I Am Your Judge: A Novel (58 page)

“But it’s plausible. Why else would he have worked with a hematology expert like Furtwängler? Helen Stadler could have stumbled across what he was doing. The keywords she jotted down all fit the topic.”

“And Burmeister and Hausmann are doctors who had an interest in keeping the UCF current with the latest in medical research,” Bodenstein said. “It would elevate the reputation of their clinic incredibly and also bring in cash. But then Rudolf became unsustainable and he had to leave the UCF. The trigger may have been the Kirsten Stadler case.”

“And this Dr. Janning, who was friends with Rudolf earlier, had gotten everything off his chest when he visited Gehrke’s house and told him the truth,” said Pia. “But Janning is still on Helen’s hit list, and most probably on the sniper’s as well. Why?”

“Because in her eyes, he was partly to blame for her mother’s death,” said Bodenstein.

“I’m going to phone Hausmann and Janning right now.” From her backpack, Pia dug out the piece of paper on which she’d written their numbers.

“Be careful,” Bodenstein warned her. “We still don’t know enough to confront them with Rudolf’s story. If they are coconspirators, they’re also accessories and might destroy evidence.”

“They did that long ago,” Pia countered.

She chose Professor Hausmann’s cell number first. He answered and frankly admitted he’d been alerted that Pia might call. That wasn’t good, but she had expected as much. Pia explained why she was calling.

“Why did Professor Rudolf leave the UCF? What really happened?” she demanded to know.

“Just a moment, please.”

She heard footsteps; then a door closed in the background.

“We were always having trouble with him,” said the professor in a pleasantly deep voice. “Rudolf had a dictatorial management style that no longer fit in a modern clinic. There were ever-increasing protests from the doctors and nurses. Finally, I had no choice but to ask for his resignation and cancellation of his employment contract. It was the only way to obtain peace and quiet in the administration of the hospital.”

“So that was the reason?” Pia insisted. “Not the Kirsten Stadler case in the fall of 2002?”

Hausmann hesitated for a fraction of a second.

“That case certainly escalated the strained mood,” he said, elegantly extricating himself. “A young doctor from Rudolf’s team had complained to the hospital administration and the Federal Association of Physicians after he had criticized Rudolf’s decisions and was subsequently warned off.”

“What did the complaint involve?”

“I don’t recall the details. It was probably mainly a matter of personality conflicts. Rudolf was a difficult character, and self-confident young doctors did not have an easy time with him.”

Pia was sure the first two sentences were lies.

“What did Helen Stadler want from you when she visited you last August?” she asked.

“Who visited me?”

“Kirsten Stadler’s daughter. According to our information, she spoke with you a few months ago.”

Again a tiny pause.

“Ah yes. The young lady. Right now I don’t recall.”

Pia didn’t believe him for a second. “I assume she tried to blackmail you, because she had obtained internal details from Dr. Hartig that you would have preferred to keep confidential. But that is of no interest to us. I’m sure you’ve seen in the media that in the past fourteen days, five individuals have been shot to death. We have now determined the motive of the perpetrator. All the victims had some connection to the Kirsten Stadler case via relatives. That puts you in a key position, because three of the five victims had some connection to the UCF. You need to cut short your vacation ASAP and talk to your secretary. If she had notified you a few days ago, when we first tried to reach you, we might have been able to prevent two of the murders.”

“What should I do?” asked the professor, and he suddenly sounded extremely anxious.

“Make public the facts surrounding the death of Mrs. Stadler before the press does. The news will reach the sniper, and perhaps no more people will have to die.”

“But that … that isn’t something I can simply do,” replied Hausmann.

“Why not? Whom are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” the professor argued. “But I’m only an employee of a hospital belonging to a foreign corporation that does not particularly like negative headlines.”

“There will be negative headlines anyway,” said Pia. “I can only advise you to come back and do some damage control.”

“Yes, I … suppose … I can…,” stammered the administrative director of the UCF.

“Oh, and Professor,” Pia said, pretending that she had just remembered something else. “The sniper has not yet been caught. If you have loved ones who mean something to you, you really ought to warn them.”

With that, she hung up. Then she tapped in the cell number of Dr. Arthur Janning. He answered on the fifth ring. She also asked him what Helen Stadler had wanted to discuss, and like Hausmann, he beat around the bush.

“Your name has come up in connection with the death of Kirsten Stadler ten years ago,” said Pia, and enumerated once more the victims of the sniper. “Someone in your family or you yourself could be next. Are you completely indifferent to the danger?”

“No, of course not,” Janning replied uncertainly.

“Professor Hausmann told me what Rudolf did at the UCF back then, and why he had to go. The case has broken wide open, and the media are going to jump on it. Why won’t you help us?”

“Hausmann did what?” Janning began in a surprised voice. “What do you expect? What am I supposed to do?”

“Wrong question. You should be asking: Why is my name in Helen Stadler’s notebook? Why don’t you tell me what she wanted from you? What did you do or neglect to do in 2002?”

No reply.

“We’re going to find out, whether you cooperate or not,” said Pia. “We can only protect you from the murderer who has your name on his list if you work with us.”

“What kind of list?”

This time Pia didn’t reply.

“Where are you right now?” she asked instead.

“In Cortina d’Ampezzo,” replied Janning. “With my family. But we’re coming home tomorrow.”

“Check in with us when you arrive. You’ll be given police protection.”

She hung up and at the same moment her phone rang.

“We found Wolfgang Mieger’s car,” Kai Ostermann told her. “It was in the parking lot at the Main-Taunus Center, the key still in the ignition. I informed the evidence team and they’ll bring it to the crime lab.”

“Very good.” Bodenstein nodded. “Anything else?”

“Yep.” Kai’s voice sounded tense. “Unfortunately, nothing good. I got hold of Vivien Stern and learned something about Dirk Stadler that you’re not going to be happy about.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in Bodenstein’s office.

“Vivien Stern was actually a close friend of Helen Stadler’s. They’d known each other ever since the fifth grade.” Kai consulted his notes. “In the summertime, they often went to a weekend cabin somewhere in the Taunus hills that belonged to a friend of her father’s. A man who was ill.”

“Wolfgang Mieger?” asked Pia.

“I have to assume so.” Kai nodded. “Like Stadler, Mieger came from East Germany. He got out just before the Wall was built. They didn’t know each other, but since they worked at the same company, they eventually got to be friends. Ms. Stern told me that Stadler had been in a frogman brigade in the East German People’s Army and had fled across the border by swimming forty kilometers across the Baltic Sea to the island of Fehmarn in West Germany. I checked it out and learned that Stadler had won several medals. For three years in a row, he was the best sharpshooter in the People’s Army.”

For a moment, you could hear a pin drop.

“I don’t believe it,” Bodenstein muttered.

“After that,” Kai went on, “I thought I’d look into why Stadler has a handicapped ID. We assumed he had difficulty walking, but that’s not true. He has a handicapped ID because of mental problems. Neither his family doctor nor the Frankfurt city doctor had heard about him having difficulty walking.”

“He played us for fools!” said Pia in surprise.

“He wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t been in the German Federal Army.” Bodenstein shook his head. “He was in the East German Army. Damn it! Why didn’t I think of that when Neff said he came from Rostock?”

“By the way, he doesn’t have a sister in Southern Bavaria,” Kai added. “In all of Kempten, there’s nobody with that surname. And the people who have the same telephone prefix have never heard of a Helga Stadler.”

Bodenstein was just as surprised as Pia.

“Neff has it coming,” he grumbled, grabbed the phone, and dialed the number of Erik Stadler’s company. But when he answered, Bodenstein hung up.

“What was that about?” asked Pia.

“I had an inspiration,” replied Bodenstein, placing a call instead to the officer who was watching Dirk Stadler’s house in Liederbach.

“Nothing happening,” said one of the officers. “A little after eight the blinds rolled up, that was all.”

“Okay,” said Bodenstein, who had a bad feeling. “I’d like the two of you to go up to the house and ring the doorbell. Then phone me back.”

As they waited for the callback, Pia tried once more to reach Dr. Burmeister, but his phone was now turned off. Bodenstein’s cell rang. The two officers had rung Stadler’s bell several times, but no one came to the door. These geniuses had just now discovered that someone could easily slip from the backyard into the neighbor’s yard without being seen from the front.

“Check the garage and talk to the neighbors,” Bodenstein ordered in a voice he was controlling with an effort. “And I want a callback at once, got it?”

He hung up, puffed up his cheeks, and exhaled slowly.

“The bird has flown the coop,” he said soberly. “Kai, please send out an APB for Dirk Stadler and his vehicle.”

“Will do.” Kai got up and left Bodenstein’s office.

“He brazenly lied to us about his fictitious sister in Southern Bavaria.”

Pia still couldn’t believe that she’d been taken in so easily. “He was so … so believable.”

“You can say that again. He was absolutely certain that we didn’t suspect him. And he needed only two more days, namely until this morning. He needed to wait for Burmeister to come back from vacation. Remember how he jotted down that phone number?”

“Yes, why?”

“He wore gloves to do it.”

Pia thought back.

“You’re right,” she recalled. “He was just about to load his luggage into the car, and it was cold. But he could have taken off his gloves in the house.”

“And he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to leave fingerprints or DNA on the piece of paper.”

“But we could have found that anywhere in his house.” Pia frowned in thought.

“As I said, he was stalling for time,” said Bodenstein. “He knew that he had left traces at one of the murder sites, and that sooner or later, we would find Mieger’s car, which he no doubt had used. But as long as we had no match for the prints, we would first have to decide he was a suspect and then get a search warrant for his house. And maybe he thought his prints might be in a database somewhere.”

“We did a routine computer search on him, and nothing turned up. Except for a couple of incidents in Flensburg, Dirk Stadler is a totally blank page, never in trouble with the law.” Pia shook her head. “So he made up this sister just to give himself an alibi.”

“Quite possibly.” Bodenstein nodded. “And his son would surely lie to us, too, or warn him. That’s why I broke the connection before he could pick up.”

The phone rang again. The officers had asked a few neighbors, but no one had seen Stadler drive off. Most of them didn’t even know him and had to think hard. His garage at the end of the row of houses was empty.

“You think that Stadler is our man?” Pia asked.

“Yes,” replied Bodenstein with a dark look. “You and your intuition were right from the beginning. He planned the whole thing meticulously, betting that he would be the focus of the investigation. That’s why he was prepared for all the questions.”

“We should have found out much earlier that he no longer works for the Cty of Frankfurt,” Pia remarked.

“But we didn’t.” Bodenstein stood up and went to the door. “He anticipated this risk by believably acting like he was handicapped; he even told me on the phone that he was at the cemetery at the moment. Besides, he made sure we had no time to think things over. Maybe Hartig and Thomsen are in cahoots with him and deliberately steered suspicion onto themselves to gain Stadler some time.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Pia, following him into the hall.

“We inform the commissioner and the team,” said Bodenstein. “Then we have to find this weekend cabin that Helen Stadler’s girlfriend mentioned. And we have to find Burmeister.”

Kai came around the corner, his laptop under his arm. He had heard Bodenstein’s last sentence.

“That’s no longer an issue,” he said excitedly. “This time the sniper sent two simultaneous e-mails to the newspaper. Faber copied them both to me. The first is about Ralf Hesse. The second, you have to see for yourselves.”

*   *   *

Everyone stared mutely at the gruesome photo that Kai had projected onto the big screen in the conference room of the special commission. It showed a dark-haired man in a white T-shirt with a panicky, pain-stricken expression on his face. He was strapped to a table in the OR. His arms and legs were restrained, but his right hand lay on his chest, cleanly severed at the wrist, and the stump of his arm had been expertly bandaged.

“That’s Dr. Burmeister.” Pia had to fight off the rising nausea. A wave of helpless rage rolled over her, and she didn’t know who made her more furious: the sniper or Burmeister, who had so carelessly dismissed her warning.

“They must have caught him at the airport or at the front door of his house,” she surmised.

“‘They’?” Dr. Nicola Engel asked.

“Hartig and Stadler,” Pia replied. “I’ll bet you anything they’re working together. And there’s something else that indicates Hartig has something to do with this.” She pointed to the photo. “He was a surgeon, and a rather good one, before he picked a fight with Rudolf and Burmeister.”