by Tanja Pleva
Sam winked up at the sky. The rain was worsening. But Germain, unimpressed, continued to say that the other week he had been in this house and discovered something of interest that he would like to show to Sam.
Sam had no idea what this might be, but he pretended to be interested and agreed to an appointment on the following morning to examine the video records of the hotel. There was maybe still time for a short excursion, although he doubted that. Hamburg was expecting him back.
Germain had a patronizing attitude, reminding him a little bit of Sam's late old friend Argault. Not externally, except for their size. Argault had professed a noble bearing, while Germain was rather peasant-like. Perhaps it was just his French spirit, which made Germain feel so trustworthy.
Yet at last he said goodbye and went off the other way.
Sam looked after the older man for a while, listening to the rhythmic pounding of the raindrops that were beating on the metallic car roofs, until he set out himself to walk back to his hotel. The cold felt good. It cleared up his mind.
There was the question of whether the murderer had known his victims before. The women came from two different places. Both of the men were doctors, both were attending a medical conference in either town.
But what did a gynecologist and an ophthalmologist have in common? Nothing obvious. At second glance, they had both been married. Like millions of other people.
Had the murderer perhaps mistaken Katarin Gromowa for Harry Steiner's wife? Had he wanted to take out what was closest to each, what they loved and treasured?
If so, why?
Again, revenge came to Sam's mind. The motive might have been about revenge. Only for what?
And whom would it strike next?
Juri had been deeply asleep, his whole body calming down when the phone rang next to his ear, he jumped up and had no idea where he was. 'Nice!'
He softly cursed at the woman who was lying next to him. Seemed he had just drifted away after sex.
Accepting the call, he said, 'One moment, Love.' Then he shook the woman in his bed awake and frantically pointed at the mobile. 'My wife will soon be back! If you don't want to be quartered, you should get out of here at once', he whispered.
The young woman stumbled sleepily out of bed and dressed up as quickly as she could. Keeping the shoes in her hand, she rushed out of Juri's flat, while he fell back on the cushions in relief.
'We are on Love terms now?' asked Sam.
'Just when needed. What's your problem, Love? Can't sleep tonight?'
Sam apologized for disturbing him at night, but then said that the medical conferences kept bothering him.
'The only thing I could do is check the Internet.'
Juri swung his legs out of the bed, went to his desk and browsed through his notes.
'Here we go … urology in Munich, pediatric diseases in Stockholm, general cancer in Rome, endocrinology, gynecological oncology, minimum invasive surgery, orthopedics and trauma surgery, joint replacement, nice, and each of them in a different city. Just in Germany alone there are conferences almost twice a week. And that's just what I have so far. If you want me to check more exactly, the list will be even longer, Sam.'
Sam was standing for a while on a bridge to watch the dancing reflections of the streetlights on the water. The rain pockmarked the surface and Sam was soaked all over. He stroked his dripping hair back and left at a rapid pace. It was time for bed.
Spine first, then skin... what was the murderer up to next time?Internal organs, eyes, extremities? Was there a pattern at all? How could Sam protect the next victim, if there was any? Easy answer: not at all! There were too many potential victims.
Sam did not want to admit it, but the case was irritating, because the murderer matched no real profile. He was not sexually motivated, he did not act for delusional religious causes, he was neither spontaneous nor killing in the heat of passion. His murders were like a small staging, sophistically planned. Well, to who were those little plays and slips addressed?
16.
Venice The giants of brass rang four o'clock in deafening manner. People seemed to freeze for a short moment, as if time had halted. 'The nicest drawing room in Europe', that was what Napoleon had called the Piazza San Marco, and that it was, especially when Venice was changing into the fairytale stage of the Carneval di Venecia.
A veritable royal household drifted past Leila. They looked like 16th century ghosts, keeping on to stalk St. Mark's Square according to their ancient habits. But as soon they started posing, to be photographed by a few tourists, all the magic was gone.
Leila looked up with a wink. Heavy raindrops descended on her like tiny water balloons. All day it had been drizzling on and off and the sky was covered in deep grey, adding to the mysterious aura that was veiling Venice in this season.
Rafael was standing on a gondola, waving and calling words she did not understand. What a honeymoon! She cast a final look at the wonders of Venetian architecture on St. Mark's Square and accepted help to step into the gondola.
One hour they rode through mist-enshrouded waterways, below bridges, past ancient houses with small balconies.
Rafael watched Leila as she absorbed her surroundings like a little child, and he felt pleasantly warm. This was how luck must feel. They had married in secrecy and his family would perhaps never forgive him for that, least of all his father, who had not approved of any of his relationships. Therefore he had kept Leila hidden from the outset.
He hoped to have turned Fate the other way, so that it would not strike him, as it had struck the others. Creeps made him tremble. Looking back on his life, he saw lots of grief and splinters. That would come to an end now. Yes, he was confident with his new love. And his child, whom she carried, would change everything.
Barcelona, Paris and Venice were still to be followed by a few other European cities. He had cleverly connected his honeymoon with a few important business meetings, but Leila had not noticed that so far.
His I-phone was gently beeping. He read the lines contently. Yes, Berlin would be the climax of this journey. In any respect.
17.
Paris Sam had slept miserably that night. The present case had mingled with the past one in his dreams and vivid imagination, so that he woke up, bathed in sweat, as Lina was just about to cut his eyes out of his skull. He had felt no pain, just a dull pressure, which came - as he found now - from a corner of the pillow that was sticking into his right eye.
He turned on his back and looked at the ceiling of the hotel room that was decorated with a big ugly stain of water like a misshapen heart. How fitting, he thought and got out of the bed.
Half an hour later, showered and shaved, he sat with Germain in a slightly darkened room of the French commissioner's office with fresh ground coffee and fragrant croissants. They watched the black-and-white recordings of a video camera from the lobby of the George V. Within one hour they found out that the lobby did not tell a lot.
The next recording showed the hotel passage on the fourth floor. A chambermaid pushed her trolley from one room to another and took new towels and bedding inside. She knocked at doors, went in and came out again. She entered Dr. Harry Steiner's room at about 10 o'clock in the morning and left it again at 10:26. Sometimes, guests came and left again. Including Harry Steiner and Katarin Gromova, who had left their room at 9 o'clock in the morning and came back at 12 o'clock. She had closely cuddled up to him and looked quite high-spirited. All the time she was raising her arm and giving him a kiss.
'What is she doing?' Germain pressed the pause button.
'She is so excited. It looks as if she was constantly checking the time. Has a woman's watch been found with the body?' asked Sam.
'No, I don't think so. No jewelry, as far as I know. Maybe she had left them in the safe deposit.'
Germain made a short phone call and confirmed that no jewelry was found in the room or in the safe deposit.
'We will ask Monsieur Steiner. He will come here in one ho
ur.'
In the video file, Dr. Steiner left the room again at about 12:30, without his mistress. At 12:55, the last room on this floor was made ready. The chambermaid placed the trolley in the laundry closet at 1 p.m. and left through a door, above which a luminous sign was installed, reading 'Exit'. She came back less than five minutes later, pulled the trolley out again, pushed it straight in front of the door of number 410, Dr. Steiner's room. She knocked, opened the door with a key-card and pushed the trolley inside. The door shut. The chambermaid did not come out again.
'Well there's our murderer.' Sam ran his hand over the dimple in his chin. 'Disguising as a chambermaid. Very original', he said sarcastically.
He had already briefly thought about that in Barcelona, but had not pursued it any further. It had been the most obvious thing to do.
'Chambermaid, room service, porters or Securité. Of course, such a person is less suspicious in hotel corridors.'
'What would have happened if the chambermaid would have needed the trolley again?'
'There are always two trolleys in the laundry. She would have thought that a colleague had taken it.' Germain lit a cigarette and blew the smoke against a table lamp so that it curled around the bulb.
The half-past-three record showed the mock chambermaid coming backwards out of the door.
'Bastard!' Germain directed his fury onto the cigarette by veritably crushing it into the ashtray.
There was a slight knock at the door. The head of a brunette officer popped in to announce Monsieur Steiner. She smiled at Sam with a flirty blink and quietly closed the door again.
'Sam, are you married now?'
'Non, Monsieur.'
'Take any chance you might get then. You will never again be as young as you are today.'
Harry Steiner seemed to have aged by twenty years during the night. He sat stooped on a chair, his face was an old man's, the lachrymal sacs under the red-rimmed eyes were swollen and he had not since changed his clothes.
He confirmed that the day before he had bought for Katarin a white-golden Chopard with diamond hearts and a brown leather bracelet. She had been as happy as a small child. But the watch and a couple of diamond earrings, which she had already worn at their first meeting in the café, were lost.
He could not tell anything about Katarin Gromova's past. She had always said, What does the past matter, we are living now Harry. Now and tomorrow maybe no more. On saying so, Dr. Steiner slumped into a heap and uncontrollably sobbed.
According to him she did not have a computer, so it seemed unlikely that she had been looking for men online, like Jasmin Rewe had. But did the victim's past really matter that much? Suddenly all of this seemed to Sam entirely pointless.
He looked at Germain, who made notes on a slip of paper and again glanced in turn at Dr. Steiner, who was slowly calming down.
Nobody said anything for two long minutes. The only noise was the pencil gliding across the paper.
'Dr. Steiner, do you still have your key-card?' asked Sam gently.
'I think so.' Harry Steiner thought for a moment, then he felt in his right jacket pocket, then searched the left one, then both inside pockets. 'It would have to be … well, I probably left it in the room. I … I don't know', he said confused and rubbed his forehead, as if to stimulate his memory. 'No, I am sure that I took it. How odd.'
'Did you bump into somebody? After you left the room at noon?'
Harry Steiner looked at Sam distrustfully. 'Yes, I did …, before I entered the taxi, I did bump into some fellow … or he bumped into me. It was a young man.' Harry Steiner tried to remember precisely.
'What did he look like?'
Now Germain had stopped writing.
'He was smaller than I, about five foot seven, slim, well dressed. Dark jacket, dark trousers. He wore a cap, French style. But there was … what was it?'
'Think again. Did he have something in his hands, was he tattooed, did he wear jewelry?'
Dr. Steiner shook his head. 'Nothing like that. He said: “Entschuldigung, Señor”.'
'What? In these languages? Are you sure about that?'
'Of course I am sure.'
Sam raised his right eyebrow and examined the other in doubt. Had Dr. Steiner maybe misheard? If not, what kind of countryman were they dealing with here? One who dressed up like a Frenchman, wrote German poems and apologized in German, addressing people in Spanish? Or was someone trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the police?
'Did you notice this man before?'
'No, I did not.'
'How did he know that you were German?'
'I have no idea.'
'Can you remember his hair color?'
Dr. Steiner scratched his temple and closed his eyes for a moment. 'Yes, I believe that he was blond … but I am not completely sure anymore. He had this cap on his head, you see.'
Blond was rarer in the southern lands, although there were of course blond Spaniards, too. A German would be likelier though, Sam thought. But would a German in Paris address anybody by saying 'Señor'?
18.
Hamburg Jens Wimmer was just about to unlock his apartment door, when he was jammed with full force against it. From the corner of his eyes he could see other shapes coming from up and downstairs.
'Jens Wimmer?'
He tried to nod, hands raised, and that was a hard thing to do because he was still stuck with his face against the door. He was patted down and somebody examined his pockets.
'Interesting. What have we got here?'
The policeman held a small plastic bag with three medium-sized blond hairs up in the air and pocketed it. Then Wimmer was released.
'Yes, that's me. What is going on here?' he asked indignantly.
'We must ask you to come with us', said the officer firmly and put handcuffs on him.
Jens Wimmer was stowed into a police vehicle and taken straight away through town. No one spoke a word to him during the entire drive.
Sam left the office of the Police judiciary shortly after Brenner's phone call. The excursion to Germain's had to be postponed till another day.
Brenner met him at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, pushed another file into Sam's hand and introduced him to Ms. Estelle Beauchamp, who would replace him only briefly, while he would be off having an intervertebral disc surgery.
She was wearing a bob hairdo and hid her alert eyes behind black framed, narrow glasses, which made her look very sexy in Sam's eyes. She reached out her warm well-manicured hand and at once put it back into her pocket.
Sam opened the file. An unsolved murder case four years ago, in a Viennese hotel. This was not a doctor's wife, though, but a prostitute, one Anna Galanis.
She had been found dead in the hotel bed, covered with a sheet. Cause of death: Intracardiac injection of poison.
Although the lady had been registered by an escort service, it was never discovered whom she had met that evening. It was assumed she had spontaneously arranged to meet her murderer.
Among the evidence there was a small slip of paper. Sam read the lines and sighed. 'A few days ago I thought that the case was virtually solved. Yesterday I was told otherwise, yet I still had a faint trace of hope. Now I know that we are far from catching this villain', he remarked depressed.
'Well, well, who's going to be so pessimistic here? Your service record is filled with an exceptionally high success rate, don't forget this, O'Connor.'
Yet even Brenner's reassuring words could not lighten up Sam's mood. The moment of success, that resulting satisfaction and pride of the action, was always very short and quickly erased. It would last only until the next case was lying on the table. This could take a week, a day or a few hours. The ulcers of society were growing day by day.
Brenner slapped his shoulder in a patronizing gesture, made a painful face and said goodbye, while Ms. Beauchamp again pulled her hand from the pocket to stretch it out to Sam one more time. Sam seized it and found that it had cooled within a few minutes by several d
egrees.
Brenner and Ms. Beauchamp headed towards the exit, while Sam looked for the gate signs. He turned to look once more after Brenner and his replacement, as she also turned around and gave him a final smile, before the automatic door closed between them.
While Sam was sitting in the gate area waiting for the call for his flight, he had a look at the images of the third victim. They had been taken from different angles. No mutilations, no wide open staring eyes. The woman rather looked like she was sleeping. Had this murder been the beginning of a series? A little test run maybe? If it was, then the murderer had rapidly developed. But there were no other cases since. What had the murderer done in the meantime? Had he been in prison because of another crime and had therefore not been active?
The flight included some air turbulence, which made Sam swallow two packages of peppermints to overcome his panic and the upcoming feeling of airsickness. Yet he landed safely at Hamburg airport.
Half an hour later he listened to the detailed report of Juri, who was obviously proud of his research. When they finally had a look at the video records from the elevator, Sam noticed at once something about Jens Wimmer, which did not match his present image of the murderer.
He did not want to irritate Juri though and kept quiet for the time being.
'Nice! Have a look at this. The guy is really turning mad. And she is accosting her web-pal. No sound, alas. But he will be able to tell us more soon. For he is sitting next door, you know.'
Sam smiled at his partner. 'Topnotch! Do you know when he returned from his trip?'
'Early today. And hooray, we caught him.'
'OK. Let's go then.'
1953