jaunt by then.”
The phone call ended there. Pekki hadn’t said anything about whether it was an accident or a possible homicide. Koskinen was torn for a moment about whether to call him back. His throat was dry from his run, so he went to the fridge. He’d have plenty of time to hear the details in the morning.
3.
Koskinen liked the dry, biting mornings of September, and his bicycle was moving easi er than normal. His leg muscles pumped away, relaxed, and he wasn’t feeling the previous night’s jog even on the uphills.
He changed his route every day. Today’s trek started with a stretch of gravel road that cut through an uninhabited patch of forest. The noise of traffic soon fell behind, and he could hear the happy twittering of the titmice from the fir trees. As his journey continued toward downtown, he rode along the streets of a sleepy neighborhood of single-family homes admiring the fall colors—the rust-colored hedges, the blood - red clusters of berries on the mountain ash trees in the yards.
His brain rolled along nicely with his pedaling—the half-hour commute was plenty of time to plan out the whole day. He would flip through the crime reports from the last twenty-four hours right after the ir morning meeting. Then he could tackle his backlog of preliminary investigation reports. I f th ose turned out not to be too convoluted, he might still have time before lunch to flip through some of the obligatory committee memoranda, working group reports, directives, and various queries that streamed in from the National Police Board at the Interior Ministry every day.
This wasn’t the first time Koskinen would have to forget his schedule.
He was about two miles from the office when the phone in the pocket of his windbreaker started ringing. He held on to the handlebar with his left hand and fumbled the phone out with his right. It was difficult to talk on a cell phone while riding in city traffic. There was a busy intersection ahead, and a long, accordion bus was turning in front of him. He almost dropped the phone , juggl ing like a circus acrobat to get his bike over the stone curb onto the sidewalk.
“Hello!” he yelled. “Is anyone still there?”
He heard Pekki’s voice, feigning petulance: “Barely… I was just about to go make some more coffee. My old cup got cold while I was waiting.”
“What d’you want!”
“Now, you don’t need to yell… I’m not deaf.”
“Get to the point! I’m on my bike here in the middle of the sidewalk .”
“Okay, okay,” Pekki answered quickly. “Tanse ordered us to push the morning meeting up. No rush, just so long as you’re in conference room numero dos in fifteen minutes.”
The call ended. Koskinen shoved the cell phone in his pocket and got back in the saddle. Fifteen minutes! He set off pedaling furiously, blaming his ruined morning ride on Sergeant Pekki. His speaking style irritated Koskinen even more than usual; just Pekki’s numero dos had annoyed him to no end. Was it really that hard to just say “conference room two?” You would have thought he could have learned more than how to count on that trip to Majorca.
He realized how childish his grumpiness was and started pushing even harder. He ran two red lights, although the lights had just barely turned, and for several blocks he cut in and out of traffic, even though there was a bike path right next to the road. The last part, a steep uphill on Sorin Street , he rode standing up with his butt off the bike seat. It was exactly eight o’clock when he locked his bicycle next to the wall of the police station.
A crowd had already gathered in the lobby. All sorts of property had disappeared during the night, from cars and bicycles all the way to outboard motors and satellite dishes. Almost every night someone had lost their spouse, and other, more routine cases included vandalism—broken windows, slashed tires , etc. Walking past, Koskinen glanced to see if Sergeant Tiikko
The phone call ended there. Pekki hadn’t said anything about whether it was an accident or a possible homicide. Koskinen was torn for a moment about whether to call him back. His throat was dry from his run, so he went to the fridge. He’d have plenty of time to hear the details in the morning.
3.
Koskinen liked the dry, biting mornings of September, and his bicycle was moving easi er than normal. His leg muscles pumped away, relaxed, and he wasn’t feeling the previous night’s jog even on the uphills.
He changed his route every day. Today’s trek started with a stretch of gravel road that cut through an uninhabited patch of forest. The noise of traffic soon fell behind, and he could hear the happy twittering of the titmice from the fir trees. As his journey continued toward downtown, he rode along the streets of a sleepy neighborhood of single-family homes admiring the fall colors—the rust-colored hedges, the blood - red clusters of berries on the mountain ash trees in the yards.
His brain rolled along nicely with his pedaling—the half-hour commute was plenty of time to plan out the whole day. He would flip through the crime reports from the last twenty-four hours right after the ir morning meeting. Then he could tackle his backlog of preliminary investigation reports. I f th ose turned out not to be too convoluted, he might still have time before lunch to flip through some of the obligatory committee memoranda, working group reports, directives, and various queries that streamed in from the National Police Board at the Interior Ministry every day.
This wasn’t the first time Koskinen would have to forget his schedule.
He was about two miles from the office when the phone in the pocket of his windbreaker started ringing. He held on to the handlebar with his left hand and fumbled the phone out with his right. It was difficult to talk on a cell phone while riding in city traffic. There was a busy intersection ahead, and a long, accordion bus was turning in front of him. He almost dropped the phone , juggl ing like a circus acrobat to get his bike over the stone curb onto the sidewalk.
“Hello!” he yelled. “Is anyone still there?”
He heard Pekki’s voice, feigning petulance: “Barely… I was just about to go make some more coffee. My old cup got cold while I was waiting.”
“What d’you want!”
“Now, you don’t need to yell… I’m not deaf.”
“Get to the point! I’m on my bike here in the middle of the sidewalk .”
“Okay, okay,” Pekki answered quickly. “Tanse ordered us to push the morning meeting up. No rush, just so long as you’re in conference room numero dos in fifteen minutes.”
The call ended. Koskinen shoved the cell phone in his pocket and got back in the saddle. Fifteen minutes! He set off pedaling furiously, blaming his ruined morning ride on Sergeant Pekki. His speaking style irritated Koskinen even more than usual; just Pekki’s numero dos had annoyed him to no end. Was it really that hard to just say “conference room two?” You would have thought he could have learned more than how to count on that trip to Majorca.
He realized how childish his grumpiness was and started pushing even harder. He ran two red lights, although the lights had just barely turned, and for several blocks he cut in and out of traffic, even though there was a bike path right next to the road. The last part, a steep uphill on Sorin Street , he rode standing up with his butt off the bike seat. It was exactly eight o’clock when he locked his bicycle next to the wall of the police station.
A crowd had already gathered in the lobby. All sorts of property had disappeared during the night, from cars and bicycles all the way to outboard motors and satellite dishes. Almost every night someone had lost their spouse, and other, more routine cases included vandalism—broken windows, slashed tires , etc. Walking past, Koskinen glanced to see if Sergeant Tiikko
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