‘They only kill members of their own ethnic group and are a largely American phenomenon. All these findings are said to be based on scientific FBI research, and they’re all total crap.’
Stoya fired a warning glance at Scholle, who was seated beside him at the conference table, vainly trying to stifle a yawn. Unlike his associate, who considered profiling hocus-pocus, Stoya had faith in the abilities of the sixty-year-old expert, who had personally interviewed numerous serial murderers in the course of his career.
Many more than Zorbach.
Privately, he found the paraplegic psychologist extremely unlikeable, but his professional expertise was beyond dispute. Although their meetings in the last few weeks had not as yet proved productive, Hohlfort had often been helpful to the police in the past. Now that they had a definite suspect at last, they wanted to hear his expert opinion.
‘Professor, you told us last time that we ought to look for a run-of-the-mill kind of individual. Someone who’s rather retiring and not in the public eye.’
‘That’s right. Forget Hannibal Lecter, he’s a novelist’s invention. Lecter has about as much in common with reality as I do with an Olympic hurdler.’
Hohlfort gave the rims of his wheelchair a gentle slap and grinned at his little joke. No one else did.
‘Serial murderers are the losers of our society. We’re looking, not for an outstanding anti-hero, but for someone at odds with himself and his lot in life. A niche personality, as I term him. Outwardly quite normal and rather inconspicuous, but inwardly a mass of imponderables.’
Stoya made a meaningless note on the pad in front of him. ‘Could he be a journalist?’
Hohlfort shrugged. ‘Serial murderers pursue a wide variety of occupations. They can be petrol pump attendants, bus drivers or lawyers, supermarket shelf-stackers or civil servants.’
He glanced derisively at Stoya’s colleague.
‘They can even work for the police.’
Scholle groaned and turned to his partner. ‘Come on, Philipp, we’re wasting our time here. Grandpa’s pearls of wisdom are about as precise as my horoscope.’
If the professor was stung by these disrespectful words, he didn’t show it. He rested his elbows on the arms of his wheelchair and spread his hands with an air of unconcern.
‘I’m not here to do your work for you, gentlemen. You’re the investigators, not I.’ He gave Stoya a look which conveyed that even the best profiler could do nothing if the police failed to find the hiding place in which the Eye Collector had held and murdered the kidnapped children.
‘Nor have I come armed with a computer that’ll spit out the perpetrator’s profile at the touch of a button once you’ve fed it with information,’ Hohlfort added. ‘I can only provide you with another piece of the jigsaw. It’s your job to insert it in the right place.’
Stoya frowned at Scholle and asked the professor to go on. Hohlfort needed no second bidding. If there was one thing he liked, it was sharing his inexhaustible store of knowledge with other people. Provided they didn’t dispute it.
‘To return to your question about the murderer’s occupation...’ Hohlfort stared at an invisible point on the room’s bare ceiling and assumed a meditative expression. ‘All I can tell you is this: the Eye Collector enjoys planning and may have some professional connection with projects that have firm deadlines. He’s used to completing things within a given time.’
Stoya couldn’t help thinking of the coffee mug on Zorbach’s desk in the newspaper office. It bore the words: Creative people have no working hours, only deadlines.
‘And he has at least a rudimentary grasp of medicine.’
Stoya nodded reluctantly. The eyes had not been professionally removed, but nor had the operation been botched, and just enough anaesthetic had been administered so that it lasted until the ultimatums expired. At least that’s what they thought, given the absence of any external marks of violence indicating that the children had been unconscious when they were drowned. Stoya sometimes tried to console himself with that thought, but he never succeeded.
‘In any event,’ Hohlfort continued to pontificate, ‘the perpetrator has left the planning and victim selection phase far behind him, or he wouldn’t proceed in such a smooth and practised manner. We can also assume that years ago he attracted significant attention to himself in some way.’
By shooting a woman on a bridge, for instance?
‘I’ve a question for you: What provides the trigger?’ Stoya asked during one of the professor’s few pauses for breath. ‘Could the Eye Collector be working out some trauma by doing what he does?’
Hohlfort nodded vigorously. ‘I would even lay odds he has a medical record. He has never left us any usable fingerprints or traces of DNA, unfortunately. Since we can’t enlist the help of those, we must adopt the classical method of narrowing the field. And that begins with the vital question of motive.’
The professor smiled his TV smile for the first time and raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘And here I leave the terra firma of science behind and venture on to the quicksand of speculation.’
Scholle seemed to construe this as the final whistle and started to heave his bulk erect, but Stoya indicated to him to be patient for a little longer. He was eager to get out of there himself, not least because the stuff he’d snorted ten hours ago was losing its effect and he badly needed another kick. But that would have to wait.
First I must make sure we’re really heading in the right direction.
Unlike Scholle, who was already convinced of Zorbach’s guilt, Stoya found it inconceivable that a former colleague could have committed the most loathsome series of murders he’d ever encountered in the course of his career. Nevertheless, Zorbach had turned up at the latest crime scene before its location was widely known, his wallet had been found there even though it couldn’t have fallen out of his coveralls, and he had displayed accurate inside knowledge. That made him their hottest candidate to date. That he knew the precise deadline on the one hand but not the modus operandi – drowning – on the other, Scholle dismissed as ‘a psychopath’s behaviour, incomprehensible to anyone of sound mind’.
Stoya thought this simplistic, but he naturally backed the hunt for Zorbach, which was already in full swing. His home was being searched at this moment and a call had been put out for his Volvo. It was only a matter of time before he was found. Time which Stoya had to use in order to prepare himself to question his former colleague.
‘So please speculate,’ he told the professor, glancing at his watch.
Less than ten hours left...
‘Exactly what does the Eye Collector want his murders to achieve?’
60
(9 HOURS 41 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
Nothing about the sleepy residential district on the outskirts of the Grunewald betrayed that a brutal murder had been committed there only hours before. It was as if the fresh snow had not only covered the roofs, roads and gardens but obliterated even the memory of the horrific crime. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this the safest place in the world. A district where parents gave their children names that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an Ikea catalogue: Tombte, Sören, Noemi, Lars-Alvin, Finn. Where the kids’ times for watching TV were strictly limited and they were expected back from piano lessons, not the football pitch. Where their elders leant on garden fences to discuss the best lawn feeds and excoriate the neighbour who had once more allowed his dog to foul the footpath without clearing up the mess, in spite of the ubiquitous blue boxes full of poop bags installed by the local council. Where last year’s biggest scandal occurred when old Herr Becker turned up for the annual street party with an Asian girl decades younger than himself. And now this!
I drove at a walking pace, peering in at the illuminated windows. Some of them already displayed Christmas decorations: home-made paper chains, a wooden crèche, strings of single-colour fairy lights. None of the gaudy or garish stuff you
found in less affluent districts. No flashing Father Christmases on the roofs or halogen reindeer in front of the garages. The decorations in this district were discreet.
And boring, in my opinion.
‘We’ll meet in Kühler Weg,’ I said into my mobile.
‘The crime scene, you mean?’ Frank didn’t sound exactly overjoyed to be playing the errand boy again.
‘Exactly.’
‘What do you want this time?’
‘Your car.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’re serious.’ Frank gave a forced laugh. ‘You’re on the run, right?’
‘No, just being careful.’
‘Okay, don’t tell me anything, but I’m not stupid. I know why Thea and the rest of the top brass are in a huddle in the conference room at this moment. The police are after you, and they don’t know whether to sweep the story under the carpet or splash it on page one.’
Zorbach suspected of murder. How close did our star reporter really get to the Eye Collector?
I could already see the headlines and guessed that Thea was planning to jump in with both feet, whereas the moneybags were assessing the potential damages if I sued the paper for defamation.
Provided I managed to prove my innocence.
‘No wonder Big Momma Thea made me swear to tip her off at once if you called me.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘No worries, I’m on your side. I won’t breathe a word, but I’m not lending you my car just because your own has become too hot.’
His remark reminded me that I’d been idiotic enough to forget to replace my licence plates. Up till now I’d been blessed with more luck than judgement. If I wanted to make the most of the time that remained before the police picked me up, I would have to be a bit smarter. And that included getting hold of a car that wasn’t on the wanted list.
‘Why don’t you just turn yourself in?’ Frank asked. ‘I mean, if you haven’t done anything, nothing can happen to you.’
The problem is, I can’t explain how I came to be at the crime scene, how my wallet got there, and how I knew about the exact deadline.
‘Let me ask you a question: What would you do if you were suddenly approached by a woman who claims she witnessed the Eye Collector’s most recent murder?’
‘No shit?’
I omitted to tell him that my witness was a blind medium who had spent the last few minutes sitting beside me with her head propped against the car window. She seemed to have found her excursion to the houseboat more strenuous than she cared to admit.
‘Man, that would be the story of the century.’
And how. You’ve no idea...
‘So bring me your car.’
Frank sighed. ‘Look, it’s not really mine – it’s my granny’s Toyota. She’ll kill me if you leave a single scratch on her beloved bus.’
‘Don’t worry, Frank, I’ll be careful. See you in ten minutes.’ I had reached the end of the street and hung up.
‘We’re there,’ I told Alina. I parked the Volvo with two wheels on the pavement.
We were just outside the suburban house in whose garden Thomas Traunstein had found the dead body of his wife Lucia, fourteen years his junior. A pebble-dashed building with brickwork cornerstones and a double garage, it was the only home on the street in total darkness. Even the illuminated house number had been turned off.
Alina stretched and yawned. She extricated her watch from underneath the sleeves of her numerous sweaters and opened the glass lid over the dial.
‘What are we doing here?’ she asked sleepily.
‘Finding out if you’ve been here before.’
I opened the driver’s door, flooding the car with a gust of icy air. TomTom sat up on the back seat and started panting.
‘You mean you want to find out if this place really is the one I told you I saw in my vision?’
Yes. Why don’t we take this lunacy at face value? I want to know if a blind witness ‘saw’ a murder committed here.
I got out. My eyes began to water as I faced into the wind and looked along the street to where it petered out into the woodland path that I had driven up when I first came here.
The path to the Teufelsberg.
Recalling Alina’s description, I asked her how long it took her to get to the top of the hill.
‘I remember driving uphill for a bit. We rounded several bends...’
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Do you have a sense of time when you dream?’
No, but I don’t kidnap little children either.
I raised my head and peered into the grey-black sky, trying to gauge the direction in which the Teufelsberg lay. The hill was a mound of debris overgrown with grass and trees. It was composed of rubble from buildings destroyed during air raids and house-to-house fighting in the Second World War. The place now served as a convenient recreation area for the inhabitants of Berlin, who went walking there, flew kites, or sped down the slopes on sledges in the snow. I wondered if the Traunsteins’ garden was visible from the summit in daylight. I couldn’t tell in the darkness, but I suspected it was too far away, even for someone with binoculars.
What else did you expect, you idiot? I asked myself, turning to face the house. Did you really think there was something in this blind girl’s nonsense?
I leant against the car and debated my next move. The front garden was enclosed by a low fence. I could easily have vaulted it in my better days, and it wouldn’t have presented a major obstacle even now.
‘I don’t mean to moan,’ Alina said behind me, ‘but it’s almost nine o’clock and I’m still not home. TomTom’s hungry and he needs to go walkies.’ She laughed. ‘That makes two of us.’
Her grin left me in no doubt as to what she was alluding to.
‘Wait here,’ I told her. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Where are you going?’ I heard her call, but I’d already crossed the road and was walking past the garage and into the trees. After a few metres I turned left on to a narrow path, worn by walkers and cyclists, which ran parallel to the fence at the rear of the property. Another ten paces, and I came to a halt.
This was where I had stood yesterday in the pouring rain, only a stone’s throw from the garden shed whose flat roof was now covered by a thick layer of snow.
The spot where Lucia Traunstein’s body had been lying on the lawn was still enclosed by crime-scene tape and protected from the elements by the tent, which forensics had yet to remove. I was too far from the shed to see if the door had been sealed with tape, but I felt sure it had.
‘It was made of timber, not metal. I sensed that because I got a splinter in my finger when I slid the bolt open. Besides, there was a smell of resin when I went inside.’
I screwed up my eyes, but it was too dark to tell whether Alina’s description of the Traunsteins’ garden shed was accurate.
Right...
I shook the fence, which was of green painted metal. The posts were embedded in concrete to prevent wild boar from digging their way in, and the top curved outwards, which made scaling it more difficult, but not impossible. I was just about to haul myself up when I heard something rattle nearby. It happened again when I released the fence. I turned to the right and shook it again to make sure.
No doubt about it. I made my way along the fence, and then I saw it: the garden gate wasn’t locked. Or rather, it had been, but someone had failed to close it properly when turning the key, so the tongue of the lock hadn’t engaged.
How can that be? This is a crime scene.
It should never have been left so easily accessible, even if forensics had completed their work.
Mystified, I pushed the gate open with my foot and looked at the ground.
The footprints leading across the lawn to the rear of the shed might have been left by various people. By the father, who had dashed into the woods to look for his children, or by a policeman or forensics officer who had come to check that the garden fence was secure and failed to do so. There must sur
ely be an innocuous explanation even for the very fresh footprints in the snow, which led in only one direction.
Unless they belonged to whoever it was who had just turned on a torch on the ground floor of the house some twenty metres away.
59
No timber. Only metal and plastic had been used in the construction of the shed, but it did have a sliding bolt on the door. I was wondering briefly what it meant, if anything, that Alina’s vision accorded with reality in this respect at least, when I was once more distracted by a light flickering inside the big terrace window.
So as not to be mistaken for a burglar myself, I walked straight up to the house without taking any precautions. To a neighbour who happens to glance out of his window, a man slinking along bent double looks very much more conspicuous than one who strides across a lawn as if he owns it.
It wasn’t until I reached the window that I hugged the wall and peered through a crack in the curtains. I corrected my initial suspicion at once. No torch. No burglar. The sporadically flickering light I’d seen from the shed came from a projector attached to the living room’s wood-panelled ceiling. There was no light source other than the film on the screen over the fireplace.
I couldn’t even make out whether anyone was watching it from one of the two U-shaped sofas.
Watching what, exactly?
I screwed up my eyes, but the screen remained grey. Moments earlier it had been showing an ill-exposed black-and-white home movie: unsteady shots of what, with a little imagination, had appeared to be a spacious bathroom equipped with two washbasins, a loo, a bidet, and a shower cubicle. Then someone, either intentionally or inadvertently, had draped something over the camera lens – probably a towel, I guessed – with the result that Traunstein’s living room was plunged in gloom again.
I was debating what to do next when I heard someone giggle. Although muffled by the window, which was shut, the sound was loud enough to seem wholly inappropriate. Laughter didn’t belong in the living room of a man whose wife had just been murdered – a man who had only a few hours left in which to recover his kidnapped children alive.
The Eye Collector Page 10