I Am Your Judge: A Novel (50 page)

That suited him fine.

He put the car in the garage and went inside. The house was nice and warm, and he noticed that he was hungry. After he changed his clothes, he put a couple more logs on the fire and fixed himself some scrambled eggs and bacon. He ate the food right from the pan and turned on the TV. No official statement from the police, only shots of the crime scene that told him nothing. Blue lights, crime-scene tape, a hearse, and reporters looking solemn, saying the same things as they had last Friday. They were again characterizing him as a psychopath, a monster. How unimaginative. Always the same vocabulary. And incorrect. But soon they would know his true motives. Whether they would understand them was something else, but he had no doubt that someone somewhere would secretly comprehend why he had been driven to act. Why he could not let these people escape unpunished.

Four names were left on his list. Burmeister was next. He was on vacation with his daughter, but was returning the day after tomorrow, and then he would receive his punishment.

*   *   *

It was two thirty in the morning when Pia’s phone rang. Bodenstein was still talking with Kröger at the construction site; Pia stood down below, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello, Henning,” she said in surprise. “Did you and your family have a Happy New Year?”

“You can make that singular,” he replied dryly. “I spent the night with Friedrich Gehrke.”

“Excuse me?”

“There was a little argument with Miriam when she told me she preferred to visit friends. She didn’t like it that I had to go out in the early evening to deal with another dead body. Since Ronnie, who was on duty, and I had nothing better to do, we decided to clear out a couple of cold-storage drawers.”

“You are really incorrigible.” Pia shook her head and at the same time felt a little ashamed because deep inside, she felt a hint of malicious glee. Miriam used to be her best friend, but after she and Henning got married two years ago in something of a rush, their friendship had soured. It particularly rankled Pia that Miriam always acted as though she had succeeded in reining in Henning’s excessive workaholic tendencies, which was the reason why Pia had divorced him. Obviously, this was not the case.

“So, listen up,” said Henning without going into detail about the spat with his wife. “There are a couple of points that could be interesting. In the report from the crime scene, it states that Gehrke had burned papers in his open fireplace before he died. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s right. Quite a lot, in fact. Why?”

“We found no soot particles in his bronchial passages or in the lungs or on the mucous membranes. Either he wore a protective mask or he wasn’t present while the fire was burning.”

“What do you mean—‘he wasn’t present’?”

“Hold on. In the vicinity of the nose and mouth, as well as the upper and lower lip, we found skin desiccation and minor subcutaneous hemorrhages, as well as light irritation of the nasal and oral mucous membranes.”

“And?”

“We did a quick test in the laboratory and found that Gehrke had inhaled chloroform. In vivo, forty percent of a one-time dose is broken down in eight hours by the lungs, and because of that, we have to examine the lung tissue, which will take only a moment.”

Pia was exhausted and couldn’t help yawning. She couldn’t understand what Henning was getting at.

“Would it be all right if you e-mailed us a report tomorrow?” she asked. “I’m standing in front of a house in Griesheim. We’ve had another sniper murder.”

“I had a hunch you weren’t celebrating New Year’s with friends,” Henning replied, wide awake and unmoved. “We just heard about it on the radio. So maybe you should listen to me after all.”

“Yeah, sure.” Pia sighed.

“I’ve come to the preliminary conclusion that Gehrke inhaled chloroform and then lost consciousness,” Henning continued. “From Kröger’s report, I couldn’t tell whether a cotton ball or a handkerchief soaked in chloroform was secured at the crime scene. In addition, subcutaneous bleeds on the back of the head and the nape of the neck indicate that he was being gripped hard.”

Finally the penny dropped for Pia.

“You mean that Gehrke was murdered?”

“Bingo, even though it took you awhile. But I’ll let the current corpse serve as your excuse.”

“And the insulin?”

“Someone could have given him the injection at any time. He was sedated and couldn’t defend himself.” Henning didn’t sound as though his marital troubles were giving him a headache. “Chloroform isn’t really in fashion these days, but it’s marvelous for putting someone out for a while—”

“How certain are you?” Pia interrupted him. Bodenstein had come out of the construction site with Kröger, and both were now standing next to her.

“I’m fairly sure. But you’ll still get all the lab results, of course.”

“Thank you, Henning. My boss just arrived. Talk to you again tomorrow.”

“What did the Lord of Death want at this hour?” Kröger inquired.

“He had nothing better to do tonight, so he performed an autopsy on Gehrke,” Pia replied. “He’s pretty sure that his death was the result of foul play. Apparently, Gehrke was knocked out with chloroform. There were no soot particles in his lungs, which means he must have been dead before the documents were burned.”

“Another homicide.” Bodenstein shook his head in resignation. “That’s just great. As if we have nothing else to do.”

“You guys should go home.” Kröger patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll finish up here. Whatever Dr. Kirchhoff can do, I can do, too.”

“You’re a screwball, Christian,” said Pia with another yawn. “Come on, boss, let’s go home. Tomorrow’s another day.”

*   *   *

After he dropped Pia off at Birkenhof around four in the morning, Bodenstein drove home. His fury at the sniper and his own powerlessness had metamorphosed into a feverish unease. Since Inka preferred to sleep in her own bed after she came back from her emergency call, he had no reason to stay home. He realized that he didn’t have to take anyone into consideration. He didn’t have to justify his actions or feel guilty for working on a holiday; there were no children to disappoint by failing to keep a promise, no reproachful looks. He could turn on all the lights in the house at five o’clock, start the coffeemaker, and take a leisurely shower and shave without worrying about waking someone up. Why, he thought as he stepped over to his wardrobe in the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, would he want to change this situation? Living in a relationship seemed much more complicated than living alone; the drawbacks far outweighed the advantages. Even during the period after his divorce from Cosima, he’d enjoyed living alone; back then, the only thing that had bothered him was the lack of comforts in the coach house of the Bodenstein Estate. Now, on the other hand, he owned a lovely house, and being free felt like paradise.

Bodenstein enjoyed the freshly brewed coffee and the view out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the entire Rhein-Main region. He wasn’t the type of person who started the new year with a zillion resolutions, only to give them up in a matter of weeks. But at this moment, he intended to achieve three things in the year 2013. First, he would catch the sniper; second, end his relationship with Inka; and third, accept Gabriela’s offer. No more self-doubt and constant giving in out of sheer laziness. This year, he was going to change a few things, and he was looking forward to it.

Feeling motivated, a little later he put on his coat, turned off the lights in the house, and went out to his car. They were close to reaching a breakthrough in the sniper case; his intuition told him that. Yet he was wary of having overlooked something, and that made him edgy. The investigation had been chaotic from the start, and the team was not working smoothly together. Every time he thought he’d understood something, new circumstances had popped up, a new murder happened, and all that talk about a perp profile had confused him utterly. Nicola’s decision to bring in a profiler had simply been premature. Before they had even figured out what the murders were all about, they’d been distracted by psychological speculations that had to be revised the next day, and at some point, they’d lost their perspective. In the end, who was to blame for their failure to arrest the sniper yet? Why did more people have to die?

As Bodenstein drove along the streets of Kelkheim that were littered with fireworks debris, he thought about Chief Inspector Menzel, his former boss in Frankfurt. His motto was:
Remember everything that you heard or saw and follow the trail backwards.
The sniper simply hadn’t allowed them enough time to think things through and to eliminate false starting points. He had hounded them forward, put them under pressure, and they had let themselves be hurried, although in a homicide investigation, nothing was more disastrous than haste, stress, and exhaustion. Tired people make mistakes, drew the wrong conclusions, and lost the thread. At least now they had names and knew what was driving the sniper. They could warn the individuals who were on Helen Stadler’s list.

For days, Bodenstein had secretly been anticipating that the higher-ups would take him off the case that was attracting so much attention, or bring in some super-investigator from State Criminal Police headquarters to replace him, but that had not happened. Either they trusted him to get the upper hand in the case, or else there was no one else foolish enough to scorch his reputation with such an unpopular investigation. Failure was always bad for anyone’s career; failure in the eyes of the public was professional suicide. But he had no intention of failing. On the contrary. Now that most of the pieces of the puzzle were on the table, they just had to put them together correctly. And they had to do it today.

*   *   *

Pia’s eyes were watering from fatigue as she drove toward Hofheim shortly before 7
A.M
. along the paved frontage road that ran parallel to the autobahn. When she’d got home, Kim wasn’t there, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. After Pia Skyped with Christoph, she had nodded off on the couch, but she wasn’t able to enter a deep sleep. One nightmare had followed another, and around five, she received a cryptic text on her cell phone, which Kim had no doubt sent around ten the night before in answer to her text. It had been delayed by the annual overload of the cellular network on New Year’s Eve.
Okay. Call if you need me. Not drinking until 11. After that, we’ll see! ;-) XO Kim.

By six thirty, Pia gave up on sleeping. She took a shower, put on clean clothes, fed the animals, and took off again.

As she drove through the pitch-dark morning, she pondered what mistakes she might have made that could possibly cost Christoph his life. The offenses of Renate Rohleder, Patrick Schwarzer, and Bettina Kaspar-Hesse had not been capital crimes—they were human errors, long forgotten or repressed. But the decisions they made back then had injured other people so deeply that their actions became a boomerang that returned to punish them ten years later in the most horrible way.

A fox ran across the road, its eyes shining spooky green in the headlights; then it vanished into the dark.

No one went through life without occasionally hurting other people, now and then causing disappointment, problems, and even outright harm. For almost any action that hurt someone else, there were rules for rectification, namely the penal code. Long ago, people took the law into their own hands, but that time was over. Even if many felt unjustly treated by the law, as a rule, they did not take up arms to exact vengeance. But that’s exactly what the sniper was doing. He did not trust in the system of justice and the rule of law. Instead, he held to the biblical legal code: “a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a brand for a brand, a welt for a welt.” He was meting out his own justice. What did his deeds mean? Your beloved for my beloved?

Pia’s cell phone beeped, and the thought that had flitted through her head evaporated. She called up Henning’s text and read it as she drove.
Dr. Hans Furtwängler, Cologne,
he wrote.
He had a lot to do with Rudolf, maybe he can help you guys out. Tel. no. follows.

Dr. Hans Furtwängler! Fritz Gehrke had phoned him before his death, and she had read the name in Helen Stadler’s notebook. Kai had already checked out the old doctor and also asked him what he and Gehrke had talked about on Saturday evening for fourteen minutes. But she couldn’t recall what Furtwängler had told Kai. She definitely needed to ask him again. She turned off the highway toward Hofheim and reached the station three minutes later. Kim’s car was parked in the public parking lot, and it hadn’t been there for long, because Pia could see tire tracks on the frost-covered asphalt. Where had her sister spent the night?

*   *   *

Professor Dieter Rudolf was beside himself. Last night, the police had taken him into custody and locked him in a cell without giving him a chance to call anyone. On the way from the cell to the interrogation room, his shoes kept slipping off because he’d had to surrender his shoelaces, but the height of humiliation was that he’d had to hold up his pants with one hand, since they were too loose without a belt.

“This is wrongful deprivation of personal liberty!” he yelled angrily at Bodenstein and Pia as he was ushered past them into the interrogation room. “I’m going to lodge a complaint, you can count on that!”

“Shut up and sit down.” Bodenstein pointed to the chair across the table from Pia, who had already taken a seat.

“You’d better watch how you talk to me,” the professor retorted. “I have rights!”

“In a society in which we have rights, we also have obligations,” Bodenstein countered with a cool look at the man sitting across from him. The professor’s thin face was flushed and his Adam’s apple hopped up and down. He was unshaven, and his white hair was sticking out wildly. The night in the cell had deeply shaken his ego, and he was reacting precisely the way Bodenstein had expected: with aggression and shouts. Men in executive positions liked to think of themselves as untouchable. Used to obedience without complaint from their subordinates, they had a hard time taking orders from anyone they would normally regard as beneath them.