My partner and I got there fast, arrived as two thieves exited the store carrying backpacks weighed down with jewelry. They pulled guns and one fired a shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased one of them down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists.

All of a sudden, the thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand but he surprised me. I was still in mid-sprint when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I sprawled on the ground. He should have kept running but, for what reason I can’t imagine, instead he decided to kill me.

When he came toward me, I got a shot off first and the bullet caught him in the side. He went down, and for a second we both just sat there on the sidewalk, looking at each other. He raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his gun. He didn’t, and I blew his head off.

It turned out that he and his partner were gangsters from Estonia on a crime spree. They had come from Tallinn to Helsinki on a day cruise. I guess they expected to rob Tillander and go home on the same boat that evening.

“If you take this case away from me,” I say, “you’re taking my career away with it. You might as well have retired me.”

“Your career opportunities ended when you left Helsinki for Kittilä. You requested the transfer, why complain about it now?”

After the shooting, the department made a big deal about it, gave me a medal and promoted me to detective. Later, when I was promoted to inspector, I requested a transfer back here to Kittilä, my hometown. He thinks this is about my pride, but he’s wrong, this is about my duty. “You either retire me right now or back off my case. Which is it?”

He can take a chance on me and the case, or get rid of me and explain why he forced out a hero cop. Bad press. I wait while he thinks.

“Okay, you win. However, should you decide that you want a homicide team to step in, I’ll oblige you. I don’t care who does it, I just want the case solved fast.”

“Fair enough.”

“Anything else I can do to help?”

“Locate Sufia Elmi’s parents. Have a pastor and an officer go to their home and inform them about the murder.” In this country, Lutheran clergy accompany the police when they notify relatives of the deceased. “And the autopsy will be later today. I could use twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA sampling.”

“Done. Call me with daily progress reports. And Kari, this is on your fucking head now.”

I hang up, so pissed off I can barely breathe.

AT EIGHT A.M., I go out to the common room. Antti and Jussi, the only patrol officers I’ve got because the others are all on Christmas vacation, are lounging around drinking coffee. Their field uniform coveralls are rumpled. Antti looks so much like a stereotypical Finn that it’s almost comical. Blond hair and a face shaped like a frying pan. Jussi is dark-headed, heavyset and serious. They look sleepy.

Valtteri looks tired too. Maybe he couldn’t sleep after seeing Sufia’s body. He’s wearing his newest dress sergeant’s uniform, starched and pressed. He knows today is important.

I lean against a cluttered desk. “I guess you all know this murder is the biggest case our department has ever handled. We’re the crime team and the whole country will be watching, so we’re not allowed to make mistakes.”

“I’ve never investigated a murder before,” Jussi says.

“You went to school. Just do what you were taught.”

When I was coming up in the force, you just had to attend the police academy for a couple months. Now you need a bachelor’s degree to be a cop. Antti and Jussi are young guys in their twenties: educated police officers.

“Besides,” I say, “we have some good evidence, this might not be a tough one.”

“My winter vacation starts the day after tomorrow,” Antti says, “I’m off for two weeks.”

“Not anymore. Your vacation is canceled until this is over.”

He raises his voice a little. “Why?”

“Because it’s your job. Other people are already on vacation, there’s nobody else to do it. You were the responding officers, it’s your case.”

“I’ve got plane tickets to Thailand.”

He’s giving me a hard time because Sufia’s murder will interfere with him fucking Thai whores on Christmas. “Sorry,” I say.

I dim the lights, go to the computer and set the PowerPoint slide show at ten-second intervals. Images from the crime scene flash on the wall.

“I canvassed Marjakylä last night. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for someone who lives there to kill Sufia, drive the two hundred yards across the road and just slip back into his house.” I hand Valtteri my notebook. “I want you to start by checking alibis.”

He takes out a pocket flashlight and flips through it. “Your father is in here.”

“Him too.”

An image of Sufia’s face and torso comes up and I freeze it. “We’ve got mutilation, including a broken beer bottle stuffed into her vagina. He may have raped her before he dumped her and killed her. Her eyes are gouged out, like he didn’t want her to see him. It could mean he was ashamed. He cut off a piece of her breast.”

Jussi looks sickened and interrupts me. “Who the fuck could do something like that?”

“He may be a psychotic sexual predator who hates women. We haven’t had much in the way of serial murderers in this country, but you never know. If it is and he’s a local, this is probably his first kill or we would recognize his modus operandi, and we can expect more murders to follow at intervals.”

“There’s a typical profile for this kind of serial killer, if it is one,” Antti says.

“Yep. Typical serial killers are male, age twenty to thirty. Their usual motives are sex, power, domination and control. They roughly fall into two categories-organized and disorganized. The motive for an organized killer is most often rape. Organized killers usually have above-average intelligence and plan their crimes methodically. They tend to abduct their victims, kill them in one place and dump the bodies in another. Disorganized killers are most often motivated by sadism, are of lower intelligence, commit impulse crimes of opportunity and leave bodies at the murder site. For both types, a series of five or more murders with a cooling-off period between each is common. As like as not, a serial killer has been wrapped up in a sex-murder fantasy since his teens or even earlier. The reality committed as an adult may disappoint the killer, causing him to act it out again and again, trying to find a way to make the murders more satisfying.”

“You know a lot about it,” Jussi says.

“I did a lot of reading about serial killers while I was working on my master’s thesis. This murder is atypical. Abduction, three separate weapons, including a bottle broken beforehand in preparation, and writing on the body all meet the criteria for a methodical, organized killer. But killing her on site and leaving her there instead of dumping her in a separate location point to a disorganized killer. I’ll check out the crime database and look for similar crimes.”

“What about the ‘nigger whore’ thing?” Jussi asks.

“That’s our problem in determining motive. We can’t say yet if the crime is the product of a deranged mind, or maybe a race crime dressed up to look like one. We need to figure out which one it is to focus our investigation. Maybe the autopsy will help. For now, we’ll stick to the basics and work with what we’ve got until we can narrow down the field of potential suspects. We’ve got the tire tracks and the Lapin Kulta bottle he used on her eyes and vagina. I have a lead on the car. Eero Karjalainen claims he saw a BMW 3 Series sedan pull out of Aslak’s driveway around the time of the murder.”

Antti raises his eyebrows. “Eero?”