I Am Your Judge: A Novel (57 page)

It seemed to Bodenstein as if a black hole opened beneath his feet when the woman replied that no employee by that name had worked in the office.

“Are you quite sure?” Pia asked. “Who is your superior?”

“Dr. Hemmer. The department head.”

“Please connect me with him.”

It took a while before the man picked up and confirmed that Dirk Stadler hadn’t worked for the City of Frankfurt in the past two years. There had been irregularities.

“Are you referring to the judgment concerning tax evasion?”

“Yes, that was the reason,” the office manager admitted.

Pia thanked him and hung up.

“How was I to know that it was old information?” Neff tried to defend his mistake. “I’m here only as an adviser, not an investigator. This is really not my job, and I thought someone would double-check the information. Ostermann does that sort of thing all the time and—”

Kai gasped angrily, but before he could say a word, Bodenstein completely lost it. He slammed his palm on the table, and Neff stopped in midsentence.

“You accepted this assignment; you even volunteered for it! You bragged about your excellent connections, and I
depended
on you. Teamwork means relying without question on everyone involved. Don’t you get that? If I could do everything by myself, I wouldn’t need colleagues or a team. Through your gross negligence, you caused us to stop focusing on Stadler. That is an investigative disaster that can never be put right. I promise you, Neff, if it turns out that Stadler is the perp, then I will personally make sure you lose your job.”

He shoved his chair back and stood up.

“Pia, call Dr. Burmeister at once. We’re taking him into protective custody,” he commanded. “Kai, Cem, and Kathrin, you go research everything you can find about Dirk Stadler.”

Those who had been given assignments got up and left.

“But I really—,” Neff began. He would probably have pleaded “not guilty” in court even if he were caught red-handed, with a bloody knife in his hand, standing next to a corpse. Bodenstein took advantage of his height as he looked down at Neff.

“Shut—your—mouth,” he said menacingly. With his inflated view of his own abilities and his arrogant narcissism, this man had brought nothing but unrest to his team. And it turned out that he had even obstructed the investigation. “Get out of my sight. Right now. Before I do something I’ll regret.”

Then he turned on his heel and left the room.

*   *   *

Standing in the corridor, Pia tapped in the number of Dr. Simon Burmeister’s cell phone. The blood was rushing so loudly in her ears that she could hardly formulate a clear thought. Would her theory be proved right? When she called Stadler on Friday, shortly before Hürmet Schwarzer was shot, he had claimed to be at the Frankfurt Main Cemetery, checking the durability of gravestones. Why had she simply believed him? But why would she have had cause to doubt him? On Friday evening, she had again spoken with Stadler, and she tried feverishly to remember how the man had behaved. Burmeister did not answer his cell phone. It was twenty past ten, so he was probably at his meeting. Pia went to her office and sat down at her desk. Kai appeared only seconds later.

“That sleazy bastard tried to shove the blame onto me,” he complained furiously, plopping down on the chair behind his desk. “He puts on a good show, I’ll give him that. Talking big, refusing to be pinned down, uttering stupid, superficial psychobabble.”

He was really pissed off, but Pia had no words of solace for her colleague, because she felt exactly the same way. She was annoyed because she had relied on Neff and had been taken in by Stadler, even though from the start, her intuition had been warning her to beware.

In her cell phone, she searched for the message from Henning with Dr. Furtwängler’s phone number. She called the doctor in Cologne, but she got his wife, who claimed that her husband was out and did not own a cell phone.

Pia ended the call. She no longer felt like listening to lies and excuses. Once again, she tapped in Burmeister’s number. Still no answer. So she called the UCF and demanded to speak to Dr. Burmeister. She was put on hold for a long time, but finally someone from the hospital administration answered.

The woman sounded irritated as she reported that “Dr. Burmeister has not yet arrived. But we expect him any moment. He’s scheduled to perform an important operation at ten.”

Pia was suddenly filled with foreboding.

“Are you sure he’s not there?”

“That’s what I just told you,” the annoyed woman snapped. “Do you think I’m incompetent?”

“Dr. Burmeister’s life is in danger,” Pia said insistently. “As soon as he arrives at the clinic, have him call me right away. And now I need phone numbers for Dr. Janning and Professor Hausmann.”

“Those gentlemen are still on vacation,” the administrative woman informed her in a cool voice. “I am not authorized to release any information—”

Pia hit the roof. “Listen, this is an emergency!” She no longer bothered to sound polite or friendly. “In case you misunderstood: I am Chief Criminal Inspector Pia Kirchhoff from the Homicide Unit of Kripo Hofheim. We have already had five homicides; we are trying to prevent two more! Now, give me the goddamned phone numbers
at once
or I’ll have you arrested for obstructing a police investigation!”

The woman finally seemed to understand. Clearly intimidated, she rattled off the phone numbers. Then Pia hurried over to Bodenstein’s office. Before she could knock, he opened the door, and she almost fell into his arms.

“I can’t get hold of Burmeister,” she told him. “He hasn’t shown up at the hospital yet, although he—”

“Ms. Albrecht just called me,” Bodenstein interrupted her. “She found documents in her father’s house and clothes that reek of smoke.”

Pia, who was worrying about Burmeister, didn’t understand.

“We’re going to Oberursel.” Bodenstein pulled on his coat as he walked. “Hurry up.”

“But we can’t just—,” she began, but Bodenstein didn’t let her finish.

“Gehrke supposedly burned documents,” he said impatiently. “But no smoke particles were found in his bronchial passages and lungs. Either he was wearing a face mask or he was already dead when the documents were burned in the fireplace. Rudolf’s clothes reeked of smoke, and Ms. Albrecht found a document binder that obviously came from Gehrke’s house.”

“I see.” Pia postponed the calls she was planning to make until later. “Give me a minute to get my things.”

*   *   *

“Fritz Gehrke was the victim of a cover-up.” Karoline Albrecht got straight to the point. “When he figured out what my father had done, he had to die.”

On the big dining room table lay the document binder that she’d found in her father’s car, and next to it a cell phone and other papers. Her exhaustion was evident on her face, yet she presented the facts that her investigation had uncovered with a precision that won Bodenstein’s respect. She had dismissed his polite inquiry as to how she was feeling by saying simply, “I’m all right.” The left side of her face was swollen, and a bruise stretched from temple to chin, but even this disfigurement couldn’t ruin the remarkable symmetry of her face. He wondered how she would look when she laughed.

“The search for my mother’s murderer isn’t the focal point of my interest,” she said. “That’s your job. I want to find out what my father did, and why my mother became a victim. The truth is, my father gave the order to stop Kirsten Stadler’s respirator. Part of a diagnosis of brain death is the so-called apnea test, in which the patient’s ability to breathe unaided is tested. He is disconnected from the respirator, and if he does not start breathing within five minutes, that is one of the indications of brain death. Kirsten Stadler was still breathing unaided in the first test as well as the second. Normally, the tests must be carried out no more frequently than twelve hours apart, and by doctors who have nothing to do with an eventual explantation. Are you following me?”

Bodenstein and Pia nodded.

“The first offense against existing laws in the case of Kirsten Stadler was that these tests were performed a few hours apart. The reason for this was her blood type. It was determined that she was blood type O, which meant that her heart would be a match for any recipient.”

“The blood type!” exclaimed Pia. That was what had been hovering for days on the edge of her consciousness, but she hadn’t been able to put it into words. She now remembered her conversation with Henning. In answer to her question of whether Professor Rudolf might have transplanted organs for money, he had explained that especially for a heart transplantation, this would be as good as impossible because of the incompatibility of the blood types. “You can’t simply transplant a heart into any recipient; the blood types have to match. A to A, B to B, and so forth. The one exception is blood type O. A donor heart having this blood type will match with any donor.”

“Correct.” Karoline Albrecht nodded. “Blood type O was the death sentence for Kirsten Stadler. With the tacit consent of the head of intensive medicine, at the behest of my father all life-support measures were shut off. An hour later, her brain was irreversibly damaged due to lack of oxygen.”

“How do you know this?” Bodenstein asked.

“As chance would have it, the head of intensive medicine phoned,” replied Karoline Albrecht. “Dr. Arthur Janning wanted to speak to my father. He and my father used to be good friends, but Kirsten Stadler’s case had turned them against each other. There had already been incidents which he unfortunately chose to ignore, but this case was the last straw.”

“But why did your father take these measures?” Pia asked. “That was murder!”

“What’s one murder compared with the Nobel Prize in Medicine?” Karoline Albrecht snorted. “That’s my father’s cynical worldview. I always admired my father for his skill, but he was acting out of completely different motives than I’d assumed. Maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d let a person die to gain access to a donor organ.”

“Kirsten Stadler had to die so that he could implant her heart into the son of his friend Fritz Gehrke,” said Pia.

“Precisely.” Karoline Albrecht nodded and heaved a great sigh. She seemed to have reached a point far beyond any emotion. There was no other choice but to proceed, no matter how horrible the truth might be. “But there must be an even bigger story behind all this. My father did not help Maximilian Gehrke out of pure friendship, but because he feared that Gehrke’s company, Santex, might opt out of funding his research projects.”

She slapped her hand on one of the files.

“These binders come from Gehrke’s house,” she said. “I don’t know what the documents prove, or whether they prove anything at all. There are protocols, documentation of transplantations, patient documents, and the complete correspondence between my father, Dr. Furtwängler, and Fritz Gehrke.”

“What did Furtwängler have to do with your father?” Pia asked.

“He was the hematologist.” Karoline Albrecht shrugged. “His specialty was human blood. He and my father had done research together in Cologne. Exactly what sort of research, I don’t know.”

Bodenstein cleared his throat.

“And why do you think that your father killed Gehrke? Why now, after so many years?”

“After I told Gehrke about the sniper’s motives by showing him the obituary, he must have gotten on the phone. Dr. Janning told me that he spoke with him in great detail on Saturday afternoon and confessed to him everything that had been weighing on his soul for years. After that, Gehrke must have been beside himself, so he called my father.” Karoline Albrecht pointed to her smartphone. “That’s my father’s secret cell phone, which I found in his safe. Gehrke called my father at around eight
P.M
. on Saturday evening.”

“He drove over to his house, knocked him out with chloroform, and injected him with an overdose of insulin,” Pia spun the thread further. “Then he searched through all the documents, burned most of them, and took these binders home with him. It was supposed to look as if Gehrke, in desperation, had wiped the slate clean and then committed suicide.”

“And he almost succeeded,” said Karoline Albrecht, her voice breaking as she stood up. She went to the window and looked out into the garden. “Sheer ambition drove my father to walk over dead bodies. Even the body of my mother.”

She folded her arms, choking back sobs, but otherwise keeping her emotions under iron control.

“For what he did to my mother, my daughter, and me, he deserves to go to Hell,” she blurted out. “All the suffering he caused is not balanced out by the good he undoubtedly did. And the more I learn about his intentions, the clearer it is to me that he never viewed the patients as individuals. He saw only the opportunities their deaths presented for himself. His empathy was never genuine. All he ever cared about was recognition, fame, and honor. I hope he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Her face and her bearing hinted at the powerful emotions she had managed to suppress with an admirable amount of self-control. Rage, pain, disappointment, grief.

“If we can pin Gehrke’s murder on your father, then he will sit in prison for a very long time,” said Bodenstein. “But so far, we have only circumstantial evidence, which a clever lawyer could easily tear to pieces.”

Karoline Albrecht went back to the table, opened her leather-bound Day-Timer, and took a note out of it.

“I know that I should have left this to you, but I … I’ve had someone investigate a couple of things,” she said quietly. “This is the address of a witness who saw my father coming out of Gehrke’s house at 12:35
A.M
. on Sunday morning. One of Gehrke’s neighbors who had let his dog out late in his backyard. He gave a good description of my father. Along with the documents and the clothes that smell like smoke, you should have enough evidence.”

*   *   *

“What did Rudolf do?” Pia puzzled when they were back in the car and Bodenstein had started the engine. “In his research, was he trying to overcome the restrictions of blood type?”

“Sounds a lot like Dr. Frankenstein.” Bodenstein was skeptical.