in his blog, much of which can be construed as the hate-mongering of a deranged madman. I combine it with the manifestos of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech, some others. With so much material to work from, and since it’s supposed to be the rambling, semi-coherent tract of a psychopath, it won’t take too long or be very hard.”
“Won’t you find it hard to type thousands of pages with only one working hand?” I ask.
“Nope. I’ll use dictation software. I’ll get it done faster than if I typed it.”
“Suppose you make Malinen the lone gunman. What if he has an alibi for the time of the killings?”
Milo’s look says I’m stupid. “Duh. His killing rampage has to end in suicide.”
“Of course, how silly of me. And we have enough firearms for an army, but we need guns that can be traced back to him.”
“We check the database, find someone who has what we need, and B&E them. To do it right, we’ll have to make some videos of me posing as Malinen firing the weapons and fly them on YouTube, and also the most humiliating sexual ones starring the minister of the interior and the national chief of police. Their depravity will draw some attention away from the killings themselves. Malinen is about my size. We steal some personal items to make videos of him firing the weapons—I’ll wear a balaclava—return the items, and they’ll turn up during the investigation, along with the guns, which he’ll fingerprint for us before his unfortunate demise. I think I’ll even force him to make a voice-over for the video.”
“And his ‘unfortunate demise’ will take place how?”
“In his summer cottage, which is a short trip from my summer cottage by boat. We either lure him there, make him believe he’s meeting someone, or take him there by force. It doesn’t matter much, just so long as we get him there alone, without his family.”
Milo has all the bases covered except one. “How do you plan to get all those people in one place?”
His smile is knowing. “I don’t. You stole all of their phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads. They contain their calendars. We know where they’ll be and when. If they’re too spread out for us to shoot them all in one day, we plant bombs.”
“Bombs. So you’re not concerned about collateral damage?”
“If I wire them up so that a cell phone completes the circuit—Iraq jihad style—we can do it in line of sight and ensure no innocents are injured. There are three of us, after all. We choose which of us kills who, with time intervals to support the lone-gunman theory, and it should work out.”
“And where will you get the explosives?”
“Helsinki is expanding at a tremendous rate. Because of geography, we can’t grow outward, and nobody wants skyscrapers here, and so we’re building downward instead of up. Underneath the city, there’s an ever-expanding warren of tunnels. And those tunnels are created with explosives. It won’t be hard to liberate a small amount for our purposes. There must be tons down there.”
“And what if Moore doesn’t kill the Corsican father and son who intend to wipe out everyone on Saukko’s Shit List?”
“We either murder them too, or the money disappears from the safe-deposit box—I’m not sure how to pull that off yet, but I’ll work it out—and their deal is off. According to Moore, there’s nearly a million in it. I wouldn’t mind to heist it. Let’s see what comes of it.”
“Let me think about this,” I say, and step out for some cold water and kossu. It doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.
I sit back down in the sauna. I’m cold from the shower, splash some water on the stones to warm me up. “No,” I say.
Milo’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean no. I don’t want to murder all those people.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. They want to murder you and your family, and I’m sure mine and Sweetness’s along with them. You think they knew Mirjami and Jenna were going to be in the Audi when it blew? They assumed it would be Kate.”
“Sorry,” I say, “I just can’t see us doing it.”
“Pomo,” Sweetness says, “I’m with Milo on this one.”
These two have never put me on the defensive before. “When did this become a democracy? Sweetness, you call me pomo—boss—doesn’t that imply I make all final decisions?”
Milo gulps beer, now hot and ruined, says “Yuck,” and goes out to get a cold