I Am Your Judge: A Novel (37 page)

Dirk Stadler stopped and rubbed his eyes.

“I still can’t comprehend it. She had just tried on her wedding dress in Frankfurt, and the same night, she took her life.”

“Why in Kelsterbach? What was she doing there?”

“That’s something else I don’t understand. To this day, it’s a riddle why she went there and how she got there.”

“Did she leave a suicide note?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

Pia thought about the letter that the Judge had sent to the editor of the
Taunus Echo: For I am come to judge the living and the dead
. The sentence came from the Apostles’ Creed.

“Are you a religious man?” Pia asked.

“No.” Dirk Stadler shook his head. “I stopped believing in a just God many years ago.”

“May we take a look at Helen’s personal effects?”

“If you like. I’ve left everything the way it was in her room upstairs.”

“Do you know where your son has been in the past few days?” Bodenstein asked.

“No.” The sudden change of topic seemed to surprise Stadler. “I last saw him on Christmas Eve, when he and Lis came to visit me. Just before you arrived, his bookkeeper brought me the keys to his office, because she couldn’t reach him. Is something going on with him?”

“We took him into police custody yesterday,” said Bodenstein. “We’ve issued a preliminary indictment against him.”

“Against Erik?” Dirk Stadler was astonished. “You … you believe that my son would be capable of shooting people?”

“Well, he is a good shot. He definitely has a motive. And he has no alibi for the times when the murders were committed.”

“But Erik? He would never … do anything like that!”

Neither Bodenstein nor Pia missed the tiny hesitation. Was Dirk Stadler not entirely convinced of his son’s innocence?

With an effort, Stadler got up from the stool and limped toward the living room. His accommodating attitude had evaporated.

“If you would like to see Helen’s room, it’s upstairs, the second door on the right. Please pardon me if I stay down here, my leg is bothering me quite a bit today.”

“Of course,” said Bodenstein.

Stadler bent toward the vacuum cleaner, but then something seemed to occur to him.

“If I were you, I’d talk with Jens-Uwe. Or with Mark Thomsen.”

“Mark—who?”

“The chairman of HRMO,” said Stadler with a bitter smile. “Helen’s … surrogate father. As if she needed one.”

*   *   *

There was a lot of activity at the Seerose Mall in Eschborn. All the sensation-seekers were out in force. People had come from near and far, not to shop, but to see and take pictures of the spot where Hürmet Schwarzer had died. The shoe store’s display window with the bullet hole had already been replaced, and the bakery where the victim had worked was again open for business. As if nothing had happened.

“Unbelievable,” said Pia in disgust as they drove past, seeing the crowd trying to get a look at the bloodstain. “Why do people do stuff like this?”

“I’ll never understand it,” said Bodenstein, shaking his head. “But right now, I’m starving. Want to get something to eat?”

“Good idea,” Pia agreed. “How about that Burger King up ahead?”

“If you must.”

Bodenstein was no fan of fast food, but Pia felt a need for some calories, meat, and mayo. The alternative was KFC, but that wasn’t her favorite. A few minutes later, they were standing in line at one of the cash registers.

Bodenstein was studying the menu on the wall with a skeptical look. He seemed completely out of his element.

“May I help you?” The young man behind the counter slapped down a tray and took Pia’s order.

“Have you found something you’d like?” she asked her boss.

“Not yet.” Bodenstein thought about it, then turned to the cashier. “What can you recommend today?”

“Uh, what do you like to eat?” replied the young man, putting on a polite expression after a moment of irritation. “Are you a vegetarian?”

“No. Do you still have that Filet-O-Fish on your menu?” Bodenstein asked.

“No, we don’t. This is Burger King.”

Pia had to stifle her laughter as Bodenstein listened to descriptions of the various burgers and condiments available, then asked for more information. The people standing beside and behind him were gawking in astonishment. Finally he decided on a Big King XXL with fries and a mineral water. Pia let him pay, grabbed her tray, and headed for an empty table.

“Why is everyone staring at me?” Bodenstein asked as he sat down across from her.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Pia snorted, and then laughed until tears came to her eyes. “‘What can you recommend today?’ Who asks that in a fast-food joint?”

“I’m not familiar with their selections,” Bodenstein replied with dignity, but then even he had to grin. “So the Filet-O-Fish isn’t offered here?”

“No!” Pia shook her head and wiped away her tears with a paper napkin. “Oh man, the look that guy gave you, I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life!”

With a smile, Bodenstein unwrapped his burger, examined it critically, and then bit into it.

“Hmm, not bad,” he said. “But it doesn’t look anything like the one in the advertising photo.”

Pia shook her head as she chewed. They had spent almost an hour in Helen Stadler’s room and found nothing helpful. Plenty of books and clothes, photo albums, cosmetics, and textbooks. There were old stuffed animals in a carton in the closet; mementos in her desk drawers: used concert tickets, postcards, old photos of her mother, and all sorts of things that Helen had kept because she couldn’t bear to throw them out. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, except they didn’t find the one thing that every young person had in her room, namely a computer or laptop.

Dirk Stadler told them that Helen had owned a laptop. On the day of her death, she’d taken it with her in her backpack, as usual, and he’d never seen it again. After the investigation, the police had returned the backpack and all its contents to him, but there was no laptop. Strange. Stadler suspected that she might have left it at Jens-Uwe’s on that day.

Pia was just finishing her fries when Kai called. She’d asked him to find out about a Mark Thomsen, the chairman of HRMO.

“Dead end,” he said. “There’s no one in the area by that name.”

“But he’s listed on the masthead of HRMO’s Web site,” Pia recalled, holding her cell phone clamped between her shoulder and ear.

“Correct. His name is there. And the town of Eppstein. But that’s all,” said Kai. “According to the residential Registration Office, there’s no Thomsen living in Eppstein. I can’t find him in our computer either.”

“Well, that’s interesting.” Pia wiped her greasy fingers on a fresh napkin. “You could call Lydia Winkler. Maybe she knows something.”

“Will do. Oh, and there’s news about Patrick Schwarzer. Get this: He used to do community service work, driving an ambulance.”

“Let me guess,” said Pia. “He was on duty on September sixteenth, 2002.”

“You got it,” Kai confirmed. “His birthday was the day before, and apparently he partied hard, so the next day, he still had quite a bit of residual alcohol in his bloodstream. When he tried to turn the ambulance around with Kirsten Stadler on board, he went into a ditch. And that resulted in a delay of a good forty-five minutes.”

Cem and Kathrin had confronted Patrick, the widower of Hürmet Schwarzer, with the message from the Judge, and that jogged his memory. He’d completely forgotten the episode from ten years before, since the patient had no personal connection to him. And it was the only blunder he’d made in two and a half years. When he realized that this mistake, so insignificant to him, had eventually cost his wife her life, he broke down and announced he was going to kill himself. Cem called a psychologist and waited until Schwarzer’s father and brother arrived.

“‘The guilty parties shall feel the same pain as the one who has suffered because of their indifference, greed, vanity, and thoughtlessness. Those who have taken guilt upon themselves shall live in fear and terror, for I am come to judge the living and the dead.’”

Pia quoted from the letter that the Judge had sent to the newspaper editor.

“The killer has evidently achieved his goal,” Kai said dryly. “The guy is completely devastated.”

On the way to the car, Pia related to her boss what Kai had told her about Patrick Schwarzer’s past.

“Another strike against Erik Stadler,” Bodenstein said, thinking out loud. “He must have been aware of the long delay back then.”

“What if we’re dealing with a professional hit man that one of the Stadlers hired?” said Pia with a shiver. It would be nearly impossible to catch a pro who may even have come in from another country and would vanish the same way.

“If so, we’re looking for his client.” Bodenstein peered out into the fog that was growing thicker.

“Then all our thoughts about profiling are no longer relevant,” Pia replied. “The murder contract could have been arranged by the elder Winkler, or Stadler with his gimpy leg.”

“Damn it,” Bodenstein cursed. “We’re no farther along than we were last week, and we’re running out of time!”

“At least we’ve found out what it’s all about,” Pia argued. On a full stomach, she was again thinking effectively. “The deaths of Kirsten Stadler and her daughter are the reasons for the murders.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Helen’s suicide was probably the trigger,” Pia suspected. She raised her hand and checked off the suspects on her fingers. “Erik Stadler. Dirk Stadler. Joachim Winkler. Jens-Uwe Hartig. Those are our main suspects, and we need to watch them closely. Even more important, we need to find any other potential victims. So we’re going to have to put more pressure on Stadler Junior, Hartig, and the UCF.”

“Let’s do it,” Bodenstein agreed with a nod. “We need to get this motherfucker.”

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The dim light of dawn filtered through the slats of the blinds as Bodenstein opened his eyes and waited for his mind to disengage from the remnants of a confusingly realistic dream. It was rare for the cases he worked on during the day to bother him at night. Yet this time, some of the people who’d been baffling him and his team with riddles had slipped into his dreams, as if they wanted to tell him something. He turned over on his back, savoring the utter silence in the house. No child calling for him, no dog who wanted to be taken for a walk. And no Inka either. The other side of the bed was untouched. She’d sent him a text in the late afternoon saying that she had to go to Limburg on an emergency case and had no idea how late she would be. Since she didn’t want to wake him, she would sleep at home. The flimsiness of her excuse made Bodenstein feel depressed. In the past, she had often come to his place in the middle of the night, and she had a key to the front door. Why was she doing this? What had happened?

On Christmas Day, everything had seemed fine, but now she was suddenly retreating from him. Did she feel that he wasn’t paying enough attention to her? Or did she have doubts about a future together with him? He realized that she had a problem with Sophia, but he’d hoped that their relationship was strong enough to solve it. When he’d been married to Cosima, there were often minor fights and arguments, but with Inka, he had never had any clashes. She simply clammed up whenever something displeased her. What he’d at first taken as harmony now appeared to be more a result of her inability to resolve conflict, and even worse: her lack of interest. Inka was proud and independent. She had never had a long-term partnership and apparently hadn’t missed it, so why would she change now, in her early fifties? Had she grown too close to him? Did things seem confining? Was he too boring for her?

Bodenstein glanced at the digital display on his alarm clock. Eight o’clock. Today he wanted to pay a visit to Fritz Gehrke and try to talk with him about the Judge’s accusations from the obituary. He sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and went to the bathroom for a shower.

Why hadn’t Inka answered his good night text?

What exactly did he feel about her? It was hardly love; at any rate, not that deep, warm, heart-pounding feeling he had felt for so long with Cosima, even if it wasn’t necessarily reciprocated. His relationship with Inka had not developed out of stormy infatuation and passion. It was an old affection that had been rekindled through the marriage of their children. They both had their own work and their own lives, and they had never made a deliberate decision to become a couple. Inka had drawn closer gradually, and he had accepted the fact that she never took the step to rent out her house as a way of making their partnership official. After Oliver’s divorce from Cosima and his brief affair with Annika Sommerfeld, Inka had been a willing confidante. They had talked for hours on the phone and in person. At some point, they had landed in bed together. That had been good. Familiar. Unfortunately, no more than that, he now had to admit to himself.

As he shaved, he thought about the fact that he hardly knew Inka. There was a boundary that she wouldn’t let him cross. Always this caution, a locked room inside her to which he was denied entry. He could talk with her about all sorts of things, but she never talked about herself. To this day, she wouldn’t tell him who Thordis’s father was. She didn’t talk about her time in America and never mentioned any acquaintances or friends.

It bothered him that he had thoughts like this. Just because they hadn’t slept together in two nights and she hadn’t texted him. Why should he immediately question their relationship? She’d simply had too much to do at her horse clinic, and he was busy, too. Still, doubt gnawed at him. Was he convincing himself that everything was fine because he was too afraid to face the truth? Was he really satisfied with a relationship that was so casual?

Bodenstein got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen, absentmindedly pressing the button on the coffeemaker and shoving two slices of bread into the toaster. No message from Inka on his cell. He spread cream cheese and strawberry jam on the toast and ate it standing up as he drank his coffee. Out the window, another overcast, sunless day was dawning. In the newspaper, he’d read recently that December of 2012 was about to become the darkest month since 1951, when weather records were first kept. Maybe it was just the lack of light along with the difficult case that was oppressing his psyche and making everything seem so bleak.