My First Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

so red that it was almost pathetic. Tommi had been one of his best friends. I thought about how I would feel if I woke up with a hangover, only to find my friend’s corpse floating in the water. Riku had been singing in EFSASfor only a year, but he had spent several years in chamber choirs in Eastern Finland and Savonlinna.
    “I hadn’t ever been to Tommi’s summerhouse before, and, damn, is it a swank place. Totally sweet. We went in Pia’s car, and I drove ’cause I wanted to feel what it was like to be behind the wheel of a Bimmer. Timo and Sirkku were with us in the car. The others were ahead, and I wanted to pass Tommi, so I did a little rally move to get around him. That last dirt road was really fun to drive.” Riku’s strange, high voice was like that of an excited child. Judging from his breath, I deduced that he had fortified himself with a few pick-me-ups on the return trip to the city. Still, his enthusiasm over the car seemed inappropriate.
    “Tommi was a good driver, but he scared the hell out of me a couple of times weaving across the road like a maniac—he had the girls screaming. Then when we got to the house, we started practicing. We sounded good as hell, and I was already getting my parts down. When we didn’t feel like singing anymore, I sat down at the piano for a bit since the music for ‘Lensky’s Aria’ was sitting there—do you know it?” Riku hummed the first few bars. I had never heard of Lensky before, but I concealed my ignorance by smiling lamely. Rane looked incensed. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought this experience should have sobered Riku up a bit more than it had.
    “Then Tuulia came and told me not to play any sad songs, so I started going through this old volume of
Songs of Hope
that I found in the piano bench. Then I guess we ate and headed over to the sauna. Tommi and I went swimming and raced, and I won. By then, I was pretty drunk—Tommi had some real whiskey, Jack Daniel’s, you know?”
    I had had the pleasure of making the gentleman’s acquaintance, a bit too intimately perhaps, on more than one occasion,and now I recognized the smell on Riku’s breath was Jack as well.
    “Tuulia and me danced a little, but the Bach on the CD we were playing didn’t really work for that. Then I guess I passed out, and in the morning I didn’t feel so hot.”
    Rane was tapping away furiously at his keyboard. I wondered whether he was trying to mimic Riku’s eastern drawl. Riku was in constant, nervous motion. Despite his bloodshot eyes and two-day stubble, he was actually a very stylish young man. His slightly reddish hair—was that its real color?—was cut in a trendy style, and his outfit looked like it had been carefully coordinated, with his socks matching his violet Burberry checked shirt and the frames of his glasses. Short and slender, he looked even younger than he was, almost like a boy.
    Riku had found the body, and Mira had mentioned that Riku had been wandering around downstairs during the night. I asked him about this, and he flushed like he was guilty of something.
    “Yeah...I didn’t even remember that. I was still pretty drunk, I guess. It was sometime after midnight. I had gone to bed, but I couldn’t sleep, so I went to see what Tuulia was doing. She was lying on her back snoring, and Mira was sitting on the bed staring at me, but Pia...she wasn’t anywhere.”
    “You didn’t see her upstairs either?”
    “She must have been up there, with Tommi...Yeah, well, see, when I was lying there trying to sleep, they were talking on the landing upstairs and Tommi told Pia that she should come sleep in his room. Pia said she wouldn’t, that kissing and screwing were two different things. I guess you already know they were fooling around...”
    Though everyone appeared eager to share information about Pia and Tommi’s relationship, Riku seemed to speak of it with a certain degree of admiration.
    “And after that?”
    “Nothing. I guess Pia