Dead Woods
Dead Woods
Maria C Poets
Germany (2015)
The body of thirty-four-year-old software developer Philip Birkner is
found in the forest. Tracks at the scene of the crime point to several
possible killers. Lina Svenson and Max Berg of the Hamburg Homicide
Division investigate and soon discover more than one dark secret in the
dead man’s past…
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Maria C. Poets
Translation copyright © 2015 Maria Poglitsch Bauer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as
Mordswald
by the author through the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform in Germany in 2013. Translated from German by Maria Poglitsch Bauer. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477829967
ISBN-10: 1477829962
Cover design by bürosüd
o
München,
www.buerosued.de
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014921447
CONTENTS
Prologue
The stupid cow. The slut. She does it with everyone. Now she’s making out with this guy in front of the house even though everyone knows that she and Carsten are an item. She’s like a hooker; that’s what she is.
Now what? She’s going home by herself? I’m sure she made out with practically everyone tonight. Got plastered, too; I can see that. She can’t even walk straight. She doesn’t even notice that I’m trailing her. I bet she wouldn’t recognize me if she saw me; she’s that drunk. And to think, we were once a couple, she and I. At first she couldn’t get enough of me, and then she just dropped me like a hot potato. Found herself another guy. But maybe it was a good thing to see early on how she operates.
She’s turning into the park now. Makes sense. It’s the shortest way to her house, to Mom and Dad. It’s quite dark here, especially under the trees, where the moonlight doesn’t reach the ground. She’s just a shadow now—a shadow that stumbles and hiccups. What a fool she’s making of herself. It’s good we’re not together anymore. I wouldn’t do it with her now even if they tied her up underneath me.
Now she’s holding on to a tree. It looks like she’s about ready to puke, but no, she walks on. For a few seconds I can see her face under the streetlight. Her lipstick is a bit smudged, but she actually looks quite pretty. I’m so close now that I can smell her. She’s reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke, but there’s also a trace of perfume. The perfume I once gave her as a present. How cool is that—she’s still using it.
She’s stopping again. Sniffles. Oh, she’s crying! Why? She got everything sluts her age want: she looks good, half the guys her age run after her, and her parents are totally cool, not nasty like mine . . . But really, she’s blubbering. There she is, in the park, bawling.
I don’t know why . . . Somehow I’m feeling sorry for her. I mean, if someone’s bawling like that, she must be going through a ton of shit. So I go to her.
“Hi,” I say.
She looks at me. The moon is throwing edgy shadows on her face, and her eyes shimmer in the moonlight—like diamonds, like stars, like . . .
She stops crying. She’s laughing now. It sounds as if she’s laughing at me. “Oh, it’s you . . . I didn’t notice you at the party.”
No wonder. I wasn’t there
, I think, but don’t say it. Instead I just look at her. Two or three tears are still gleaming in her eyes. Her lips are almost black even though I know she’s wearing red lipstick. She’s wearing a miniskirt and an extratight top. I’m starting to get hard. Her tits are bigger now than they were before. Cool. Way cool.
She stops laughing. “So what d’you want?” she asks.
I can’t stop staring at her tits. Man, they’re epic. A woman’s tits, not those of a girl; not like before. I reach for them, but she steps back. Suddenly she’s looking at me strangely, as if she’s afraid. Cool. I take a step toward her. She takes another step back. I follow. It feels like I have an iron rod in the front of my pants.
She’s trying to turn around and run away, but because she’s smashed and in such high heels, she stumbles. If I hadn’t caught her, she would have landed right on her pretty face. But now I’ve got a hold of her, my hand squeezing her arm tight, and I don’t let go.
“Hey, what are you doing? Stop it,” she says. As she tries to get away, her tits bob up and down like crazy. Totally amazing.
“Let go of me! Damn it!” she screams. I’m afraid somebody might hear us, so I slap her face. I look around, but we’re alone. It’s late. I’m still holding on to her, and she starts scratching me. Stupid cow! This slut does it with everyone, but an old friend like me isn’t even allowed to touch her? I slap her again. She kicks me in the shin. My grip tightens.
“Let go of me, you idiot!”
I’m about to slap her again when she starts hitting me. We’re wrestling with each other. Even though she’s fucked up, she still knows how to throw a punch. I manage to grab her hair and pull her away from the path, deeper into the bushes, where there’s no light at all. She tries to scream, but I slap her face again. At one point we stumble and end up on the ground. I’m on top of her with my hands around her wrists. Face-to-face, I see her eyes glowing in the moonlight. She looks furious but also totally panicked. How cool can this get? I fumble around at my trousers, trying to open the stupid zipper. She’s onto what I’m planning and starts to beg.
“Please,” she says. “Please, no.” She goes on like that for a while, but I know she really wants it. She can’t fool me.
I’m so busy with the damn zipper that I don’t notice that someone is coming. Two people, a man and a woman. They’re laughing and quite noisy, but I’m still afraid they might hear us. I can see that, under me, she’s ready to open her mouth and scream, but at the last moment I cover her damn mouth with my hand. She wriggles like crazy. Shit. It’s not easy covering her mouth when she thrashes around. I punch her in the face to shut her up. Then my hands are suddenly around her throat. I really don’t know why. Her skin is smooth and soft, and I remember that it always used to smell so good because she would dab some of the perfume I bought her behind her ears.
She must have done this today, too, since she smells the way she used to smell before. No, not like before. Back then she didn’t reek of alcohol, or of fear, or of other guys. It’s the smell of those things that’s too much for me. I’m wild now, blind with anger and throbbing. My hands tighten on her neck, like I’m trying to wring it out, squeezing out the very last drop. The last drop of what? Of love? Of fear? Fear is reflected in her eyes. They’re little glittering diamonds of fear, drilling into me—and I can’t stop. I’m pressing and pressing and pressing. Oh, man, that’s cool. Mind-blowing!
Chapter 1
It had rained during the night. The ground was still damp, and thick drops glistened on the leaves in the rays of early sunshine. Birds conducted loud conversations, though it was only a few minutes after six in the morning. A steady murmur of traffic noise wafted over from the nearby Autobahn. Trotting along the gravel path next to her colleague, Lina Svenson furtively rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, yearning for a cup of coffee. Max Berg looked very proper with his short black hair, clean jeans, a jacket, and perfectly polished shoes. It was not the first time Lina asked herself how the hell he managed to pull it off.
The white-and-red police tape was fluttering about twenty yards ahead of them. The uniformed policeman recognized Max and let them pass. They approached the scene of the crime, where several figures in disposable overalls were carefully searching the ground. Small numbered tags marked the spots where the forensics team had found something. A technician was taking pictures. The body, barely hidden by a few stinging nettles, lay about five yards away from the path. The body was the reason Lina had been so rudely awakened at such an ungodly hour. Karl Sotny raised his head when they came closer. Lina had worked with the coroner several times since she joined the Hamburg Major Crimes Division. She was glad to see him here today. He was one of the few colleagues who had never made stupid remarks about Lina’s height, age, or style—her five-foot body and punk haircut.
Max stopped short and Lina almost ran into him. Sotny came out of the muddy underbrush and welcomed them with a nod. A strand of gray hair fell over his forehead. One of the white-clad members of the CSI team also straightened up and came over. Lina recognized Reiner Hartmann, who was an almost-friend of Max.
“Good morning,” said Max to no one in particular. “How’s it going?”
The coroner handed both of them disposable overalls and protective shoes and gestured toward the underbrush. “Come along.”
Lina followed her colleague cautiously and stopped a few steps away from the corpse. The dead man wore a light-colored T-shirt, a leather jacket, and jeans, which seemed to have been quite presentable once, but were now smeared with dark soil, blood, and some reddish-gray substance. He lay on his side, one hand protecting his temple, as if he were still warding off what had overtaken him. One side of his face was on the dark forest soil; the other half was almost totally obscured under a layer of encrusted blood. An ant crawled in an open wound at his temple.
Lina raised her head and sniffed. “Did he puke before he died?”
Sotny tilted his head. “You can smell that? Amazing.”
Lina was about to answer, but the noise from a low-flying plane right over their heads made conversation impossible. A whoosh in the treetops a few seconds later sounded as if the souls of the passengers followed the plane at their own speed.
“He did indeed vomit before he died,” continued Sotny when it got quieter again. “We found traces of the vomit around his mouth and I assume that the puddle on the ground is his as well.”
“Can you tell us anything about the dead man?” asked Max.
“Male, between thirty and forty, closer to thirty,” Sotny replied. “In good shape—apart from the fact that he’s dead.”
“Did he die from the head wound?” Lina asked.
“Most likely. A blow with a blunt instrument, probably a stone.” Sotny gestured to the brush around the corpse. “More than enough of those around here. It’s probably just a matter of time until we find it.”
“Time of death?”
“Sometime last night.”
Lina could have guessed that herself. The Niendorfer Gehege in northern Hamburg was a small, highly frequented forest. A cyclist on his way to work had discovered the dead man this morning. It was almost impossible for it to have been in the undergrowth undetected for more than a few hours.
“Could you narrow that down?” Max asked.
“Between eleven and maybe three, but don’t quote me. It might be half an hour earlier or later. I will only know more after the autopsy.”
Max nodded and looked closely at the dead man and the area around him. “Am I wrong, or are there quite a few footprints here,” he said and turned to Hartmann. “Or are they all from you and your people?”
“A few, yes, but not all of them, for sure. It must have been like Grand Central Station here. There seem to be at least three, maybe four, different footprints. One of them belongs to the dead man.”
“So two or three perps?” Max asked.
“Maybe. Or curious bystanders, none of whom called the police.”
“Robbery?”
Hartmann shrugged. “I was about to check his pockets when you arrived.”
Max motioned toward the body. “Don’t let us keep you.”
Hartmann squatted next to the dead man. Lina gazed at the man’s battered face. He seemed to have been quite good-looking: short dark hair, clean-shaven. His wide-open eye, the one that wasn’t masked by blood, was blue. It still seemed to be staring toward the bushes. Lina turned away. It was not the first corpse she had ever seen, but she still hadn’t gotten completely comfortable with dead bodies. As far as murder scenes were concerned, this one didn’t look all that bad. She remembered the remains of the woman they had fished out of Hamburg’s harbor two years ago, in winter, and was glad that she had not had breakfast yet.
Hartmann, careful to move the dead man as little as possible, went through his pockets. He removed a keychain, a phone, and a wallet, which he flipped open and searched. Inside was a new ID card, which Hartmann removed and placed in a plastic bag. Then he got up and came back to Berg and Svenson.
“Here,” he said. “This should help you with your work.”
Max took the bag with the ID card.
“Philip Birkner,” he read aloud, then the address and the date of birth. Sotny had been right. The dead man was thirty-four years old.