I would have come running if I could, but can only call out and ask if he’s hurt.
“No,” he answers, his voice calm now. “Come here.”
I follow his voice and enter a bedroom. He’s staring up into the shelf space over a closet. I look and see a waif of a girl. She’s folded herself into the tight space. Her eyes radiate terror. Loviise Tamm.
I doubt if she speaks anything but Russian. “Talk to her,” I say. “Tell her we’re police, here to help her, and ask her if she can get down from there.”
She seems to take our stated good intentions at face value. She pushes her hands against one wall, feet against the other, faceup, and shimmies down, spiderlike. It reminds me of a circus trick. “Can you make her feel comfortable and try to find out what happened here? Ask her to please not sit or touch anything, and tell her we’ll take her away from here very soon.”
They go back and forth for a few minutes. Some of it I understand, some of it I don’t.
When they’re done, Sweetness explains. “It’s like her mom said, she was promised a job in Helsinki. Then, when she got here, the men who brought her talked about her owing them money for arranging her work and the cost of the trip over, and took her passport. They locked her in this apartment. Other people, including some girls, came and went. They kept her fed, but wouldn’t talk to her. Just told her to wait and all would become clear. She was frightened the whole time. Then a man came just a little while ago. He was angry because she was going to leave, and he said he was going to get something from her first. He sat on the couch and told her to take out his ‘thingy.’ She said it was big and hard, she didn’t know what to do, and he told her to get on her knees and put it in her mouth. She froze, it seemed icky and wrong. He started to yell and he slapped her, but the doorbell rang. He answered it and a woman was at the door. She saw Loviise and looked furious. He told Loviise to get up, go to a bedroom and shut the door. She heard him talk to the woman, but their voices were low and she didn’t understand what they said. Then she heard him shout and everything went quiet. She was afraid of him and his anger and his ‘thingy,’ and crawled up into that space to hide. When I came in, she had a blanket pulled over her and I couldn’t see her, but I saw the blanket move from her breathing, I jerked it away and found her. That’s when I yelled. She scared the shit out of me.”
“Ask her what the woman looked like.”
He asks and translates. “She looked like a magazine.”
“What does that mean?”
She clarifies. “She was very beautiful, like a woman in a magazine.”
Her case of Down syndrome appears to be as mild as her mother claimed. She seems largely functional, but her naïveté likely saved her from a worse fate than she suffered. If she didn’t even know how a penis functions, she needed to be broken in, accomplished by raping her on a regular basis until she gave up hope and just succumbed to it. No one had gotten around to that yet. “Thank her and ask her to wait right here.”
I go over the rest of the house quickly. There’s little to see. Cheap furniture. More IKEA stuff. Some microwavable food in the fridge. A case of Stolichnaya vodka and a crate of beer, I suppose for the clientele. I find some yellow latex cleaning gloves in a closet along with cleaning supplies, and a roll of masking tape in a kitchen drawer. I use it to hide the bullet holes in the front door.
I put on the gloves and rifle through the corpse’s pockets. I find two passports, Loviise’s and his own. If he had her passport, but no others besides his own, it indicates that he meant to turn her over to me. Something went wrong first, and he was murdered. I also take the corpse’s credit card. He was one of those dummies who keeps his bank codes on him with the user number sequence written on it. I take it, too. If he were