Free Fatal Headwind by Leena Lehtolainen Page B

for Juha too—that’s in the Sjöberg blood—but we aren’t idealists.”
    Katrina Sjöberg sipped the rest of her coffee and then poured more from the thermos.
    “I didn’t realize I was so tired,” she said when some of the coffee spilled on the saucer. “Are we close to being done?”
    The expression on her face, lined by weather and time, changed quickly. Now it was exhausted again, the laugh lines turning to the deep furrows of age.
    “Where are you going to stay tonight?”
    “Good question. Usually I stay with Mikke, but that probably won’t work. I imagine the renters have already moved in. I don’t know. Anne could probably put me up, but I don’t think I want to go there. I should let them mourn in peace. Maybe I should just wait for Mikke. We can always sleep aboard the Leanda if there isn’t anywhere else. When will I be able to go home?”
    Now the expression of amusement was back, which made Katrina Sjöberg’s eyes look decades younger.
    “I’d say we can probably manage that within a couple of days. One last question, though. So your son, Mikke, inherited one quarter of the stock of Merivaara Nautical. Following his parents’ death, Juha controlled the remaining three quarters. Is that still the case?”
    Katrina Sjöberg shook her head.
    “No, Mikke sold his shares to Juha years ago. He graduated in nautical engineering, but boat manufacturing never interested him. Sailing has always been his love. I don’t know exactly what the company’s ownership arrangements are anymore. Juha is still the majority shareholder, but he isn’t the only one. Mikke sold high during the worst period of the last stock bubble. A few years later when the market crashed, Juha had to broaden the ownership base in order to keep the company afloat.”
    I didn’t have anything else to ask Katrina Sjöberg just then. Because she didn’t have anywhere to go, I arranged for her to use one of the lounges at the police station. Mikke Sjöberg wouldn’t be showing up for about another hour, so I went back upstairs to our unit. I wanted to brush my teeth and send a message to the Trade Register office and confirm a list of Merivaara Nautical owners. I told Puupponen to go home. Koivu and I could handle Mikke Sjöberg once the Leanda finally made land.
    Even for three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the unit was quiet. The previous evening’s brawlers had been interviewed and most of them released, with the most dangerous offender sitting in a holding cell waiting to be remanded for trial.
    The ambulance boat would be docking soon. If the on-call pathologist started work immediately, we would have some initial test results by tomorrow evening. The pathologist probably wouldn’t be able to tell us anything more precise about Juha Merivaara’s time of death than we already knew—sometime between one thirty and seven in the morning. The most important thing would be to figure out what had crushed his temple.
    The telephone rang.
    “Hey, it’s Puustjärvi. We just got to the marina. What do I do with these people?”
    “Let them go. Wasn’t that what we decided? Tell them that I’ll call them in for official questioning later.”
    “OK, sounds good. I’m feeling a little groggy. I fell asleep on the boat, since I was awake the whole night.”
    I sighed. I had no doubt Puustjärvi was dead tired, but I had wanted to hear whether anything interesting was said during the trip back.
    “Go ahead and go home if you don’t need to come back here for anything.”
    “I need to grab my car.”
    “OK, swing by my office then. I won’t keep you long.” Puustjärvi was what they called a good old-fashioned cop, even though he was barely forty years old. In his previous job working on a small-town police force, he got to know all the crooks, petty thieves, drunks, and moonshiners, and he learned to get along with them. I wondered why he had chosen to come to Espoo during the recent reorganization, since more than once