“Oh God, how the time flies.” Renate sighed, wiping tears from her eyes. “They’ve been grown men and women for so long, but I can still see them as children when I read their names.”
She patted Emma’s hand.
“It makes me so happy that you and Florian can be there for the party.”
“We’re happy, too,” replied Emma, although she was not completely sure whether Florian really was glad about the reception and the summer festivities. He wasn’t exactly enthralled by his parents’ life work, in which they had invested the greater part of their fortune.
“No!” Emma stopped Louisa from spearing another piece of cake. “You’ve still got half a piece on your plate.”
“But I only like the soft part,” Louisa protested as she chewed.
“You have to eat the crust, too. Or do you want Grandma to throw it in the garbage?”
Louisa started to pout.
“Want more cake!” she demanded.
“But dear, you’ve already had two big pieces,” said Renate.
“But I want more!” the child insisted with a greedy look.
“No. That’s all,” said Emma firmly, taking the plate out of Louisa’s hand. “We’re going to eat supper soon. Why don’t you tell Grandma what you did at day care today?”
Louisa pressed her lips together defiantly, then realized that she really wasn’t going to get a third piece of cake. She burst into tears and climbed down from her chair, looking around wildly.
“Don’t you dare!” Emma yelled in warning, but it was too late. The little girl kicked at the ceramic birdbath, which fell off its stone support and broke into pieces.
“Oh my, the lovely birdbath!” cried her grandmother.
Emma saw that Louisa had already spotted her next target, a flowerpot full of geraniums. She jumped up and grabbed her daughter by the arm before she could cause any more damage. Louisa squirmed, shrieking at a frequency that could shatter glass, kicking and flailing about. Emma was used to her daughter’s temper tantrums, but the intensity of Louisa’s rage startled her.
“I want cake! I want cake!” she screeched, totally beside herself, her face red as a lobster. Tears sprayed from her eyes, and she threw herself to the ground.
“Stop making a scene,” Emma hissed. “We’re going upstairs until you’ve calmed down.”
“Stupid Mama! Stupid Mama! Cake! I want ca-a-a-ke!”
“Just let her have another piece,” Renate interjected.
“Absolutely not!” Emma snapped at her mother-in-law. How was she ever going to make any headway with Louisa if her in-laws kept torpedoing her like this?
“Cake! Cake!
Cay-ay-ake!
” Louisa was ratcheting herself up to genuine hysteria; her face was dark red, and Emma was about to lose her patience.
“We’d better go upstairs,” she said. “Sorry. Something’s been bothering her the past few days.”
She dragged her shrieking and howling daughter into the house. The peaceful afternoon was over.
* * *
There were days that consisted of nothing but a string of ordinary banalities, too uneventful to remember at all. Most people let days like these simply flow by, measuring the passage of the years by birthdays, holidays, or some other memorable event—that was what their lives were reduced to in hindsight. For years, Pia had kept a diary, in which she jotted down key words for what had happened each day. Sometimes she amused herself by rereading what insignificant crap she’d recorded, but these brief notes gave her a satisfying feeling of living her life more consciously and not letting a single day go by unnoticed.
Pia braked and then moved to the right to allow a tractor to pass. It had turned into the underpass from the other side. She waved to Hans Georg, the farmer, whose land was up in Liederbach, where he pressed hay and straw for her each year, and he waved back.
On days like today, she often left her diary blank. What was she going to write? Girl’s body found. Stubborn youth interviewed. Autopsy from 12:00 to 4:00. Took 126 useless tips on the phone. Media inquiries fended off. Ate nothing all day. Kathrin Fachinger pacified. Mowed the lawn after work.” Not likely.
Pia had reached Birkenhof. She touched the garage door opener and the green door slowly swung upward. This luxury was one of many improvements that she and Christoph had made to the house after the city of Frankfurt had finally dropped its threats to demolish it. The case had been dragging on for years. Pia could smell the tangy scent of freshly mown grass through the rolled-down car window, and she knew that Christoph had arrived home before her. The strip of lawn on the left side of the gravel driveway between the birches that gave the property its name had just been mowed.
It had been the right decision not to buy the Rabenhof estate in Ehlhalten. The mere renovation would have taken forever. Since the building commission had finally given the green light last summer for the remodeling of the house at Birkenhof, they preferred to spend their money on fixing up that somewhat outmoded residence.
Pia pulled up in front of the garage and got out of the car. After ten months of living in a construction site amid scaffolding, building rubble, torn-up floors, and cans of paint and mortar, everything had finally been finished a couple of weeks ago. The house had been extended upward by a story and had a new roof, new windows, new insulation, and, above all, a proper furnace, since the old electric heating had cost them a horrendous amount each month. Now a modern heat exchanger and solar cells on the roof provided for heating and hot water. These investments had, of course, strained their credit to the limit, but a real home had now been created from what was a stopgap living arrangement. Christoph’s lovely furniture had at last been brought out of storage, where it had been relegated when he sold his house in Bad Soden.
After her stressful day, Pia longed for a shower, something to eat, and a glass of wine on the terrace. The horses were still in the paddock, the front door of the house stood wide open, but there was no sign of the dogs. She could hear the motor of the tractor in the distance. Christoph was probably busy in the back meadow, with the dogs keeping him company. Then the old red tractor appeared, and on the foldaway seat next to the driver, a small blond figure was jumping up and down, waving with both arms.
“Piiiiiiiiaaaa! Pia!” a bright voice rang out over the clatter of the motor. Good God! With all the commotion that had kept her on pins and needles all day long, she’d totally forgotten that Lilly was arriving today. Pia felt her spirits sink. Bye-bye peace and quiet and relaxing with a glass of wine.
Christoph stopped underneath the walnut tree, and Lilly clambered down from the tractor as quickly as a monkey and came running over to Pia.
“Pia! Pia! I’m so excited!” she cried, her whole freckled face beaming. “I’m so happy to be back in Germany.”
“I’m glad to see you, too.” Pia gave her a wry grin and threw open her arms to give the child a big hug. “Welcome to Birkenhof, Lilly.”
The little girl threw her arms around Pia’s neck and pressed her face to her cheek. Her joy was so genuine that it touched Pia to the heart.
“It’s soooooo beautiful here, it really is!” the girl gushed. “The dogs are so sweet and the horses, too, and everything here is so lovely and green, much nicer than at home.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Pia smiled. “How do you like your room?”
“It’s awesome!” Lilly’s eyes lit up and she held Pia’s hand tight. “You know what, Pia? You two don’t seem like strangers at all, since we’re always Skyping. And that’s so cool. I probably won’t even get homesick.”
Christoph had put away the tractor and came across the courtyard, followed by the four dogs, their tongues hanging out, reaching almost to the ground.
“Grandpa and I drove around in the tractor, and the dogs ran alongside the whole time,” Lilly recounted excitedly. “I helped him put the horses in the paddock, and you know what? Grandpa made my absolutely favorite meal, just like I dreamed of: roulades!”
She opened her eyes wide and rubbed her tummy. Pia had to laugh.
“Hello, Grandpa,” she said to Christoph with a grin. “I hope you left me a bite of Lilly’s favorite food. I’m as hungry as a bear.”
* * *
Louisa had finally fallen asleep. For two hours, she had sat in a corner of her room, staring into space with her thumb in her mouth. When Emma had tried to touch her, she’d moved away. At last the child had dozed off, exhausted, and Emma had put her to bed. This odd behavior had scared Emma more than the earlier uncontrollable outburst. She clamped the baby monitor under her arm and left the apartment. The talk with Corinna wasn’t until seven o’clock, but Emma hoped to have a brief chat with her father-in-law alone. Maybe he could give her some advice about how to deal with Louisa.
The door to her in-laws’ apartment on the floor below was ajar. Emma knocked and stepped inside. Because of the heat, the shutters were closed, bathing the room in a faint twilight and pleasant coolness. The smell of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air.
“Hello?” she called. “Josef? Renate?”
No answer. Maybe they were still outside on the terrace.
Emma stopped in front of the big mirror in the entry hall and was shocked at her appearance. She made a face. She certainly didn’t look very attractive. Damp strands of hair had come loose from her bun and were straggling down the back of her neck; her face was flushed and as shiny as bacon rind. Her buttocks and thighs had always been problem areas, but she’d managed to hide them reasonably well. Now they’d grown to almost elephantine proportions, and her legs had swollen in the heat. Depressed, she ran both hands over her butt. It was actually no wonder that Florian hadn’t shown any desire to sleep with her in months, the way she looked!
Suddenly, she heard voices and pricked up her ears. Emma wasn’t the sort of woman to listen at closed doors, but the conversation was so loud that she couldn’t help hearing several sentences. A door was flung open, and Emma now recognized Corinna’s voice, sounding unusually incensed.
“… have no intention of canceling the whole party!” she hissed.
Emma didn’t catch her father-in-law’s reply.
“I couldn’t care less! I kept warning him that he’d better not push it too far,” Corinna snapped back. “I’ve really had it up to here. As if I didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Wait a minute! Corinna!” Emma’s father-in-law called.
Quick footsteps were approaching, and it was too late to retreat to the kitchen or some other room.
“Oh, hello, Emma.” Corinna gave her an oddly appraising look, and Emma responded with a strained smile. She hoped her friend didn’t think she’d been eavesdropping.
“Hello, Corinna. I … I was a bit early and … I … I heard voices and … then I thought maybe you’d already started.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” Corinna no longer showed even a hint of her annoyance. Her usual cheerful expression had returned. “We can go over a few points regarding the guest list and the seating chart before the others get here. Let’s go outside on the terrace.”
Emma nodded, relieved. Although she would have liked to know what had set Corinna off, she couldn’t ask without admitting that she’d been listening, however inadvertently. Her gaze shifted to the open door of the study, and she saw her father-in-law sitting at his desk, his head buried in his hands.
Monday, June 14, 2010
The mood in the ready room of the Regional Criminal Unit in Hofheim was tense. All weekend, the phones had been ringing incessantly. Hundreds of tips from the public had come in, and dozens of people said they had seen the girl. Some of the tips had sounded promising at first, but they had not stood up to closer inspection.
There was no missing person’s report, no hot trail in the Mermaid case, not even a lukewarm one. They were not a single step closer than they had been on Friday, and with each passing day, the chance of a swift resolution to the investigation grew slimmer.
Pia recapped the results of the autopsy.
“The girl was around fifteen or sixteen years old. Multiple injuries all over the body point to severe abuse over a long period. Most of these injuries had not been treated by a physician. These include broken bones in the upper arm, forearm, and collarbone that had not healed properly.” The brutality concealed behind these precise words was unimaginable. “There were numerous scars on her buttocks, arms, and legs, as well as traces of sexual abuse and marks that looked like cigarette burns. In addition, the victim suffered from extreme vitamin D deficiency, significant skin pallor, and ricketslike changes in bone structure, which lead to the conclusion that the girl had not been exposed to sunlight for a very long time.”
“How long had she been in the water?” asked a colleague who normally worked in another group, but all officers in the Regional Criminal Unit who were not working on another case had been assigned to assist the Special Commission.
“Time in the water was estimated at twelve to twenty-four hours,” Pia went on. “Time of death cannot be precisely determined, but it was probably two days before the body was found.”
Kai Ostermann wrote these key details on the whiteboard, which had previously been empty except for the photos of the corpse and the discovery site.
“Cause of death was drowning,” Pia continued. “She had been injured so severely by blunt trauma—probably kicks and blows to the abdomen and chest—that she had little chance of surviving. During the autopsy, ruptures to the liver, spleen, and bladder were found, which had caused massive internal bleeding in the abdominal cavity. If she hadn’t drowned, she would have died soon afterward from internal bleeding.”
It was deathly quiet except for the muted ringing of a telephone in the next room. The twenty-four men and five women gathered in front of Pia didn’t move a muscle. There was no coughing, no throat clearing, no moving of chairs. Pia read in the faces of the team what she herself was feeling: sadness, bewilderment, and repulsion. It wasn’t always easy to deal with the terrible results of crimes of passion, but what this girl had suffered, possibly over a period of years, burst all bounds of the imagination. Most of Pia’s colleagues were fathers, and for them it was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain any sense of emotional distance in a case like this.