Kilian saw shock and horror in her eyes and quickly stuck his foot in the door before she could slam it in his face.
“Where is Chiara?” he asked.
“Get lost!” she replied. “You know that you’re not allowed to see her.”
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Is she home? Please, Britta. If she’s not here, then call her up and tell her to come home at once.”
“What’s the meaning of this? What business is it of yours where the kids are? And just look at you!”
Kilian skipped the explanation. His ex-wife wouldn’t understand anyway; she never had. For her, he was the enemy. It was hopeless to expect even a scrap of sympathy.
“Are you planning to drag her into your filthy, disgusting world?” Britta hissed, full of hate. “Haven’t you brought enough misfortune down on all of us? Fuck off! Get out of here!”
“I want to see Chiara,” he insisted.
“No! Now take your foot out of my door or I’ll call the cops!” Her voice had turned shrill. She was scared—not of him, but of what the neighbors would say. Even in the past, that had always been more important to her than the truth.
“Yes, please, do that.” Kilian removed his foot. “I’m staying right here. If necessary, all day long.”
She slammed the door, and he sat down on the top step. Better for the police to pick him up right here so he wouldn’t have to try walking down through the town again. The police were his only chance to protect Chiara.
* * *
It had taken less than three minutes to free her hands from her bonds. The guy who’d tied her up hadn’t taken a lot of trouble. Meike rubbed her sore wrists. The heavy iron door of the furnace room swallowed every sound, so she couldn’t hear what was going on upstairs in the house or if the guy was coming back. The tiny barred window behind the furnace was more a ventilation shaft than a window. Even for a person as thin as she was, it wouldn’t provide a way to escape.
Meike was still stunned by Wolfgang’s cowardly behavior. Even though she’d screamed for help and begged, he had simply turned around and left as the bearded guy struck her down. The knowledge that she’d misjudged him for all these years hurt far more than all the punches the guy had delivered. For the first time since she’d known Wolfgang, Meike saw him for what he was: not the understanding, protective, fatherly friend whom she had idolized, but, rather, a wimp, a spineless coward, a scaredy-cat who in his mid-forties still lived with his papa and didn’t have the guts to stand up to him. What a monumental disappointment.
Meike touched her face. The nosebleed had stopped. She looked around the furnace room for some object she could use to defend herself. But unfortunately, the room had been cleaned out, thanks to Georg, Hanna’s second husband, who was an incredible neat freak. Besides the furnace, there were only a few shelves on the wall. A rolled-up clothesline, a bag of clothespins, two dusty rolls of blue garbage bags, a stack of old T-shirts and underwear that Georg had used to polish his shoes and his car. Nothing that would serve as a weapon. Shit!
But the thought of stepfather number two reminded Meike of the Taser. She dug in her back pocket and felt instantly more optimistic. It was still there. In the heat of the fray, Wolfgang’s pal had forgotten to search her for possible weapons. He probably didn’t think she had any. Firmly determined not to give in to her fate without a fight, Meike took up position next to the door. He was going to come back to kill her; that threat had been unmistakable.
She didn’t have to wait long. Only a few minutes later, the key turned in the lock with a scraping sound and the door swung open with a creak. Like a beast of prey, Meike hurled herself at the man, using the element of surprise to her advantage. She pressed the Taser to his chest. A shock of 500,000 volts whipped through his body, jerked him off his feet, and flung him against the wall. He collapsed and gaped at Meike like a baffled sheep. She had no idea how long the paralysis would last, so she didn’t hesitate. Just letting him lie here was much too humane; he had to suffer, really suffer. Meike put the Taser in her back pocket and took the clothesline from the shelf.
It wasn’t easy to tie up the limp body with the nylon cord. The guy weighed a ton, but Meike was furious and determined to take her revenge, so she mobilized powers she hadn’t dreamed she possessed. She rolled the paralyzed man back and forth until she had him tied up like a package.
“Now the Grim Reaper is nothing but a Mini Reaper.” Meike straightened up and swept her sweat-soaked hair out of her face. With malicious satisfaction, she saw the fear in his eyes. She hoped this bastard felt the same fear of death that her mother must have felt when he attacked and beat her so bestially.
He moved the fingers of one hand and muttered some incomprehensible gibberish.
Meike couldn’t resist the temptation to give him another shock, and this time she picked a spot that would really hurt him. Feeling no sympathy, she watched his eyes roll up. Drool ran out of the corner of his mouth, and a convulsive twitching shook his body. A dark spot widened on the front of his light-colored jeans.
Content, she stood back to regard her handiwork.
“All right. Now I’m going to Munich. No one is going to find you here. By the time my mother gets out of the hospital and happens to come down here, you’ll be nothing but a skeleton.”
In farewell, she gave him a kick in the side, left the room, and locked the door behind her. Maybe she would tell the police what was down in the furnace room. Or maybe not.
* * *
Bodenstein waited patiently. He had his hands clasped on the table, watching the man across from him with an almost rapt calm, saying nothing. Bernd Prinzler was trying hard to appear composed, but Bodenstein noticed the nervous play of his jaw muscles and the drops of sweat on his brow.
This bone-hard giant, who feared neither death nor the devil, and certainly not the police, was very worried. He would never admit it, but under those mountains of muscles and tattooed skin beat a soft heart.
“I rescued her from the streets,” he said unexpectedly. “She was walking the strip for some little pimp. I happened to see him beating her and stepped in between them. That was seventeen years ago. She hadn’t even turned thirty, and she was at the end of her rope.” He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and gave a shrug. “Naturally, I didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with her. I just liked her.”
Bodenstein was careful not to interrupt him with a question.
“I got her out of there and we moved to the country and got married. Our youngest had just turned one when she tried to kill herself. She jumped off a bridge and broke both legs. She was sent to the nuthouse, and that’s where Leonie met her. Leonie Verges. Until then, my wife didn’t really know what was wrong with her.”
He paused, wrestling with himself for a moment, before he went on.
“Michaela suffered abuse even as a baby at the hands of her old man and his perverted pals. She went through total shit. In order to cope with it all, she split inside. So there was not only Michaela but also dozens of other personalities with their own names, but she didn’t know about them. I can’t explain it as well as a psychologist, but Michaela would spend years as another person, and that’s why she couldn’t remember a lot of things.”
Prinzler rubbed his beard absentmindedly.
“Michaela went to therapy with Leonie for years, and what came out of it was genuinely awful. You can’t even imagine that people could do things like that to a child. Her old man was important, and his pals were, too. Real Mr. Cleans, the upper crust of society.” He snorted with contempt. “But in reality, they were all lousy, deviant pigs, abusing children. Even their own. When the children got older, they had to go. Most of them landed on the strip, turning into drunks or dope addicts. These fucking pigs are real clever; they always keep an eye on the kids. And if they fuck up, they get sent out of the country or bumped off. Most of them are never missed. Michaela always called them the ‘lost kids.’ Orphans, for example. Who cares about them? This child-molesting organization is worse than the Mafia. They’re not afraid to do anything, and there’s no way out for the kids. Michaela’s family kept trying to get in touch with her, but when they came to me, I pretended I didn’t know her. At some point, I got the idea of faking her death—with a funeral and the works. After that, nobody bothered us anymore.”
Bodenstein, who had expected a completely different story, listened quietly and with growing bewilderment.
“A few years ago,” Prinzler went on, “a dead girl was found in the Main. It was a big deal in the papers. Michaela somehow found out about it, although I always tried to hide things like that from her. She found out about it anyway and totally flipped out. She was dead certain that the same guys were behind it who’d done all that harm to her. We thought about what we could do. Michaela definitely wanted to tell her story to the public, but I considered that dangerous as hell. These guys are everywhere and have gigantic influence. If we did go public, the accusations would have to be absolutely airtight, with evidence, names, places, witnesses and everything. I talked to my lawyer about it, and he thought we could pull it off.”
“You’re talking about Kilian Rothemund?” Bodenstein asked.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Prinzler said with a nod. “But Kilian made some sort of mistake, and they really screwed him. All that evidence that he was a child molester was faked. He had zero chance of fighting back. They ruined his whole life because he was a threat to them.”
“Why didn’t you do anything else about it back then?” Bodenstein asked. “What about the evidence that your wife had?”
“Who could we trust?” Prinzler replied. “They were everywhere; some were even cops. Who’s going to believe a biker and a woman who’s been in the loony bin half her life? We decided not to do anything else, and went underground. I know all about what people are capable of doing if they have a lot to lose. Shortly before I retired, an undercover cop and two of our boys were shot in one of our locales. Then the same thing happened.”
“What happened?” Bodenstein asked.
Prinzler stared at him, eyes narrowed.
“You know. Your colleague asked me about it yesterday. About the undercover guy and why his own side had him wasted.”
Bodenstein didn’t follow up on the comment, because then he’d have to admit to Prinzler that he didn’t know what he was talking about or what his colleague had done. Rage was rising up in him. The nerve of Pia, withholding investigative results from him. He feverishly attempted to reconstruct the chronology of what happened yesterday. When had Pia spoken to Prinzler at the Preungesheim jail? Before or after she talked to him in his office and asked him about Erik Lessing? What had she found out? And why had she even followed that line of questioning?
In order not to reveal his ignorance to Prinzler, he merely asked him to go on.
“At any rate,” Prinzler said, “my wife began writing down her story with Leonie’s help. It was a good exercise, Leonie thought. That was the point of it. But then another dead girl was found in the river. I always stayed in contact with Kilian. Together with Leonie, we decided to see it through this time. But not with the cops or the state attorney’s office. We wanted to go straight to the public. We had plenty of evidence, even statements from insiders who corroborated what my wife had experienced.”
Bodenstein could hardly believe his ears. Pia’s suspicions had been right: All three of their cases were connected.
“We discussed the best way to spin it so that nobody could thwart our plans. At some point, Leonie told us about Hanna Herzmann, and then I had the idea of getting her on board. She was instantly a hundred percent behind the idea, and she checked over Michaela’s notebooks together with Kilian. But then—”
There was a knock on the door of the interview room. Kai stuck his head in and signaled to Bodenstein that he had something important to tell him. Bodenstein excused himself, got up, and stepped out to the hallway.
“Boss, Kilian Rothemund has given himself up,” Kai announced even before Bodenstein had closed the door behind him. “Our colleagues are bringing him here.”
“Very good.” Bodenstein went to the watercooler and got a cup of water. Kai followed him.
“I also have information about Helmut Grasser. He lives in Falkenstein, at Reichenbachweg One thirty-two B.”
“Then send somebody over there to bring him down here for questioning.”
“I will in a sec.” Kai held out his phone to him. “Have you seen the photos that Pia just sent over?”
“No. What’s that?” Bodenstein squinted. Without his reading glasses, he could see only colored splotches on the display.
“Two little girls in pink T-shirts with the logo
Sonnenkinder,
” Kai replied excitedly. “They look like the scraps of fabric in the stomach of our Mermaid, don’t you think? Pink cotton with white type? The cloth could be from one of the T-shirts.”
“And how does that help us now?” Bodenstein’s thoughts were somewhere else entirely. Had mistakes been made in the cases of the Mermaid and Hanna Herzmann? Had he overlooked something important? Should they have figured out earlier that behind the brutal attack and the murder of the therapist there was a child-molestation ring? Could that be true?
“Pia was at a party in Falkenstein. Celebrating the eightieth birthday of the founder of the Sonnenkinder Association. She suspects that this charitable organization has something to do with our Mermaid.”
“Aha.” Bodenstein drank the rest of his water and filled the cup again. What if Prinzler were lying only to get himself and the criminal organization that he belonged to out of the line of fire? What he’d said so far sounded logical, but it could also be a pack of lies.
“The address of the Sonnenkinder Association is Reichenbachweg One thirty-four.”
Ostermann looked at him expectantly, but Bodenstein didn’t immediately grasp what he was getting at.
“Helmut Grasser, who was seen by the witness on the evening that Hanna Herzmann was raped, has something to do with this association,” Kai explained to help him connect the dots.