Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's been twelve years since he last saved one. She had jet black hair, long and as straight as the aspens that grew behind the barn. Her skin was alabaster; so pale and devoid of color that the ceramic angel he gave her couldn't have been a better match. He still dreamed of her green eyes and how expressive they were as she took her last breath.

The last time he checked she was still nameless. He hated the police sketch that suggested what she may have looked like in life. It lacked everything beautiful and special about her. They didn't even get her eyes right—they were much too dark; not at all like the vibrant green he remembered. How could they have gotten it so wrong? She had only been gone for a few days by the time they found her. Surely, she wouldn't have looked that different by then.

He wanted to know her real name as much as he imagined the police did. She was the only one left unidentified; the only one left nameless in his prayers. He could have used the name she gave him, but he knew that was an alias and it didn't feel right to misname her.

She was different from the ones who came before her. Of all the women, she was most like his daughter. Not in looks. His daughter had mousy brown hair, cut short in an act of rebellion, and her gray-blue eyes were as dull as her conviction to God. It was her spirit. She was full of piss and vinegar, and the way she pushed back, fighting him tooth and nail, was his daughter in another's body.

She was also the only one he brought into the house; the others had been confined to the space he had prepared for them in the barn. His wife had been away visiting family and he wanted to spend as much time as possible with her. The barn was cold and he didn't like to be cold.

He always wondered if this had been a mistake. The surfaces in the room in the back of the barn were tile and metal; easily cleaned. There were no carpets, furniture, or blankets to hide hairs. He did his best afterwards to shower her, washing away anything she may have picked up in the house that could lead back to him. And it had been twelve years. If he had missed anything the police would have found him by now.

She was the last one before his wife became sick with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Early on, his wife lost the muscle control needed to swallow, and he spent a lot of time pureeing her food, or making her milkshakes and smoothies. As the disease progressed and she lost control of other muscle groups, all of his time was devoted to her. He bathed and dressed her. He moved her from the bed to her armchair to her favorite spot in the garden and back to bed again. He fed her and took her to the toilet. He did everything for her.

His wife died in June of respiratory failure. It's now October.

He sat at his workbench in the barn, applying white glaze to the last of the angels. He made three, just as before. He would have to wait until tomorrow for the glaze to dry and it would then be days before the firing process was complete.

He wasn't in a hurry. He wanted everything to be perfect before he started again.

Chapter Text

"I didn't know."

Her confession hung in the air of his hotel suite, darkened to fit their mood after the conclusion of a case that nearly took both of their lives. Sofia Karppi and Sakari Nurmi stood in the living room, framed by a window looking down onto the streets of nighttime Helsinki, both searching the other for some sort of sign as to what would come next. A desk lamp nearby provided the only light, its amber hue casting just enough illumination to navigate and to see the guilt in her eyes.

Sakari watched as Karppi nibbled her lower lip, drawing its skin between her teeth. She played with her lips frequently; usually when her wandering mind was working overtime, trying to puzzle out one of their cases. Was she aware of this habit or was it her brain's way of subconsciously grounding her; keeping her from jumping off whatever cliff lay ahead?

She took an uneasy step forward, slowly and cautiously closing the distance between them. She parted her lips only a hair and stopped, her mouth teasingly close to his own. He could feel her exhalations as puffs of warm air against his lips, and his heart stopped for just a moment as it skipped a beat. Such a cliché; nevertheless, his reality as adrenaline and norepinephrine coursed through his body in anticipation of her touch.

He wondered if she was thinking of that morning in his apartment, a year and a half ago, when she had tried to kiss him and he had rejected her. Karppi hadn't known it then, but they had been on the precipice of a dark chapter in their time together. The guilt he had felt from his role in her stepdaughter's imminent arrest overrode any physical desires he may have otherwise had that pivotal morning.

Now, in this dark hotel room, with the space between them infinitesimal and heat radiating from within, he found it hard to breathe. His arms dangled like dead weights; his body unable to do anything but wait for what was to come next. He hoped she knew that he wanted this; the logical next step in their slow burn toward being more than just partners.

This moment in time, this moment in their shared history, was as far from perfect as two people could get. Earlier in the night, she had shot him, her love for her son understandably superseding any place Sakari may have had in her life. She had created a wrinkle by fully admitting what he had already suspected; that she had discharged two bullets into his center mass, just as she had been trained to do, without knowing he had been wearing a ballistic vest.

He shouldn't want to have anything to do with her. He should scream at her, and push her, and run as far from her as he could.

And yet.

While the night lacked the usual precursors to an intimate moment, nothing was ever conventional between them. He didn't think it possible for them to have a normal relationship, either as law enforcement partners or lovers; an inevitability four years in the making. He welcomed what was happening between them now, had fantasized about it too many times to count, and was eager to see where it would take them. But he needed her to take the lead. That was their natural state of being and too much lately had been off-kilter for him to flip the script now.

After what seemed like an agonizingly long time, his eyes fluttered shut as those lips she had been nibbling finally fell against his. She was dipping her toes into the water with this initial contact. The kiss was tentative and a little shaky, as if she were seeking forgiveness and was afraid he wouldn't give it.

He didn't pull away, wordless confirmation that she should continue. He wondered if he should actually speak the words; make it absolutely clear to her that he wasn't going to reject her this time.

Kiss me. Please.

But words weren't needed as she brought her mouth to his again. Still, she seemed unsure of herself, exhibiting a level of insecurity he had never seen in her before.

He met her hesitation with a tenderness that surprised him, as everything in his body was begging him to scoop her up and carry her to the couch. Overcome with an intense desire to protect her from everything bad this world wanted to throw at her, he instead reached up and gently brushed his fingers across her cheek, telling her with his touch that she was safe with him. His body was on fire as he parted his lips, yearning to taste every millimeter of her.

"Mom!" Karppi's son called for her from the bedroom. Emil's voice, pleading for comfort only his mother could provide, cut through their building intimacy like a hot knife through butter.

"Coming." Her expression was one of amused resignation as she pulled away, leaving behind a cold void in her place. He couldn't be mad—her role as a mother would always come first—but he could miss her.

Karppi had just gotten Emil to sleep. The day had been long and traumatic for all of them, but especially for the boy who had been taken and used as a pawn in a monster's fucked-up game of revenge. He had been the target, the abduction a trap by Jouni Paarma to get to Sakari, and he wasn't sure he could ever truly forgive himself for the series of transgressions that led to today.

He wouldn't be surprised if Emil continued to have trouble sleeping. He was safe with them, but nightmares were a given as the twelve-year old tried to process and heal from what he had been through.

Recalling that he had once read something about playing Tetris after experiencing trauma, Sakari sat on the couch, reclining into the back cushions, and searched the topic on his phone. He scrolled through page after page, reading about how the visual and spatial demands of the classic video game interrupted the brain's need to obsess over every detail of the event.

He downloaded the game onto his phone, immediately starting it up so that it would be ready for Emil in the morning. The boy didn't need to know why he was playing it. Sakari would present it as a game from his childhood that he wanted to share with his gaming friend.

Sakari was probably five or six the last time he played the game, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of his childhood home in Finland, craning his neck to see the screen of the boxy television set placed up on a small table. He could vividly remember playing video games in that room with its large picture window looking out onto the pine forest behind the house.

Not long after that, he had given his NES to his best friend, who had promised to look after it for him. He was moving with his parents to South Africa and had to leave a lot of his possessions behind. It never seemed fair to him; his life being upended to suit the whims of his parents, neither of whom gave a shit about him. Why couldn't they have spared him the pain and just skipped to the part where he lived with his grandmother?

When he finally returned to Finland a few years later, he was an orphaned teenager, taken in by the only person who ever truly loved him. Mummu did the best she could to repair his broken heart and fix the cracks that had formed in his fragile psyche, but her best had never been enough. If only he had known then the benefits of Tetris after a traumatic event, perhaps the image of his mom shooting his dad in the head and turning the gun on herself wouldn't be seared into his brain, forever popping up when he least expected it.

He was splayed out fully on the couch now, propping his head with pillows. He played the game on his phone, missing the janky movements of the blocks directed by the rectangular controller of his youth. Tapping a screen wasn't as tactilely pleasing as pressing responsive buttons. The original, familiar theme music had been replaced with a barely recognizable pop version. Still, he was having fun and soon lost himself in the task of constantly rotating, dropping, and fitting together the differently-shaped blocks.

Sakari yawned and rubbed his eyes with the pads of his hands, exhaustion too strong to fight. He closed the game and looked at the time; an hour had passed since Karppi left him to attend to Emil.

And in that time, he hadn't once, until now, pictured her distraught face—tears welling in her eyes, smudged eyeliner, her jaw clenched—as she pulled the trigger and released the second bullet into his body. He had been too shocked to have fully registered her first shot. Had they exchanged words? Had there been any hesitation on her part?

He stood, shaking the distressing image away, and walked across the darkened living room to the bedroom. The door separating the spaces had been left ajar and a light from within created a trapezoid-shaped beam on the floor. He peeked through the opening and found Emil and Karppi sleeping soundly.

Sakari carefully opened the door and padded softly across the carpeted floor. They had left one of the bedside lamps on and he paused, contemplating if he should turn it off. But something stopped him; a fleeting thought that the light was meant to keep dark thoughts away.

They were on the far side of the bed, Emil's back to Sakari and Karppi facing him, her body balancing precariously at the edge of the mattress. The slightest movement from her son could have sent her toppling to the floor, but she was perfectly at ease. It was as though muscle memory alone, built over twelve years of comforting Emil, kept her in her place.

The boy's head rested against his mother's chest; his face partially covered by his mop of blond hair. Karppi was curled up next to her son with an arm and a leg draped over him, protecting him even in her sleep.

It was then—as he watched their chests slowly rise and fall, and listened to their soft, almost synchronous snores—that Sakari realized they had left half the bed for him. They had even gone as far as fluffing the pillow and turning down the top of the covers.

He closed his eyes and inhaled sharply through his nose. He was overwhelmed with a wave of anxiety, a feeling of ice flowing through his veins, and retreated quickly, hoping he wasn't as loud as he imagined himself to be.

He stood at the hotel window—the same window where they had kissed—and focused on the red and white lights from traffic below. He took a deep breath, concentrating on the feeling of his lungs expanding and then contracting as he slowly exhaled. This cycle repeated until he felt the panic subside.

He didn't know exactly what he wanted from her; what he wanted for them. His lips still tingled when thoughts of her mouth pressed against his flitted across his consciousness; he definitely wanted to experience that kiss again, along with countless more.

An aching pulse coursed through the rest of his body when he imagined what it would feel like to have her under him; their skin meeting, his hands exploring her curves, her legs wrapping around him to draw him closer.

All he knew was that he was damaged and she was damaged, and yet somehow—together—they felt whole and right. But the likely innocuous gesture on her part of making room on the bed and turning down the blankets had scared the shit out of him.

It's not like they hadn't shared a bed before. There was that time in tiny Rönnvik, early in their partnership, where they had been forced into one bed by circumstance and his shitty car. He shouldn't have ignored the signs that his alternator was going—the headlights flickering and dimming; the faint, acrid smell of electrical wires melting; the power door locks never working for Karppi. She had laughed when his engine died on a dirt road cutting through a farmer's field in the middle of nowhere, her hatred for that car released as pleasure over its death. But she hadn't laughed when they stood aside the only bed in the only available room in the only motel for miles around.

It was different now. They had years of experiences shared behind closed doors—smiles and laughter, inside jokes, tears and anguish, passionate kisses, rejections—that made everything with her take on a new meaning.

Turning down the covers and preparing the bed for sleep was something he imagined she had done for her late husband. He wondered how many times tiny Emil had toddled into his parents' room in the middle of the night and climbed their bed, nestling in between them for comfort.

Sakari found it difficult, almost impossible, to picture himself in such a blissful, familial scene. Fatherhood was for others, not for him. With two bullets, discharged in a fit of rage, his mother had obliterated any parental instincts he may have once had.

Thoughts about Leo, the son he didn't know about until the boy was almost one, had been coming frequently to him as of late. He had told Karppi that he wanted nothing to do with the child and, at the time, that had been true. In the year and a half that followed, he had been too distracted—too fucked up on booze, and drugs, and one-night stands with nameless women—to think about Leo much at all.

Then, Laura had reentered his life, lying in a hospital bed with no idea where their son was located. And suddenly, Sakari's entire purpose was to find the three-year-old and fuck up anyone who stood in his way.

He could have chalked it up to being a cop, a field he had entered specifically to help people, or just being a decent human being. But the intensity with which he pursued leads that night, and the insane relief he felt upon finding Leo in that freight container, derailed all of Sakari's self-pitying thoughts about parenthood. Maybe he could be defined by more than his mother and father after all.

Chapter Text

Sofia studied the water, allowing her thoughts to wander and escape with the retreating tide. The surface rippled as late autumn winds blew in from the sea, lifting and swirling the soft waves of her honey-blonde hair. She had recently treated herself to a much-needed haircut, shedding the overgrown and tangled disaster it had become in a direct reflection of her life.

She found peace on the undeveloped waterfronts of Helsinki, absent of people and smelling of fish and brine, and often went to them to clear the static from her brain. The gray mass inside her skull never seemed to shut up as images, theories, and moments in time she wished she could reverse were on a constant loop.

And she had a lot of moments that she wished she could erase, or at least approach differently. The years since her husband's death had been particularly blemished by mistakes, misjudgments, and the overlooking of evidence that even the most junior of investigators should have seen.

How could she have missed the signs that Henna, the step-daughter she had helped raise, was on a downward trajectory, spiraling out of control as grief swallowed her? Drug use or not, it should have been clear to Sofia that she needed help. Nurmi could see it; he practically begged her to intervene. Yet she ignored him, her ego too big to admit that he was right.

And then it was too late. By the time Henna landed herself in the hospital, she had already committed her crimes; the one that would send her to prison and the one that Sofia had kept secret to this day.

In the eighteen months after her daughter's arrest for drug trafficking, when she had been placed on disciplinary leave for not disclosing her knowledge of the crime, Sofia had barely functioned. Emil and she had moved in with his grandfather, living on an isolated island far from her former life and those she believed had betrayed her. She had helped with chores and spent a lot of time wandering the fields around the property, but only by forcing herself to get out of bed each morning for Emil's sake. She had ceased her daily runs, showered sometimes, and rarely brushed her long, unruly hair.

Returning to work after that time had been complicated and difficult. She had harbored a lot of anger toward the department and had lost all faith in her partner. Nurmi, of all people, should have looped her in on the plans to charge Henna with drug trafficking. For him to be the one to perform the arrest was like a stab in the gut and it had all been too much for her to easily forgive.

When brought back to the fold, she had been given no choice but to work with him again, mirroring the start of their partnership. This rebuilding of their professional relationship, had been, in many ways, more difficult than those first few weeks ever working together. The second time around, they had an established history; shared moments that forever sealed them to the other.

Now, after all the pain and struggles—after shooting him, for god's sake—their union inexplicably felt stronger than ever.

The Paarma case had done a number on their psychological health and they had both taken an extended leave from work to recover. They texted one another at least once a day, mainly to check-in and see what the other was up to. Nurmi, returning to the precinct ahead of her, would sometimes share an anecdote about their fellow detective, JP; a frequent source of amusement for them both. Otherwise, they avoided all talk of work.

She had taken Emil to his grandfather's house again, helping around the property while he recuperated from the heart attack he had suffered trying to stop Paarma from taking Emil. They stayed for a few weeks, during which time Sofia had arranged for a caretaker to continue to look after her aging and frail father-in-law. Emil and she then spent two weeks in the Canary Islands.

Greece had been the regular holiday spot for the family, back when it was the four of them. Jussi had always made the arrangements, taking them to places that had a mix of history, art, great food, and nice beaches with calm waters for Henna and Emil. But they rarely went elsewhere and never as far as off the coast of Africa. That was the main appeal for Sofia; their trip had been a chance for Emil and her to have an adventure to call their own.

Four years had passed since Jussi had been killed while running late at night, ripping a hole in the fabric of the family they had created. Emil had been too young to truly grasp the concept of death and coped by lashing out at her. Her own grief had been felt as countless, tiny cuts marring the entirety of her skin. Her son's words, expressions of unresolved anger and sadness, had been like salt poured over the open wounds.

Any semblance of a relationship she had once had with Henna, the girl born to another, irrevocably broke that night. Henna blamed Sofia for her father's death, having witnessed the argument that led to Jussi storming out of the house, never to return.

Sofia knew people were constantly judging her for the enormous amount of time she would spend on a case, seemingly ignoring her responsibilities as a parent. She also failed tremendously in helping the children grieve their father. But how could she possibly help them when she herself didn't know how to move forward and without a support system to help her? Beyond all her faults, and there were many, she loved Henna and Emil fiercely. Even when they didn't love her back, she would do anything to keep them safe.

Today was Sofia's third day back at work and she was already exhausted. They didn't have an active assignment; instead, she had spent the last two days reading through the final report of the Paarma case. She had been advised not to read it; or to at least stop at the point of Emil's abduction.

In her mind, she had no choice. Reading the narrative as written by other officers and seeing in words the testimony that Emil, Nurmi, and she had provided, helped her to process what had happened to them. They had experienced much of it together, but had suffered so much alone.

Emil had started seeing a pediatric therapist after returning from their trip, but how she ultimately moved forward with her own demons remained to be seen. Sofia had spent many hours in the past weeks considering the events of that night; going over every second to see if she could have reversed course somehow. In the end, she had concluded that there wasn't a single thing she would have done differently because the outcome had been Emil coming home alive.

She had heard the whispers of other officers expressing their surprise that she and Nurmi were still partners, and their gossip enraged her. First she was labeled a shitty mother for focusing too much on work and now she was being judged for doing the only thing she could do in order to save her child.

She thought back to that night and its illusion of choice. In her desperation to save Emil, with her mind clouded with anguish and her eyes blurry from tears, she had thought that Nurmi's chest looked a bit bulky. Maybe he had prepared for the unknown and worn a vest. That had been the extent of the thinking, though. She had no choice and had pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Later that night in his hotel suite, she had approached him, needing to confess and seeking absolution. Tender kisses followed, wholly unlike any they had shared before. These kisses hadn't been fueled by alcohol or pushed unexpectedly on the other as a distraction from one's pain. They were the kisses of two people who had been to hell and back together; who had deeply hurt one another with words and actions, and yet who knew, unquestionably, that they would always be a sanctuary for each other.

The sound of tires on gravel and the closing of a car door behind her brought her back to the present. She smiled, knowing who it was before she looked. There was only one person who would know to find her here. Inhaling the salty air and closing her eyes for just a moment, savoring the last of the solitude, she turned to see her partner walking toward her.

"Did you ever find out who called you from Germany?" Nurmi asked. The mysterious phone call had been the start of a rewrite that completely destroyed the neat and tidy narrative she had developed around Jussi's death and their final months together as husband and wife.

"No," she said. "But I don't really want to know."

She didn't want to think about the affair he had had with her former colleague and friend, and didn't believe Peltola when she said it was only a one night stand. She refused to allow images in her head of their betrayal, so she had resolved to never let her mind go there. Sofia would never have all the answers. In this case, unlike others, she welcomed ignorance.

Nurmi cleared his throat and looked beyond her, clearly uncomfortable about something. "I'm thinking of trying to get custody of Leo."

She hadn't been sure she would ever hear that name again. Nurmi had been rocked by his ex-girlfriend's revelation that he was the father to her baby. He had insisted at the time that he wanted no part in the boy's life; that he didn't want to be responsible for anyone. But Sofia knew that was a lie born from anger and self-protection.

He removed a big envelope from his coat pocket; the results of a paternity test that was required before he could move forward with his petition. He had waited until now, when he was with her, to read the results. Taking the report out of the envelope, he scanned it before handing it over, betraying nothing as he allowed her to read it.

"You're not the father." She spoke matter-of-factly, hoping to cover the feeling of relief that had washed over her. Whatever he decided to do now would fully be his choice and that somehow made it better. "Does it change anything? Leo still needs a father."

He sighed and looked toward the sea, fighting off unspoken emotions he wasn't ready to share. Not wanting to press the issue, Sofia embraced him, offering him comfort and a retreat from whatever was going through his head.

"Hello?" A familiar, disembodied voice emerged from the dispatch radio in Nurmi's car. Leave it to JP to have the worst timing. "A body was found."

She broke the hug and reluctantly pulled herself away, offering Nurmi a knowing smirk. As criminal investigators who regularly saw the worst in humanity, they had long ago become experts at compartmentalizing and flipping switches on a moment's notice.

Taking her usual place in the passenger seat, she let JP know they were on the way. The body was a few kilometers away, near the train yard north of the city center. Even with the emergency light flashing and the siren blaring, they had some time before arriving.

Sitting in silence wasn't awkward for them; they were used to the other retreating into their own thoughts. But she needed to say something, her brain itching to release the words, and hoped he would accept them in good faith.

"I've told you about my father," she started, watching the city pass by through the side window. "I don't know him…don't even know his name."

She wasn't looking, but could hear the sound of his hands tightening around the steering wheel. She cleared her throat, suddenly dry and tight, and continued.

"Maybe it's stupid," she said, finally glancing at him to gauge his reaction. "I always wanted a dad. Didn't have to be the one who helped create me, just…someone."

He shook his head and sighed, focusing on getting them through a busy intersection without hitting anyone. She didn't think he looked angry at her for broaching this subject; maybe a little annoyed that it had to be now, in heavy traffic, on their way to examine a corpse.

"I just want you to know…" She hesitated for a moment, choosing her next words carefully. It was ultimately his decision on what he would do with his life, but she wanted him to realize that he had value as a father. "For what it's worth, you would make a great dad and I think you should pursue custody."

"Sofia." They usually called each other by their last names, a common convention among law enforcement to maintain professionalism, so his use of her first name threw her. "Later."

They rode the rest of the way in silence, this time decidedly awkward. She had broken the number one rule for maintaining sanity in their professional lives—keeping their personal lives separate.

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The body, wrapped in what appeared to be a plastic shower curtain, had been thrown into brambles between a service road and railroad tracks. The top half of the head, from the nose up, was visible. There was bruising around both eyes, but otherwise the exposed skin was pristine. Sticks and dead leaves were tangled in long, red hair.

By the time they arrived, JP had finished the initial walk through, establishing the trail of the crime and cordoning off the area. Yellow markers, each one numbered and placed at items of evidence, dotted the ground.

Sofia scanned the scene, her hands shoved in her pockets, using all of her senses to imprint it in her mind. These first impressions were the longest lasting and could instantly derail an investigation if interpreted incorrectly.

The air smelled of diesel and creosote, a pungent odor of tar and smoke that burned her nose and left a bitter taste in her mouth. The smell of human decomposition, unmistakable and permeating, was absent, so the body hadn't been there long. She couldn't detect blood in the air; neither its iron smell, nor its coppery taste. Although, that could be because the odor of the train tracks overpowered everything else.

Tire tread impressions, likely left by whoever dumped the body, had been preserved by a sequence of perfectly aligned weather events. Yesterday afternoon's late November rain had muddied the dirt road and plummeting temperatures overnight had frozen the ruts where a vehicle's tires had sunk.

The body was not well hidden and appeared to have been hastily deposited. Autumn had taken the leaves from the shrubs, allowing the shower curtain, in its various shades of yellow, to stand out amongst the dull landscape.

"Who found the body?" She turned to the group of investigators standing nearby, asking no one in particular.

"A railroad employee inspecting the tracks," JP said, tilting his head in the direction of an individual being questioned some distance away. "He ignored it at first. People dump shit here all the time. But the hair stood out."

Sofia nodded her acknowledgement and bent down to get a closer look. At first glance, the hair didn't appear to be a natural color of red and the brown roots confirmed it.

"Koskinen recognized the victim," JP said. "A prostitute."

"Sex worker." Sofia corrected her colleague, not hiding her aggravation with his use of the outdated and devaluing term. "And who the hell is Koskinen?"

"New member of the team," Nurmi said, squatting next to her. His gloved hand moved aside the victim's hair as he carefully looked for bullet wounds or other signs of trauma to the head. "She transferred from trafficking."

Right.

Peltola, who had argued with Sofia's husband on the side of a dark road and pushed him into the path of the car that would take his life, had been suspended from the force pending an investigation. Even if her role in Jussi's death was found to fall short of negligent homicide, Peltola would never return to the department; not as long as Sofia was around.

She stood, her knees cracking from the effort, and walked the short distance to the forensics team. "Go ahead and start processing the body," she said. "Let me know as soon as her hands are free."

Nurmi and she retreated to his car for what would be a long wait. Forensics would painstakingly unroll the woman from her shroud, collecting any small pieces of evidence—hair, fibers, and other detritus—as they proceeded. It would be a while before Sofia could get a closer look.

Nurmi had a thermos of coffee and two mugs stored in the center console. She sipped on the hot drink while she she searched the local newspaper's archive on her phone.

"Why the hands?" Nurmi's voice broke her concentration and she glared at him, a mixture of annoyance and confusion on her face. "The victim's hands," he said, holding up his own as a visual. "Why are you so interested in them?"

He reached over her to retrieve a sandwich he had stashed in the glove box. This man's constant need for food never ceased to amuse her. There were days where she would live on coffee and chocolate alone, but god forbid Nurmi skipped a meal. She pressed herself back into the seat, giving him space to get his lunch.

"The scene reminds me of my first case with homicide," she said.

Sofia had joined homicide twelve years ago, following her mentor, Tapio Koskimäki, who had become chief of the unit. He had previously been one of her instructors at the Police University College and then mentored her when she started her career in investigation.

Ever since stumbling upon The X-Files as a teen, she had wanted to solve murders. She had been fascinated with the mysteries of the week and identified with both of the FBI agents sent to solve them. Fox Mulder's tenacious search for the truth, oftentimes using unconventional methods, appealed to her desire to make sense out of the nonsensical. But it was Dana Scully, a small-framed woman who took absolutely no shit from anyone, who made the biggest impression on young Sofia. Through her intelligence and scientific skills, Agent Scully demanded that space be made for her in a field dominated by men.

With Koskimäki, Sofia had it easier than Scully; he created the space for her, recognizing early on that she had the drive, skills, and empathy required of a homicide investigator. She had to bide her time in traffic accident reconstruction until she had proved her skills to the rest of the department, but Koskimäki being her champion certainly hadn't hurt her chances, and she quickly graduated to homicide.

About a month into her new position, she rode along to a crime scene with her mentor and superior. It was there that she had witnessed Koskimäki's expression change from one of general disgust with humanity to one of actual horror.

She scrolled through the search results on the newspaper's website until she found what she needed—an article from 2008. She handed her cell to Nurmi, giving him a moment to read the headline on the small screen: Police investigate body found wrapped in plastic.

"This was the third woman found that year. The third one rolled up in a shower curtain. Although, that specific detail has never been released to the media or public."

She watched Nurmi ponder this information, a now familiar expression of doubt on his face. They were good partners because he wasn't afraid to challenge her and provide alternatives to think about, even if they usually ended up back at her theory.

"A curtain, shower or otherwise, isn't exactly an uncommon means of transporting a body," he said as he returned her phone.

"No, but there was something else." She raised an eyebrow, teasing that there was more to the story. "When the body was unrolled, Koskimäki knew to go straight to her hand." Nurmi looked on with interest as she continued. "She was holding something; an angel—a little ceramic figurine. Koskimäki had found similar ones in the hands of the two other victims. Three women, all sex workers; three shower curtains; three of the same calling card…" She trailed off, giving her partner a chance to come to his own conclusion.

"A serial killer."

She nodded. "And we never caught him. If our victim is holding something, then I think it's safe to say it's him."

She finished her coffee, returning the mug to the center console, and leaned against the window to read more about the 2008 murders. Halfway through the second article, she was startled by a loud knock right next to her ear, followed by the door opening.

"Jesus!" She had to grab the dashboard and contort her torso back into the car to keep from falling to the ground. "What the fuck is wrong with you, JP?"

"Forensics asked me to get you," he said, not paying any attention to her curses or glares as she exited the car.

She walked quickly to the body, expertly avoiding the evidence markers scattered around the scene. Now uncovered, Sofia could see that the victim was nude except for socks covering her feet. The socks were a peculiar touch. Perhaps a twisted sense of compassion, she thought. As though the killer wanted to keep her warm. She looked young; late teens or early twenties. She barely had a chance at life.

In addition to the petechiae around her eyes, she had bruises on her neck, wrists, and ankles. Her breasts were covered in slashes of varying lengths. It appeared as though she had been bound and strangled.

"Fuck," Sofia uttered to herself.

She removed a pair of blue latex gloves from a box being held by one of the junior forensic investigators and snapped them over her hands. The victim's right hand was open and empty, but her left, on the far side, was clenched.

Sofia leaned over the body, having to brace herself with one hand on the ground to keep her balance. Her arm began to shake as her muscles fought against the effort. She couldn't walk to the other side where the shower curtain was laid out. There was evidence to be collected and forensics didn't need her tromping all over it.

She was afraid her arm was about to give out. "Nurmi, I need you to hold me so I don't fall on our victim."

"Karppi, maybe this should wait for the autopsy." She knew he was right, but there was no way she was going to delay this any longer.

"Just hold me up!" She shouted at him, her impatience winning the ever present battle against politeness.

She could hear his steps as he approached, dead leaves crunching under his feet. He dug his feet in behind her and wrapped his arms tightly around her core, providing a counter balance. As ridiculous as they must have looked, the move relieved some of the strain and she was able to focus on her task.

She gently lifted the woman's hand. It was cold and stiff, rigor mortis having set in. Experience told her this woman had been dead for no more than twenty-four hours; maybe thirty or so with the freezing temperature of last night.

She was careful to open the hand only enough to see inside. Forensics would need to take pictures of the object in situ, assuming she was about to find what she expected.

As she unfurled each finger, starting with the index, moving to the middle, and then the ring, a glossy white object began to emerge. Still grasped by the pinky, resting in the palm of their victim's left hand, was a small ceramic sculpture in the shape of an angel.

Chapter Text

In the week since the woman had been found by the train tracks, her body dumped as if she were nothing more than trash, the case board in the homicide unit's conference space had been dotted with pieces of the puzzle. The picture so far was jumbled and incomplete, some of the pieces pinned off to the side as the team worked through their meanings and connections.

Their latest victim's name was Nora Rehn. Nora, born and raised in Sweden, had run from an abusive household, ending up in Helsinki a year ago. She had met a man online and their message history had preserved his early words to her. He had promised an escape from the abuse, a place to live, and notions that she would be safe with him. He had painted an irresistible picture of a better life.

The reality is that Nora had traded one form of abuse for another. Journal entries, buried deep in her phone on an app she kept hidden, revealed how desperation to leave her parents had evolved into desperation to leave this man. He had been exploiting her, taking all but a fraction of her money from her work; it had been enough to ensure she stayed with him.

In the last few months, as her nineteenth birthday approached, Nora had been jotting down plans to escape. She had hoarded the little money he allowed her to have, reached out to a social worker, and had visited an elderly woman renting out a room in exchange for housework. By all accounts, she had been on the verge of turning her life around.

Also on the board were pictures of the other three women; the ones found twelve years ago. The first two had been previously identified as thirty-one-year old Maarja Niska from Rovaniemi and twenty-two-year old Sadie Vanhatalo from Porvoo. Maarja and Sadie had family who missed them terribly—mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and a now fifteen-year-old son who wanted nothing more than an answer as to why they had to die.

And that was a question Sakari knew would go unanswered. They would find the sick fuck who killed them—he was sure of that—but understanding why was impossible.

Because he kept all of his emotions close to the chest, people assumed he must lack empathy. How can someone who doesn't feel himself possibly feel for others? But it was actually the complete opposite; Sakari's sensitivity to the world around him was ingrained in every one of his cells. He felt so deeply, that it physically hurt, and as a way of protecting himself, he had learned long ago to build a wall.

Their third victim, Karppi's introduction to the case, remained unidentified, and that was its own special kind of pain. This unknown woman's genetic profile had been sitting in Finland's national DNA database and the Europol Information System since she had been found, waiting for a match that never came.

Their occupation, cause of death, and certain details of the crime scenes—the use of a shower curtain and the figurines—were all that connected the women to one another. They had been strangers living in different neighborhoods and working in the sex trade for different reasons. Other than their petite stature, a physical trait that Sakari knew made them vulnerable to a man who wanted to hurt them, they didn't look anything alike.

Sakari spun his pen, slowly moving it from finger to finger, as Rautamaa, chief of the homicide unit, reviewed the board. Her straight blonde hair was particularly shiny today and he could smell her nose-tickling, flowery perfume from across the table. He wondered who in the building had caught her eye. JP would have an idea and Sakari made a mental note to ask him later.

Karppi sat across from him, alternating between chewing on her pen and tapping it on her notepad. He couldn't describe her current state as patience wearing thin because she never had any to begin with. She was constantly restless and short-tempered, straining at the leash like a dog being held back from a juicy steak.

He noticed that she was especially fidgety today, her agitation ramping up during discussion of the 2008 murders. She hated unsolved crimes, seeing them not as mysteries that lacked evidence, but as fundamental flaws in police work. It was incomprehensible to her that a human being could take another's life and not leave anything behind that could be traced.

She had only been a junior investigator back then, following others instead of leading. But that wouldn't matter to her; he knew she would blame herself for this case's unsolved status and be champing at the bit to discover what had previously been missed.

Rautamaa's cell buzzed and vibrated across the table. She glanced at it and answered, holding her finger in the air as a signal that this would only take a minute and everyone should stay put.

As their boss made her way to her office, Karppi's impatience finally won and she pushed her seat back from the table, using the interruption to formulate her own plan. She moved closer to the board and stood in front of the picture of the third victim.

In one hand, she held an unnecessarily oversized mug of espresso, something that Sakari was sure she did just to annoy him. With her other, she mindlessly fiddled with the hem of her sweater, stretching it out of shape. At some point in the weeks between the Paarma case and returning to work from medical leave, she had her hair cut. She must have gone to a salon in the Canary Islands because that's when Sakari first noticed the change.

The first picture she had sent him was a selfie taken on the beach, if the sliver of turquoise below the blue sky in the background was any indication. The wind had lifted her hair on one side, throwing long, tangled strands against her face. Her bare shoulder, pink from the sun, peeked from beneath the mass of dirty blonde hair. In the weeks since, he may or may not have studied that shoulder until it was devoted to memory.

The second picture was a candid of Emil and her, probably taken by their waiter or a stranger passing by. They were sitting at an outdoor table late at night. Fairy lights were strung from the eave of the bistro behind them and the table's candle cast a warm glow over their faces. She had her hand around her son's head, bringing him close so she could smush her lips against his cheek. Emil's face was scrunched up with a classic expression of adolescent embarrassment. Sofia's hair was much shorter in this picture, falling just below her shoulders, and had been colored a warmer shade of honey. Sakari liked the way the shorter length added softness to the strands and bounce to her natural waves.

He came up beside her in the conference room and placed a hand on the small of her back. It was a reflex trained from countless crime scenes, when she was lost within her own mind, as a way of alerting her to his presence. Her eyes scanned the board, always returning to their unidentified victim.

"What's going through your head?" He had been her partner long enough to recognize the signs of her investigative brain hard at work.

She brought her hand to her mouth, squeezing and folding her lower lip between her thumb and index finger, another signal that she was deep in thought. "I can't pinpoint why, but I feel she's the key to solving this case."

She pointed to the picture of victim three, a snapshot taken by the medical examiner who conducted her autopsy. Her grayish-blue tinged skin and sagging face, a result of post-mortem muscle relaxation, were familiar sights to the homicide investigators in the room.

Seeing too many corpses, in all of their ugly stages, ruined Sakari's ability to passively watch movies that featured death. The image of a face that's perfectly shaped with the natural warmth of living skin tone, and eyes closed delicately, as if the person had gone to sleep, was far from reality. He wanted to scream at the screen that death, even non-violent death, is never that peaceful or beautiful. The only thing that kept him from his commentary was the fear of looking like a freak.

Next to victim three's autopsy photo was an artistic rendering of what she may have looked like in life. The artist had used the photo as a jumping off point to imagine her with muscle tone and blood running through her veins; with her straw-straight, long black hair cleaned and brushed. It had been created with the hope that someone in the public would recognize her; someone would have a name or, at the very least, an interaction that could have been a starting point to identify her. But that never happened. The release of the postmortem drawing produced no leads and she remained nameless for all these years.

No wonder, Sakari thought. He knew forensic art required a great amount of skill, and he certainly couldn't do it, but it was as though the department had hired a child to produce this sketch. He thought it looked like shit and he was angry for this woman.

"Nurmi." Rautamaa's voice, normally subdued, barked from across the room. He and everyone else turned to see her standing at the door of her office. "I need to see you."

He shrugged at Karppi's questioning look and walked the short distance across the conference room, ignoring JP's childish grin as he passed. He felt like he was being called to the principal's office, especially as he entered and Rautamaa shut the door behind them.

He stood, nervously rubbing the back of his neck, and wondered what this was about. His brain scanned recent events and came up empty as to anything he could have done wrong.

"Sit," she said, pointing to the standard office chair, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, in front of her desk. She went to her own seat, a high-backed, black leather executive chair and reclined with her arms folded over her chest.

"That call was from forensics," she said, nodding her head in the direction of her desk and the cell phone placed face down on it. She paused to clear her throat. "The lab found trace semen on one of the socks Nora wore." Sakari nodded; they had talked about this during one of their morning debriefs last week. "We have a DNA hit."

"Okay," he said. This was good news that should be shared with the whole team, all of whom were still gathered just outside this office as they waited for Rautamaa's return. He couldn't understand why he was in here, sitting alone with his boss, as she clearly struggled to relay this information. "And?"

"You know that all crime scene investigators have their genetic profile in the system." She paused again, and Sakari wanted to reach across the desk and shake it out of her; whatever it was she was trying and failing to convey.

Yes; he knew that his DNA was in the database—as was Karppi's, and JP's, and Koskinen's, and Rautamaa's—all for the purpose of excluding crime scene contamination. Unlike Karppi, he had endless patience, but his was definitely wearing thin.

Finally, Rautamaa took a deep breath and sighed. "The DNA from the semen is consistent with that of Sofia Karppi."

What the fuck does that mean?

He massaged his forehead, pressing the tips of his fingers deep into the thin muscle, as he searched for clarity. He heard the words, understood the meaning of each of them alone, but couldn't decipher them as a whole.

"I don't understand," he said. "That doesn't make any sense."

"The man who left that semen is, in all likelihood, Karppi's father."

Sakari's stomach dropped and his heart pounded as the implication hit him. Either her father, forever a mystery to her, is a serial killer or he's the unluckiest bastard alive. Neither scenario could possibly be how she imagined finding him after a lifetime of missing him.

"We have to proceed with caution," Rautamaa continued. "Karppi has a history of covering for her family and we can't have that happen. I'd like you to find out where he lives. JP and Koskinen will bring him in for questioning."

He shook his head and shifted in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. In this small space, with the heat blasting from vents overhead and creeping through his body from within, the smell of her perfume was making him sick. "That's not possible."

"Why?" she asked, her voice clipped with impatience. Chuckling, she added, "He's obviously not dead."

Sakari closed his eyes, a conscious choice to keep from rolling them. He respected his boss, probably more than the others, but this wasn't the time for a stupid joke. He felt protective of Karppi and the very real psychological damage this could cause her. "Sofia has no idea who her father is."

"Oh." Rautamaa brought her chair upright. "Well then, send her in here. I need to—"

"No," he said, cutting her off. "I'll talk to her."

Sakari left quickly before Rautamaa could argue otherwise and returned to the conference room only to be faced with an argument. Karppi was standing over a seated JP, invading his space and making the man who was much taller than her shrink into himself.

"What's wrong with it?" Their colleague had his arms crossed in defiance and was staring down Karppi; for asserting dominance or threat assessment, Sakari wasn't sure. Whatever "it" was had set her off.

"They were women, JP." Karppi emphasized her point by pressing her finger into his chest. "They were someone's daughter. It's dehumanizing and I wish you would get that through your thick, balding head, you fucking idiot."

"Karppi," Sakari said, "come on." Not for the first time in their partnership, he grabbed her arm to pull her away from the situation that had gotten her so heated. He had witnessed her temper enough to know that JP wasn't in for a good time if she didn't cool down.

She shrugged him off, also not for the first time in their partnership, and proceeded with her beat down of the detective who was more her equal than anyone else on the force. "You. Koskinen," Karppi said as she snapped her fingers and turned to the newest team member. "Explain it to him."

"She's right." Koskinen's voice was strong and confident, despite her junior status. The young investigator who had recently transferred from human trafficking was JP's partner and Sakari was impressed with her courage to speak against him. Although, maybe it had less to do with courage and more to do with fear of landing on Karppi's bad side. "'Prostitute' is an old term," she said. "You really shouldn't use it anymore. They had names and that's what we should call them."

Karppi smirked at JP, having accomplished her goal of utterly humiliating the man. Leaning down, she whispered in Koskinen's ear, and the young woman nodded and smiled. Karppi looked smug and proud, as if seeing a younger version of herself blossoming before her eyes.

She reached over JP to grab her laptop from the table, nearly hitting him in the head, and marched into their office. Sakari followed, keeping a short distance between them to head off any other disruptions.

He sat at his desk and picked up a file that had been laid out, pretending to read while he instead observed her. Her face was pressed close to the computer screen and she squinted her eyes. He would have to ask her at some point, when she wasn't likely to bite his head off, if she should get them checked.

Had her mother worn glasses? he wondered. Or was it her father who had poor eyesight? Maybe both.

He hadn't forgotten about the DNA and his conversation with Rautamaa from only minutes ago. He just wasn't sure this was the right time or place. Then again, was there a right time or place to tell your partner that her previously unknown dad is probably the serial killer she's been hunting off and on for twelve years?

This news was going to destroy her; he knew that. For as strong and formidable as she was, Karppi was also sensitive, holding all of her emotions just under the surface. While she kept them buried well enough, it only took a scratch for every insecurity, fear, and doubt to escape and take hold.

He hated that he had to be the one to hurt her, but was there any other choice? Is this how she felt when she read that message from Paarma; the one that told her she would see her son again only if she killed her partner?

"What did you say to Koskinen?" He made small talk to take his mind off what he would have to do before the day was over. But he was also genuinely curious. It wasn't every day that he saw one of their colleagues react with a smile to Karppi's words.

"Thanks." She didn't look up from her screen as she continued to do whatever it was she was doing on her side of the desk. "And I invited her to grab a drink."

"Tonight?" His voice was higher and more rushed than he meant it to be. If he couldn't see her after work, he would have to tell her here, before she left, and that didn't seem like the best plan. He wanted her to have the chance to cry or scream, if that's what she needed to do in order to process the information.

"No." Karppi looked up, squinching her face in annoyance. It struck him how much she looked like Emil in the picture from the restaurant in Tenerife. "What does it matter?"

He picked up another file to pretend to read in an effort to appear casual. In reality, his anxiety was through the roof and he flipped the pages far too quickly to be convincing. Rautamaa would expect them to discuss this latest development at the team meeting tomorrow morning, so it had to be tonight.

"I was wondering if you were free."

"Oh." His question seemed to have thrown her. She furrowed her brow and pursed her lips as she took time to consider her answer. "I promised Emil we would order pizza and watch a movie."

"What one?"

"Onward." She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, narrowing her eyes with suspicion. "Why?"

Sakari hadn't thought ahead enough to come up with an excuse for seeing her after work. Although, maybe he didn't need one. It had been almost two months since they kissed, but something had been building between them in the meantime.

At least, he thought so. He was no more sure of her feelings for him than he was of how to tell her about her father.

There had been plenty of opportunities to talk about what had happened in that hotel room. There had been the days before they went on leave, the multiple text messages they sent each other on a daily basis, the last couple of weeks since she returned to work.

They just never brought it up. They went about their lives as if that night had been like any other night. Just a couple of cops staring longingly into each other's eyes and accidentally touching lips after a tough day at work.

So, because they never talked about it, he couldn't be sure the kiss blew her socks off the way it had his.

But when they had said their goodbyes before going on medical leave, she had thrown her arms around him and held him tight. Her hand had lingered on the back of his head, and he could feel her fingers brushing through his hair as her warm, labored breath tickled his neck.

The morning of her first day back at the precinct, she had hugged him again. They had been standing side-by-side at their lockers, hanging up their coats and holstering their firearms, when she wrapped her hand around his arm. Again she kept her hand firmly in place, as though she were afraid he would run. She had looked around, maybe to see if anyone was nearby, before finally embracing him. This time, his hands went to her hair, brushing through it to reach the back of her head so he could bring it to the place on his chest where his heart beat below. She had murmured something; words he couldn't quite make out, but sounded an awful lot like "I missed you."

Sakari still couldn't be sure, though. She had always been a hugger. It was one of the dichotomies of her hard-shell personality that stood out the most. So he would have to come up with an excuse to see her tonight, and quickly.

"I was hoping we could talk about Leo," he said. Based on her reaction to the paternity test results, there was no way she would turn him down for that. Just in case, he added, "I'll pick up some pizza and beer on the way."

She graced him with a smile that stretched across her face. Her already prominent cheekbones lifted and his eyes fell to the dimples in their wake. He had never noticed them before, but now that they had made their presence known, he was going to fix them to his memory.

"Hawaiian," she said.

"Huh?" Her words to him didn't register. He was too lost in the landscape of her face.

"We like Hawaiian pizza."

Chapter Text

Her apartment was a disaster. It was always messy as housework was way down on the list of priorities, but it was particularly bad tonight; the one night she didn't want it to be. In the almost three weeks since returning from vacation, the two of them had just existed and their apartment reflected that.

Emil started at a new school and was attending therapy regularly. He was doing as well as could be expected after suffering trauma, and was also working through unresolved grief from the death of his father. Sofia tried not to beat herself up too much over her failures, but the change in her son after only a few sessions with his psychologist made her question just what the hell she had been doing in the months after Jussi's death.

He also spent a lot of time in the afternoons attending arts-based extracurriculars. Everything with him tended to be tinted with the rose-colored glasses of motherhood, but Sofia always thought he was creative and skillful at drawing. Spending time after school with teachers and peers who shared his passion was helping him to grow into himself, and for the first time in years, she saw a light at the end of the tunnel for her son.

While she was absorbed in the case and devoted all of her free time to puzzling out the evidence and leads, she was trying to do a better job of leaving the precinct in time to have dinner with Emil. She would often be up until one in the morning reading through old reports or coming up with theories, but at least they would occupy the same space.

And unless she was on-call, the weekends were for relaxing or having fun outside of the apartment. They certainly weren't for cleaning or anything remotely resembling a chore.

So there she stood, hands on hips, as she looked around the living room at empty soda cans and snack wrappers. There were three different sketch pads on the coffee table and paint markers strewn about. The sweater she wore two days ago was hanging off the back of the chair. And why were her rain boots in the corner by the television? She couldn't even remember when she last wore them.

Her phone dinged with a notification, a twinkly trill she had assigned to him. She reached into her pocket, removing her cell and opening her messages. He couldn't possibly be here yet; it was too early.

At Alko - you really don't have a favorite beer?

She smiled and chuckled at his obsession with her drinking habits. According to him, on their first day ever working together, he had asked her about her favorite drink, and she had said beer—any beer, he always emphasized in his retelling of the story. She had no recollection of the conversation, but Nurmi had apparently memorized it and kept it with him all these years. He just couldn't fathom that beer was beer and she took some perverse pleasure in torturing him with her indifference.

When she was on vacation, every night before bed they would text each other and he always started with did you find it? He had to explain himself the first time he asked; that "it" meant her favorite beer. It soon became the text she looked forward to the most.

She tried to think of something witty or funny to say to him now, but settled on a simple response of really truly no favorite. Secretly, she hoped that he would finally find it for her.

If he was buying beer, it wouldn't be long before he arrived. There was still tidying up to do, if for no other reason than it could be an outlet for her nervous energy.

"Emil!" She looked toward his bedroom, waiting for him to emerge. Her sullen pre-teen spent most of his time at home holed up in his room and when they were together, he barely replied to her questions with more than a one- or two-word answer.

And that was the only way they conversed; by her asking questions of him. God forbid he willingly offered information about his day. Sofia knew this was normal; that every adolescent since Cain and Abel would go through a monk-like phase of silence and introspection. But as his mother, it was exhausting and she was starting to forget what he sounded like.

As she waited for him, she saw the historical romance novel she was halfway through lying on the floor. Why it was on the floor, she didn't know, but she scooped it up and went to the bookshelf, hiding it behind Emil's graphic novels. Nurmi didn't need to know she enjoyed that kind of book; she would never hear the end of it.

When Emil finally made his way to the living room, he had changed into shorts and a t-shirt, despite it being the last day of November. After so many years of influence and guidance, she was finding it hard to step back and remove herself from the decisions he made about his own needs. "Is Sakke here?"

Apparently he found his voice again, and of course it would be because of Nurmi. Calling her partner by his first name was weird enough; Sofia didn't think she would ever get used to the shortened version her son preferred.

"He'll be here soon," she said, picking up her rain boots. A pile of dirt was left behind on the floor where they had been thrown. There wasn't time to vacuum, so she grabbed an extra pillow from the couch and tossed it in the corner. The pillow was big enough that it almost looked like an intentional design choice.

"Could you help me pick up?" she asked as she returned the boots to their rightful place by the front door.

Between the two of them, they were able to make the living room look a little less like a tornado had blown through. In the kitchen, she looked around and was thankful that there wasn't much to do here. Her less than stellar cooking skills had finally paid off as eating takeout every night meant no dishes piled up in the sink. All she had to do was wipe down the table. As she tossed the sponge onto the counter, she glanced at the clock on the stove. Nurmi would be arriving any minute and she was still in her work clothes.

Her bedroom was in even worse shape than the rest of the apartment, but at least she could hide the mess behind the door. She took off her jeans, adding them to a pile on the floor, and pulled on comfortable leggings. As she removed her t-shirt and sweater, she caught a whiff of her armpits and didn't like what she smelled. Not feeling like walking to the bathroom to put on deodorant, she searched the top of her dresser for anything that would make her smell less like an old gym sock.

"Why is there so much shit up here?"

Along the back, she found a couple of bottles of body mist she didn't know she had and sprayed them each in the air. The one called Beach Day smelled like sunscreen with an overpowering coconut scent. The marketing department had phoned it in on the day they had to come up with a name for the other one. Honeysuckle smelled exactly like the summer flower; sweet with a hint of vanilla. She liked that one and spritzed it under her arms. The scent was delicate; just enough to cover her stink without making her smell like a grandmother at church.

Sofia went to her closet to look for a shirt that was casual, but not so casual that he would think she didn't even try. She had never given much thought to her clothes before, having always chosen her wardrobe for utility and comfort more than anything else. But as she removed the pale pink tunic top from its hanger, she realized it was the only piece she owned that wasn't a variation of black, gray, or white. And pink was barely a color.

Why that mattered for tonight, she wasn't quite sure. She was going through a lot of trouble for pizza and beer. There was an almost subconscious pull to make herself attractive to him, something she hadn't focused on since the early days of dating Jussi. And while Nurmi was her work partner, she couldn't deny the hints of something more between them. There were obvious hints like the kisses they had already shared, but also subtle ones, like the way her stomach tightened when he would smile at her or the way her entire body felt like it was on fire when he would touch her arm.

The doorbell rang and she took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess from that whirlwind of cleaning, so she combed the errant strands with her fingers, quickly putting them back in place.

Making her way to the entry, she had to force herself to take several deep breaths. He's just here to talk about Leo, she reminded herself as she opened the door. "Hi." She hoped that she sounded relaxed and not like a ball of nerves.

"I have food and drinks." Nurmi was balancing two pizza boxes in one hand and bags in the other. She noticed that he was wearing her favorite black shirt and jeans, and at that moment, she realized she had a favorite outfit. "Jaffa for Emil and for us, a hefeweizen that's supposed to be really good and my favorite Trappist ale."

Other than Jaffa and ale, which she knew was a type of beer, she had no idea what he was talking about. She grabbed the pizza from him and stepped aside, allowing him to redistribute the bags as he entered. As he did so, his arm inadvertently brushed against her breast and she experienced another one of those subtle hints as her heart settled in her throat.

-----------

"Goodnight, sweetheart." Sofia tucked Emil's hair behind his ears as she leaned down to kiss his forehead. She knew he wouldn't let her do this forever and that day was approaching as fast as a freight train, but for now, she relished in their nightly routine. "Read until you get sleepy."

After dinner, the three of them had watched a movie and then Emil and Nurmi had played video games long into the night. The boys had been having so much fun together that it pained her to have to send Emil to his room, even if it was far past his normal time. Getting him out of bed in time for school was going to be a chore she didn't look forward to.

She shut the door behind her and went to the kitchen for more drinks. One of the beers that Nurmi brought was just okay; she liked that it tasted a little bit like chocolate, but otherwise it was too bitter. Her general dislike for it hadn't stopped her from drinking two bottles of it with her dinner, but she wouldn't add it to her list as a potential favorite.

From the fridge, she grabbed two bottles of the beer she did like; the golden one that tasted like something she couldn't quite put her finger on. She read the label, Hefe Weissbier, and tried to translate it. Under the best of circumstances, her German was passably iffy, but while tipsy, forget about it. Weissbier was "white beer," which didn't really make sense to her, and she had no clue what hefe meant. Whatever it was, she liked it.

She returned to the living room and handed one to Nurmi. He was sitting in the middle of the couch where she had left him, scrolling through his phone. Fluffing a pillow to put behind her back, she sat next to him, curling her legs up under her. They tilted their bottles toward the other in a wordless gesture of cheers before they drank in sync, both gulping down a generous amount of what could become her favorite beer.

"So…" Her voice trailed off as she tapped her fingernails against the glass bottle, awkwardly breaking the silence that permeated the room.

He took another quick sip and placed the bottle on the coffee table, shifting it back and forth until it was in a spot he deemed acceptable. Leaning forward with his arms resting on his thighs, he clasped his hands so tightly that his fingertips turned red. The energy between them had become increasingly strange as the night progressed, and she had assumed it was because he was nervous about Leo, but squeezing the life out of his hands seemed like a disproportionate response. Endless scenarios ran through her head as to what he was thinking about; everything from disappointment that she didn't like the chocolate beer to I'm moving to Italy because I can't deal with your craziness anymore.

After what seemed like forever, he turned to her and smiled, the corners of his mouth lifting just enough to put her wild thoughts at ease. She looked down as he rested his hand on her knee. His touch was warm and it made her toes tingle. "I'm nervous," he said.

"Me too." She chuckled, a bit louder than she would have liked, and took another sip of the hefeweizen, pushing it down with a forceful swallow. The weight of his hand on her felt really good and she couldn't help but draw a bit of her lower lip between her teeth, biting it to stop herself from jumping him.

"I've been thinking about you growing up without a dad," he said.

She nodded, encouraging him to continue. She had said her piece in the car the other day, telling him what she thought he needed to know in order to make a decision about Leo.

"What happened exactly?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"What happened between your parents? Why wouldn't your mom want you to know? Was she scared of him?"

She was taken aback by this rapid-fire and unexpected line of questioning. This night was supposed to be about him and she couldn't understand why he was prying so much into her origin story.

She averted her eyes, taking a deep breath to calm herself before facing him again. "Nothing specific happened," she said, the building tension evident in her voice. "She just…"

Her heart started to beat faster, pounding within her chest and pulsing up through her neck, as the panic set in. They were really going there, she realized. It seemed inevitable in a way, considering their current case, but why was this happening now? He was here to talk about Leo, not her fucked up family tree.

She took another swig of the hefe weissbier for courage, and then another. "This is really good," she noted absently, buying some time for herself. In her delay, the taste memory finally hit her and she broke out into a giggle. "It's banana bread!"

"Karppi?" There was his hand again, this time wrapped around her calf, holding her in place as if he were afraid she was going to bolt.

Fuck. Another swallow of liquid banana bread made its way down her throat and settled in her stomach.

"My mom was a sex worker." The words came pouring out as the cork on this part of her life, the part not another soul on Earth knew about, was abruptly pulled. There wasn't a set up or an easing into the topic. It was simply a bit of personal trivia shared between friends.

She scanned his face for a reaction, darting her eyes without focusing on any one part of him for too long. He was burning a hole through her, his hand still resting on her leg, keeping her in place. She watched as his brows furrowed and his lips parted, in shock or disgust or judgment, she didn't know.

"She didn't have the best childhood and got involved with the wrong people." She was fully committed to the whole story now. "She had a boyfriend, pimp, whatever…" She flicked her hand, signaling her dismissal of this man's role in her mother's life, and her own. "But she also had clients. Birth control isn't perfect and…" She looked past him, to a blank space on the wall, and shrugged her shoulders in a half-hearted attempt at resignation. "Here I am."

"Sofia." Her name was like a wisp of smoke, barely perceptible in the air.

Nurmi shifted his weight on the couch, leaning closer and moving his hand up her leg to her knee. It was probably for comfort and nothing more, but the intimacy with which he performed the gesture repulsed her in light of what she had just told him. Her previous irritation with him, which had mellowed a bit as she revealed this bit of herself, bubbled to the surface and she exploded.

"I don't judge her for how she made money." She glared at him and stood, leaving the hand that had been caressing her knee to fall and thump against the cushion. Walking to the other side of the coffee table, she slammed the beer bottle on the tabletop, and the ringing of glass against wood reverberated in the room. "What the fuck does any of this have to do with Leo?"

She whipped her head toward Emil's room, waiting to see if her booming voice had disturbed him. The apartment was quiet with no sign of movement behind the bedroom door and Nurmi motionless on the couch. He was giving her space, as he had done so many times before.

Sofia escaped to the kitchen, thankful at this moment that her apartment didn't have an open floor plan. She grabbed another bottle from the fridge and opened the top on a raspberry hard seltzer that had been in there forever. She didn't particularly like hard seltzer; it tasted like dirty water and the static in feet that have fallen asleep. But she didn't want to sully the memory of her banana bread beer with a night ruined by her temper, so foot seltzer it was.

She leaned against the sink counter, using it to stay steady and upright. The effects of the alcohol combined with her emotional state was kicking her ass. Between swallows, she picked at the bottle's label, flicking tiny pieces of paper to the floor.

The conversation hadn't gone like she had imagined, and his questions had thrown her for a loop, but of course he would be curious about this aspect of her life. She had grown up not knowing the identity of her father and the only certainty regarding Leo's paternity was that Nurmi had nothing to do with it.

Why do I have to be such an asshole?

"Sofia." His voice jolted her from her self-admonishment. "Let's sit," he said as he pulled a chair away from the table for her.

She pushed herself away from the counter and stumbled the short distance, easing into the chair with a bit of a wobble. I should probably stop, she thought, right before downing more of the seltzer.

He sat across from her and somehow managed to immediately find some schmutz on the table that she had missed during her quick wipe-down earlier in the evening. He nudged the spot with his fingernail, removing whatever it was, and flicked it to the floor.

"I do need your advice about Leo," he said, "but that's not why I'm here. I'm sorry for misleading you."

She noticed that he was sitting with perfect posture—back straight, knees at ninety degrees, both feet flat on the ground, and arms resting on the table. It's how he sat at the beginning of their interrogations when he was establishing authority.

She was nervous again. She couldn't think of any good reason why he would have lied to her and his demeanor didn't make sense.

"We have a partial match for the semen found on Nora Rehn's sock."

His lack of enthusiasm about this news and its delivery with such subterfuge, was confusing. The department hadn't managed to get even a partial match off of the previous three victims, so this should be good news. She waited for him to provide more information, but none seemed to be coming. Instead, she watched as his confident interrogation stance wilted and he found yet another spot of dirt on the table to pick.

"What's going on?" she asked.

He groaned and threw his head back, grinding his fingers into his temples. "Fuck," he muttered at the ceiling, before dropping his gaze to her. He held the look for too long and her chest heaved as she tried to suck in air. Whatever was happening was prickling her nerves, signaling a primal need to protect herself from the unknown that was about to fall on her. "Sofia, you are the partial match. The man who left that DNA is your father."

Heavy silence, save the high pitched sound of blood rushing through her ears, descended on her. She felt weightless, like she was riding on top of a wave in the ocean.

She pushed away from the table, chair legs scraping noisily on the floor, as the crest of the wave broke and she came crashing down into the sea. Her stomach cramping, she ran to the bathroom and just managed to reach the toilet before the night's pizza and alcohol made its way out.

There was only one other time in her life when her body acted of its own accord, completely out of control of any thoughts, or guidance, or caution from her brain. When she saw Jussi flung over the hood of that car, tumbling limply in the air, and landing with a sick thud on the pavement, her legs had propelled her to him and she had screamed like a rabbit clutched in talons.

She was aware of Nurmi behind her, sitting on the edge of the tub as he held her hair out of the way and gently rubbed her back. This was now the second time in their history together that he watched her vomit and under any other circumstances she would have been mortified.

His words, a punch to the gut so hard that it caused a visceral response, played over and over in her mind. My dad? What are the fucking odds?

She closed her eyes and focused on the mechanics of breathing. Clumps of hair were stuck to her forehead and beads of sweat rolled down the back of her neck.

She wished her mom was still alive. Sofia had so many questions for her. Did she know who her father was and withheld his identity to protect her? Or did her work make it impossible for her to know exactly who had impregnated her? Did she truly not know?

Forensics must have shit a brick. She imagined their reaction when her genetic profile popped up on the screen. They were accustomed to having to eliminate strands of her long hair that were shed at crime scenes, but semen? Holy shit. She burst into laughter at the absurdity.

"Karppi?" Nurmi's confused voice broke through her cackling. He brushed her sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes and away from her forehead, his concern evident in the gentleness of his touch.

"Would you get me some water?" She reached up to flush the toilet. "I'll be out in a minute."

He left and she tried to put herself back together. A washcloth soaked in cold water helped to bring her temperature down and the blotchiness on her cheeks faded from an angry red to a flushed pink. She brushed her teeth to get rid of the horrid taste left in her mouth and grabbed a couple of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet, stuffing them in her pocket.

Looking in the mirror, she could see that she was still a mess. The force with which she threw up had caused blood vessels to burst, and petechiae encircled her eyes and dotted her jaw and neck. Her hair was even more tangled than usual. She felt like she had been in a fight as her stomach muscles burned and a sharp pain had settled beneath her ribcage.

Her reflection brought forth an image in her mind of Nora Rehn's battered body, thrown so hastily into the brambles. She wanted to believe that the teenager's death had been quick, but the visible evidence on her body suggested otherwise. She thought of the other victims: Maarja Niska, Sadie Vanhatalo, and victim three—the woman without a name.

There had been too many cases since her first month in homicide; other victims, whose identities were both known and unknown. During the countless hours she had spent advocating for them and trying to make sense of their deaths, all her victims had held a place of importance.

Yet Sofia's first victim had always meant the most to her. She could never explain it; could never understand why, regardless of the case, her thoughts would inevitably travel to her.

She didn't believe in god or the supernatural. If something existed, there would be evidence to prove it. Victim three existed. Her body—made of bones, and muscles, and flesh—was evidence of a woman who once lived. Sofia believed in her; believed that she was the key to bringing justice to Sadie, Maarja, and Nora.

And now Sofia had an unexpected connection; her own existence inextricably tied to Nora and, possibly, the others. Despite her agnosticism, she couldn't help but wonder if this connection is what had bonded victim three to her so strongly.

By leaving her nameless, the killer had victimized her twice. She had an identity. There were people walking around with memories of this woman, and in those memories, they would call for her by name. He had taken that from her, leaving her with nothing but "victim three."

Chapter Text

Sakari stood at the kitchen sink, filling a tall glass with tap water, wondering if that could have possibly gone worse. In the time between Rautamaa telling him about the DNA match to the moment the words left his mouth, he had been contemplating how he would tell Karppi. Different combinations of words and inflections, different scenarios, had been playing over in his mind all day. In the end, he had realized there wasn't a good way to tell her—there couldn't be—so he had just spit it out.

Her physical response to the news, immediate and raw, shocked him. Although, he supposed, it shouldn't have. While she presented herself as stoic to a fault to others, he saw right through her cracked facade and knew just how vulnerable she could be. He could only imagine how he would feel if the situation were reversed and she had told him without much pretense that his previously unknown father was, in all likelihood, a man who had violently taken the lives of four women. Vomiting seemed about right in retrospect.

He took the water to the living room and sat on the couch, waiting for her to return. Minutes passed and still no Karppi. He craned his neck, peering into the hallway, and realized that the bathroom door was open, but the lights were off. He wasn't sure what to do now; whether to stay or leave.

He made his way to her bedroom, softening his steps in case she had sneaked in there and was asleep. The door was closed and he opened it just enough to peek in. The light from the hallway shone directly on her bed and he could see that she wasn't there. Already feeling like he was invading her inner sanctum, he didn't dare allow his eyes to wander to the rest of the room, even as his curiosity was killing him.

As he contemplated what to do next, he heard a door open and close behind him. He turned to see Karppi walking past him, a bit unsteady on her feet, with two large boxes stacked on top of one another in her arms. "Where were you?" he asked.

He followed her back to the living room and watched as she awkwardly dropped the boxes on the coffee table. She unpiled them, placing them next to each other, and removed both tops at once, throwing them to the floor. She sat and started rifling through the contents, seemingly oblivious to his presence.

"Karppi?"

"Sorry, I…" She pulled out a piece of paper, squeezing her lips between her thumb and index finger as she glanced at it before tossing it aside. Back into the box she went, clearly focused on some task known only to her.

"Sofia," he said, emphasizing each syllable to get her attention. "What are you doing?"

She looked up at him, shaking another paper in her hand. "This is what's left of my mom." Her voice cracked and caught in her throat. "They've been in my storage locker since she died."

He sighed and sat next to her, watching as her eyes welled with tears. Placing an arm around her, he brought her close, kissing the top of her head as she nuzzled into him and buried her face in his shirt. He held her while she cried and wondered if she could feel his heart pounding beneath his chest.

They stayed like that for minutes—too many, yet too few—finally parting after her sobs subsided and her breathing fell into a relaxed rhythm to match his. He cupped her face, pink and blotchy, and kissed her forehead, her skin warm and soft beneath his lips.

"I'm sorry," he said. What else could he say but that? It covered so much ground. I'm sorry that your mom left you with so many unanswered questions. I'm sorry that you ached for a father only to have that ache turn into the worst pain. I'm sorry that I ever had to hurt you.

Her cheeks pressed against his palms as they lifted into a smile. "I know." She reached into her pocket and tossed something into her mouth, followed by a drink of water. Deducing his questioning expression, she added, "Ibuprofen."

His head was pounding and he thought of asking her for some, but he could manage without. "You should get some sleep." She smirked and snickered under her breath. "It was worth a try."

"I thought I would look through my mom's stuff," she said. "Maybe there's something in here that can help us find our unsub."

He nodded his understanding, both with her shift to Detective Karppi and the use of cop jargon for the man who provided half of her chromosomes. She was protecting herself, flipping the narrative to create distance from the horrible reality that had been thrown at her. He pulled one of the boxes closer to him and started removing papers, reading through each one carefully so as not to miss anything.

It was obvious that when her mother died, Karppi had just grabbed what little possessions she had and dumped them into these boxes. The contents, through which he learned her mom's name was Raija, were mostly old bills going back decades. Occasionally he would find objects that provided a glimpse into the woman she had been—crossword puzzle books, each page filled out in pen; takeout menus with favorite items circled; old banknotes. If his mental math was correct, Raija had squirreled away over ten thousand markkas, the currency that hadn't been used in Finland in almost twenty years.

Sakari's eyes were getting heavy, his lids falling and his head jerking as he struggled to stay awake. Glancing at his watch, he saw that the time was nearly one in the morning. "I should probably head home." He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, his t-shirt pulling up and exposing his stomach to the cool air. As he stood, she reached for him, wrapping her hands around his wrist and pulling him back down.

"Please stay," she said, her voice pleading. She looked as exhausted as he felt. "We can stop for tonight, but don't leave."

His new apartment was a twenty minute walk from her place and it was cold out, neither of which sounded appealing in the middle of the night. "That would be nice actually," he said.

She smiled and trotted to the bathroom, returning several minutes later with a toothbrush still in its packaging. He thanked her, said his goodnights, and took his turn in the bathroom to get ready for bed. When he returned to the now dark living room, illuminated only by the glow of the city through the windows, she was standing in the shadows, waiting for him.

She inched forward, closing the distance between them slowly enough that he could have stopped it at any time. Instead he waited, his chest rising and falling with each labored breath. She took his hand in hers and led him away from the couch where he had been expecting to sleep. "Sofia…" he whispered; her name a question, a declaration, an invitation to his heart.

Stopping at the door of her bedroom, she turned to him, so close he could feel the heat radiating from her. She traced his mouth with trembling fingers, as if she were memorizing not only its shape, but every dip and every crease. With the faintest of sighs, she leaned in, her lips hovering just long enough to make him ache. Her movements were deliberate and languid as she took her time, leading him down the path of a kiss that was as unpredictable as it was safe and familiar.

She pulled away, leaving behind the sting of her lips, and rested her forehead against his shoulder. Holding her against him, he wove his fingers through the strands of her hair and gently massaged the back of her neck.

"Come to bed with me." Her voice was raspy and hushed, muffled by his shirt. "I just want to fall asleep next to you."

He allowed her to lead him into her bedroom; the refuge he had been wanting to get a better glimpse of not long ago. But all of his attention was focused on her as she removed her clothes, dropping them to the floor. She stood alongside her bed in her underwear and a bra trimmed with lace, smiling at him as she slipped beneath the blankets.

He removed his shirt and jeans, folding them neatly and placing them on top of the dresser, along with his socks and watch. Glancing down, he was suddenly thankful that he was wearing a new pair of boxers; there was no chance of having an embarrassing hole or frayed hem.

His neck throbbed with a quickening pulse as he joined her and she brought the covers up over him. They were on their sides, facing one another, as hands slowly explored bare shoulders and arms. He wouldn't allow himself to explore further; not tonight. She ran her fingers through his hair and pressed her lips to his, gently teasing them and lingering long enough for him to feel the way her words formed against his mouth as she whispered, "Goodnight, Sakari."

-----------

He awoke to an empty bed, the sheets on her side wrinkled where her body once lay. The room was still dark on this first day of December, as they were well into the late sunrises of the season. He still had a headache, having never bothered to ask for ibuprofen, but it was nothing some caffeine couldn't fix.

He was disappointed she was gone, but not entirely surprised. He had watched her brows furrow and her lips purse in the early stages of a fitful sleep before finally passing out himself. He imagined she had slept for a couple of hours, her body giving her no choice, before starting in again with her mother's belongings.

Sakari turned on the bedside lamp, squinting and rubbing his eyes as they adjusted to the light. He redressed in his t-shirt and jeans, leaving his watch and socks to be retrieved later. There was a mirror over the dresser and he ran his fingers through his hair, attempting yet failing to neaten the tufts sticking out every which way. He shrugged it off and made his way out to the rest of the apartment.

He found her at the kitchen table with yet another cardboard box in front of her. This one was white and covered in duck stickers; "SOFIA" was written in yellow marker on the side. She was tipping her chair back, balancing it on its hind legs, focusing all of her attention on a small, stuffed elephant in her hands.

She hadn't noticed him standing there, giving him time to quietly observe her. The red and purple pinpoints of burst capillaries that dotted her jaw and eyes had faded, but enough remained to be a reminder of how violently she had reacted the night before. Her legs were bare as she wore nothing but a t-shirt, several sizes too big for her, its hem falling midway down her thighs.

He quietly cleared his throat, trying not to startle her, but failing as she slammed the chair to the ground. "Sorry," he said. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit." She smiled and motioned for him to join her.

"What's all this?" he asked as he sat next to her.

She held up the elephant, turning it to face him. "This is Ollie."

She offered it to him and he took it, squeezing its soft belly and running his fingers over the big ears. It had one, blue button eye and a string of thread hung where the other once was. Its gray fur was matted down, clearly the result of years of love. "Emil hugged the crap out of this, huh?"

She shook her head. "Ollie was mine. I slept with him every night. He came with me to the grocery store, to the playground…" Her voice became quiet as she added, "Every car ride up north." She retreated to a memory known only to her. Whatever was up north seemed to pain her.

He handed the elephant back and watched as she kissed her old friend before gently laying him on the table. She reached into the box and pulled out the tiniest beanie he had ever seen. "And that?" He gestured at the pink hat the size of her hand.

"My hospital cap." He had no idea what she was talking about and his confusion must have been obvious because she said, in a questioning tone of disbelief, "From when I was born? Newborns have trouble regulating their temperature so you get a little hat in the hospital."

He wouldn't know any of this, never having been around a baby. Nor did his parents ever talk to him about his own birth, choosing instead to mostly ignore him.

"There isn't anything helpful in my mom's stuff," she said, "but maybe there's something in my baby box."

It was becoming a little embarrassing just how little sense she was making. "What the hell is a baby box? Is it where your mom stored you?" He chuckled at the ridiculousness of that image.

She placed the tiny hat on Ollie's head, stretching it over the elephant's big ears. "Actually, yes," she said, laughing along with him. "At least while I napped. But then it becomes a box that parents…" She paused, contemplating something, and restarted the explanation. "It's a box that some parents keep to remember the baby years."

She correctly deduced that his mom and dad wouldn't have done this. He hadn't told her everything about his childhood—the long absences as his parents traveled overseas, the constant fighting between them, the feeling he always had that they never really wanted him and he was simply a burden to their more worldly aspirations. Sofia knew enough that she must have caught herself in her assumption that what her mother did for her, and what she almost certainly did for Emil, hadn't applied to him.

Wanting to move on from the dark cloud that had settled over them, he reached into the box decorated with ducks and pulled out the first thing he laid his hands on. It was a photo album with a nameplate he could hardly believe.

He turned it so she could see. "Fifi?"

She rolled her eyes. "A nickname that never stuck…thank god."

He laughed and opened the book, turning to the first page. He was met with a picture of a very pink and very wrinkly newly born Karppi. Her little face was scrunched up in a scream with that impossibly small pink beanie from her baby box sat upon her head.

He turned page after page, his mood lifting with every new picture of his partner as he had never seen her before. At the same time, he was examining the photos with a detective's eye, looking for anything odd or out of place among the normal baby captures.

After about ten pages, his investigative mind noticed a recurring theme. "Look at how bald you were." He jumped forward several pages. "Still bald…my eyes hurt from the reflection."

"Stop." She playfully swatted at his arm and wrestled the photo album away from his hands.

"How old were you there?" he asked, pointing to a picture of Karppi in a sundress. She was sitting on a beach with her chubby legs splayed in front of her and a handful of sand halfway to her mouth.

"Hmm," she pondered. "It's summer; maybe one and a half?"

"Shouldn't you have had hair by then?"

He was enjoying this glimpse into her past maybe a little too much. Jonesing for a coffee, he looked around the kitchen until he spotted an espresso machine. "Is that new?" He pointed to the machine that looked very much like the one he had owned until a fire destroyed it.

She followed his gaze. "I've had that for a while. I'll make you some."

He placed his hand on her knee to keep her seated. Her bare skin was cool against his warm palm, coming close to distracting him from his task. "I'll take care of it."

He returned a few minutes later with two coffee-sized mugs, placing one on the table in front of her. "You really need to embrace demitasse cups," he said as he took his place next to her again. He sipped at the liquid, wincing when it burned his lip. "And you need to let me adjust the water temperature on that machine. It's way too hot."

She was too absorbed in the photo album to pay him any mind. He reached into the box and pulled out another book. This one was small and dark red; not exactly a baby color. Opening it, he saw lists of names, streets, and cities.

"Karppi," he said, holding it for her to take. "It's an address book."

She grabbed it and immediately started to leaf through the pages, her eyes quickly scrolling up and down. "That's my grandfather," she said, pointing to an entry. "Fucking drunk asshole."

Sakari recognized the town as one in Lapland that he would pass through on his way to cross country ski. He wondered if this was the source of the car rides up north that had bothered her so much.

She noted a couple of other people she knew as friends of her mother, but kept returning to the same page. "This name is familiar. I don't know why."

He looked down as she tapped on the name: Leena Korhonen. "That's the most common surname in the country," he offered as a possible explanation.

She shook her head, dismissing his contribution, and folded down a corner of the page. "I'm going to wake up Emil and get ready for work."

Wanting to finish his espresso before heading home to shower and change clothes, he pulled the photo album toward him. He picked a spot randomly about two-thirds of the way in and opened it.

There was a picture of a young woman with straight brown hair that fell far below her shoulders. The woman was holding a little girl, about three or four, who had her tongue stuck out in an impish pose. The girl's blonde hair, as white as linen, exploded out of her head in a cascade of wild, wavy curls. There were suggestions of a relation in their faces, but the difference in their hair was striking.

Written below the picture, in cursive script, was: Raija and Fifi, Tampere, 1986.

Chapter Text

Nurmi looked up at her as she entered their office at half past nine, her mother's address book grasped firmly in her hand. Sofia had taken her time getting ready for work and generally dragged her feet once he had left her place, wanting to delay the inevitability of today for as long as possible.

"I brought you breakfast," he said, pointing to a takeout coffee and paper bag on her desk.

As she sat, her nose caught the sulfuric odor of hard-boiled eggs. Hungover from both alcohol and emotional trauma, her stomach flipped at the smell and she pushed both to the far end of her desk, narrowly avoiding yet another embarrassing vomit incident.

He opened his own takeout bag and pulled out a Karelian pasty topped with egg butter, eating a third of the pie with one bite. She must have looked as nauseated as she felt because he mumbled an apology and turned his chair to eat the rest out of her sight.

The two worked in silence, both absorbed in their usual morning routine of catching up on emails. At least she was trying to work. The events of last night—all of them—had taken her consciousness hostage and she couldn't focus.

By now, the rest of the homicide team would have knowledge of the DNA partial match. The entire Helsinki police force probably knew, as there was nothing that cops liked more than a bit of internal gossip.

She would have to face the team soon and her parentage would be the number one topic of conversation. She glanced at the address book, sitting on her desk, and ran her fingers along the spine. It would have to be entered into evidence on the off chance that it provided a lead in identifying her father, so she took this time to touch one of the few tangible remnants of her mother's life.

And then there was Nurmi. Or Sakari? She found it funny that something as simple as a name could throw her off so much. Now that they were more frequently dipping their toes into decidedly non-professional activities with one another, she found herself in an internal battle of what to call him at any given moment.

She was normally able to maintain her professional life in a bucket separate from her personal one. But she definitely had a smaller, dual-purpose bucket that had filled up so much over the last couple of years, it was reaching a tipping point. It held the arrest and imprisonment of her now-estranged daughter, knowledge of the affair between her late husband and former colleague, terrifying memories of Emil's kidnapping, and now…whatever this was that was developing between her partner and her.

Four years ago, when they had first been forced together by Koskimäki, Sofia had wanted nothing to do with him. She had been grieving a husband who, for all of his faults and through all of their marital problems, had still given her Emil. She loved Jussi and his death had destroyed her in ways she was still discovering to this day.

Nurmi had also been a cocky, little shit in those early weeks, and she never had the patience for him. The last thing she needed were lectures on how to do her job from a financial cop; one nearly ten years younger than her at that. His constant need to prove himself in homicide, and to her, had annoyed the hell out of her.

However, the man was objectively attractive and admiring his features had come easily. Back then, his hair had been a little too perfect and his face too smooth and unmarked by life, but from the very beginning she had been struck by his piercing blue eyes and enviously long lashes. And those lips—as plump as a ripe strawberry and tinged with its juice.

By the time he had shown up at her apartment unannounced, toward the end of their first case, Sofia's resentment over their partnership had waned. With files strewn all over the floor, drunk and grieving her newly dead mother, she had found herself wanting nothing more than to consume him and find out if his lips tasted as good as they looked.

She always wondered what would have happened that night had she been able to keep herself together. He hadn't exactly stopped her from fumbling with the button on his pants and he had met her frantic, liquor-fueled kisses with his own. It was only when she broke down in tears, the weight of her grief too heavy to push back, that the night went in a different direction.

"How did it go getting Emil to school?"

Nurmi's interruption of her memory startled her, as if he had caught her with her hands in the cookie jar. She felt uncomfortably warm and wondered how flushed she looked. Removing her sweater layer and tossing it aside, she sighed in relief as the cool office air hit her arms.

"Surprisingly easy," she replied. She had wanted to prepare Emil for Nurmi's continued presence in their apartment, telling him that they could get some gaming in before school. Emil had jumped right up to get dressed, but by the time he emerged Nurmi had left and he couldn't hide his disappointment. It was a lesson in motherhood she hadn't been faced with until now; she would have to be more careful with her son's feelings toward this man who had no real obligation to him.

Their cell phones dinged at the same time, notifying them of the ten o'clock morning debrief. She really didn't want to do this; these meetings were bad enough on a normal day. Did she really have to be there when they talked about her unknown father's bodily fluids?

She placed her elbows on the desk, holding her head in her hands, and groaned in misery over something that hadn't even happened yet. Her hair hung over her face, hiding all but the desktop from her immediate view.

She felt his hand on her back, its weight pressing between her shoulder blades. "Hey," he whispered, leaning close to her ear and tickling it with his voice. "It'll be okay." She pivoted her head, giving him side-eye and a doubtful look. Her skepticism didn't seem to deter him from his belief as he continued to rub her back.

She stood slowly, his hand trailing down her spine as her body became upright. Her heart pounded and her legs felt heavy as the weight of what was about to happen fell on her.

While closing the lid of her laptop, she peered down at the address book sitting near it, wondering if it held the answer to everything. She grabbed both of them together, along with her coffee, and made her way out to the conference room. They still had a few minutes, but getting there before the others would allow her to pick a spot that had optimum space for building a wall.

Sofia sat closest to the board with her chair facing it, her back to everyone as they filed into the room. She could hear whispers, but ignored them and drank her coffee as if it were any other day. Her bruised stomach protested the acidity, but her need for caffeine outweighed any potential consequences.

Without actually seeing him, she sensed that Nurmi was sitting right behind her, and the squeeze he gave her shoulder confirmed her suspicions. In her current state, feeling like a wound up top about to be let loose, she recoiled against his touch. He was getting awfully handsy, she thought, hoping that the others hadn't seen his intimate gesture.

Rautamaa pulled her chair over to Sofia, leaning in so only she could hear. "I'm sorry we didn't have a chance to meet one-on-one. I was pulled away to deal with something else this morning."

"It's fine." Sofia smiled, drawing her lips tight, hoping to nip in the bud any further conversation.

She actually wasn't fine with it. Her boss' lack of contact after life-changing news stood in stark contrast to Koskimäki and it made her miss him all the more. Had he been here instead of Rautamaa he would have delivered the news of her birth father himself. It wasn't lost on her that their relationship had been as close to a father-daughter one as she would ever have and she ached to have him here.

Nurmi did the best he could, and she wouldn't have traded sleeping next to him for anything, but telling her should never have been his burden to bear.

Rautamaa took her usual place next to the board and started the meeting. They reviewed the list of action items, marking off tasks that were done. Pictures of the angels that were found grasped in the hands of all four of their victims had been sent to a ceramics expert. This had been done twelve years ago without much success, but they had all agreed that it was worth trying again.

They also discussed the possibility of exhuming the third, unidentified victim in the hopes of finding previously overlooked evidence. Maybe something had been missed that could finally identify her; and with a name, came the possibility of new leads. Rautamaa tabled this extreme idea until they could ascertain if newer, more advanced DNA analysis techniques would help with the evidence they already had.

They then moved on to their most recent victim, Nora Rehn. Nurmi updated everyone on the shower curtain that had been used to transport her body from where she had been killed to the train yard where she had been discovered. Unfortunately, it was a popular design from a common brand, and unless they got lucky by finding a receipt in a suspect's possession, it wouldn't provide a strong lead.

Hairs, fibers, and fingernail scrapings had been sent for analysis. The manufacturer of the tires that had left their imprint in mud was being tracked down. Nora's abusive pimp, the man she had been desperately trying to escape in her final weeks, had been ruled out with a solid alibi out of the country. People who saw Nora, witnesses to her final days and hours, were being questioned after pleas to the public had been released in the media.

And then they shifted to the new items list; topics that had popped up since the meeting from yesterday. Sofia rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. It's only been one fucking day.

She watched as a splotchy, pink rash spread over Rautamaa's pale skin, starting at her neck, and moving up to her jaw and cheeks. Fumbling her notes and clearing her throat, the Chief of Homicide was noticeably uncomfortable.

Sofia's nervousness had actually sunk below the surface while she listened to the first part of the meeting, her mind distracted by the minutiae of the case. Now that she was reminded of what was coming, the anxiety returned with a vengeance. She hadn't had a full-blown panic attack since the day after Emil's kidnapping, when her body came down from its protective adrenaline rush and her brain opened itself up to reliving every horrible second of that night. But here in the conference room, with her colleagues surrounding her, the familiar feeling of an elephant sitting on her chest was a signal that she was about to spiral into one.

She just wanted to get through this and Rautamaa wasn't helping with her awkward silence. Inhaling deeply through her nose in an effort to keep the panic at bay, Sofia stood and turned to face everyone, taking matters into her own hands.

"Hi," she said casually, waving at the room. "My name is Sofia Karppi and my dad is a serial killer."

No one laughed, except JP, who thoroughly enjoyed her comedy. She wasn't surprised. She and JP had worked together the longest and their rivalry was based on mutual respect and, if she had to admit it under extreme duress, friendship. Dark humor was often the only way they could make it through their cases without wanting to jump off a cliff. She would have to thank him later, reluctantly, for helping to ease the tension.

"We all know by now that semen was found on one of Nora's socks," Sofia continued, taking control of the meeting from her boss as she had done so many times before. "DNA was extracted and its genetic profile was run through various databases. Forensics found a partial match," she explained as she walked back and forth in front of the case board. She was in full detective mode, completely in her element, as she relayed this information.

"In this case," she continued, "a familial match." She looked around the room at her colleagues, finally landing on Koskinen to be her center of focus. She felt a connection with the newest member of their team, recognizing herself in the young woman, and hoped that she could be as good of a mentor as Koskimäki.

Koskinen offered her an encouraging smile and Sofia continued, speaking directly to her. It was easier to continue if she felt like she was simply having a conversation with a friend.

"I am the familial match," she said, the words that everyone already knew out in the open. "Half of my genetic markers are close enough that we can say, with certainty, that I am the daughter of the man who left that semen."

Sofia was taking a matter-of-fact approach, choosing her words to be as professional as possible. As nightmare-inducing as all of this was for her, above all else, she was a homicide investigator and she had four victims who deserved justice.

"Unfortunately," she added, "I have no knowledge of my father." She looked at Nurmi, having avoided his gaze for the entirety of the meeting. As strong as she hoped that she appeared on the outside, she was cracking under the surface, and she feared that one empathetic look from him would be all that was needed to shatter into pieces. With the worst part being over, she could finally allow herself to find safety in his eyes.

She grabbed the little red book from the table and held it up for everyone to see. "I do have this," she said. "It's my mom's address book. It's old—there are names of people who have been dead for a long time—but Nurmi and I will go through all of them. Someone in here must have known her when she became pregnant with me."

She handed the book to Nurmi and started pacing again, considering how much she wanted to share. She hadn't planned on going into any details about her mother's line of work, but she knew it would all come out eventually. Maybe it was best to just rip off the band-aid.

"One other thing," she said, biting her lower lip. "My mom has more than a family connection to this case."

Her heart pounded as she was already regretting her choice to go down this path. They were her colleagues, and she didn't think there would be judgment from any of them, but what if she was wrong? She glanced at Nurmi, and he tilted his head down just a touch; a small nod to let her know it would be okay.

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, she said, "My mom was a sex worker." She paused to observe JP. He didn't roll his eyes or scoff at her deliberate choice of words. Maybe she and Koskinen had been successful in finally beating the term "prostitute" out of his vocabulary. "So that complicates my parentage."

Having said everything she wanted to say, and feeling completely spent, Sofia returned to her chair, turning it to face her colleagues. Rautamaa stood by the case board again to lead the rest of the meeting.

"Thank you, Karppi. I understand that this must have been quite a shock. Of course, this means I have to take you off the case."

"What? Why?" Sofia asked, confused by this redirection.

Rautamaa ignored her and turned to Nurmi. "Give the address book to JP," she directed. "He and Koskinen will take over."

"No!" Sofia, in her anger, stood so quickly that Nurmi had to stop her chair from falling. "This is my case," she said as she moved toward her boss. "It's been my case for twelve fucking years! You can't fucking do this." Rautamaa leaned back as she got in her face, so close that Sofia could smell the coffee on her breath.

"Karppi, please. Sit," Nurmi pleaded, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the chair.

Sofia shrugged him off, but kept her distance from Rautamaa. She didn't trust herself to not punch the woman in the face and, as much as she wanted to do just that, it would only make matters worse. "I'll go above you," she said, her voice low and threatening.

"I know how much this case means to you," Rautamaa said, "but you have a clear conflict of interest."

"I don't," Sofia replied. "The only connection I have to this man is half of my chromosomes." She softened her voice, hoping it would help plead her case. "I know that my participation will be defensible in court."

"She's been doing this for a long time," Nurmi said. "She knows more than any of us what needs to be done to ensure an airtight prosecution."

Sofia looked at Rautamaa for any sign of a reaction. Anger was bubbling up again and she bounced in place as a way of directing the energy to anywhere other than her boss' face.

Rautamaa sighed. "Okay," she said, pointing her finger at Nurmi and adding, "But he's in charge of everything." Sofia began to protest, but was immediately cut off. "Nurmi, you are now the lead detective on this case. You are to write up all reports, you will enter all evidence into the record, you will sign everything. Everything," she repeated with emphasis. "Unless it's about her DNA or work in assistance of you, Karppi's name is not to appear anywhere from here on out. Understood?"

Nurmi nodded and Rautamaa turned to Sofia, waiting for her answer. She would be lying if she said her ego hadn't just taken a huge hit, but she could tell this was the only way forward. "Understood."

-----------

Needing fresh air after the most draining meeting she had ever had the displeasure of attending, Sofia grabbed her coat, and walked two blocks to a park. It was one of the larger green spaces in Helsinki, and she would sometimes come here to eat her lunch and clear her head. Her favorite spot had a fenced-off dog park across from a playground with walking paths and benches separating the two areas. She could sit and eat a sandwich while looking back and forth between the dogs and kids, directing her mind away from the horrors she saw too often.

She sat on her favorite bench, fortuitously empty, and turned her head toward the dog park. There were only two dogs today and they were the laziest dogs she had ever seen as both of them were flopped on the ground not doing much of anything. She turned her attention to the playground where a gaggle of toddlers and preschoolers ran wild, despite the chilly December air.

She missed bringing Emil to the playground and watching him interact with the other kids as she hovered nearby. A lot of parents would use this time to socialize; gossiping about other parents, bragging about their kids, or complaining about teachers. But not Sofia; she never much cared for that aspect of these outings. She had preferred to keep a close eye on Emil and the other children, even as their own parents left them to their own devices. Admittedly, her job had made her a bit of an overly paranoid mother, but she had seen too much of the dark side of humanity to trust anyone who may have been lurking around a playground.

Turning her attention to the entrance of the park, she saw a familiar figure approaching. Considering this was her private oasis and no one knew she came here, he must have followed her.

"Hey." Nurmi sat beside her, the weight of him pressing against her. His hand went to her leg and she shifted away, denying his touch.

"Not during work." He scooted over, giving her space, and she sighed. This was all so confusing; the need to set boundaries while also knocking down the walls they both had built around them. There were times when all she wanted to do was jump him and get lost in his embrace. But then there were other times, like today, when she questioned what they were doing. They had a good thing going; he was the best partner she ever had, constantly challenging her and pushing back to make her a better investigator. The fear of the unknown was creeping in like a plague, threatening to derail what her heart really wanted. "There's obviously something happening between us. I'm open to it," she said, adding for herself more than for him, "I really am. But we can't do this sort of stuff at work."

"We're not at work."

Sofia rolled her eyes, not in the mood for his wisecracks. "You know what I mean. You squeezed my shoulder at the start of the meeting," she reminded him, providing an example of when he had done this sort of thing at work.

"It was just to let you know I was there," he explained. "I've done it lots of times."

She furrowed her brows and opened her mouth to argue back, a reflex at this point, but various moments in their partnership played through her mind and she realized he was right. He had often reached out to touch her to let his presence be known or to make sure she was okay in times of distress. Why had it never bothered her until now?

"I had a thought while walking here." As they so often did when having more personal conversations, she quickly changed the subject. They would have to talk about their relationship at some point, but she didn't have the energy for it today. "My mom probably has an arrest record. Maybe we can cross-reference those dates to client arrests."

"That's a good idea," Nurmi said absently, not fully paying attention to her.

She followed his gaze and realized he was watching a boy trying to climb up the slide. The child was small, maybe two, and would make it halfway up before losing his grip and sliding back down.

On his last attempt, instead of sliding, the toddler's top-heavy body tumbled backwards. He went ass-over-tea-kettle onto the soft, rubberized play surface below.

Nurmi gasped and stood, craning his neck to get a better look. "Why isn't anyone helping him?"

Sofia could see that the boy was already running off to find a different way of hurting himself, as kids regularly do. "He's fine," she replied. "Toddlers have a lot of fat on them. They're well cushioned."

"Sofia…" His voice was soft and hesitant, hinting at some sort of internal turmoil. "I don't know anything about kids." He sounded sad and defeated, and she knew immediately what, or whom, this was really about.

Ignoring her own rule, established only moments ago, she stood and took his hand in hers. She looked down at their intertwined fingers, her thumb resting atop his. He was squeezing her hand; all of the insecurities she knew he had were clinging to her like she was a lifeline.

"Leo would be lucky to have you."

She gently tugged his arm, leading him away from this oasis and back to reality. It wasn't until they reached the park entrance, stepping out onto the sidewalk alongside a busy street, that they let go.

-----------

On the way back to the precinct, Sofia again relayed her idea about looking through arrest records for her mom leading up to her own birth. Nurmi agreed that it was a logical next step in trying to find her father, but also protested her insistence that she be the one to look through them. She knew that he only wanted to protect her; it was sweet in a way, even if it was a bit patronizing.

It didn't bother Sofia how her mother had earned money to survive, and she told Nurmi as much. She only wished that her mother's life had been easier so that she would have had safer options. All of her judgments were reserved for her grandfather and the men who had exploited her.

Having died when she was six, Sofia didn't have many memories of her grandfather, and none of them were happy. They consisted of hating the ten-hour car trip up north; the way he smelled of pungent sweat, bourbon, and tobacco; and listening to her mom cry at night as they lay next to one another in a shared bed.

It wasn't until she was an adult and her mother slowly opened up about her past that Sofia learned anything about him. He was an abusive drunk who blamed Raija for the death of his wife during childbirth. Imagining a large man physically and emotionally abusing a small, innocent child for anything, let alone something over which she had no control, filled Sofia with so much rage it was a good thing he was already dead.

It hardly came as a surprise when Sofia also learned that her mother had left her childhood home, gradually making her way south until she settled in Helsinki. Raija eventually made friends, including those who introduced her to a different way of making a living. She would have a place to stay, safety, and a support system of other women.

Her mother hadn't shared much beyond that, choosing instead to retreat into an inner world of alcohol abuse and emotional detachment. Sofia didn't know the name of the boyfriend, the man who could be her father, when Raija became pregnant. From her birth certificate, Sofia knew that she had been born in a hospital in Tampere, but had no idea if the boyfriend followed or stayed in Helsinki.

All of this would have to be answered if they had any chance of identifying him. At the moment, her mom's old address book was their best lead. Their only other hope at the moment relied on the possibility of her mother having spent time in jail. It was an unfortunate image, but no more heartbreaking than everything else she had endured.

The blessing of dementia in Raija's final years had been that all memories of her horrible childhood, of a father who abused her, had been erased. She had continued to recognize Sofia, and all of her memories seemed to center around the thirty-three years they had shared as mother and daughter. For Sofia, it had been her only comfort as she watched her mother, and their forever complicated and dysfunctional relationship, descend into darkness.

Chapter Text

Sakari sat at the kitchen table in his new apartment, nibbling at dinner with an indifference toward his food that was unlike him. Too tired to cook and not interested in being social, he had grabbed take-away sushi on the way home from the precinct.

His laptop was open and he worked in between bites, researching the names written in Raija's address book. Karppi had helpfully notated people she knew had died long ago and bookmarked the page where she wanted him to start. Rautamaa may have officially made him the case lead, but everyone knew who would really call the shots during this investigation.

He hadn't been happy about Karppi's plan to go to the police archives by herself and hadn't hesitated to tell her so. He had no doubt that she could handle seeing proof in writing of her mother's work. She had clearly come to peace with it long ago. It was the other information she could potentially find—the identities of men who could be her father—that worried him.

He had known her long enough to predict what would happen. She wouldn't stop at writing down names to hand off to him for further investigation. She would sit alone in that room, surrounded by hundreds of files, obsessively researching each candidate on her computer until she exhausted his trail. They hadn't talked about her life with her mother or why it was so important for her to have had a dad around, but Sofia had said enough that Sakari knew she wanted nothing more than to know the man; even if it was simply to acknowledge his existence and move on with her life.

There was a question that troubled him; one that was prompting numerous scenarios in his mind, all leading to her having a complete breakdown in that room. What if in her research, her father's identity became obvious? Maybe she would find a newspaper article about an arrest for assaults on sex workers. She could find a picture on a company's website of her face on a stranger's head.

He knew her; saw right through the walls she had built around herself. He sometimes wondered if he was the only one who saw her for who she really was—a person who felt everything; someone who could go from tough as nails to fragile as an egg shell in the blink of an eye. In that room, she would stumble upon her father and she would be alone, left to process the biggest mystery of her life without any support. Without him.

Having hit his limit of work for the day, Sakari pushed the plate of half eaten sushi to the other side of the table and powered down his laptop. Looking around at the moving boxes stored neatly in various corners of his apartment and needing a distraction from the woman who took up most of his headspace lately, he decided that now was as good a time as any to finally finish unpacking. While mostly contained to the kitchen, the explosion and subsequent fire at his old apartment had rendered it uninhabitable. He had been here for weeks, but had only bothered to set up the essentials, leaving everything else untouched.

After tackling the kitchen and living room, Sakari opened the door to a completely empty second bedroom. There was nothing to unpack in here because, as of now, this room served no purpose.

He had been contemplating Leo's custody for months, starting from the moment he carried the scared boy from that shipping container to the ambulance. At first, it was simply a thought that entered his mind when he had nothing else to fill it. Knowing the boy was safe with Laura's parents, he could go on with his days, only wondering once in a while if bringing Leo into his life permanently was the right choice.

Emil's kidnapping, as traumatic as it had been, had served as the final impetus to actively pursue custody. Karppi had almost lost her son that night and witnessing her anguish, seeing how far she had been willing to go to save him, had overwhelmed Sakari with the need to make sure his own son was never in danger again.

And he had assumed that Leo was his. In his heart of hearts, he felt that he had fathered the boy and, once he had settled on the idea of pursuing custody, started making preparations under that assumption. He chose this new apartment with its second bedroom solely because of its proximity to a playground and great schools. Sakari was blocks away from his old life, his favorite restaurants, and the bars he would visit late at night.

The paternity test had only been a formality; a requirement of the courts through which he would be granted custody. When he opened that envelope and saw that it wasn't so—that someone else had helped to create Leo—he was crushed. Nothing had prepared him for how deeply disappointed he felt when he saw the words written on that piece of paper: Excluded as the biological father.

Karppi had asked him if it changed anything; if not being Leo's father would be the end of it. He hadn't answered her because, at that moment, it had changed everything and he didn't want her to think less of him. He had already been unsure of his ability to be a good father, but at least there would have been a biological foundation from which to start.

It was only today when he made his decision and he had both of the Karppi women to thank for giving him the final push he needed. Looking through the baby and childhood pictures that Raija had saved, seeing how joyful and vibrant Sofia had been, he had realized how much he wanted to experience that with Leo.

And then in the park, with her hand wrapped around his and with the utterance of only a few words, Sofia had shown him the depth of her belief in him. He had been embarrassed by his overreaction to the boy falling from the slide and even more so by having to admit that he was completely clueless; completely unprepared to take care of a small child.

But she hadn't seen any of that; she never had. She only ever saw the best in him. She saw the kindness, and empathy, and ability to love that he knew he had, if only there were someone to bring it out of him. It's why she entrusted Emil to his care when they had only known one another for days. It's why she exposed her innermost thoughts and feelings when she was with him. It's why his role in Henna's arrest had left her tattered and broken.

Leo would be lucky to have you.

Sakari took one last look at what he hoped would be Leo's room. Knowing that custody wasn't a certainty, he wouldn't allow himself to feel anything more than hope. He wouldn't buy furniture, or curtains, or even imagine how it would be decorated.

He would, however, allow himself to see the room as a possibility. On the day of the paternity test results, with his firmly held belief that he was Leo's father shattered, he had arrived home and immediately closed the door to this bedroom. Tonight, as he left the room, the door stayed open.

-----------

Sleep wasn't coming easily and Sakari glanced at his cell phone again, not understanding how time could simultaneously be dragging while also moving too quickly. It had been a while since insomnia had hit him this hard and he was struggling to get through the night.

A little after two, he was counting the hours left until morning. If he nodded off in the next thirty minutes, he could still get in about five hours of sleep. He could function on that. Of course, he knew that this was a futile exercise. Negotiating with his anxiety never worked.

This case was gnawing at him from the inside, settling in his stomach and in his head. He was mentally exhausted, no longer able to handle the image of Nora Rehn's naked and battered body constantly eating away at him. Even when working on other avenues, the memory of their victim in her final, dehumanizing state was always lurking and draining every ounce of his energy.

It was a demon he battled in every case and with every corpse that took up residence in his subconscious. He often wondered if he had made a mistake by transferring to homicide and opening himself up to the raw pain he hadn't felt since that morning he found his parents lying in their bed. He hadn't actually witnessed his mother killing his father and then herself, but he saw the results and his brain had filled in the rest. His imagination had created a crimson-tinted film that would play on a loop, his mother forever holding a gun to his father's head while he slept; forever bathing the bed in blood.

Drugs had helped. He would take whatever he could find, but heroin had always been what he returned to. He liked the initial rush of euphoria as it entered his brain, converted to morphine, and bound itself to opioid receptors. What he really craved, what fueled his addiction, was what happened once those receptors released their neurochemicals in the brain stem. It was at that point that his breathing and heart rate would slow, and he would enter the world of nothingness. It was the only way to turn off the projector and stop the movie.

He had been clean when Laura reentered his life the first time; before Leo. She was a part of his past—a drug and fuck buddy—and it had been easy to let her in again. Being with her had reminded him of how good it felt to feel nothing and he soon found himself aching for that void again.

It wasn't until the pain from his neuropathy became unbearable that he acted on that ache. When he was tired or stressed, the pain could be so intense that it felt like each nerve ending, the hundreds of thousands of them in his extremities, was being poked with an ice pick. Those same opioid receptors that sent a wave of neurochemicals to his brain stem, washing him out into the abyss, also blocked pain messages along neural networks. He relied on that intersection of physiology and pharmacology to relieve the tortuous stabbing sensations that would start in his fingers and toes, and creep into his hands and feet.

The physical pain coinciding with the emotional anguish he felt after Henna's arrest had created the perfect storm to start using again. If it had been one or the other, maybe he would have had a chance to fight the temptations. Together, it had been too much to resist. He had felt immense sadness for Karppi's daughter who had also lost her father at too young of an age. He saw himself in her, which is why her drug use had been so obvious. If only Karppi had listened to him; if only she hadn't been so obnoxiously stuck in her own head.

It was after a weekend of complete self-destruction that he finally stopped. He had come too close to overdosing; too close to being trapped in the emptiness forever. As much as he needed that escape from his pain, he never wanted it to be permanent. Even then, in the midst of their rift, the chasm so wide he doubted he would ever hear Sofia's voice or see her beautiful face again, he wanted to stay. Just in case.

He needed to hear her voice tonight and wondered if she too was awake, her always active brain preventing her body from shutting down for the night. He would feel horrible if he called and she had been sleeping, though. Taking his cell off its charging stand, he opened his messaging app and found theirs at the top. He smiled at their last exchange from a few hours ago.

     I finally finished moving in

Please tell me your precious espresso machine survived the fire.

     It did not 🙁

Sad

His thumb hovered over the blank message field. It wouldn't hurt to text her. Either she would answer or she wouldn't.

     Are you awake?

Within seconds, two blue check marks appeared and his phone rang, her name on the screen. He answered it before it could ring a second time.

"I can't sleep." He recognized that he was whining, but he was too tired to care.

Karppi laughed, a sound that he could hear countless times a day and still want more. The first time he had heard her really laugh, a reaction to something truly funny as opposed to appeasing his stupid sense of humor, he had been thrown by the sound. She was a giggler and that just didn't seem to match up with the hard edge by which she presented herself.

"Are you hungry?" Even in the middle of the night, amidst insomnia, she had no trouble going right for his jugular. She loved to tease him about what she saw as his constant need for food. He didn't think his desire to eat regular meals was strange. What was strange was her ability to survive a day on coffee alone.

"Too many thoughts running through my head." He didn't ask her why she was also awake; the question wasn't needed. Laying on his back with one arm wedged between the pillow and his head, he stared into the darkness, waiting for her to say something. He could hear her hemming and hawing as she thought about how to respond.

"Pick one," she finally said.

"Huh?"

"Pick a thought and tell me about it." Her voice, hushed and throaty, had a physical effect on him that he hadn't anticipated. He shifted under the covers, his boxers suddenly too tight.

Fuck.

"Why do you think he stopped?" Among the many thoughts he wanted to share, he chose to start with something related to their case to take his mind off of where it really wanted to go. There was no need to clarify his question; Karppi would know what he was asking.

"He may not have." Her answer came quickly, as if she had been waiting for this very conversation. She loved talking about a case and he loved listening to her. "It's possible he's killed outside of our jurisdiction. It's less likely that he's killed and the bodies haven't been found. I think he gets off on them being discovered."

"That makes sense." Sakari turned on his side, nestling into the pillow and holding the phone to his free ear.

He listened to her breathing and wondered what she was doing on her end. How was she sprawled under her covers? Did she always sleep in a bra and underwear or had that been for him?

"Sakari…" The syllables of his name drawn out in her husky voice made him feel unbearably warm under the covers, with a pain in his chest that felt like his heart had been impaled with a hot iron. He was starting to regret calling her. It was too difficult not having her next to him; the curves of her body molded with his, her hair draped across his chest, his hands running down her back. "Did you know that snails have teeth?"

He laughed at her sudden steering of the ship into another direction. "I did actually."

"Is there anything you don't know?"

What a loaded question, he thought. There was plenty he didn't know; plenty to still discover about her. He wanted to know her favorite movie and what types of books she liked to read. He wanted to know why she became a police officer and how she had developed her unparalleled abilities in homicide investigation. He wanted to know the sound she would make as he slipped inside her and how it would feel as she writhed beneath him in pleasure.

The effect her sleep-deprived voice was having on him was overwhelming, flooding his body with sensations and crowding his head with thoughts that couldn't be filled. He needed to end this call before he took it somewhere not so innocent. "Thanks for indulging my insomnia," he said, hoping she wouldn't detect the frustration borne from her physical absence. "I hope you're able to sleep."

"You too. Maybe this will help…elephants purr."

"Goodnight, Karppi."

He placed the cell on its stand and turned the other way, no longer caring about the time. He would sleep or he wouldn't, but at least he would now have the low rumblings of elephants and the sound of her voice to keep him company.

Chapter Text

The archives of the Helsinki Police Department were in a building separate from the precinct, having been moved years ago to make room for the growing department. While everything these days was digitized, arrest records from the time frame in question remained on paper files, stored in a climate controlled basement of a multi-use building.

The reading room was stark and soulless, its fluorescent lighting casting everything in a harsh, unnatural bluish-white glow. There was an ever present buzz that had been imperceptible at first, but once detected, wouldn't leave Sofia's ears.

She sat at a large table, gnawing at the sharp corner of her thumbnail as she waited for the records to be brought up from below. The woman retrieving them had grumbled when Sofia asked for all files of last names starting with "K" from 1979, the year her mother had arrived in Helsinki, to 1983, the year of her own birth.

There were strict rules for the reading room, which Sofia found to be incredibly stupid and unnecessary. This wasn't some grand library, holding the country's literary treasures. It was a shitty, concrete brutalist office building that was completely void of charm, and the fact that she had been asked to leave her coffee at the door wasn't coloring her judgment of it at all.

She could hear the approaching trolley, its squeaky wheels echoing in the hallway, and scrambled to hold open the door. The archivist, an older woman barely taller than the box-loaded cart, wheeled past her. "This is all of them," she said as she started to unload boxes onto the table. "Now, these are strictly the arrest records themselves. There's nothing in here about court appearances. Those would be in a different area and I would need more time to retrieve those."

"I understand," Sofia said. "I think this is all I need."

The archivist left and Sofia started by arranging the boxes in chronological order. There were two or three boxes per year and Sofia had started the day with the assumption that she would have a lot to read through. But as she searched through each box, the papers grouped together in alphabetical order by surname, she was quickly discovering that her mother may not have been arrested after all. She had leafed through all of them and not found a single record for Raija Karppi.

She considered going through every file again, page by page, on the off chance that something was out of order or had been misplaced. That would take an inordinate amount of time by herself, though, and she didn't want to spend all day in this obnoxiously bright room. The harshness of the lighting and the lack of caffeine had already given her a headache, so she decided to call Nurmi and ask him to come over to help. He would be even less happy than she was about the no coffee rule, but she would make it up to him by buying him lunch.

"Any luck?" he asked, having picked up his phone after a couple of rings.

"No, I can't find anything on her." She dragged one of the 1979 boxes toward her to begin searching again. "Any luck on your end?" She hoped that Nurmi would be able to tell her something about the name in the address book that seemed so familiar to her.

"There are hundreds of Leena Korhonens in Finland and the address in your mom's book doesn't come back to any of them. I need something else to go on."

"What's the city?" Sofia asked, trying to get a sense of when her mother may have known this woman. Having headed down this unexpected path, she had already forgotten her original reason for calling him.

"Tampere, but another address is scratched out. I can make out Helsinki and maybe Holkkitie for the street name, but I can't read the number."

"My mom moved from Helsinki to Tampere when she was pregnant with me." Sofia's voice trailed off as a possible connection started to form in her head. "Stay on the phone."

She looked for records of Korhonens in the box in front of her, finding several, but all men. She pushed that box out of the way and brought over the next one, and then the next one. There were a lot of people with the last name of Korhonen who had been arrested over the years, but no one with the first name she sought.

It wasn't until 1982 that Sofia found it: an arrest record for Leena Korhonen. Several arrests, in fact, and all for prostitution. "Nurmi, I think this is her. She was a sex worker."

"Hold on," he said. She could hear indistinct sounds on the other end of the phone. "I had to wake up my screen. What's the address?"

"Holkkitie 3, Helsinki." She opened the camera on her cell while Nurmi cross-referenced this new information with known addresses of the various Leena Korhonens. There was a passing thought that she was probably breaking another rule, but said fuck it and clicked away, capturing images of Leena's arrests to be pored over later.

"Found her," he said after a couple of minutes. "She lived at that address from 1975 until May of 1983. She had an address in Tampere until 1991."

"Okay, so maybe my mom met her in Helsinki and then they both moved to Tampere."

"It sounds like they were friends," he said. "That must be why you recognize her name."

"Probably." Sofia shoved files in boxes and quickly gathered her things. Now that she had information that could be acted upon, she just wanted out of this soul-sucking building. She navigated the hallways toward the exit, juggling her phone, as she bundled up to face the Helsinki weather. "I want to talk to her. See if you can find where she is now." Her stomach protested its emptiness and she was in desperate need of some coffee. "I'll be there soon with lunch."

Sofia walked into their office a little after noon with two salmon soups and a vat of coffee for herself, already half gone. She handed a container and a plastic spoon over to Nurmi, who ripped off the top and started eating.

"You eat like a bear." She settled into her chair across from him and opened her own container, dipping the spoon in and touching her lip to the soup to make sure it wasn't too hot. The air outside had cooled it down to a reasonable temperature and she savored that first taste of creamy broth.

"Thanks for lunch," Nurmi said in between spoonfuls.

In the time it took her to unpack her bag and power up her laptop, he had finished his soup. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and leaned back into his chair, reclining with his hands linked behind his head. He stared at her with a big grin plastered across his face, leaving her to think she had something on her own. She brushed her fingers across her chin, feeling for spilled soup that wasn't there. "What?"

"Have you ever been to Oulu?"

"Maybe once?" She had a vague memory of walking around the city with her mom and visiting its famous policeman statue.

"I found her." Nurmi sat up and pushed a folder across the desk. "She's living in a retirement community. We'll leave for Oulu in two days. I wanted to give you time to make arrangements for Emil." Sofia raised her eyebrows, impressed with both how quickly he had found their mystery woman and the fact that he recognized she would need to find Emil a place to stay overnight. "She's particularly excited that you're coming," he added. "She thinks it's been about thirty years since she last saw you."

"I still have no idea who this woman is." Sofia picked up the folder and opened it, looking to see if anything that Nurmi printed out would jog her memory. She was frustrated with her inability to make the connection.

"Well, she seems enamored with you," he said, "or at least, little kid you. I had to tell her I was needed at a crime scene to get her off the phone. She kept going on and on about little Fifi."

Sofia groaned and held the folder in front of her face, hiding the blush she felt spread across her cheeks. It had been ages since anyone last called her the nickname she hated so much, the one that made her feel like a prissy poodle, and yet it was the second time in as many days that the horrid name had come out of Nurmi's mouth. "Please don't say that again."

Nurmi chuckled, a sound she didn't hear too often from him. "She didn't really call you that. I added it for my own amusement."

-----------

They left Helsinki in darkness, the glow from the city disappearing behind them as they traveled north. Nurmi had picked Sofia up at five in order to make the seven hour trip to Oulu before the sun set for the day. It was the end of the first week of December and the days would only get shorter as they approached the winter solstice.

As others trudged through the days, wishing they had more hours of light to inject into their sun-starved veins, Sofia revered the darkness. These long days of winter absent the sun—snow crunching beneath her boots, wind whipping her hair, the smell of heat radiating through the house—filled her with a peace that her overactive senses desperately sought. Even as life continued to swirl around her, reaching out to her, prickling the fine hairs on her skin, the darkness provided a heavy blanket to weigh her down; to keep the anxiety at bay.

She wore a hard exterior, an armor she had built as a child to prevent too many questions. They were questions she never had the answers to; about herself, about her living situation, about her mother. Underneath that armor was an overly sensitive girl who just wanted to be anchored in a world that was constantly pushing and pulling her in every direction.

They were about halfway to Oulu when the snow started to fall, getting heavier the further north they traveled. They were both experienced drivers in these conditions and took turns after each food or restroom break, but it was draining to constantly be on alert for how the car was handling on the road.

By the time they reached the tail end of the trip, a little over an hour south of the city, the skies cleared and Sofia could admire the white blanket of snow that covered the entire landscape. As Nurmi drove, she allowed her already tired body to relax and her mind to wander. Her eyes began to droop, the lids heavy with exhaustion, and she closed them to rest for just a moment.

"Almost there." Her arms and legs twitched as Nurmi's voice reached out and jolted her awake. The sun reflecting off of the millions of ice crystals, dancing across the snow-covered ground, hurt her eyes and she had to squint against the bright light. "Sorry. I didn't realize you were asleep."

"It's okay." Yawning and rubbing her eyes with her knuckles, she remembered what she had been thinking about before drifting off. "I want to say something."

Nurmi looked at her with an expression of caution bordering on fear. He should be used to this by now, she thought; her tendancy to jump right in to a conversation she had been having with herself in her head.

"I know that you have doubts about being a dad. Maybe you're afraid that your inexperience with kids will work against you." She remembered the playground the other day and his overreaction to a boy falling down a slide. It had been out of proportion only because he didn't have countless examples of that boy walking it off; bouncing from the ground like he was a rubber ball and running away only to fall again and get right back up.

"But I promise you it won't. You'll learn along the way; just like the rest of us did." Sofia couldn't remember all of the serious tumbles that Emil had taken over the years, even the ones that led to tears, and boo-boo kisses, and bandaids; but the first one was seared in her brain and she never failed to point out the spot to him when they passed it. Emil had been walking for a couple of months at that point; long enough to get the gist of it, but too short of a time to truly understand the power that gravity had over his tiny, top-heavy body.

The four of them had been taking a stroll along the waterfront on a warm summer evening. Jussi and Sofia, each lost in their own thoughts, connected by their linked hands, walking slowly so the short legs in their family could keep up. Henna was beside her father, holding his other hand as she turned a wooden barrier between the grass and sidewalk into a balance beam. Emil toddled ahead of them, frequently squatting in place to pick up a rock or poke at a grasshopper that crossed his path. Most of the waterfront sidewalk was level and easy for a new walker, but there was a point further up where the land dipped just enough that a few stairs had been installed to make the trek easier. And like a moth to a flame, that boy who had only recently learned how to use his legs took off and disappeared from view.

Sofia had run to him and screamed. She knew from all the books she had read and all the mothers she had talked to that outwardly reacting was the worst thing she could have done, but it's not like she could have stopped it. There was her baby, her sweet Emil with his peach fuzz head, torn up and bloodied on the bottom step. She screamed, and he screamed, and Henna screamed, and Jussi scooped him up and held him in his arms. They're just scrapes, Jussi had said; we'll take him home and get him cleaned up.

So she got it—Nurmi's self-doubt. His fear of the unknown.

"Sofia, I—"

"I've seen you with Emil." She plowed ahead, not allowing him to interrupt. Variations of these words had been playing in her head for days and she wanted them out, for his sake. And maybe for her own. "You're fooling yourself if you think you can't do this, and Leo needs someone other than his grandparents. He will grow up knowing you chose to be his dad when you could have easily walked away."

"Sofia. Stop." He interjected again, this time more firmly and stopping her in her tracks. "I'm seeking custody."

She shifted in her seat to look at him more fully, to make sure she had heard him correctly.

"My lawyer submitted the papers yesterday." He glanced at her and the corners of her mouth lifted in a wide grin as happiness for him and for Leo overwhelmed her.

"I don't know what to say."

He reached over and rested his hand on her thigh. It was warm from being wrapped around the steering wheel. "Everything you just said is enough. No one has ever believed in me the way you do."

She placed her hand on top of his as the implications behind that statement hit her. How could his parents have been so distant? How could they have looked into his blue eyes, full of promise and love, and not seen the brilliance and all encompassing kindness behind them? How many people over the years had failed him; failed to tell him just how much he had to offer the world?

She looked down at their hands, fingers wrapped around each other as they drove toward Oulu, and wondered why it had taken them so long to finally get to this point. Minus those first few days, when her grief for her husband was still fresh and raw, and she had railed against any pairing, there had been an inexplicable connection between them. A loose line that had quickly become taut, pulling them toward one another and this moment.

Maybe it was best that so much time had passed since that first kiss in her apartment. The kiss that was so intoxicating that she still dreamt of it; still felt the electrical pulses of it sparking across her lips. When it happened, she was grieving her mother, but also the husband who had died too young. At the time, she had been dreaming about him nearly every night—sometimes underneath her as she arched her back, sometimes hugging their kids, sometimes standing with her as they fought, sometimes flying through the air and landing with a thud. He had invaded her sleep and woke her with a cold sweat for months, until eventually his visits diminished, only to reappear on dates that meant something to them. Their wedding anniversary, birthdays, the day Jussi left the world.

No matter how deeply her body ached for Sakari's touch, she hadn't been ready for him; nor him for her. He had been closed off, his friendly nature a facade for the pain he kept pushed down. If they had continued down that road, had allowed that taut line to pull them completely into one another, it would have ended in disaster. That road would have been littered with pieces of them, shattered and left behind in their wake.

So now—this moment in time—was perfect. Now gave them a chance.

-----------

They arrived in Oulu at lunchtime and Sofia, learning to be more considerate of Nurmi's needs, suggested a stop at a café. But apparently during his overly long phone call with Ms. Korhonen, she had promised him a home cooked meal and he was really looking forward to it.

The retirement community was charming, and based on outward appearances alone, expensive. It looked nothing like the austere nursing home in which her mother spent her final years. The buildings, each of which housed several apartments, were designed to resemble large cottages with massive front windows that reflected the surrounding pine trees.

Sofia was a ball of nerves as she walked from the car into Ms. Korhonen's building. It was entirely possible that this woman, who clearly meant something to her mother at some point, held all of the answers she was seeking. She alone could be the key to solving not only this case, but also the biggest mystery of her entire life: the identity of her father.

She allowed Nurmi to take the lead as he checked in and obtained visitor passes at the front desk. She followed him down the hallway to Leena's apartment, always a few steps trailing, and waited behind him as he rang the doorbell.

"Why are you hiding?" He looked over his shoulder at her, bewildered that she was acting so out of character; following instead of leading. His badge was draped over his neck, a stark reminder that this wasn't a social call.

"I'm not," she said, not too convincingly. He cocked an eyebrow and pursed his lips, signaling that he knew she was lying. "Okay," she relented with a release of air, rolling her eyes, "I'm nervous."

He reached behind and took her hand, guiding her closer to him. That same hand navigated across her shoulders to rest below her neck, a literal confirmation that he had her back.

The door opened and they were greeted by an older woman, her black hair peppered with white. "Ms. Korhonen," Nurmi said as he dropped his hand from Sofia's back and held his badge close so the older woman could see it. "I'm Detective Sakari Nurmi and this is—"

"Sofia." Leena's voice was soft and warm. Her eyes glistened and she sniffled as she brought Sofia in for a hug. "I can't believe it. After all these years." She pulled back, taking Sofia's face in her wrinkled hands. They were cold and felt like silk against her cheeks. "The pictures your mom sent me over the years didn't do you justice," she said. "You are stunning, my little dove."

Little dove. This term of endearment suddenly brought forth a memory of blueberry pancakes, eaten in a sun-filled kitchen with cats rubbing against her calves and a much younger version of the woman standing in front of her.

"Eema?" Sofia's voice was timid and childlike, reflective of the time in her life when most of her happy memories centered on this woman. Leena smiled, confirming their connection, as if Sofia's heart hadn't done just that.

Nurmi, standing awkwardly off to the side, looked thoroughly confused. "Eema was like a big sister to my mom. I was over at her house all the time. You had two cats I adored and you made the best pancakes," she said to Leena as the three made their way into her apartment. But Sofia herself was confused about one thing. "Why do I know you as Eema? I don't think I ever heard mom call you Leena."

The older woman shut the door behind her and took their coats, hanging them neatly on hooks. "When you were learning to talk," she said, "you couldn't quite get my name right. 'Eema' was so cute, we just went with it." She shuffled toward a small table set up with coffee and plates, and beckoned them to follow. "Sit, sit," she said. "Help yourself to coffee and I'll be back with lunch."

Nurmi did as told and took his place at the table, pouring himself and Sofia coffee. She wandered around the room, looking at pictures of Leena at various points in her life. On a shelf, next to a series of books on human behavior and social welfare, there was an ornate gold frame holding a picture of her mother and Leena as she remembered her. They were on a beach with their arms around each other, grinning widely for the camera. Behind them was a wild-haired little girl in a yellow bathing suit with her back to the camera, playing in the sand.

"My hair was a mess back then too." Sofia handed the frame to Nurmi as she took the seat next to him. She sipped on her coffee, watching him slowly shake his head.

"Have you ever heard of a brush?"

She yanked the picture from his hands and placed it on the table next to the coffee pot. "It was probably windy."

Leena returned, carrying a big bowl of meatballs and gravy in one hand and mashed potatoes in the other. She spooned heaping amounts of both onto their plates, giving herself a much smaller portion, and sat next to Sofia. "I can't eat as much as I used to," she said, "but you kids are still growing."

Nurmi grinned and eagerly dug in. "Thank you," he said around a mouthful of potatoes.

"I was sorry to hear about Raija's death." Leena sandwiched Sofia's hand between hers, looking at her with glassy eyes that reflected the light overhead. "We didn't talk as frequently, but she was still my dearest and oldest friend. She was absolutely over the moon when you two married," she added, tilting her head toward Nurmi.

He was too preoccupied with his meal to have noticed, but Sofia scrambled to correct her. "Oh, no. No, we're not married." She chuckled nervously. "He's my partner. My law enforcement partner," she emphasized so there would be no more confusion.

She looked at him for back up, as if they were dodging bullets behind a car, and saw that a smirk had formed around the fork in his mouth. He had heard everything and was leaving her to flap in the wind.

"I must have misunderstood," Leena said. "Detective Nurmi said on the phone that he had some questions for me about your mother. When he said he would be bringing you, his partner, I just assumed he meant wife."

Sofia reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out her badge. Draping the chain around her neck, she untwisted it until the badge lay flat against her sweater, and opened the cover. "I'm also a detective."

"That you are," Leena said. "I do remember now Raija telling me that you had become a police officer. She was very proud of you. I hope you know that."

Sofia smiled self-consciously at the attention and averted her eyes, poking a meatball with her fork. Their relationship had more downs than ups as her mother struggled to overcome a childhood with a father who resented her existence. She didn't know when her mother stopped selling herself for money, but even as a young child, Sofia knew that her life was different from the other kids. She had often been left at Eema's house and when her mother was home, she had been emotionally distant, the large amounts of alcohol she consumed having dulled her affections.

As she entered her teen years, Sofia had questions that her mother had been unwilling to answer. Questions about what took her out of the house so often and why was a father never mentioned? The secrecy had bred resentment that she carried with her through her graduation from Police University College and into her twenties.

It wasn't until Sofia was a mother herself that Raija finally opened up, sharing with her the complicated and heartbreaking reality of her past and of Sofia's birth. With her own baby to protect and the driving need for him to flourish in an often cruel world, Sofia finally understood her mother's choice to keep her in the dark. It had been the only way that Raija knew to remove herself from her daughter and at least give Sofia a chance to be her own person.

"Eema…" Sofia paused to consider how to broach the subject of their visit. She grasped her badge, a reminder of the role she would now have to play. "Ms. Korhonen," she started again. "We have some difficult questions to ask you. I'm really sorry to bring up potentially painful memories, but it's very important that we learn more about your relationship with my mom. I know you were in her life when she had me…" Her voice trailed off, suddenly embarrassed to be talking about this with the woman who once made her blueberry pancakes. "And how you knew her."

Leena dabbed the corners of her mouth with a napkin and sipped her coffee as she picked up the picture Sofia had brought to the table earlier. "You were about four here," she said. "We spent a lot of time at this lake during the summer." She stood, returning the frame to its spot on the bookshelf and sat in a well-worn armchair near a sunny window. Sofia and Nurmi followed, sitting on the couch beside one another.

"You were eight when I met Eino," Leena continued. "He was an architect. We married and moved to Oulu, and had two children." She pointed to a family portrait hanging on the opposite wall. "I went to university and became a social worker. It wasn't easy being in my forties and raising two kids, but I wanted to help others avoid the life I had once lived."

"Ms. Korhonen—" Nurmi started to speak, but their elder held up her hand.

"Allow an old woman to tell her life story, Detective Nurmi." Sofia couldn't help but chuckle at the way Leena put her partner in his place and gently elbowed him in the side.

"Yes, Sofia," she said. "Raija and I were prostitutes." Sofia cringed at the word, and Leena, ignoring her reaction, continued. "I was older and befriended her. She was the little sister I always wanted. There was probably an underlying need to save her."

Leena picked at a piece of lint on the arm of her chair, her wrinkled fingers pulling it off and brushing it to the floor. "She had a boyfriend…Sig. He was horrible to her," she said through gritted teeth. "I tried to get her to leave him so many times. It took getting pregnant with you for her to finally come to her senses. She left him and Helsinki before she started showing."

"Sig?" Nurmi asked, confirming he had heard correctly. He had a pen and pad open, taking notes as they went along. "Do you remember his last name?"

"Sigurd Linden," Leena said. "He was in prison last I checked. Although, that was a while ago."

As she formulated the next question in her mind, Sofia's heart raced and her foot began tapping against the floor. This could possibly be the moment in which she would know, once and for all, the full story of her existence and she wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answer. Nurmi must have sensed her trepidation—or maybe he simply felt the couch shaking—because a couple of his fingers wrapped themselves around a couple of hers. "Is he my father?"

"He could be, but your mother was never sure."

"Why did he go to prison, Ms. Korhonen?" Nurmi asked.

"Which time?" Leena's voice was short and biting. "He's been in and out his whole damned life. Sometimes for trafficking, a robbery here or there, but mostly for assault." She became quiet and turned her head to the scenery outside the window, disturbed by whatever was going through her mind. "He took his anger out on women." She looked at Sofia with an expression that communicated the rest of the story; how he had been with her mother and why she had fled. "Stay away from him, little dove. You're better off not knowing."

Sofia shook her head. "I wish I could, Eema," she said, reverting back to her own term of endearment for this woman who had meant everything to her at one time. "He may be involved in our case. I don't have a choice."

"He'll hurt you, Sofia." Her voice trembled and tears fell to her cheeks.

Sofia knelt in front of her, taking the older woman's hands in her own. They were as soft as she remembered, and she was suddenly filled with regret for letting so many years go by without contact. "I promise you he won't." She looked up at Leena and offered her a smile. "I'm tough; just like you taught me."

-----------

In her motel room that evening, Sofia sat cross-legged on the bed, alternating between writing notes on her laptop, smoking a cigarette, and taking shots of the Scotch she had stashed in her suitcase. Feeling like her jeans and sweater were slowly suffocating her, she had replaced them with an old, ratty t-shirt she had pilfered from Jussi's drawer early on in their relationship. Her hair, driving her even crazier than usual, was pulled back into a loose ponytail.

After more reminiscing of their time together all those decades ago, Leena and she had exchanged phone numbers and promises to keep in touch. As strained and unhealthy as their relationship had been, Sofia missed her mom, oftentimes experiencing little moments where she wished she could call her and hear her voice. With the case looming over her, she found some solace in her reconnection with Eema.

But the comfort wasn't enough to stop her mind from running to dark places. She thought about her temper and how quickly she could go from calm seas to raging tempest. Her inability to control her emotions had landed her in constant trouble as a teenager, picking fights with whoever dared to cross her. Had she inherited that instability from her father?

And what about Emil? He had been so angry in the months after Jussi's death; had exhibited intense hatred toward her. Was there something else going on? Some innate psychopathy driving both of them? Were they destined to go down the same path as a man she never met?

She remembered her words to Eema just hours ago; she was tough, but she wasn't fearless and she was scared shitless to meet this man who could be her father. Physically, she could handle herself—she had gotten herself out of bad situations plenty of times before. And she would have Nurmi by her side; this was one visit she wasn't willing to conduct on her own. But he couldn't protect her from the inner turmoil she was experiencing; the questions about her sanity and basic nature. He could only protect her if she opened up and made herself completely vulnerable, and she wasn't sure she was even capable of doing that.

Her thoughts went to him, wondering what he was doing in his room next to hers. She tipped back the whisky and drank, her eyes watering as the heat from the alcohol burned her throat and inflamed her chest.

The cigarette was stubbed out in the ashtray next to the bed, its bluish smoke rising like a snake as she ground it into the glass. She was trying to quit, having promised Emil she would do so after an intense lecture. One day at school, he had learned about the dangers of smoking, and promptly came home to tell her she was going to die with shriveled up, black lungs.

But on a night like tonight, when her head hurt and she just wanted an escape, the combination of the two poisons—alcohol and nicotine—called to her.

Grasping the bottle, she stood, her body swaying, and went to the outside corridor. She knocked on his door and waited, keeping herself upright by resting her forehead against the wall. She stared at the brass number nailed to the door, willing it into focus as her eyes wobbled in her head. Having confirmed it was the right room, she knocked again and pressed her ear to the door. Not hearing anything inside, she turned to look out at the parking lot and noticed that his car was gone.

"Boo." She gulped more of the amber, biting liquid, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and walked unsteadily back to her room. She turned the doorknob only to find that it had locked behind her and she hadn't bothered to bring the key card. "Fuck." Her favorite curse word was slowly drawn out in irritation with herself.

Snow swirled over the railing and into the corridor, and the t-shirt and chunky socks she wore did little to shield her from the frigid air. Covered in goosebumps and shivering, she slid down the wall and sat, drawing herself into the smallest possible space as she weighed her options. Nurmi had checked them in and she hadn't paid any attention to where the front office was in relation to their rooms. She had seen too many frozen bodies overtaken by the elements to wander away, drunk off her ass and not thinking clearly, to find it.

"Karppi, what the fuck?" She turned her head to a familiar voice. The heavy, pungent smell of greasy food hit her nose, flipping her booze-filled stomach. Nurmi juggled what she deduced were take-out boxes in one hand as he reached down to help her stand. "Why are you sitting out here dressed like that? It's freezing." She stumbled when he let go, catching herself from falling by grabbing onto his coat sleeve. "Are you drunk?"

She showed him the bottle, half empty, and giggled. "Just a little." She pinched her thumb and index finger together, leaving a sliver of space between them to illustrate just how drunk she was. He rolled his eyes and swiped his key card, ushering her into his room. "Where were you?"

"I went out to get us dinner." He placed the boxes on top of the small table in the entry and removed his coat and hat, draping them neatly on top of the room's dresser.

She tipped the bottle toward her mouth, but he swiped it from her and directed her toward a chair despite her pout and grumbling. Stripping the duvet from the nearby bed, he wrapped it around her like a cocoon.

"Where did you get the liquor?" He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her, his face weary with what looked like disappointment.

She narrowed her eyes at him; liquor sounded unsavory and dirty compared to the more sophisticated Scotch. "My suitcase." She spit the words, hostile to his interrogation.

"We're here for work. You shouldn't have it."

Sofia snorted and shrugged the blanket off of her body. It had taken the chill away, but now felt oppressive as anger boiled inside of her. "Don't patronize me, Nurmi," she seethed.

"I just—"

"No! You don't get to tell me how to live. Last I checked, your dad wasn't some fucked up, prostitute-murdering serial killer."

Nurmi flinched and Sofia immediately recognized that she had chosen the wrong words in her anger. Their situations weren't exactly the same, but he certainly knew her pain more than anyone else could possibly understand it. That one of his parents had killed the other made it all the worse and she felt like a total piece of shit.

"I'm sorry." She sat beside him on the bed and he didn't move. She reached for his hand, a slow and shaky movement betraying her fear of rejection, and sighed in relief when he allowed her fingers to intertwine with his own.

"Why were you outside?"

"I was curious what you were up to," she said, adding with embarrassment, "and I locked myself out."

He seemed to accept this without further explanation and walked away, leaving her arm and leg cold and missing him until he returned with the whisky. He guzzled from the bottle and handed it to her as he sat, his body leaning heavily against hers. She too knocked back a shot, her throat now numb to the biting of the alcohol.

Reaching over him to place it on the bedside table, her arm brushed against his chest. It was barely a touch, more a meeting of atoms, but it stole her breath and sent a surge of heat between her thighs. The world suddenly stopped and he appeared in her periphery; a beacon to reach for, a pier to moor against.

With inhibitions buried under half a bottle of liquor and a searing need to have him fill the emptiness she felt inside, she straddled him and cupped his ears, her thumbs pressing into his cheeks as she pulled him toward her in fevered determination. Looking down into his eyes, she saw the reflection of her own desire in his pupils as they grew and pushed against his irises until they were thin, blue rings. Her gaze dropped to his lips; soft, and full, and parted to accept her. With a sharp intake of breath, she pressed her mouth to his. Her movements were desperate and needy; her fingers tangled in his hair, her body rocking on his lap, her lips prodding clumsily against his until they opened and their teeth collided.

One of his hands went to the back of her head and grabbed her ponytail, while the other arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her closer. It had been too long since she had felt this way—breathless, heart racing, the aching pulse between her legs that grew stronger with every kiss—and she ground herself into him, moaning into his mouth as his warm tongue pushed against hers.

Tearing herself away from his lips, she removed her shirt in one fluid motion and tossed it over his shoulder. The socks that had previously protected her feet in the freezing outside air felt like they were now burning them. She rolled off of him onto the bed and took one off, throwing it to the ground. The other one was halfway off when he grabbed her hand and pulled it away.

"Sofia, stop." His mouth was swollen, his lips red, as his words caught on ragged breath.

"What? My feet are hot." She started to take the sock off and he again stopped her.

"We can't do this," he said, dropping his gaze to the ground as she looked at him with confusion.

She sat up and rested her back against the headboard, going over the last minute in her head, searching for an explanation. He grabbed her shirt and held it out, draping it across her lap when she made no effort to take it.

"You don't want me."

"Jesus, Sofia," he said, exasperated. "Are you insane?" He took her shirt, turning it right side out, and held it open for her. Accepting the situation, she leaned forward, enabling him to dress her.

"This isn't right," he said. "Our first time shouldn't be in some nasty motel in the middle of nowhere with you too drunk to remember."

She started sobbing as she became acutely aware of the weight of the last few days crushing her. He removed her lone sock and gently maneuvered her until she was on her side, resting her head on the pillow. He retrieved the duvet from the floor and draped it over her, leaning down to kiss her wet cheek.

He ate his dinner in bed next to her, occasionally brushing stray hairs from her forehead. She had never been this unguarded with anyone; not even Jussi. Her inability to open up had been one of the sticking points in their marriage.

She had no idea what time it was, but her whole body ached, and her eyes were swollen and stung. She closed them, stepping into the darkness that she craved, and fell asleep to the sound of a hockey game on the television.

Chapter Text

A week after their trip to Oulu, Sakari hovered near the pottery expert the department had hired to analyze the angel figurines left behind with their victims. Dr. Mauro, a professor of ceramics at nearby Aalto University, had reviewed the photos of their killer's calling card, but needed to see them in person to properly inform her analysis. She was sitting at a table in the evidence room, holding in gloved hands the small sculpture found with Nora Rehn. She looked at it through a loupe, turning the figure slowly in all directions. Occasionally, she would scratch notes on a piece of paper.

Sakari appreciated the thoroughness—this case was frustratingly short on evidence and they could use anything they could get to kick things into gear—but Dr. Mauro seemed to be taking her sweet time and he was getting impatient. He glanced at his watch again and grumbled quietly to himself as he realized the end of the work week was minutes away.

He was two hours from taking an important step; one that could alter the trajectory of his life in a big way. In the days leading up to tonight, they had both been referring to it as "just dinner" when it was anything but.

He had asked her in the car, on the way to a crime scene, as people do. A drug deal gone bad; a quick resolution in the middle of a case that was eating them both alive. They had needed that—a solvable distraction from the question of who had fucked Karppi's mom all those years ago.

"There's a restaurant in my new neighborhood I've been wanting to try."

"Oh. Yeah?" Sofia had sounded distracted; like he had interrupted some deep thought, when all she was doing was looking out the window. But maybe he had interrupted—she had been distant since that night in Oulu; more so than usual.

He supposed it was his fault; at least, partially. That night hadn't ended the way he had wanted it to; the way he had hoped it would. The condoms he had packed, the ones she would have seen if she hadn't blitzed herself into oblivion, would have told the story. That he had been thinking of her constantly; imagining what it would be like to finally become one with her. That he wanted no one but her and nothing but her legs wrapped around him as she pulled him in deeper and he became lost in her.

And then he had rejected her. Again. Except this time there wasn't a daughter being arrested in a matter of hours. This time there was a daughter so lost in herself that she had to drink to the point of nearly dying to take the pain away. If he hadn't returned with dinner when he did, if he had left the motel for that shitty Chinese place twenty minutes later, how would he have found her? Would she have been dead on the floor of that corridor? Would she have wandered off and died in a snow drift?

She had kissed him and he had kissed her back. Her lips are irresistible, and they had been warm and pliable after being so cold. She hadn't frozen to death; she was there. She had smelled of sex and he could taste the whisky and tobacco on her tongue. She had clutched at him, dug her fingers into his face as she held on for dear life. He had felt her heat as she ground herself into him. But it wouldn't have been right. There was no way for her to truly consent to what was happening between them, so he had stopped it and she had broken down.

He had thought he was doing the right thing by just being there for her; tucking her into bed so she could get the sleep she had so desperately needed. But then it had been his turn to get some sleep and all he could think about were her words: you don't want me.

Those words stung. Without knowing what she was doing, she had managed to poke at the part of him he wished he could change the most; the carefully crafted facade that made him appear uncaring and devoid of human emotion. Of course he wanted her—in every way; mind, body, and soul—but when had he ever truly made it clear to her? Kissing her wasn't enough; he had to show her in other ways that the facade was just that—a false wall built to conceal the destruction his mother had left behind.

This was all new to him; this slow construction of a foundation for what he hoped would be more. He wanted more than a quick fuck with her; and so he had asked her if she wanted to have dinner with him on Friday night, in a restaurant with great food and wine, and a candlelit table for two. An actual date.

"Would you like to join me? Just for dinner. At the restaurant. Friday night? It's French." Smooth; not at all awkward.

But she had melted, right there in the passenger seat, as only Karppi could melt. A turn of her head, a raising of eyebrows, and a lip drawn between her teeth; and then a nod and "Just dinner?"

"Just dinner."

They had smiled at one another; subtle uplifts of the corners of their mouths, as if they each had a string gently tugging at them. They both knew it could never be just dinner.

"I need an X-ray machine," Dr. Mauro said, her first words to him since she had begun her examinations forty minutes ago. She motioned him over, handing him the loupe after he sat beside her. "Hold it up to your eye. You adjust the focus by turning this ring."

Sakari looked through the lens while she pointed at a spot on the angel. He didn't see anything on the glossy white surface. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"There," she said, pointing to the exact same spot, as if whatever peaked her interest would magically appear. "Do you see a faint line? It's really more of a dip."

He squinted and thought maybe there was something. "I guess so…barely."

"With the naked eye, the entire surface appears to be uniform," she said. "This is hand-sculpted clay that has been glazed and kiln-fired." Sakari nodded as he had already surmised that much. The figurines were clearly angels, but nothing about them suggested they had been mass produced or crafted by a master sculptor. "But there's clearly something underneath the glaze, marked on the clay itself. It created a valley where the paint settled."

"Okay," he said. "And you need to X-ray it because…?"

"If we try to remove the glaze, we will likely ruin whatever is underneath. X-raying it will allow us to see the anomalies beneath the surface."

Now that she mentioned it, Sakari had a vague recollection of learning about this technique in art history class. It was often used to see early versions of famous paintings. He supposed that it made sense to use it in this case as well, but he had really hoped to take a shower before dinner and this was sounding like it would be a long process.

He made a point of looking at his watch, the universal sign for I don't have time for this shit now. "Would you be able to come back on Monday? I think the guys in charge of the X-ray have left for the weekend." He knew the department had machines for things like bomb and drug detection, and forensics probably had something as well, but he actually had no idea who "the guys in charge" would be and didn't want to go searching for someone.

"My last final exam was this morning," Dr. Mauro said. "I'm leaving tomorrow to spend the holidays in Italy."

Fucking hell.

As much as he wanted to freshen up before their date, he knew none of that would matter if Sofia found out he delayed a potential break in the case until after the new year. "Okay," he sighed. "I'll see if I can find someone."

He returned twenty minutes later with Hieta and a mobile X-ray unit. As Sakari had suspected, all of the techs were packing up and headed out for the weekend. Fortunately, an IOU for a case of beer had been enough to get Hieta to stay late and help.

With everything finally set up, Dr. Mauro placed the figurine on the imaging plate. Hieta made some final adjustments and directed her and Sakari to sit beside him so they could see his laptop screen.

"Don't we need those big lead aprons?" Sakari asked, a little nervous that they seemed to be jumping right into the radiation without any precautions. The last thing he needed was more radiation destroying his nerve endings. He was participating in a clinical trial for a new type of non-opioid pain treatment that seemed to be working well so far—something about sodium channels, and molecular batteries, and blocking neuron signals. All he knew was that he hadn't had a flare up in weeks and he wanted to keep it that way.

"Those went the way of the dinosaur," Hieta said. Sakari's doubt must have been plastered on his face because Hieta added, "You get the same amount of radiation by flying on an airplane a couple of times. Are we ready?"

Glancing at Dr. Mauro and seeing how excited she was to see if her theory was correct, Sakari gave the go ahead and Hieta began the imaging. He explained that it would take about a minute for the radiograph to appear. Sakari looked at the time on the laptop. It was quarter to six and he was supposed to be at the restaurant by seven. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples to try to push away the headache he felt coming on.

"Fascinating," Dr. Mauro said. Sakari opened his eyes and could clearly see something in contrast with the ghostly image of the angel.

"There's definitely something there." He leaned closer, trying to make sense of the lines on the screen. "They don't look random." He knew what it looked like to him, but wanted another opinion. "Hieta, what do you think?"

"Looks like a snake. It's wrapped around a stick. Like the doctor symbol."

"The Caduceus," Dr. Mauro said. "But that has two snakes."

"The original symbol of medicine has one snake; the Rod of Asclepius." All of this was at the forefront of Sakari's mind as he had just researched it for the Paarma case. Did all these assholes attend the same course on symbolism in serial murders? "But I don't think that's what this is. See here?" He pointed to the top of what Hieta described as a stick. "There's a perpendicular line. It looks like a cross."

Sakari left the room, returning a few minutes later with three evidence bags, each containing the pottery left with the victims from 2008. He removed the one found with Maarja Niska, placing it on the plate as Dr. Mauro had done earlier, and directed Hieta to start the imaging.

He stood behind the others as they waited for the image to appear. At first, they didn't see anything and Hieta suggested rotating it to capture a different side. After some trial and error, they were finally able to make out the same symbol on Maarja's angel: a snake wrapped around a cross.

They X-rayed the last two figurines: the one left with Sadie Vanhatalo and the one left with their unidentified third victim. Both had the same results.

Sakari's heart beat with excitement as he realized the angels were more than calling cards. They weren't simply throwaways meant to mark the victims as his. The killer had taken his time to sculpt them and draw a symbol only to obscure it with paint. Did he get off on the anticipation of the sketch's eventual unveiling or had he drawn it for himself? Was it a message only for his victims that he had hoped would never be found?

At twenty minutes to seven, Sakari had four images on his laptop, only differing in small details like size and number of curves on the snakes. He ran through the building, juggling his messenger bag and coat as he texted Karppi. They were supposed to meet at the restaurant and he hoped she was running behind.

     Don't leave. Change in plans. Otw to your place.

???

     Be there in 10

Normally, it would take closer to fifteen minutes to get to her apartment from the station, but there were advantages to being a cop.

-----------

Sakari knocked on Karppi's door twelve minutes later. He was sweating beneath his winter coat and his hair was a mess from the winds whipping in from the sea. It wasn't exactly how he wanted to look for their first date, which he now hoped would involve delivery of some sort. He was famished.

He was running his hands through his hair, attempting to make himself somewhat presentable, when Sofia opened the door. She was wearing a sweater dress with a waist that hugged her curves and a bottom that draped loosely over her hips. She had paired the short dress with riding boots, leaving a section of her legs showing from just below the knee to mid-thigh. He took one look at her and his heart settled in his throat, leaving him nearly speechless.

"Holy shit" was all he could manage.

She laughed, more like a breathy release of air than her usual giggle. "Come in," she said, stepping aside for him to enter.

He could hear the sounds of a video game and peered into the living room, seeing Emil on the couch. Now old enough to stay home alone for a few hours, he had set himself up with junk food and was chatting with friends on his headset. "Are you winning?" Sakari asked in the way of a greeting.

He suddenly felt awkward with Emil; he didn't know what to say to a twelve-year-old whose mom was all dressed up for something that was "just dinner." They had never talked about it, but Sakari got the sense that there hadn't been many dates, if any, since the death of Emil's father. He wondered what was going through the boy's head right now as his mom's work friend stood before him with the intention of being more than a colleague.

"I'm getting my ass beat." Emil's attention never left the screen. Did he even know why his mom was wearing a dress? Someone on the other end of the headset must have questioned who he was talking to because he rolled his eyes and said, "My mom's boyfriend." Apparently, he was a step ahead of the adults in the room.

Sofia either didn't hear or was choosing to ignore her son as she came up behind Sakari, taking his coat from him and throwing it over the back of an arm chair. "I guess this means no dinner?"

"Not at the restaurant, but I'm starving. Could we order in?"

She fiddled with her phone, handing it over with the food delivery app open. "Your choice," she said, adding, "as long as it's not that tofu crap."

He saw that there was a highly rated French restaurant in her neighborhood and ordered all three of them boeuf bourguignon and apple tarte tatin. It wouldn't come close to the experience of sitting next to her in a candlelit restaurant—their eyes meeting over glasses of wine, their hands reaching for one another—but it would have to do for tonight.

"I'm sorry for the last minute change of plans." He guided her into the kitchen, his hand on the small of her back. Her dress was soft and silky—cashmere if he had to guess—and an image of it pooled on the floor of her bedroom dashed across his mind. He had to focus on the dress and not the woman wearing it if he had any chance of concentrating on work. They sat and he removed his laptop from its bag, angling it so she could see the screen. "I knew you'd be pissed off if I waited to show you this."

He navigated to the case folder on the homicide unit's shared drive and opened the first picture; the radiograph of the pottery found in Nora's hand. He didn't say anything. Instead he leaned back with his hands folded in his lap, giving her time to observe and come to her own conclusions.

"Is this an X-ray of one of the angels?" she asked, turning to him for confirmation. He nodded and she went back to the picture. She pointed at the screen, her finger landing on the contrasted image beneath the surface. "That's a snake wrapped around a cross. Is that under the paint?"

"Yes, and it's on all of them." He opened the other pictures, one by one, arranging them in a grid on the screen.

She took time to closely examine them, biting her lower lip and furrowing her brow while she processed what she was seeing. "Fuck. He thinks he's saving them."

"How do you get that from…" He tilted his chin at the screen. "That?"

"It's a symbol of Christ's salvation." He watched as she opened a browser, typed Moses and the bronze serpent in the search bar, and navigated to the image results page. It was full of paintings, drawings, and illustrations that all shared the same motif of a snake wrapped around a pole with people gathered at its base.

"I could never forget this story from Sunday school because it's so fucked up." Sakari looked at her with disbelief. He never would have guessed that this foul-mouthed, quick to violence, astonishingly gorgeous and intoxicating woman grew up in the church. "What? My mom was religious and made me go. Anyway…" She shook her head and smirked. "God sent venomous snakes to punish the Israelites because they were complaining about him, but then he told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Anyone who was bitten by a real snake could then look at the fake one and God would let them live."

She then typed John 3, clicked on a link to an online Bible, and started reading. "'Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.'"

"In Christianity," she said, "the pole became a cross and the serpent salvation."

"So we're dealing with another religious nut?" He was thinking of Paarma and his delusions of serving a greater purpose.

"Hmm," she mumbled, her mind already on to the next thing. "Do you want something to drink?"

Without waiting for his answer, she went to a cupboard and stood on her tip toes to reach the upper shelf. He briefly considered helping her, but the move revealed her upper thighs and his primal thoughts rendered him useless.

She returned with a bottle of merlot and one of the hefeweizens he brought the night he told her about her father. She sat and poured the wine into a Moominpappa juice glass, a combination of drink and vessel that he found to be strangely endearing, and slid it over to him. "You're not going to have any?"

She shook her head. "I don't like wine." Her indifference toward the wide variety of beers the world had to offer was odd enough, but not liking wine? He couldn't imagine. "Were you able to find Sigurd Linden?"

"He's been out of prison for fifteen years. His last known address was in Helsinki two years ago, but I haven't found anything more recent. I'll ask Koskinen to track him down on Monday. When we find him…" He paused as he weighed his next words carefully. Despite his role as the lead on this case, she was still officially his senior and he felt like he was somehow overstepping a boundary. "I don't think you should be directly involved."

"Don't be ridiculous. I can handle it."

"I know you can handle him as a police officer. It's your emotional state as his potential daughter that worries me."

"I can handle it," she repeated, more forcefully than before. Her face and chest were flush, and he felt an argument brewing. "We already decided the best way to get him to cooperate is to have me approach him as just a woman looking for her father. Why the change?"

"You came up with that plan." He pointed at her, raising his voice in frustration. Everything always had to be her idea. "I never liked it."

"It makes the most sense. If he knows we're cops he'll run. And you'll be nearby in case I need back-up."

"You don't have to be involved at all. We are legally within our rights to dumpster dive for shed DNA. You know that. Koskinen finds him, I follow him, and I pick up a discarded can, or cigarette, or whatever the fuck else he puts in his mouth. He's none the wiser."

Sofia pushed her chair away from the table and walked away, putting distance between them. He could feel the tension in the air; the ripples from the two of them falling back into this familiar dance of pushing and pulling against each other. "I don't think you understand how important it is for me to meet him." Her back was to him and she was leaning on the counter for support, leaving him to imagine what was going through her head.

You could tell me why it's important, he thought. He was well aware that he wasn't communicating with her about her lack of communication with him.

"Yes, this is a murder investigation," she said, "but it's my life."

Sakari found himself in a bad place, torn between trusting her instincts and skills as a seasoned police officer and wanting to protect her from the harm this visit could cause. Maybe she would meet him halfway. "Will you at least let me go with you? I'll pretend to be your boyfriend." With the way things were going, the emphasis would be on pretend.

"Mom," Emil called from the other room, "dinner's here."

Sofia left without answering, but that hardly mattered. Sakari already knew what the answer would have been. She was going to do this alone.

Chapter Text

By the following morning, Sofia had found Sigurd Linden. She had stayed up half the night, using public sources and law enforcement databases to trace his movements in the last two years. He was living with his adult son in Vantaa, not too far from the airport. This was a promising lead; his location provided easy highway access to the train tracks where Nora's body had been found.

The house was nondescript, blending in with every other residence in the area, and was the last property on a small, dead-end street. The sun was low in the sky, but there was still enough light that a couple of houses had people out front. One was working on a car in his driveway while another was hanging Christmas lights on her porch. They both gave her questioning looks as she sat in her car, going over her plan one last time.

In one coat pocket was a DNA collection kit that she had swiped from the station earlier that morning. In the other pocket, she had placed a photo of her mother in her younger years and a puukko knife. She would have preferred having her service weapon on her, but as she wasn't on duty, it was at the precinct. Unless she wanted to come up with a reason for taking it home, she wasn't allowed to sign it out, and she would already have enough to explain to Rautamaa on Monday.

She had told Emil that she would be home by five; and in a text to Nurmi, scheduled to be sent at that same time, she had given him what he would need to find her should she not return. He would have Linden's address and the knowledge that she had already gone there.

He would be livid, but she felt backed into a corner and was afraid of being shut out of the investigation. Her mother's ex-boyfriend wasn't only a person of interest in a series of murders; he was potentially her father. If anyone had a right to dictate how Linden would be approached, it was her.

Nurmi's plan to collect discarded DNA wouldn't allow her to process this nightmare scenario on her own terms. A certain part of her needed to see Linden before he was arrested; to see what he was like on a typical day in his life. What clothes did he wear on a lazy Saturday in early December? Was he in the middle of a book or a jigsaw puzzle? What did he sound like when he was engaged in casual conversation and not lying his way out of an interrogation?

A stack of booking photos lay on the passenger seat. She picked up the top one, his most recent, taken twenty years ago. He would have been about the same age as she is now.

She studied the photo and used the mirror on the car's sun visor to compare every feature to her own. Their noses were the most similar with a gently sloping bridge and rounded tip. They both had brown eyes, but his were round and hers were almond. Her mouth, so distinctive with its cupid's bow shape and lower lip dimple, didn't look anything like his thin set mouth; it also didn't look like her mother's.

There actually wasn't much of her mother in her at all and she barely resembled Linden. Doubts started to creep in, making her rethink this crazy plan of hers. If he wasn't the one who left his DNA on Nora's sock, what was the point of being here? He was probably just a violent man from her mother's past, better left alone; just as Eema had said.

But then, she wouldn't be much of a homicide investigator if she ignored their only lead. Regardless of the lack of similarities between them, Linden was the most likely candidate to have impregnated her mother. He needed to be ruled in or out, and getting a sample of his DNA was the only way to do it.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was now or never.

She dropped the photo on the seat and grabbed her phone from the cup holder, opening her messages. Satisfied that she had correctly set up the scheduled texts to Nurmi, she closed out of the app and silenced the phone.

As she exited her car, the two neighbors working outside stopped and watched her as she walked to the front door. Karppi loved nosy neighbors; they were always the first to call the cops when shit went down. Sofia wished they would mind their own damned business.

A golden retriever welcomed her to the front porch, wagging its entire body in a sign of hopeful friendship. Sofia extended the back of her hand for it to sniff and patted its head once she had been accepted.

Before she could knock, the door opened and she was greeted by a girl who appeared to be about the same age as Emil. "Oh, hi," the girl said, surprised to see a strange woman at her house. "Elsa, come." The dog ran past her into the house and she shut the door. Sofia could hear her yell from behind the door. "Grandpa, someone's here."

Sofia reached into her coat pocket, reassuring herself that the knife was still there. She was somewhat relieved by the presence of a child in the house, doubting that things would go south with her there, but violent men don't often act rationally.

The man who came to the door resembled the photos in her car, but appeared different enough that her certainty wavered. The deep lines in his face, so prominent at the time of his arrests, had softened. There was a lightness in his eyes. He looked like a lovable grandfather who would play hide-your-nose and hold you in his lap as he read you a book.

"Sigurd Linden?" Her voice was nowhere near as strong as she wanted it to be.

"Yes. What can I do for you?"

For all of the time she had spent rehearsing this moment in her head, Sofia wasn't quite sure what to say or do next. She had built an image of a tough guy who would be unwelcoming from the start and that's not who was standing before her.

"My name is Sofia." She pulled out the picture of her mother and held it up for him to see. "My mother was Raija Karppi."

He didn't look at the picture. Instead his eyes narrowed as he studied Sofia's face, just as she had the picture of him a minute ago. She wondered what was going through his head as he made the connections between memories of her mother and the woman standing before him.

"Well fuck," he said under his breath. "I heard rumors, but our mutual friends weren't exactly trustworthy." He stepped aside and motioned for her to enter the house.

Sofia waved at the girl, standing shyly off to the side, as she walked into a small entryway. "You already met my granddaughter, Ingrid," Sigurd said, "and that's Elsa. You'll want to keep your shoes on or she'll steal the socks right off your feet. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee?"

Sofia shook her head. "No, thanks. I don't want to take up a lot of your time. I just had a couple of questions about my mom."

Sigurd tossed dog toys from the couch into a big basket by the wood stove, giving her a place to sit. He settled into a worn armchair and the dog followed, plopping onto his slipper-clad feet.

"She's like a furnace down there." Sigurd pushed up his shirt sleeves and Sofia couldn't help but stare at his arms. They were large and muscular, and covered in tattoos and scars.

"The markings of another life," he said, having caught her examining him. "It's warm in here. Do you want to take off your coat?"

Sofia's hand instinctively went to the pocket holding her knife, feeling the shape of its sheath from the outside. Sigurd seemed harmless now, but she knew his record and how many times he had been arrested for beating women.

"No, I'm good. I'm sorry for staring. I couldn't help but notice—"

"All the scars? I've been in a lot of fights over the years, both in and out of prison."

"You were in prison?" Her voice was light and uplifted, as if she didn't already know his background. She would play the role of the naive daughter of an ex-girlfriend.

"Off and on my whole life." He shook his head in self-disapproval. "I'm not proud of any of it. But I'll never go back." He pointed to a cross hanging on the wall above the wood stove. "Not as long as I have the Lord guiding me."

Sofia glanced around the room, noticing for the first time all the signs of an overly religious household—crosses, angel statues, paintings of Jesus. She had been so focused on the man sitting in front of her that she missed the bigger picture.

"Mom took me to church every Sunday." She decided to make small talk to encourage his continued revelations.

He laughed. "Raija tried to get me to go, but I wasn't ready back then. It took many years of prison for me to finally find salvation."

Sofia's heart raced as she thought back to last night's conversation with Nurmi. There were too many coincidences lining up—his past association with at least one sex worker, the Christianity overtones, his violence against women. All of the pieces were starting to come together, pointing to this man as the one who thought he was saving those women by killing them.

Of course she knew the possibility of that coming into this, but it was nebulous before now. She didn't have the crucifixes and angels staring her in the face.

"Mr. Linden—"

"Call me Sig."

"Sig," she started again, her voice catching in her throat. She needed to get what she came here for and get home to Emil. "How much do you remember about my mom?"

"We weren't good together," he said with an air of regret. "I did some things to her that I shouldn't have. I admit that. But I did love her."

Sofia clenched her fists as she restrained herself from lunging at him. What he likely did to her wasn't love; not even close. Images of his oversized hands pummeling her mother's face filled her head and it was taking every ounce of self-control to stay calm. "Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

He nodded. "I went off to work and when I returned all her stuff was gone. I never saw her again."

"She was about twelve weeks pregnant with me and I don't know who my father is." Sofia was blunt. She didn't want to make this visit longer than it needed to be.

"Oh." He clearly understood what she was getting at, but didn't seem upset or even surprised by the possibility. She wondered how many other times he had been approached by possible children.

"I'm sorry for coming here out of the blue. Mom was never sure and I just need to know for health reasons." She had thought of this layer to her cover story during the twenty minute drive here.

"Are you sick?"

"I'll be okay, but it would help to know my full genetic history. Would you be okay with testing and finding out?"

Sofia breathed a sigh of relief as he nodded his approval. Removing the test kit from her pocket, she opened the box and placed its contents on the coffee table between them.

"I have this kit and we're supposed to collect your spit." She handed Sigurd the swab and tube, avoiding all technical words that would give her away as anything but a layperson. "You peel this wrapper, swirl the stick on the inside of each cheek a few times, and then put it in this container."

"When will we know?" he asked before swabbing his cheeks.

Sofia knew that she could convince the lab to expedite this particular DNA sample and they would have the results more quickly than they would if this was simply a question of paternity. Sigurd couldn't know that, though, and so she made up a number. "I think it will take about six weeks."

"And what if it's true? What if you're my daughter?"

You'll be arrested, you sick fuck.

She smiled at him, feigning happiness with the prospect of finally knowing her father after all these years. "I would like to get to know you better, if that's okay with you."

He nodded. "I'd like that."

-----------

Sofia stood outside Nurmi's apartment building, debating whether to go in or walk away. Now that the visit was over and she had been able to leave unscathed, she had no regrets about seeing Linden. However, none of that would matter to Nurmi. He wouldn't be able to look at her standing in front of him, breathing and unbruised, and just accept that everything worked out fine. He would see it as a stupid and reckless move on her part and he wouldn't hesitate to tell her so. She wasn't sure she was up for the lecture.

Only a week had gone by since she last threw caution to the wind and he had found her freezing her drunk ass off in the corridor of that motel. He hadn't said it outright, but she knew that boneheaded mistake of hers had scared the shit out of him. The only reason he hadn't laid into her that night was because his desire to take care of her had superseded any disappointment he felt in her choice to drink half a bottle of whisky and lock herself outside, half naked, in sub-zero temperatures. And his disappointment had been deep.

"May as well get this fight over with." She sighed and opened the door to his building. There was a choice of elevator or stairs, and she chose stairs to give herself time to talk herself out of this. It was her first time at his new place and she wondered if it would be her last.

His apartment was on the fourth floor with a welcome mat outside his door. He didn't seem like a welcome mat kind of guy. She thought back to the times she had been at his old apartment and couldn't remember if he had one there. But there were a lot of things about him that had been there all along that she was only now noticing, so maybe this was another thing to place in the falling-for-Sakari-Nurmi area of her brain.

Taking a deep breath and steeling herself for the berating that was to come, she rang the bell.

He opened the door and her nose was assaulted by the sharp odor of paint fumes. He was wearing sweatpants and a Nirvana t-shirt splattered with white specks and splotches. A couple locks of hair were matted to his forehead, trapped beneath a streak of dried paint.

"I love the look." She smiled and reached up, carefully disengaging the hair from his skin. He winced as her fussing plucked a single strand from his head, and she winced back, pressing her finger into the spot where the hair had been. "Why would you ruin such a great shirt, though?"

He shrugged as he stepped aside for her to enter. "I have another."

The t-shirt was from the band's only appearance in Finland; a 1992 concert at the Ruisrock Festival in Turku. She knew this because her mother had taken her to the concert and wore the shirt often. That Sofia was only eight-and-a-half at the time hadn't mattered to Raija.

"Were you even born then?" She wasn't sure she wanted to know, but this seemed like the perfect time to finally work out their age difference—she guessed that he was eight or nine years younger than her.

"I was two." So she was about seven years older; less cougar and more house cat. "I got into them when I was a teenager. They're good for brooding."

"Yeah." She muttered her agreement as she looked around, taking in the space. His new beloved espresso machine, a replacement for the one lost in the fire, had a place of prominence on the counter along with more demitasse cups than one man could ever need.

"I like your new apartment. It looks like you're settled in."

"Yeah, just painting the second bedroom." He pointed down the hall. "It'll be Leo's if all goes well." He went to the fridge, coming back with two beers, and motioned for her to sit at the kitchen island. "I'm surprised to see you after last night. You barely said two words during dinner."

"Yeah, well, I was mad." She propped herself onto the tall counter stool next to him. Taking a swig of beer and wiping away a drip on her chin with the back of her hand, she pointed the neck of the bottle toward him. "And now it's your turn."

He narrowed his eyes with suspicion. "What did you do?"

Sofia pulled her phone out of her pocket to look at the time. "In about thirty minutes, you're going to get a text from me. I wrote it earlier today. It was my safety net in case I needed a rescue or…" She paused to consider if dark humor was needed at this moment and decided he would just have to deal with it. "Or a body bag."

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, and flakes of dried paint rained down on his nose. "Fuck," he sighed. "I was hoping to be wrong this time."

She reached out to hold his hand, but he moved it away, denying her the connection to him. It would be a lie to say that didn't hurt, but it wasn't exactly surprising. "I'm sorry, but I had to do this on my own terms. That night in Oulu, I swore to myself that I wouldn't go alone. But you were going to shut me out completely and I needed to see him before he was arrested. I can't explain why. I just needed to do this on my own."

"For fuck's sake, Sofia!" He slammed his fists on the counter, startling her with its intensity. She had expected him to be angry, but this reaction was completely beyond his usual admonishments over her tendency to be independent to a fault. "I'm your partner. You could have gotten yourself killed."

"Nurmi—"

"No! It's my turn to talk." He removed himself from the stool and started pacing the kitchen, his hands clenched into fists at his side. "Do you want to die?"

Sofia, feeling like this was a trap of some sort, remained silent. It was also a ridiculous question that didn't deserve an answer. Of course she didn't want to die. Although, she could admit that it seemed that way at times.

He stood behind her, caging her in with his arms extended on either side; not touching, but so close she was convinced she could feel his heat. Speckles of paint were trapped in the fine hairs of his forearms and her eyes fluttered shut as she imagined herself in the shower, running soapy hands over his muscles.

"Do you want this or not?" He leaned in, and his voice, low and rough, tickled her ear. She ached with the need to be filled with him and she hated herself for being aroused by his anger. "If this is going to work…" He covered her hands with his own, trapping her in place as he kissed her neck, starting just below the ear he had tickled with his words and moving down to the soft spot where it met her shoulder. "You have to trust me."

She moaned and tilted her head, seeking out his lips. After all this time, after all they had been through together, how could he still think this was a matter of trust? "I do trust you."

"No, you don't." He pushed away from her, leaving her mouth half open in anticipation of a kiss that she so desperately needed, and returned to his pacing. "We've been partners for four years and you're still blocking me at every turn."

"Months." She knew this was it; the start of the fight they should have had long ago. And yet, she still wanted to fuck him, right here on the kitchen island, as the throbbing between her legs was unbearable. Fuck you for working me up.

"What?" He stopped in his tracks and turned to her, clearly annoyed with her flippancy.

"We've been partners for four months, not years. You fucked off to Europol for two years and I was suspended for eighteen months. Or have you forgotten that already?" She gulped down her drink and stretched to place the bottle on the other end of the island, making sure it was well out of her way. Anger was overtaking arousal and she didn't trust herself not to throw it against the wall. "You want to talk about trust? Let's talk about how you trusted me so fucking much that you went behind my back to arrest my daughter."

"Trust had nothing to do with that."

"Oh?" she asked with disbelief. She couldn't fathom any other explanation. "What was it then?"

He stared at her and she met his glare with a defiant one of her own.

"Do you think I don't know?" he asked, his voice seething.

She sighed and dropped her elbows to the island, holding her head in her hands. She was tired of going around in these cryptic circles. "Know what?"

"About Henna and Sasha Nyqvist." He leaned down so that his face was inches from hers, invading the little sanctuary she had made for herself. She could smell the hoppy, pumpernickel scent of the dark lager on his breath. "And the fact that you covered up his death."

The room seemed to close in on her as her heart pounded, pushing blood from its core to rush to her head. She felt trapped, buried under her lies, and it was difficult to breathe. Of course he knew—how could he not? Despite her assurances, Henna wasn't a master criminal and wouldn't have been able to completely cover her tracks. It had always been a matter of when, not if. Sofia hadn't been thinking clearly that day under the bridge when Henna poured her heart out to her, confessing to stabbing Sasha and pushing him into the Gulf of Finland.

She had intended to tell him. Eventually. But then the arrest happened and suddenly they were no longer speaking; two stubborn people unwilling to give an inch.

"We arrested her on drug charges to stop any further investigation," he said. "I did all of that to protect you."

"Sakari, I—"

He turned his back to her and she watched as his shoulders slumped. "You need to leave."

He wouldn't have to tell her twice. His revelation and pure anger on top of the stress from the rest of the day was putting her into a tailspin. She just wanted to cry, but wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her exposed like that.

Sofia removed the plastic bag containing Sigurd Linden's buccal swab from her pocket and tossed it onto the top of the island. Rautamaa had made it clear that all evidence would have to be signed off on and processed by Nurmi, and she wasn't about to break protocol twice in one day.

"Tell the lab to fast-track it."