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on an extra brown ski hat over it, and donned sunglasses to
hide my face from the cameras when I punched in the
alarm code. I walked behind the Old Student House to
reach the elevator to the parking garage. It was always
possible that Petri was watching the security cameras.
A store detective and a junkie—was that the team of
thieves? Though a burglar alarm deactivator was not part of
a store cop’s regular equipment, it would have been easy
enough for Petri to obtain. Maybe he had also gotten his
colleagues to see Veli-Pekka Virtanen as harmless. Or had
the men perhaps figured that a junkie was too obvious a
suspect to fall under suspicion?
In the secret room I opened the employee directory Bruun
had given me. Petri’s full name was Petri Ilmari Aalto,
address Pengerkatu Street, as he had said. Military rank,
reserve second lieutenant; age, thirty-one. I googled Paula
Johanna Salo but didn’t find anything to help with the
gravestone woman. It would have been useful to have
access to the police database.
Fortunately, I had connections. Tommy H. and I had been
in the army together and in our spare time we had trained
together for the police academy entrance exams. Tommy H.
had been in love with me and imagined we’d build a career
together, but in the end I didn’t apply to the police
academy. They’d hardly have accepted a murderer’s
daughter. On our last long march, Tommy H. had sprained