I Am Your Judge: A Novel (24 page)

“So what are we going to do?” Bodenstein asked her.

“We’re going to take back control,” Pia suggested. “From Napoleon Neff and my sister, too. They’re supposed to be analyzing our results, not confusing us totally.”

“Agreed.”

Because of the growing public interest, the Ministry of the Interior was putting more pressure daily on Nicola Engel, and she was passing it on to Bodenstein. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to coordinate and lead a big team. Until now, he’d simply been holding the reins too loosely. People like Andreas Neff, with such an inflated view of themselves, had to be kept in check or they’d drive the whole team nuts. And Pia’s sister was no team player either, since she was used to being an expert witness and expressing her opinion, for which she received a great deal of respect.

“Have we heard anything about the Stadlers, father and son?” Bodenstein asked.

“Erik Stadler was working at his company yesterday and drove home at around seven. This morning, he left the house at 8:07 and went jogging,” Pia informed him. “Dirk Stadler came out to get the newspaper but has been in the house ever since.”

“Then we’ll drive over to see Erik first and after that, visit Dirk Stadler,” Bodenstein decided, getting up. “And only the two of us.”

*   *   *

Many people had unbelievably steady routines. The bakery salesgirl, for instance. You could truly set your watch by her daily schedule. To the exact minute. Within the past two weeks, he’d been unable to detect any deviations or irregularities. Each morning, she left her apartment at 5:45
A.M
. and drove to her job at the bakery next to the REWE supermarket at Camp Phoenix Park in Eschborn. She always parked her car in the same space behind the Aldi Market. She worked from 6
A.M
. to 1
P.M
., interrupted only by a breakfast break, and the time never varied. When she got off work, she went to the REWE supermarket next door to buy groceries, seldom taking more than fifteen minutes. From there, she drove to her home on Berliner Strasse in Schwalbach, where she lived with her husband, who was usually home when she arrived. He never stayed longer than till 2:30, when his lunch hour was probably over. At 4
P.M.,
the bakery salesgirl drove to her second job at a nail salon in Bad Soden, where she worked till 6:30 five days a week. The couple had no children; maybe they wanted to have some one day, since the woman was still young.

“Good morning.” She beamed at him when it was his turn in line. She was already reaching for the loaf of bread. “The usual?”

“No, not today.” He smiled, too.

“Oh, don’t you like the farmer bread anymore?”

“I have some left over. But I would like a
Flotte Henne.
”

“Coming right up.” She reached her gloved right hand into the display case, picked up a roll with cheese and lettuce and slices of hard-boiled egg, and stuck it in a paper bag along with a napkin.

“And?” he asked in a conversational tone. “Bags all packed for vacation?”

“No, not yet,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to pack this weekend in peace and quiet. Two seventy, please.”

He handed her a five-euro bill.

“Keep the change,” he said. “A little extra for your vacation.”

“Oh—thank you!” Genuine joy flashed beneath her professional cheerfulness. “Happy New Year! See you later.”

Yes,
he thought.
You will.

He wished her a Happy New Year, too, and a nice vacation, and left the bakery for the last time.

*   *   *

There were only a few cars in the parking lot of the old factory building at the end of Wiesenstrasse in Sulzbach. The property looked neglected. The asphalt was cracked and strewn with potholes; old tires were stacked against chain-link compartments filled with trash bags, and in a corner of the lot, a scrapped shipping container was rusting away.

“Twenty years ago, this was one of the largest middle-class employers in the area,” Bodenstein said, balancing between the craters full of meltwater. “Until the junior director put a bullet through his head in his office. After that, the plant rapidly fell into bankruptcy. No company wanted to take over this space.”

“I can understand why.” Pia gazed up at the dreary façade. “The building seems to have bad karma. Are we really at the right place?”

She shuddered.

“Erik Stadler doesn’t seem to be bothered by the gloom.” Bodenstein nodded toward the rectangular company sign made of Plexiglas that was posted next to the entrance:
SIS—STADLER INTERNET SERVICES.

The glass door was so filthy that it looked like milk glass, and very few people seemed to have bothered using the door handle, judging by the fingerprints on the glass and frame. Bodenstein and Pia entered the foyer. Worn red floor tiles, faded yellowish wallpaper, and closed doors with old-fashioned labels:
OFFICE, BOOKKEEPING, WC, PRODUCTION
. A laminated sign pointed the way for visitors to SIS, Inc., on the second floor. Up there, it was a whole different world, and Pia looked around in astonishment.

“Somebody sure invested a lot of money in this dump,” Pia said, impressed. “Look at that parquet floor.”

“Vinyl,” a woman corrected her, with three document binders in her arms as she came out of the room across from the stairwell. The door said
ARCHIVES
. “Optical laminate. Not cheap, but indestructible and, above all, antistatic. That’s important in a company full of computers. May I help you?”

“My name is Bodenstein, Kripo Hofheim.” He showed the woman his ID and introduced Pia. “We’d like to speak with Mr. Stadler.”

“Sorry, the boss isn’t here.” The friendly smile on the pretty freckled face vanished, giving way to a chilly expression. “And, I can’t tell you when he’ll drop by again. Lately, he’s been mostly working from home.”

“And who are you, if I may ask?” Bodenstein inquired politely.

“Franka Fellmann. Executive assistant.” She squared her shoulders, at the same time unintentionally thrusting forward her well-rounded breasts. Then she rolled her eyes and gave a theatrical sigh. “Also bookkeeper, receptionist, secretary, and cleaning woman. Whatever you wish.”

The bitter undertone could not be missed. Bodenstein knew all too well how useful it could be when someone possessed both an offended ego and a pronounced need to confide in other people. So he put on a sympathetic tone of voice.

“It sounds as though you have a lot to do,” he said in a friendly way. “And so close to New Year’s, too.”

“He left me with the entire annual report,” Franka Fellmann complained, hefting the three document binders. “He was here briefly this morning because I urgently needed him to sign a few things. But then he disappeared, and I’m not sure I can get everything done on time.”

As the frustrated assistant was telling Bodenstein her troubles, Pia’s gaze wandered over the framed photographs hanging on the walls, which were painted a mocha brown. Pictures showing a paraglider, BASE jumper, parachutist, and biathlete crossing the finish line as winner.

“That’s the boss in all those photos,” Ms. Fellmann volunteered unasked. “That’s the sort of nonsense he lives for.”

“Erik Stadler goes BASE jumping?” Pia asked in surprise.

“That’s not all. He’ll do anything as long as it’s life-threatening,” his assistant replied with a mixture of pride and disapproval. “An adrenaline junkie, as they say. He even won a bronze medal in the Olympic biathlon once, when he was in the army in Bavaria.”

“Interesting,” said Bodenstein with a nod. “In case you see or speak to your boss today, please tell him to get in touch with us.”

“What is this about?” Ms. Fellmann, now once more the executive assistant, raised her carefully plucked eyebrows.

“He already knows,” Bodenstein said vaguely. “Thank you very much.”

They turned to go when Pia thought of something.

“Oh, Ms. Fellmann, could you tell us where we could find your boss’s sister?”

Franka Fellmann looked first at Pia, then at Bodenstein, amazed.

“Helen is dead,” she replied. “She committed suicide a couple of months ago. And the boss hasn’t been the same since.”

Pia was the first to recover from the shock.

“We didn’t know that. Thanks for telling us. Good-bye.”

In silence they went down the stairs and left the building.

“Why didn’t the Stadlers tell us that?” Pia asked on the way to the car.

“We didn’t ask them about Helen,” Bodenstein reminded her.

“Still.” Pia stopped. “It’s strange. They talk to us for half an hour about how the mother died, but they never mention Helen’s name. And they forget to say that she killed herself.”

“Hmm,” was all Bodenstein said.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Pia asked.

“That Erik Stadler might be our man?”

“Precisely.” Pia sucked pensively on her lower lip. “Into extreme sports. A guy who loves taking risks. And as a biathlete and former soldier, he can shoot.”

“Let’s go into Frankfurt and have a talk with him,” Bodenstein suggested. “If he’s there.”

“I have a gut feeling that he isn’t,” Pia replied, looking worried.

*   *   *

Karoline Albrecht did something that she’d never done before, and did it with a pounding heart and a guilty conscience. She rummaged through her father’s study, which had always been off-limits to her. After he’d caught her thirty years ago sitting at his desk and talking on the phone to a girlfriend, the room with the bay windows, the massive safe, and the bookshelves up to the ceiling had been declared a no-go zone. She never again went into the study uninvited, and to this day, it held only unpleasant memories of various moral and punitive sermons delivered to her in the holy of holies. Whenever her father left the house, he usually locked the door, ostensibly to keep out the cleaning woman. But Karoline had learned from her mother where to find another key.

For a moment she hesitated, standing in the middle of the room. Where should she start, and just what was she looking for? She finally conquered her inhibitions and began by pulling out the wastebasket, but found nothing of interest. With the meticulousness of a tax auditor, she worked systematically from the north to the south. The desk held no secrets, as anticipated, and the password of the old-fashioned computer turned out to be an insuperable obstacle for her. Checking the telephone memory, she found only a single recent call, a number with a Kelkheim area code that was called on Christmas Day. Since Thursday of last week, her father had neither placed nor received any calls, and Karoline found that odd. For almost half an hour, she thought about where her father might keep the key to the antiquated safe. She looked behind the pictures on the wall, under the carpet, and in a flower vase, took one book after another out of the bookcase, and finally found the key inside a medical treatise her father had written titled
Surgery of the Thorax,
which was still a standard work for medical students. By then, her guilty conscience had evaporated. Instead, she was seized with the fever of the hunt, which forced her to concentrate and put aside her brooding. She unlocked the safe and propped open the hundred-pound door of concrete plates and steel. In addition to her parents’ passports, she discovered several jewelry boxes belonging to her mother, her father’s watch collection, cash, car titles, gold coins, a family genealogy, insurance documents, two manuscripts for other medical books, tax returns for recent years, and document binders with papers for real estate that her father had purchased as investments for his old age. What she had hoped to find was not in the safe, namely the obituary, whose exact wording she was burning to know.

Just as she was about to close the monstrous door, a telephone chirped softly. Karoline strained to listen and located the ringing inside the safe. She hurried to open one jewelry box after another and found the device, which had stopped ringing by then, among a collection of watches. It was a smartphone, a rather current model, and it was fully charged. Why did her father keep a phone in his safe? And why did he have an obsolete cell phone on his desk when he owned a much more modern device?

Karoline weighed it in her hand for a moment, then pressed the Home button and ran her finger across the glass. The main menu appeared and showed two calls had come in during his absence. She bit her lip. Was her father familiar enough with this device that he would notice? Maybe he hadn’t entered password protection, since he never took the smartphone with him. In the end, her curiosity was stronger than all her misgivings. First she brought up the list of all the calls that had come in and was flabbergasted. Yesterday alone, he’d had several conversations that each lasted longer than an hour. He had called a few old friends, some colleagues and companions, which in his situation was no surprise. But why had he used the old-fashioned cell phone and not the landline phone sitting on his desk? She had no answer.

*   *   *

Purely by chance, a couple of weeks ago, his attention was drawn to the high-rise, probably because a gigantic illuminated billboard made the building stand out among all the glass and reinforced concrete façades of the office buildings in the commercial area of Eschborn South. It was approximately one kilometer as the crow flies from the Seerose Industrial Park, which on a day with no wind was not an impossible distance. He had driven there twice to look over the building in detail, which had just been renovated. Unobserved, he climbed up the scaffolding to the roof. The workers he did encounter had paid him little notice. Apparently, so many companies had been involved in the renovation that a strange face didn’t attract attention. For the residents of the 312 apartments who had been living with the construction crews for months, the sight of a man on the scaffolding was nothing unusual. He had scouted how he could get onto the roof. The first time, he climbed up the scaffolding, but that would be difficult carrying the heavy case, so the second time, he went through the building. Today, he again pressed one of the many buttons on the intercom and announced himself as “the mailman.” The door buzzed and he entered the building. He knew that there were cameras in the foyer and on the way to the elevators, so he’d pulled up his hood and wore a hard hat over it.