by Lena Bourne
“I did,” I say and walk to her, wrapping my arms around her. The wool is scratchy against my bare chest, but she’s soft underneath it. This could be the last time in a long time I’ll feel good. Gotta cherish the little things. I never appreciated how much that actually means until I met Eva. “But I have to go anyway.”
“Is it him?” she asks in a shaky voice. “Today is exactly six months since the last one.”
I look into her eyes, still dark because there’s not enough light to show me the brilliant blue color they actually are. Like the sea in spring.
“It looks that way,” I say. “Don’t print it.”
Her eyes narrow like I’ve offended her by asking her that. “You know I won’t,” she says defensively.
And I do.
I took a risk when I started dating Eva. We met while she was a reporter covering the first of the killings, always hanging around looking for tidbits to print. Reporters are cagy and full of tricks. They’re like vultures circling a story and most of them would do anything to get it. But I trusted myself not to tell Eva anything about the case, since I never discuss the cases I’m working on with anyone. I work best alone. When she asked me for coffee one afternoon, waiting for me in front of the police station, I knew she wanted to probe me for information about the dead girl in an ancient ball gown found on the steps of Alte Nationalgalerie, or Old National Gallery, wearing just one transparent shoe. But I said yes to coffee with Eva anyway, because I couldn’t look away from her lively, brilliant blue eyes after thinking about the dead girl’s ice blue ones for three days straight.
I think even she was surprised when we ended up talking about everything but the case for six hours straight—all through coffee and then dinner and a drink after.
I was surprised when I could tell her about the case later. Somehow she understood my thoughts and conjectures better than I did myself as I laid them out. And she never put any of the things I told her in any of her articles. Not unless I expressly told her she could.
Now her eyes are sparkling at me, like bright high noon sun hitting the ocean, and I think we’re on the verge of an argument. She’s not a morning person and she doesn’t like to have her integrity questioned. I learned both those things after our second date.
“I know you won’t,” I say.
“Good, you should,” she counters edgily. “And I thought you weren’t working the case anymore.”
“I hoped so,” I say. She’s right in that I’m not authorized to go see the crime scene or whatever it is that Schmitt wants me to see. I’m going because I have to. It has nothing to do with being allowed to. Even I don’t fully understand it. Yet, I do. The madman behind these killings needs to be stopped. The more people trying to stop him, the better. I’m one of those people.
I kiss her instead of trying to explain all that. I will, once we have more time, and I’m sure she’ll be able to make better sense of it all than I can on my own.
Her eyes are soft and sleepy again once I pull away from the kiss to get ready, my blood flowing hotter and my mind clearer, for having kissed her first.
But my blood turns cold again before I reach the police station, and my brain is a frozen wasteland of purpose and determination. The razor-sharp, icy wind of early morning has nothing to do with it.
It might’ve stopped snowing in the night, but the wind off the northern plains is vicious. The street is dark and empty, forbidding even, new buildings interspersed with the rubble left untouched since the end of WWII. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from Eva’s place to the Alexanderplatz police station, but it feels like hours lost in some bleak nightmare. Bleak. This city’s got all the reasons to seem that way going back decades, but somehow the prevalent vibe it gives off is hope and rebirth. Then The Fairytale Killer struck and changed all that. Now all the bleak and depressing cracks are showing.
I thought to get some breakfast and a cup of coffee on the way, but by the time I reached the first open coffee shop, my appetite was gone, taken by the bleak inevitability of the horror starting up again. The horror I, and everyone else in this city, hoped had gone to sleep just like the “princesses”. Gone to sleep, never to wake.
The city’s main police station is an imposing rectangular building, built with function not aesthetics in mind. A lot of this city was rebuilt that way, until old buildings and churches coexist with the utilitarian structures, rubble, and the ultramodern. A messy mix of everything coexisting side by side. Poor, rich. Utilitarian, historic. Communist, capitalist. All the extremes in such a small place. And now The Fairytale Killer. A serial killer with such a twisted mind, such degrees of sadistic enjoyment wrapped up in a methodical, well-planned package that all my training and all I’ve seen have not prepared me for it.
The Fairytale Killer in more ways than one. He not only stages his murders as scenes from the most famous fairytales but kills the wonder of them in the process. He’s planned this for a long time. I understand that much about him. He takes perverse pleasure in making everything just so, just the way he wants it. I know that too. But much more than that, I can’t be certain of.
“Inspector Novak, over here,” a man calls to me just as I’m about to mount the stairs to the police station.
He’s standing by a police cruiser. Hatless and jacketless, his cheeks quickly reddening from the biting gusts of wind. I think he’s the one who puked at Cinderella’s crime scene. Hans something.
“Where are we going?” as I open the passenger door to get in, ignoring him as he opens the back door for me.
“A forest near Eberswalde. It’s about 50 kilometers out,” he says as he gets behind the wheel.
I can barely feel my face, and I bet it’s going to be much worse outside the city.
“That’s near the Polish border, right?” I ask. It’s an area I haven’t explored yet.
The man nods and I settle back for the long ride.
As soon as we clear the city, the countryside stretches out flat and vast. Endless possibility it looked like when I decided to make my home here almost three years ago. But now the horizon is hidden in dawn grayness and some kind of fuzzy curtain that’s probably ice crystals kicked up by the gusting wind, and I have no idea what I was thinking. It just looks bleak and bleaker. And the farther into the grey nothingness we drive, the worse the hopelessness becomes. I wish I’d kept my phone on silent last night. I wish I was just now waking up in Eva’s warm bed, with the prospect of spending the whole day with her before me. But even that happy thought gets sucked up by the grey nothingness where it evaporates on contact. Like it never was.
Hans signals and turns off the highway. We’re approaching blinking lights of blue and orange and white and yellow that light up the sky like a carnival. There’s no less than three ambulances, six police cruisers, two fire trucks, a few crime tech vans, and five unmarked, dark sedans parked in an area maybe ten square meters at the edge of a forest. What did they find? An entire cast of characters from a fairytale dead and posed in the woods? I wouldn’t put it past this monster we’re hunting.
The lights were dazzling from a distance and they’re blinding up close. Hans stops the car directly behind the last of the cruisers. The ground is so trampled that grass and rock are showing in places beneath the blanket of snow.
What the hell? Did the Germans suddenly forget how to be careful and methodical in securing a crime scene? This bastard leaves so few clues as it is, why help him by destroying the ones he does by shoddy forensic work?
All the cars are still full of people though, their pale faces all fixed on me as I exit the cruiser. A vicious gust of wind hits me square in the face, making me wish I hadn’t forgotten my scarf and hat before going to Eva’s last night. But she makes me forget a lot of things and she makes most mundane things inconsequential. It’s why I enjoy spending so much time with her.
“Novak!” detective Schmitt calls. “It’s this way.”
He’s standing at a narrow opening in the line of snow-cove
red pines about fifty paces beyond the first of the cars. He’s my age, about thirty-five years old. A thin man, head, and shoulders shorter than me, his dark hair hidden by a sensible hat that covers his ears and forehead. His bushy mustache is sprinkled with specks of snow.
“Why so many people?” I ask as I approach. What I really want to be asking is, Why me? I spent the first four months of the past six interviewing every US Military person in the area I could get access to and some I, strictly speaking, couldn’t. I came very close to a disciplinary hearing because of it. I didn’t sleep, I hardly ate, and my new relationship with Eva was almost nipped in the bud because of it. But I concluded that no active member of the US Armed Forces was involved in these murders. I reported as much to Schmitt and his superiors. But here I am anyway, the knot in my stomach frozen along with every other part of me.
“We didn’t know what we’d need,” Schmitt explains. “So we brought everything.”
“Walk in my footsteps,” he adds as he turns to enter the forest.
Many people already had, since the trail he’s leading me down is a narrow path of packed snow.
“A call came in that there was a fire at a cabin in the woods at about four AM. The fire department responded, trampled and flattened the only approach to the cabin wide enough for a car and found no fire,” Schmitt explains as we walk. His sentences as curt and formal as I remember them. This guy hates incompetence more than anything else and if he’s not careful that futile hatred will eat him alive before he’s forty.
“They had no grounds to enter the house, since there was no trace of a fire, but at least someone had enough brains to contact the owner,” Schmitt continues.
The silence is undisturbed this deep in the wood and his voice is muffled by all the snow and the thick pines surrounding us. The sensation is not much different from the one right before you drift off to sleep. Listening to a fairytale, perhaps. Only this one won’t have a happy ending.
“The man took his sweet time getting here from Berlin,” Schmitt says. “He’s some hotshot CEO, not to be disturbed by mere mortals for just anything, which this was in his opinion, so he took his sweet time getting to the cabin. He’s the one who found her. He’s not so talkative anymore.”
Schmitt was born on the wrong side of the wall. He worked hard and had to jump many hurdles to be where he is, and he’s got no love for the privileged that often still look down their noses at him. His real last name is Pozlovski, but he changed to his grandmother’s maiden name to avoid as much discrimination as he could as he rose through the ranks. The dissatisfaction frothing inside him, just below the surface of his curt propriety made him a suspect in my mind and I investigated him as much as I could, given all the red tape involved. But by that point, I was grasping at straws. Not that this entire case up until now hasn’t been grasping at a bunch of straws that broke as soon as we touched them. Schmitt couldn’t have carried Sleeping Beauty up all those steps to the top of the tower where she was found. She was over six feet tall and outweighed him.
“In there, top floor,” Schmitt says in a slightly wheezy voice.
The trees sheltering our approach have opened up into an almost perfectly round clearing. A poorly kept cabin made of dark brown wood stands in the center, the shutters on the windows mostly ripped off, and the glass of the few small windows facing us broken. The left part of the steeple roof is caved in and the falling shingles have destroyed the entire left side of the porch railing.
“Hansel and Gretel?” I ask quietly.
He shakes his head. “Thankfully, no.”
About twenty meters separate us from the path to the front porch and we walk them in silence. To the left of the house, a wide path through the trees is blocked by a black Land Rover, a police cruiser, and a white forensic van. A grey-haired man is sitting behind the wheel of the Land Rover, wrapped in a dark brown blanket, his dark eyes huge in his round face as he watches us approach the house. But I doubt he sees us.
“The Investigator is here!” Schmitt yells at the house, causing the two crime techs in full-body white jumpsuits under their thick down parkas to look at us sharply from the back of their van where they’re fiddling with something I can’t see. One of them walks over and hands me a pair of white plastic shoe covers and black latex gloves without saying anything. My bare hands are already so chaffed by the cold and wind it stings as I pull them on, but I’m glad for the sharp pain. My head already feels like it’s crammed full of the snow all around us and I feel the beginnings of a cold headache starting along my forehead. I wish the crime techs would bring me a hat too.
I’m about to ask Schmitt what the hell we’re waiting for, when a white jumpsuit clad crime tech clutching a camera comes out of the building, muttering something that’s muffled by the thick scarf wrapped around her face to the point of being unintelligible.
“Go on in,” Schmitt says. “The owner says the cabin is still structurally sound, but with that roof, I’m not so sure. The last thing we need is for the whole thing to cave in before we comb through it. So we’re doing this one at a time.”
The first of the three wooden steps leading up to the porch creaks so loudly I wait with bated breath for it to break, but it holds.
The inside of the cabin is barely warmer than the outside, the only real difference is that the thin wooden walls are blocking most of the wind, though the chilly air still has no trouble entering through the cracks. My breath comes out in thick white plumes.
The front door opens into a narrow hall. The steps to the top floor are right in front of me. The stairs run along the wall on one side and have a wooden banister, made of thick, dark brown two-inch thick boards. It’s slanted sideways, as though someone who didn’t quite fit forced his way up them anyway. I’m guessing the main room of the house is behind the wall the staircase hangs on and that the kitchen is at the back of the cabin. Or maybe the kitchen is…
I stop my train of thought and take the first step upstairs. I know what I’m doing. I don’t want to see the body. Once I see the body, the nightmare will be real again. I’d fooled myself into thinking this case was over for me, all the while knowing there was no chance of it.
Despite the frozen state of everything, I can still smell the dust that’s been accumulating in here for years, maybe decades, while the owners let it fall to ruin. A shame. It’s a lovely spot. Secluded, peaceful, serene. Not anymore.
The trail of many covered feet leading from the top of the stairs to the room is unmistakable and I follow it blindly.
I have to bend a little so as not to hit my head on the low doorway leading into the room.
She’s lying on the queen-size, heavy wooden bed that dominates the small room. All the other furniture in the room—the two nightstands and the narrow wardrobe, is made from the same wood. I’m guessing the red and blue striped bare mattress she’s lying on is filled with actual horsehair. All old, all way past its prime.
Not the girl.
She’d barely reached her prime before she was cut down.
Her heart-shaped face is porcelain white, almost shining beneath the carefully combed black hair encircling it. The red ribbon in her hair shines. A straight cut fringe covers her forehead and the sides reach to the nape of her neck. Her cheeks are flushed. Her lips are bright red, parted slightly, matching the ribbon in her hair. A bright red apple with a single bite taken out of it is held loosely in her open palm that’s resting by her side. Her other arm is draped across her stomach.
She’s wearing a pale green shirt with short, ballooned sleeves traced with dark red. It’s tucked into a long, coarse light brown skirt. She’s posed as though she bit into the poisoned apple then took ill and collapsed on top of the bed.
Like a doll. Not breathing. Her skin is as white as the snow surrounding this cabin. Just like a doll of Snow White taken straight from the popular cartoon.
But she’s no doll.
Her left forearm is covered by a black-inked tattoo of a single rose, its
thorny stem extending down to her wrist. The blooming flower is as red as her lips, but the monster who bled her and raped her before posing her as the image that cuts right into your childhood and rips it to shreds tried to cover it with white powder. It’s caked now, revealing the red bloom, marring this perfect picture, making it just the work of a psycho.
It helps me to see the woman she was, not this grotesque doll he made her into. It lets me make a silent promise that I’ll stop this guy before he does it again to another down on her luck young girl who had to work to eat despite the danger. Who had no one and nothing to shelter her from the man who turned her into this mockery of Snow White, a beloved character of girls everywhere, young girls with innocent dreams of princes and a charmed life.
The frozen knot in my stomach is roiling inside me. It’ll do me no good to hate the man I’m hunting. It’ll just cloud my judgment and make me do rash things. But that ship has sailed. I hate this Fairytale Killer more than I’ve ever hated anything or anyone. Not that my promises are worth a damn. I’ve been ordered off the case, threatened with a dishonorable discharge if I don’t remove myself from this investigation.
I move over to the window, maybe in an unconscious need to get some fresh air even though the air coming in through the broken window and the cracks in the walls is quite fresh enough. The translucent, lacy curtains on the window are drawn, but despite that, I can see the approach to the cabin perfectly. It’s actually a wide lane, made wider by the fire truck obviously, judging by the broken pine branches trampled into the snow on either side of it. And it’s not so far from the main road.