“Well, I’d rather put my money on the unknown woman who left the Waldschänke with Birkner.”
“Maybe Jensen drove to the woods with one of his drinking buddies,” Lina said and sipped her espresso. “He’s telling his sob story, an idea sparks to life—to give that bastard Birkner what he deserves—and off they go.”
Before Max could answer, someone shouted, “So that’s where you’re hiding!”
Hanno waved to them, got himself a Coke, and finally came wheezing to their table. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, sitting down and looking at them. “And? How’s Jensen coming along?”
“Moving along,” Max said and told him about the interrogation. “He hasn’t confessed, but he has a motive and his alibi is iffy.”
Hanno nodded as if he had expected this. “I checked whether we have anything on file about him,” he said and fumbled in his jacket pocket for a piece of paper on which he had scribbled information. “Two years ago, Philip Birkner filed charges against him because of suspected industrial espionage. The investigation is still open. By the way, the name Philip Birkner rang a bell on the computer.” He looked reproachfully from one to the other. “Why didn’t anybody check this yesterday? He was involved in a murder investigation fifteen years ago, just marginally, though. Birkner was nineteen when a young girl from his school was murdered, Julia Munz, eighteen years old. She and Philip Birkner had been an item for a while. They separated a short time before her death.”
“Who killed her?” Lina asked.
“The killer was never found. Birkner was initially on the list of suspects since rumor had it that the girl was the one who broke it off, which might have caught him by surprise. But he was out of town at the time of her murder.”
They were silent for a while. Lina nibbled on her salad.
“And?” Max asked. “Is there more?”
Hanno shrugged. “Julia Munz was strangled in a park after a party. She was partially undressed but hadn’t been raped. It’s possible that the murderer was interrupted or he wanted to make believe it was a rape.”
“Were there tracks? Hair? Fibers? DNA?” Max pressed.
“DNA evidence was secured, but at that time they couldn’t analyze it yet. The technology simply wasn’t there. They did find hair from at least four different men on the dead girl’s clothes.”
“An attempted gang rape?” asked Lina.
Hanno shook his head again. “Not likely. According to witnesses, Julia Munz had been quite generous with her affection at the party, throwing herself first at one guy and then at another.”
All three were quiet again until Max said what all of them thought. “Does this have anything to do with our case, or doesn’t it?”
Hanno leaned back and took a sip of his Coke. “Just in case, I requested the old file. When we’re running out of ideas, we can look into it.” He waved with his piece of paper. “But I also have something more recent: the list of telephone numbers on Birkner’s cell. Remarkably many women.” Hanno looked up. “At least for a man who’s in a strong relationship. Look into it.”
Lina and Max looked at each other. “And what about Jensen?” Max asked. “I’d like to keep him here until we’ve checked out his alibi.”
Hanno was not convinced. “What was it—he claims to have been on a booze cruise in Eppendorf on Thursday? And you think after that he drove to the Niendorfer Gehege to kill his former boss? How did he know that Birkner was in the forest?”
“He might have trailed him in the evening, clobbered him with two guys he hired, and then driven back to one of his favorite haunts to have an alibi,” Lina said, watching the straw she clutched dissolve slowly.
“Hm,” responded Hanno. “I’m sure you know all this is quite far-fetched, don’t you?” Then he grinned. “It looks like a pub crawl is on your schedule today. You only have yourself to blame. But if you don’t come up with something, you let Jensen go immediately. Understood?”
On a late Saturday afternoon, the area around the Eppendorfer Marktplatz was rather dead. Most of the fashionable shops were already closed and it was still too early for barhopping. Lina and Max strolled down the street, looked in the shop windows, and were silent. It had stopped raining and the air felt humid and close. Lina took off her jacket and wrapped it around her waist.
They began with the Almira, one of the bars Frank Jensen often frequented—maybe also on Thursday. Nobody in the little bar remembered having seen the man in the photo Max handed around. No one, not the woman behind the bar, the innkeeper, or the regular customer who claimed to be there practically every night, had seen the man on Thursday.
“I know you almost live here, Willi,” the woman behind the counter said to the man in his late sixties with gray stubble on his face. “I’ve been wondering why you bother going home to sleep.” The woman looked as if she were in her late fifties, probably was in her midforties, and seemed to be part of the furniture. The furnishings inside the bar were shabby and the drink menu was short. As for food, they offered bread with rendered fat, sausages, and goulash soup. Since smoking was allowed here, it seemed likely that Frank Jensen would turn up at the Almira from time to time.
“But haven’t you seen this man before?” Max asked. The woman looked at the picture again. “Yes, sure. He’s been here quite a bit lately. Drinks his beer and doesn’t say much.”
Lina looked at the name of the bar written in elaborate script above the counter. How did the joint end up with this name? Beerheaven or The Crown would be better fits than the slightly exotic Almira.
The next place was the Tropicana. Here, the name lived up more to the promise: Brazilian flair, Brazilian music, and Brazilian servers—at least from the looks of them. The bar was large and hall-like; a cocktail bar rather than a tavern. The door leading to a small front garden stood wide open. Lina suggested they order something to drink, her treat.
“People open up more that way,” she explained. She had noticed that the people at the Almira had been reserved, maybe ill at ease after she and Max had introduced themselves.
“Fine,” said Max. “I’ll have some orange juice.”
“You’re really boozing it up today, aren’t you?” she teased. Her colleague just shrugged.
Lina decided on a beer, paid for the drinks, and handed Max his glass. She climbed on one of the barstools and looked around. The place wasn’t very full yet. The young woman behind the counter had her eyes on everything. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. Her skin was the color of coffee with milk. She wore her hair in corkscrew curls and had an absolutely dazzling smile. Lina gestured for her to come over and pushed an old photo of Frank Jensen across the counter. He had been in much better shape then.
“Sorry, have you seen this man before?” Lina asked. “These days he looks . . . somewhat more battered.”
The young woman bent forward and looked at the photo.
“This guy?” She shrugged regretfully. “Sorry, I’ve never seen him. Is he your guy? Did he walk out on you?”
Lina hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. “You can say that. I’ve got to know whether he was here on Thursday night.”
The young woman looked at Max, who was sipping on his OJ without getting involved, and back to Lina. Her face was a veritable question mark.
“That’s my big brother,” Lina said, patting Max’s shoulder. Max almost choked on his orange juice. The woman behind the counter giggled.
“Do you think one of your coworkers might know the man?” Lina asked, pointing to the photo. “Or your boss?”
“Maybe,” she said. Scanning the room, she motioned to a man who was serving people in the garden. He was around thirty, had black hair, and moved like a dancer. His smile reached all the way to his sideburns. The young woman whispered something and he winked at Lina before bending toward the photo, which was still on the counter.
“So you’re looking for a man?” He had a strong accent. Portuguese maybe. Possibly a stage accent—good for business. His eyes flashed, and Lina had trouble suppressing the urge to show him her badge, after all. Instead she batted her eyelashes again and, voilà, the man looked at the photo once more and finally nodded. “Yes, that guy’s been here quite often lately, but I don’t know his name. He drinks a lot, mostly by himself, and rarely talks with other guests.” His rolling Rs were impressive.
“Thursday evening?” Lina asked.
The man moved his head slowly. “I can’t say for sure.”
“Were you the only one working on Thursday?”
“No, there was also Michele. Linus, too.”
“Are they also here tonight?”
“Michele will be here in half an hour. Linus called in sick.” The man frowned. “You’re asking questions like the police. What did your husband do?”
“He isn’t my husband.”
His gaze wandered to Max, who lifted his glass of OJ and said, “I’m just the big brother.”
Lina repeated her batting-eyelashes routine. “We’ll wait for Michele, okay?”
“Sure,” said the man and left.
“So, I’m your big brother, am I?” Max said quietly. Lina knew from his tone that he was amused.
“Should I have introduced you as my uncle?”
Max laughed, but then turned serious. “Why didn’t you say we’re police?” he asked in a low voice. “You know we can get into trouble for that.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it.”
“Oh,” Max said.
Lina took a long sip of beer. She sometimes found Max almost eerie, the way he somehow seemed to know what she thought. He didn’t have to say much. It was the way he pronounced oh and looked at Lina that made it seem like more than just one little word. She was quiet for a long time. Max finally broke the silence when he asked, “What made you join the police?”
She had to laugh. When she lifted the beer bottle, she saw that it was empty and ordered another one. After the young woman with the dazzling smile placed a bottle in front of her, Lina grinned and said, “I lost a bet.”
Max thought he must not have heard her right, which didn’t happen often. “Excuse me?”
“Yep. I became a cop on a bet.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Lina shook her head and took another sip of beer. “I know, no one ever freaking buys it, but it’s true.” And she told Max about that evening eight, almost nine, years ago. It was after her kickboxing class. She’d gone to a bar with some others from her group. “We were all in our twenties,” Lina explained. “A few of us were unemployed, a few studied at the university without much enthusiasm, some had jobs, and one was doing an apprenticeship as a printer. I’d been enrolled at the university the past two years—ethnology—but I had expected more and was bored. The lectures only cursorily covered questions about how people in different cultures deal with life, how they shape it, even though it should have been the very core of the field. Or maybe I always chose the wrong seminars.”
That evening at the bar, the discussion had turned to occupations and career prospects. Someone mentioned that the job security offered to civil servants was totally cool, eliciting a “yuck” from someone else, and others chimed in with descriptions of civil servants, leaving out not a single stereotype: lazy, slow, stuffy, reactionary, without imagination, and dead set against any change. And cops—they were the worst. “Actually, I’d really like to find out whether that’s true,” Lina had thought out loud. “I mean, I only know cops from demonstrations and traffic stops. Hard to believe they’re all idiots.”
“Why don’t you try it out?” one of the gang, Lutz, had said. “Then you’ll know.”
“Hm, not a bad idea.”
All the others had laughed their heads off. Lina, a cop? Lina who had been at demonstrations with her mother ever since she was a toddler and who got sick at the mere sight of someone in uniform? “You wouldn’t dare,” Lutz had said.
“Just watch me,” she replied.
“Never.”
“I’ll do it.”
That was that. She couldn’t back down. They decided that she would apply for police training and, if accepted, stay with it for four weeks. She had to swear she wouldn’t intentionally flunk the entrance exam. If she lasted the four weeks, her friends around the table would throw a super party for her. If she gave up before the four weeks were over, she’d have to clean the toilet at the dojo for a month.
“In the beginning, I didn’t take the whole thing seriously,” Lina explained to Max. “I mean, I never thought they’d take me. My mother used to occupy empty houses—she was a squatter. She’s still active. You know, St. Pauli, the coalition against gentrification, and so on. But despite all that, I passed the test for the criminal division.” With a wry smile, she added, “I’m a little too small for the uniformed police, but in Major Crimes even a little person has a chance. So I started the training.”
“And when your four weeks were over?” Max asked and ordered another orange juice and another beer.
“We had a huge party. My buddies rented an entire bar. Everyone knew about me, my new name was Miss Piggy, and they laughed their heads off that we, of all people, had managed to place a mole with the cops.”
Max tilted his head, as he always did when he was stunned by something somebody said. “Sounds like your group saw the police as the enemy.”
Lina gave him an astonished look. “Of course we did! What did you think? Otherwise, the bet would have been a joke. The club sits smack in the middle of St. Pauli, right in the red-light district. Half those people I was with were politically active.” She shrugged. “Cops were public enemy number one. That’s how I grew up, and that’s how a few in the club still think today.” She took a sip of her beer, put her elbows on the counter, and stopped talking.
“So why did you stay?” Max asked after a while.
Lina remained silent. She wondered for a moment how she could sit in a bar with Max and tell him what she hadn’t told any other colleague, things she could only talk about with very few people. After a long time she said, “I found the training surprisingly interesting, and so I just stayed on for a while after the first four weeks. On one of the first operations during my training, we raided a brothel. We found three girls from Sri Lanka, none of them older than their midteens. They were here illegally, of course, and they didn’t know one word of German . . . except some pertinent jargon.” She laughed bitterly. “I saw the fear in their eyes. I heard what my colleagues came up with, not even under their breath, along the lines of ‘Pity we’re on call.’ I tried to calm the three girls the best I could. I tried to speak English with them, which they understood a little, well, better than many of my colleagues. But in the end they were still led away in handcuffs.” She shrugged. “Afterward I was singled out by our trainer. He claimed I had interfered with the investigation, done things on my own, without permission. I said that I simply felt sorry for the girls. ‘If you plan on staying with the police,’ I was told, ‘you’ll have to learn quickly that that’s exactly what such people want you to feel.’” Lina inhaled deeply. “I think that was the moment I realized that I was going to stay on. I saw the girls. I saw their fear. They didn’t want to play me—I’m sure of that. To help such girls, I could achieve much more if I was with the police than if I were working for some initiative or nonprofit against forced prostitution and human trafficking.” She grabbed the bottle and took a swig. “And so I stayed . . . much to the chagrin of some of my colleagues.”
For most members of the police force Max knew, Lina was something exotic, something to be approached with curiosity, mistrust, or even open dislike, especially since she wasn’t one to keep her opinions to herself. He still remembered her first day with the homicide squad. She wore black jeans, heavy boots, and a
hoodie. Her spiked hair was streaked with neongreen. Hanno’s eyes almost popped out. Alex just silently shook his head. Sebastian thought at first she was a perp who had escaped somehow from one of the interrogation rooms.
Max knew it wasn’t easy for her and was about to say something, when a woman bent over the bar from the other side and said, “Hey, Andre said you wanted to ask me something.”
Max looked up. The woman in front of them wore her hair in a ponytail. Her small, strong hands rested on the counter. This must be Michele, the woman who worked on Thursday and might remember Frank Jensen. Lina was lost in thought, so Max nodded and slid the photo toward the woman. “Have you ever seen this man?”
Michele just glanced at the picture and nodded. “Sure, that’s Frank. He’s been here a lot lately. Always drinks more than is good for him.” She looked up. “Has he done something wrong?”
“No. My sister’s looking for him,” Max said, smiling. Lina raised her head and looked at him. “Was he also here the day before yesterday?”
“Day before . . . Thursday. Yes, I think so. Yes, for sure. He was talking with one of our other regulars. The two have become friends, I think. At least they’re always talking when they meet here, even though Frank otherwise likes to be left alone. Dirk, the other one, was here, too, on Thursday. He bought me a drink to celebrate that he’s off for a week.”
Lina cleared her throat. “That means he’s out of town?”
Michele nodded. “He was going to go to Freiburg, to visit family, or something.” She eyed them warily.
“Do you have any idea how we could reach Dirk? Or what his last name is?” Lina asked.
Michele picked up a rag and started to wipe the counter, though it wasn’t dirty. “Why do you want to know that? Are you from the police?”
“Man, I suck at undercover work.” Lina winked at the woman. “Yes, we’re from the police. We’re investigating a murder. A man lost his life and left a woman and her little son behind. All we want to know is whether this man,” she pointed at the photo, “was here on Thursday and when he left. Do you know anything about him? You know his name, after all.”
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