Read Her Enemy for Free Online

you, with Armi gone and you accused of a murder you didn’t commit. But just try to hold on, and you’ll be a free man again soon.”
    I could hear how empty that cliché sounded. Things would never go back to the way they had been. Armi was dead, there would be no fall wedding, and soon the courts and the mediawould publicly be discussing the most intimate aspects of Kimmo’s personal life. Right now, I couldn’t do anything but let the guard take him back to his holding cell.
    Ström was still hanging around. Obviously, he wanted to continue Kimmo’s interrogation. I tried to adopt a friendlier posture as I walked over to talk to him.
    “I’ve heard Hänninen’s version of events now. Could you tell me your own? Why did you charge in like that?”
    “What right do you have to ask?”
    “Ström. We can make this whole thing very uncomfortable for each other. You can yell at me, and I can yell back and file complaints. But isn’t it in both of our interests to catch the real perpetrator as fast as we can?”
    “You don’t think Hänninen is guilty?”
    “How about instead you tell me why you think he is guilty.”
    “Well, first off, he was the last person who saw the victim alive. We’re interviewing the neighbors right now. Who knows, maybe someone saw Hänninen leave and then saw the girl alive afterward. That wouldn’t prevent Hänninen from having gone back, though. But if one of the neighbors did see someone else going there, and we find evidence on someone else that’s just as good as what we have compiled on Hänninen, then we’ll reconsider.”
    I stared Ström straight in the eye, even though I had to crane my neck to do so. With broad shoulders that rose toward slightly protruding ears, his heavy frame seemed tense. His washed-out brown eyes avoided my gaze as sweat began to emerge from the large pores in the skin of his face.
    “And second, you know just as well as I do that these sorts of homicides are usually the work of someone close to the victim. And who was closer to her than her fiancé? Seems pretty straightforward to me.”
    “Each man kills the thing he loves,” I muttered.
    “What?”
    “Oh, nothing.” I didn’t think Ström would know a line from an Oscar Wilde poem or have seen Fassbinder’s
Querelle
. “But this is all circumstantial evidence.”
    “Whoever strangled Mäenpää was wearing rubber gloves. Hänninen was wearing rubber gloves when we showed up. They’re in the lab right now. The rubber suit had Mäenpää’s fingerprints on it. A piece ripped from it was under Mäenpää’s leg on the lawn. Mäenpää fought against her attacker, and she had pretty long nails. Maybe she was able to rip a piece off of the suit with them.”
    “Are there scratches on Hänninen’s thigh?”
    “There was some kind of scrape.”
    “Have a doctor look at it.”
    “We just have to wait for the lab results on the gloves. If the gloves are a match, then this case is closed.”
    “I don’t think rubber leaves a mark that easily,” I countered.
    “And besides, there was all the stuff Hänninen had in his room. Rubber clothing, chains, ropes. Handcuffs. A whip. And look at these magazines!” Ström slapped down a stack of English-and German-language magazines with names like
Skin Two
,
«O»
, and
Bondage
. Each featured stylized pictures of beautiful women in rubber or leather clothing, with chains or without, bound or laid out for whipping. Looking at them with Ström so close was embarrassing, because for me many of the pictures were more than a little intriguing.
    “He’s clearly a pervert. This is the same as that Marquis de Sade stuff, and in those books, they hanged and strangled women all the time. The whole thing makes my stomach turn. Someone should put all these S&M freaks out of their misery. If you hadseen what he was doing when we went in there, you would be just as convinced he’s guilty.”
    “Why did you storm into the house?”
    “Think about it.