I Am Your Judge: A Novel (20 page)

“It was horrible,” Erik recalled. “Mama was in intensive care. She looked like she was just asleep, but the doctors told us that she was brain-dead. The massive hemorrhages had damaged her brain beyond repair.”

For a while, no one said a word. The wind howled in the fireplace and shook the bare branches of a pathetic-looking fruit tree that stood in the backyard on the few square meters of grass.

“When I came back from China two days later, my children were completely traumatized,” Dirk Stadler went on. “My in-laws were not in much better shape. Under intense pressure from the doctors, they had agreed to an organ donation from their brain-dead daughter.”

He cleared his throat.

“My wife had refused to be an organ donor for various reasons; she even had a living will, which in those days was still uncommon. The doctors should have waited until I returned, but they were in a big hurry. So much so that they hadn’t observed the prescribed time mandated between the two brain-death examinations. In the clinic’s records, the times had been falsified. In addition, the doctors had removed more organs than they had previously indicated. Not only her heart and kidneys, but also her eyes, bones, skin, and connective tissue. For this reason, I later brought legal action against the clinic.”

He stopped and looked sadly at the picture of his wife on the sideboard.

“To this day, it’s some consolation to know that with the donation of her organs, Kirsten saved the lives of several individuals,” he said in a low voice. “But my father-in-law was beside himself with grief and rage. He was firmly convinced that he’d been ambushed and betrayed, because he never signed a consent form for organ donation, merely a power-of-attorney document for the treatment of his daughter. But when anyone sues a hospital, the outcome is always the same: The UCF offered me an out-of-court settlement with payment for pain and suffering. I accepted it, because I could no longer pay the legal fees. There were enough funds left over that I could set aside money for the children’s education.”

Pia was observing both men with keen attention, registering every gesture and word, but found no cause for concern. Dirk Stadler gave the impression of a man who had suffered a terrible loss and gone through hell, but he had now made his peace with the past. Erik Stadler also seemed calm and composed. He put into words what Pia had been thinking.

“We’ve all spent a long time getting over this,” he said. “But Mama wouldn’t have wanted us to sit around, crying. She was a happy person, and that’s how we keep her in our memory. That’s the only way we can live normal lives again. Time heals all wounds, even deep ones, eventually, if you let it.”

“I can’t imagine who would take revenge on people who had anything to do with Kirsten’s death,” Dirk Stadler added. “I mean, back then, I could have understood it if someone blew their top in rage. But now, ten years later?”

“Excuse me, I have to go.” Erik Stadler glanced at his watch and grabbed his tablet computer. “I have a company in Sulzbach, and we have a lot to do before year’s end. Call me if you want to know anything else.” He pulled a business card out of the computer’s protective cover and handed it to Bodenstein. He also gave his card to Pia and Kim.

“We don’t want to disturb you any longer.” Bodenstein stood up, and Pia and Kim followed suit. “If you think of anything else that might help us, please give us a call.”

Dirk Stadler accompanied them to the front door.

“Did you injure your leg?” Pia asked.

“Yes, I did,” Stadler replied with a smile. “But it was fifteen years ago at a construction site in Dubai. I used to be a structural engineer and traveled all over the world. My leg has been giving me trouble lately, especially when it’s cold and damp.”

“What sort of work do you do now?”

“After my wife died, I had to give up my job so I could be home for the children,” said Stadler. “I took a year of unpaid leave and after that got a job with the Frankfurt city planning office. I fulfill their disabled quota.”

Erik slipped on his jacket and put on a knit cap.

“Thanks for lunch, Papa.” He patted his father on the shoulder and gave him a wink. “For once something other than bratwurst at the hot dog stand.”

“Anytime,” said his father. “Call me about Saturday. And say hi to Lis.”

“I will. See you then.”

Dirk Stadler smiled as his son left, but the smile vanished from his face when Erik was gone.

“By the way,” he said to Bodenstein and Pia. “My in-laws have never gotten over the loss of Kirsten. She was their only daughter. Since then, they’ve been involved in a support group for the relatives of organ donors, and there’s one more thing—” He broke off and shook his head.

“What is it?” Pia prompted him.

Stadler looked sad. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I don’t want to hide anything.” He pressed his lips together, hesitated, and then took a deep breath. “My father-in-law used to be an excellent marksman and hunter.”

*   *   *

“How horrible,” Pia said as they walked to their cars. “From one moment to the next, everything changes forever.”

Dirk Stadler had written down the address of his in-laws in Glashütten, but first she wanted to drop off one of the unmarked cars in Hofheim before they drove up into the Taunus.

“What did you think of the two Stadlers?” Bodenstein asked Kim.

“As a husband, Dirk Stadler suffered the greatest loss,” she answered pensively. “But I got the impression that he has processed the death of his wife and is managing well. Neither he nor his son was nervous or tense when talking with us, the way people are who have something to hide. Even their astonishment and sadness did not seem feigned to me. At any rate, the two seem to be close.”

“Oh, damn it!” Pia stopped short. “We completely forgot to ask about the daughter.”

“Forget about her as the perp.” Kim shook her head. “You’re looking for a man.”

“But we should at least talk to her,” Pia insisted. “Besides, she was with a man when she went to Renate Rohleder’s flower shop.”

Her cell rang.

“Hello, Henning,” she said when she saw the number of Forensic Medicine on the display. “I—”

“It’s a quarter past two,” he interrupted her coolly. “Or fourteen hundred fifteen, if you prefer. When might the subordinate ranks from the cellar of the Institute of Forensic Medicine expect the arrival of the criminal police?”

“Why?” Pia was baffled. “Did we have an appointment?”

“Your boss requested that we make the autopsy of the corpse from Christmas Day our top priority, and due to the lack of personnel, I will perform this one myself,” said Henning sarcastically. “Why doesn’t the noble Sir von Bodenstein answer his cell phone? I’ve already tried to reach him several times.”

“We’re on the way,” Pia pacified him. “Fifteen minutes, okay?”

Henning Kirchhoff ended the call as abruptly as he’d begun.

“Damn! The autopsy!” Bodenstein pulled his smartphone out of his coat pocket and checked it. “I don’t understand why it doesn’t work. I had extra memory programmed into it. Here, see for yourself.”

He held it out to Pia.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have turned off the ringtone,” she said with a grin. “Then maybe you would have heard it.”

“Technology and I are never going to be friends,” Bodenstein grumbled as he frowned. “We’ll leave my car here and pick it up on the way back. Then we can ask Stadler about his daughter.”

They decided on the car that Pia and Kim had come in because it was a little more comfortable than the other one. Bodenstein sent a patrol to Glashütten to interview Joachim and Lydia Winkler—Dirk Stadler’s in-laws.

“I found that both the Stadlers reacted appropriately when I told them about the obituary and the victims,” Pia said. She turned to her sister to explain: “Ever since I took a seminar in observing nonverbal communication during interviews, I pay particular attention to people’s body language.”

“We can’t rule out anything,” Kim replied. “There are people who can trick a lie detector. But I can hardly imagine that Dirk Stadler with his disability could climb up on a transformer shed or into the front yard at Gehrke’s neighbor’s house. Besides, his limp would make him too noticeable.”

“And that would be too simple a solution,” Bodenstein thought.

They drove along an unusually deserted autobahn in an equally deserted city. The fear of the sniper had turned the region into a collection of ghost towns.

“Take a look at that!” As they drove past, Pia pointed at a few taxis lined up at the train station waiting for fares when normally there were a hundred. “Things can’t go on like this.”

“I’m afraid he isn’t done with his revenge campaign,” Bodenstein said somberly.

“We have to do something. There’s no need for panic.”

“We already discussed this,” Bodenstein said, shaking his head. “It would be irresponsible to lull the public into a sense of security that doesn’t exist.”

“As long as it’s this windy, there won’t be any more murders,” Kim remarked. “The perp avoids direct contact with his victims; he shoots only from a distance. But he can do that only under ideal conditions.”

The feeling of powerlessness that was rising up inside Pia was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. They were searching for a phantom, for a clever, cold-blooded killer who left nothing to chance, made no mistakes, and was always one step ahead of them. With Kirsten Stadler, they had a single dubious lead, and that was all after three murders. As Kim had said this morning, they were faced with completely new ground rules. The personalities of the victims, which normally played a significant role in police investigations, were in this case unimportant. The victims weren’t the actual targets of the perp, but only means to an end. There were no traces, no evidence, no witnesses. All they had were three dead bodies, three obituaries, the impression of a shoe that had been sold in Germany by the hundreds of thousands, a description of the perp that was so vague, it could apply to one out of every three men, and the name Kirsten Stadler. What if they couldn’t find this madman and stop him? How many victims would he add to his death list?

“At any rate, it wasn’t the brother who went with Helen Stadler to Renate Rohleder’s shop,” Kim said unexpectedly. “The age doesn’t match, and I wouldn’t call him ‘extremely good-looking’ by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Hmm,” was all Pia said, and then no one said another word until they’d reached their destination and Bodenstein turned into the parking lot of the forensic institute. For Pia, it was always a familiar feeling when she entered through the heavy wooden front door of the art nouveau villa on Kennedyallee, in which the Institute of Forensic Medicine of Frankfurt University had resided since the 1940s. There had been a time in her life when she had spent more time in this building than in her own apartment. They walked along a hallway lined with dark wood wainscoting. At the end a stairway led down to the basement of the institute. In the first of the two dissection rooms the washed and naked corpse of Maximilian Gehrke was waiting for them.

“So there you are,” said Ronnie Böhme, the autopsy assistant, as he emerged from the small office that also served as a break room. “I’ll call the boss.”

“Thanks, Ronnie.” Pia smiled and hung her jacket on the coatrack. Bodenstein and Kim left their coats on. It was always cool in the autopsy room.

“The coffee is freshly brewed. Help yourselves.” Böhme grinned, holding the phone to his ear. At the same moment, steps were approaching, and he hung up.

“I don’t want to hear any excuses.” Henning appeared in the doorway, followed by a young man who looked like a student, and State Attorney Heidenfelder. Pia recalled his first autopsy seven years before, when he got so sick, he had to throw up. The corpse was Isabel Kerstner, and it was Pia’s first case that she had solved together with Bodenstein.

“I wasn’t planning to apologize for anything,” replied Bodenstein. “Let’s get started.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need your permission to do my job,” Henning snapped.

Clearly evident in the harsh light of the operating lamp was the devastation that the Core-Lokt projectile had caused upon exiting the body. It had smashed the ribs and torn a tremendous hole in the surrounding tissue. Pia studied Maximilian Gehrke’s thin face. He looked like he was sleeping peacefully. After reading his diaries, she almost felt like she knew him. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by rage at the person who believed he was justified in committing such a depraved act, setting himself up as judge and executioner.

“It’s a shame that a young man who’d already been through so much had to die so violently,” she said, full of sympathy. “At least he didn’t suffer.”

“He was dead before he hit the ground,” Henning confirmed. “His heart was literally shredded.”

“And it wasn’t even his own.”

“Pardon me?” Henning gave her a quizzical look over the edge of his surgical mask.

“He had a heart transplant ten years ago,” Pia explained.

Her ex-husband dropped his hands and pulled down the mask.

“Okay. Just a minute here,” he said, looking from Pia to Bodenstein to State Attorney Heidenfelder. “You all know that I’m a passionate advocate of autopsies—better to do one too many rather than one too few. But I would really like to know what you hope to learn here. This is the third time I’ve had a cadaver whose cause of death could be easily ascertained by a first-semester medical student.”

“We’re grasping at straws,” Bodenstein conceded. “At present, it appears that the female donor of the heart that Maximilian Gehrke received might be the reason for the three murders. But we have nothing tangible, no concrete evidence, not a thing.”

“We’re not primarily interested in the cause of death,” Pia added. “Perhaps some new clue will come to light.”

Henning sighed and gave a shrug.

“I wish I could help you.” He pulled his mask back up. “But I’m afraid you’re going to get the same noncommittal autopsy report as for the other two victims of the sniper.”

*   *   *

The feeling that her father was keeping silent about something worried Karoline Albrecht. She knew it would be a good idea to speak with the friendly detective, but she shied away from it. Her mother was dead, and she was afraid of losing her father as well, if she said anything to the police. But even worse, she feared learning a truth that might destroy the image she had of her mother. Maybe Papa was right when he said he wanted to protect her. Karoline no longer recognized herself. All her life, she had never shrunk from tackling problems and finding solutions—so why was she hesitating now, driving all around the area, unable to make a decision? Was it still the effects of the shock that she’d suffered on Thursday evening? Last night, she was on the phone with Carsten for almost an hour after she had spoken briefly with Greta, who was doing well under the circumstances. She was able to sleep through the night with no nightmares, thanks to a mild sedative.