I Am Your Judge: A Novel (25 page)

He took the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor with no problem. There he opened the glass door of the stairwell to the balcony, swung over the parapet, and stood on the scaffolding. Only a few minutes later, he was on the roof and climbing up a fixed ladder. Up there, between a forest of antennas and satellite dishes, he could be seen from the high-rise of the stock exchange, but no one would look twice at a man wearing a hard hat. He walked farther along the concrete wall and then slid down into the gap between the building conduits and the side wall of the front penthouse apartment. Here he was hidden from view and could set up his rifle in comfort. And he had an unobstructed view past the wall to the Mann Mobilia building in the direction of the REWE supermarket.

It was guaranteed to be a spectacular shot, which would garner the most publicity. It was cold up here, but he’d expected that, and was wearing thermal underwear and a down jacket. He carefully assembled his rifle, chambered a round, and took up position. As camouflage, he spread a gray blanket over himself and the rifle barrel. Now he was no more noticeable than a satellite in the sky. He looked through the telescopic sight and adjusted the focus. The advertising banners of Mann Mobilia were hanging limp. No breeze. Perfect.

He observed the people, the cars, the special offer signs at Aldi. The telescopic sight was so fantastic that he could even read the registration expiration date on the license plates of the cars, from almost a kilometer away. Her car was in the parking lot. Everything was ready. He glanced at his watch. Eleven forty-four
A.M
. It had taken him eleven minutes to get here from the street door. Now he had to wait for an hour and twenty-five minutes, but that didn’t matter. He had plenty of patience.

*   *   *

No one was home at Erik Stadler’s apartment in the North End of Frankfurt, and he wasn’t answering his cell either.

“That was a useless trip,” Pia grumbled. “Home office my foot! Who knows where he’s wandering around.”

It took them a couple of minutes to get back to their car, which she’d left in Oeder Weg. The parking situation in the North End was a disaster as always. It was especially bad in the evening, on weekends, and now, between Christmas and New Year’s, when most people had taken days off and didn’t have to go to work.

“Stadler Senior works for the City of Frankfurt, doesn’t he?” Bodenstein asked, and sat down in the passenger seat.

“Yeah, but I doubt they’re answering their phones,” replied Pia. “Call Ms. Fellmann instead. She liked you, and I’m sure she’ll give you Dirk Stadler’s cell number.”

“What do you mean, she liked me?” Bodenstein gave her a surprised look.

With any other man, Pia would have assumed he was fishing for compliments, but not her boss. As far as women were concerned, Bodenstein was incredibly slow on the uptake; he didn’t recognize the most obvious signals. In the past, this had gotten him into trouble several times, and he seemed to have noticed far too late what was wrong in his marriage. He simply had no defenses against sly female wiles. In the down-to-earth Inka Hansen, he might have finally found the right woman. Pia rarely talked to him about personal matters, but she would have liked to ask whether he was happy with this staid and oddly emotionless veterinarian. Pia never really knew where she stood with Inka.

“Well, she practically stuck her boobs in your face. She was seriously putting the moves on you. And then the idiotic way she was batting her eyes,” Pia now said scornfully, doing an exaggerated imitation of what the assistant had done. “But she’s head over heels in love with her boss. And as I see it, the feeling certainly isn’t mutual.”

“Amazing that you can detect all that in a conversation lasting three minutes.” Bodenstein clicked his tongue, put on his reading glasses, and tapped the number from Erik Stadler’s business card into his cell. Pia was right. Franka Fellmann gladly gave him the cell number, and he was able to phone Erik Stadler’s father.

A moment later, they heard his voice from the speakerphone. “Stadler.”

“Bodenstein, Kripo Hofheim. Mr. Stadler, where are you at the moment?”

“At the main cemetery in Frankfurt,” Dirk Stadler replied in surprise.

“At your daughter’s grave?” Bodenstein asked.

There was silence for a few seconds.

“No.” Stadler’s voice sounded choked. “My daughter is in the cemetery in Kelkheim. I’m here on business. We’re examining gravestones for their stability.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that your daughter had committed suicide?” Bodenstein asked.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” replied Stadler after another brief pause. He cleared his throat. “It’s still a very painful subject for me. After my wife’s death, my daughter and I went through some tough times and were very close.”

Bodenstein, who’d been prepared for some flimsy lie, was disarmed by Stadler’s honesty.

“Please excuse my tone of voice and my bluntness,” he said more gently. “I was annoyed because you hadn’t said a word about it yesterday.”

It was another thing that Pia admired about her boss. If he made a mistake, he had the strength of character to admit it.

Stadler accepted the apology. “I’m sure you’re under a lot of pressure at the moment.”

“We’d like to speak with you again.”

“Of course. I’ll be done with work at four.”

“Then we’ll see you at four thirty at your house. Many thanks.”

Bodenstein ended the call.

“Do I believe him, or do I not believe him?” he said more to himself than to Pia.

“Why would he not want to tell us about his daughter’s suicide?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking myself.” Bodenstein leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes, and sank into a meditative silence.

*   *   *

Celina Hoffmann uttered a curse. She drove down the row of parking places for the third time, but there wasn’t a vacant spot anywhere. It was already one minute to one, and if she didn’t find a parking space soon, she’d be late for her shift. And she would miss Hürmet. She wanted to pay her colleague back the fifty euros she’d borrowed from her two weeks ago, and she had to do it before the end of the year. Celina didn’t have a whole lot of personal rules, but she was superstitious, and her grandmother had always preached that you shouldn’t start the new year with any debts, because that would draw bad luck and even more debts would follow.

“Well, all right,” she muttered as she saw an Opel backing out of a parking spot right in front of her. She put on her blinker and backed up a little. The old guy was turning the wheel this way and that, while his wife was trying to direct him, standing helplessly next to the car. This might take a while.

Damn! Today was another one of those days when everything, absolutely everything, was going wrong. First she had overslept, and then she discovered that there was hardly a drop of gas left in the tank. She barely made it to the gas station, and after she’d filled the tank, she noticed that she’d left her wallet at home. Fortunately, she knew the young guy who worked at the station. He advanced her some money, and then she drove back home and had to trudge up to the eighth floor, because the elevator was broken again. No, this was definitely not her day.

At last, the old guy got the car out of the slot. His wife climbed into the passenger seat, and Celina could finally park her car. She ran across the lot, and even from a distance could see the line in front of the bakery counter. Old Asunovic was working her shift. Another piece of bad luck. She would naturally tattle to the boss that Celina had come in late. She pushed her way through the waiting customers and opened the door in front of the counter that led into the tiny break room and the storeroom.

“Did Hürmet already leave?” she called breathlessly, flinging her jacket and purse onto a chair and slipping into her smock.

“Late again?” bleated her older colleague, who was sliding a tray of pretzel sticks out of the convection oven. “Of course Hürmet has left. It’s five after one.”

“Ah, shit. I couldn’t find a parking place.” Celina squeezed by her colleague into the salesroom.

“Finally,” said Özlem, her other colleague on the midday shift, who was equally pissed off. “All hell has broken loose in here.”

“Hey, if you happen to see Hürmet coming out of REWE, let me know, okay?” Celina said. “I have to give her that fifty euros. For that, I’ll be cleaning up tonight, too.”

“Okay.” Özlem nodded and served the next customer.

*   *   *

Fourteen minutes ago, she left the bakery and as usual disappeared into the supermarket. He waited patiently. It was just as crowded as usual. Although not all the office workers from the high-rise office buildings were on the job in the last week of the year, the parking lots were jammed, and there was hustle and bustle everywhere. People went into the stores and came back out, some looking frantic, others calm and relaxed. From this position, they looked like ants. There still was almost no wind, though up here there was a light breeze, but he’d added that into his calculations. At this great distance, even with a precision rifle like his, some deviation in the trajectory was unavoidable. This time he was going without the noise suppressor, because it would lower the speed of the bullet. At shorter distances, this was negligible, but from six hundred meters, he didn’t need anything slowing it down. He checked his breathing, concentrating completely on the exit door of the supermarket. And there she was. With the shopping basket on her arm, she headed straight past the boutique and the shoe store toward Aldi, where her car was parked. Inhale. Exhale. He had her head precisely in the crosshairs and curled his finger. Stop! Damn, she stopped and turned around. Apparently, someone had called her name. Didn’t matter, he wouldn’t get her lined up like this in the field of fire again. He squeezed the trigger, the shot cracked, and the recoil slammed the rifle against his collarbone.

*   *   *

Karoline was sitting at the table in the kitchen of her apartment, frowning as she looked at the PowerPoint presentation that she’d opened on her laptop, trying to grasp the correlations. So far, the information at her disposal was pretty skimpy, but at least she’d found out who the third victim was. The newspaper and Internet gave only the first names and the first letter of the last names of those affected, but from that and an item on her father’s secret cell phone, she had come to a conclusion that seemed logical. But it still wasn’t clear what Renate Rohleder and her father had to do with Friedrich Gehrke. Karoline knew Gehrke slightly; he belonged to her parents’ larger social circle and had to be around eighty years old by now.

“Maximilian has been shot,” the old man said in a trembling voice when he left a message on her father’s voice mail. “Please call me.”

That’s all he said. The relationship between Gehrke and her father didn’t seem to be so superficial as she’d thought. He did have her father’s secret cell phone number, after all, while she did not.

Karoline had called Renate to hear from her about the advertising display with the company logo that she had seen on the delivery van belonging to the man who accompanied Helen Stadler. She had also Googled “Hartig,” the goldsmith in Hofheim. The owner of the business was Jens-Uwe Hartig. He had a shop and workshop in Hofheim on the main street, but the Web site told her nothing. A few pictures of objects he had made himself; otherwise, only information about store hours, telephone number, and tax number. Not even a photo of the boss at work, and no vita either. What did this Jens-Uwe Hartig have to do with the daughter of the deceased Kirsten Stadler? Was it possible that he and the daughter were behind the murders?

Karoline massaged the back of her neck and bit absentmindedly into the salami sandwich that was both her breakfast and lunch. Something didn’t fit, but she simply didn’t have enough information. She closed her laptop and instead took out the list of her father’s contacts that she had written down from his smartphone before she put it back in the box of watches, closed the safe, and returned the key to its hiding place. Then she had closed and locked the study, but kept the door key. Just in case. A feverish impatience had replaced her paralyzing sadness, and she couldn’t stand to be in her parents’ house any longer, since it was filled with memories of Mama. From her car. she phoned Greta, who to her relief seemed to be feeling a little better. At least she wasn’t crying anymore. Greta even told her mother that she had gone with her cousin Dana to the riding stable and now she wanted her own horse. After New Year’s, it was a tradition for Carsten to take the whole family on a skiing vacation to Austria, and Greta was looking forward to that.

As she ate her sandwich, Karoline studied the contact list and was again stopped by a name that meant nothing to her. Peter Riegelhoff, with a Frankfurt area code and a long telephone number that obviously belonged to an extension, because a search in the Internet reverse phone book produced no hits. In the past few days, her father had called this Riegelhoff several times. Karoline consulted the Internet and found that there were several men in Frankfurt with this name: an importer of organic wines, an advertising man, a dentist, and a lawyer. To find out which was the right man, she would probably have to try calling them willy-nilly. She wasn’t keen on doing that, sniffing around in her father’s affairs, but he’d left her no choice.

*   *   *

“Hürmet! Wait!” Celina stormed out the side door of the bakery and ran after her colleague. Hürmet stopped. She turned around with a smile.

“I don’t want to start the new year owing any money.” Celina grinned and waved the fifty-euro bill that she’d stuck in the pocket of her smock earlier. As she reached out her hand, Hürmet’s head exploded. Just like that. A pink fountain of blood and brain matter sprayed into the air. At the same time, there was a loud bang, and the shop window next to her shook. Time froze. Celina opened her mouth and wanted to scream, but no sound came from her lips. She simply stood there, looking on in disbelief as Hürmet fell to the ground not a meter away. Silently she collapsed into herself, as if her body were made of pudding. Celina still held the money in her hand as she stared in bewilderment at her colleague, who suddenly had no face. All around her, panic broke out. People were screaming; parents pulled their children to the ground; many people just took off running; others sought cover behind parked cars. Celina didn’t notice that cars were crashing into each other and people were running into other people and knocking them down. She stared uncomprehending at the bloody mass that had once been Hürmet’s head and heard a shrill, hysterical shriek. Somebody grabbed her hard by the arm. She tried to pull away, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the horrendous sight. Not until a man gave her a slap did she come to her senses.