Free Copper Heart by Leena Lehtolainen Page A

seemed irritated with him. To date, the high point of Antikainen’s police career had been a knife fight between two rival Gypsy gangs that resulted in two fatalities.
    I felt sick to my stomach. “Let’s have Forensics and our detectives meet down at the station. Lasarov, you come too to represent Patrol. Timonen and Hopponen, will you be OK here? We’ll keep the Tower closed until further notice, and we’ll send someone up at noon to relieve you so you can go eat.”
    Descending the stairs back to my car felt unreal. The lightning rod on top of the Tower, shining innocently in the morning sun, reflected beams of light directly into my face. It was almost as if the Tower were winking at me. And the blood up there—was it Meritta’s or someone else’s? Meritta’s murderer? Then there were the pieces of fingernail. And Ella’s brooch? What the hell was happening? Had I come back to my boring old hometown just to get caught up in another murder of an acquaintance?
    Everyone else was already waiting in the break room by the time I arrived. Detective Järvi was looking downcast at the empty coffeemaker. “There isn’t even any coffee,” he said to me in an accusatory tone.
    “So go ahead and make some. You must know how.” Goddamn it. I was Järvi’s boss. Did he really expect me to handle the coffee just because I was a woman?
    Järvi glanced at me with a slight frown and then slipped out to get some water for the coffeemaker. I did feel a bit ashamed of myself. Bossing around a guy who had been a cop almost as long asI had been alive felt gauche. And besides, growing up, everyone had always known him as the nice cop in town. He came to our elementary school and taught us to look both ways before we crossed the street. He came to our junior high to warn us about shoplifting and souping up our mopeds. He came to our high school to lecture us about drinking and driving. Always just as thin and gray, he had looked more or less the same for as long as I had known him. Fortunately, the cop who had once written me a ticket for riding my bike at night without a light had retired a few years earlier.
    “Otherwise we had a pretty quiet Friday night,” Järvi observed as he poured the coffee grounds into the filter. “There isn’t anybody in the tank. Antikainen and I don’t really have a backlog either, so we can start the investigation immediately. I don’t think we need the county at all. If we need reinforcements, we can call guys in from other nearby towns.”
    “I don’t see how that’s an
if
,” I said, “when the first thing we have to do is interview nearly two hundred people.”
    “But most of them are just going to say they left before you did. And when you left, Flöjt was still there,” Antikainen pointed out. “And the boys can help.”
    By “the boys” presumably he meant the local patrol officers.
    “They have Karttunen and Säkkinen out on vacation already. And the rest of you are supposed to be taking your summer breaks soon. And there’s the comp time you’ve been building up. I don’t see what the problem is with working with the county. Do you have some issue with them?”
    “What’s your problem?” Antikainen suddenly yelled. “You go spend a few years in Helsinki and now you think us local cops are a bunch of yokels who don’t know how to do anything?”
    “Maybe she doesn’t want to have to lead the investigation,” Järvi suggested.
    I couldn’t help nodding, since Järvi had hit the nail on the head. If the brooch we had found in the Tower was Ella’s, and if the rumors about Meritta and Johnny’s relationship were true…I couldn’t handle a third summer in a row of rummaging around in my friends’ dirty laundry. Approaching Meritta’s possible murder professionally would be impossible. Based on my two previous experiences, I knew how investigating a murder felt when my own emotions were in play. Even though I had handled both incidences well enough and good