Chapter 15
On the way back to headquarters, Lina said, “That clique they had, Julia and Philip—we should look into it.”
“What makes you think so?” Max steered the car through the gathering rush hour traffic. “Aren’t most kids in some kind of clique?”
Lina looked at him. “Daniel Vogler obviously wasn’t part of one. Neither was Sonja Birkner, at least not that particular one. She told me that on Monday,” she explained after seeing Max’s inquisitive look.
“The clique and the loner. Isn’t that one of the typical scenarios for bullying among students?” Max signaled and turned into the parking lot in front of headquarters. “But Lukas Birkner would never allow even the hint of a shadow on Philip Birkner’s brilliant image.”
“If that clique indeed bullied Daniel Vogler, he’d have good reason to hold a grudge against Philip Birkner,” Lina concluded. “Who knows how he craved revenge all those years.”
“But according to Frank Jensen, nobody noticed anything two years ago.”
Lina shrugged. “Maybe Vogler knows how to control himself.”
Daniel Vogler seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Alex and Sebastian didn’t find him either at work or at home. Hanno now put both locations under discreet surveillance.
When Max sat down at his desk with a cup of tea, Lina was on the phone.
“So what did you find out?” she asked eagerly, pen in hand. She listened, occasionally said, “Really?” or “Hm,” and took notes every now and then. Finally she said, “Is that unusual? . . . Okay, I get it . . . Yes, I will . . . You can bet on it. Thanks.” Then she put down the receiver and looked at Max.
“That was Marita Schön from White-Collar Crimes,” she explained. “She went through the Markman Solutions file once more and noticed that the company engaged an unusually high number of management consulting firms: twenty within a year and a half.”
Max whistled quietly. “If Markman Solutions were an individual, I’d say: definitely too many therapists.” He sipped his hot tea. “But why did she only notice it now? The files have been with them for some time, haven’t they?”
“Because Marita is the only one working on it.” Lina shrugged. “The case wasn’t high priority, at least not until now. Marita said she’ll check out the consulting firms and keep us posted.”
Max rocked in his chair, deep in thought. “Let’s assume that Markman Solutions indeed hired someone for some industrial espionage. In that case, it would be smart to make several small payments.” He grimaced. “But no fewer than twenty consultants? Wouldn’t they have figured this would stand out if anyone checked?”
Lina shrugged. “Nobody checked so far. And if I hadn’t asked . . . the file could easily have vanished in the piles of unsolved cases. You know how short-staffed we are.”
And how limited the chances for success. About forty percent of all German companies fall victim to white-collar crime each year, but the culprits manage more often than not to hide their tracks to such an extent that nothing can be proven, even if there are sufficient grounds for suspicion, and the investigations just peter out.
“Anyway,” Lina said. “It ties in with the story Vogler told us. The alleged profits from poker games with which he claims to have financed his apartment could really be payments from Markman Solutions, hidden under the term consultations.” She snapped her fingers. “Now I remember! When we talked to him, something seemed not quite right; I had a strange feeling. That was it: Daniel Vogler claimed to have won the money in poker, but Franziska Leyhausen thought he’d inherited it.” She told Max about her conversation with Frau Leyhausen.
“Couldn’t she have made a mistake?” Max asked, dubious.
“It’s possible, but it could also be that Daniel Vogler no longer remembers what story he told her. Or maybe he hadn’t yet concocted the poker story at the time—if it is a tall tale.”
Max frowned. “It’s illegal to play poker for profit on the Internet. So he wouldn’t necessarily claim this method for laundering his fees for industrial espionage.”
Lina shrugged. “Or do it just for that very reason—because it’s so absurd. Besides, what’s the probability of being nailed for playing poker? I’d say almost zero. And what kind of penalty are we talking about?” She went online. “Up to six months of incarceration or a monetary penalty of what the culprit would earn in hundred and eighty days. Well, whoopee. A real deterrent.” She looked at Max. “This would also explain Markman’s payments to several consulting firms. The amounts range from ten to twenty thousand euro. If you get twenty payments in that amount, the apartment is half paid off.”
Max was not convinced. “You can win that much at poker?”
“Who knows? But don’t forget: Daniel Vogler is quite good at math.”
They were about to call it quits for the day when their colleagues who were surveying Vogler’s apartment called. The target had just driven up and entered his apartment. Since Sebastian had already left, Hanno had sent Alex and a forensics team to search Vogler’s place. A short time later, two policemen delivered the suspect to headquarters. Regular business hours remained an illusion.
Daniel Vogler didn’t look up when Lina and Max entered the interrogation room, but examined his fingernails, as if he hadn’t seen them in a while and had forgotten that they existed.
“Good evening, Herr Vogler,” Max said when he sat down across from the man. Lina mumbled a brief greeting.
Vogler neither raised his head nor said anything in return.
“We have a few questions.” Max leaned back and said, “Where have you been today?”
“At my grandmother’s.”
“The entire day?”
“More or less.” Only when prodded, did he say in a monotonous voice that his grandmother lived alone at the southernmost tip of the city. “She’s ill. I visit her regularly and see that things are all right. Both of my parents are dead. I’m her only relative,” he added.
“And where were you last Tuesday night?” Max asked.
“At home. I was working.”
“Were you logged in at the university computer center?”
“Right.” Daniel Vogler sounded bored.
“Did you talk with Franziska Leyhausen or did you see her?”
“No.”
Max waited a few seconds before saying, “Franziska Leyhausen was found dead this morning, in Jenisch Park.”
Vogler said nothing. Lina watched him as he inspected his fingernails again. “When . . . and how did she die?” he finally asked without looking up. Lina shivered.
“She died Tuesday night. She was murdered.”
Vogler lifted his head and looked first at Max and then at Lina. “You were looking for her yesterday, weren’t you? So she was already dead then?”
“Looks like it.”
“Do you already know who did it?” Vogler asked.
When neither Max nor Lina answered, Vogler shrugged and again scrutinized his fingernails.
“Herr Vogler,” Max said quietly, “It’s just a matter of time before the DNA results from the scene of the crime will be back.”
No reaction from Daniel Vogler.
Lina tried to suppress the uneasy feeling she had about this man and looked at his gaunt figure, his pale face, and his stringy hair. She tried to imagine Franziska Leyhausen with this man. “How did you meet Frau Leyhausen?” she asked.
Vogler measured her. “Through an Internet site.” He shrugged again. “We tried it for a while, but it simply didn’t work out.”
“Who ended the relationship?”
“Both of us,” Vogler stated, “by mutual agreement, as they say.”
“But you remained friends?” When Vogler nodded, she continued. “How often did you see each other after that?”
“Every week or two. We went to the movies, concerts, and th
ings like that.”
“Did Frau Leyhausen mention the events of last Thursday?” Max asked.
“No. Last Wednesday she called and asked whether I was interested in the concert at the Waldschänke. That was the last time I spoke with her.” He sounded quite unmoved by the death of a good friend—or maybe he hadn’t yet absorbed the news.
“Herr Vogler,” Max asked, “do you still remember Julia Munz?”
Not at all impressed by the sudden change of topic, he said, “Yes.”
“What kind of relationship did you have with her?” Max asked.
“We were in the same grade for a while. She was one of those dumb girls, the ones who just giggle and only think about parties.” Vogler shrugged. “We didn’t have much contact.”
“Didn’t she sometimes annoy you, tease you . . . maybe bully you?” Lina probed.
With a dismissive gesture, Vogler said, “Sure. There were those stupid remarks every now and then. For people like Julia I was the geek. They couldn’t stand it that I had more brains than they.”
“How exactly did your classmates bully you?” Max wanted to know. “What did they do or say?”
It was the first time Vogler seemed to consider a question seriously. “That’s a hell of a long time ago. No idea. Well, there was the occasional stupid chatter, but I can’t remember details.” He shrugged. “In retrospect, it really wasn’t important. Kids’ stuff.”
Lina doodled on her notepad. Vogler was definitely too mellow about everything for her taste. She recalled the boy in her own classroom who had been unlucky enough to be targeted as a nerd and a black sheep. Even now, more than fifteen years later, she remembered some of the pranks they’d played on him and found them anything but harmless. The boy had never been part of the classroom community, and however hard he tried, he never fully belonged.
But were such feelings of being excluded a strong enough motive for murder? And what reason would Vogler have had to kill Franziska Leyhausen?
The air in the little room was sticky and Lina had to suppress a yawn. Max cleared his throat, nodded, and said, “Good, Herr Vogler. I think that was it for now. We’ll talk again tomorrow.” By then they’d have initial results of the house search and, with some luck, news from forensics.
“So I can go home now?” Daniel Vogler was getting up.
“Unfortunately not,” Max said. “You’ll have to spend the night here.” He sounded as if he really were sorry. “We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
Daniel Vogler looked nonplussed for the first time.
“So what’s your impression?” Hanno asked soon afterward. He was slouching in his desk chair, hands crossed behind his head, and behind him dramatic black clouds darted across the evening sky, as if the scene had been sped up.
Lina grimaced. “A creepy type. But so far we have no evidence he had anything to do with the murders. There’s just the suspicious coincidence that he knew both Philip Birkner and Franziska Leyhausen.”
“And Julia Munz,” Max added.
“But why would he kill Leyhausen?” Hanno asked.
“Maybe she knew that he’d killed his former classmate and former employer?” Lina suggested. “Maybe she saw him Thursday night? Or maybe he told her more than he’d planned.”
Hanno rocked back and forth in his chair and frowned. “You talked to the friend of Frau Leyhausen, this Barbara So-and-so, didn’t you?” he asked Lina. “Why don’t you speak with her again? Maybe Leyhausen told her who else she’d talked with about Thursday night.” He checked his watch. “Nine o’clock. Where’s Alex?”
It turned out that Alex had driven straight home from Vogler’s apartment. When Hanno called his cell phone, he was just having dinner with his family. He reported, mouth half-full, that the search turned up nothing important—at least nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. There was no blood-crusted steel pipe, no muddy size 44 shoes—even though that actually was Vogler’s size.
When Hanno put down the receiver, he mumbled something about willful subordinates and stared gloomily at Max and Lina.
Lina grinned. “What are you mad at me for? I always do what you tell me to do.”
Chapter 16
Max stood in front of the skyscraper in Bundesstrasse and looked up at its dirty-beige facade. Several institutes of the University of Hamburg were housed in this building, among them the department of mathematics, where Daniel Vogler was employed. Shaking his head, he turned away from this ugliness from the 1970s and entered the foyer. It took quite some time before he found what he was looking for on the large display board. Finally, he stood in front of a door on the fourth floor behind which the department office was supposedly located. Unfortunately the door was locked. Sighing, Max looked around the wide, windowless hallway. Information about meetings, working teams, and room utilization was posted on a blackboard. A framed display listed all the people working in the department. Daniel Vogler was not on the list.
Max was still standing in the hall, not sure what to do, when he heard the clicking of high heels behind him. He turned around and saw a woman of about fifty in a simple gray suit coming toward him. She carried a large, black leather case in one hand and a key ring in the other. She paused briefly when she saw Max, then nodded and stopped at the door at which he had just knocked.
“Are you looking for something? Can I help you?” she asked.
Max smiled and introduced himself. “I’m looking for someone who knows Daniel Vogler. All I know is that he works as a mathematician and computer scientist at the university.” Motioning to the display case, he added, “But he isn’t listed here.”
The woman raised an eyebrow, “I know Daniel,” she said. Then she smiled. “It’s actually not that confusing around here. Come in.”
She opened the door to the office and put her bag on a chair in front of the desk.
“Why is Major Crimes interested in Daniel Vogler? Someone asked for him yesterday already. I hope nothing happened to him.”
“We’re investigating a murder and he’s an important witness.”
“Oh,” the woman said, and raised an eyebrow again. She removed the pitcher from the coffee maker and added water from the sink faucet. “What is it you want to know?”
“Herr Vogler stated that he’s employed here but often logs in from home. Is that true?”
The woman inserted a filter and added coffee. “Yes. Daniel has a half position, one that is just temporary, for two years.” She looked at Max. “That’s why you didn’t find him on the list outside.” She turned on the machine. “Daniel is quite a loner, even for a mathematician. He’s seldom here, but he turns in good work.”
“He once explained to me what he’s doing, but I didn’t understand a word, I’m afraid.”
The woman smiled. “That would probably be true for most. Come along.” She opened a door that led to a room that was noticeably larger than the front room. One wall was completely covered with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase stuffed with books. Another wall consisted of a huge whiteboard covered with mathematical formulas. The woman stepped behind the desk and put down her bag, which she had brought along. She smiled when she saw Max’s confused expression. “I haven’t introduced myself yet. I’m Professor Thelmann, Daniel’s immediate boss, and his dissertation adviser.”
“I didn’t know that Herr Vogler had a doctorate,” Max said to hide his embarrassment. It was a rarity for him to succumb to clichés, but he wasn’t totally immune.
“Oh yes, right on schedule. He studied mathematics and computer science and got his doctorate in mathematics. He’s highly intelligent; I’m sure you noticed . . . You know him, I assume.”
“Yes, I’ve already talked with him.” He resisted the temptation to ask for an explanation of what exactly Vogler and Professor Thelmann worked on, since he guessed it would take quite some time. Instead he said, “If I understand you correctly, Da
niel was your student and got his doctorate here, with you, and then went into the private economic sector—and then returned?”
Professor Thelmann nodded. “Exactly. He didn’t enjoy his excursion into the harsh outside world, and he was back a short time later.”
“Is this something that happens quite often? I mean, that someone joins the private sector and returns after a while?”
The woman shook her head. “No. It’s actually quite unusual. The poor working conditions at universities have a lot to do with that. Usually only temporary positions are available, and positions for support personnel are being constantly reduced.” She grimaced. “For freshly minted scientists who plan an academic career and want to start a family, the conditions are definitely less than stellar. So most leave and never return.”
“But Daniel Vogler did. Were you surprised?”
“No. It rather surprised me that he entered the private sector in the first place. He could have applied to a different university and, most likely, would have found a job.”
“So what surprised you? Maybe he wanted to finally have a secure, well-paying position.”
Professor Thelmann smiled. “Daniel is quite an odd fellow. He’s not interested in money. He prefers to work by himself and to spend his time solving problems about whose existence ninety-nine percent of people are oblivious.”
Max thought about the explanation Vogler had given him and Lina and silently agreed with the woman.
“Computer science is more of a hobby for him, something to relax with. His real passion is mathematics. I doubt a job exists in the private sector that wouldn’t quickly bore him.”
Max nodded. “What he did was way below his capacity, wasn’t it?”
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