Carl felt a shiver down his spine. “Really? But what about the surname?”
“Denise is called Denise F. Zimmermann. The ‘F’ stands for ‘Frank.’ We’ve checked. And now look at the list of these kids’ parents on Marcus’s note.”
He quickly scanned the list. There it was. Not Birthe Frank, as Marcus remembered it, but Birgit Frank. Birgit Frank Zimmermann.
“I noticed it on the buzzer for her apartment when I was doing my rounds of the Borgergade area, Carl. A single initial for a middle name can be more important than it seems.”
Gordon was right. This was a real game changer, possibly linking two seemingly unrelated cases. Motive, people, and murder weapon. But to what and how?
“I need to tell Marcus about this immediately.”
He dashed to his office and already had Marcus on the other end of the phone after three rings.
“Marcus, listen to this! The single mother who had an argument with Stephanie Gundersen at the parent-teacher meeting wasn’t Birthe Frank but Birgit Frank, and her daughter was called Dorrit before she later changed it to Denise,” he said without so much as a hello. “So the mother’s full name was and remains Birgit Frank Zimmermann, regardless of whatever mysterious reason lies behind her only using Frank back then—it might even have been just in the context of the school that she only used Frank.”
There was a sigh at the other end. The relief was audible.
“So now you have the connection between the three women: Stephanie Gundersen, Birgit Zimmermann, and her mother, Rigmor Zimmermann. Satisfied? All three women had some sort of connection with each other. And two of them end up being murdered years apart in exactly the same way. Do you think we should just call that a coincidence, boss?” asked Carl.
For a moment it was deadly quiet at the other end, and then came the outburst.
“Birgit Zimmermann has a middle name that begins with ‘F’; of course she bloody does. How did we miss it back then? So in some way she was already in our sights when we investigated the Stephanie Gundersen case.”
37
Sunday, May 29th, and Monday, May 30th, 2016
Anneli had had luck on her side once again. She had managed to commit yet another atrocity without being seen by witnesses or passing cars in the neighborhood.
With a ferocious thud, the heavy-footed girl had banged her head against a lamppost and clearly broken her neck, because the angle of her head didn’t look like it should.
In many respects, Bertha, alias Roberta, Lind had proved to be a creature of habit. Her bicycle route and the twice-weekly circuit training she no doubt hoped would help her squeeze into a size fourteen were as routine as always, just as Anneli had anticipated.
It had been hot that Sunday, and everyone in Denmark felt the heat. Accordingly, Bertha had worn a minuscule top that slid up her sweaty back, revealing a figure that wasn’t the result of good eating habits. At least ten times while cycling, she had alternated between sending text messages and pulling down her top at the back, and the eleventh time proved to be once too many. Taking a wide left turn, she completely lost concentration and overcompensated with the handle bars, making her turn too sharp.
Anneli had driven in second gear, maintaining a speed of eighteen to twenty kilometers an hour to ensure that she didn’t get too close to Bertha and remained out of earshot. But when Bertha’s bike unexpectedly veered off course a little, she really put her foot down and swerved into Bertha with the side of the car.
Strange, how far a body that heavy can fly, thought Anneli as she hit the brake and watched the helpless course of the body in the side mirror.
“I didn’t see her eyes, but mission accomplished, all the same,” she said to herself immediately after. Then she parked the little red Renault in a deserted side street off Amager Boulevard, abandoning it after wiping down the interior and taking her rubbish with her.
As Anneli had expected, the TV news didn’t describe this hit-and-run incident in the same way as the others. But there was still quite a lot of publicity, because once again it had involved a driver who had left a victim to die. However, in this case, it was believed that the woman may have been hit by a larger vehicle whose driver probably hadn’t noticed what had happened.
The morning after, Anneli heard on the radio that the police technicians believed that Bertha had swerved too far off the bicycle path onto the road and been knocked off by a passing truck, and that the strength of the impact when she landed, combined with her body weight, had caused her death rather than having been hit by the truck. As with all accidents occurring when someone was making a turn, it was tragic but couldn’t be compared with the more frequent right-turn accidents that were a constant risk for cyclists in Copenhagen.
Anneli was immensely pleased. Up until now, she had stuck to her plan and remained steadfast to her mission to rid the world of human scum. Of course, the novelty had worn off, as had the immediate intoxication and exhilaration. After all, she was a seasoned killer now. And three strikes in just eight days gave a certain confidence.
This Monday morning, it seemed like everyone had decided to leave her alone. Nobody spoke to her, but it was obvious that they all knew how ill she was and that she had come to work directly after her radiation therapy. So much for her manager’s discretion.
Anneli didn’t care. The most important thing for her was to dedicate herself to her upcoming missions and assess their risk.
Just now, when parliament was about to break for its summer recess, the media quickly found other news to write about. Apart from the hit-and-run case, which took up several pages in all the newspapers, the main story was Birna’s death last night at Copenhagen University Hospital. The hunt for who was being called the Nightclub Killer was already in full swing.