I don’t know why.”

It’s two thirty P.M. on December sixteenth. We won’t see daylight again until Christmas day, and then only a glimmer. She’s right. That’s the way things are here in winter. A bunch of depressed hard drinkers freezing in an endless night. Kaamos is tough on everyone. I can see how being pregnant here would make her feel vulnerable and frightened.

My cell phone rings. “Vaara.”

“It’s Valtteri. Where are you?”

“In Hullu Poro with Kate. What’s up?”

He doesn’t speak.

“Valtteri?”

“There’s been a murder, and I’m looking at the body.”

“Tell me who and where.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Sufia Elmi, that black movie star. It’s bad. She’s in a field on Aslak’s place, about thirty yards off the road.”

“Anybody there with you?”

“Antti and Jussi. They were the responding officers.”

“Anything that requires immediate attention, like a suspect?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then seal off the crime scene and wait for me.” I hang up.

“Problem?” Kate asks.

“You could say that. Somebody’s been murdered in a snowfield on Aslak Haltta’s reindeer farm.”

“You mean where we met?”

“Yeah.”

She looks at me and I read pain in her eyes. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she says.

I didn’t realize how much she needs me right now, and I don’t want to leave her. “Me too. Can we talk about this later?”

She nods but looks sad as I kiss her good-bye.

2

I STEP OUTSIDE INTO the dark, and the cold makes my face burn. I take a deep breath to clear my mind, feel the hair in my nostrils freeze, check my watch. It’s two fifty-two P.M. I call Esko Laine, the provincial medical examiner, tell him there’s been a murder and to meet me at the crime scene. He’s getting ready to go to sauna, sounds a little drunk and less than pleased.

The car skitters on the ice as I pull out of Hullu Poro’s parking lot. I light a cigarette and crack the window, despite it being minus forty. Nicotine and cold are a good combination for thinking.

Finland has a population of only five and a half million people, but a lot of violent crime. Per capita, our murder rate is about the same as most American big cities. The overwhelming majority of our murders are intimate events. We kill the people we love, our husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and friends, almost always in drunken rages.

This is different. In a country as sensitive to insinuations of racism as Finland, the murder of a black, female public figure will explode across national headlines. It’s never happened before. If the actress, Sufia Elmi, has been murdered, I’ve got a big problem.

Finns are sensitive about race relations because by and large we’re closet racists.