The Healer Read Online Free Page A

reality was otherwise. The fires were as much as a meter and a half in diameter. People used all kinds of things they found on the shore and in abandoned buildings as fuel. There were rumors that they used dead animals, even people.
    It was strange how I’d got used to seeing the fires. I couldn’t have told you when the first ones appeared or when the evening ribbon of flames they formed became a daily sight.
    Farther off, beyond the silhouette of the buildings on the shore, were the modern towers of Pasila, and the blaze and glow to the left told me where the city center was. Over it all lay a dark, boundless night sky that held the whole world in its cold, sure grip.
    I realized that I was looking for connections between what I’d just read and what I was now seeing.
    Johanna.
    Out there somewhere.
    Like I’d told Lassi, there was no point in my going to the police. If they didn’t have the time or the resources to look for the murderer of these families, how would they have the time to look for a woman missing for twenty-four hours, one of thousands of missing people?
    The Healer.
    West–East or North–South.
    The night didn’t seem to hold any answers. The music thumped upstairs. The wind moved through the trees on the slope of the ridge below, singing through the bare branches as well as it could but able to prevail against the barrier of human and machine-made sound only for brief moments. The cold of the balcony’s cement floor on the soles of my feet prompted me to seek warmth.
    I returned to the kitchen table, read through all of Johanna’s documents on the Healer one more time, made some coffee, and tried to call her again. It was no surprise when the number could not be reached. It was also no surprise that a hint of panic and desperation was beginning to splash through my worried mind.
    There was one thing I could be sure of: Johanna had disappeared on a job investigating something connected with the Healer.
    I pushed all other thoughts aside, drank my coffee, and read the printouts of the e-mails the Healer had sent to Johanna, in the order they were received. As I read them, I sorted them into two piles. In the first, I put messages where the necessity of the crimes was defended, sometimes at great length, and Johanna’s previous articles were mentioned, sometimes with the implication that her work was something like the Healer’s—to uncover lies and to liberate. The other pile contained the messages that directly stated where the murder victims could be found and contained only a few hastily and poorly written lines.
    I leafed through the piles again and came to the same conclusion that I had the first time. There were two authors. At least in theory. At least that’s what I thought.
    I opened the map Johanna had made again. It was like a pocket guide to hell. I moved through the red points marking the murders, went through the dates and Johanna’s figures. There were two or three days between the murders. Johanna had added a question mark to each of the four points of the compass and calculated possible locations of future murders.
    As I stared at the map, the icon for Johanna’s e-mail program caught my eye. I hesitated. Reading another person’s e-mail is undoubtedly wrong. But maybe this situation was an exception. Besides, we didn’t have any secrets from each other, did we? I decided that I would open her e-mail only if the situation absolutely demanded it. In the meantime I would get by strictly on what related directly to the article Johanna was working on now.
    I remembered the phone call I’d recorded, turned on my own laptop, and plugged my phone into it.
    I copied the last conversation I’d had with Johanna onto the computer, searched a moment for the right program, downloaded it, and opened the audio file with it. The audio editing software was easy to use. I separated the sounds, removed my and Johanna’s voices,