Bad Wolf

by Nele Neuhaus

  Her mother probably hadn’t been able to decide what to wear to the broadcast. The clothes her stylist picked out for her seldom found approval in her eyes; she liked her own clothes better. The bedroom didn’t look like it had been the setting for a passionate night of love; it looked instead as though Hanna hadn’t been home at all.

  Meike went back downstairs.

  She didn’t like this house; it gave her the creeps. When she was a kid, it was nice to live on a street with no cars driving past. With the neighbor kids, she roller-skated and rode go-carts; they had played Chinese jump rope and hopscotch and wandered through the woods. But then the house had turned into an enemy. After months of fighting, her parents had finally separated. Her father suddenly vanished, and Meike’s mother had left her alone with constantly changing au pairs. As she grew older, it had been sheer hell to live in such a stagnant place by the woods in Langenhain, removed from any sort of excitement.

  Meike opened the mailbox, took out a stack of letters, and quickly looked through them. Once in a while, some mail came for her. A note that was stuck between the letters dropped to the floor. Meike bent down and picked it up. It was a page torn out of a calendar.

  Waited until 1:30, she read. Would have liked to see you. My cell battery is dead! Here’s the address. BP knows about it. Call me. K.

  What could this mean? And what was this address in Langensebold?

  Meike’s curiosity was aroused. She would never admit it, but the change that had come over her mother during the past weeks made her mad. Hanna was acting very secretive and refused to tell anyone where she was going or where she’d been. Not even Irina. Was “K” her new boyfriend? And who was BP?

  Meike glanced at her cell phone. It was just a little past eleven. More than enough time to drive over to Langensebold and check out that address.

  * * *

  Bodenstein pressed the button to open the door and stepped into the security screening area. He nodded to the officer on duty, who was sitting in the guard room behind bulletproof glass, to let him out. Pia was already waiting in the car and had the motor running. He got in and sighed with relief. She had gotten hold of an official car with air conditioning, and it was pleasantly cool inside.

  “Do we know anything more?” Bodenstein asked, fumbling with the seat belt.

  “Female body in a car trunk, they said,” Pia replied. She turned left in the direction of the autobahn. “Did everything go all right at your appointment with the notary yesterday?”

  “Yep. The house is sold.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “Amazingly, no. Maybe it will be when we move our stuff out. But if all goes well with the house in Ruppertshain, leaving will be easier.” Bodenstein thought about his meeting with Cosima last night at the notary’s office in Kelkheim. For the first time since their ugly separation almost two years ago, he’d been able to look at her and talk to her rationally, without getting upset. He had no feelings left, either good or bad, for the mother of his three children, and the woman with whom he had spent over half his life. And that was both frightening and a big relief. Maybe this was how they would continue to deal with each other in the future.

  On the drive to Weilbach, he told Pia about the hearing at State Criminal Police headquarters and Behnke’s defeat. The shrill ring of Pia’s cell interrupted him, postponing any decision about whether or not to tell his colleague about the showdown in the corridor between Behnke and Nicola Engel.

  “Can you take this?” Pia asked. “It’s Christoph.”

  Bodenstein answered the phone and then held it up to Pia’s ear.

  “I don’t know how late we’ll be today. We just got called out again, and we’re on our way over there now,” she told Christoph. “Hmm … yes … grilling is perfect. There’s still some pasta salad in the fridge, but if you’re stopping at the store anyway, could you get some detergent? I forgot to write it down.”

  A typical everyday conversation between two people in a relationship, like Bodenstein used to have with Cosima. In the past two years, as he’d gone through a private state of emergency, he’d often missed this feeling of closeness. No matter how much he tried to tell himself that the freedom he now had was an exciting new opportunity, he longed for a real home and another person with whom he could share his life. He wasn’t cut out for living alone for any length of time.

  Pia listened to Christoph for a while, occasionally muttering in agreement, but all of a sudden she smiled in a manner Bodenstein had seldom seen.

  “Okay,” she said, ending the call. “I’ll call you later.”

  Bodenstein turned off the phone and placed it on the center console.

  “Why are you grinning like that?” he asked.

  “Oh, that little girl,” Pia replied lightly without looking at him. “She’s so cute. You wouldn’t believe the things she comes up with.” She turned serious again. “It’s almost a shame that she has to leave so soon.”

  “A couple of days ago, you were singing a different tune,” Bodenstein said, amused. “You were totally worn-out and you were crossing off the days to her departure on your calendar.”

  “You’re right. But in the meantime, we have come to an agreement, Lilly and I,” Pia admitted. “Having a kid like that in the house really does change everything. Most of all, I underestimated the burden of responsibility. Sometimes she’s so independent that I forget how much she still needs to be protected.”

  “You’re right about that,” Bodenstein said with a nod. His youngest daughter had turned four in December, and now that she spent every other weekend with him, or sometimes a couple of days midweek, he noticed how much attention such a small child required, but also how much joy she gave him.

  They left the A66 at the autobahn exit in Hattersheim and turned onto the L3265, heading for Kiesgrube. They could already see the scene of the crime in the distance, because there was a helicopter standing in a meadow, its rotor blades lazily turning in neutral.

  At the edge of a neighboring wheat field, they saw police vehicles, a medical examiner’s car, and an ambulance. Pia slowed down and put on the blinker, but before she could turn onto the dirt road, a uniformed colleague motioned for them to park by the side of the highway. They got out to walk the last fifty yards on foot. A wall of humid heat seemed to slam into Bodenstein as he followed Pia along the narrow grass shoulder; the dirt track had been turned to mud by the thunderstorm and was roped off. The wheat had not survived the previous night unharmed, and the downpour had broken many of the stalks or bent them to the ground.

  “Please go around the outside!” shouted Christian Kröger, pointing toward the field, in which a narrow path was marked with tape fluttering in the wind. The leader of the evidence team and his three colleagues had already put on their white overalls with hoods—not a job to be envied in this searing heat. There was no shade tree anywhere in sight.

  “What have we got?” Bodenstein asked when they reached Kröger.

  “A woman in the trunk of a car, naked and unconscious,” Kröger told them. “Not a pretty sight.”

  “She’s not dead?”

  “You think they send a chopper to take corpses to forensics?” Kröger snapped. “No, she’s still alive. Two people from autobahn maintenance spotted the car from the rest stop and thought it was odd. They drove over here—unfortunately, they didn’t think to take care about destroying evidence.”

  One of the seven deadly sins in Kröger’s eyes. But who apart from a policeman would immediately think of a crime when an empty car was found abandoned in a field?

  “The car wasn’t locked, and the key was in the ignition. And then they found her.”

  In passing, Bodenstein looked into the open trunk of the black Porsche Panamera and saw big dark spots, presumably blood. Two EMTs were busy in the ambulance.

  “The woman was seriously injured,” one of them replied to Bodenstein’s question. “And completely dehydrated. One or two more hours in the closed trunk in this heat and s
he wouldn’t have survived. We’re just trying to get her ready for transport. Her circulation is totally fucked.”

  Bodenstein wasn’t bothered by this rather unprofessional expression. EMTs were front-line fighters, and the crew of a rescue helicopter was bound to see things that were much more gruesome than a normal person could stand. He glanced at the face of the woman, which was disfigured by bruises and lacerations.

  “She was beaten up and raped,” the EMT said soberly. “And very brutally.”

  “My colleague said she was naked,” said Bodenstein.

  “Naked, hands and feet bound with cable, and gagged with a rag,” said the EMT. “What a bunch of bastards.”

  “Boss?”

  Bodenstein turned around.

  “I spoke to the two guys who found the woman,” Pia said in a low voice, stepping into the shade of the ambulance. “They told me that the parking lot behind the rest stop is known in certain circles as a meeting place for people who want to have anonymous sex.”

  “You mean she could have met somebody there and wound up with the wrong guy?” Bodenstein’s eyes swept across the field to the rest stop. There were so many sick and perverted people running around in this world that sometimes he could hardly bear to think about it.

  “It’s possible,” Pia said with a nod. “Our colleagues have checked the license plate. The vehicle is registered to a firm in Frankfurt. Herzmann Productions on Hedderichstrasse. There were no papers or purse in the vehicle. But the name Herzmann sounds familiar.”

  She frowned as she tried to remember.

  Suddenly, the name popped into Bodenstein’s head. He wasn’t a big TV watcher, but maybe he’d read something recently, or maybe it was simply because the alliteration made the name easy to recall.

  “Hanna Herzmann,” he said. “The TV host.”

  * * *

  A bed, a table, a chair, a cabinet of light-colored veneered wood. A small window, barred of course. In the corner, a toilet without a lid, a washbasin, above it a metal mirror. The smell of disinfectant. Eighty-five square feet that would be his whole world for the next three and a half years.

  The heavy door closed with a thud behind him. He was alone. It was so quiet that he could hear his pulse beating in his ears, and the desperate need overcame him to grab his cell phone and call somebody, anybody, just to hear a human voice. But he no longer had a cell phone. Or a computer. Or his own clothes. As of today, he was a man who took orders, a prisoner, completely and utterly at the mercy of the moods and regulations of indifferent guards. He could no longer do what he wanted. The law had taken away his privilege to decide how to spend his time.

  I’ll never be able to stand it, he thought.

  Ever since the day the Criminal Police showed up with a search warrant, tossed his house and office, and confiscated his computer, he’d been in a state of shock. He remembered Britta’s disbelief, the disgust in her eyes when she set his luggage at the door and said she never wanted to see him again. The next day, the temporary injunction was issued that forbade him from seeing his children. Friends, his colleagues, his partner—they had all abandoned him. And finally the police had arrested him. Flight risk and suppression of evidence. Bail denied.

  The weeks that lay behind him, the pretrial custody, the trial itself—it had all seemed utterly unreal to him, a labyrinthine nightmare from which he would eventually awake. When the female judge read the verdict, he realized they were really going to send him to prison for three years. His children, who were more precious to him than anything, would be twelve and ten years old the next time he saw them, but he had still believed he was strong enough to endure all of it. He had kept his composure when they led him in handcuffs from the courtroom through the storm of flashing cameras belonging to the sensation-greedy mob of reporters. He had spent so many years of his life among them, the right side of the law.

  Even the medical exam and the humiliating procedures that stripped away the rights of every new arrival in the joint had failed to provoke any visible agitation from him. When he put on the worn institutional clothing that many other men had worn before him and the guard indifferently stuffed his clothes in a sack and took his wristwatch and briefcase, his mind had still refused to accept the irrevocable nature of his situation.

  He turned around and stared at the scratched cell door. A door with no handle or lock, one that he would never open himself. At that instant, it became bitterly clear that this was now his reality, and he would never awake from this nightmare. His knees went weak; his stomach rebelled. He was suddenly overcome by a naked, panicky fear. Of being alone and helpless. Of the other prisoners. As a convicted child molester, he ranked at the very bottom of the prison hierarchy, and for his own safety they had put him in solitary.

  He had lost all control of his life and couldn’t do a thing about it. His independent life belonged to the past, his marriage was in ruins, and his reputation had been irrevocably destroyed. Everything that had formed his personality and his life, his whole identity, had vanished along with his suit, shirt, and shoes, now consigned to a green clothes sack.

  Starting today, he was nothing but a number. For 1,080 endless days.

  The shrill ring of a bell tore him out of a deep sleep. His heart was pounding, he was soaked with sweat, and it took him a few seconds to understand that he’d been dreaming. This dream, which had not haunted him in ages, was so oppressively real that he could hear the squeaking of the rubber soles on the gray linoleum and smell the unmistakable prison stench of piss, male sweat, food, and disinfectant.

  With a groan, he got up and went to the table to look for his cell phone, whose ringtone had woken him. It was hot and sticky in the trailer. He’d wanted to take only a short nap, but then he’d fallen sound asleep. His eyes burned and his back ached. He’d stayed up until dawn reading through stacks of notebooks and newspaper articles, listening to cassette tapes, poring over reports of conversations, minutes of meetings, and diary entries, taking notes the whole time. It was anything but easy to filter out the most important facts and put them into context.

  He found the cell phone under a pile of paper. Only a couple of calls, but to his surprise not the one he was waiting for so anxiously. With the click of a mouse, he awakened the laptop from standby mode, entered his password, and scanned his in-box. Disappointment flowed through his body like an insidious poison. What was going on? Had he done something wrong?

  He stood up and went to the dresser, where he hesitated a moment before pulling out the drawer. Among the T-shirts he found the photo and took it out. The dark eyes. The blond hair. The sweet smile. He really ought to get rid of the photo, but he just didn’t have the heart to do it. His longing for her hurt like a knife wound. And there was absolutely nothing that could ease the pain.

  * * *

  You have reached your destination, announced the voice of the GPS navigation program. Your destination is on the left.

  Meike stopped the car and looked around helplessly.

  “Where?” she murmured, taking off her sunglasses. She was in the middle of a forest. After the glaring sunshine, she could see nothing but trees and underbrush, a thick, dark green, here and there dappled with golden patches of sun. Then she noticed a gravel road and a tin mailbox like the ones in American movies. Refusing to be deterred, Meike put on the blinker, turned, and jolted along the winding forest road. The tense feeling grew. Who was BP? And who was K? What awaited her at the end of the forest road? She passed the last rows of trees. Bright light nearly blinded her. Around a curve, a veritable fortress unexpectedly appeared. A metal gate with surveillance cameras, an opaque fence crowned with a razor-wire barrier. Signs warned the uninvited visitor of the danger of guard dogs, high voltage, and land mines.

  What the hell was all this? A paramilitary off-limits area in the middle of Main-Kinzig county? What kind of story was her mother chasing? Meike shifted into reverse and backed down the gravel road the way she had come until she reached a fork in the road. T
he other track looked like it was seldom used, but it led in the direction she wanted to go. When she was far enough off the main highway that nobody could see her conspicuous red car, she got out the binoculars from the glove box, closed the sunroof, and continued on foot. After about fifty yards, the track ended. Meike kept to the right and soon reached the edge of the woods. The metal gate was quite a ways off, but here she was out of sight of the cameras that were located above the gate. A short distance farther on, Meike spied a raised blind on the edge of a Christmas-tree farm. Luckily, she was wearing jeans and running shoes, because the stinging nettles and thistles were over three feet tall. The blind looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time; the wooden rungs of the ladder were covered with moss. Meike felt her way cautiously up the ladder, trying out the stability of the wooden seat at the top before she sat down on it. She had a perfect view from up here.

  She adjusted the focus of her binoculars and found herself looking at a building. In front of the open gates, there were at least twenty motorcycles, heavy machines with flashing chrome, mostly Harley-Davidsons, but also two or three Royal Enfields. Next to them, separated by a chain-link fence, was a junkyard in which piles of motorcycle and auto parts, tires, and oil drums were stored. In the shade of a huge chestnut tree next to the building stood tables and benches. A swing barbecue grill was smoking, but not a soul was in sight. On the other side of the big courtyard, the guard dogs advertised on the warning signs were dozing in the sun inside caged dog runs.

  Except for the distant drone of a prop plane, it was completely quiet. Honeybees and bumblebees buzzed in the surrounding thickets, and deep in the forest a cuckoo called.

  From her elevated vantage point, Meike inspected the rest of the gigantic fenced area. Between tall trees stood a residence, surrounded by a well-tended garden with carefully trimmed bushes, blooming flower beds, and emerald green lawns. A little way from the terrace, the blue water of a swimming pool glittered, and farther back in the yard was a children’s playground with swings, sandboxes, jungle gyms, and a slide. A peaceful paradise among razor-wire fences, big motorcycles, and aggressive attack dogs. Very strange. What was this place?