Bla, bla, bla, thought Pia, and nodded. She let her boss, Cem, and Christian go past her, then waited thirty seconds before she followed them into a long, low room, and what she saw there took her breath away. Many years ago, she’d been on a raid of a Frankfurt S and M club that had looked similar, except that the members of the club were adults and satisfied their strange desires of their own free will. This place was specifically designed for the abuse of children. This was where Oksana, the Mermaid, had been tormented and tortured. At the sight of the rack, the chains, the handcuffs, the cages, and the other horrendous implements, Pia felt all the horror and fear that had eaten into the concrete walls like acid.
“Hands up!” Pia heard Bodenstein shout, making her flinch. “Get over by the wall! Go, go!”
Under different conditions, Pia would have stayed back, as her boss had ordered her to do. But right now, she had to keep going. Her worry about Lilly was greater than any sense of reason. She stepped through the doorway and entered another big room, in which there were barred cells to the left and right. Her gaze swept over a group of four children, not much older than eight or nine, who stood lethargically in front of one of the cells without moving. Christian and Cem had their weapons aimed at a man and a woman, and Pia recognized the dark-haired woman who that morning had attempted to pull Renate Finkbeiner away from her wounded husband. So that was Corinna Wiesner, the woman who had pretended to be Oksana’s mother. But where was Frey?
“Lilly!” Pia shouted as loudly as she could. “Where are you?”
* * *
Hanna had been scared to see him again. Everything inside her had resisted allowing him to see her lying so helpless and ugly in a hospital bed. But when he entered her room so unexpectedly and took her in his arms without hesitation, kissing her gently, all her fears evaporated. For quite a while, they just sat there looking at each other. At their first meeting in Leonie’s kitchen, Hanna had first noticed his eyes, those extraordinarily bright blue eyes, which exerted a strong magnetic attraction on her. Back then, his eyes had been full of bitterness and despair, but today they shone with warmth and confidence. It took a moment before she noticed how his face looked and the fact that his right arm was in a sling.
“What happened?” she asked softly. Talking was still difficult for her.
“It’s a long story,” replied Kilian, pressing her right hand tenderly with his left. “But maybe it’s finally over.”
“Will you tell me about it?” Hanna asked. “There’s so much I can’t remember.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that later.” His fingers twined with hers. “First you have to get well.”
She heaved a deep sigh. Until this moment, she had dreaded the day when she would leave the protective walls of the hospital and have to look life in the face again. Now this fear vanished, as well. Kilian was here. He didn’t care how she looked. Even if she never regained her flawless beauty 100 percent, he would stand by her.
“Do you still have our e-mails?” Hanna asked.
“Yes. Every one.” He smiled, even though it was difficult with the bruises. “I’ve read them over and over.”
Hanna returned his smile.
In the past few days, she had also been rereading his e-mails on her new iPhone, and she knew them almost by heart. He had lost everything from his former life and had done time in prison, an innocent man who had been abandoned by all. But neither the humiliating social ostracism nor the loss of status, possessions, and family had succeeded in breaking him. On the contrary. Hanna, too, had been ripped out of her world of superficialities and propelled by fate into the deepest abysses of hell. Yet they would both manage to survive and work their way back up to the light. But she would never again take for granted what life had given her.
“Meike was here earlier,” Hanna croaked. “She left an envelope for me. I didn’t understand everything that she told me. Look in the drawer of the nightstand.”
Kilian released her hand and opened the drawer.
“Here’s the envelope,” he said.
“Please open it,” Hanna replied. The painkillers made her feel so woozy that she had a hard time keeping her eyes open. Kilian’s expression changed as he looked at the pages inside the envelope, and he frowned.
“What is it?” she asked.
“They’re photos of … cars.” He said it casually, but Hanna still noticed his sudden tension, despite her dazed state.
“May I see them?” Hanna held out her hand, and Kilian gave her the photos, which had been printed by a color ink-jet printer.
“This is in front of the Matern villa in Oberursel,” Hanna said in surprise. “What … what does this mean? Why did Meike give me these?”
“I don’t know.” Kilian gently took the pages from her hands, folded them up, and shoved them back in the envelope. “I’m sorry, Hanna, I have to go now. The police allowed me to visit you briefly because I turned myself in, but I’m spending the night at state expense.”
“Then at least I won’t have to worry about you,” Hanna murmured. Fatigue was making her eyelids feel like lead.
“Will you come and visit me tomorrow?”
“Of course.” He bent over her. His lips touched hers, and he stroked her cheek. “As soon as they lift the arrest order against me and I’m free again, I’ll come back to you.”
* * *
After she left the hospital, Meike drove around aimlessly for a couple of hours. She felt terribly alone. She would never again set foot in the house in Langenhain, not after everything that had occurred there, so she’d decided to drive to Sachsenhausen to her friend’s apartment. Hanna still wasn’t doing much better; the painkillers fogged her mind and made a rational conversation with her impossible. There were so many things Meike wanted to talk to her mother about. She hoped at least that she’d received the envelope with the photos and passed them on to the cops.
Meike drove along the river on Deutschherrnufer and turned down Seehofstrasse. Since so many people were away on summer vacation, she found a parking place not far from the apartment building. She maneuvered the Mini into the spot, grabbed her backpack, and got out. The slam of the car door echoed loudly in the silent neighborhood, and Meike looked around. Her body was still sore from the fight and she was dead tired, yet her mind was still on high alert. What she had experienced today would haunt her forever—she knew that. Her flight from the attack dog in the woods had been bad enough, but it was nothing compared to what had happened at her mother’s house. She shuddered. The guy would have killed her without hesitation; she had seen it in his eyes, which had held absolutely no sympathy. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened if she hadn’t had the Taser.
Meike crossed the street as she fished the door key out of her backpack. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a movement between the parked cars. Fear surged inside her. Her pulse quickened, she broke out in a sweat, and she ran the last few yards to the front door.
“Shit,” she whispered. Her fingers were shaking so hard that she couldn’t get the key in the lock. Finally, she managed to do it and shoved the door open. She was startled when something dark darted past her. The cat from the old lady’s apartment on the ground floor!
Meike slammed the door behind her, leaned against it in relief, and waited until her heart had calmed down a bit. In front of her was the small courtyard and the door of the house in back, where the apartment was located; then she would finally be safe. She longed for a hot shower and twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep. Tomorrow she would decide whether she’d better stay here for a while and then ask her father and his wife to take her in.
She stepped away from the door. The motion detector clicked, the light in the entry went on, and a moment later she was inside the house and trudging up the creaking staircase. Made it! She unlocked the door of the apartment and suddenly heard a voice behind her.
“There you are, finally. I’ve been waiting all evening for you.”
The blood froze in her veins; the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Very slowly, she turned around and looked straight into the bloodshot eyes of Wolfgang Matern.
* * *
“Pia! I am here!” The bright little voice was shrill with fear.
At that second, the lioness awoke inside Pia. She would rather die than leave the child to this monster.
“Stay where you are!” Bodenstein barked at her, but Pia ignored him. She turned around and ran back in the direction where Lilly’s voice was coming from. At the fork in the corridor, she turned right, trying to call up the layout in her memory, but in vain. The cellar was an underground labyrinth of passages, drainage canals, old air-raid bunkers, and countless rooms. The part she had seen so far seemed to have been expanded fairly recently, with concrete floors and modern fluorescent lights and light switches. But now she entered an area that seemed as old as the Palais itself. The corridor was alarmingly low and dim, the walls and ceilings were made of brick, and the floor was dirt. The only light sources were old-fashioned latticed ceiling lamps, which did little to penetrate the gloom. The deeper Pia went, the stronger became the musty smell of dampness and rat droppings. Suddenly, a black hole yawned in front of her, and it was only at the last second that she saw the steps, which led down into another narrow, dark tunnel. Water dripped from the ceiling, and the steps were so slippery that she had to hold on to the rusty handrail to keep from falling. Pia stopped, listening in the dark.
“Lilly!” she yelled, but she got no answer. The only sound she heard was her own gasping breath. Was she still going the right way? Fear and despair threatened to overwhelm her, and she had to force herself not to turn back. The passage was straight ahead now; there were no more forks in the path or other rooms, and Pia realized that she must be underneath the park of Palais Ettringhausen, in the secret passage that led down to the Nidda River. At the same time, she figured out Frey’s plan: He wanted to escape with Lilly. Maybe there was a boat waiting for him at the river. She had to hurry! She heard footsteps behind her, and she risked a look back over her shoulder.
“Wait for us, Pia!” Christian called. But instead of waiting, she ran even faster. Frey had a head start, and she had to catch up with him. The corridor abruptly widened and ended at a huge grated gate, one side of which was standing open. Pia stepped out, and suddenly there he was, this ruthless beast in human form.
“Hello, Ms. Kirchhoff.” Markus Maria Frey was somewhat out of breath, but still he smiled. In the pale light of the full moon, she could see his face and his eyes. And she saw the empty smile of an insane person, a sick mind. She hoped he would be tormented by it for the rest of his life. Frey was backing up but didn’t let Pia out of his sight. With one hand, he had a tight grip on Lilly’s upper arm; with the other, he was pressing a pistol into the girl’s neck.
“Put down your weapon at once! And stay where you are. Or I’ll be forced to shoot the little girl.”
This was exactly the spot where Helmut Grasser must have thrown Oksana into the river. He had run through the passage, carrying the dead child in his arms, and then stopped to check that nobody was walking on the path along the riverbank, which ran past a few yards below. Frey had now reached the path, and between him and the river lay only the narrow embankment.
“Give up!” said Pia in a commanding voice. “You haven’t got a chance. This place is crawling with police.”
A thousand thoughts raced through her head. Frey was less than thirty feet away from her, and she was an excellent shot. All she had to do was pull the trigger. But what if he reflexively fired his gun, which he surely would have reloaded?
“Take it easy, Lilly,” she said, lowering her weapon. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“Pia, the man wasn’t nice to me at all,” the girl complained. Her eyes were huge with fear, and her voice quavered. “He shot Robbie and Simba and he hurt Grandpa!”
Christian and Bodenstein appeared behind Pia; above them on the wall enclosing the park, floodlights went on, bathing the whole scene in a ghostly bright light. Pia heard her boss talking on the phone in a low voice, trying to get the River Police to come here from their position downstream, where the river flowed into the Main. From the left and right, the black-clad figures of their colleagues from the SAU approached, keeping out of the light.
“State Attorney Frey!” Bodenstein called. “Let the girl go!”
“What’s he up to?” Christian whispered. “He can’t get away from here; he must realize that.”
Pia could no longer think clearly. All she could see was Lilly, whose blond hair shone like gold in the garish light. What terror this little soul must have had to endure! How could a man who had children of her age do something like this?
Frey stood motionless for almost a minute atop the embankment, but now all of a sudden he was moving. Everything happened at a furious pace. He grabbed Lilly around the waist and jumped into the inky water of the river.
“No! Lilly!” Pia roared, full of panic. She wanted to take off running, but Bodenstein caught her arm and yanked her back. She saw Christian take a few steps forward and then jump into the water, too. Within seconds, pandemonium broke out on the riverbank promenade, which until then had been totally deserted. Police officers stormed in from all directions, an ambulance appeared, and from the direction of the Main, the brightly lit boat of the River Police turned into the Nidda. Bodenstein held Pia tightly in his arms.
“There she is!” he shouted. “Kröger has the girl!”
Overcome with relief, Pia’s knees buckled. If her boss hadn’t been holding her, she would have collapsed. Colleagues from the SWAT team helped Christian out of the water, and someone picked up Lilly and wrapped her in a blanket. Only two minutes later, Pia was able to hold the child in her arms. She no longer cared what happened to Frey. As far as she was concerned, he could drown in the river like a rat.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
For Ostermann, it was an easy task to find the owner of a vehicle by tracing the license plate number, at least for cars registered in Germany. He was not too surprised when he read the names, which were gradually correlated with the photos. An hour and a half earlier, two patrol officers had shown up with Kilian Rothemund, who had given him an envelope with photos of parked cars. Meike Herzmann had taken the pictures of the cars on Thursday evening in front of the house of the media mogul Hartmut Matern in Oberursel. Rothemund had no idea why she had done that, but he had an interesting theory about why all those cars were there, which was corroborated by each name that came up.