Fatal Headwind by Leena Lehtolainen

foreign fibers on Juha Merivaara’s clothes, and a fingerprint other than his own had shown up on the metallic insignia on the collar of his jacket. Although that could have been from sometime earlier, it was still a place to start. I asked Koivu to come into my office.
    “You’re going to go take fingerprints from everyone who was on the island the night of the murder. I’m also going to want all the clothes they were wearing for fiber analysis. Puustjärvi can go with you to inspect the clothes. He might remember what everyone was wearing that morning,” I said, cursing the fact that I was already a day behind. We should have made all the suspects strip yesterday.
    I glanced at my calendar. At one o’clock I had the Criminal Division commanders’ weekly meeting, which I couldn’t miss. Koivu and Wang would have to interview the Merivaara family without me. I found Koivu at the coffee machine, and Wang was with Lähde in Interrogation Room 2 working on some of the brawlers from the weekend. Koivu wasn’t surprised when I told him that the Rödskär case had turned out to be a homicide.
    “It had to be someone on the island, so let’s focus on them. I doubt whoever it was will be able to hide it for long.”
    “That Holma guy seemed familiar for some reason,” Koivu said, frowning.
    “He’s a pretty famous opera singer,” I said, surprised because Koivu was more of a Bon Jovi type.
    “I didn’t mean that. I was just looking at my files because I remembered he had something to do with a case I investigated back in April.”
    I hadn’t made the time to look up Holma’s police record because I didn’t think I’d find anything worse than a parking ticket.
    “Holma saved a girl from an attempted rape.”
    Then I remembered the interview where Tapio Holma said he had been forced to play a hero in real life, not just on stage.
    “And the girl’s name was Riikka Merivaara?”
    Koivu nodded and told me where the folder was with the case files. He had followed the case because one of the attempted rapists had also been involved in an aggravated assault a few weeks earlier.
    If I got lunch from the cafeteria, I would have just enough time to look at those case files before my meeting. After grabbing a cup of coffee, cheese sandwich, and a yogurt, I retreated to my office.
    Over the years I’d developed a talent for building a coherent narrative out of the disconnected, often contradictory statements in a pretrial investigation file. Now the chain of events I was reading was like a soap opera.
    On the last Saturday in April, Riikka Merivaara had been partying in downtown Helsinki. The closing bell at the bar came at three thirty in the morning, and an old school friend who happened to be at the bar offered Riikka a ride home.
    Riikka hadn’t hesitated long. The night buses drove all over Espoo, so getting back to her house in the south part of the city would take at least an hour. A taxi from Helsinki would cost nearly two hundred marks. Her school friend, Aki, swore that the driver, who had also gone to the same school, was sober.
    Riikka didn’t like the third man in the party. Tuomo Haaranen was big and hairy, and he had more than the average number of tattoos. She could tell from his eyes that he had messed up his head with more than alcohol. But Riikka had drunk five lemon grappas and was exhausted. The trip home on the empty freeway would only take twenty minutes. Riikka decided to take the ride.
    Riikka and Tuomo Haaranen had sat in the back seat of the Mitsubishi. Riikka was disgusted when Tuomo lit up in the car, and she asked him to throw his cigarette out the window. Haaranen responded with an arrogant laugh, saying that he would be setting the rules in the car. That was when Riikka started to be afraid.
    About halfway home, Haaranen had started complaining that he hadn’t had his Saturday screw. He asked if Riikka was willing and started touching her breasts. Riikka tried to struggle away, but