Free Wolves and Angels by Seppo Jokinen Page A

close relatives. In the picture a squat man with thick legs was running after a ball; his blue-and-white striped jersey bore a black number ten. The name Diego Maradona had been scrawled over the picture. Koskinen wondered whether the autograph was genuine.
    The pictures of motorcycles taped to the walls were also striking— three large posters and a half dozen centerfolds. The makes varied from Triumph and Norton to Harley-Davidson. One of the posters had been pasted to a cardboard backing. It sported a 350cc Royal Enfield. The chrome fuel tank and fishtail exhaust gleamed, and its seat was the wide tractor model. Koskinen remembered the bike well from the old days. Royal Enfield had once been an elite bike, even though they had carried the nickname Royal Oilfield because of how much they leaked.
    Anniina Salonen sensed Koskinen’s interest. “Raymond was a motorcycle freak. He loved them more than anything.”
    Suddenly she burst into hysterical laughter. “Sometimes he pretended his wheelchair was a motorcycle. He would buzz from one end of the hallway to the other making engine sounds with his mouth.”
    Koskinen turned to look at Salonen—her broad shoulders were shaking with laughter. She would have made a good discus thrower. Her body was well-muscled and full-bosomed, but she still didn’t look a single pound overweight. Her honey yellow hair had a 1960s - style perm.
    Salonen noticed Koskinen’s sharp gaze and her laugh cut off. She wiped the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
    A post-traumatic stress reaction, Koskinen thought. He had run into it often enough in his twenty-plus years of service.
    The talk of Timonen ’s motorcycle games reminded Koskinen of the missing wheelchair. He had forgotten about the issue that had bothered him so much the previous evening, and decided to throw additional resources at it as soon as he got back to the station. At this point finding the wheelchair might be the best—if not only—way forward.
    Salonen looked at Koskinen’s fallen face.
    “Is something wrong?” she asked timidly.
    “I was just thinking about where Timonen ’s wheelchair could be.”
    Salonen’s mouth dropped open in shock. She covered it with her hand.
    “You haven’t found it?” she said, almost unintelligibly.
    “No.” Koskinen shook his head. “Could you describe it?”
    “An electric Meyra. Raymond’s arms were weak; he wasn’t able to roll on his own.”
    Koskinen looked around. “How long did he live here?”
    “He was here ten years ago when I started work.”
    “Are residents just left to their own devices at night, since there’s no staff on site?”
    “No, of course not. Everyone has a medical alert phone.”
    “How does it work?”
    Salonen pointed toward the nightstand. “That thingie over there opens a two-way connection to a security company. If no one responds from this end, they send someone to see what’s wrong.”
    Koskinen looked at the telephone device next to Maradona’s picture. It didn’t have a handset or any buttons. The mic and speaker were built in, and two small indicator lights were blinking on the front.
    “What if someone falls in the bathroom, for example, and can’t drag themselves to the phone?”
    “They wear bracelets that open the connection. The speaker phone works from pretty far out.”
    Koskinen remembered the photographs taken at the crime scene— Timonen wasn’t wearing any sort of bracelet, and none of the reports had mentioned one either. He opened the nightstand drawer. There it was , a chunk of plastic with a button connected to a wide strap. Koskinen dug a pen out of his breast pocket, used it to turn over the bracelet, and noticed that the strap was torn. The sequence of events was easy to imagine: t he killer had ripped the alarm from Timonen ’s wrist, thrust it into the nightstand drawer, and then pressed the pillow over his face.
    Salonen looked at the device over Koskinen’s