I Am Your Judge: A Novel (17 page)

“Don’t you have a friend you could lean on?” Bodenstein asked gently.

“It’s Christmas,” she reminded him. “I could not and will not demand that of anyone. I’ll manage all right. Life must go on.”

Bodenstein put his hand on her arm and gave it a squeeze. Yes, she would get through it. Karoline Albrecht was a strong woman. She would not go to pieces because of this fateful blow, even though she must feel devastated right now.

“We need to speak with your father,” Bodenstein said. “Would you be kind enough to tell him we’re here?”

“Of course. Please come in.”

They followed her into the house, which smelled better than it had at their last visit. The dining room table was cleared, the Christmas decorations put away. Karoline Albrecht left them in the dining room and then came back a few minutes later.

“My father is waiting for you in his study,” she said.

It was obvious that the professor had also suffered in the last few days. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by bookshelves that reached to the ceiling. He looked like a gray shadow of himself and did not get up to greet them.

“Would you mind leaving us alone?” he asked his daughter, who immediately left the study, discreetly closing the door behind her. Bodenstein then told the professor about the murder that had occurred early that morning in Kelkheim.

“The victim was a young man, only twenty-seven years old,” he said. “His father told us that he’d had heart problems since birth and was saved by a heart transplant operation.”

“Tragic.” Professor Rudolf looked at him without much interest.

“We thought that you might know him. His name was Maximilian Gehrke.”

“Gehrke? That doesn’t ring a bell.” The professor shook his head wearily. “For over twenty years, transplants have been my daily bread. I rarely recall individual cases.”

“But you must remember cases that are special or unusual,” Kim said. “Maximilian was a young man with a congenital heart defect. Please try to think back.”

The professor took off his glasses, rubbed his reddened eyes, and carefully thought it over.

“Yes, I do recall the boy,” he said at last, looking up. “He came into the world with a tetralogy of Fallot, and from that, he developed a right ventricular hypertrophy, with other associated unfavorable factors. After a couple of unsuccessful operations, the boy had virtually no hope of survival. His last chance was the HTX. The heart transplant.”

Bodenstein and Pia exchanged a glance. Could this be the breakthrough they’d been waiting for? Did this establish the connection between two of the sniper’s victims?

“Let me ask you again: Does the name Ingeborg Rohleder mean anything to you?” Pia asked.

“Who would that be?” The professor put his glasses back on.

“The first victim,” said Pia. “She was seventy-four years old, lived in Eschb … uh … Niederhöchstadt.”

“Ah yes, you did ask me that already. No, I’m sorry. I really have never heard the name before. Is that all?”

“Not quite.” Bodenstein searched for the right words to broach the sensitive topic. “What do you think the perpetrator was referring to in his letter?”

“Believe me, I’ve been pondering that question night and day since you told me about it.” The man’s shoulders slumped forward. “For the life of me, I can’t make any sense of it. In all the years I’ve worked as a physician, I’ve never had a problem with a patient’s relatives.”

Bodenstein and Pia then said good-bye and left the house without seeing Mrs. Albrecht again.

“That was great, the way you got him to remember Maximilian,” Pia said to her sister as they crossed the street to their car.

“I was thinking of that map in your head.” Kim smiled. “The way you never forget a dead body or a murder scene. I was hoping that it might be the same for a doctor.”

“In any event, we now have a connection between two of the victims.” Pia zipped up her jacket to her chin. “But what does it mean? It’s enough to drive me crazy that there’s no useful clue. The perp must have cased his targets thoroughly; he knew their habits and lifestyles and found places where he could lie in wait for them undisturbed. And afterwards he was able to vanish easily and without being seen. How is it possible that nobody ever sees him?”

“Maybe people do see him but think nothing of it,” Kim said. “Like the man with the dog up ahead. You see him, and ten seconds later he’s forgotten, so long as he doesn’t do anything unusual. The perp must be a man who can adapt and move about without being noticed.”

“That thing with the letter this morning bothers me,” said Pia. “He must feel very sure of himself to take the risk of being recognized.”

“The risk was actually quite low,” Bodenstein objected. “I’m sure that he chose the woman carefully. She was old and fearful, and he also had the surprise factor on his side. Don’t underestimate the perp. He doesn’t leave anything to chance.”

“Sooner or later, he’s going to make a mistake,” Pia opined.

“I’m not waiting for that to happen.” Bodenstein beeped the remote to unlock the car. “We’re getting more and more pressure by the day. People are panicking.”

“And the perp isn’t going to leave it at three victims,” Kim prophesied. “He wants attention.”

“Then he’s going to get it,” Pia said. “Let’s give all the details to the press. That way we can calm down the public, when they realize that they’re not in imminent danger.”

“We can’t risk it.” Bodenstein shook his head and started the engine. “It might lead to collateral damage that we’d have to answer for.”

“The only one who has to answer for any of this,” said Kim, “is the perp.”

*   *   *

She opened the freezer, and all of a sudden she had tears in her eyes when she saw all those freezer bags. Mama had always been so thrifty. Rarely did she ever throw anything away. She rinsed out jam and pickle jars and saved them for canning fruit. Plastic ice cream containers had been reused for decades in the Rudolf household for freezing food, always carefully labeled.
Szeged Goulash,
Karoline read in her mother’s neat handwriting on one package,
9/12/2012.

“Oh, Mama,” she whispered, wiping away the tears. “You know what a lousy cook I am.”

She took out the goulash, closed the lid of the freezer, and went up the steep cellar stairs. Papa hadn’t budged from his study since his conversation with the police officers, which was fine with her. She didn’t really want him to witness her mute dialogue with Mama. He simply didn’t belong here. At least not during the day. As far back as Karoline could remember, her father had left the house at seven every morning and seldom returned home in the evening before ten. Mama had never complained, and at one point, she confessed to Karoline that she was dreading the day when he retired and would be around the house all day long. She had settled into her own life, pursued numerous activities, and developed interests that he had not shared. His work was the only thing he thought about, nothing else.

Like me,
Karoline thought, again fighting back tears. She now couldn’t understand why she had worked like a crazy woman for the past twenty years, instead of spending time with her family and friends. Everything that had always been so important seemed so banal now. She had advised top managers all over the world about values, about the reappraisal of personal deficits, about time management and strategies for improving their corporate culture and image. In doing so, she had treated with contempt all the values that had once meant something to her. In her pursuit of success and acclaim, she had sacrificed not only her marriage, but her entire social sphere had also fallen by the wayside.
Don’t you have a friend you can lean on?
the police officer had asked her. No, she didn’t. That was the painful truth. Her only confidante had been her mother, and now she was gone. Mama’s death had left a void inside her. In other people, that area was filled with pleasant memories and experiences, with love, happiness, partners, and friends, with people who meant something. In her, there was little that was memorable. Added to her grief was the shattering realization that so far, her life had been superficial and with very little substance.

Karoline forced herself to enter the kitchen. She used to love this room, which had always been the focal point of the house. Mama’s domain, in which there was always something simmering on the stove or baking in the oven and sending a seductive aroma through the house. An abundance of potted herbs stood on the wide recessed windowsills, and garlic and onions occupied a wooden shelf. But now the kitchen had lost its charm and had been turned into a place of horror. The window through which the bullet had entered was temporarily patched with a piece of cardboard. That was the only thing left to remind them of what happened there Thursday evening; the crime scene cleaners had been extremely thorough.

Karoline took a saucepan from the cupboard, filled it with the frozen goulash, and set it on the stove. Then she opened a package of spätzle and put on a second pot of salty water. The escape into routine chores kept her from collapsing like a house of cards and sinking into the black waters of terror. Karoline wasn’t taking the sedative tablets that her doctor had prescribed, because they made her feel numb. Likewise, she had politely but firmly turned down the opportunity to speak to the psychologist from the crisis intervention center. She didn’t want to talk, because there was nothing to talk about. She would have to deal with the shock on her own. All she needed was time. She had to comprehend and accept what had happened, and then figure out how to go on.

She stared through the lattice window at the snowy garden outside. Back there behind the bare hornbeam hedge, Death had lain in wait. The police officers told her that the shooter had taken up position on the transformer shed and had shot from there. But … why? The press claimed that the “sniper” shot people at random. His first victim had been a woman out walking her dog. This morning, he had struck again, this time felling a man who was just walking through the front yard. Those two might have been victims of opportunity, people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But her mother had been in the kitchen of her own house, which stood hidden behind hedges and trees at the end of a cul-de-sac. Nobody came here by chance. The killer must have meticulously planned the shooting.

The water that she’d set on the stove for the spätzle boiled over and evaporated with a hiss. Karoline awoke from her trance, went over to the stove, and turned down the burner.

All of a sudden, the diffuse fog of grief and bewilderment that had shrouded and paralyzed her over the last few days lifted: Clearly her mother had not been shot at random. So why did she have to die? Was there something that Mama hadn’t told them about? Was there a secret, an old wrong that she knew nothing about? She had to find out. It was essential. Otherwise, she would never find peace again.

*   *   *

Their colleagues from the evidence team had examined Maximilian Gehrke’s apartment thoroughly and brought back several boxes containing diaries, letters, and other mementos. Bodenstein again set off to visit Fritz Gehrke, while Pia, Kim, and Kai went through the contents of the boxes. For a young man, Maximilian seemed to have been an unusually enthusiastic diary-keeper, but that was easy to understand. Because of his serious illness, he had spent his childhood and youth secluded from other children, and to make matters worse, his mother had died when he was ten. Not an easy life for a young person, but Maximilian did not seem embittered by it. He had always loved music and books; he had played piano and organ and read passionately. His diaries contained book reviews and concert critiques.

“‘I know that I will never grow old,’” Pia read in a diary entry from the year 2000. “‘And that’s why I so enjoy life, as much as I can. Papa hopes that one day a matching donor heart will be found for me, and that until then, the rest of my body will remain healthy enough to accept a transplant. I don’t know whether I should hope for such an event, because it would mean that someone else would have to die first, a young person, because hearts are not transplanted from older people.’”

“Pretty wise for a fifteen-year-old,” Kai thought aloud.

“No wonder,” said Kim. “He had to deal with the topic all his life. Which makes it even more tragic that he didn’t have a chance to grow old.”

With every homicide came the challenge of logically connecting things that were apparently unrelated. The police had to deal with the victim, his life story, and his circle of family and friends in order to discover the motive and identity of the perpetrator. When her research was done, Pia often knew more about the victim than his best friends and closest relatives did, yet she couldn’t allow herself to be swayed by his fate. Emotions such as empathy for the victim and fury at the killer could affect her objectivity. She had to thank the countless hours in the forensic institute for her ability to regard the victim as not only a human being, but mainly as an object for criminological investigation. This time it didn’t work so well; that’s what dawned on her with every diary page she read. Maximilian Gehrke was a victim, true, just like Ingeborg Rohleder and Margarethe Rudolf, but none of them had been the actual targets of the perpetrator. They died because the actions of a relative had awakened the urge for retribution in the killer.

“Look at this!” Kim shouted. “I found something. On September 16, 2002, Maximilian wrote that a suitable donor heart had been found and that he had to be at the clinic that evening.”

Kai and Pia looked up. Kim scanned the pages, turning them quickly, and read a couple of passages aloud. The seventeen-year-old was very worried about having an organ from another person inside his body. Although he was feeling much better physically just a few weeks after the operation, the origin of his new heart was bothering him a lot. What had happened to the donor? Why had that person died so young? Maximilian Gehrke had made every effort to find out the name of the donor, and eventually he was successful.

“His heart came from a woman named Kirsten Stadler,” Kim read aloud. “He learned her identity from an employee in the Frankfurt trauma clinic, but unfortunately, he doesn’t mention the person’s name.”