Dead Woods (2 page)

Chapter 2

On the way to the address listed on the ID, Max stopped at a bakery so Lina could get a coffee. He asked her to bring orange juice for him, something Lina never understood. They had been partners for two years, and she had never seen him drink anything other than juice, tea, or all-but-flat mineral water. Waiting for the drinks, she looked in the mirror behind the counter: short, tousled hair, dark circles below the eyes, a rumpled T-shirt. She hadn’t slept enough, as usual after working out. But six in the morning never was her best time. When she worked for the vice squad, the working hours had been more to her liking. She looked away, took the coffee and juice, and went back to the car.

Max drove while she sipped the hot coffee and felt her spirits revive. Neither of them spoke. It was too early in the morning and too soon after a dead man was found. They were in no hurry since neither of them enjoyed thinking about what they might find at the address. Even though the number of single households constantly increased, they didn’t anticipate any such luck.

“Not a bad area,” Lina said when they approached the apartment of the dead man. Hamburg Rothenbaum, fronting the Alster River, was one of the best locations in town. To live in one of these well-kept Art Nouveau houses, you needed to have a high-paying job or hail from a rich family, maybe belong to the city’s moneyed nobility. The house Philip Birkner had lived in turned out to be a somewhat more modest version of the surrounding luxury buildings, but it was still quite presentable, with its stucco facade and tall windows. The nameplate next to the doorbell had another name next to Philip Birkner: Katja Ansmann. Max and Lina exchanged a glance.

They rang and the buzzer let them in. When they came closer to the apartment on the second floor, they heard a child crying.

“Shit,” said Lina.

The woman who waited for them at the open door was beautiful—slender and tall, with high cheekbones and blond shoulder-length hair. That was the first thing Lina noticed. The woman was stunning. Lina assumed that if she wore a suit, she’d look as if she were born to wear it. Now she was wearing a bathrobe and looked like she had just come out of the shower. She carried a little child on her arm, who slept soundly against her neck.

“Frau Ansmann,” Max said. The woman scrutinized first him and then Lina. Lina felt as if she were on display and the potential buyer did not like what she saw. Max whipped out his badge; Lina did, too.

“May we come in for a moment?”

“I don’t know . . . I have to take Leon to daycare and then go right to the office . . . I have an important appointment today,” she said before trailing off. But the look on Max’s face seemed to let her know that there were more important things than meetings with clients. She sighed, as if she were doing this favor for the detectives only reluctantly. “All right, then, come in. But I don’t have much time.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it will take a while,” Max said evenly. The woman had taken his badge into her hands when he had shown it to her. It was still in her palm as Max and Lina walked into her home. Max hated moments like this, hated the split second when he saw the realization in people’s eyes about why he was there.

Frau Ansmann looked at the badge and swallowed. Silently, she pressed the child closer to her chest and motioned Max and Lina in and toward some chairs. She sat down on the sofa. The boy was still on her arm. He had put a thumb in his mouth and was about to fall asleep again.

“Frau Ansmann,” Max said quietly, “I assume that Herr Birkner is your significant other.”

The woman nodded without taking her eyes off him.

“I’m afraid I have bad news.”

The presence of the child was only going to make this harder, thought Lina. She did not have to ask if Philip Birkner was the boy’s father. On the far wall were family portraits: the woman and Philip, the woman with the baby, the baby and Philip, the three of them. The black-and-white photos were taken by a professional and looked nothing like the usual family snapshots.

“Herr Birkner is dead.”

Slowly, as if in slow motion, Katja Ansmann covered her mouth with one hand.

“It wasn’t an accident. We don’t know yet for sure how he died, but his body was found at the Niendorfer Gehege this morning.”

“Where?”

“In the Niendorfer Gehege. Maybe you know the small grove in the north of Hamburg.”

Frau Ansmann was about to shake her head—no, impossible; it was not a district where Philip would be found; he couldn’t have been there. Her kind of people went for walks along the Alster, or jogged there, but never in that district. She did not say it and she did not shake her head, but Lina could guess her thoughts, at least the most important one, the predominant one: it’s impossible that Philip is dead. The woman’s eyes were closed and she cradled the child, who had fallen asleep and whose face was shining in the light of the morning sun. It was quiet in the apartment but one could hear water running somewhere in the house and a door slammed in the stairwell. The room smelled of a child and sleep, of stale water in a vase, and the hint of perfume.

“How was he . . . I mean, why . . . Who . . . ,” she said before coming to the realization that neither Lina nor Max had answers for her.

“Is there someone you could call? Or should we call for a chaplain?”

“I . . . No, no. That’s not necessary. I’ll manage.” She said nothing else. Her voice was remote, as if she were lost in thought.

“Frau Ansmann, unfortunately we have to ask you a few questions,” Max said gently. He had a pleasant voice that had a relaxing effect on most people. “Do you know where your partner was last night?”

The woman nodded. “At a concert.”

“Where?”

“I forget the name, something terribly old-fashioned, even though they say it’s quite nice . . . Somewhere in . . .” She stopped. “In Niendorf.”

Max kept a straight face. “Did he go there alone?”

“Yes.”

“And you stayed home because of the child?”

“No. I attended a lecture at the Chamber of Commerce. I’m an executive consultant and I met some of my clients there. Friedericke Moosig, a girl from the neighborhood, was watching Leon.”

“When did you come home?”

“Around twelve thirty.”

“Why didn’t you spend the evening together? Did you have a fight?” Max looked closely at Katja Ansmann.

“No. We often do things separately. We are . . .We were . . . interested in different things.”

“What was Herr Birkner’s occupation?”

“He’s . . . He was a software developer.” She gave them the name of the company he worked for and their address in town. Lina wrote it down.

“Are his parents still alive?” Max asked.

The woman nodded before getting up to retrieve her phone from the other room. Lina and Max looked at each other. She knew his work address by heart, but had to look up the information about her partner’s parents. Lina glanced around the large, luxuriously empty room. Designer furniture, a high-end sound system from B&O, polished parquet flooring. There was a big window and next to it a double-leaf door to the balcony. An old chestnut tree outside added a green hue to the room.

Katja Ansmann returned. The little boy on her arm had woken up and was whining. “Leon is hungry.” Rocking him gently, she talked to him quietly to calm him down. Half-asleep, his thumb in his mouth, the little boy watched the two visitors. Katja Ansmann gave them the address of Philip Birkner’s parents. Then she leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes for a moment.

“Frau Ansmann, do you know if Philip Birkner had any enemies?” Max asked.

“Enemies? Philip?” She opened her eyes again and looked confused for a moment. Then she actually laughed. “Philip is on the best of terms with everyone. He looks good and loves to laugh. He manages to win over complete strangers within minutes. No, I can’t imagine that anyone wishes him any harm. Even though . . .” She scrunched her eyebrows. “Frank Jensen, a former employee of Philip’s.” Lina thought that the woman blushed. “Until two years ago, Philip had his own software firm. He had to declare bankruptcy because of a grave mistake by Frank Jensen.”

Max tilted his head. “And why should Herr Jensen be upset with your partner? It makes more sense the other way around.”

Before she could answer, Lina got up quickly and said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll briefly look at the apartment.”

Katja Ansmann looked confused, with a touch of distrust and alertness.

“Why . . . I mean, he’s dead, isn’t he? He didn’t commit any crime, he’s . . . He was . . .”

“Frau Ansmann,” Max said with the voice he always used to calm people, “I assure you that we have no suspicion at all against Herr Birkner, but we have to explore all possibilities to find the person who killed him. Maybe there are important clues in this apartment.”

Katja Ansmann gave a shrug, pressed the child closer, and motioned to Lina as if she were dismissing a maid.

Lina left the room.

The entry hall was wide and empty except for a wardrobe and an old chest of drawers. Lina opened the dresser. It was used for storing shoes. When she checked the sizes, she found that Leon was a size 26, Katja a 41, and Philip a 44. Katja owned at least six pairs of pumps in different colors and nothing heavier than a pair of suede boots with heels. There was nothing that one would wear for traipsing through the woods and muddy undergrowth. Lina closed the dresser and turned to the wardrobe. Handbags, jackets, and shawls—all of top quality. Katja’s perfume lingered in her jackets. Philip’s jacket emanated the scent of a manly aftershave. Next to the living room was the child’s room. Lina looked in quickly: toys on the floor, a child’s bed, shelves with picture books and more toys, a wardrobe, and a dresser. The window in Leon’s room looked out onto a leafy backyard. The kitchen was next to the child’s room. Shiny surfaces, all in lacquered burgundy or stainless steel. Everything brightly polished, expensive design, upscale appliances. Beside the espresso machine stood leftovers from last night: pasta with a red sauce on two plates, one of them a child’s plate. Who had eaten with the boy? Philip or Katja? Or the sitter? There were three used coffee cups and a wineglass. A narrow door led from the kitchen to a balcony with the same view of the backyard as from Leon’s room. Lina opened the door to the pantry. Not much there: Italian antipasti, Italian espresso, Spanish olives. Lina had not seen the names or packaging in her supermarket. Probably from gourmet foodstores. There were tons of those around here.

The room next to the kitchen was furnished like a home office, with a desk, a chair, a computer, and shelves with folders and technical books on computer science and programming languages. In front of the window stood a pullout couch and a little table. A squash racket hung on the wall. A film of dust indicated that it hadn’t been used in a while. In a bookcase that divided the room were a few worn paperbacks, a stereo system from B&O—like the one in the living room—and a flatscreen TV. Was it an office that could also serve as a guest room or a refuge when there were quarrels and stress?

The bedroom was on the other side of the hallway. The window overlooked another backyard, a gloomy one, with some ivy as groundcover. A king-size bed, little tables without drawers on the left and right, a wardrobe the size of a minibus. The linen had the fresh scent of laundry softeners. It made Lina sneeze. A large print of K
andinsky’s
Lyrical
hung on a wall. When Lina had first seen the painting, what she saw was a puking rat, not the jockey it was meant to represent. Things are not always what they first seem to be.

There were marble tiles in the bathroom, and the furnishings came from V
illeroy&Boch. A few splashes of toothpaste were visible on the mirror and a large fluffy towel lay on the floor.

Lina could hear the boy’s whining in the living room, faint at first, and then increasingly loud. She went back in. The parquet floor squeaked a little under her feet.

“You better leave now,” Katja Ansmann was saying as Lina entered. “As you can see, the child’s getting restless.”

Lina wanted to say something, but Max had already gotten up.

“Of course, we understand,” he replied. “Are you sure you can manage by yourself? Do you have a girlfriend whom you could call?”

Katja Ansmann nodded and led them to the door. “Thank you. I’ll be all right.”

Back in the car, Lina reached for her paper cup of coffee. It was lukewarm now, of course. She took a sip and grimaced. She rolled her neck and it creaked with each rotation. Max looked at her. “Too much gymnastics?”

Lina grimaced once more. She had finally gone kickboxing again last night, which Max belittled as gymnastics. She sighed. “When I was young, I used to be able to tolerate more.”

Max laughed. “Don’t act as if you’re ancient. Twenty-nine’s just barely adult.” She looked even younger, maybe early twenties. “So, what do you think?”

“It doesn’t look like she was very moved by the news.”

Max didn’t say anything. He had heard people scream when they were told, or cry quietly, or collapse without a sound. Some sat there as if they were frozen, while others made coffee as if an old acquaintance had come for a visit, someone they hadn’t seen for a while. It had also happened, rarely, that someone laughed—embarrassed, disbelieving, or relieved laughter. Max thought that Frau Ansmann’s reaction was quite within the norm, yet he understood Lina’s comment. It was a fleeting impression, a hint of a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. “Find anything interesting in the apartment?”