To Catch a Killer

by Nele Neuhaus

  “You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help.”

  “Oh, if only I’d flown to Ecuador with Christoph.” Pia wiped away the tears with the back of her hand, opened her eyes, and tried once more to light a cigarette.

  “I’m glad you didn’t go.” Bodenstein gently took the lighter from her hand and the cigarette from her mouth, lit it, and handed it back. Then he took one for himself.

  “Why did we make so many mistakes?” Pia asked despondently. “Why didn’t we look on Facebook for any of Helen Stadler’s friends?”

  “Because we didn’t have time to think things through,” replied Bodenstein. “He left us no time. He kept putting out false leads. I’m quite sure he deliberately picked the Christmas season for his series of murders, because he knew we wouldn’t discover a lot of the information in time.”

  “He made such a . . . normal impression.” Pia blew smoke into the cold air. “I almost felt sorry for him, idiot that I am. My intuition failed me completely.”

  “Wrong,” said Bodenstein, shaking his head. “From the start, you knew something wasn’t right about him.”

  They sat next to each other for a while, smoking and not talking.

  “This is no time to get discouraged,” Bodenstein said at last. “You and I, we’ve fought so many battles together; we’re going to win this one, too. We’re right on his heels. Burmeister was his last victim. All the rest are safe.”

  “Still, I have a nagging feeling that we’ve missed something.” Pia flicked the butt into the bushes. Bodenstein stubbed his out and crumbled it absentmindedly between his fingers.

  “I have the same feeling,” he admitted. “But I know that I’ve done everything in my power. We’re just people, Pia, not robots or superheroes. And people do make mistakes.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Where do we go from here?” Pia asked.

  “Rudolf has just arrived. He’s going to have to watch the video, a hundred times if necessary, until he breaks down,” replied Bodenstein. “But first we’ll put the screws to Thomsen. Kai has e-mailed the photo of Burmeister to Janning and Hausmann, so they’ll understand how serious the situation is. Hausmann has a daughter who works at a bank in Frankfurt. We’re giving her police protection.”

  He stood up and gallantly held out his hand to Pia. She gave him a crooked grin.

  “Time for the last battle.” Bodenstein smiled. “Today we’ll get him.”

  Mark Thomsen looked at the photo and the video.

  “Finally.” A faint smile flitted across his face. “The pig got what he deserved.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bodenstein wanted to know. “Are you still not telling us something?”

  “No. I really don’t know who the shooter is,” replied Thomsen. “Until the shot was fired from the high-rise, I was guessing it was Erik. But not after that. No mere sportsman could have made that shot.”

  “Why is he doing that to Burmeister? Why did he change his strategy?” Pia pressed him.

  “No idea,” Thomsen said with a shrug. “Burmeister and Rudolf are megalomaniac bulldozers.”

  Pia exchanged a quick glance with Bodenstein.

  “Rudolf and his old pal Furtwängler spent years searching for a drug that could change the blood type of a live patient. Innumerable laboratory animals died in hundreds of experiments. In the end, at least three human beings died, too. Rudolf and Burmeister transplanted hearts into these patients, deliberately choosing donors who had a different blood type, after they had initially been treated for weeks with specific drugs. The experiments were financed primarily by the pharmaceutical giant Santex. Fritz Gehrke, who was chairman of the board of Santex, was not entirely unbiased in terms of his involvement. He hoped that Rudolf would succeed and thus save his son’s life.”

  Thomsen paused for a moment.

  “The testing of the drug was still in the animal testing phase, but Rudolf and Burmeister started using it on their own patients. These individuals were utterly desperate and knew they would die unless a miracle occurred. Rudolf convinced them that he could bring about this miracle, but it failed in every case. The organ recipients survived the transplantations for only a few hours or days, then died in torment when their bodies violently rejected the organs. The number of unreported cases might have been even higher, but Hartig, who was on Rudolf’s team, knew about three for sure. After that, Gehrke wanted to resign as chairman of the board of Santex. The experiment seemed to be foundering, and Rudolf and Burmeister panicked. If their process succeeded someday, then there would be no more problems with incompatible blood types, and they would be able to save many more human lives. In addition—and this was probably a more important reason—Rudolf would certainly have won the Nobel Prize.”

  “And then Kirsten Stadler happened to be delivered to the hospital. And she was blood type O,” Pia said.

  “Precisely.” Thomsen nodded. “Rudolf and Burmeister manipulated the brain-death examination, removed her heart, and implanted it in Gehrke’s mortally ill son. Everything went well, Maximilian recovered rapidly, and Gehrke, told by Rudolf that the drugs had worked, extended his engagement in the research. But then there were problems with Kirsten Stadler’s family. Rudolf wanted to hush up everything and told Gehrke that Kirsten Stadler could have survived? Gehrke probably felt guilty and offered the Stadlers money, a lot of money. At this time, Hausmann, the medical director of the UCF and formerly a good friend of Rudolf’s, also learned about the background of the three deaths and intervened. Perhaps Rudolf would have succeeded in sweeping it all under the rug if Hartig hadn’t spilled the beans about procedures at the clinic. Then the old friends fell into a disagreement and Rudolf had to leave the UCF. The hospital reached a settlement out of court with the Stadlers, and Gehrke paid an additional million euros in hush money to Dirk Stadler.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Pia.

  “I am in contact with the relatives of two victims of Rudolf’s megalomania,” Thomsen replied. They had no courage, no money, and no opportunity to complain about him or the hospital. But based on their information and Hartig’s stories, Helen and I have begun to research it.”

  “So you do know of specific cases.”

  “Yes. With names and dates,” Thomsen stated. “About a year ago, Helen went without telling me to talk to Gehrke, Rudolf, Hausmann, Janning, and Burmeister. She had learned about the million euros shortly before and was beside herself because her father had sacrificed the truth for money. For her, the money was unimportant, nor did she feel bound by the agreement not to talk about it to which Dirk Stadler had consented. She threatened to go to the media with it, specifically with this blood type story that she knew about thanks to Hartig and me.”

  “That would have caused a gigantic scandal,” Bodenstein put in.

  “No doubt. But not only that,” Thomsen said. “It would also have been a disaster for the reputation of the entire field of medical transplantation, which has already suffered considerably from the scandals of recent years.”

  He rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger.

  “The UCF mafia was afraid of Helen because they knew that she was in contact with Hartig, and he would definitely be a credible witness before a court. They knew nothing about me. They had no choice but to eliminate the threat. So they did.”

  Thomsen laughed. A bitter snort with no mirth in it.

  “They were the ones who killed her, obviously.”

  “Why didn’t they threaten Mr. Hartig, then?” Bodenstein wanted to know. “He’s a lot more dangerous than Helen Stadler.”

  “Hartig had no interest in making the case public. And there is still his father, who plays in the same league as Rudolf and Company. That was his protection.”

  “How can you be so sure that Helen was murdered?” Bodenstein was still not completely convinced.

  “Would you kill yourself if you were just a hairsbreadth away from solving the greatest problem of your entire life?
” Thomsen asked. “She was euphoric, overjoyed, and feeling more alive than ever before. She was just about to emerge from the shadow that had hung over her and her family for half her life. She’d even summoned the courage to tell Jens-Uwe that she didn’t want to marry him before spending a year in the States. She had applied for a student visa and been accepted as a visiting student!”

  “How do you know all this?” Pia asked.

  “Helen kept almost no secrets from me,” Thomsen replied.

  “But the plans that she devised!” Pia shook her head. “She spied on people and kept real surveillance logs. Why didn’t you stop her?

  “At first, I even helped her,” Thomsen admitted. “I even did research on the people involved. We never wanted to cause anyone harm—on the contrary.

  But then Hartig found out something about it, and it got out of control. He was utterly obsessed with putting pressure on his former colleagues.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think he ever got over the way they’d treated him,” said Thomsen. “From a moral standpoint, he’d acted altogether correctly, and for that he was punished.”

  “But I don’t understand why Hartig first told Helen everything, then stuffed her so full of pills and controlled her to such a degree that she grew fearful of him,” Pia countered. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  Thomsen was silent for a long time; then he sighed and looked up.

  “He never told Helen anything about it,” he said despondently. “It was me. And that’s how this whole ill-fated story first got started.”

  Pia glanced quickly over at her boss.

  “Up until that point, Helen was firmly convinced that she was the only one who could have prevented her mother’s death,” Thomsen went on. “For her, it was like a deliverance when she realized that it wasn’t her fault, but the doctors’. Maybe she would have let it go at that if Hartig and I hadn’t been there. Jens-Uwe fell in love with her, and she skillfully extracted every detail out of him, goaded on by her father, her grandfather, and me. For all of us, there was only one idea and one intention—revenge! Each of us had his own personal motive, but in the end, we all wanted the same thing: to bring the truth to light. We’re to blame that the dust won’t settle on the case.”

  “And Hartig? What did he do?”

  “He only gradually realized what would happen if Helen found out what part he had actually played in her mother’s story. To his credit, he regretted it bitterly. But he did do it.”

  “He did do what?” Bodenstein asked.

  “Kirsten Stadler’s heart was the first one he was allowed to remove and transplant,” said Thomsen. “It was his first organ transplantation in a promising career as a transplant surgeon. He did everything right, but at the time, he knew nothing about the circumstances.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he told me about it once. Many years ago, when he gave his first talk at HRMO. Before he’d met Helen in person. It was a perfect storm that eventually led to more people dying.”

  “Who came up with the idea of killing the relatives of the people involved?” Pia wanted to know. “What did you have to do with that?”

  Again, Thomsen thought for a moment before he replied.

  “I wanted to bring to light the truth about Rudolf’s human experiments,” he said. “So Hartig seemed the right choice as informant. He and I might have been able to manage it on our own. In two cases, we had names and evidence, after all, and there were witnesses who would have testified. But then Helen got involved, and her family, and the whole thing turned highly emotional. In the case of her mother, there hadn’t been any evidence or a credible witness, but now she had one.”

  “Hartig.”

  “Exactly. And he couldn’t slow her down. I couldn’t either. I tried, but she did whatever she liked. Hartig’s tool of choice was psychopharmaceuticals, while mine was limited support of her plans. I thought I had everything under control, but I was wrong.”

  “Helen’s father was in the National People’s Army of East Germany,” Bodenstein remarked.

  “What?” Thomsen gave him an astonished look.

  “We suspect that Dirk Stadler is the sniper,” Bodenstein said. “Do you think he would be capable of something like that?”

  Thomsen frowned, pondering.

  “I never would have thought of Dirk in that connection, but now that you mention it . . . He suffered a lot after his wife died. His whole life ended. Maybe that’s why he held on so tight to Helen. He didn’t want to let her go, because he was afraid to be alone.”

  Thomsen’s comment contradicted what Stadler had told them.

  “Wasn’t it the other way around? That Helen clung to her father?” Pia asked.

  “She was too weak to tell him that she wanted to live her own life.” He sighed. “For half her life, she’d hoped that his personality would change, or that he’d find another woman. That he’d be able to return to a normal life once the past was cleared up and the guilty were punished. But Dirk seemed satisfied with the way things were. He pictured the two of them together forever. He had shut himself off from the outside world and lived only in the past. That’s also why he hated me so much. He was afraid I might take her away from him.”

  “I should think Hartig would have been an even bigger threat,” Bodenstein said.

  “No. Dirk had the upper hand because of Hartig’s guilt complex. Hartig and Helen kept allowing him to manipulate them and subject them to emotional blackmail.”

  “So did Stadler know that Hartig was once part of Rudolf’s team?”

  “Yes, of course. Hartig must have told him when he convinced him, together with Winkler, to join the suit against the UCF. Everyone knew except Helen.”

  All at once, they saw everything they knew about Dirk Stadler in a completely different light. They had paid so little attention to him that they hadn’t noticed the dark, damaged side of his character.

  “Why did the Winklers break off contact with their son-in-law?” Pia asked.

  “Joachim and Lydia disapproved of the way Dirk lived with his daughter. They thought it unhealthy. Helen slept in the same bed with him, they watched television holding hands, and they did everything together. She was undoubtedly utterly fixated on her father, and he prevented her from leaving the nest. Viewed from outside, Dirk always acted like he wanted to protect her, but in reality, just the opposite was true. Helen’s death finally pulled the rug out from under Dirk’s feet. He thought she had killed herself because she could no longer live with the guilt surrounding her mother’s death.”

  Everything Thomsen said sounded plausible and also happened to confirm Karoline Albrecht’s suspicions. The picture was finally complete. Still, Bodenstein was furious.

  “Why are you only telling us this now, Thomsen?” he brusquely admonished the man, whom he had almost come to like. “Why didn’t you lay all your cards on the table right away? You would have saved yourself and us a lot of trouble,—and maybe even prevented the killing of Ralf Hesse and the maiming of Dr. Burmeister!”

  A mocking glint appeared in Thomsen’s eyes.

  “Save Burmeister? That’s the last thing I’d want to do,” he replied coldly. “And considering the way I was treated by the police force, the way they kicked me in the ass, I had no reason to help you in any way.”

  “So why then this sudden change of heart?”

  “I don’t want any of these bastards to get out of this unscathed,” Thomsen admitted. “They should get the punishment they deserve.”

  Professor Dieter Paul Rudolf was sitting at the table in the interrogation room like a bored guest at a coffee klatsch, his hands in his pants pockets and his legs crossed. He had watched the video without batting an eye, totally unimpressed by the gruesome fate of his former colleague.

  “When can I get out of here?” he asked after responding to all their questions with stubborn silence.

  “The way it looks, never,” replied Pia. “The
state attorney’s office is preparing an indictment for at least three counts of homicide against you. Your days of playing golf and doing heart surgery are over, as well as your dream of the Nobel Prize.”

  Rudolf looked at her for the first time.

  “What is all this nonsense?” He took his hands out of his pockets and sat up straight. “Do you have any idea whom you’re talking to?”

  “Certainly.” Pia glared back at him. “We’ve learned a great deal about you recently. You lied when you claimed you could make no sense of the sniper’s e-mail, and that you’d never had a problem with a patient’s relatives. We also know that you and your former chief physician, Burmeister, precipitated Kirsten Stadler’s death so you could transplant her heart into Fritz Gehrke’s son. We know your motives. We know that Gehrke threatened to withdraw his funding because your ambitious research had failed to produce results. We know that you used the medication, which was still in the animal-testing stage, on human beings, and that those patients died.”

  Rudolf’s pale cheeks flushed with anger.

  “Your vanity would not tolerate the failure,” Pia continued to provoke him. “You were carried away by the idea of being the first surgeon in the world to succeed in transplanting hearts across the blood-type barrier. You had your eye on the Nobel Prize: fame and honor and a huge sum of money. You were utterly ruthless. You regarded Kirsten Stadler, with her O blood type, as a gift from heaven. The woman was of no more importance to you back then than your old friend Burmeister is now, or the death of your wife—”

  “Shut up!” Rudolf growled in fury. His hands were beginning to tremble.

  “For you, the organ donors were merely raw material, your patients only means to an end, and you treated your subordinates like shit.” Pia didn’t take her eyes off him, alert to the slightest reaction from her opponent. “But then all your grandiose plans were brought down by an unimportant young doctor who could no longer stand your contempt for humanity and your arrogant megalomania. Jens-Uwe Hartig reported you to hospital management and the Federal Association of Physicians. And because of that, you had to resign from the Frankfurt University Clinic.”