Bad Wolf: A Novel (Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein)

by Neuhaus, Nele

  “Fine with me.” Bodenstein finished his coffee. “Is that all?”

  “No.” Pia had saved the most sensitive topic until last. “I’d like to hear what you can tell me about the death of Erik Lessing.”

  Bodenstein, who was just about to set down his cup, stopped abruptly. His face shut down, as if a window shade had been pulled down inside him. The cup hovered an inch above the saucer.

  “I know nothing about that,” he said, finally putting down his coffee cup. Then he stood up. “Let’s go over to the conference room.”

  Pia was disappointed, even though this was the reaction she’d expected.

  “Did Frank shoot him and the two Road Kings?”

  Bodenstein stopped without turning around.

  “What is this?” he asked. “What does this have to do with our cases?”

  Pia jumped up and went over to him.

  “I think that somebody used Frank to get rid of a dangerous witness—namely, the undercover cop Erik Lessing. Lessing must have learned something from the Road Kings that nobody else was supposed to know. It was neither an accident nor self-defense. It was a triple murder, and somebody gave the order to do it. Frank carried out the order; who knows what they told him. He shot a colleague.”

  Bodenstein sighed deeply and turned around.

  “So now you know everything,” he said.

  For a moment, it was completely quiet; only the ring of a telephone could be heard faintly through the closed door.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” Pia asked. “I never understood why Frank got that special position, or why you always protected him. Your lack of trust is insulting.”

  “It has nothing to do with lack of trust,” Bodenstein replied. “I had nothing to do with the whole incident, because I was in a different department. The reason why I learned about it at all was—”

  He broke off, hesitant.

  “Dr. Nicola Engel,” Pia said, completing his sentence. “She was in charge of the department that was responsible. Am I right?”

  Bodenstein nodded. They stared at each other.

  “Pia,” he finally said quietly. “This is a very dangerous matter. Even today. I don’t know any names, but some of those responsible might still be in high positions. Back then, they never hesitated to kill if necessary, and they will do it today, as well.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Nicola wouldn’t tell me the details. Supposedly, in order to protect me. And I didn’t really want to know any more about it.”

  Pia looked at her boss. She asked herself whether he was telling her the truth. How much did he actually know? And all of a sudden, she realized that she no longer trusted him. What would he do, how far would he go, to protect himself and others?

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all,” she lied, shrugging. “It’s an old case. God knows, we have plenty of other stuff to keep us busy.”

  Her eyes met his. Was that something like relief that flashed across his face for an instant?

  There was a knock on the door, and Kai stuck his head in.

  “I just got a call from somebody who made an interesting observation behind the rest stop at Weilbach on the night Hanna Herzmann was raped.” Even Kai, who usually unnerved everyone with his unflappable composure, seemed agitated, which showed what a toll the tension of the past few weeks was taking. “Around two in the morning, the witness was driving along the highway between Hattersheim and Weilbach when a car suddenly came shooting out from a dirt road on the left with its lights off. He almost drove into the ditch from fright, but he got a brief view of the driver’s face.”

  “And?” Bodenstein asked.

  “A man with a beard and hair combed straight back.”

  “Bernd Prinzler?”

  “From the description, it’s possible. Unfortunately, he can’t recall either the make of the car or the license plate number. Big and dark, he said. Might even be the Hummer.”

  “Okay.” Bodenstein thought hard. “We need to bring Prinzler in. I want a lineup to show the witness, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  * * *

  Pia got into her car and swore when she almost burned her hands on the steering wheel. The car had been parked in the sun and was as hot as an oven. She needed peace and quiet so she could think over what she’d just learned. Located a couple of hundred yards from the Regional Criminal Unit were the Krifteler Fields, the fruit orchards and strawberry fields that stretched all the way to the A66 autobahn. Pia turned left onto the L3016, locally called “the Strawberry Mile,” and drove to the first dirt road. She parked there and continued on foot.

  Today the sun reigned supreme, but as usual it was accompanied by muggy air. Thunderstorms were predicted for later in the afternoon. The grassy dirt roads were full of muddy puddles that the last rain had left behind. The skyline of Frankfurt seemed farther away than on clear days, as did the hills of the Taunus in the west.

  Pia stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans and trudged with her head down past rows of plum and apple trees. It had shaken her deeply to learn that Bodenstein was keeping these kinds of secrets. Pia knew and respected him as a man who stood up for his convictions, even if they were unpopular. He was someone with a pronounced sense of justice and high moral values, incorruptible, disciplined, fair, and straightforward. She had regarded his leniency toward Behnke’s transgressions as an excusable weakness, a display of loyalty to a long-standing colleague who was in personal and financial difficulties, because that was how Bodenstein had once justified his actions to her. She now realized that his explanation had been a lie.

  From the beginning, Pia and Bodenstein had understood each other and worked well together, but there had always been a certain distance between them. That had changed when Bodenstein’s marriage broke up. Since then a real relationship of trust, almost a friendship, had developed between them. At least that was what Pia had imagined, but obviously the trust part was an illusion. She recoiled from the thought that her boss might have had more to do with the Erik Lessing case than he was willing to admit. But she didn’t intend to pressure him to say more. As soon as Kathrin agreed to tell her the name of her ex-lover, Pia wanted to talk to him. She was also toying with the idea of taking up the matter with Behnke. At first glance, the incident seemed to have nothing to do with the current investigations, but her instincts told her that there was a connection between the triple murders that had been ordered, the attack on Hanna Herzmann, and the murder of Leonie Verges. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Rothemund and Prinzler had been key players in the past as well as today.

  Her cell phone rang. She didn’t pay attention to it at first, but then her sense of duty prevailed. It was Christian Kröger.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Lunch break,” she snapped. “Why?”

  “I saw your car parked by the side of the road. Yesterday, I didn’t have a chance to tell you something else. When will you be back?”

  “At two eleven and forty-three seconds,” she replied curtly, which was not usually her style, and she regretted it immediately. Christian, of all people, didn’t deserve to suffer the brunt of her bad mood.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Would you like to join me for a walk through the picturesque strawberry fields? I need some exercise and fresh air.”

  “Sure, gladly.”

  Pia told him which way she’d gone and sat down on a boulder that probably served as a property marker. She turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and enjoyed feeling the warmth on her skin. With a trill, a lark sprang into the blue sky.

  The constant hum of the autobahn in the distance was a familiar sound; her house was no more than two miles away as the crow flies, right next to the A66. Christian apparently didn’t have the same need for exercise and fresh air as she did. The blue VW evidence van came bumping along the dirt road. Pia stood up and walked over to her colleague.

  “Hey,” he said, studyi
ng her. “Did something happen?”

  His sensitivity again surprised her. He was the only one of her male colleagues who would permit himself such a question. All the others treated her the same as they treated everyone else on the team. And that meant they would probably prefer to bite off their tongues rather than ask about feelings or emotional issues.

  “Come on, let’s take a walk,” said Pia instead of answering. For a while, they walked in silence, and Christian picked a couple of plums and offered her one.

  “Plum thief.” Pia grinned, rubbed the plum on her jeans, and took a bite. It tasted magnificent, warm from the sun and sweet, awakening childhood memories.

  “Theft of comestibles for personal consumption is not a punishable offense.” Christian grinned back but then quickly turned serious. “I think there are some blotches in the biography of State Attorney Frey.”

  Pia stopped in her tracks.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked in astonishment.

  “I happened to recall reading a newspaper article,” he replied. “It was shortly after Rothemund was arrested. They had interviewed a woman who claimed that the arrest was motivated by personal revenge on Frey’s part, because he—Rothemund, that is—had discovered that Frey didn’t earn his doctorate; he paid for it.”

  He spit out the pit of the plum.

  “Then last night, I was researching something and stumbled on who Frey’s doctoral supervisor was. He happens to be a member of the board of the Finkbeiner Foundation: Professor Ernst Haslinger. He was dean of the law faculty and vice president of the Goethe University, and was later called to Karlsruhe to serve on the federal Supreme Court.”

  “That doesn’t have to mean anything,” said Pia. “But why are you so interested in State Attorney Frey?”

  “Because I find his fascination with the case odd.” Christian stopped. “I’ve been doing crime-scene investigation for ten years now, but I’ve never seen a chief state attorney show up in person for a house search. If anything, they send some underling.”

  “I suppose he has more than a professional interest in the case,” replied Pia. “He and Rothemund were once the best of friends.”

  “So why did he show up on that evening in Eddersheim when we discovered the dead girl in the river?”

  “He’d been visiting friends nearby for a barbecue.” Pia tried to remember what explanation Frey had given for putting in an appearance that evening. She had wondered about that, too.

  “I believe the part about the barbecue,” said Christian. “But not the part about being in the vicinity.”

  “What are you getting at?” Pia asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Christian admitted. He picked a blade of grass and absentmindedly wrapped it around his finger. “But there seem to be way too many coincidences.”

  They walked on.

  “And what’s bothering you?” he asked after a while.

  Pia pondered whether to tell him about the Erik Lessing case and Frank Behnke’s involvement in it. She had to talk about it with someone. Kai was out, because he had been too directly involved in the events at the time. Cem, she didn’t know well enough; Bodenstein and Kathrin were not neutral observers. Actually, Christian had developed more and more into the only colleague she really trusted. Finally, she got up the nerve and told him her suspicions.

  “Oh my God,” he said when she was done. “That explains a lot. Especially Frank’s behavior.”

  “Who would have given the order to eliminate Lessing?” Pia asked. “It couldn’t have been Engel, who was the head of the department; it must have come from much higher up. The president of police? The Interior Ministry? The National Criminal Police? And today, Behnke is still enjoying special protection. Considering everything he’s done, normally suspension would be too lenient a punishment. He would have been thrown out of the civil service for good.”

  “We have to ask ourselves who would have benefited from getting rid of Lessing,” Christian deliberated. “What had he found out? It must have been something really explosive, something that could be a serious threat to one of the bigwigs.”

  “Bribery,” Pia suggested. “Drug dealing. Human trafficking.”

  “I’m sure that was his official undercover mission,” replied Christian. “No, it had to be something personal. Something that could ruin someone’s career.”

  “We should ask Prinzler about it,” said Pia, casting a glance at her watch. “In exactly one hour. Are you going with me to Preungesheim?”

  * * *

  “I know that you didn’t want me to come here, but I just had to see you.” Wolfgang looked around with embarrassment, turning the bouquet in his hands.

  “Just put it on the table. The nurses will find a vase later.” Hanna would have preferred to tell him to take the flowers away. White lilies! She hated that intense fragrance, which reminded her of funeral parlors and cemeteries. Flowers belonged in the garden, not in a small room that was badly ventilated.

  Last night, she’d written Wolfgang a text message, asking him not to come to the hospital. It was unpleasant for her to be seen in this condition by any man who was not a doctor. She couldn’t imagine how she looked. She’d touched her face, felt the swelling and the stitches on her forehead, the left eyebrow, and chin. She wondered if the makeup artists would be skillful enough to conjure up a face suitable for television out of this disastrous battlefield.

  The last time she’d looked in the mirror was in her dressing room at the TV studio that evening. Back then, her face had been flawless and beautiful, except for a few wrinkles. Now she didn’t want to see it; she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand the sight. She saw the appalled expression on her visitor’s face.

  “Sit down for a moment,” she told Wolfgang.

  He shoved a chair over to her bed and awkwardly took her hand. All the tubes running in and out of her body bothered him. Hanna could see him trying to avoid looking at them.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Good would be a lie,” she croaked.

  The conversation was strained, faltering. Wolfgang looked pale and bleary-eyed and seemed nervous. He had purple shadows under his eyes that she’d never seen there before. At some point he ran out of topics to talk about and fell silent. Hanna said nothing more, either. What could she tell him anyway? How shitty it was to live with a colostomy bag? How great her fear was of being disfigured and traumatized for the rest of her life? In the past, she would have confided in him, but now things were different. Now she wished someone else were sitting beside her and holding her hand.

  “Oh, Hanna,” Wolfgang said with a sigh. “I’m so sorry that you had to go through all of this. I wish there was something I could do for you. Do you have any idea who did it?”

  Hanna swallowed, fighting back the rising horror: the memory of pain and terror and the fear of death.

  “No,” she whispered. “Did you know that Leonie Verges, my therapist, was murdered?”

  “Meike told me,” he said with a nod. “It’s all so horrible.”

  “I just don’t understand it. In my case, the police have two suspects.” Talking was tiring her out. “But I’m sure it wasn’t either one of them. Why would they do it? I used to work with them. Instead, I think it must be because of the story I was working on.…”

  Suddenly, she had a suspicion—an appalling suspicion.

  “You haven’t spoken to anyone about it, have you, Wolfgang?”

  She tried to sit up but couldn’t. Powerless, she sank back.

  Wolfgang hesitated. For an instant, his eyes shifted away.

  “No. That is, only to my father,” he admitted, embarrassed. “He was not enthusiastic—and that’s putting it mildly. We had a big argument about it. He said that sometimes there are more important things than ratings. I can’t believe that he, of all people, would say that.”

  He laughed out loud, but it was a forced laugh.

  “He didn’t want his TV station to broadcast such unverified slan
der. He was really upset by those names. He’s terribly afraid of a lawsuit or bad PR. I’m … I’m really sorry, Hanna. Really I am.”

  “All right.” Hanna nodded weakly.

  She’d known Wolfgang’s father for thirty years, and could vividly picture his reaction. She knew Wolfgang equally well. She should have known that he would tell his authoritarian father about what she was working on. Wolfgang had a hell of a lot of respect for his father, and was at his beck and call for better or worse. He still lived in his parents’ villa, and he held the position of CEO only because of his father’s intervention. Even though Wolfgang did his job well and conscientiously, he lacked courage and the ability to assert himself. All his life, he’d been the son of the great media mogul Hartmut Matern, and in their friendship Hanna had always been the more successful, cleverer, and stronger one. Hanna knew that this didn’t bother him, but she wasn’t sure how he was handling the fact that even now, in his mid-forties, he risked being chewed out by his father in front of the whole crew whenever he made a mistake or ventured to make a decision on his own. Wolfgang never talked about this. In general, he never liked to talk about himself. If Hanna really thought about it, she knew hardly anything about him, because everything had always revolved around her: her show, her success, her men. In her boundless egotism, it had never occurred to her to think about Wolfgang, but now she was filled with regret, as she was about so much else she had done or not done in her life.

  Her throat hurt from talking, and her eyelids had grown heavy.

  “I think you’d better go now,” she murmured, turning her head away. “Talking is a real strain for me.”

  “Yes, of course.” Wolfgang let go of her hand and got up.

  Hanna’s eyes closed, and her spirit retreated from the intolerable glare of reality back to the twilight realm of a world in between, in which she was healthy and happy and … loved.

  “Good-bye, Hanna,” she heard Wolfgang say, as if from a great distance. “Maybe someday you can forgive me.”

  * * *