Tuesday, November 11, 2008
“The skeleton is that of a girl who at the time of death was between fifteen and eighteen years old.” Dr. Henning Kirchhoff was in a hurry. He had to catch a plane to London, where he was expected to testify as an expert witness at a criminal trial. Bodenstein was sitting in a chair in front of the ME’s desk, listening as Dr. Kirchhoff packed the necessary documents in his briefcase and held forth on fused basilar sutures, partially fused iliac crests, and other indicators of aging.
“How long has she been inside the tank?” Bodenstein interrupted him at last.
“Ten to fifteen years max.” The medical examiner stepped over to the light box and tapped on one of the X-rays. “She once had a broken arm. You can clearly see a healed fracture here.”
Bodenstein stared at the photo. The bones glowed white against the black background.
“Ah yes, and there’s something else that’s very interesting…” Dr. Kirchhoff wasn’t the sort of person to blurt out the information. Even when pressed for time he was still able to make his report suspenseful. He looked through a few X-rays, holding them up against the light of the box, and then hung up the one he wanted next to the negative of the humerus. “The first bicuspids on the right and left side of the upper jaw had been extracted, probably because her jaw was too small.”
“And what does that mean?”
“That we saved your people some work.” Dr. Kirchhoff fixed Bodenstein with his gaze. “That is, when we correlated the dental chart data in the computer with the list of missing women, we got a match. The girl was reported missing in 1997. We also compared our X-rays with antemortem X-rays of the missing girl—and look here…,” he said, hanging another negative on the light box, “here we have the fracture when it was still relatively fresh.”
Bodenstein was growing impatient, but it suddenly dawned on him who it was that the workman at the old airfield in Eschborn had happened to dig up. Ostermann had made up a list of girls and young women who had disappeared in the past fifteen years and were never found. At the top stood the names of the two girls that Tobias Sartorius had murdered.
“Since there are no other organic materials available,” Dr. Kirchhoff went on, “sequencing was impossible, but we were able to extract the mitochondrial DNA and got a second hit. As far as the girl from the tank is concerned, she’s…”
He stopped talking, went around his desk, and rummaged through one of the many mountains of documents.
“Laura Wagner or Stefanie Schneeberger,” Bodenstein surmised. Dr. Kirchhoff looked up with a peeved smile.
“You’re a spoilsport, Bodenstein,” he said. “Just for jumping the gun like that and messing up my story, I ought to keep you in suspense until I get back from London. But since you’re kind enough to drive me to the S-Bahn station in this awful weather, I’ll tell you on the way which one the skeleton belongs to.”
* * *
Pia Kirchhoff was sitting at her desk, brooding. She had stayed up late the night before studying the files and had stumbled upon several inconsistencies. The facts in the Tobias Sartorius case were clear, the evidence against him unambiguous at first glance. Yet when she read the transcripts of the interviews, Pia couldn’t help thinking of questions to which she found no answers. Tobias Sartorius had been twenty years old when he was sentenced to the most severe punishment under juvenile criminal law for the manslaughter of then seventeen-year-old Stefanie Schneeberger and the murder of Laura Wagner, also seventeen. A neighbor had witnessed the two girls entering the house of the Sartorius family within a few minutes of each other late in the evening of September 6, 1997. Tobias and his ex-girlfriend Laura Wagner had already had a loud argument out on the street. Before that all three had been at the fair where, according to witnesses, they had consumed considerable quantities of alcohol. The court had found Tobias guilty of killing his girlfriend Stefanie Schneeberger in the heat of the moment with a tire iron. He had then killed his ex-girlfriend Laura, who had witnessed the crime. Judging by the amount of Laura’s blood found everywhere in the house, on Tobias’s clothes, and in the trunk of the car, the murder must have been committed with extreme brutality. Clear indications of a gruesome killing had then been concealed. In a search of the property, Stefanie’s backpack was found in Tobias’s room; Laura’s necklace was in the milk room under the sink; and finally the murder weapon, the tire iron, was discovered in the cesspool behind the cow stalls. The defense argument that after the altercation Stefanie had forgotten her backpack in her boyfriend’s room was dismissed as irrelevant. Later, shortly after 11:00 P.M., witnesses had seen Tobias driving out of Altenhain in his car. But around 11:45 his friends J?rg Richter and Felix Pietsch said they had spoken with him at his front door! They said he was covered in blood and refused to come back to the fair with them.
Pia had stumbled across this discrepancy in the chronology. The court had assumed that Tobias removed the bodies of the two girls in the trunk of his car. But what could he have done in a mere three-quarters of an hour? Pia took a swig of coffee and rested her chin in her hand, deep in thought. Her colleagues had been very thorough, interviewing almost every inhabitant of Altenhain in the course of their investigation. And yet she had a vague feeling that something had been overlooked.
The door opened and her colleague Hasse appeared in the doorway. His face was a ghastly white; only his nose glowed red and inflamed from constantly blowing it.
“So,” said Pia. “Are you feeling better?”
In reply Hasse sneezed twice in rapid succession, then inhaled with a sniffle and shrugged his shoulders.
“Jeez, Andreas, go home.” Pia shook her head. “Climb into bed and get well. There’s nothing happening here anyway.”
“How far have you gotten with that stuff?” He nodded suspiciously toward the files stacked on the floor next to Pia’s desk. “Did you find anything?”
Again she wondered about his interest, but he was probably just afraid she was going to ask him for help.
“Depends on your point of view,” she said. “At first glance everything seems to have been very carefully checked. But something doesn’t quite jibe. Who led the investigation back then?”
“Detective Chief Superintendent Brecht from K-11 in Frankfurt,” said Hasse. “But if you wanted to talk to him, you’re a year too late. He died last winter. I went to the funeral.”
“Oh.”
“A year after he retired. That’s the way the government likes it. You slave away until you’re sixty-five, then step right into the coffin.”
Pia ignored the bitterness in his voice. Hasse was in no danger of working himself to death.
* * *
After dropping off Dr. Kirchhoff at the S-Bahn station by the stadium, Bodenstein took the frontage road headed for the interchange at Frankfurter Kreuz. Today Laura Wagner’s parents would finally learn the fate of their daughter. Maybe it would give them some solace to bury the mortal remains of the girl and say a final farewell after eleven years of not knowing what happened to her. Bodenstein was so lost in thought that it took him a few seconds before he recognized the license plate of the dark BMW X5 directly in front of him. What was Cosima doing here in Frankfurt? Hadn’t she just this morning complained to him that she would probably have to spend the rest of the week at the TV station in Mainz because she wasn’t making any progress with editing the rough footage? Bodenstein punched in her cell number. Despite the poor visibility because of the drizzle and road spray, he could see the woman driver in the car ahead of him put a cell phone to her ear. He smiled as he heard her familiar voice. Look in your rearview mirror, was what he had actually intended to say, but a sudden idea stopped him. His sister’s words flashed through his mind. He would put Cosima to the test and let her prove to him that his suspicions were unjustified.
“What are you doing right now?” he asked instead. Her reply left him speechless.
“I’m still in Mainz. Nothing is working out today,” she said in a tone of voice that normally wouldn’t have made him doubt her statement. The lie gave him such a shock that he began to shake. His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter, he took his foot off the gas, dropping back and letting another car pass him. She was lying! She just kept on lying! As she put on her blinker and turned right onto the A5, she told him that she’d rearranged the whole storyboard and hadn’t been able to finish up the editing on time.
“We only had access to the cutting room until twelve,” she said. The blood was rushing in his ears. The realization that Cosima, his Cosima, was telling him a bald-faced lie, ice cold and insolently, was more than Bodenstein could stand. He would have preferred to yell at her, shouting Please, please, don’t lie to me. I’m driving right behind you! But he couldn’t say a thing. He just muttered a few words and then ended the call. As if in a trance he drove the rest of the way to headquarters. At the police parking lot he turned off the engine and remained sitting in his car. The rain was drumming on the roof of the BMW and running down the windows. His world was falling apart. Why the hell was Cosima lying to him? The only explanation was that she had done something she didn’t want him to know about. And he didn’t want to know what it might be. This sort of thing happened to other people, but not to him! It took him fifteen minutes before he was able to get out of the car and walk over to the building.
* * *
In the steady drizzle Tobias loaded up the trailer of the tractor to haul everything to the containers that had been positioned next to the drained cesspool. Wood, bulky refuse, and trash. The guy from the waste disposal company had told him several times that it would be expensive if he didn’t sort everything properly. The scrap dealer had come to the farm to pick up the scrap metal around noon. The dollar signs had flashed in his eyes when he saw what a goldmine lay before him. With two helpers he had loaded it all up, starting with the rusty chains that the cows used to be tethered with, to the big items from the stables and barn. The dealer had counted out 450 euros to Tobias, promising to come back the following week to pick up whatever was left. Tobias was aware that his every movement was being watched by his neighbor Paschke with the Argus eyes. The old man was hiding behind the curtain, but now and then he would peek out through a crack. Tobias paid no attention to him. When his father returned from work at four thirty, there was nothing left of the heaps of junk in the lower courtyard.
“But the chairs,” Hartmut Sartorius objected, sounding distraught. “They were still good. And the tables. We could have repainted them…”
Tobias persuaded his father to go inside, then lit a cigarette and enjoyed his first well-deserved break since morning. He sat down on the top step and cast a satisfied glance at the now immaculate yard, with only the old chestnut tree standing in the middle. Nadia. For the first time he permitted his thoughts to stray back to the night before last. He might be thirty years old, but as far as sex was concerned, he was an absolute beginner. Compared to what he and Nadia had done, his experiences from before were downright childish. Over the years, for lack of comparison, he had pictured them as something magnificent and extraordinary. But now he was able to see them in the proper context. Childish hugs, the embarrassed in and out, lying on the stuffy childhood bed, the jeans and underwear around the knees, and always on the alert—half expecting parents to burst in because there was no lock on the door.
“Ah,” he sighed pensively. It might sound pompous, but there was no doubt that Nadia was the one who made him a man. After the first hurried union on the sofa they had moved to the bed, and he had assumed that was all there was to it. They had held and caressed each other as they talked, and Nadia had confessed that she had always loved him. She hadn’t realized it until he vanished from her life. And all those years she had unconsciously measured every man she met against him. He was annoyed by this admission from the lips of the beautiful stranger that he no longer was able to connect with the friend from his childhood, and yet it also made him deeply happy. She had then succeeded in motivating him to his best sexual performance, making him sweat and doing things he would never have thought he was capable of. He imagined he could still smell her, taste her, feel her. Simply wonderful. Fantastic. Awesome. Tobias was so deep in thought that he didn’t hear the soft footsteps and gave a start when a figure came unexpectedly around the corner of the house.
“Thies?” he asked in surprise. He stood up but made no attempt to approach the neighbor’s son or even give him a hug. Thies Terlinden had never appreciated such familiarities. Now he didn’t look Tobias in the eye, just stood there in silence, his arms clamped firmly to his sides. Today, as before, it was impossible to see his disability. That’s how Lars must look now too, thought Tobias. Lars, the younger twin by two minutes, had been automatically elevated to the position of crown prince of the Terlinden dynasty because of his brother’s illness. Tobias had never seen his best friend again after that fateful day in September 1997. Only now did it occur to him that he had never talked about Lars with Nadia, although the three of them had once been like siblings.
Suddenly Thies took a step toward Tobias and astonishingly held out his hand, palm up. In amazement Tobias understood what Thies was waiting for: They had always greeted each other that way, with a triple high-five. At first it had been their secret gang sign, later a joke that they had kept up. A brief smile appeared on Thies’s handsome face when Tobias gave him the high-five.
“Hello, Tobi,” he said in his odd voice that lacked any intonation. “Great to have you back.”
* * *
Amelie wiped off the long counter at the bar. The dining room at the Black Horse was still empty at five thirty, too early for the evening crowd. To her own surprise it wasn’t hard for her to abandon her usual outfit. Was her mother going to turn out to be right again? Was her Goth persona not a statement about life as she claimed, but nothing more than a rebellious phase of puberty? In Berlin she had felt good wearing the baggy black clothes, with all the piercings, heavy makeup, and flamboyant hairdo. Her friends all looked the same way, and nobody turned around to stare at them when they roamed the streets like a swarm of black ravens, kicking lampposts with their Doc Martens and occasionally playing soccer with garbage cans. She didn’t give a shit what the teachers and other bourgeois people said. They were just bothersome creatures who moved their lips and spouted nonsense. But suddenly everything had changed. The appreciative glances of the men on Sunday, which were undoubtedly due to her feminine figure and revealing décolletage, had pleased her. More than that. She felt like she was walking on air when she realized that every man in the Black Horse was staring at her ass, including Claudius Terlinden and Gregor Lauterbach. She still felt high from it. Jenny Jagielski came waddling out of the kitchen, the crepe soles on her shoes squeaking. At the sight of Amelie her eyebrows went up.
“From scarecrow to vamp,” she said sharply. “So, who’s the new look for?”
Then she cast a critical eye at the work Amelie had done, running her finger along the counter. She found it satisfactory.
“You can go wash the glasses,” she said. “My brother probably forgot to do it.”
A dozen used glasses from the noon rush stood next to the sink. Amelie didn’t care what the task was. The main thing was that she got paid every night. Jenny climbed onto a bar stool and lit a cigarette despite the smoking ban. She did that often when she was alone and in a placid mood, like today. Amelie seized the opportunity to ask about Tobias Sartorius.
“Of course I know him from before,” Jenny replied. “Tobi was a good pal of my brother’s, and he came over to our house a lot.” She sighed and shook her head. “But it would have been better if he’d never come back here.”
“Why?”
“Well, just think how it must be for Manfred and Andrea to see their daughter’s murderer walking down the street!”
Amelie began drying the wet glasses, polishing them carefully.
“What happened anyway?” she asked casually, but her boss needed no urging, since she was in a mood to gab.
“Tobi was going steady with Laura first, then with Stefanie. They were both new in Altenhain. It was the day of the village fair when they disappeared. The whole town had gathered in the big tent. I was fourteen then and thought it was great that I was allowed to stay out all evening. Honestly, I didn’t even notice what happened. Not until the next morning when the police showed up with dogs and a helicopter and everything else. That’s when I realized that Laura and Stefanie had disappeared.”
“I never would have thought something that exciting could happen in a dump like Altenhain,” said Amelie.
“It was exciting, all right,” said Jenny, staring pensively at the cigarette smoldering between her sausage-like fingers. “But afterwards nothing was ever the same in this town. Everything came to an end. Tobi’s father ran the Golden Rooster. There was something going on there every night, much more than here. They still had a gigantic hall, and at carnival it got pretty wild. The Black Horse didn’t even exist back then. My husband used to work as a cook at the Golden Rooster.”
She fell silent, abandoning herself to her memories. Amelie shoved over an ashtray.
“I do know that the police questioned J?rg and his friends for hours,” Jenny suddenly went on. “Nobody knew a thing. And then someone said that Tobi had killed the two girls. The cops had found Laura’s blood in Tobi’s car and Stefanie’s things under his bed. And the tire iron that Stefanie had been beaten with was found in Sartorius’s cesspool.”
“How awful. Did you know Laura and Stefanie?”
“I knew Laura. She was in the clique with my brother Felix, Micha, Tobi, Nathalie, and Lars.”
“Nathalie? Lars?”
“Lars Terlinden. And Nathalie Unger has become a famous actress. Today they call her Nadia von Bredow. Maybe you’ve seen her on TV.” Jenny stared into the distance. “They both turned out to be successful. Lars must have a super job at some bank by now. Nobody knows what exactly he does. He left Altenhain. Yes, I’ve always dreamed of the big wide world. But usually things don’t turn out the way you expect…”
It was hard for Amelie to imagine her chronically ill-tempered fat boss as a happy fourteen-year-old girl. Was that why she was often so mean? Because she’d had to stay in this dump of a town, with three eternally moaning little kids and a husband who contemptuously called her “Micheline” in front of everybody, referring to her rotund shape?
“And Stefanie?” asked Amelie, as Jenny threatened to sink back into her memories. “What was she like?”
“Hmm.” Jenny stared contemplatively into space. “She was beautiful. White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony.”
She looked at Amelie. Her bright eyes with the blond lashes looked like a pig’s.
“You look a little bit like her.” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
“Really?” Amelie stopped what she was doing.
“Stefanie was of a whole different caliber from the other girls in the village,” Jenny went on. “When she moved here with her parents, Tobi fell for her right away and broke up with Laura.” Jenny gave a scornful snort. “So my brother saw his chance. The boys were all crazy about Laura. She was really pretty. But really bitchy too. She got mad as hell when Stefanie was chosen Queen of the Fair and not her.”
“So why did the Schneebergers move away?”
“Would you stay in a town where something so awful happened to your child? They stayed here for about three months, then one day they were gone.”
“Hmm. And Tobi? What kind of boy was he?”
“Oh, all the girls were in love with him. Me too.” Jenny smiled sadly at the memories of those days, when she was still young and full of dreams. “He was handsome and simply … cool. And yet not conceited like the other guys. If they were going to the swimming pool, he didn’t mind if I tagged along. The others would all moan about what a little nuisance I was, telling me to stay home. No, Tobi was really sweet. And smart too. Everybody thought he would do something great someday. Yep. And then this. But alcohol changes people. When Tobi had something to drink, he wasn’t himself anymore…”
The door opened and two men came in. Jenny quickly put out her cigarette. Amelie cleared away the washed glasses and then went over to the customers and handed them menus. On the way back she grabbed the daily paper off one of the tables. It was open to the local section and she quickly scanned the page. The police were searching for the man who had pushed Tobias’s mother off the bridge.
“Oh shit,” Amelie muttered, and her eyes grew wide. Even though the photo was of poor quality, she recognized the man at once.
* * *