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policy.”
    “The roses cover the smell nicely. Now go ahead and eat your cake so we can get to work,” I said, trying to make it sound like a command. Ström’s absence wasn’t a surprise. Our competition for this job had been bruising. According to Ström I was only chosen for my gender, so he appealed the decision. The appeal was denied, but when the position opened up in the middle of last October, only seven weeks after Iida’s birth, Ström was asked to fill in for me while I was on maternity leave. Everyone was sure he would refuse on principle, but he accepted, and now I was taking over a unit he had been leading for nearly a year.
    I had heard rumors about the state of things. Koivu, Puupponen, and Taskinen had visited occasionally, and the others called sometimes. Ström hadn’t been an easy boss. Anu Wang, whose family originally came from Vietnam, had received the worst of it, with Ström actually saying out loud that she had been hired to fill a quota. “That slant-eyed bitch” had just been too much for him, but according to everyone else, Anu had been doing fine. She was the first ethnic-minority woman to graduate from the police academy, so she was used to standing out from the crowd.
    Challenges aside, we could have used Ström in the morning meeting. He had been the lead investigator on all of the current cases and had the best grasp of the overall situation. So my first meeting back at work consisted of hearing disjointed bits of cases and making assignments according to notes Ström had left. Fortunately the open cases were all simple crimes: a drunken brawl between a group of friends in a pub and an assault outside a shopping center with a dozen witnesses watching. The previous week, Ström had completed the pretrial investigation of a stabbing at a beach over the Midsummer holiday, which had been the summer’s most complicated case.
     

     
    My first few days at work were mostly taken up with paper pushing and meetings, which were an exasperatingly common part of my new position. Ström came back to work on Wednesday and settled back into his old office, which he shared with Lähde. He didn’t stop in to say hi, so when his file boxes were still darkening the corner of my office at one that afternoon, I marched over to talk to him.
    Ström looked pale. His skin, usually ruddy with acne scars, hung pallid from his face, and his snuff-brown hair was mussed. His aviator sunglasses concealed his eyes, and a cigarette smoldered in his hand.
    “Howdy, Ström, good to see you’re feeling better. We should have a sit-down. There’s a ton we need to review. What’s your schedule like tomorrow?”
    “Who knows? Depends on whether someone gets killed tonight,” Ström said.
    “How about a long lunch tomorrow? At a real restaurant instead of the cafeteria. My treat,” I said, trying to sound friendly.
    Ström shook his head. “I have a meeting with the prosecutor on the beach-stabbing case at twelve. If you want a meeting, you’ll have to wait until Friday afternoon. Would three o’clock work?”
    Frigging Ström. He was doing this on purpose! He wanted to test whether I would still be willing to work crazy hours after having a baby. Just handling our most important business would take at least three hours, and Ström knew it.
    “Yeah, that works,” I said calmly. “You’re tied up with that fraud case over in White Collar, right?”
    “Yeah. Goddamn mess. But I don’t really want anything bigger right now. I’m ready for a break after having to babysit the boys and that slant-eyed chick all year. I’ve had to explain everything to her and Puupponen in single syllable words.”
    “Don’t you ever let me hear you call her ‘slant-eyed’ again!” I hissed before I realized that Ström had been trying to get me to lose my cool on purpose. That had been easy for him ever since we were in the academy together.
    Ström just snorted, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another.
    “Did