Snow Angels: An addictive serial killer thriller

THE CRIME SCENE HAS been processed. Sufia Elmi’s body has been taken away. We’ve been going inside Aslak’s house once in a while to warm up, but still I’m frozen to the bone. I’m the last one to leave and I stand alone shivering. I look up. Wind has chased the clouds away and the night is starry. There’s enough light to see without my flashlight and I flick it off.

The black-and-yellow crime-scene tape looks out of place on a reindeer farm. The spot where Sufia’s body lay is a bloody hole gouged in the snow, like an empty eye socket. The scene will be torn to bits soon, when forest animals smell the blood and come looking. It doesn’t matter. It will be buried in fresh snow before long anyway.

Years ago, when I was working on my master’s thesis, I went to New York for a semester as an exchange student. What struck me most was the sky. On that side of the world, so far away from the North Pole, the sky is flat and gray, a one-dimensional universe. Here, the sky is arched, and there’s almost no pollution. In spring and fall the sky is dark blue or violet, and sunsets last for hours. The sun turns into a dim orange ball that transforms clouds into silver-rimmed red and violet towers. In winter, twenty-four hours a day, uncountable stars outline the vaulted ceiling of the great cathedral we live in. Finnish skies are the reason I believe in God.

It’s just before ten P.M. Hours spent in the cold have left me so numb that it’s hard to move. My bad knee has gone so stiff that I’m dragging my left leg more than walking on it. I limp to the top of the drive.

On the other side of the road and down a narrow lane is a neighborhood of sixteen houses called Marjakylä, Berry-Village. I walk the two hundred yards, as I have so many times, down the unpaved road. Snow banked up from plowing makes walls on both sides of me and they funnel me into the village. The people that live here seldom come or go. They exist in their own little world, year after year, in little wooden homes. The only thing that changes is their ages.

I go from house to house and explain that there’s been a murder. People raise their eyebrows and say “oho,” our language’s expression of surprise, then tell me they’ve seen nothing. Canvassing brings me closer to my parents and their neighbors, the people of my childhood.

Big Paavo’s yard is lit up by work lamps that reflect off the snow and negate the effect of strings of Christmas lights scattered around. He’s in a shed with a kerosene heater, and, as usual, he’s building something. A two-stroke engine with a bad gasket stinks from burning oil and clunks, because one of the pistons isn’t firing. I ask what he’s working on. A clothes press, so his wife won’t have to iron sheets. He’s seen nothing.

I knock on the Virtanens’ door. Through the front window, I see Kimmo and Esa’s mother, Pirkko, sitting in an armchair. She doesn’t move. I test the door and it’s open, the place smells of must and urine. Both of them are incommunicado, Pirkko from her stroke, her husband Urpo because he’s passed out on the kitchen floor. I say hello to Pirkko. Her eyes flicker recognition but she doesn’t answer, so I leave. I’ll have to speak to their sons about them.

Next I try Eero and Martta. They aren’t home and if true to form are out walking.

Christmas candles burn in a front window. Tiina and Raila invite me in, but I know better than to accept. Tiina is forty-two years old and anorexic. All her teeth have fallen out as a result, and she can’t afford dentures, but she’s learned to smile in such a way that you can’t tell. She walks around the village pushing a baby stroller with a doll inside it, and has since she was a teenager.

Raila, Tiina’s mother, is an alcoholic. She was sober for twenty years, until her fortieth birthday party, when she decided to have just one drink. For the past thirty years, she’s lived in a nightmare of alcohol psychosis coupled with religious fervor. When I was a kid, she would stand outside our house, point in the front window and shriek. Mom would tell me to pay no attention and pretend like it wasn’t happening. I ask if they’ve seen unfamiliar cars today.

“This is a day of desolation,” Raila says. “My life is a vale of tears.”

Tiina smiles her funny smile. “We’ve been watching TV all day.”

I save my parents for last. Their house is the same as it was twenty-five years ago, except for the addition of indoor plumbing. No more freezing trips to the outhouse in the morning. No more cold showers in an underheated outbuilding shared with the neighbors. Mom and Dad fought about it for years. He refused because of the expense, although he always had booze money, but she finally wore him down.

As a little kid, because it was so cold in the outbuilding, I would go two weeks without washing if they let me, and sometimes I accidentally peed on myself because opening my pants in the freezing outhouse hurt so much that I would hold it for too long.

There must be fifteen clocks hanging on the walls. I don’t know why my parents are so concerned with marking the time. The syncopated drumming of all those second hands makes me crazy. They haven’t put up any Christmas decorations yet. They always wait until the last minute. We sit in the kitchen, and I explain about the murder.

“Mom, did you see or hear anything unusual today?” I ask.

Mom doesn’t work, Dad never would let her. She still calls me by my pet name from childhood. “Ei Pikkuinen”—No, Little One—he says.

“What the hell did you expect your mother to hear?” Dad asks.

“I didn’t expect anything. This is a normal part of a murder investigation.”

Dad isn’t bad when he’s sober, but when he’s drunk, he goes one of two ways, either euphoric or mean. “You think your mother has nothing better to do all day than sit by the window and watch what goes on outside?”

“I don’t think that.”

“So you think your mother killed a nigger woman on Aslak’s farm?”

I wonder if he’s going to take off his belt, like when I was a boy. “No, I don’t think that either.”

Dad pulls out one of his favorite expressions. “Haista vittu,” sniff cunt. A colorful way of telling me to go fuck myself. His sodden mind veers off in another direction. “You heard from your brothers?”

My three brothers all moved away as soon as they were old enough. “Not for a while.”

“You’d think they’d at least call, after all we went through raising them. And you.”

Dad the martyr. “Christmas is coming, you’ll hear from them.”

Mom asks me if I’d like something to eat, and I realize I’m famished. She warms up leftover läskisoosi, fat sauce, a childhood favorite made from pork strips like bacon but less salty, and ladles it over boiled potatoes.

While I eat, Mom gossips about the neighbors and chatters about how well my brother Timo is doing. Timo served seven months in prison for bootlegging when he was young, and ever since, Mom has overcompensated by talking about him like he’s a saint.

Dad nurses a water glass half full of vodka in silence. I remember that my sister died thirty-two years ago today, that’s why he’s being such a prick.

The cold came late that year, but when it did, it hit hard. I was nine and Suvi was eight. Mom was a regular brood mare, five children in seven years. Dad wanted to go ice fishing. Suvi and I asked if we could come along and skate. Mom warned Dad that the ice was still too thin, but he hushed her up. “Kari will look after Suvi,” he said.

A lot of snow had fallen, but it was dry powder. The wind had blown it off the lake, and the ice was as slick and clean as glass. The afternoon was starry, and out on the ice we could see almost as if we had daylight. Dad drilled a hole in the ice and sat on a crate, fishing and warming himself with a bottle of Three Lions whiskey.

I tried to take care of Suvi. We were skating fast, toward the middle of the lake, but I was holding her hand. I heard a sharp crack, felt a jerk on my arm, and she was gone. It took me a second to understand what had happened, and then I was scared the ice would break under me too. I crawled to where Suvi fell through, but she was already slipping away. The last I saw of Suvi alive was her little fists thrashing, beating at the ice.

I was too scared to go in after her, and Dad was too drunk, so we did nothing. He sat there crying, and I ran for help. They drilled holes in the ice and dredged under it with fishing nets. It didn’t take long, she hadn’t drifted far. When they pulled her out, she had a look of surprise more than pain frozen on her face.

I’ve always suspected that Dad blames me for Suvi’s death. Maybe that’s why he was so quick to use his belt on me. I suspect that I blame him too. Maybe Mom blames us both. I eat the last bite of läskisoosi and set my knife and fork down on the plate. Mom is silent now, they both look lost in thought. I tell her it was delicious and hug her good-bye. I give Dad’s shoulder a squeeze and tell him I’ll see him soon.

On the way back to my car, I see Eero and Martta returning from their evening stroll, bundled up against the bitter cold. Eero is over seventy, well dressed, dapper and schizophrenic. He lived with his mother until she died twenty years ago, and then he hired Martta as his housekeeper. Whether their relationship is sexual in nature remains a mystery, as does where he gets the money to have a housekeeper.

By outward appearance, Eero is homosexual. Martta is dwarfish, gray-haired and squat. I meet them at the top of the road, across from Aslak’s drive. They’re walking their dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Sulo. Sulo is dressed in a blue-and-red sweater and tiny felt boots. I ask them about today.

“I was talking to a friend on the phone this afternoon and saw a car pull out of Aslak’s place,” Eero says.

There’s a phone booth by the side of the road. The phone is disconnected and has been for years. Eero spends hours standing in the cold, talking to imaginary friends, sometimes for so long that his breath forms a sheet of ice over the mouthpiece. Martta kept cutting the cord in the hopes that Eero would quit pumping coins into it. The phone company finally gave up repairing it, but left it there so Eero could talk into it.

“What kind of car?” I ask.

“BMW, BMW, BMW.”

He repeats things sometimes. I’m not quite believing. “What model BMW?”

“A new sedan, 3 Series, 3 Series.”

“You know BMWs that well?”

“I like cars.”

Eero always had a memory like no one else I’ve ever met. I check to make sure it’s still true. “Eero, can you remember May sixteenth, 1974?”

“Oh yes.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing special. It was a Thursday, warm. Two catalogues came in the mail. Your father got drunk and wrecked his bicycle.”