Snow Angels

7

ESKO HANDS ME a cup of coffee and tells the morgue attendant, the diener, to bring him Sufia’s body. We wait in the examination suite, and I look around to pass the time. Photos of Esko’s family hang on the walls: his daughter’s wedding, one of him and his wife at a summer picnic. I browse through a tray of surgical tools. Among the saws and scalpels, chisels and forceps, I find a set of garden shears. “What are these for?”

“This place runs on a tight budget,” he says. “A pair of rib-cutters from a surgical-supply company costs three times as much. It’s not like my patients bleed to death if they get a nicked artery from a less-than-perfect instrument.”

He comes over to the table and picks up a piece of cutlery from the collection of scalpels. “Discount stores are great. This is a bread knife I picked up on sale at Anttila. Perfect for making thin organ slices. It’s got way more cutting surface than a scalpel and does a better job at a fraction of the cost. You gotta think of this stuff if you want to run a backwater government facility.”

The diener, Tuomas, wheels in Sufia’s body on a gurney. “Want me to do anything?” he asks.

Esko scratches at his gray beard. “Break the seals on the bag and photograph the body while I finish my coffee.”

The diener unzips the body bag. Sufia is exposed, naked and violated, swathed in shiny black plastic, like an offering to an angry god on the glittering steel altar of the gurney.

Esko has dark circles under his eyes. “I guess you didn’t get much sleep either,” I say.

“I’m knackered,” he says.

An interesting choice of words, given that Sufia was knackered, like a farm animal, with a hammer.

“I’ve been province coroner for seventeen years,” Esko says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this, let alone autopsied a body so mutilated for a murder investigation. Like I told you yesterday, I’m scared I’ll fuck it up. I stayed up most of the night reading forensics journals because I was afraid I’ll forget something.”

“You won’t,” I say.

The diener finishes snapping photos. He sits down on a stool in the corner, pulls off his surgical cap. Lank blond hair falls in his face. He starts reading a magazine. I don’t bother to say hello. When I’ve spoken to him in the past, he never answered, just nodded and went on with what he was doing.

Esko examines the body while it’s still in the bag, before it’s cleaned up. He turns on a tape recorder. He states that he’s positively identified the victim as Sufia Elmi from dental records, then notes her race, sex, hair color and length and her age. He takes the bags off her hands and scrapes under her fingernails, enters the scrapings and the bags themselves into evidence. He takes samples for DNA analysis from her lips and inside her mouth with swabs, and continues.

“There’s a cord with a simple slipknot around the neck, located above a laceration in the throat.” He lifts her head and removes the noose. “The ligatures aren’t deep, the esophagus isn’t crushed. Asphyxiation wasn’t the cause of death.”

He looks the body over for hair and fiber samples, for any kind of foreign materials. The only hair samples he finds most likely belong to her, unless the killer is of African descent, and we don’t have many black people in Kittilä, neither locals nor tourists. He picks up some fibers, maybe from her own absent clothing.

He goes over the body with a UV light to make secretions fluoresce, then draws blood samples with a syringe for toxicology. Although he’s done it once already, he takes blood samples from various areas on the corpse. A single drop of the killer’s blood might expose his identity. He doesn’t find anything else and starts looking at her injuries.

“I’ll start with her eyes,” Esko says. “Puncture wounds have penetrated the cornea, iris, sclera and vitreous humor. Little ocular fluid remains. Rough, irregular intrusions suggest an imprecise instrument, and corresponding circular wounds around the eyes suggest he used the broken beer bottle, still embedded in the subject’s vagina, as the instrument.”

I stand up and look into Sufia’s eye sockets. Yesterday, she could see through those bloodstained maws. I find myself wishing I had taken the national police chief’s advice and bowed out of the investigation. I sit down again, and Esko goes on.

“Upon examining the scalp, there’s ecchymosis in the right and frontal areas, a subarachnoid hemorrhage on the right side and small hemorrhagic areas in the corpus callosum.”

Meaning the two hammer blows to her head caused heavy bruising and internal bleeding.

“The throat is incised. The esophagus, internal carotid artery and superior laryngeal nerve are severed. Aggressive compression and shearing from one cut resulted in a wound that reaches to the spine, which was nicked by the blade.”

Esko is saying he nearly cut her head off.

“To go so deep and through cartilage without sawing, the instrument must have been sharp and of some length, and so not a scalpel. He used a knife with a curved blade. A ski

I want Esko’s examination to tell me the story of her death. “Can you give me the order of attack?”

“Hang on until I finish, I’m trying to figure it out.”

“The words ‘nigger whore,’ ” Esko says, “have been written, one below the other, with a series of cuts on the body’s midsection, between the breasts and the umbilicus. Each letter is approximately three inches transversely and one and a half inches longitudinally. The writing is precise and the wounds are shallow. If a curved blade were used, it would have been awkward to use the tip to cut the words into the body while holding the knife by the handle. I think he held the knife by the tip, like a pen. The words are intersected by a light cut, interrupted by other wounds, that runs from the throat to the pelvic area.” He turns her over. “The body is nicked in other places, on the thighs and buttocks, and once in the center of her back, by a blade with similar characteristics.”

“How long do you think it took him to cut ‘nigger whore’ into her belly?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Grab a scalpel and a pad of paper and try it for yourself.”

I take a scalpel from the instrument tray and paper from a shelf, hold the blade like a pen and time myself while I scratch out the letters. “Forty-nine seconds.”

Esko moves on. “The trunk is lacerated by an incision that travels almost straight through the abdomen, severing the intestine at the duodenum and through the soft tissues of the abdomen. The incision is deep and nearly reaches the intervertebral disk between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.”

“It almost looks to me like he tried to cut her in half,” I say.

He considers it. “Maybe.”

He examines her pubic area and tries to remove the broken Lapin Kulta bottle from Sufia’s vagina. It doesn’t want to come out. He uses both hands, gives it a jerk, and it comes free. He examines her vagina and the wound inflicted by the bottle. “Mitä vittua?” What the fuck? “Come over here and look at this,” he says.

I go to the other side of the gurney. All I see is a mutilated vagina. “What?”

“Her vagina is damaged,” Esko says, “but not just in the way you think. Look again.”

I get down close to look and feel embarrassed, but now I see. Her clitoris and part of the labia minora are missing. “You think the killer is a surgeon?”

“No, I think her family had it done.”