I Am Your Judge: A Novel (8 page)

“Dr. Rudolf?”

“Yes. And who are you? What happened? Where’s my wife?”

The men from the morgue carried in the zinc coffin to remove the body and then paused respectfully.

“I’m Chief Detective Inspector Pia Kirchhoff,” Pia said. “Could we please speak privately—?”

“First I want to know what’s going on here,” the professor interrupted her. Fear flickered in his eyes behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. “My daughter’s car is outside. Where is she?”

In the doorway of the living room, a woman with blond hair appeared. Pia judged her to be in her early to midforties. Her face was rigid, her eyes glassy, and her expression vacant, either from a sedative or the effects of the shock she had suffered.

“Karoline!” Professor Rudolf squeezed past Pia. “Why won’t anyone answer the phone?”

“Mama is dead,” the woman said tonelessly. “Someone shot her … through the kitchen window.”

*   *   *

“How did he react?” Bodenstein wanted to know twenty minutes later. He apologized for the delay by explaining that he’d first had to drop off his little daughter at home.

“He totally collapsed.” Pia was still shaken by the intensity with which the professor had reacted to the horrible news.

“Did he see his wife’s body?”

“We couldn’t prevent it.” Pia shivered in the cold. “He shoved right past us and went in the kitchen. It took four men to tear him away from her body. At least his daughter was able to stop him from locking himself in his office and doing harm to himself out of sheer despair.”

They were standing in the street by the evidence team’s VW van as the snow began to come down even harder. The corpse had been taken away, and the crime-scene cleaners had shown up and were working in the kitchen. The ambulances and the medical examiner drove off. A few curious neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk underneath a streetlamp, watching as the daughter left the house and got in the Porsche with the Frankfurt plates. On the advice of the psychologist, she had not permitted Pia to speak with thirteen-year-old Greta, who had witnessed her grandmother’s murder. Pia had accepted that. It seemed unlikely the girl could have seen much, or at least nothing that would be helpful.

“She’s leaving her father here alone,” Pia remarked. “That’s odd.”

“Maybe he wants to be alone,” Bodenstein said. “Every individual reacts differently to a catastrophe like this. Besides, isn’t it better for the girl not to stay in that house any longer? By the way, where is she?”

“Her father picked her up earlier. The parents are separated, and he lives in Bad Soden,” Pia told him. “I’ve sent some colleagues out to talk with all the neighbors; maybe somebody saw something.”

“Very good.” Bodenstein rubbed his hands and stuck them in his coat pockets.

Kröger came over to them.

“We found the spot where the shooter fired from,” he said. “Do you want to take a look?”

“Of course.” Bodenstein and Pia followed him around in back of the house. The woods began just beyond the property. In one corner stood a transformer shed, and on top was a tent illuminated by floodlights.

“He was up there,” Kröger explained. “Fortunately, we were able to put up the tent before the snow started, in case there was any evidence to secure. And as a matter of fact, we found impressions of a reclining body in the moss growing on the roof. He used a bipod this time as well.”

“Can we get up there and look?” Bodenstein asked.

“Yeah, sure. We’ve already finished with it.” Kröger nodded and pointed to the ladder that was leaning against the wall of the transformer shed. Pia climbed up after her boss. They squatted next to each other and looked over at the house. In the summertime, the hornbeam hedge would block the view, but now they could see through it into the big window of the house.

“Without a doubt, it’s an ideal spot, but not easy to find,” Bodenstein commented. “He must have cased the whole area very carefully.”

“The line of sight was about sixty meters,” Kröger said to the two detectives standing next to him. “Afterwards, he could have escaped in two ways: either taking the path between the backyards and along the edge of the woods to the parking lot for the training center of the Federal Institute of Labor; or he could have gone down here past the barrier to the Hotel Heidekrug. The hotel closed last Sunday and won’t open again until the end of January, so no one would have noticed his car. And from there, it’s only a few seconds’ drive to the road to Königstein, which leads up the hill to Highway B 455. An absolutely perfect escape route. Only someone out for a walk could possibly have seen him.”

“How sure are you that it’s the same shooter as yesterday?” Bodenstein asked.

“Pretty sure. The bullet that we pulled out of the kitchen cupboard was the same caliber, at any rate. And we couldn’t find a spent cartridge here either, just like yesterday. He must have taken it with him so he wouldn’t leave any evidence behind.”

They walked slowly back to the cars.

“It sounds like the murder was carefully planned,” Pia said.

“You’re right,” Bodenstein agreed, deep in thought. “The woman was definitely not shot at random. Let’s go back inside and try to talk to the professor. We can interview the granddaughter tomorrow.”

Friday, December 21, 2012

Not much was going on in the parking lot of the Seerose Industrial Park. Except for the supermarket, the discount warehouse, and the bakery, the businesses wouldn’t open for another hour, and the office workers from the nearby office complexes mainly came over during their lunch hour and after work. This early in the morning, the customers were mostly pensioners or people on their way to work in Frankfurt, stopping to pick up breakfast or a cup of coffee. He waited patiently in line at the sales counter of the bakery, and even let someone go first because he wanted to be waited on by the nice young Turkish woman who worked the early shift every morning. Unlike her surly coworkers, she always seemed in a good mood. Right now, she was bantering with the two men in orange jackets who had left their garbage truck parked across several parking spaces. Who knew why they had done that?

“Good morning!” She gave him a smile that was as charming as it was insincere. “One loaf of the usual? Farmer’s bread, sliced?”

As a good saleswoman, she knew the preferences of her steady customers.

“Good morning,” he replied. “Yes, that’s it. And also a pretzel stick with plenty of salt, please.”

The loaf of bread would turn old and hard, like all the bread he’d bought from her in the past few weeks. He didn’t come here for the bread, but she couldn’t know that.

“Certainly,” she said. A lock of dark hair had come loose from her tight ponytail to curl over her forehead. Her face was attractive, with full lips and very white teeth. A lovely young woman. A bit too much makeup for his taste, and she didn’t really need it. But above all, she was a woman with regular habits and an extremely regular schedule, which made things easy for him.

“Do you have time off after Christmas?” he asked casually as she slid the pretzel stick into a paper bag.

“Unfortunately, no.” A woebegone look flitted across her face, but then her usual smile returned. “But in the new year, we’ll be going on vacation. Then you’ll have to get along without me for three weeks.”

In two sentences, she had shortened her life by at least three days. Originally, he had intended to let her have Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but her vacation plans now forced him to revise his timetable. But he still had some leeway in the schedule.

“That’ll certainly be a big challenge for me.” He put a ten-euro bill on the counter and smiled, well aware that she wouldn’t pick up on the ambiguity of his words.

“Well, until then, you’ll be seeing me a few more times.” With a coquettish giggle, she handed him the paper bag with the bread and the pretzel, still warm, and gave him his change.

“See you tomorrow!” She gave him a flirtatious wink as he left, before turning to beguile the next customer with her laugh. Her friendliness was not directed at him personally. But even if it had been, it wouldn’t have done any good.

*   *   *

Pia Kirchhoff stepped out of the shower and reached for her towel. Christoph had left the house a quarter of an hour before. He had taken his suitcase and assured her that she didn’t have to worry about him. Antonia and her friend Lukas would drive him to the airport in the late afternoon and bring his car back to Birkenhof sometime later.

“Of course, I understand about work,” he’d told her the night before. “In your place, I would have made the same decision.”

He had long since realized that he’d be flying to Ecuador alone. Just as Henning had said. In principle, and Pia had to admit this, all three of them thought the same way. They were all 100 percent committed to their jobs.

Back when she was still married to Henning, Pia had often felt annoyed that his work was more important to him than his private life. Henning hadn’t wanted her to get a job, but she’d spent weeks, alone and bored, in their apartment in Sachsenhausen. In the evening and on weekends, she’d gone to one of the dissection rooms at the Institute of Forensic Medicine just so she could see her husband. The last straw that had prompted their separation, in March now eight years ago, had been a cable tramway accident in Austria; specifically the fact that Henning had neglected to say good-bye to her when he left. She had moved out of the apartment—and he hadn’t even noticed until two weeks later. Subsequently, she had made the two best decisions in her life: to buy Birkenhof and to return to her old job with the criminal police. She wanted to be free, and she had promised herself never to put her own desires in second place again.

Then she’d met Christoph and fallen head over heels in love, first with his chocolate brown eyes and then with his incredible personality, although in his own way, he was just as crazy as Henning. But the biggest difference was that now she, too, had a profession that she felt passionate about. She seldom saw her job as a constraint, and often enough, there were periods when she left work precisely on time and could devote herself to her animals and the farm. Yet occasionally situations like this would come up, of course, and Christoph never complained when she had to work almost around the clock. Nor would it ever occur to Pia to grumble when the zoo needed him on-site, as had often been the case in recent months while the new elephant house was being built.

Pia stared at her face in the mirror and let out a big sigh.

She had known that Christoph would understand and not be disappointed or angry, and although she was relieved, she was sad about his reaction. For the first time, they were supposed to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve as a married couple—but now she would sit around at Birkenhof while Christoph spent the holidays with strangers thousands of kilometers away.

Just a little while ago, as he gave her one last hug before leaving to finish up some work at the zoo, she’d felt as if her heart were about to be ripped out of her chest. At that moment, she had doubted her decision. Could two dead people whom she didn’t even know be more important to her than the man she loved above all else? What if something happened to Christoph on the trip? What if the plane crashed or the ship sank and she would never see him again? How would she be able to stand that? She already missed him so much that the pain was physical. Ever since they met, they had never once been apart longer than a day.

Pia got dressed and drew her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. So far, Bodenstein knew nothing of her decision to cancel her vacation. None of her colleagues expected that she would sacrifice her time off to assist in a homicide investigation, and apart from her boss, none of them would ever consider doing the same. She could still phone Christoph and tell him that she would fly with him after all. She turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs. Her cell phone was on the kitchen table. All she had to do was pick it up and press the speed dial to reach Christoph.

But then she thought about the husband and daughter of the woman who was killed yesterday. And Renate Rohleder. Their bewilderment and horror. Pia also thought about the young girl who had seen her grandmother’s head blown off. Damn.

*   *   *

All the seats were taken in the waiting room behind the guardhouse on the ground floor of the Regional Criminal Unit. Previously, Chief Commissioner Nierhoff, Nicola Engel’s predecessor in the post, had preferred to use this space for his numerous press conferences because it was the biggest room in the building. This morning, the “Sniper” Special Commission was convening for the first time, and the room was already fully equipped with tables, a telephone, the inevitable whiteboard, PCs, printers, and a fax machine. Twenty-five officers were jammed into the space, sitting and standing. They’d been brought in from various investigative units to join the special commission, which also included Dr. Nicola Engel, the head of the regular police in the building; case analyst Andreas Neff from the State Criminal Division; and Bodenstein and Ostermann as the last contingent from K-11.

After a very brief statement to the press was issued, which Bodenstein had done last night, the newspapers and online news services were already writing sensationalist headlines such as:
SECOND SNIPER MURDER! IS AN INSANE KILLER ON THE LOOSE?
And the public was understandably nervous. To the annoyance of police colleagues manning the switchboard, people were already calling the general emergency number for information, so the first order of business was to set up an emergency phone number especially for this case. Since Ostermann was hardly saying a word, Bodenstein took over describing the situation to his assembled colleagues.

“On Wednesday morning at around eight forty-five in the Niederhöchstadt district, seventy-four-year-old Ingeborg Rohleder was shot dead,” he began. “So far, we have no indications of a motive for the crime. The shooter used a rifle and Winchester .308 ammunition. That’s a very common caliber, so it’s impossible to ascertain where, when, and from whom this ammunition was purchased. At first, we assumed that Mrs. Rohleder was merely a target of opportunity, but last night at around six thirty, a second homicide was perpetrated in Oberursel in a very similar way—”