Bad Wolf (24 page)

“Stop! Get away from the door!” Kröger roared behind him in a voice filled with panic.

Bodenstein let go of the key as if he’d burned himself, while Pia backed up in shock and instinctively grabbed for her weapon. Had Kröger seen some wires that were part of an ignition mechanism or a bomb? Or was a sniper lurking in the bushes?

“What’s going on?” Adrenaline was pumping through Pia’s limbs.

“You need to put on overalls and booties over your shoes.” Kröger brought them two sealed plastic bags with crime-scene uniforms. “We can’t have you leaving your hair and skin flakes all over.”

“Are you going nuts?” Bodenstein barked at his colleague from the evidence team. “You almost scared me to death, yelling like that!”

“I’m sorry,” Christian Kröger said with a shrug. “I haven’t been getting much sleep the past few days.”

Pia holstered her weapon, took one of the packets from him, and tore it open. On the front porch, she and Bodenstein pulled on the overalls and slipped the plastic booties over their shoes.

“May we go in now?” Bodenstein asked with exaggerated courtesy.

“Knock yourself out,” Kröger grumbled. “You’re not the ones who’ll have to deal with the bean counters in the finance department when we have to do a DNA analysis on you in the lab, just because your genetic microtraces are strewn around some crime scene.”

“All right, then,” said Pia, trying to mollify her colleague.

Inside, the house was much larger than it looked from the outside. Travertine, wrought iron, and dark wood dominated a large, somber entrance hall with a stairway leading up to the second floor. Pia looked around and then went over to the console table that stood to the left of the front door.

“Someone picked up the mail today and put it here,” she said. “The mailman must have shoved it through the mail slot.”

“Probably the daughter picked it up.” Bodenstein went into the kitchen. Looking at the kitchen table, he saw dirty glasses and four empty beer bottles, and plates and silverware with remnants of food sat in the sink. In the living room, there was a rumpled blanket on the black leather couch, as if someone had taken a nap there. On the coffee table were more glasses and an ashtray with a couple of cigarette butts. A veritable DNA paradise for Kröger’s people.

The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view of the terrace and an extensive garden. The home office was across the entry hall. Compared to the rest of the house, it looked messy. They saw balled-up paper and file folders; the drawers of a wheeled file cabinet stood open, and the contents of a wastebasket lay strewn across the floor. Pia let her gaze wander over the room. It was only an instinct, indefinable and disquieting, but after seeing so many crime scenes, she always noticed if something was off-kilter; any disturbance had an almost physical effect on her. In this instance, there were no obvious signs of a struggle or blood traces.

“Somebody was here,” she said to Bodenstein. “A stranger. He rifled through the desk and papers.”

Her boss didn’t ask how she knew. They had worked together a long time, and often enough Pia had been correct with her intuitive hunches.

They entered the room. Here, too, the walls were plastered with framed photos of the owner, but there were also family photos in between. Various men, but always the same girl, from childhood to young woman.

“That must be Meike.” Pia looked at the photos. A happy, laughing child who had metamorphosed into a fat, pimply teenager with a sullen expression. She didn’t look happy in the shadow of her radiantly beautiful mother. “And there seem to have been a few men in her life.”

“Mr. Kornbichler, in any case,” said Bodenstein, leaning down to take a look under the desk. “I don’t see any laptop or PC.”

“Maybe she keeps it in the bedroom. Or it was stolen.”

Pia stepped up next to her boss and inspected the papers strewn about. Notes, research materials, contracts, drafts for a presentation—all handwritten.

“I wonder why Hanna Herzmann would feel the need to meet men for anonymous sex at a rest stop on the autobahn,” Pia said, thinking out loud. “She doesn’t seem to have any trouble finding a man.”

“That’s not the point,” Bodenstein countered. “People who do that aren’t doing it to find a partner. They do it for kicks. The thrill. The danger. Who knows, maybe that’s exactly what she was looking for.”

Pia’s cell rang. It was the doctor who had examined Hanna Herzmann before the operation. Pia put the phone on speaker, and she and Bodenstein listened to the report with growing revulsion. Hanna had not only been raped, which would have been bad enough. No, the perp had abused her vaginally and rectally with some object, which had caused serious internal injuries. In addition, she had been beaten and kicked with extreme brutality, resulting in fractures of her facial bones, ribs, breastbone, and upper right arm. The woman had been put through hell and it was sheer luck that she’d survived.

“Sounds like pure hatred,” said Pia when she ended the call. “I’m positive that something personal was involved.”

“I don’t know.” Bodenstein wanted to stick his hands in his pockets but found that the overalls had no slits to allow him to do it. “Abuse with an object is not personal.”

“Maybe the perp wasn’t physically able to rape her,” Pia surmised. “Or else he was gay.”

“Like Norman, her former employee.”

“Precisely.”

“We’re going to have to talk to him right away.”

They continued their tour of the house but found nothing upstairs that would indicate that a stranger had gone up there, too. In the bedroom, the bed was untouched and clothes were scattered around the room; in the bathroom, there was also nothing unusual. The other rooms seemed unused. In the basement, there was a sauna, a furnace room, a housekeeping room, and an indoor swimming pool. Another room held a deep freeze and a shelving unit full of cartons. Bodenstein and Pia returned to the main floor.

“What’s going on here?” In the open doorway stood a young dark-haired woman, who was giving them a scandalized look. “What is this? What are you doing here?”

Bodenstein and Pia pushed back their hoods.

“Who are you?” asked Pia, although she’d recognized the woman’s face at once. Hanna Herzmann’s daughter had developed from a defiant adolescent in the photos in her mother’s office into a young woman. She looked as though she’d been crying. The smeared eyeliner had left black flecks on her cheeks. Had she already heard the news?

“No, who are
you
?” countered Meike Herzmann in an imperious manner. “Can you explain what’s going on here?”

She didn’t look like her mother. With those gray eyes and ash-blond hair, she seemed colorless, and her facial features didn’t really go together: her chin was too pointed, her nose too long, her eyebrows too heavy. Only her mouth was remarkable, with the very full lips and perfect snow-white teeth, undoubtedly the result of years of martyrdom to braces.

“I’m Pia Kirchhoff from Kripo in Hofheim. This is my boss, Chief Detective Inspector Bodenstein. And you are Meike Herzmann, right?”

The young woman nodded, grimaced, and scratched her upper arm. Her arms, hardly more substantial than those of a twelve-year-old, were extremely flushed and full of pustules; she probably suffered from neurodermatitis.

“Do you live here?”

“No. I’m only here for the summer.” As she spoke, her eyes followed the officers of the evidence team, who were walking around inside the house. “So, what’s going on here?”

“Something has happened to your mother,” Pia began.

“Oh yeah?” Meike Herzmann looked at her. “Is she dead?”

For a moment, Pia was shocked at the unsympathetic, indifferent coldness with which she had uttered this brief query so spontaneously.

“No, she’s not dead,” Bodenstein said, taking over. “She was attacked and raped.”

“It was bound to happen.” The young woman’s expression was as hard as granite, and she snorted contemptuously. “The way my mother has been running around with men her whole life, it doesn’t surprise me at all.”

*   *   *

Leonie Verges looked at her watch, annoyed. She’d been waiting half an hour now for Hanna Herzmann. Couldn’t she at least have sent a text saying that she’d be late? They’d been working together toward this day for almost two weeks now; Leonie had been for months, if not years.

When Leonie had first met her patient Michaela, eleven years ago in the psychiatric clinic in Eltville, she’d had no idea what a huge challenge this woman would turn out to be. Soon after Leonie finished her studies, she began working with traumatized individuals, but she had never encountered anyone with such unusual symptoms before. Michaela had spent a large part of her life in psychiatric clinics, but the vague diagnoses ranged from schizophrenia to paranoid personality disorder, autoaggressive character neurosis, schizoaffective disorders, and even autism. For decades, the woman was treated with the strongest psychopharmaceuticals without anyone ever being able to determine the actual cause of her abnormal behavior or what would trigger an episode.

In countless conversations, Leonie had finally learned in fragments what had happened to Michaela. It had been a tough test of her patience, because the woman seemed to have no complete or coherent memory of her past. On some days, a totally different person seemed to be sitting across from her, someone who behaved differently and spoke differently, no longer knowing what she had talked about in the last therapy session. More than once, Leonie was about to discontinue the therapy and give up, but then she had finally understood what was really going on with her complicated patient: Michaela’s ego consisted of many different personalities that existed independently of one another. When one personality took control of her consciousness, the others were consigned to the background and had no knowledge of any of the others.

Michaela herself had been completely shocked at Leonie’s diagnosis and had reacted defensively. But there was no doubt. According to the classification system of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-IV, she had symptoms of the most severe form of dissociation. Michaela suffered from a multiple personality disorder, which was also called dissociative identity disorder.

It had taken two years for Leonie to discover what was wrong with Michaela, and by then things had become very difficult, because her patient initially didn’t want to accept that the lengthy blackout periods she couldn’t remember had been experienced by other parts of her ego. Leonie soon realized that the woman must have had horrible experiences that led to this extreme dissociation of her personality. As a matter of fact, the picture that eventually emerged from dozens of memory fragments was so cruel and terrifying that Leonie had often been tempted to doubt the truth of the story. How could any human being experience something like that and survive? But Michaela had survived, and she did it by splitting off from these events in early childhood, or by dissociating from them. In this manner, children in particular were able to deal with traumatic occurrences such as war, murder, serious accidents, and disasters.

After more than ten years, Michaela was still not cured, but she knew what was wrong with her, what a “switch” (from one identity to another) could trigger, and she was able to cope with it. She had learned to accept the other personalities. For years, she had lived a completely normal life. Until the day when the dead girl was found in the Main River.

Leonie grabbed her phone. She had to get hold of Hanna Herzmann, because Michaela couldn’t sit here forever waiting for her. The decision she’d made ten days ago was courageous—but also dangerous. The decision to make the whole story public could have serious repercussions for everyone involved, but Michaela and all the others were aware of the danger.

Hanna’s cell phone was still turned off, so Leonie tried her again on her landline. The phone rang five times before someone picked up.

“Herzmann.”

A woman’s voice, but not Hanna’s.

“Er … is … er … could I speak with Hanna Herzmann?” Leonie stammered in surprise.

“With whom am I speaking?”

“Leonie Verges. I … er … Ms. Herzmann is one of my patients. She had an appointment at four p.m.”

“My mother isn’t here. Sorry.”

Before Leonie could say a word, she got a busy signal. The woman, apparently Hanna’s daughter, had simply hung up. Odd, and worrisome. Leonie didn’t particularly like Hanna Herzmann, but now she was seriously concerned. Something must have happened. Something that was so serious that it had kept Hanna from coming to this important appointment. Because today she was supposed to meet Michaela in person for the first time.

*   *   *

“Ms. Herzmann?” The female cop knocked on the door of the guest bathroom. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” replied Meike, flushing the toilet.

“We’re leaving now,” the officer said. “Please come down to the police station in Hofheim so that we can take your statement.”

“Yes, I will.”

Meike looked at her face in the mirror above the washbasin and grimaced. Blotchy skin, swollen eyelids, smeared mascara—she looked like shit. Her hands were shaking, and she still had ringing in her ears. Maybe the shot that had been fired barely fifty feet away from her had shattered her eardrum. The forest ranger had saved her life, although he’d really just wanted to give her a scare because she’d driven her car into the middle of the forest. But even worse than people driving around in the woods were people who let their dogs run around during the closed season. There was no excuse for that.

While searching for the eyeliner in her purse, Meike fished out the fateful message that had come in the mail today. Should she give it to the police? No, better not. Hanna had absolutely no sense of perspective when it came to research for her show, and she would tear Meike’s head off if she told the cops anything about a project that was still secret. Plus, if it had anything to do with that motorcycle gang, the police would be the worst place to take it.

Meike gave up trying to redo her makeup. She was shaking even harder, so she ran cold water over her wrists.