Nemesis: Innocence Sold

by Ross, Stefanie

  While Sandra took care of the mother and daughter, Pat gave Daniel a reproachful look. “Damned risky game, Doc.”

  “As if you wouldn’t have done the same.” They exchanged grins. “Search him.”

  “Already on it,” said Pat as he threw Daniel an object the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “External hard drive. We should take a look at the contents before we turn it over to Sandy’s colleagues.” Next, a wallet appeared. “Hartmut Reher. No pleasure to have made your acquaintance,” Daniel told him and threw the wallet on the ground.

  He and Pat reached for their weapons when the door of the building was unexpectedly jerked open and two uniformed police officers stormed into the hall.

  Sandra’s voice once again had an overtone of command that Daniel recognized. “LKA. The situation’s under control.”

  “Oh, shit. Looks like some monkeys escaped from the zoo,” Pat whispered to Daniel, keeping his Sig in his hand. The Irishman immediately understood Daniel’s impatient look. “They already took on Dirk when he wanted to go see Tim. Incompetent fools.” Pat paused. “Or worse: corrupt pigs. Look behind them, twelve o’clock.”

  With her identification in her hand, Sandra was talking to the two policemen, who had made no moves to lower their weapons, becoming increasingly angry.

  Quickly, Daniel followed Pat’s prompting and caught a glimpse of the profile of a blond man who had observed them attentively through the open door while speaking on his phone and now turned away very fast.

  “I’ve had enough,” Daniel said. “Get lost, we’ll meet at your place.”

  When Pat hesitated, offended, Daniel relented. “And thanks for your perfect timing. I’m just really mad because of these two sons of bitches. It’s unbelievable.

  “Stop it now,” he said to the policemen in his best officer’s tone, and they were silent for seconds. “Sandra, please look around upstairs,” he said in a considerably more friendly tone before he again turned to the two policemen. “If you haven’t done so already, call the crime scene unit and an ambulance for the girl. Otherwise, keep your mouths shut. What’s this all about? I feel damned inclined to agree with my friend’s assessment.” When neither policeman responded, Daniel glared at the two men. “Put your weapons away now, or I’m going to get seriously angry!” Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Pat leave. It would have been a nightmare if Pat had had to identify himself as a member of the Navy to an overzealous policeman.

  “You can . . . ,” the older man began, but the younger man grabbed his arm.

  “Leave it. I can already hear the cavalry. This was just a misunderstanding. May I ask who you are? A colleague?”

  “Eddings, LKA,” Daniel said, listening to the sirens grow louder. Not much time had passed since Sandra had placed the emergency call, and he wondered how these two jokers had reached the scene so quickly. His mood was still at a low point when an Opel with police lights stopped directly in front of the door to the building. Mario Berger jumped out. His surprise at seeing Daniel was evident.

  “Stroll through the old town?”

  Daniel lacked the patience for banter. “On the fourth floor you’ll find a photographer, Skolaski. We wanted to speak to him about photos of Tim, the son of Dirk Richter. When we arrived, a man, presumably Skolaski, lay dead in his apartment. The presumed murderer attacked us and eventually took a girl hostage but finally got the short end of the stick, as you can see. However, I have the impression that your very capable colleagues would have loved to have shot Ms. Meinke and me, if there hadn’t been witnesses.” He gestured toward the mother and child as well as an elderly lady who had been watching from the stairwell for some time.

  The officer was silent, and nothing remained of his previously humorous manner. The white-haired lady hurried to Berger with her walking stick in her hand. “Are you in charge here? This is a scandal. Those two degenerate airheads in uniform treated the people who saved Sulay’s life like criminals.” She raised her stick, narrowly missing Berger’s chin, and pointed to the stairs. “I saw everything from up there because I was waiting for Sulay. And I can describe to you in detail how the young man and his red-haired friend saved the day with great skill. And I watch enough crime dramas to know what a risk he took. His young lady was completely pale while he provoked that gaunt product of a failing society until he was attacked himself and Sulay was finally safe.”

  Berger’s smile returned. “You weren’t a teacher by any chance?” he asked with amusement.

  “Elisabeth Koch. Forty-five years of German and social studies. Why do you ask, young man?”

  “Because you remind me of my aunt and the expression degenerate airheads, while it may be accurate, is fairly unusual. Where’s your red-haired friend, by the way?” he asked Daniel.

  Daniel shrugged and wisely abstained from answering.

  Sighing, Berger again turned his attention to the former teacher. “Captain Mario Berger of the Lübeck District Office of Criminal Inspection, Ms. Koch. I will take charge of this case, and it will be a pleasure for me to take your statement personally afterward. No need for concern; I appreciate the actions of my two colleagues and will take the time to deal with the behavior of certain other colleagues.” He looked coldly at the two uniformed men. “You will have to answer some questions, gentlemen. Plainclothes last time, now in uniform? I’m curious to hear the explanation for that and to find out why you always show up and act as if colleagues were the real criminals. Get out of here before I have you arrested. If I need you, I’ll know where to find you.” The threat was understood; the younger man had beads of sweat on his forehead, and he seemed to want to say something, but he was prevented from doing so by his partner. “A classic misunderstanding, one I would say is understandable given the behavior of these Rambos.”

  The policemen turned away, and the younger one seemed seriously worried—and he had good reason to be. Berger understood Daniel’s look correctly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get them. They did have a reasonable explanation for what happened at the hospital, but for this they don’t.”

  Daniel didn’t respond, although he could have said a few things about the Lübeck police and Berger’s dubious behavior. Rage at the superfluous games flared in him again. He had to make an effort to calmly return Berger’s gaze. Once again, the Lübeck captain seemed to see through him. “The required formalities would be the last straw for you, right? If you like, you can give me your statements later. As far as I’m concerned, you can do it by e-mail. There are enough witnesses, and thanks to your report I have an overview. Where’s Ms. Meinke? In the apartment?”

  “No, here,” Sandra said, pushing past the former teacher. Although she was quite pale, she smiled at Berger and held up a pair of plastic gloves. “The crime scene’s unaltered; I just took a quick look around. There are traces of cocaine or a similar substance on the kitchen table, but otherwise there’s nothing remarkable other than a completely smashed laptop. I don’t think the technicians will be able to save anything there.”

  Daniel thought of the hard drive in his jacket pocket, and the hate-filled face of their captive spoke volumes. Grinning, Daniel looked down at him. “Another round?” he said, satisfied when Reher looked away with a trace of panic. He had withheld that Pat had found something on him.

  There were a number of emergency vehicles parked around the building; it was time to disappear, before the press showed up. “We’d like to accept your offer and will send you our statements by e-mail. It’s getting to be too much for me here,” Daniel said.

  “Good—you do that. But we should talk in private as soon as possible.”

  That sounded somewhat like a threat, thought it seemed more curious and hopeful. “We’d be happy to,” Daniel said. “But no more games. If we’re going to talk, then no more wasting time.”

  Berger nodded. “You’ll hear from me.”

  After the stuffy air in the old-town building, even the narrow alley, full as it was with parked police vehicle
s, seemed like a release. A uniformed policeman who tried to stop them apologized after looking at their LKA identification cards and held the cordon tape up for Sandra so she could pass under it.

  “Once the machinery has been started up, it does work,” Sandra said. “The van belongs to the crime scene unit, and the gray one over there is from the coroner’s office. The things look the same everywhere. What did Pat pass off to you?”

  “Pass off? Come on, that was a straightforward confiscation of evidentiary material. We just circumvent normal channels in order to get results quicker. A hard drive.”

  “I guess this is what Stephan meant by idiosyncratic behavior I should ignore.”

  “Why? Are you planning to arrest me for it?” he said.

  Although he could tell Sandra was seething, she waited until they had gone around the next corner and were back on the Upper Trave. Taking a big step, she passed him, whirled around, and blocked his path. “I just wanted to know what it was. Have I criticized you or attacked you? Actually, I was going to tell you what a stroke of genius I thought your plan was, although I was so afraid for you that I couldn’t breathe. That was pretty close.”

  “Sorry. I overreacted with Pat just now, too.”

  “What’s wrong with you? If I’ve done something wrong, then please tell me. Is it because I didn’t fire earlier?”

  Daniel had to think for a moment before he realized that Sandra was referencing how the guy had gotten past her. “No. I wouldn’t have fired, either. The guy appeared to be unarmed and was fleeing. I have no idea about German law, but I don’t fire in a situation like that.”

  “So what is it?”

  The blue sky and the panoramic view of the renovated old-town buildings reflected in the surface of the Upper Trave in front of them conjured up the ambience of a travel brochure but didn’t help Daniel get a grip on his mood. Looking for a distraction, he pointed to some tables and umbrellas set up on the bank. “Back there’s the Italian restaurant I mentioned earlier. Are you still hungry, or has all this crap spoiled your appetite?”

  “Do you mean the sight of the body or the girl being taken hostage? Don’t forget that I’m a policewoman. I’m about to starve, but if your mood doesn’t change soon, you’ll be sitting at the next table. Or, better yet, on the other side of the Trave.”

  Before Daniel could respond, a man emerged from the shadow of a building entrance with a quiet laugh. “Of course I could go on listening to you for hours, but I’m hungry, too. Is there any reason we shouldn’t eat with Maria? Otherwise you can take this bank, and we’ll take the other.” Pat laid a friendly arm around Sandra’s shoulder. “Pat O’Reilly, as you’ve no doubt already heard. Don’t let yourself get infected by Doc’s mood. We’re already familiar with it. He’s allergic to long discussions or superfluous games; they usually give him a pronounced bad mood.”

  Daniel fought the temptation to tell Pat off. “Of course Maria can eat with us. She’s familiar with the case, anyway.” The Irishman’s blue eyes glittered with pleasure, and Daniel groaned inside. When the next opportunity presented itself, he would hear it over how he had failed to notice Pat’s presence. “By the way, why’d you show up earlier?”

  Pat pointed to a balcony. “Because I saw you from up there and thought a little backup couldn’t hurt. I had a bad feeling.” He grinned at Sandra. “An inheritance from my Irish grandmother upon which I can usually depend. Now, for example, it’s telling me I’ll have trouble with Doc if I don’t remove my hand from your shoulder, but it’s worth it.”

  Sandra laughed and nuzzled against Pat. “I’ll protect you. If necessary, I’ll just arrest him.”

  “Damn it, you’ve only known each other a few minutes—you don’t have to stick to each other like barnacles,” Daniel said, feeling jealous, but his good humor returned when he saw Maria, who waved at them from their usual table. He could play at this game, too. “Keep him, Sandy. As a doctor, Maria is much too good for Pat, anyway. I’ve always said that she and I were a much better match.”

  He liked the two outraged snorts he heard in response. The meal would be nice and distracting for him. There was just one more piece of unpleasant business to take care of. “Wait with the next round until I’ve brought Dirk and Sven up to speed.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Dirk hoped his sunglasses hid his swelling rage at least to some extent, but if he was interpreting Sven’s concerned look correctly, his partner had already seen through him.

  “It sounded like Doc was in a pretty bad mood,” he said, making an evasive maneuver on the road, changing lanes to pass a slow-moving vehicle. There were still some miles of autobahn in front of them before they reached the famous arched bridge that would bring them to the island.

  “That’s nothing new. Such things always cause our medical expert to grind his teeth. For him it always has to be nice and straightforward, preferably black and white.”

  “Someone should explain to our California beach boy that that’s not how it works.”

  “He knows that—he’s not stupid—which is probably what makes him so angry. Why are you putting yourself through this crap? I can tell you’d like to kill somebody.”

  “I would, but I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to start with Berger or Röhrich. Maybe those two apes who are inexplicably allowed to call themselves police officers.”

  Dirk’s hope that his partner would be satisfied with this explanation died when Sven loosened his seat belt, turned to him, and said, “I can understand that, and I’ll spare you a lecture about self-control and so on. We could have taken care of our inquiry regarding the halfhearted missing-persons report by phone, and I don’t expect to get anything out of doing it in person. Are you expecting them to confess that they screwed up? That will never happen. Why do you want to make yourself go through confronting the parents of the boy? I don’t have the slightest desire to meet them, and I’d have expected you’d have felt similarly about that—maybe even worse.”

  Ignoring the speed limit, Dirk pushed the accelerator all the way down. The Audi sped up greatly, and Dirk suppressed the thought of the unmarked cars that carried out daily radar speed checks on this stretch of road. “I’ve long ago learned to live with the possibility that I, or one of us, could get killed, though I hope we never experience that. But no one attacks my family, Sven. Whiskey has not helped me deal with my fears about Tim, but I have realized I need the good feeling of having put the people responsible out of action. Take a look at the desks in stations and detectives’ offices. Police work’s degenerating more and more into administrative tasks, and the number of cases that get solved is decreasing steadily.”

  When his friend gave signs of protest, Dirk raised his hand. “Forget it. I know what you want to say. Thanks to Tannhäuser, we have a comfortable special status, and that does not apply to us. But Eric’s parents are not going to know that. I’m not sure whether it will help them . . . whether Eric’s father thinks the way I do at all, but I want to give him the feeling that I’ll dedicate myself to the case 100 percent, regardless of what it costs and how long it takes. We have some clues, and although I don’t have an overview yet, I know you’ll see through the chaos. This is all I have for the parents. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, and I’d never be able to communicate it over the phone.”

  Rubbing his eyes, Sven leaned back again, and Dirk heaved a sigh of relief when he was no longer subjected to his friend’s penetrating gaze. There were a lot of advantages but also a few disadvantages to their blind understanding of each other.

  Sven nodded. “You’re right. I could have thought of that myself. None of us have slept very well since the thing with Tim, and you know that I . . . But Mark . . . You and he . . .” Sven cursed.

  Dirk waved a hand. “I know you’d have been there for me, too.”

  “All right. At this speed, we should be there in under twenty minutes. I’ll turn on the navigation system. The route description sounds like ‘keep going s
traight, and turn left at the city park,’ but the devil’s in the details.”

  Sven’s calculation was accurate; not fifteen minutes later, Dirk stopped the Audi in front of the central police station in Burg on Fehmarn. “Emergency Vehicles. That’s sure to mean us, right?” he asked, squeezing the Audi into a narrow parking space between two patrol cars.

  The reception they received from their colleagues was cool, but they had expected that. After a discussion between two plainclothes officers and a brief phone call, one of them, with a forced smile, came over to them. “Please come through with me. Ms. Liebe will make time for you.”

  Neither Dirk nor Sven reacted to the obvious implied reproach that they were wasting their colleagues’ time. They followed the policeman into an office in which no one was present but which deviated from the standard public-agency look due to the skilled placement of a few personal objects. Dirk looked at a paper flower with fringed ends that had obviously been cut out by a child and was stuck to the monitor with tape. He could almost see his own son concentrating and struggling with a sheet of paper and scissors. When he also discovered the pictures of two preschool-age girls on the desk, his decision was made. Discussion with Sven was superfluous. The same thoughts had occurred to his friend; he was already nodding and looking at the child’s drawing of a sailboat on the wall.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, and a few seconds later the door opened. A woman in her forties balanced a tray with a thermos and some cups and closed the door behind her with a well-aimed kick.

  “Hello. Captain Angela Liebe. So now we are also getting important visitors from Hamburg because of Eric. Sit down. Do you like tea? Black, fresh brewed, not crap in a bag. You’ll have to get your own coffee; I don’t drink it anymore. What brings you to our island?”

  Dirk didn’t have to force himself to smile. The woman’s direct and unceremonious manner appealed to him; the uncomfortable chair in front of the desk appealed to him less. Nevertheless, he sat down and suppressed a grin when Sven also had difficulty finding a reasonably comfortable position for his legs.