There’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I go in and do a walk-through. It’s spacious, nicely decorated. There’s a living area and bedroom, a bathroom with a sauna. It’s also got empty beer and liquor bottles all over the place. Maybe because she was a Muslim, using alcohol embarrassed her, and Sufia didn’t want the maid in to clean it until she got rid of them first.

An overflowing ashtray sits on a coffee table. I sift through the butts: they’re all Marlboro Lights. I take a long minute to let it sink in, to get a sense of what might have happened here. Nothing broken, no bloodstains evident. It’s just a little messy.

I take out the cameras and start snapping photos. The sheets are stained with semen, but nothing that might link to Sufia’s murder presents itself.

Two books sit on the nightstand beside the bed. One is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Sophisticated reading, and in English. Sufia must have had good language skills. The other-in Fi

On television, crime-scene investigators just hose down everything with Luminol, and-abra-cadaver!-invisible blood pools are exposed, crimes solved, murderers brought to justice. In fact, Luminol reacts with lots of chemicals, household bleach among them, and can destroy other crime-scene evidence. If the room had been professionally cleaned before I processed it, I might use Luminol, but for me, it’s a last resort.

I lift fingerprints from the doorknobs, the desk, the bathroom sink, every surface that will hold them, then I start bagging evidence. First I do detail stuff, collect pubic and other hair from the bed and toilet. Then I move on to bigger things. I strip the dirty sheets off the bed and fold them inward to keep evidence intact before bagging them.

In a closet, I find several pairs of dirty panties in a hamper, most of them semen stained. I bag the cigarette butts and liquor bottles. When the floor is clear, I spend an hour on my hands and knees going over the carpet, focusing on hairs and fibers, angling a flashlight low to make them stand out.

I finish and look at my watch. I’m supposed to meet Esko for the autopsy in forty-five minutes. As far as yielding evidence goes, the place is a mixed blessing. There’s nothing here to bring the case to a quick conclusion, but a lot that may help me down the road. I sit down on the edge of the bed for a minute to form a mental image of the person who’s been living here. There’s been a lot of drunken fucking going on.

The murdered have no privacy, their flaws and secrets are held up to scrutiny in an effort to bring them justice. Because of the circumstances of her death, I had canonized Sufia slowly but surely over the past day. Sufia, the snow angel-that was a mistake, I know nothing about her. To get at the truth, I need to see her as she was. This room is a begi