by Noah Fitz
“She’s not,” said Marc and pointed to the door. “Could you unlock it, Mr. Lind, please, and come in with us?”
“I thought I would act as an eyewitness?” The janitor’s already ashen face turned grayer.
“We fooled you.” Marc gave him his predatory smile.
Lind’s hands were now shaking even more. His bunch of keys rattled. At the third attempt, he finally got the door open and let the inspectors in. The workshop smelled of wood, alcohol, charred cables, and something Tine could not describe.
Marc was the last to enter the room and closed the door behind him. “Relax. My colleague and I just want you to tell us something about this switch.” He stepped to the workbench and pointed to the remote control hanging on the black wire. Mr. Lind’s shoulders slumped as if he were relieved, but he still seemed worried. He quickly reached into the breast pocket of his blue suit and fished out a shiny flask. Quickly he unscrewed the fastener and took two small sips. “Otherwise I can’t think.” He puffed and blew out noisily with bloated cheeks.
“That thing had been broken for a long time and I actually found the place useless anyway. The bunker was littered with stuff and nobody felt obliged to dispose of it. But one day a woman from the administration came to check up on things. She’d just been newly elected and, of course, she had to be innovative in front of the others. Full of zest for action and with a TÜV inspector in tow, she strutted around in here.”
“Interesting, but let’s get back to the basics, please.”
Tine opened her notebook and turned the pages. She pretended to look for something specific, and then she noticed it. “You must always remember that this is just a job. Let go, Pride.” The two lines were from Marc, scrawled across the page, but easily readable.
Immediately, Tine noticed how quiet it was all of a sudden.
The janitor stared at her with his mouth open. “Why are you smiling?” He seemed intimidated.
“I just realized you’re hiding something.” It sounded confident and apparently came across as pretty convincing, because Lind flinched. “You have to answer honestly,” Tine said. “Otherwise you’ll get caught up in your lies, and you’ll have to repeat your story in front of a judge. Would you prefer that?”
“All right.” The old man sighed. “I hid my homemade brandy down there. The woman from property management knew about the bunker, and I didn’t know what to do because I was afraid of being fired so close to retirement. So I got this thing…” He took the bulky box in his hands, so as not to meet her gaze. Desperately he searched for the right words. “I faked an attack of weakness and grabbed onto it. Fortunately, the cables didn’t hold and came loose from the clamps. Afterwards the contacts were so badly damaged that nothing worked. I’m not a good electrician; at most I can only replace lamps or even…” Again, he paused and reflected. “… only lamps. So, a few days later Mr. Holm came by and brought back the soldering iron, but he didn’t have time to fix it. His son Peer—a good boy—spent a lot of time here. Especially after the accident because his parents were too busy with their grief. Well, anyway, Peer was there and fixed the thing, but he switched the wires. Since then the buttons work the other way around and one of them’s stuck. You only have to tap it once and then the cover moves down slowly. Luckily, the guy from the TÜV didn’t come back. And women have no clue…” He stopped himself and tried to cover his last statement with an embarrassed cough. “I mean, not all of them, of course. But that lady did not notice. I took my stuff somewhere else with Peer and Olaf, and in return Olaf could spend the winter here. Sometimes in summer, too.”
Marc lifted his radio to his lips. “Please bring Mr. Holm in.”
Squeaking, the door opened. A cold breeze swept over Tine’s feet.
The medium-sized man with the dark hair and tired eyes, in which a hint of panic flickered, moved with small steps.
“Open the hatch, please.” Mark pointed with his chin to the trapdoor, which the fire department had provisionally put back into its original position.
Holm was obviously overwhelmed by the situation. His uncertain gaze wandered from Marc to Tine and then to the janitor, who held the remote control in his hands.
Marc lowered his voice. “Mr. Holm?”
The man walked indecisively towards the square, grabbed the ring, and pulled at it. “It’s blocked. Or maybe it’s too heavy.”
“Maybe there’s another reason for this?” Marc took the remote control from Lind’s gnarled fingers and held it out to Peer’s father.
Mr. Holm hesitantly reached for it; he still looked like a startled animal fearing for its life.
Tine and Marc concentrated on his reaction.
Mr. Holm squinted and pressed the button with the word OPEN on it. Nothing happened. Astonished, he turned to the trapdoor and pressed again, a little harder. This time his thumb stayed on the button longer. “Is this a test?” he said, half afraid, half angry.
“Yes, and you passed with flying colors,” Tine said, not quite sure whether her supervisor thought so, too. She half expected a rebuke, so as a precaution, she didn’t even look at him.
Renewed crackling from the radio. “Mr. Kräuser is to come in,” Wulf said.
The procedure was practically identical. Immanuel Kräuser also did not know about the broken remote control for the hatch.
“That’s why the engine must’ve burned out,” Marc said once the test was complete. To himself he muttered, “They all fell through the grid.” His disappointment could not be ignored. He shook his head in frustration, then turned to Mr. Lind unexpectedly: “Where’s the soldering iron now?”
“Peer has set it up in a corner over there.” The retired janitor shuffled behind one of the shelves, and Marc stapled himself to his heels. Curious, Tine followed the two men.
“A different question, Mr. Lind.” Wulf picked up a piece of cable from the floor. “Could you please show me how to remove the sheathing?”
“You can do that with any normal knife,” Lind said casually and stopped in front of a workshop table. “Or with a carpet cutter. Here’s where the boy always tinkered around.”
“Can you confirm that, Mr. Kräuser?”
The new janitor rushed over and nodded violently. “I had nothing against him. He was nice.”
“Can you remove this protective cover?” Marc held the cable under the man’s nose.
“I had a wire stripper here, but it was confiscated.”
“In your opinion, an ordinary knife won’t do?”
“Multicore cables can break, but even with a single wire, a groove can weaken the material.”
Marc nodded and dropped the wire to the ground. “ ’The die is cast,’ Julius Caesar said, and yet he lost the last battle of his life.” He gave Tine a look full of meaning. “That’s why we’re not going to make slogans, but finish our work. Mr. Holm? Will you come with me, please?” With those words, Marc Wulf left the workshop.
Only then did Tine understand the way her partner thought. Reconstructing the course of a crime and putting herself in the mind of a murderer required an unfathomable intimacy that she still had yet to acquire.
“And me?” Lind tore the inspector from her thoughts.
“You? You should drink less,” she said. “Otherwise, you won’t really be able to enjoy your retirement.”
“And what do we do with Mr. Kräuser?” said the accompanying officer. “Shall we take him back to the station?”
“Yes. He must explain his crime to the magistrate.” Tine nodded and hurried past them into the open.
Chapter 43
Berlin | Police Headquarters
Marc rubbed his hands together. “In the meantime, we also found the baseball bat you used to knock out Dustin’s lights in the garage. Were you trying to avenge your sister’s death, Peer?”
The boy cried silently. His facade had collapsed.
“They killed themselves,” he said.
“What did yo
u have on them all?”
The boy bit his lower lip incessantly. He sweated. His pupils pulsed. The chief inspector paid attention to every subtle hint. He concentrated on the context. He read between the lines, attentively watching the micro-expressions and the hands. He analyzed everything the boy said. He was confident about the outcome of his investigation: this young man had driven the children to their deaths.
Peer hit the tabletop with his fist. Tears rolled from his eyes and gathered on his chin into a drop that he hastily wiped off. “I didn’t murder anyone,” he insisted.
“Back to my question: What did you have on your friends? Let’s start with Yara.”
“Yara was adopted and was constantly afraid that if she did something wrong, she would end up back in the home. I filmed her fucking Enno. Enno was gay—Dixon too—but they were too afraid to admit it. I provoked Dixon until he got Yara drunk and she…” Peer gestured.
“Did he rape her?”
The boy nodded. “In the workshop. She was so drunk she didn’t even notice. Dixon was also wasted. I secretly recorded everything.”
“How did you get in there?”
“Mr. Lind often forgot the key. I had a spare made.”
“And Sarah?”
“She was a he.” Peer laughed dismissively. “They all pretended to be the coolest people in the world, but they were totally scared of being themselves. How sick is that?” He had tears in his eyes. He just let them go.
“Sarah never went swimming. Even in the outdoor pool she wore long dresses. Her tank tops always reached down to her knees. She went to the girls’ loo. But once she pushed someone into the pool and fell into the water herself. She was soaking wet and ran straight into the changing room. I followed her and watched her change. Of course, I had my cell phone with me.”
“Why did they have to hurt themselves? Did Yara pull her own tooth?”
“No. That was me. I pulled it. It was the rule. Dixon filmed it. The cuts on her feet were from a carpet knife, but that was her. She did that. We all had to prove ourselves to be part of it.”
“Some kind of ritual? Only the toughest were allowed to join?”
“Maybe. Actually, I just wanted to see her suffer…” Peer’s voice failed. For a few seconds he stared at Wulf with his eyes wide open, then suddenly it broke out of him: “Pia didn’t die immediately. I ran to the street and there she was. All alone. She had cuts on her face and arms. Her teeth were everywhere… And I… I… couldn’t help her!”
The boy shivered all over and Marc gave him a moment before asking, “Where was the rest of your clique?”
“They ran away.”
“Tell me, if you only wanted to kill your former friends, why did so many children at your school wear these ribbons?”
“It was totally hyped. That was Dixon’s idea. The game went viral. Everybody wanted in.”
“And how did you keep them all happy without getting caught?” Wulf asked.
“There are so-called proxies. And VPNs. I accessed the internet through servers abroad…”
“That’s not what I mean. Not every challenge ends in death.”
“No. I didn’t take everyone in, either. Most were scouts.”
“And the rest?”
“As I said, most of the trials were harmless. Pulling a tooth. Running a razor blade over the gums. I didn’t expect there would be so many sick children at our school. They wanted more and more, invented more and more brutal methods. On their own initiative.”
“And you were the leader. Did you write the program yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Without help from anyone?”
“Yeah. It’s not hard.”
“And the Cyrillic numbers?”
“I read it in a thriller and found it suitable for my game.”
“How were the ribbons awarded?”
“I had them hidden in a secret place. And when one passed a test, I sent them a message with the exact directions.” Behind the boy’s innocent appearance was the unscrupulous activity of a man eaten up by anger and hatred, a man on a bloody vendetta.
“Whatever gave you the idea in the first place?”
Peer’s lips twitched, but he remained silent.
“Nice trick, by the way. The one with the power cable was very clever.” Marc held up a wire wrapped in red plastic. “Did you come up with that on your own?”
“Yes. It wasn’t hard. An ordinary cable break. Out of boredom I scraped off the insulation with a carpet knife. Then I had the idea. I took a pair of pliers, nipped off a piece of wire, and put it into a heat shrink tube.”
Marc bent down to a small suitcase that stood next to his feet. He rummaged in it briefly, took out a knife and let it snap open. Gently, the blade moved along the shrink tube and bent the thin plastic material apart. The plastic was meant to shrink when heat was applied.
“Clever,” Marc said, praising the boy with a touch of sarcasm. “Protected yourself by slipping a piece of plastic between them.” Marc put the knife away and also cleared the power strip from the table. He rubbed his fingertips together. “Did you know there was no blade in that box cutter?”
Peer shook his head.
“The suicide attempt was not a fake?” Wulf’s eyebrows furrowed.
Another head shake.
“And your parents? You didn’t think about them?”
Peer was silent.
“They’ve already lost one child through a terrible, silly, childish prank. Were you going to take the second one away from them as well?”
“Of course I thought about them. But my mom recovered from Pia’s death surprisingly quickly. That hurt me so much. She even met with this Immanuel! The asshole who killed my sister, of all people!”
Again, Wulf waited a minute before continuing.
“Why were you hiding in that bunker?” he asked quietly. “Were you trying to frame him for the murders? Was that your plan? Because you didn’t want your mama to be happy again? Or because Mr. Kräuser was partly responsible for your sister’s death?” Although stress bubbled inside him, Marc still radiated an indescribable serenity. He looked at his suspect inquisitively and waited for the telltale signs of a lie.
“No,” Peer said. “None of that… Well, maybe some of it.”
“Can you please enlighten me?”
“I overheard Mom and the neighbor. I overheard everything. Immanuel likes little girls. He groped Pia. He would’ve raped her if Olaf hadn’t intervened!”
And in the end Olaf killed your sister, thought Marc, but was careful not to say it aloud.
“The photo of that girl is still on our kitchen table. Call my mother. She’ll tell you.”
“Are you talking about this girl here?” The chief inspector got up, went to the door and opened it. “Say, Snookums, would you come here, please?”
A girl in a gray dress and a red coat appeared in the doorway.
“You can go in.” Marc stopped behind the girl and watched Peer. “Annabel, can you tell us, what has your uncle done for you? You have to tell us the truth, please—you must never lie to the police.”
The girl was small and skinny. Her thin mouse-blond hair was short. “Uncle Immanuel donated his bone marrow to me,” Annabell said, beaming with joy. “I had cancer. He almost died because he… In the hospital… um… his blood was somehow poisoned because a nurse wasn’t paying attention, I think.”
Tine turned to Annabell. “Did your uncle ever hurt you?”
The child shook her head vigorously. “I had no more hair, and then Uncle Immanuel shaved his head as well. Now we’re two eggheads, he said.” The girl giggled.
Tine smiled back. “How old are you?”
“Ten. I lost two teeth, but they’ll grow back, the dentist said.”
“Thank you, Annabell. You did a good job.” Marc led the child outside and then sat back in his chair. “Well, Peer, I think you heard something that’s not true.”
“He’s a pervert! I found Pia’s love letter! It was addressed to him. Full of hearts and with lots of glitter and stickers!”
“Well, your sister had a crush on an older man. It happens sometimes. Kids also fall in love with teachers. We asked Mr. Kräuser about it, and he said, except for that one slip, there was nothing.”
“He raped her one hundred percent!” Peer jumped up so abruptly that the chair tipped over and hit the floor with a cracking sound.
The young lawyer gawked in horror but didn’t make a sound. All in all, he made a hopelessly overburdened impression; the only thing he could think of was to put the chair back up. Wulf ignored him completely. He focused his attention on the boy.
“He didn’t,” the chief inspector replied calmly. “Your sister was examined by a doctor after her death for any kind of injury. Pia was innocent.”
“Of course she was!” Peer said, in tears. “She shouldn’t have died! Not her—not my sister!”
“I didn’t mean that. She was a virgin. Your sister wasn’t raped, she was just desperate. Just like you are now. Nothing puts us in such distress like despair.”
“What?! But…” Stunned, the boy sank into his chair. He seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Obviously it was impossible for him to accept the thought that he had been wrong. For a moment Peer brooded dully, then confirmed this assumption by blurting out, “And what happens to this Immanuel now, huh? Will he get away with it?”
“He’ll have to answer to a judge, just like you.”
“That’s exactly why I wanted to slit my throat!” cried Peer. Spit flew from his mouth. He clung to the table. His gaze wandered erratically across the room. “I don’t want to rot in prison!”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Peer,” Wulf said. “Most likely you’ll get off with a suspended sentence and end up in a psychiatric hospital, which you’ll leave very soon because you’re fully sane. We found the shoe print, but we can’t prove that you kicked the railing at the exact time Yara was standing on the bridge. You were pretty clever in that respect, anyway.”