The Healer Read Online Free

and an advocate for the meat processing industry, he’d had to look on, with his hands and feet tied and his mouth taped, as his wife and three small children were each cold-bloodedly executed with a gunshot to the head. He was murdered last, with a single bullet to the center of his forehead.
    Johanna had interviewed the police investigator, the interior minister, and a representative of a private security company. The piece ended with an extended plea from Johanna, directed as much at the police and the public as it was at the Healer himself.
    I also found a map of Helsinki and a chart Johanna had made of the date and location of each murder, the times she received the e-mails, and the main contents of the messages. This had to do with the sticky note I’d found. I looked at it again: West–East or North–South. The map clearly showed that the murders had progressed chronologically, first from west to east, then from north to south.
    Based on Johanna’s summaries of the contents of the messages, the e-mails had grown darker as the murders reached the south side of the city. Some of the messages also had a surprisingly personal tone: Johanna was addressed using her first name and praised for her “truthful and uncompromising” journalism. The writer even seemed to believe that she would understand the necessity for this kind of extreme action.
    The second-to-last message had come the day after the murders in Punavuori. A family of four—a father who owned and operated a large chain of car dealerships, his wife, and their two sons, aged ten and twelve—were found dead in their home. Without the e-mail message, the deaths would probably have been classified as another of the murder-suicides that were occurring weekly. The suicide theory was supported by the fact that the large-caliber weapon the murders were committed with was found in the father’s hand, as if he were handing it to the police as proof.
    Then the Healer’s message arrived. The address was given in the e-mail—Kapteenikatu 14—with an admonition to investigate the matter more thoroughly.
    This was duly done, and it became clear that although the gun had been in the father’s hand, someone else had helped him aim and shoot. So he had felt each shot in his hand and body and seen and heard his own children die from bullets that came from a gun he was holding.
    The last message was hastily and poorly written—stilted in both grammar and content. It didn’t defend the crimes in any way.
    I got up from the table, walked to the balcony, and stood there for a long time. I breathed in the cool air, trying to blow away the invisible stone on my chest. The stone lightened, but it didn’t roll away completely.
    We’d moved into our place almost immediately after we married. The apartment had become a home and the home had become dear to us; it was our place in the world—a world that was completely different ten years ago. Of course it was easy to say afterward that all the warning signs were already visible then—the summer stretching out long and dry into autumn, rainy winters, increasingly high winds, news about hundreds of millions of people wandering the world, and exotic insects appearing in our own yards, on our own skin, spreading Lyme disease, malaria, sandfly fever, encephalitis.
    Our building was on a high hill in Herttoniemi, and on a clear day you could see across the bay from the living room and balcony all the way to Arabianranta, where most of the houses were continuously flooded. Like many other neighborhoods that suffered from flooding, Arabianranta was often dark. They didn’t dare let electricity in because of the water that remained in the badly damaged buildings. With the naked eye, from two and a half kilometers away, I could see dozens of fires along the shore. From where I stood they looked small and delicate, like just-lit matches that could easily be blown out. The