Free Nights of Awe by Harri Nykänen Page B

to hear the latest news. I wasn’t surprised to find the light still on in Simolin’s room.
    I had been the same way when I started in the Violent Crimes Unit. I’d sit in my office until the wee hours, sifting through the details of a case. I enjoyed being able to chat with the detectives who were on night duty and hear their experiences. I was an avid listener. We’d down cups of automat coffee and talk. Sometimes an interesting call would come in and I’d tag along. I understood Simolin better than he knew.
    He was sitting at his desk, bent over a sheaf of papers. He had taken off his jacket. His shirt was blindingly white and there was a dark-blue tie at his neck.
    “Aren’t you tired?”
    “I took a little nap. I’m still going through the last of the tip-offs.”
    “Anything interesting?”
    “As expected, some are racist – you know, those ragheads got what they deserved, etc. There might be some important information in here too, but it’s still tough to tell at this point. I’ve sorted them into some semblance of priority. I can read you a few.”
    “Go for it.”
    “Mrs Aune Kujala says that she saw a young, foreign-looking man lifting a bicycle into a white van in front of the City Theatre at eight-thirty in the morning. There were two men, also foreign-looking, in the car. No licence-plate number, no make. It did occur to me that to an old woman, a minivan might look like a van.”
    “Drop by tomorrow and find out more.”
    “Then there’s this tip-off from a service-station owner who says three skinheads were laughing knowingly while watching the five o’clock news on the killings. We got the tapes from the petrol-station security camera and there’s a pretty decent shot of all three. We’re looking for them. SUPO gave us a name and address for one of them, but he wasn’t at home. A patrol is going to try again later tonight.”
    “I don’t believe they’re our guys.”
    “Me neither,” Simolin said.
    “Didn’t anything come in about the Citroën Hamid rented?”
    “Amazingly enough, no.”
    Earlier that evening, Oksanen had discovered that Ali Hamid had rented a green Citroën C5 hatchback from Hertz. We didn’t release the vehicle details to the media until all patrols had searched for it for a couple of hours with no results. I thought it was strange that no tip-offs from the public had come in.
    “That car’s got to be in someone’s garage,” Simolin remarked. “And it could be that it hasn’t been used since it was rented. Maybe it’s being saved for a specific purpose.”
    “Could be.”
    Simolin made no effort to decorate his office with anything that reflected his personality. There were no fishing or hunting pictures on the walls, no cartoons or Che Guevara posters or any other ideological material. All that was on the shelves were case folders and a slim collection of legal literature. Simolin preferred looking up information online. The sole spark of personality was the image on his computer’s screen saver. It was of a Sioux Indian chief in a magnificent feathered headdress. I knew that the Indian belonged to the Sioux tribe, because I had asked Simolin.
    Later I heard from one of Simolin’s academy classmates that Simolin was crazy about North American Indians and had made himself a complete Indian outfit out of moose skin, plus a perfect replica of an Indian bow and arrows. I wasn’t surprised; somehow I could imagine him being into stuff like that.
    The information about Simolin’s hobby had spread rapidly around the VCU, and for a while it was impossible for him to escape it. Whenever he was in a meeting, some wiseass would fold his arms akimbo and end whatever he was saying with: “Ugh! I have spoken!” Until the joke got old, words like forked tongue, paleface, papoose, teepee, great white chief, long knife and yellow-hair were tossed around the department in all possible contexts.
    Simolin didn’t get mad, he just smiled shyly. He clearly possessed