Bad Wolf

by Nele Neuhaus

  “How could that happen?” Pia asked.

  “I was a blue-eyed boy in the true sense of the word.” He smiled a little, but the smile vanished a moment later. “I trusted the wrong people and I felt too safe. They put knockout drops in my drink. Twenty-four hours later, I woke up in my car after a total blackout. While I was unconscious, they put me in a bed with naked children and took pictures. This is the usual way they keep difficult people in check. I know of two employees of the Youth Welfare Department who had the same thing happen to them. Also a teacher who wanted to report his suspicions that a pupil was being abused, and at least three others. Nobody has a chance, because these men have connections in government ministries, business, politics, and even the police. They provide cover for one another, and not only in Germany. It’s an international operation, and there’s a lot of money at stake.”

  He pensively studied his injured right hand, turning it back and forth.

  “When the girl was found dead in the river a few weeks ago, Michaela finally wanted to talk. Bernd called me up and I immediately agreed to work with them. I had nothing more to lose, but there was a small chance I might be able to redeem myself if we could prove everything in public. Through Michaela’s therapist, Leonie, we were put in contact with Hanna Herzmann. She was excited about the possibility of getting such an explosive topic for her show. And although we warned her, she obviously underestimated the danger of these men. Just as I did. She told her old childhood friend Wolfgang Matern about it. He’s the CEO of Herzmann Productions.” Rothemund sighed. “Hanna didn’t have the slightest idea that Wolfgang Matern’s father, Hartmut, was involved in the abuse. Naturally, I knew that he owned the TV station, so I purposely didn’t include his name on the list. I didn’t want to put Hanna into a conflict-of-interest situation. Besides, at first I wasn’t sure whether she could be trusted. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that she was such close friends with Wolfgang Matern and would tell him all the details.”

  “You mean that Wolfgang Matern attacked Hanna Herzmann?” Pia asked him.

  “No, certainly not in person. I think that Helmut Grasser was the one who assaulted her. And who killed Leonie. You can’t intimidate women with compromising photos or videos. These criminals use different tactics with women than with men.”

  Pia remembered the car with the local license plates that Leonie Verges’s neighbor had seen several times in the vicinity of her house. It was registered to the Sonnenkinder Association.

  “This Sonnenkinder group,” Bodenstein said, “does it really do anything for mothers and children, or is it purely a front organization?”

  “Oh, no, they do quite a lot,” replied Kilian Rothemund. “It’s actually an excellent program. They support the education of young mothers and provide scholarships for children and teenagers. But there are also children who officially don’t exist. Young mothers disappear right after they give birth and leave their babies behind because they think the children will be in good hands. Finkbeiner also likes to bring in orphans from the Far East and Eastern Europe. They aren’t reported here; they simply don’t exist, and no one misses them. They are fodder for the pedophiles. Michaela knew all about it, and she called them the ‘lost kids.’ It’s simply incomprehensible what is done to them. When the kids get too old and are no longer attractive to the pedophiles, they’re passed on to pimps or simply disposed of.”

  Pia thought of the artist’s renderings that they’d had done with the help of the witness from Höchst. She excused herself, went to her office, and returned with the printouts.

  “Do you know these two?” she asked Rothemund.

  A fleeting glance was enough.

  “The man is Helmut Grasser,” he said. “And the woman is Corinna Wiesner, also an adopted child of the Finkbeiners, just like her husband, Ralf Wiesner, the director of Finkbeiner Holding Company. He and Corinna are probably the most loyal soldiers in Finkbeiner’s underground army. Officially, she is administrative director of the Sonnenkinder Association, but in reality she’s the leader of the ‘secret police’ of the ring. She knows about everything, and she’s ice-cold and absolutely ruthless.”

  * * *

  Helmut Grasser talked for fifteen minutes, his words spilling out like a waterfall. Thankful at last to have such an attentive audience, he told them about a sad, loveless childhood in various foster families, and a mentally ill mother who had rejected him as the unwanted product of a rape. She was only sixteen when he was born. The Youth Welfare authorities had eventually contacted the Finkbeiners, and there he had experienced for the first time in his life something like affection and care, and yet he would always remain a second-class child. Because his mother was alive, the Finkbeiners had not adopted him or taken him as a foster child. He had grown up in the orphanage at the Sonnenkinder Association, and he’d done everything he could to win acceptance because he so wanted to belong to the family. But the Finkbeiner children, who were younger than he was, had looked down on him. They shamelessly exploited his efforts to gain their favor and constantly made fun of him.

  Grasser was not married. He lived with his mother in one of the houses on the Finkbeiner estate in Falkenstein, right next door to the people he’d worshiped for thirty years. And they had never stopped exploiting his devotion for their own purposes.

  “Okay,” Bodenstein finally interjected. “What about Hanna Herzmann and Leonie Verges?”

  “I was supposed to scare the Herzmann woman so that she’d stop sniffing around,” Grasser admitted. “The whole thing got a bit out of hand.”

  “‘A bit out of hand’?” Bodenstein said, raising his voice. “You bestially tortured a woman and almost killed her! And then you left her in the car trunk, and with that you became an accomplice to attempted murder!”

  “I only did what they asked me to do,” he said defensively, and in his deep brown eyes lurked a trace of self-pity. According to his logic, he didn’t view himself as a perpetrator, but a victim. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Everyone always has a choice,” Bodenstein shot back. “Who demanded that you do such a thing?”

  Grasser was intelligent enough to acknowledge his dependence on the Finkbeiners and to recognize the constant humiliations he had endured. But he was too weak-willed to free himself from them. He justified his actions to himself by saying that he was only following orders. After being ridiculed all his life, he sought revenge for his hurt pride by attacking those weaker than himself.

  “Who demanded that you do that?” Bodenstein repeated.

  Grasser realized that lying would do no good, so he seized the opportunity to pay back his oppressors at last.

  “Corinna Wiesner. She’s my immediate boss. I do what she tells me, and I don’t ask questions.”

  Pia’s phone started buzzing. She glanced quickly at the display. It was Hans Georg’s number, the farmer from Liederbach who always pressed the hay for her horses. He probably wanted to tell her that he’d finished mowing. It could wait.

  “Did Corinna also order you to film your attack on Hanna Herzmann? And did she order you to let Leonie Verges die of thirst and to film that, too?” Bodenstein asked caustically.

  “Not directly,” Grasser said evasively. “She didn’t tell me exactly what to do.”

  “Then what are you talking about?” Bodenstein leaned forward. “You just said you would do what people tell you to do!”

  “Well…” Grasser shrugged. “I was just told that this and that had to be done. But how I did it was up to me.”

  “What does that mean, specifically?”

  “I came up with the idea of pretending to be cops.” Grasser seemed almost proud of himself. “I ordered all the stuff on the Internet; it’s a great con. And it works every time. Sometimes we do it just for fun, making some money.”

  “What about taking the videos?” Pia asked.

  “There are plenty of people who are into that stuff,” he said.

  “What stuff?”

  “You kno
w, watching somebody die. The real thing, not faked.” Grasser was completely unmoved. “For a video like the one showing the TV bitch, you could get a cool two grand.”

  Kröger had already told them about the so-called snuff movies. Pia herself had never seen one, but she knew that online in IRC chats, Usenet forums, in closed user groups, videos were offered that apparently showed genuine murders in full-length features, often as the perverse climax of the worst hard-core pornographic scenes, but there were also executions, torture, murders of babies and children in the context of child pornography.

  Grasser described the details of his sickening deeds with such relish that Pia felt ill. He seemed to her like a horny gorilla pounding on his chest with his fists.

  “Just stick to the facts,” she said, interrupting his description of the attack on Hanna Herzmann. “What about the girl? How did she end up in the river?”

  “Don’t rush me. One thing at a time,” said Grasser, enjoying being the center of attention for once. His life had otherwise been spent playing a minor role.

  Pia pretended she was getting a phone call and left the interview room. The way this jerk was gaping at her, steadily undressing her with his eyes, was just too much to take after all she’d been through today.

  Outside, she leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, and breathed calmly in and out so as not to hyperventilate. How could there be such revolting, sick people in the world?

  “Hey, is everything all right?” said Christian Kröger, coming out of the listening room between the interview rooms. It had a one-way mirror and was used to observe interrogation sessions. Pia opened her eyes and looked into his worried face.

  “I couldn’t stand looking at that asshole one second longer,” she blurted out. “A team of horses couldn’t get me back in there.”

  “Let me take over.” Christian patted her arm sympathetically. “The others are in the listening room. Go in there and join them.”

  Pia exhaled deeply.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Have you eaten anything today?” Christian asked.

  “No. I’ll grab something later.” Pia managed a smile. “I hope this whole thing will be over soon.”

  She went in to join Kai, Cem, and Kathrin and sat down on a chair. Helmut Grasser let loose a couple of obscene remarks from his vast storehouse as Christian came into the interview room and took up a position behind Grasser’s chair.

  “Get to the point, you sick little fuck,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to get another electroshock treatment.”

  The smug grin on Grasser’s face vanished.

  “Did you hear that? He’s threatening to torture me!” he complained.

  “I didn’t hear a thing.” Bodenstein didn’t bat an eye. “We were discussing the girl. Please continue.”

  Grasser gave Kröger a dark look.

  “Oksana, that stupid slut,” he said, “she kept running away. I was always the one who had to do the dirty work, and I got shit if the little bitches made trouble. Somehow she made it downtown, so we had to pretend we were her parents.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Bodenstein asked.

  “Corinna and me,” said Grasser.

  “Where did the girl run away from?”

  “From the palace.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Helmut Grasser gave him a surly look, but then he began talking again. The catacombs of the Palais Ettringhausen in Höchst, which belonged to the Finkbeiner Foundation, housed the cellars where the abuse took place and the videos were shot. They sold like hotcakes all over the world. The children were normally kept in Falkenstein, but some of them were always in Höchst, to “be available.”

  Just this expression made cold shivers run down Pia’s back.

  Oksana, Grasser explained, was actually too old for the needs of the pedophile men, but for some reason, the boss was crazy about her. One evening, she provoked his wrath by refusing to do what he ordered.

  “As long as they’re small, they’re easy to intimidate,” Grasser said as blithely as if he were talking about animals. “When they’re older, they get devious and sly, those little beasts. Then you sometimes have to take more drastic measures.”

  Pia turned away and buried her face in her hands.

  “I can’t take any more of this,” she muttered.

  “Me, neither,” said Cem dully. “I have two daughters. I don’t dare think about them.”

  “Oksana was tough; these Russian girls often are. Something in their genes,” Helmut Grasser’s voice said through the loudspeakers. “The boss had beaten her until she could hardly breathe; then he held her under in the Jacuzzi. A little too long, I guess. It was an accident.”

  He shrugged.

  “And then what?” Bodenstein’s face remained impassive.

  “Once in a while, one of them doesn’t survive. It happens. I was supposed to get rid of her that same evening,” replied Grasser. “But I was a little behind schedule, so I tossed her in the river.”

  “Unbelievable. Because he was a little behind schedule!” Kathrin muttered.

  “It’s lucky that he was,” Cem said cynically. “Otherwise, no one would ever have known what was happening.”

  “My God,” was all Pia said. Cem was right. Yet the discovery of the dead girl had been the trigger for a whole series of tragedies that they hadn’t been able to prevent. If the witness had called in earlier, if she’d seen the photo of Oksana in the paper and not first on Germany’s Most Wanted, then perhaps Hanna Herzmann wouldn’t have been attacked, Leonie Verges might still be alive, and Michaela Prinzler might not have shot two people to death.

  Could have, would have, if only.

  “Would you please answer your cell?” said Kathrin, because Pia’s phone kept humming and buzzing.

  “Later. It’s not that important,” Pia replied, leaning forward because Bodenstein had shoved a photo across the table toward Grasser.

  “What is this?” he asked. “We found it in the girl’s stomach.”

  “Hmm. Looks like a piece of a T-shirt. The boss likes the girls to wear these pink shirts, especially when they’re a bit older. It makes them look younger.”

  “We found the fabric in the child’s stomach,” Bodenstein repeated.

  “Maybe she ate it. We always kept her hungry, or she’d get too insolent.”

  Cem gasped for air.

  “All this can’t really be true, can it?” Pia was stunned. “No human being could do these things.”

  “Yes, they can.” Kai nodded. “Unfortunately. Just think about the guards in the concentration camps. They would go home in the evening and behave like completely normal family men after driving people into the gas chambers all day long.”

  “I’d like to do the same thing to these guys,” Cem grumbled. “But someone like Grasser probably won’t even be sent to prison. He’ll end up in the loony bin, because he had a difficult childhood. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Again, Pia’s cell buzzed. She turned it off

  “Did you do all this by yourself, or did you have help?” Christian was asking on the other side of the mirror.

  “Occasionally, I take somebody with me,” Grasser said. “With the TV bitch, the boss even came along. I took Andi with me to deal with Leonie; usually, he’s only allowed to drive the kids around.”

  “So, the boss himself was there,” Kröger repeated. “Isn’t he a little old for … field work?”

  “‘Field work.’” Grasser chortled in amusement. “I like that. But what do you mean ‘old’? He isn’t much older than you are.”

  “We’re talking about Josef Finkbeiner, aren’t we?” Bodenstein asked.

  “Oh, no, Josef doesn’t do it anymore.” Grasser dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “He might paw a kid once in a while, whatever he can get his fingers on. No, Nicky is the boss.”

  “Nicky?” Bodenstein and Kröger asked simultaneously. “Who’s that?”

  Grasse
r looked at them in surprise, then grinned and leaned back.

  “You already arrested him,” he said. “I just saw him walk past in the hallway.”

  “Who is Nicky?” Bodenstein asked angrily, having lost his patience. He slammed his palm on the table.

  “Well, you guys aren’t very smart, are you?” Helmut Grasser shook his head, not the least bit intimidated. “Nicky’s real name is Markus Maria Frey.”

  * * *

  “We need arrest warrants at once for Frey and Corinna Wiesner,” said Bodenstein. “I want an immediate all-points bulletin sent out. He can’t have gotten too far.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Kai Ostermann with a nod.

  When they confirmed that Chief State Attorney Frey had flown the coop, Bodenstein had called all members of K-11 to the waiting room behind the watch room. They were joined by a few colleagues from other departments as well as those officers who were already off duty but had been summoned back to work.

  “Who saw Frey last?” Bodenstein asked.

  “He left the building at four thirty-six, supposedly because he wanted to get his cell phone from his car,” said the officer who had been on watch at the door.

  “Okay,” said Bodenstein, checking his watch. “It’s six forty-two now. That means he has a good two-hour head start.”

  He clapped his hands.

  “Let’s go, people. Let’s get to work!” he shouted. “There’s no time to waste. Frey will try to get rid of any evidence. I want a search warrant for the Palais Ettringhausen and for all locations of the Sonnenkinder Association, as well as for the private residences of Grasser, Wiesner, and Frey. For the search in Höchst, we’ll need the Special Assignment Unit, a hundred men, and, in the event Frey goes on the run, a helicopter. Our colleagues from the River Police have to be informed, too.”

  Pia was sitting on a chair by the wall, completely stunned. The voices around her were only a distant rumble in her ears.