Fatal Headwind by Leena Lehtolainen Read Free Book Online Page A

not? He kicked me so hard it left a bruise. Look!” Jiri lifted his loose black T-shirt.
    His ribs on one side were nasty shades of blue and green, but I made a point of appearing neutral.
    “You are going to be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. The prosecutor will probably see Officer Akkila’s behavior as a result of your provocation,” I explained. I knew the prosecutor assigned to the case, and I was sure he wouldn’t charge Akkila. Whether he was right was a different matter. I knew from experience that Akkila’s use of force was frequently over the top. If he had been my subordinate, I would have sent him home without pay for a few days to think.
    “So the police don’t decide whether to press charges?” Anne Merivaara asked.
    “No, of course not.”
    It would have been easier if the investigation into the McDonald’s incident had gone to the National Bureau of Investigation, but the complaint Jiri had filed was considered insignificant enough that the powers that be had decided to handle the matter in house. But yesterday, Anne Merivaara had called me directly, as if I were her personal police officer. I didn’t like that setup. Patrol Division had interviewed Jiri after his arrest and then released him that same night. Jiri’s father had objected to filing the complaint. Juha thought Jiri should be ashamed, that the son of an entrepreneur should understand that interfering with other people’s livelihoods and violently resisting the police weren’t acceptable.
    “Juha thinks that if Jiri wants to change fast-food culture, he should start from the opposite side by getting a job at McDonald’s and trying to rise to a leadership position. That would be the best way to influence the company’s practices. Of course that would take decades, but Juha thinks that changing internal business structures is the only good way to change the world for the better. That’s what he did,” she had said on the phone.
    Even though I had better things to do than listen to the Merivaara family’s ideological arguments, Anne worried that the charges against Jiri would hurt the reputation of the family business. A company that sold eco-friendly boat paint might not gain much favor with the Sunday boating set when it came out that one of the heirs to the business was a promising young environmental terrorist.
    I had agreed I would meet Jiri and Anne. Although I had decided to handle the preliminary investigation myself, Anu Wang was serving as my witness in Interrogation Room 2.
    “As far as I’m concerned, we can wrap up this conversation,” I said once we had spent a while belaboring the point of who made the first move, Jiri or Officer Akkila. Each blamed the other, and I was ready to believe them both. Jiri Merivaara seemed like just the kind of kid who would try to be a hero by attacking a cop. “I’ll send the record of these proceedings for your signature in a couple of days, and then they’ll go to the prosecutor.”
    “So you and the other pigs don’t have any say over whether that shit who kicked me gets charged? Ha, ha, ha! We know how it is. Cops protect their own. Including you, you fucking pâté-eating bitch . . .” Jiri grumbled.
    I couldn’t help laughing at such an odd epithet. In the hall, Anne Merivaara and I had a moment alone while Jiri disappeared into the restroom.
    “Someone needs to talk sense into that boy. Riikka and I have tried, but it’s no use. He doesn’t have any real contact with his father, and he just calls Tapio an opera clown. Mikke is the only one Jiri might listen too, but he’s in Estonia sailing.”
    “Is Mikke Sjöberg related to you?”
    “He’s Juha’s half brother, but he has his mother’s name.”
    Just then Jiri marched past me without a word. Anne Merivaara ran after him, waving a rushed good-bye. As I quickly assembled the pretrial report, I hoped this would be the last time I was mixed up in the Merivaara family’s affairs.
    No