I Am Your Judge: A Novel (38 page)

Then he remembered the offer from Cosima’s mother, which he still hadn’t discussed with Inka and had almost repressed. The longer he waited to mention it, the harder it would be. On the other hand, he didn’t want to bring up something so important without having time to discuss it in detail, especially since she reacted so sensitively to anything that had to do with Cosima’s family.

He decided simply to wait. Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, and the next day was the start of a new year with new opportunities. Right now, he had a murderer to catch.

*   *   *

It was cold in the house, so cold that he could see his breath like a whitish cloud. Under the two blankets, it was nice and warm, although his bladder was full. Otherwise, nothing was pressing him. The days had turned into nothing but waiting for the weather to pass. He hoped the fog at least would lift soon. Last night, he’d been reading a mystery until his eyes almost fell closed. It had been one of his favorite books, and it was certainly written in a suspenseful way, but he found the description of the violence of this psychopath against women revolting.

His gaze moved over the ugly, faded wallpaper to the window with the paint peeling off the sill.

He threw off the covers, grabbed his fleece jacket, which was hanging over a chair next to the bed, and slipped into his lined boots. In the bathroom and living room, it was just as cold as in the bedroom, and the woodbox next to the stove was empty. He went to the toilet, then put on his scarf and jacket, grabbed the basket, and stepped outside to chop some firewood. The wooden steps of the porch creaked under his weight, and a crow cawed as it flew out of a stand of three trees. The fog had settled over the houses, enveloping everything in a damp cold. He went around the house, picked up a couple of logs, and pulled the axe out of the chopping block. A bit of exercise in the early morning suited him fine. After ten minutes, he had enough firewood for two days, so he lugged the basket back into the house. A little later, a fire was crackling in the stove and radiating a pleasant warmth. He filled the cheap coffeemaker with water, spooned ground coffee into the filter, and turned on the machine. Last summer, he had thought about fixing up the house, but other, more important things intervened. Now it was no longer worth the trouble. The police would get wise to him sooner or later. They’d catch him and put him on trial. The public would hate him and think he was sick. They’d call him a crazy psychopath, and he couldn’t really blame them, considering what he had done and was going to do. In the eyes of the public, nothing could justify his actions, but he couldn’t care less. The people who had to die had been sentenced to death by their own fathers, husbands, and children—he was merely the executioner. He had documented everything meticulously. The living would receive their punishment and the dead would get justice. All of them.

*   *   *

It was nine o’clock on the dot when Bodenstein parked in front of Fritz Gehrke’s house and got out of the car. He opened the garden gate, went up the steps and along the path to the front door. No one answered when he rang the doorbell. The blinds were closed all over the house, and Bodenstein had a bad feeling. As he was thinking whom he could call to check on Gehrke, a small white car with the name
NURSE HILDEGARD
painted on the side pulled up. A stout woman with bobbed hair dyed cherry red got out with a black bag over her shoulder and strode up the steps. Under a thick down jacket, she wore some sort of white uniform, and she had on white shoes to match.

“Isn’t even the Sabbath sacred to you damned reporters?” she admonished him before he could say a word. “Get out of here or I’ll call the police!”

“I’m not from the newspaper. I’m from Kripo,” said Bodenstein, showing her his ID. “And you are?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I’m Karin. Karin Michel.” The expression on her red-cheeked face changed to remorse.

“Not Nurse Hildegard?” Bodenstein said with a smile.

“We’re all Nurse Hildegard.” Ms. Michel gave him a mischievous smile. “There are seven of us. Most of us used to work in nursing homes, but working somewhere like that is pretty frustrating in the long run. Sure, the work is still stressful, but this way, we have more time for the oldsters. And they appreciate it.”

She fished out a thick ring of keys from her jacket.

“The blinds are all drawn,” Bodenstein said. “No one reacted when I rang.”

“Oh, that’s normal,” replied Karin Michel. “Sorry I yelled at you. But for the past few days, there have been reporters constantly hanging around, and it was a real bother for poor Mr. Gehrke. As if he hasn’t suffered enough.”

She put on her glasses, which were hanging around her neck on a cord, and searched for the right key. Bodenstein respected people like Karin Michel. It wasn’t easy to take care of old or sick people and stay cheerful, warmhearted, and sympathetic.

“No need to apologize,” he said. “How often do you visit Mr. Gehrke?”

“Morning and evening. It’s not good for the old man to be alone so much,” she went on. “Max used to visit his father every day and was always helping out. Terrible what happened. Just horrible.”

Finally she found the right key and opened the front door. The house was warm, and it smelled stuffy and smoky. Bodenstein’s premonition grew stronger, but Karin Michel didn’t seem to notice anything unusual.

“Hello, Mr. Gehrke, it’s me, Karin!” she shouted. “Oh, he’s sitting here in the dark again. He does that a lot. Forgets to turn on the light and open the blinds. He fell once, but luckily didn’t hurt himself.” She pressed a switch, and the electric blinds in the whole house rolled up. “I told Max he ought to get motion detectors installed in the house, but Mr. Gehrke wouldn’t hear of it. It would use too much electricity. He was born in 1931, the war generation. They’re always thrifty. I’ve got lots of clients like Mr. Gehrke.”

The woman was talkative but not nosy. She didn’t try to find out anything from Bodenstein.

“Could you wait a moment? I’ll go find him and tell him that you want to talk to him.”

“All right,” Bodenstein said with a nod. “Thank you.”

“Be right back.” The nurse marched off, calling loudly for the old man.

Bodenstein paced restlessly. Suddenly he heard a scream. He took off after the nurse and found her in the hallway, her face chalk-white.

“Oh God, oh God!” she cried. “Mr. Gehrke! Over there.”

Bodenstein pushed her gently aside and entered the study. His sense of foreboding had proved correct. Fritz Gehrke was dead. He sat slumped at his desk, his chin on his chest. At first glance, he looked as if he’d dozed off and departed this life in his sleep, but then Bodenstein noticed the syringe the dead man still held in his hand. Bodenstein put his arm around the nurse’s shoulders and led the trembling woman into the kitchen.

“Sit down,” he said. He searched the cupboards until he found a glass, filled it with water, and handed it to her. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Gehrke alive?”

“Yesterday. Last night around six in the evening,” she murmured in a daze before taking a gulp of water. Her hand was shaking. “He was the same as ever, and wished me a good evening when I left.”

“Was he diabetic?” Bodenstein asked.

“Yes, type 2. But he dealt with it well. He’s … He was a very disciplined man.”

She began to cry.

“This isn’t the first dead person I’ve encountered.” She wiped the tears away with her hand. “But Mr. Gehrke was such a dear man. So brave. What happened to his son simply broke his heart.”

Bodenstein had a completely different suspicion, but he didn’t want to take away the woman’s illusion, and so he didn’t comment.

*   *   *

Karoline Albrecht drove onto the A 3 autobahn at Niedernhausen. She put on her blinker and stepped on the gas. The black Porsche 911S accelerated like an airplane, the 400 horsepower at her back roared, and the speedometer read 150 km/h after a few seconds. She had always loved driving fast. Her first car, which she received right after she got her driver’s license, had been a VW Golf GTI. Now she drove a Porsche. As a partner, she was entitled to a company car in that price range, but it was really just as superfluous as her luxurious house. Greta had given up horseback riding when she went to boarding school, but if she was going to start riding again, Karoline could buy her a horse. In that case, a robust four-wheel-drive vehicle with a trailer hitch would be more practical than a pricey sports car. For a couple of minutes, Karoline indulged in fantasies about her future and pictured the house she would buy for Greta: an old farmhouse in a lovely garden with tall old trees and rosebushes and perhaps a pond by a weeping willow, its branches hanging down to the water. With the money that she could get for her luxury abode in Kelkheim, she wouldn’t have to work for a couple of years, and she would also inherit something from Mama. The thought of her mother snatched Karoline right back to reality. At Montabaur, she had to slow the Porsche down to 100 km/h. Carsten had called last night and invited her to spend New Year’s Eve with them at his parents’ house on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria. She was still welcome at her former in-laws’ house, thanks to Nicki, Carsten’s second wife, who had accepted Karoline into her family without resentment since she was Greta’s mother. But Karoline had politely declined the invitation. She couldn’t simply drive off, not now. There was Mama’s funeral to arrange. And she needed to find out what happened ten years ago, or the uncertainty would torment her till her dying day.

She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and glimpsed the chaos that was raging inside her—sorrow, grief, rage, and pain, all the feelings that felt so burdensome because she was afraid of losing control. How long could she hold on before she collapsed like a house of cards? When would her strength run out, this iron self-control of hers?

She’d always been good at focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and this was a skill she needed right now. According to her navigation system, she would arrive around 11:26 at the home of Dr. Hans Furtwängler, who was one of the people her father had phoned in the past few days. Her conversations with Gehrke and Arthur yesterday had not been very instructive. She was haunted by a gloomy certainty that something was there—an old debt that connected her father with his friends and colleagues. Karoline didn’t have much hope of learning more from Furtwängler, but each tiny bit of information was a piece of the puzzle. With a little luck and using her powers of deduction, she might eventually see the whole picture.

*   *   *

Karin Michel sobbed, utterly undone, twisting a wet tissue between her fingers. “Max’s death upset him so much that he no longer wanted to live.”

Bodenstein and Pia exchanged a glance. The stack of empty document binders and the ashes still warm in the living room fireplace spoke of something different. The labels on the spines of the binders had been carefully removed and also burned, so that there was no longer any hint of what had been in them. Fritz Gehrke had disposed of all the documents, and then he took his life with an overdose of insulin. He hadn’t left a suicide note, but on his desk lay the copy of the obituary that the sniper had sent. Bodenstein had deliberately not told him about it; he had wanted to proceed cautiously and not show it to the old man until today. Somebody had beaten him to it—but who? It could only have been Faber, that journalist, who had probably done his own research. The content of the obituary was doubtless the trigger for Gehrke’s suicide. Later today, Bodenstein was going to give Faber hell.

“Does Mr. Gehrke have relatives we should inform?” Pia asked. She had already put on latex gloves and bright blue booties over her shoes.

“As far as I know, there’s a sister somewhere,” replied Karin Michel, now somewhat more composed. “But she lives abroad and she must be around eighty.”

“Thank you, I’m sure we can locate her.” Pia jotted this down. “You may go now, Ms. Michel. Thank you for your help.”

The nurse got up from the kitchen chair, and Pia accompanied her to the front door. Before she left, she took the front door key off her key ring and handed it to Pia.

“I won’t be needing this anymore,” she said sadly, and left.

In the meantime, Kröger’s team had photographed the body and the study and done a careful examination of the rest of the house. Dr. Frederick Lemmer, who’d arrived shortly after Pia, had earned a lot of bonus points from Kröger by waiting respectfully until the evidence team finished working. Just as Pia returned to the study, two men carefully lifted the body of the old man from the chair and laid him on the rug.

“May we take a look around now?” Bodenstein asked Kröger.

“Sure, we’re done in here,” said the head of the evidence team.

They searched the desk, not too surprised to find very little on the desktop or in the drawers. Fritz Gehrke had made a thorough job of it.

Lemmer measured the temperature of the corpse, found the typical grayish-purple lividity on the buttocks, back, bottom of the thighs, and in the lower part of the calves, because the blood drained by gravity into the lower extremities as soon as it stopped circulating.

“Rigor mortis has not yet dissipated,” he told Bodenstein and Pia. “I estimate that death occurred between ten
P.M
. and one
A.M
. No external influences are evident at first glance.”

Pia pressed her gloved finger on the telephone’s memory button. The last number was dialed at 8:48
P.M
. and had an Oberursel area code. Before that, Gehrke had phoned someone in Cologne.

“I bet this is Professor Rudolf’s number, the husband of our victim number two,” said Pia.

“What makes you think that?” Bodenstein wanted to know, astounded.

“Just a hunch,” said Pia.

The phone rang. Pia wanted to pick up at once, but Bodenstein signaled for her to wait. A number with a Frankfurt area code. After the third ring, the voice mail kicked in.

“Fritz, it’s me,” said a man’s voice after the beep. “I just heard the news. Fritz? Are you there? All right, I’ll try you again later.”