I Am Your Judge: A Novel (12 page)

With an effort, she sat up. Her limbs hurt and her whole body felt heavy as lead. The nightmare images sloshed around in her head like water that came seeping in through tiny cracks and couldn’t be stopped before it tore down walls and filled up everything to destroy it all. Her world no longer had any colors, and her life from now on would consist of a before and an after.

Karoline braced herself and got up from the edge of the bed to drag herself into the bathroom. For two days, she’d worn the same clothes, hadn’t had a shower, and had eaten almost nothing. She had phoned Carsten a few times and also talked to Greta. She had worried about her father, who had spoken hardly a word, trapped in the same hell of bewilderment and horror as she was. Last night, she had driven home because she needed clean clothes, and then she fell on her bed and dropped right off to sleep. The phone rang while she was in the shower. She didn’t care who it was; she would call back later. Sometime. Right now she had to be strong. For Greta, and especially for Papa. He needed her more than ever before.

*   *   *

Pia was sitting at her desk, typing the final words of her report into the ComPre system on her computer. Then she saved the file. They’d been so close to catching the sniper, but then all their effort and anticipation had changed to disappointment. Three young men had just wanted to play a practical joke with the blank gun that belonged to one of their fathers. A nasty joke, as it turned out, with far-reaching consequences. Bodenstein, relieved that nothing had happened to his daughter Rosalie, had taken the three chastened wrongdoers to task and explained the seriousness of their situation. The police action was going to cost their parents a couple of thousand euros, and they might also have to pay compensation claims for damages. Thirty-four people were injured in the mass panic, some of them seriously, and the woman who had suffered a heart attack was in critical condition. Pia got up and went to the break room, where she found Bodenstein and Nicola Engel.

“They didn’t think about the repercussions at all,” Bodenstein said, shaking his head as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “They just thought it would be great fun to fire shots in the mall. Incomprehensible!”

“It doesn’t surprise me.” Engel sipped at her coffee. “Many young people these days have absolutely no concept of right and wrong. They sit at their computers and shoot people down, as blithely as we used to eliminate players from the game in Parcheesi.”

“Their parents are going to hit the roof,” Pia muttered. “Especially the father who forgot to lock up his gun cabinet properly. Sometimes I can’t believe that people haven’t learned a thing from the school shootings that killed sixteen in both Winnenden and Erfurt.”

“Nobody wants to think that their kid would do anything like that,” said Bodenstein.

“All right.” Dr. Nicola Engel rinsed out her cup and put it in the rack next to the sink to dry. “At any rate, this whole incident turned out pretty well. Good work, Ms. Kirchhoff.”

“I’ve already written up the report,” Pia hastened to say in order to avert the inevitable question from her superior.

Engel looked at her and then nodded. “I took that for granted,” was all she said. Then she turned to Bodenstein: “Can you spare a few minutes? I have something I want to discuss with you.”

“Of course.” Bodenstein followed her out of the break room.

Pia crossed the hall and went into the office she shared with Kai Ostermann. She was annoyed to see Andreas Neff sitting at her desk.

“What did I tell you?” He had his feet propped on the edge of the desk and was grinning, pleased with himself. “I was sure that the incident today couldn’t be the sniper. He’s not going to strike again before Christmas.”

“I’d like to sit at my desk, if you don’t mind.” Pia waved her hand to shoo him away. “There’s a desk free in Ms. Fachinger’s office at the moment.”

“There’s one in here, too.” Neff pointed to the former desk of Frank Behnke, which Ostermann, as the main person in charge of case and evidence documentation, had been using as an extra space for sorting reports and case exhibits. “So I’ll take this one, if that’s all right.”

“If I were you, I’d keep my hands off that desk and everything on it,” Pia advised him.

Her phone rang.

“Are you hard of hearing, or are you trying to piss me off?” she said to Neff. He made a show of taking down his feet, then got up with maddening slowness and sauntered across the room. Pia picked up the receiver and dropped into her chair.

“I have a colleague from Niederhöchstadt on the phone,” Kathrin croaked. “He wants to talk to the boss or to you.”

“Patch him through,” replied Pia.

In the meantime, Neff had begun looking through the stacks of documents that had been carefully sorted on Behnke’s former desk. Kai was going to flip out when he saw that someone had messed up the order of his papers.

“Rothaus here, Eschborn police station,” the officer said. Pia knew him well. “Today we got an anonymous letter in the mail that might be of interest to your team. It’s an obituary for Ingeborg Rohleder.”

Pia jumped as if she’d had an electric shock.

“An obituary?” she said to make sure.

“Yep, black border, a cross, but the text is weird,” said Police Superintendent Rothaus. “It reads: ‘In memoriam Ingeborg Rohleder. Ingeborg Rohleder had to die because her daughter implicated herself in the denial of assistance and acted as an accessory to negligent manslaughter.’ It’s signed ‘The Judge.’”

Pia noticed that she’d been holding her breath out of sheer tension, and now she exhaled. This was a highly interesting development. The names of the sniper’s two victims had not been made public, and why would anybody from the Rohleders’ circle of acquaintances want to write something like this? It clearly indicated that there was a purpose behind the perpetrator’s actions. It might even offer an explanation of the motive.

Pia thanked her colleague and promised to be at the police station within half an hour.

“Any news?” Neff asked curiously.

Pia ignored his question, jumped up, and went off to look for Bodenstein. She found him outside Nicola Engel’s office, about to leave.

“I’m going to rescue Inka for a change,” he said. “You can call me if—”

“We have to drive over to Niederhöchstadt,” Pia interrupted him excitedly. “Our colleagues received an anonymous letter in the mail with an obituary for Ingeborg Rohleder. It clearly reveals that the perp knew the name of at least one of his victims and—”

She quit talking because Neff was coming down the hall.

“Don’t stop because of me,” he challenged her with a smile.

“I’m not saying anything as long as you’re sneaking around, eavesdropping,” Pia replied hostilely. The smile vanished from the case analyst’s face, though only briefly. Andreas Neff undoubtedly had a thick skin.

“You can’t shut him out,” said Bodenstein after Neff had left. “Engel wants us to work with him; she’s made that very clear to me.”

“But he’s an idiot,” Pia said stubbornly. “And he gets on my nerves with his stupid babbling.”

Bodenstein sighed and fished his cell out of his pocket.

“We’re going to Niederhöchstadt,” he said as he tapped in a number and raised the phone to his ear. “And we’re taking Neff and Kröger with us.”

“Do we have to? Take Neff, I mean?” Pia asked, not at all pleased.

“No discussion,” Bodenstein told her. “Try to get along with him. Please.”

*   *   *

Nothing in life is carved in stone, he thought. Sometimes you just had to be flexible. Even the best-laid plans could be upset if there were elements of uncertainty that could not be calculated. He’d considered another course of action, but who knew when the bakery salesgirl would be back from vacation?

He bit into his cheese sandwich and again leaned over the table to look at the blueprints of a building and some photos. When he was at the bakery yesterday morning, he noticed that the building under construction, which he’d planned to shoot from, had been covered with exterior drywall over the course of a day. That was extremely irritating, because now he had to go searching for another location fast. Purely by chance, he’d found the perfect spot, and now he was looking on Google Maps to check the escape route that he’d already cased the day before.

The TV news program was broadcasting a new report about the shots fired that morning in the Main-Taunus Center mall, and the chaos that had resulted. He grabbed the remote and turned up the sound.

“According to police, it was not the sniper who had recently shot two women in Eschborn and Oberursel, but three young men who were firing blanks from a pistol.…”

He shook his head and switched off the TV.

On the oilcloth covering the kitchen table, he had already laid out all the tools he would need to clean the rifle thoroughly. It was important to clean a rifle after each time it was fired. Any lead residue in the barrel would impair the precision of the bullet’s course, and the breech had to be cleaned of powder residue and lightly oiled. Here, he could be certain that no one would disturb him while he worked. He removed the cheek piece from the stock, pressed the safety, and at the same time, pulled the bolt out of the breech housing. Then he carefully sprayed some cleaning oil through a tiny tube into the barrel and inserted the brass cleaning brush. He smiled pensively as he ran the brush through the barrel, from the breech to the muzzle. He skillfully twisted the wiper piston and the cleaning brush out of the muzzle and pulled the cleaning rod through the barrel. Then he ran a linen patch through the barrel, repeating the entire procedure until the last patch showed no more soiling. They had been two good shots. He hadn’t forgotten a thing.

*   *   *

“So, this clears up everything,” said Neff as they looked at the anonymous letter in the office of the department head at the Eschborn police station. “The perpetrator wants the attention that he feels he deserves. John Allen Muhammad in Washington, D.C., called up the appropriate chief and claimed that he was God. Establishing contact with the police is absolutely symptomatic of a narcissistic personality disorder.”

Neff had been talking nonstop, almost without taking a breath, since they had left headquarters, and Pia was starting to feel like she was being brainwashed. She couldn’t think clearly, and it was proving extremely hard for her to take her boss’s request to heart. Christian Kröger made no secret of his dislike for the “secret weapon.”

“A completely normal sheet of copy paper. Size DIN A4, eighty gram, white,” he cited, ignoring Neff. “Who has touched it?”

“Only the officer who opened the mail,” replied Police Superintendent Rothaus.

“Okay, we can easily check his fingerprints in order to rule him out.” Kröger examined the envelope; like the letter, it had been put in a plastic sleeve.

“The obit looks fairly professional,” said Bodenstein.

“These days, that’s easily done,” said Kröger. “In the notices portals of daily newspapers, you can design family notices with a couple of mouse clicks and post them online instantly.”

“I estimate that the sniper is about thirty years old,” Neff offered. “He’s comfortable with the Internet and knows how to design an obituary online and—”

“I’m forty-seven, and I know how to do it, too,” Kröger cut him off indignantly. “Even my parents know how, and they’re over seventy.”

“Could your parents climb up on transformer sheds in the dark and shoot somebody dead from eighty meters away even with poor visibility?” Neff countered sarcastically.

“You based your statement on the ability to design notices online,” Kröger reminded him, but Neff merely skirted that argument with a smile.

“If this notice is indeed a message from the shooter to us,” Bodenstein said, thinking out loud, “then Ingeborg Rohleder is no random victim.”

“Denial of assistance and acting as an accessory to negligent manslaughter,” Pia quoted. “What do you think that means?”

“At least the perp has revealed something crucial,” Bodenstein said with a frown. “Ingeborg Rohleder had to die because
her daughter
did or did not do something. And that casts a whole different light on the murder.”

“It’s proof that the sniper is not shooting his victims at random,” Pia said. “He acts deliberately, considers his actions justified, and thinks he’s a judge.”

“Let’s go,” said Bodenstein. “We’re going to see Renate Rohleder and confront her with this accusation.”

He thanked the officer on duty and left the station, followed by Kröger, Neff, and Pia.

“A psychopath,” Neff replied unasked to Pia’s last comment. “It’s obvious. He was insulted, and now he’s taking revenge. Not on the guilty party herself, but on her close relatives. This is especially nefarious.”

“But yesterday you said exactly the opposite,” said Pia. “You were one hundred percent convinced that the sniper was killing at random.”

“Yesterday we didn’t know what we know today,” Neff protested, slippery as an eel.

That was the last straw for Pia.

“You’re never at a loss for an answer, are you?” She shook her head in contempt. “Did you learn these work techniques in America, too? Taking liberties with Chancellor Adenauer’s famous phrase, ‘What do I care what I said yesterday?’ By constantly changing opinions, you’re undercutting your own authority, and you shouldn’t be surprised if none of us takes you seriously.”

Kröger grinned with amusement. For the first time, Neff was speechless—but unfortunately, not for long.

“At the start of an investigation, one must entertain all possible hypotheses, even if they appear abstruse at first glance,” Neff said, defending his 180 switcheroo.

“In the future, you ought to indicate that you’re merely making vague conjectures,” Pia said coldly. “Otherwise, whatever you say is intentionally misleading.”

“I did not anticipate that a dilettante like yourself would be able to follow my reasoning,” he replied. “And no wonder. I have never experienced such a chaotic and inefficient unit as your K-11.”

Pia already had her mouth open to issue an unfriendly remark, but Christian Kröger beat her to it.