I Am Your Judge: A Novel (42 page)

“Let’s wait and see what the house searches turn up.” She glanced at the clock, cleared the dishes from the table, and put them in the dishwasher. “I’m going to take the dogs out and feed the horses. See you later at the station?”

“Of course,” said Kim with another yawn. “I’ll be there at nine. And before that, I’m going to do some shopping.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” said Pia with a grin. “Not that we couldn’t celebrate New Year’s tonight without our traditional meat fondue.”

“Should I also buy a few fireworks?” Kim called after her as she went into the entryway and slipped on her wooden clogs.

“Don’t bother,” Pia said cheerfully. “From here we can see the fireworks in Frankfurt and all along the Taunus slope. It would just be a waste of money.”

*   *   *

Bodenstein knew at once that the search of Jens-Uwe Hartig’s residence would turn up nothing. At five in the morning, Hartig was already fully dressed. Or maybe he’d never gone to bed. Unshaven, he opened the front door and refused to take the search warrant when Bodenstein tried to hand it to him.

“All right, then,” he said calmly. “Okay if I make some coffee?”

“Please do.” Bodenstein and Pia followed the man into the kitchen. “Haven’t you slept at all?”

“A little.” Hartig watched without emotion as an officer carrying laundry baskets walked past him and switched on the lights in all three rooms. Then Hartig turned to the coffeemaker, picked up the glass pot, and filled it with water. “I don’t sleep well anymore, not since Helen died. Mostly I watch documentaries on TV, or go over to the shop. Work takes my mind off her.”

“Were you there last night? Your car’s engine is still warm.”

“Yes. I got home half an hour ago.” The hint of a smile passed over his exhausted face. He opened a cupboard. “As if I knew you were coming. Would you like a cup?”

“No thanks,” the two detectives both replied. The coffee machine began to chuff. The stuffy odor of sweat and cigarette smoke was replaced by the aroma of coffee.

“Do you know Mark Thomsen?” Pia inquired.

“Yes.” Hartig nodded. “Kind of an idiot.”

“Were you jealous of him?”

“Why would I be jealous?” Hartig countered.

“Because your fiancée had a pretty close relationship with him,” said Pia. “Dirk Stadler described Thomsen as her ‘father surrogate.’”

“That’s bullshit. Mark seemed to latch on to her from the first time she went to a HRMO meeting with her grandparents. At first she liked the attention, but with time it became … unpleasant.”

“In what way?”

“He was patronizing and condescending, and he kept giving her unwanted advice.” Hartig shook his head as if to dismiss an unwelcome memory. “He even fixed up a room in his house for her.”

“Do you think he was interested in her sexually?”

“You’ve seen Helen’s picture,” replied Hartig with a hint of bitterness. “She was very beautiful and always made a needy impression. Crude macho types like Thomsen love that sort of person. It makes them feel big and strong, even though they’re nothing but failures. Thomsen is a poor soul, who revels in fantasies of revenge. He kept pestering her with his ideas, blatantly trying to incite her.”

“What sort of revenge fantasies?” Bodenstein inquired.

“He wanted to punish the people who in his opinion were to blame for his misery.”

“Do you believe that Thomsen would actually shoot someone?” Pia asked. “There’s a big difference between talking about it and doing it.”

“I certainly do.” Hartig poured himself more coffee and grimaced. “There’s not much holding him back. He shot people when he was with the GSG 9. And more than once, he’s said that it would be no big deal for him to take somebody out from a couple of hundred meters. It’s like a video game, nothing more.”

Pia didn’t reply. She didn’t believe that Thomsen would have really killed her or Bodenstein yesterday, but he wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot her, maybe in the leg, to underscore his demands.

“Do you know how to shoot, Mr. Hartig?” Bodenstein asked.

“I used to. My father was a fanatical hunter and was always dragging my brother and me into the forest, even when we were kids. The first time he put a rifle in our hands, we were still in kindergarten.” Hartig laughed unhappily. “That was his idea of how to make little bed wetters into tough guys.”

“Shooting is like riding a bike, you never forget how,” Pia paraphrased what Thomsen had told her yesterday.

Hartig looked at her face and shrugged.

“I wouldn’t even remember how to load a rifle,” he claimed.

That brief glance from his dark eyes had been enough to tell Pia he was lying. His apparent indifference, his lack of expression, the way he was neglecting his appearance—it was all carefully contrived in order to deceive them. Jens-Uwe Hartig was a very intelligent man for whom any sort of failure was equivalent to a personal insult, a man who took action and moved things along if they were important to him. He had already shown how far he was prepared to go when he revolted against the methods used by his physician colleagues. With his eyes wide open, he had destroyed his own promising career in medicine.

Pia regarded the man with the greasy, scruffy hair who was trying to play the part of a grieving man with a broken heart. She had to admit he did it well. Pia might have been duped by him if that strange look hadn’t flared up in his eyes, a look that in no way matched the rest of his manner. There was something calculating and cryptic about his expression that evoked a vague unease in Pia.

While their colleagues packed up everything that seemed worthy of examination, Bodenstein got a call. Lis Wenning wanted to speak with him, so he decided that Pia should stay to supervise the search of Hartig’s shop. In the meantime, Bodenstein would drive over to Erik Stadler’s office, which opened at seven thirty, in order to bring Stadler’s girlfriend to the station for an interview.

“Where exactly were you when the murders occurred?” Pia asked Hartig when they were alone in the kitchen.

“If you tell me what the times were, I can give you an answer,” Hartig said. “By the way, do you mind if I smoke?”

“No, go ahead. It’s your house,” said Pia. She told him the times and dates of the four murders.

Hartig listened intently, then lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He had thin wrists and lovely, slender fingers. Surgeon’s hands. Jens-Uwe Hartig was, in general, a handsome man.

“I can’t remember exactly,” he admitted, squeezing his eyes tight for a moment. “And I don’t really have any alibis. That must be one reason why you’re having my home searched. I’m a suspect, aren’t I?”

Again, the strangely furtive glance.

“Maybe,” said Pia. “We hope to find information in your house that we urgently need, but that you have refused to share with us.”

That wasn’t quite the whole truth, but it was certainly one of the reasons why the search warrant had been approved.

“What information?”

“About employees of the UCF who dealt with Kirsten Stadler. Do you happen to recall any names?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Hartig apologized. “I remember only Professor Rudolf and Dr. Hausmann.”

“Stop this charade!” Pia felt the same helplessness that she’d felt thousands of times before when questioning suspects who were lying or simply refusing to answer. “You and Helen hardly talked about anything except what happened to her mother. So I’m sure names must have been mentioned. Why won’t you help us? Don’t you care if more innocent people die?”

“You’re desperate, aren’t you?” Hartig said with a contemptuous smirk. “You don’t even know these people. Why do their deaths bother you so much?”

Pia stared at him in amazement. Was he serious, or did he just have a sick sense of humor? Why couldn’t she figure out what it was about Hartig that upset her so much?

“I seldom know the people I have to deal with in my job,” she replied. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like it when someone sets himself up as judge over life and death. We live in a nation governed by law, which I represent. If everyone did whatever came into their head, we’d be living in anarchy.”

“The rule of law is a farce.” Hartig’s expression was contemptuous. “For me, my concern with the Stadlers ended on the day I lost Helen. After that, I broke off all contact with her family and turned my sights toward a future that has nothing more to do with Helen or her demons. Can’t you understand that?”

“Yes, I can,” said Pia. “But I still don’t believe you. Why do you keep going to the cemetery each morning?”

Hartig sighed.

“I loved Helen more than anyone else in my life,” he replied. “The fact that she preferred death to a life with me affected me deeply, and to this day, I don’t understand it. Maybe that’s why I visit her grave every morning.”

Pia surveyed him skeptically, but waited in vain for some telltale gesture, a compromising twitch of his lips, or any other sign that he was lying. She decided to take off the kid gloves.

“How do you get along with Erik Stadler and his girlfriend?” she began innocently.

“After Helen died, I’ve had no contact with them. But before, we always got along fine.”

“And with Helen’s father?”

“Dirk was very grateful to me for everything I did for Helen.”

Not a real answer to her question.

“And what was it you did for her?”

Hartig hesitated briefly before he replied.

“I protected her. As best I could, and as much as she’d allow me to do. Helen was a woman full of contradictions.” He gazed pensively at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “On the one hand, she was courageous and self-confident, but on the other, she was full of fears and doubts. She never got over the loss of her mother and the circumstances of her death. She held on to every person who meant something to her with an obsessiveness that for many was hard to bear. The fear of being abandoned again became deeply rooted in her soul.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and rubbed his face. Pia was reminded of what Franka Fellmann had told her about Helen Stadler.

“We’ve heard that Helen had serious mental problems, yet she refused to see a therapist.”

“She suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. She didn’t need therapy, just love and security. The feeling of being safe. And that’s what I gave her.”

“It apparently wasn’t enough. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken her own life.” Pia was eager to see how Hartig would react to this provocation. She was expecting an angry outburst, a fierce protest, but she got the opposite response.

“Yes,” said Hartig calmly. “It obviously wasn’t enough for her. That’s the worst thing about it. I failed her.”

“People have told us that Helen never tried to work through the trauma; instead she wallowed in it. And you supported her choice. Last summer, you and Helen visited the flower shop owned by Renate Rohleder, whose mother was the first victim of the sniper. What were you looking for there?”

“I did not encourage Helen to dwell on the trauma. I helped her to work it out.”

“By threatening people?”

“No one threatened anybody,” said Hartig, shaking his head. “Helen was totally beside herself when she stood there, facing that woman. Until we walked into that flower shop, I had no idea who Renate was.”

Pia asked him a few more questions about Helen, Dirk and Erik Stadler, Mark Thomsen, and Helen’s grandparents. Hartig answered calmly and without hesitation. Everything he said sounded absolutely credible and sincere. His expression matched his tone of voice, and he didn’t try to gloss over or conceal anything. No contradictions, no exaggerations. The perfect surviving relative who was still wrestling with the loss, but who wanted to regain his footing in life. A little
too
perfect. Pia was amazed that Bodenstein, who was an extraordinarily good judge of character, had been fooled by Hartig. He had called him a Good Samaritan who’d been utterly derailed by Helen’s death. The man who stood before her seemed in no way devastated. Either he was making a gigantic effort to process the loss of his beloved fiancée and his failure to save her or he was an ice-cold, calculating psychopath who was leading them all down the garden path.

*   *   *

Lis Wenning showed up without an attorney. She made a bleary-eyed but composed impression. Bodenstein took her into his office and offered her a seat in one of the visitors’ chairs.

“I would walk through fire for Erik,” she began. “We’ve been together for six years now, and have weathered both highs and lows in our relationship, especially since Helen’s suicide. Erik loved his sister very much, and her death hit him hard. But he also viewed her shortcomings realistically. Helen suffered a psychological trauma because of her mother’s death, but above all, because of the breakup of her family. She clung to her father, and he in turn found comfort in being with his daughter. She was truly sick: she had anxiety attacks, an extreme fear of loss, and she could not cope with even the slightest change.”

Lis Wenning shook her head.

“When her father wanted to buy a new car, she had a fit; she locked herself in the old car and cried like a little girl. New furniture scared her. If something was simply moved in the house, she was frightened. Dirk humored her and changed nothing. He idolized her. And she could be extremely lovable sometimes.”

“Your boyfriend’s bookkeeper told us quite different stories about Helen,” Bodenstein remarked.

“Franka? Yes, I bet she did. Erik had Helen working for him for a while, when his father was extremely busy. Franka was insanely jealous. She would rather work a twelve-hour day than have assistance from anyone else. She took over everything in the company, and Erik let that happen because it was convenient for him. But then she started treating him like a child. And she would snap at clients on the phone because she was completely swamped and could no longer attend to her own work. So finally, he decided to fire her.”

“Oh, she told us that she had quit,” Bodenstein remarked.

“Yes, this time she did,” Lis Wenning agreed. “When Erik tried to fire her two years ago, she promised to improve, so he changed his mind and hired a receptionist.”

“Back to Helen.” Bodenstein stretched out his legs. “How was her relationship to Mark Thomsen?”