Straight into Darkness

by Faye Kellerman

  “A day later Marlena Druer was found dead. Looking through her belongings, we found a letter signed by a man named Robert. We went to the address written on the stationery. A Robert Schick had once lived there, but no one was in the unit when we came.”

  “He had moved out.”

  “Yes. And he left no forwarding address.”

  “Continue.”

  “As we were leaving, an American journalist living across from Schick poked his head out of his room. He told us that the apartment we thought belonged to Schick was rented to a so-called English aristocrat named Robert Hurlbutt. The building wasn’t a tenement, sir, but no real aristocrat would ever live in such a flat.”

  “Obviously, we have a Hochstapler.”

  “Yes, but not completely. Ulrich was looking up citizens’ records before the riots broke out. He found a promising family. The man was an antique dealer by trade but was also a minor attaché for the Russian diplomatic corps. His name was Dirk Schick, and he was married to a woman named Della Weiss who was born in Boston. They had one son named Rupert—”

  “Aha!” Volker interrupted. “This is the man. Bring him in!”

  Berg stared at him in disbelief. “I would bring him in, Kommissar, if I could find him. It would help if I could sift through the records without being pestered by civil servants. It might give me a clue to his current place of residence.”

  “They wouldn’t be civil servants if they didn’t pester you. Sit down, Berg. You’re making me strain my neck to look up.”

  Berg sat.

  Volker said, “How is Rupert Schick tied in to the Mayrhofer mother and daughter?”

  Here Berg paused. “I don’t know if he is. I haven’t spoken to the family yet.” He checked his pocket watch. It was close to eight. “I have several things I need to investigate. I’d like to go over to the crime scene and look for any leftover evidence before the ground is completely destroyed by pedestrians. Afterward, I could go over and talk to the victim’s sister. It would be nice to find out if there is a connection between her and Schick.”

  “All right.” Volker started patting his coat pocket. “Look over the crime scene, then speak with the family. I want you to find out as much as you can about the victims, especially the mother. I want to know the woman’s friends, her enemies, her habits . . . everything about her. See if you can find a connection between the latest murders and the earlier ones.”

  “I will do my best.”

  “I don’t care about your best! I want results! These latest ones may be chance murders, you know, not at all connected to the earlier ones. The victims were murdered in daylight and were slain by bludgeoning, not by strangulation. It doesn’t appear that Frau Mayrhofer was a woman of means, and this time the fiend attacked and killed a child.”

  “Regina Gottlieb wasn’t a woman of means, either.”

  “But she was dressed in finery. Did you see Edith’s frock?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Rather plain in comparison.”

  “The sensible brown wool dress.”

  “Exactly my point, Axel. It was hardly silk and lace.”

  “One of her boots was gone. A missing article of apparel is consistent with the other murdered victims.”

  “Yes, but some other lunatic could be copying the first murders.”

  “How would he know about the missing shoe?”

  “Because there are always idiots in the department who talk too much. How many confessions have we gotten so far for these crimes?”

  “Four.”

  “Who investigated the claims?”

  “I believe Kalmer and Messersmit. The claims were investigated and proved to be false.”

  “What did I tell you? The world is filled with lunatics. Somehow they all end up in Munich.” Volker took out a tin of Grathmohl cigarettes, lit two, and offered one to his Inspektor. Berg wondered what had happened to the Kommissar’s custom-made sterling silver cigarette case with the hand-rolled smokes. Perhaps Volker was annoyed with him and felt that he didn’t merit such a luxury.

  “Danke.” Berg inhaled deeply.

  “Bitte.” Volker coughed. “While you’re looking over the crime scene and talking to the family, I will try to clear you with Records. Although the clerks won’t take kindly to your prying. So be it. We need to find this bastard!”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You damn well should thank me.” Volker exhaled a plume of smoke and rolled his eyes. “Working around the German bureaucracy is worse than the trenches.”

  Berg smiled.

  “I’m serious!” Volker stated. “Now leave before my overwhelming desire to shoot someone is taken out on you.”

  Berg dropped the grin. Volker was serious about that as well.

  FORTY-TWO

  The patch of death looked as ordinary as its surroundings, bare and stark and covered with the brown detritus of wet, decomposed leaves. The sycamores were beginning to green, and the tender shoots of crocuses poked through the ground. Officially, spring was still several weeks away, but nature ran on its own calendar.

  This particular copse was off the footpath that hugged the Kleinhesseloher See at the northern end of the Englischer Garten. The wide and beautiful lake, constructed more than a century ago, was calm and majestic, filled with squawking ducks and honking geese. When the Great Inflation hit and food was scarce, poaching was common. Additional security was introduced to protect the ducks. That was years ago and since food was obtainable now, the police had been scaled back. This was a good reflection on Munich—honesty had been restored to the city—but unfortunate for Edith and little Johanna. More policemen in the park might have saved their lives.

  “We found them here, Inspektor.” Berg turned to the spot. The voice belonged to Leopold Hoss, a short and slight man who had served in Munich’s police department for nearly twenty years. His face was round, as were his brown eyes. His upper lip, though very thin, was visible because his mustache wasn’t much thicker than a line of charcoal. His unprepossessing stature had probably held him back from advancement. “The little girl was buried under leaves, but there was no attempt to hide the mother.”

  Maybe it was as Gebhardt suggested, that the little girl wasn’t the target, and the burial was an attempt to rectify the horrendous act. Though far from consoling, it was better than thinking that the murderer had taken pleasure in shedding the blood of a child. Berg stared at the spot, at the impression left by the mother’s body. “Was the woman faceup or facedown?”

  “Faceup with her hair fanned about her.” Berg’s eyes looked up from the crime scene and focused in on Hoss. The policeman added, “It seemed odd to me . . . that someone would fan her hair like that . . . especially in daylight. Smoothing it out like that had to have taken time.”

  In his head Berg heard Herr Professor Kolb’s voice: An act of boldness and arrogance as well as an act of Freudian compulsion. The murderer had to create his artwork even if it was extremely dangerous for him to do so.

  Out loud Berg said, “As if her face was being framed for a picture?”

  “Exactly.” The policeman’s upper lip twitched, sending the mustache into an undulating motion. “As if she was positioned to look like she was . . . sunbathing almost. Not in this weather of course . . . and not where she was.” He fidgeted nervously. “The bash on her skull wasn’t noticeable.”

  Hair flowing around the face . . . just as it had been in the cases of Anna Gross and Marlena Druer. But not like Regina Gottlieb. Or maybe Regina’s hair had indeed been fanned around her face but Messersmit and Kalmer had failed to note it in the case file. Berg thought a moment. In the postmortem pictures, Regina was facedown. “Was her head resting in a pool of blood?”

  Hoss shuddered, still clearly disturbed by the images. He wasn’t the only one with nightmares. “Yes, there was blood . . . quite a bit of it. Though much had seeped into the ground, I think.”

  “She was clothed?”

  “Yes. Both of them wer
e clothed. I don’t know what the pathology doctor has revealed, but there was nothing to suggest that the woman had been violated. She seemed to blend in with the ground.”

  “Maybe that’s why it took some time for anyone to notice her. You say that she was fully clothed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And does that include shoes as well?”

  Hoss fidgeted again, rubbing the palms of his gloved hands against each other. “Boots, actually. There was only one boot. The other foot was bare. We looked for the missing boot, but we couldn’t find it anywhere in the vicinity. And we raked up quite a bit of ground searching for it . . . as you can tell.” Berg regarded the nearby thickets filled with piles of dead leaves. The exposed ground was bare, hard, and cold. Hoss cleared his throat. “I was told that with the others, footwear was missing—a stocking or a shoe. This seems to indicate the same man, I think.”

  “Who told you about the missing shoe?”

  Hoss averted his gaze in response to Berg’s harsh tone. “I don’t remember, Herr Inspektor. Only that it is a common rumor that is circulating.”

  This valuable information was supposed to have been kept quiet. Volker had been correct in his assessment of the department. It was a small, provincial town, filled with gossip, innuendos, and rumors. Berg cleared his throat, trying to dislodge aggravation from his voice. “What about the little girl? Was her shoe missing as well?”

  The policeman checked his notes. “I do not have any remarks concerning the little girl’s shoes. I think that means that she was found with both shoes.”

  “But you are not certain?” Berg emphasized.

  “No, Herr Inspektor, I am not certain.”

  Berg made a note in his pad to recheck the victims’ articles of clothing. He also jotted down a reminder to look at the crime-scene photographs in detail. The pictures should be developed later this afternoon—if he was lucky. Most likely, they’d be done by tomorrow. “Underneath the piles of leaves, the area was checked for any articles left behind?”

  “Several times.”

  “And you found nothing other than the bodies?”

  “No . . . yes . . . I mean we didn’t find anything, Herr Inspektor. Nothing that . . .” He swallowed hard. “When she was removed . . . where her head was . . . there was lots of blood. Also, there were bits . . . chunks of tissue.”

  The poor policeman looked ill. Berg said, “It was probably brain tissue.”

  “I think so, Herr Inspektor. The poor woman was hit very hard.”

  • • •

  “COMPLETELY NONPRODUCTIVE, the interview was,” Berg said to Müller. “According to Edith Mayrhofer’s relatives, the poor woman didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  “Dead people are all saints, don’t you know?” Müller answered.

  “Edith was different from the other victims, Georg. She was a solid workingwoman—pure Bavarian from both sets of grandparents. She was not violated, nor was she strangled. She wasn’t Jewish, she wasn’t a Kommunist, nor had she ever flirted with Kommunismus. She wasn’t bohemian or a Kosmopolit. According to her family, she wasn’t even political.”

  “That is the first lie, Axel. No one in Munich is apolitical.”

  “She didn’t seem to have any strong political ties, Georg, which makes her very different from Anna or Marlena. And she was murdered in full daylight, unlike the others. She and her poor little girl!”

  “Dreadful. Our murderer has become emboldened because he keeps getting away with more and more outrageous behavior.”

  Again Berg heard his thought recited in Kolb’s voice: Killing has taken the place of sex. He will need more and more excitement to become stimulated. “If the slayings were all done by the same hand.”

  “The shoe, Axel.”

  “Ah, yes, the shoe.” Berg shrugged. “While it is true that we haven’t made that information public, there are lots of people who know about the shoe.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Just about everyone in the police department.”

  “That’s not lots of people.”

  “It is if they talk to their wives and girlfriends who are, without a doubt, pressing them for all the information they have.” Berg stared at the ceiling. “You know, Georg, we haven’t even considered another distasteful possibility.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It could be one of us, you know—someone in the department.”

  Abruptly, Müller tried to sit up, then grimaced in pain. His left leg was still elevated, though he was no longer in traction. “Bist du verrückt? Who said that?”

  “No one.” Berg regarded his friend. Müller’s face was more swollen and purple than it had been yesterday, a sign that the healing had begun, although he looked far worse because of it. “Just a thought.”

  “Axel, you can’t seriously think it’s one of our own.”

  “A crime done in daylight, Georg. An ordinary person might be noticed rummaging around in the bushes. But a policeman? When people see a uniform, they look away.”

  “I can’t believe that. I refuse to believe that.”

  “Georg, this was done by someone very powerful and very arrogant. Who is more powerful and arrogant than someone in the department, someone who is used to controlling people, someone who has had experience with firearms, someone who has access to firearms, which are still illegal for the private citizen to own.”

  “We fought a war, Axel. Do you know how many men have a Luger or a bayonet hidden in their closet?”

  “Lots.”

  “Yes, lots,” Müller said. “Anyway, I can think of ten people who have that kind of arrogance and who aren’t policeman. Adolf Hitler for starters.”

  “So maybe it’s Hitler,” Berg suggested.

  Müller laughed. “Axel, even a radical Kommunist like Gerhart Leit would have no problem identifying Hitler.”

  Berg frowned at Müller’s logic. The man who had gone to the theater with Anna Gross clearly wasn’t Hitler.

  “The sacrificial lamb,” Berg said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Berg ran his hands down his face as if he were washing it.

  Müller said, “Axel, we have a picture from Leit, and we have an identification of that picture—a Russian named Rom or Roman, as in Romanov. Furthermore, we have the name Robert Schick, who was a Kommunist, from one of Anna Gross’s calling cards. We have the name Robert on a letter that was in Druer’s possession—also a Kommunist—”

  “Supposedly a Kommunist,” Berg broke in. “Supposedly he was also an aristocrat. What he is, though, is a Hochstapler, a fake.”

  “Even so, Axel, he exists. Rupert Schick comes from a family where the father was an attaché to Russia. My good friend, if you find a Russian in the police department named Robert or Roman or Rupert who matches Leit’s sketch and who speaks English fluently, then you can start making accusations.”

  Berg rolled his eyes. “I’m not saying it is one of our own, just that it was done by someone with arrogance and power. Someone like Volker.”

  “Herrjemine, Axel, here you go again.”

  “Georg, we’re not looking at this the correct way. We’re missing something.”

  “I agree with that, but throwing out preposterous suggestions about Hitler or Volker isn’t going to get us closer to the culprit.”

  “We need to think in a different direction, Georg.”

  “I disagree, Kamerad. Don’t get distracted. Work with what we have. Find Rupert Schick.”

  Berg contained his irritation. “Any suggestion on how to do that?”

  Müller closed his eyes. “I have no suggestions. My mind is blank, Herr Inspektor. Even laid up as I am, I think I have it easier than you do right now.”

  Berg chastised himself. He was taxing Georg’s strength. “You must rest, my friend. You look very pale.”

  “I am tired,” he admitted. “Where are you going after you leave here?”

  “I’m going to try to visit Ulrich
.”

  “I’ve heard he’s improving, thanks be to God.”

  “Thanks be to God. Afterward, if Volker cleared me with the bureaucrats in Records, I will try to find out more about the family Schick.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Danke.” Berg patted his friend on the shoulder. “I will see you tonight, if time permits.”

  “More like if Karen permits.”

  “Ah.” Berg smiled. “Your wife doesn’t like my presence?”

  “Right now, my wife is not fond of anyone in a uniform—policemen, doctors, nurses, bureaucrats, streetcar conductors, U-Bahn workers, bakery ladies wearing cotton aprons, butchers wearing leather aprons, waiters in restaurants, and, finally, anyone associated with an army or a political party.”

  Berg laughed. “That’s all of Munich.”

  “Indeed. Karen is quite the misanthrope these days.”

  • • •

  FROM BEHIND THE WINDOW, Berg peered inside the isolation chamber at Ulrich resting inside an iron lung, his body wrapped in bandages that seemed to run head to toe. The surgeon had said that he was making remarkable strides—much better than expected. His other lung was beginning to pick up the slack for the injured one, and his breathing had improved. With time, luck, and God’s help, the injured lung would inflate within a week.

  Berg would just have to take the doctor’s word because from his perspective, things didn’t look good.

  He thought for a moment, musings rather than ideas. Perspective was a mutable thing. Perspective changed radically when viewed from different angles. Looking at his injured friend, Berg decided that that was what he needed.

  He needed perspective.

  He needed a different angle.

  FORTY-THREE

  Walking down the long hospital corridors, Berg considered Georg’s simple words: Find Rupert Schick.

  Whoever he was, Schick was not going to be found in this current incarnation. The name hadn’t appeared on any of the city registries or in the registries of neighboring Bavarian towns. The only things Berg was going on were the name and the sketch. He kept thinking, What if Leit hadn’t gotten it quite right? The sketch was vague enough to resemble a multitude of people: What if Berg was looking for the wrong man?