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before when I was filling a summer vacancy in the Helsinki PD. Then Koivu had moved up north to join the Joensuu force. A couple of summers ago, I had ended up nearby, acting as sheriff for the summer in my hometown of Arpikylä. While I was there we had solved the murder of a local artist together. After moving to Espoo I’d missed Koivu, and I was happy to be working with him again. He was more like the brother I never had than just a friend from work. I loved my two sisters, but I never related to them.
    “Did you find anything out at the shopping center?” I asked Koivu.
    Koivu thought our best hope was focusing on contacting people who used the parking garage. Maybe someone would remember another car parked near the Mercedes Noora was found in. Noora’s body had to have been transported to the garage in a car, although the killer had taken a huge risk transferring the body in public. Kati Järvenperä, the woman who found the body, was also a key figure. It was probable that the killer had been in the parking garage when she arrived and seen her leave the trunk of her car unlocked.
    “This forest seems like the probable scene of the murder,” I said contemplatively. There were no houses on the north side of the nearest street, and the mushy ground of the pine forest ended in a dense willow thicket. Behind it was a tall hill overgrown with grass and crisscrossed with walking paths. The willows partially obscured the view into the forest, which was shaded by the tall pines. Noora’s home was on the south side of a street that wound along the seashore, just a few blocks away. How would Noora’s parents feel, seeing the police cars parked in the lot next to the forest and the red-and-yellow-and-black-striped tape cordoning off the area where we were combing for signs of their daughter’s murderer? Would they ever be able to walk through this park again without remembering that their daughter was beaten to death here?
    I had to stop thinking so much about people’s feelings. I would do them far more good by concentrating on things like how the murderer had got hold of Noora’s ice skates. Top figure skaters like Noora had their boots and blades custom made and took good care of their equipment. No way would Noora have been carrying a brand-new pair of skates bare—they would have been stored in soft cloth bags. The plastic guards used when wearing the skates off the ice caused the blades to rust. So why were the skates out of Noora’s equipment bag at all? Did Noora take them out or did the murderer? And where were the bags they should have been in?
    I moved off to the side to call Taskinen. He’d decided to check in on Silja at home before his interview after all.
    “Ulrika Weissenberg? I don’t know her very well. We were invited to her place once, but she doesn’t seem to think that a police officer and a day-care administrator are very glitzy people.” Taskinen’s voice contained a surprising edge—clearly he didn’t like the chairwoman of the figure-skating association any more than Elena Grigorieva did. He did give some basic background, though.
    Ulrika Weissenberg was the chairwoman of the Espoo Figure-Skating Association and vice chair of the Finnish Figure-Skating Federation. She didn’t hold a steady job, devoting herself instead to the organizations she’d become attached to twenty years before when her own daughter was a figure skater. The daughter had given up the sport relatively quickly, but Ulrika remained involved. As I understood it, the Finnish Figure-Skating Federation was one of the most contentious sporting organizations in the country, and the power-hungry Weissenberg was no peacemaker. She was happy to be in charge, but she often crossed skates with the athletes.
    Taskinen mentioned that Weissenberg’s husband was an important division head at Nokia. Ulrika Weissenberg didn’t sound like an easy interviewee, but I really wanted to know what she had been arguing with Noora about