to collect the skank, so technically it already belongs to me. But he has a valid complaint, so I don’t point this out or make any demands of him. “How much?” I ask.
“Fifty thousand.”
“Do you really have anything I can use?”
“I did a good job, as promised. People across the political spectrum in the most compromising positions. Most of them sexual in nature. A few involving money.”
“Get on something secure. Buy another throwaway phone or something. Send the cloudspace web address and passwords, along with your bank account number. I’ll give you thirty K, not for the skank, because I already paid you for it, but for the loss of your stuff, job, and the beating you took. Fair enough?”
His phone runs out of time and the line goes dead.
I make one more call. Mirjami’s autopsy should have been performed by now. I couldn’t bring myself to attend and so didn’t ask about its scheduling. One of the coroners gets furious when detectives don’t attend and then call him for results. He believes cops should be present in every step of an investigation. Getting transcriptions takes forever. I call the stenographer, ask him if he’ll do me a favor, just listen to the end of the recording and tell me the cause of death. He’s nice about it, says he’ll call me back.
It doesn’t take long. “She died of morphine overdose,” he says.
I start to ask how such a thing might be possible, then remember he’s a stenographer, not a doctor, thank him and figure it out for myself. She had a morphine pump. She could barely negotiate it with her bandaged hand, and I don’t think it’s even possible to OD with one. Someone went to her room and finished the job of murdering her.
I remember Moore’s reference to her being my mistress. The two bikers spying on us for Jan Pitkänen must have come to that conclusion because they saw her entering my bedroom at night. I check my received calls and count them down to one identified only by number, not by name. That’s the doctor’s number. I call. He doesn’t answer. I send him a text message and ask if he can check with the staff on duty and ask if a man with a scarred face visited Mirjami. A few minutes later, he answers. He doesn’t have to ask, he saw a man fitting that description himself. I thank him and ring off. So Pitkänen killed my friend.
Pitkänen. I said I would kill him, and a big part of me wants to. Mirjami’s murder deserves to be avenged. But I’m hedging again. Blood, as often as not, brings more blood, and another part of me wants to hurt no one. So much blood has already been spilled. I ask myself what Mirjami would want. She was a gentle spirit, a healer, would likely want nothing done. I could try to make a deal. After Milo kills his boss, Pitkänen will have lost his sponsor, will be acting alone. I could offer him a cash settlement, compensation for his face and a truce. But revenge, like a funeral, is for the living, not the dead. Will I really kill him? I don’t think I’ll know until the moment I’m forced to make the decision.
Sweetness comes out of the kitchen and belches. “We moving today?”
“Yeah. Get your stuff together and we’ll leave in an hour or two.”
I check on Kate. She’s showered, dressed, and has her makeup and hair done. She’s also breast-feeding Anu.
“Hello, husband,” she says. “How are things?”
I’ve come to suspect from our interactions since she left me that, when she ran away from home, first to the hotel and then to Florida, her hateful attitude wasn’t really directed at me, but a façade designed to mask that she knew I played some part in her life, but wasn’t sure what it was or who I was, whether I was friend or foe.
On rare occasions, she would snap to reality enough to comprehend that I’m Anu’s father and would bring her here for visits, but remained confused about the state of our relationship when she saw me. She probably thought she left me for a reason, but couldn’t fathom what it was, so her natural assumption was that she had a reason or she wouldn’t have left. So she treated me as an enemy. I was really just an unknown quantity, and as such, frightening. She’s getting past that now.