by Nele Neuhaus
“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Pia told him. “And I don’t think Rudolf is going to reveal something tonight, of all nights.”
“If he doesn’t, I’ll bring him into the station.” Bodenstein was standing in front of the station door. “We have to talk to him. I’ll come by and pick you up.”
He broke the connection and read the text from Inka.
Sorry, she wrote, Emergency in Usingen. Be there later!
Emergency here too, he wrote back. I’ll be in touch. In case I don’t see you—Happy New Year!
Then he put away the phone and went inside the station.
After Bodenstein’s call, Pia ran around, feeding the horses and dogs, and tried to call Kim. Her sister didn’t answer, so she sent her a text. Then she walked in the dark along the track between the paddock and the riding area, thinking about Christoph. Over in the Galápagos, it was only eleven thirty in the morning.
She wished she could put a tail on all the suspects and tap their phones, but they didn’t have enough manpower for that, and the Frankfurt judges were known for their reticence when it came to signing warrants for wiretaps. On that topic, Bodenstein always went strictly by the book, while she would have taken a more flexible approach, especially when there was a chance of learning something significant. When Neff had admitted today that he’d done research on his own that was only semi-legal, her boss had not been happy. Yet it was the first truly useful action that conceited little snot had taken. Then he’d ruined it all by being just as slipshod and inattentive to detail as Ehrenberg, who had overlooked what was probably the most important piece of information to surface since the start of the investigation. No wonder Bodenstein had lost his cool. They were all on edge.
Pia opened the big gate and shut it behind her. Above her droned the traffic on the autobahn. It was pitch dark and cold as hell. She understood her boss’s reaction. The sense of powerlessness they all felt had stripped them of any remaining scraps of patience. But the most unpleasant thing was the way the administration of the UCF was stonewalling. Even after four deaths, they still didn’t seem to comprehend the gravity and the urgency of the situation. Or—and this seemed more likely to her—they were afraid that something might come out that had previously been so carefully hushed up.
A car emerged from under the autobahn overpass. The glare from the headlights approached swiftly, and the car reached her a few seconds later.
“Riegelhoff is at home and is waiting for us.” Bodenstein shifted into reverse and backed into the dirt road to turn around. “But just to be safe, I sent some officers over so he won’t change his mind.”
“Why didn’t he call and tell us to come over?” asked Pia, fastening her seat belt.
“We’ll have to ask him that.” Bodenstein was irritable and tense. The car bumped over the train tracks.
“Why is the Judge now announcing his attacks?” Pia asked. “What’s the point of that?”
“No idea,” replied Bodenstein as he got onto the A 66 heading for Frankfurt. “Maybe he wants to piss us off, play cat and mouse in order to show us what idiots we are. What really bothers me is that Faber has obviously been doing some investigating of his own behind our backs, even though I asked him several times not to do that. I’m really ticked off at him!”
Pia said nothing. In all the years they’d been working together, she’d never seen him in such a thunderous mood. Obviously something else was bothering him, too, something personal that was adding to the strain and making him touchy.
Here, of course, everything was less comfortable than it was at home, but that didn’t bother him. There was no dishwasher, so he washed the two pots, the plate, and the silverware by hand. He liked washing dishes. It was a satisfying task, like cleaning windows and mowing the lawn. You saw the result at once, and it was conducive to relaxing and thinking things over. He liked the small house with its simplicity and bare-bones furnishings. He fully enjoyed the time he was able to spend here. Soon he would have to exchange this place for a prison cell, and not a second went by that he wasn’t aware of that. He put away the clean dishes and silverware, wiping off the scratched sink with a microfiber cloth. The stove was making noise; it was so hot that he could walk around in a T-shirt. Here it was peaceful; there were no neighbors to bother him, no one who wanted anything from him. And above all, he had Helen’s papers here. Whenever he had the slightest doubt about the reason for his actions, he needed only to reread everything, and then his anger was reawakened and fierce, along with the thirst for revenge, for punishment and retribution. The way she had suffered, they would have to suffer, too. Death would have been too merciful for any of them. They had to endure what Helen had endured, the same helplessness and despair; they had to be damned until the end of their lives and even beyond. He glanced at the clock. It was 7:42 P.M. He had to see about getting ready. He got dressed carefully because the night was cold, and he didn’t know how long he would have to wait. Long underwear, black jeans, over those the thermal pants, also black and with no reflectors. Then the black polar fleece pullover and the black hoodie. Three pair of socks with the cheap gym shoes, which he had bought a size bigger so they would fit. Gloves, cap. He had no real concern that the police might figure out who his next victim would be. How could they guess what names were on the list? His e-mail was purely intended as a provocation. They had gotten a bit closer to him, but he still had a safe head start.
The rifle was already in the car. It would take him about half an hour to drive there; he’d already timed it a couple of times. The gas tank was full. Tonight the weather was supposed to be calm. Maybe a slight drizzle, but no wind. All over Europe, people would be celebrating the New Year in a few hours, shooting millions of euros worth of fireworks into the night sky. And that suited him just fine.
She turned left onto Oberhöchstädter Strasse as her smartphone beeped. With one hand on the steering wheel, Karoline opened the e-mail that had just arrived. It was from Konstantin Faber and was exceedingly unfriendly.
Hello, Ms. Albrecht, why did you feel justified in passing along to third parties the information that I entrusted to you? The police called me today and accused me of forwarding one of the obituaries, because Friedrich Gehrke, the father of Victim No. 3, has committed suicide, and the obituary was found at the scene.
She heard a loud honking and saw that she had drifted over the line into the oncoming traffic. She whipped the wheel to the right, then put on her left-turn signal so she could turn off onto Füllerstrasse at the stoplight. A wave of nausea came over her. What had she done now? Fritz Gehrke had killed himself? That couldn’t be true! And she was to blame because she’d given him that obituary. But he’d seemed so levelheaded. He even seemed grateful to her because now he understood why his son had had to die. The left-turn signal turned green, and Karoline stepped on the gas. Her thoughts were racing. She drove along the road that led to the B 455, wondering whether to bother the inspector at eight o’clock on New Year’s Eve. What had she done with his business card? She rummaged through her purse on the passenger seat, then dumped everything out and flicked on the ceiling light. There it was. No, that was the card from the mortuary. But she did have . . . Something rushed through the beam of the headlights, and Karoline was shocked to see that she was driving too fast, way too fast. She hit the brakes hard, and the Porsche went into a skid on the rainy roadway. Tires squealing, the car went into a curve and she whipped the wheel sharply to the right. The rear end skidded out and she felt a dull thud as the rear axle struck the curb of Waldparkplatz.
“Shit!” The steering wheel was torn from her hands in the collision, and her temple whacked against the side window. For a second, she felt weightless. Then the car flipped onto its side on the wet asphalt, spun around like a top, and kept sliding over the embankment. There it plowed a furrow into the underbrush of the woods. The sound of ripping metal vibrated through her bones, wood splintered under the weight of the car, until the vehicle finally came to rest. Now it was pit
ch dark and utterly still, except for the soft clicking of the engine cooling down. Karoline hung dazed from the seat belt, feeling something warm dripping down her face. Then she blacked out.
Riegelhoff’s house, a charming little single-family dwelling, was located on Waldfriedstrasse, right next to the city woods. A police car was parked on the sidewalk in front. Police officers from Frankfurt were already on-site.
“It’s outrageous to keep us here!” complained the attorney, a robust man in his midfifties with gray hair and a reddened, knobbly nose. He was wearing a tux with a bow tie under a cashmere coat; his wife had on a floor-length gown with a fur-trimmed cape over her shoulders. “We have a dinner invitation and we need to leave.”
Bodenstein quickly stepped forward to reply.
“If you’d called me back, you could have saved us all this trouble, and we would be celebrating somewhere, too,” he replied coolly, omitting any form of greeting. “More important, maybe we would have known whom the sniper was going to shoot tonight and could protect him.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, but—,” Riegelhoff began.
Bodenstein cut him off. “We’ll explain it to you,” he said. “And if we don’t get any useful information from you, then you can spend the night in a cell, I can promise you that.”
Riegelhoff’s eyes were shooting daggers at Bodenstein, but he seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation and relented.
“Ten minutes, darling,” he said to his wife, who merely shrugged. Then he nodded to Bodenstein and Pia. “Please come with me.”
He took off his coat, tossed it over the banister, and led them into his study. Pia briefly explained what they’d learned from the sniper and the assumption that he was taking revenge on people whom he believed had caused the death of Kirsten Stadler or condoned what happened.
“How can I help you?” asked Riegelhoff, probably still hoping to get the matter over with rapidly and be off to his party.
“Ten years ago, you represented the UCF in a lawsuit filed by Dirk Stadler,” Bodenstein now took over. “So you know the people involved in the Kirsten Stadler case; you know their names. The sniper has announced that tonight he will shoot a fifth victim. And it will very probably be someone who was not involved.”
“Perhaps you yourself are on his list,” Pia added. “So your wife could be shot. Or your children.”
“A bad joke.” Riegelhoff gave a thin-lipped smile.
“It’s no joke,” Bodenstein replied, dead serious. “He shot the mother of a woman who had refused to help Kirsten Stadler’s children when they found her lying unconscious in a field. And the wife of an ambulance driver because on that day he still had residual alcohol in his bloodstream and drove the ambulance into a ditch. Further victims were the wife of Professor Rudolf and the son of Friedrich Gehrke, who had received a heart transplant from Mrs. Stadler. You knew Mr. Gehrke, and on Saturday, you attempted to return his call.”
Riegelhoff turned pale. His fingers fiddled nervously with one of his cuff links.
“What do you mean, I knew him?” he asked uneasily.
“The day before yesterday, he took his own life,” said Pia.
“Oh . . I . . . I didn’t know that.” Riegelhoff seemed concerned, but Pia did not miss the tiny flicker in his eyes. Was that relief? How odd.
“What could Fritz Gehrke have wanted from you? Why did he burn documents before he killed himself?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Riegelhoff answered. “He only left his name and phone number on the answering machine and asked me to call him back. I was rather amazed, because I hadn’t heard from him in eight years.”
“Then it was probably about the case from back then,” Bodenstein suspected. “What did Gehrke have to do with it?”
Riegelhoff hesitated. In front of the house there was a loud bang, and the lawyer flinched. He tried to cover up his nervousness with an offhand remark.
“Your horror story is making me jumpy,” he said with an uneasy laugh.
That was enough for Pia. She had no more time for tactics and evasive maneuvers.
“Dr. Riegelhoff, this matter is deadly serious,” she said emphatically. “We’re trying to protect the individuals who might be the next victims on the sniper’s list. You could help us. Give us the names of doctors and responsible administrators who worked at the UCF in 2002. We don’t care what they had to do with the case, but tonight someone is going to die, and you might be able to prevent it. Do you understand? Would you want to be responsible for someone’s death?”
Riegelhoff thought a moment, then decided to make an effort.
“I have the documents in the archive at my office,” he said. “We could drive over there.”
“Okay, let’s go,” said Bodenstein with a decisive nod. “Your wife should come with us. We can’t guarantee that the sniper doesn’t have you or your family in his sights.”
It was dark. And cold. A dull, throbbing pain in her body, but much worse was the terrible pressure in her head. She didn’t know what was going on. Where was she? What had happened? Why was there such a stench of gasoline? A light was blinding her, and she shut her eyes again.
“Hello? Hello!” A strange voice. Brightness. “Hello! Can you hear me? The ambulance is on the way.”
Ambulance?
“Hello! Stay awake!” Somebody was roughly patting her cheek.
This must be a dream.
“Go away,” she murmured, in a daze.
“She’s coming to,” said a man’s voice.
Karoline heard a siren, then another one. She opened her eyes with difficulty. Blue lights were flashing. It was bright as day. But it was evening. New Year’s Eve! She wanted to call Greta and wish her a Happy New Year. Greta. Mama.
A metallic crash right next to her ear, cold air.
“I’m cold,” she said.
“We’re almost done,” replied the man’s voice. “We’re getting you out. Does anything hurt?”
“My head. And my arm. What happened?” Karoline blinked into the bright light, recognized a police uniform.
“You had an accident.” The officer was young, no more than midtwenties. “Can’t you remember?”
“Yeah. There was . . . an animal on the road. I . . . I had to brake,” Karoline whispered. Other men arrived. Orange jackets, dark blue overalls. EMTs. Firemen.
They got her out of the seat belt, which had protected her from worse injuries, and lifted her carefully from the wreck of the Porsche on a litter.
“I can walk by myself,” she protested weakly.
“Sure, sure,” was all they said. They put a neck brace on her, and Karoline caught a glimpse of the area before they loaded her into the ambulance. The road was blocked. Police. Fire department. A bright-yellow tow truck arrived just then. It was bright inside the ambulance, they strapped her in and started an IV drip to prevent shock. The doctor asked for her name and address, today’s date, and the day of the week. He seemed satisfied when she gave the right answers without hesitation.
Why had she seen the animal so late? Why was she driving so fast? Then she remembered. She’d been looking for the inspector’s business card. But why?
“I need my purse and my cell phone,” she told the younger of the EMTs, who seemed more approachable than his older colleague. “They must be in my car.”
“I’ll take a look and see if I can find them,” he promised her, and vanished from sight. A few minutes later, he returned, and she was relieved to see him holding up her brown Bottega Veneta purse.
“I found the cell phone and put it inside,” he said, settling on the jump seat next to her. The doors slammed shut and the ambulance began to move.
“Thank you. And the wallet and key ring?”
The young man felt in her purse and nodded. “Both there,” he confirmed, and she closed her eyes. “Now we’re going to the hospital in Bad Homburg. Is there someone you want us to call?”
“No, thank you.” Karoline tr
ied to smile. “I’ll do it later myself.”
She surrendered to the shaking of the vehicle, listened to the siren, and tried to figure out in her mind the route they were taking. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be badly injured. And now it didn’t matter that she’d forgotten to go shopping.
There was nothing better than careful planning. The shell of the building was a perfect site for an ambush, with an ideal escape route; he had meticulously checked it out twice. He had parked his car at the HEM gas station, right next to the traffic circle, and from there, it was only a couple of minutes to the A 5 autobahn. If things got dicey, he could also drive across the fields to Weiterstadt or through the industrial zone to Büttelborn and over to the A 67. All around were only meadows and fallow land, except for the three newly constructed houses. He had found a comfortable position, and instead of the dipod, he was using two sacks of mortar, which also provided something to hide behind. It was only quarter past nine. Plenty of time. As he lay there, he screwed the Kahles scope onto the rifle and looked through it. Wonderful optics. He looked into the brightly lit house, saw the man standing in the open kitchen with a different woman. They were talking and laughing. In front of the house stood a car with license plates from Gross-Gerau; that’s why he’d assumed that they invited guests tonight. But it didn’t matter. The children were sitting in the living room in front of the TV, one on the floor, the other sprawled on the black leather couch. Cute kids. A boy and a girl. He saw the homeowner upstairs now with another man. He was no doubt proudly showing off his new house. They had just moved in a couple of weeks ago. Luckily. If they’d been in their old apartment in a multifamily dwelling, he would have had much greater problems finding a suitable shooting position. Of course, he could have dealt with the man somewhere else—in his car, on his way to work, in the parking lot—but he wanted to do it exactly like this. Right before their eyes. Before the eyes of his children. They should see the way their father died, they should feel as helpless, shocked, and desperate as Helen had. And they must never forget the sight for the rest of their lives.