by Nele Neuhaus
In vain she had looked for something in the CVs of the two men that could have explained the veiled intimations that Furtwängler and Janning had made. Her conversation with Furtwängler, an agile octogenarian with a fresh Caribbean suntan, had proceeded quite informally after he had first expressed his condolences with the appropriate sorrow. Karoline had claimed that she just happened to be in Cologne and had recalled her visits to his lovely garden from her childhood, but as soon as she mentioned the name Kirsten Stadler, the man’s jovial demeanor abruptly vanished. she ran into a wall of silence, and the conversation soon came to a standstill.
Karoline glanced at the clock on the stove. Almost midnight.
Disheartened and disappointed by the lack of progress she’d made, she wanted to give up and crawl into bed, but then an idea came to her. Greta had been longing for her thirteenth birthday more than any other, because then she’d finally be old enough to register on Facebook. Since then, she seemed to spend half her life on social networks, uploading photos, posting daily trivialities, and defining her degree of popularity by the number of “Likes” she received. Karoline had already seen Greta sulk for a whole weekend because she’d been “unfriended” by someone on Facebook, which was tantamount to not being invited to a birthday party in the old days. Greta had declared that she almost wouldn’t exist in the world if she weren’t on Facebook.
So Karoline had set up a user account for herself and learned the basic concepts. To her amazement, she had received friend requests from all sorts of acquaintances and former schoolmates. She poured herself another glass of white wine and logged on to Facebook. Via the search box, she instantly found Helen Stadler. She was astonished to see that the account was still active; apparently, no one had thought to shut it down. She could hardly believe her good fortune, and clicked on Helen Stadler’s friend list, which at fifty-four persons was quite manageable. Since she hadn’t been friended by her, she could see only a few photos and postings, but she jotted down the names of those who had commented on Helen’s postings or “Liked” them. One name popped up more often than others: Vivien Stern. Karoline went to her page and wrote her a brief note. She doubted whether the young woman would answer, but there was always a chance.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Today was the last day of the old year, a special day. For many people, it was the perfect moment to look back on the old year and to take stock. What was good, and what was bad? What would I want to change? Where would I like to be at this time next year? As far as he was concerned, everything was clear. Nobody would ever understand why he had to do all this, so he would either be sitting in prison or roasting in hell. It pretty much boiled down to the same thing.
Most people would be celebrating the new year, and not alone. They would eat, drink, act as though it were a special night, but it was a night like any other. In other cultures, December 31 was an utterly normal day. He no longer had any interest in celebrating, with the firecrackers, the bottle rockets, and all that New Year’s Eve hysteria. Not anymore. In the old days, it had been different. Back then, he had drunk champagne with his colleagues and later celebrated at home with his family. They always had raclette or fondue, to go with the wine. But that was long ago. Today he was alone. And tonight he was going to kill someone. There were plenty of people who looked forward to the new year but would not live to experience it. On New Year’s Eve, there were more accidents than usual, and old people died as always. But one person would die who was not yet on the list. Or was he? Was this person already fated by birth to be killed on December 31, 2012, by a semi-jacketed .308 Winchester round fired from a Steyr SSG 69 rifle? Or was his death merely a result of the various decisions that he’d made in his life, leading him to that moment tonight when he would perish?
He felt no sympathy. No one had ever had any sympathy for him. He, too, had had to accept what happened and learn from it in order to keep living. He, too, had been left behind, unable to change a thing. Fate struck out of the blue, mercilessly and without warning. And then you sat there and had to deal with it. For the rest of your miserable life.
Pia had not slept well. Something kept churning inside her head, and it was driving her crazy because she simply couldn’t grasp what it was. At a quarter to four in the morning, she got up and dressed, then went down to the kitchen to make herself some coffee. Last night, she had Skyped with Christoph but very wisely neglected to mention the incident with Thomsen and the cocked pistol pressed to her temple. He was already worried about her, afraid that she wasn’t eating right or getting enough sleep, so she didn’t want to cause him even more concern. She missed him with every fiber of her being. In the daytime, she managed to forget how much she missed him because she was so busy working on the case. But at night, she lay awake in bed and longed for his familiar presence, for the smell of his skin and the sound of his breathing in the dark. She’d never realized before how much she’d gotten used to him being close, and how much it hurt when he was away.
Fortunately, it was only temporary. How would it feel to lose someone you loved through death, gone from one second to the next? How would it be to get the news that your partner or daughter, mother or son had died, without having the chance to say good-bye? Pia thought about Dirk Stadler, who’d had to cope with two such traumas, first when he’d lost his wife and then his daughter. And about Jens-Uwe Hartig, who’d had to bury his fiancée shortly before their wedding. And Mark Thomsen, who had lost his son and then his wife and finally his job.
Pia recalled the horror that Renate Rohleder and Professor Rudolf felt when they realized their mistakes had caused the dearest people in their lives to be killed. The sniper had robbed Fritz Gehrke, that old, sick man, of the most important person he still had in his life. And Patrick Schwarzer, who in his view had made a minor error, was then punished for it ten years later.
A fate worse than death—the saying contained a real kernel of truth. The loss alone was enough to tear open wounds that would never heal, but knowing that you were to blame for the death was a truly devilish punishment. Was that why Gehrke had killed himself?
Just as Pia was making herself two slices of toast with salted butter and Nutella, Kim showed up.
“Good morning,” she murmured, shuffling over to the coffeemaker. “How do you manage to be so disgustingly awake?”
“Good morning.” Pia grinned. “It’s the early-bird gene. I’m the lark and you’re more of an owl. Would you like some breakfast before we get going?”
She slapped the warm pieces of toast together and bit into them.
“I can’t stomach anything this early in the morning.” Kim shook her head in disgust and sipped her coffee.
“Mark Thomsen doesn’t have a real motive,” said Pia with her mouth full. “Unless there’s something connecting him to the Stadlers that we don’t know about.”
“I’ve been wondering about that, too,” replied Kim. “Stadler got a payoff from the UCF back then. What if he hired somebody?”
“A contract killer, you mean?”
“Yeah, exactly. A pro.”
“I thought about that, too,” Pia admitted. “You’ve been convinced the whole time that the perp is a pro. Dirk Stadler has the same motives as his in-laws and his son. And anyone who has the right connections can find somebody to do the dirty work. Lithuanians, Russians, Kosovo Albanians—they’ll do that sort of stuff for cheap.”
“We don’t have to go that far.” Kim was gradually waking up. “What about this? Maybe Thomsen was paid by the Stadlers to carry out their revenge.”
Pia thought it over as she ate her toast. Was Mark Thomsen a man who would kill for hire? What good would blood money do him if he was caught and had to spend his life behind bars? No, a guy like him acted out of conviction or not at all. He wasn’t the type to let himself be harnessed to someone else’s cart.
“Let’s wait and see what the house searches turn up.” She glanced at the clock, cleared the dishes from the table, and put them in
the dishwasher. “I’m going to take the dogs out and feed the horses. See you later at the station?”
“Of course,” said Kim with another yawn. “I’ll be there at nine. And before that, I’m going to do some shopping.”
“You’re a sweetheart,” said Pia with a grin. “Not that we couldn’t celebrate New Year’s tonight without our traditional meat fondue.”
“Should I also buy a few fireworks?” Kim called after her as she went into the entryway and slipped on her wooden clogs.
“Don’t bother,” Pia said cheerfully. “From here we can see the fireworks in Frankfurt and all along the Taunus slope. It would just be a waste of money.”
Bodenstein knew at once that the search of Jens-Uwe Hartig’s residence would turn up nothing. At five in the morning, Hartig was already fully dressed. Or maybe he’d never gone to bed. Unshaven, he opened the front door and refused to take the search warrant when Bodenstein tried to hand it to him.
“All right, then,” he said calmly. “Okay if I make some coffee?”
“Please do.” Bodenstein and Pia followed the man into the kitchen. “Haven’t you slept at all?”
“A little.” Hartig watched without emotion as an officer carrying laundry baskets walked past him and switched on the lights in all three rooms. Then Hartig turned to the coffeemaker, picked up the glass pot, and filled it with water. “I don’t sleep well anymore, not since Helen died. Mostly I watch documentaries on TV, or go over to the shop. Work takes my mind off her.”
“Were you there last night? Your car’s engine is still warm.”
“Yes. I got home half an hour ago.” The hint of a smile passed over his exhausted face. He opened a cupboard. “As if I knew you were coming. Would you like a cup?”
“No thanks,” the two detectives both replied. The coffee machine began to chuff. The stuffy odor of sweat and cigarette smoke was replaced by the aroma of coffee.
“Do you know Mark Thomsen?” Pia inquired.
“Yes.” Hartig nodded. “Kind of an idiot.”
“Were you jealous of him?”
“Why would I be jealous?” Hartig countered.
“Because your fiancée had a pretty close relationship with him,” said Pia. “Dirk Stadler described Thomsen as her ‘father surrogate.’ ”
“That’s bullshit. Mark seemed to latch on to her from the first time she went to a HRMO meeting with her grandparents. At first she liked the attention, but with time it became . . . unpleasant.”
“In what way?”
“He was patronizing and condescending, and he kept giving her unwanted advice.” Hartig shook his head as if to dismiss an unwelcome memory. “He even fixed up a room in his house for her.”
“Do you think he was interested in her sexually?”
“You’ve seen Helen’s picture,” replied Hartig with a hint of bitterness. “She was very beautiful and always made a needy impression. Crude macho types like Thomsen love that sort of person. It makes them feel big and strong, even though they’re nothing but failures. Thomsen is a poor soul, who revels in fantasies of revenge. He kept pestering her with his ideas, blatantly trying to incite her.”
“What sort of revenge fantasies?” Bodenstein inquired.
“He wanted to punish the people who in his opinion were to blame for his misery.”
“Do you believe that Thomsen would actually shoot someone?” Pia asked. “There’s a big difference between talking about it and doing it.”
“I certainly do.” Hartig poured himself more coffee and grimaced. “There’s not much holding him back. He shot people when he was with the GSG 9. And more than once, he’s said that it would be no big deal for him to take somebody out from a couple of hundred meters. It’s like a video game, nothing more.”
Pia didn’t reply. She didn’t believe that Thomsen would have really killed her or Bodenstein yesterday, but he wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot her, maybe in the leg, to underscore his demands.
“Do you know how to shoot, Mr. Hartig?” Bodenstein asked.
“I used to. My father was a fanatical hunter and was always dragging my brother and me into the forest, even when we were kids. The first time he put a rifle in our hands, we were still in kindergarten.” Hartig laughed unhappily. “That was his idea of how to make little bed wetters into tough guys.”
“Shooting is like riding a bike, you never forget how,” Pia paraphrased what Thomsen had told her yesterday.
Hartig looked at her face and shrugged.
“I wouldn’t even remember how to load a rifle,” he claimed.
That brief glance from his dark eyes had been enough to tell Pia he was lying. His apparent indifference, his lack of expression, the way he was neglecting his appearance—it was all carefully contrived in order to deceive them. Jens-Uwe Hartig was a very intelligent man for whom any sort of failure was equivalent to a personal insult, a man who took action and moved things along if they were important to him. He had already shown how far he was prepared to go when he revolted against the methods used by his physician colleagues. With his eyes wide open, he had destroyed his own promising career in medicine.
Pia regarded the man with the greasy, scruffy hair who was trying to play the part of a grieving man with a broken heart. She had to admit he did it well. Pia might have been duped by him if that strange look hadn’t flared up in his eyes, a look that in no way matched the rest of his manner. There was something calculating and cryptic about his expression that evoked a vague unease in Pia.
While their colleagues packed up everything that seemed worthy of examination, Bodenstein got a call. Lis Wenning wanted to speak with him, so he decided that Pia should stay to supervise the search of Hartig’s shop. In the meantime, Bodenstein would drive over to Erik Stadler’s office, which opened at seven thirty, in order to bring Stadler’s girlfriend to the station for an interview.
“Where exactly were you when the murders occurred?” Pia asked Hartig when they were alone in the kitchen.
“If you tell me what the times were, I can give you an answer,” Hartig said. “By the way, do you mind if I smoke?”
“No, go ahead. It’s your house,” said Pia. She told him the times and dates of the four murders.
Hartig listened intently, then lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He had thin wrists and lovely, slender fingers. Surgeon’s hands. Jens-Uwe Hartig was, in general, a handsome man.
“I can’t remember exactly,” he admitted, squeezing his eyes tight for a moment. “And I don’t really have any alibis. That must be one reason why you’re having my home searched. I’m a suspect, aren’t I?”
Again, the strangely furtive glance.
“Maybe,” said Pia. “We hope to find information in your house that we urgently need, but that you have refused to share with us.”
That wasn’t quite the whole truth, but it was certainly one of the reasons why the search warrant had been approved.
“What information?”
“About employees of the UCF who dealt with Kirsten Stadler. Do you happen to recall any names?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Hartig apologized. “I remember only Professor Rudolf and Dr. Hausmann.”
“Stop this charade!” Pia felt the same helplessness that she’d felt thousands of times before when questioning suspects who were lying or simply refusing to answer. “You and Helen hardly talked about anything except what happened to her mother. So I’m sure names must have been mentioned. Why won’t you help us? Don’t you care if more innocent people die?”
“You’re desperate, aren’t you?” Hartig said with a contemptuous smirk. “You don’t even know these people. Why do their deaths bother you so much?”
Pia stared at him in amazement. Was he serious, or did he just have a sick sense of humor? Why couldn’t she figure out what it was about Hartig that upset her so much?
“I seldom know the people I have to deal with in my job,” she replied. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like it when s
omeone sets himself up as judge over life and death. We live in a nation governed by law, which I represent. If everyone did whatever came into their head, we’d be living in anarchy.”
“The rule of law is a farce.” Hartig’s expression was contemptuous. “For me, my concern with the Stadlers ended on the day I lost Helen. After that, I broke off all contact with her family and turned my sights toward a future that has nothing more to do with Helen or her demons. Can’t you understand that?”
“Yes, I can,” said Pia. “But I still don’t believe you. Why do you keep going to the cemetery each morning?”
Hartig sighed.
“I loved Helen more than anyone else in my life,” he replied. “The fact that she preferred death to a life with me affected me deeply, and to this day, I don’t understand it. Maybe that’s why I visit her grave every morning.”
Pia surveyed him skeptically, but waited in vain for some telltale gesture, a compromising twitch of his lips, or any other sign that he was lying. She decided to take off the kid gloves.
“How do you get along with Erik Stadler and his girlfriend?” she began innocently.
“After Helen died, I’ve had no contact with them. But before, we always got along fine.”
“And with Helen’s father?”
“Dirk was very grateful to me for everything I did for Helen.”
Not a real answer to her question.
“And what was it you did for her?”
Hartig hesitated briefly before he replied.
“I protected her. As best I could, and as much as she’d allow me to do. Helen was a woman full of contradictions.” He gazed pensively at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “On the one hand, she was courageous and self-confident, but on the other, she was full of fears and doubts. She never got over the loss of her mother and the circumstances of her death. She held on to every person who meant something to her with an obsessiveness that for many was hard to bear. The fear of being abandoned again became deeply rooted in her soul.”