I Am Your Judge: A Novel (6 page)

“It looks great on you,” Karoline said.

Greta smiled radiantly as she looked for the price tag, which was hanging out of one sleeve.

“Oh no!” Her eyes widened in consternation. “I can’t buy this.”

“Why not?”

“It costs a hundred eighty euros!”

“I’ll give you the jacket for Christmas if you like it.”

The girl looked dubious but then turned back to glance in the mirror, torn between reason and desire. Finally the jacket ended up in the shopping bag with three pairs of jeans, a sweater, and a hoodie. Greta was overjoyed, and Karoline was pleased.

When was the last time she’d been downtown shopping five days before Christmas? It must have been twenty years ago, if not longer. Karoline used to love pushing her way through the crowds with her best friend. She loved the kitschy Christmas decorations, the rousing Christmas carols, the vendors’ booths that stood on every corner, and the aroma of roasted candied almonds in the cold December air. When she picked up Greta at the boarding school early in the afternoon to take a walk downtown, she’d been thinking of Goethestrasse, but Greta insisted on going to the shopping malls on the Zeil. For three hours, they had plowed their way through overheated and overcrowded department stores. She felt happy watching her daughter prowl the aisles with shining eyes, looking for Christmas presents for her girlfriends, for Nicki, Papa, and her half sister. Greta also enthusiastically tried on clothes that her mother secretly found largely impossible. To Karoline’s surprise, even the crowded stores were fun, calling up long-forgotten memories from her youth.

Back then, she’d had so much time. Her mother had always been generous and never chided her if she sometimes came home late. How amazing it felt not be under pressure from any sort of deadline. Her smartphone was back in the glove box of the car, and she didn’t even miss it.

At five o’clock, they lugged their loot in a zillion bags to the car, which was parked in an underground garage, to drive back to Oberursel. Baking cookies with Grandma—that was something Greta still loved doing at thirteen.

“Do you really want to stop working?” she asked her mother as Karoline maneuvered the black Porsche out of the parking spot.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Karoline gave her daughter a sidelong glance and saw the doubt in her eyes.

The girl sighed.

“I like it at the boarding school, but it would be much nicer if I could live with you and Papa—during the week, too. But…”

“But what?” Karoline stuck the ticket in the reader, and the gate rose up.

“Papa said that the world would have to end before you would ever stop working,” replied Greta.

*   *   *

Bodenstein and Pia were feeling rather frustrated when they arrived back at the station in Hofheim. A photo of Ingeborg Rohleder hung on the bulletin board in the conference room, and next to it, Ostermann had written her name and the time of the murder. That was all they had. The canvassing of the neighborhood, which some of their colleagues had done, had turned up nothing. The statements of witnesses had been helpful only in pinning down the exact time of the fatal gunshot. No one had seen the shooter. Evidence techs had searched the crime scene meticulously within a radius of 250 meters, but except for the faint impression of the bipod, they had found nothing: no fibers, no shoeprints on the frozen ground, no cartridge casing, no skin scrapings, and no hair. The perp remained a phantom, and his motive a riddle.

“How should we proceed now?” asked Ostermann with a rasping cough.

“Hmm.” Bodenstein studied the map on the wall and rubbed the back of his neck in thought. Where did the perp escape to? Was he audacious enough to get away by crossing the playground and the Rhine highway and walking right past the Eschborn police station? Or did he take the Lahnstrasse, then the footpath to the viewpoint, and get into a car there? Those were undoubtedly the two fastest escape routes, but there were other options as well. Walking to the parking lot near the swimming pool, for instance, or going farther, past the tennis courts to the fairground, which was used for parking by the employees in many of the surrounding businesses. In any of these places, he could have unobtrusively gotten into a car and disappeared down the road.

“We should inform the public and ask for help,” Pia said, and Ostermann nodded in agreement. “We’re probably not going to find any more facts relevant to the crime than what we already have.”

Inwardly, Bodenstein argued against it, because he was afraid of the immense amount of time it would take to handle the usual phone calls from idiots and all the phony leads that would have to be checked out. He really couldn’t afford wasting any time, given the extreme shortage of investigators at his disposal, but there seemed to be no alternative. Pia was right—at the moment, they weren’t expecting to turn up any more facts. Still, there was a slim chance that someone may have seen something that had seemed unimportant at first.

“Okay,” Bodenstein said at last. “We’ll go to the press. And hope for the best.”

*   *   *

The spot was ideal. The fir branches hung low over the flat roof covered with moss, and the road was a dead end. By six in the evening, it was pitch dark. On the right side of the road were only meadows, and her house was the last one, right at the edge of the little wood located between the outskirts of the village and the old state road to Königstein. She had turned on the light in the kitchen ten minutes before and then gone upstairs. The old house had huge, old-fashioned lattice windows and no roll-down shutters, only wooden folding shutters, which seemed to be only for decoration; they probably hadn’t been closed in years. From his perspective, the house looked a lot like a dollhouse. He could see into every window and follow exactly what she was doing. He knew her daily schedule, which hardly ever changed except in the most minor ways. In no more than ten minutes, she would go back to the kitchen and start fixing dinner for herself and her husband.

The temperature had dropped by a few degrees since yesterday. The snowstorm predicted for late evening would be a long time coming. The cold didn’t bother him. He was dressed for it. He glanced at his wristwatch. The digital display jumped to 18:22. At that moment, she entered the kitchen. Through his Kahles ZF69 rifle scope, he could see her as if she were standing right in front of him. She bent down, then turned around and took something out of a cupboard. Her lips moved. Maybe she was listening to music and singing along, as many people do when they’re alone. His index finger was on the trigger. He was breathing deeply in and out, concentrating intently on his target. Then, as she turned in his direction, he squeezed the trigger. In the same second that the bullet crashed through the windowpane and burst her head wide open, he flicked his eyes reflexively to the right and saw a second person in the kitchen. Good God—she wasn’t alone! A shrill scream pierced the air.

“Shit!” he muttered. Adrenaline was pumping through his body, his heart hammering. He hadn’t counted on anyone else being in the house. The woman hadn’t been singing; she was talking to someone! Swiftly, he disassembled the rifle and stowed it in the bag. Then he put the used casing that had been ejected
in
his jacket pocket and crawled to the edge of the roof. Under cover of the tree branches, he slipped down from the roof of the transformer substation and vanished soundlessly in the dark.

*   *   *

The whole project in the kitchen turned into a gigantic mess. Like a spurting fountain, the hot liquid sprayed her face, hands, and arms.

“Damn!”

She looked down at herself and saw that she was covered with orange spots. The pumpkin and carrot juice would be almost impossible to get out of the light gray cashmere of her favorite sweater. Pia swore a blue streak because she’d forgotten to put on an apron before she stuck the immersion blender in the pot and turned it on. The juice had also spattered the Ceran cooking surface on her convection stove top, the floor, and half the kitchen. Normally she wasn’t such a klutz in the kitchen, but she was feeling out of it, and this was the first time she was making pumpkin soup with ginger and coconut milk. The recipe had sounded good and promised to be child’s play, but the pumpkin had almost done her in when she was unable to cut it up as easily as described in the recipe. After she had sawed on the gourd in vain with a meat knife and almost sliced her finger, she marched outside with the obstreperous sphere and without further ado set it on the chopping block next to the shed and quickly split it apart with an axe. She finished dicing up the pumpkin in the kitchen.

“I’ll be a laughingstock if I can’t even make a simple pumpkin soup,” Pia muttered, turning off the blender. Stupidly enough, the recipe page was so covered with orange liquid that she could no longer decipher how much coconut milk to put in the soup.

Outside, a car drove up, and a minute later the front door opened. The dogs greeted Christoph with happy barks.

“Wife at the stove,” he called cheerfully as he came into the kitchen. “That’s the way to start a vacation!”

Pia turned around and smiled. After more than four years, her heart still skipped a beat whenever she saw Christoph.

“I planned to have dinner ready long ago, and surprise you with a delicious soup. The recipe said it was easy and would take only twenty minutes. But it all started going wrong when I had to use brute force to break up the pumpkin into small bits.”

Christoph’s eyes surveyed the kitchen, which Pia had transformed into a battlefield. He tried not to grin, but then he couldn’t help laughing. Ignoring the pumpkin-carrot splatters, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

“Yum,” he said, licking his lips. “Tastes good!”

“It’s only missing the coconut milk. And the coriander.”

“You know what?” Christoph took the blender from her hand. “Let me finish this while you clean up and set the table.”

“I was hoping you’d say that, beloved husband.” Pia smiled, gave him a kiss, and got ready to clear away the chaos she’d created with her cooking experiment.

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting at the table, and the soup actually did taste fantastic. Pia talked nonstop about all sorts of trivia, which was out of character for her, but she was trying to avoid having Christoph ask whether she’d been at work today. She was torn between her desire to spend three weeks with her husband and the awful feeling that she was letting down her boss and colleagues. The dilemma was tormenting her, because normally she was not a person who put off making unpleasant decisions. At first, Christoph went along with her evasive maneuver, but finally he brought up the awkward subject.

“Have you decided yet whether you’re flying with me or staying here?” he asked casually as they were clearing off the table.

“Of course I’m going with you,” she replied. “My bags are all packed.”

“Did you and your colleagues catch the murderer?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Pia shook her head. “There are no clues, no witnesses, no obvious motive. Maybe the woman was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there’s no connection between the victim and the perp.”

“You mean, she was shot at random?”

“It’s possible. That sort of thing is rare, but it does happen.”

“So now what?”

Pia began to fill the dishwasher.

“The boss wants to take the case public in the hope that somebody somewhere might have seen something. So there’s absolutely no reason for me to stay home,” she said, keeping her voice cheerful, though she felt the exact opposite. “It won’t really matter whether I’m here to help them or not.”

*   *   *

“I just came from Wiesbaden,” Dr. Nicola Engel announced as she sat down on one of the visitors’ chairs in front of Bodenstein’s desk. “At the office of the State Criminal Police, I happened to run into the head of Operational Case Analysis. He said it might be possible to send over one of his people, as reinforcement and to lend us another perspective.”

“I see.” Bodenstein took off his reading glasses and looked at his boss expectantly. Nicola never “happened” to run into anyone, and her use of the phrase “might be possible” was only a rhetorical trick to make him feel that she had asked his opinion. In reality, she had undoubtedly already arranged everything without consulting him.

“Andreas Neff is an experienced case analyst,” she went on. “He was in the States for a while and learned the latest profiling methods.”

“I see,” Bodenstein said again. The idea of working with a stranger on this case didn’t exactly please him, but since Pia was leaving on vacation tomorrow and Fachinger was still out sick, he desperately needed some backup.

“What do you mean by ‘I see’?” Nicola Engel asked. “I thought you’d be happy to have some help.”

Bodenstein gazed pensively at his boss, who years earlier had once been his fiancée. A lot had happened since the incidents in the summertime two years ago, which had resulted in her arrest and suspension from the force because of serious accusations made by their longtime colleague Frank Behnke. Behnke claimed that Dr. Engel had ordered him to liquidate an undercover investigator during a raid fifteen years earlier, to stop him from spilling the beans about the connections between some high-ranking personalities and a pedophile ring. The arrest of the leader of the criminal police had created quite a stir, and naturally, the press had jumped all over it.

But Dr. Nicola Engel had not allowed these accusations to stick. She finally revealed to Bodenstein what she until then had resolutely kept secret. In 1997, he was also working in Frankfurt K-11, but he had only peripheral knowledge of the events. Nicola now told him that in reality it wasn’t Frank Behnke, but she herself who had been the victim of a plot that extended into the highest political levels. When she became a danger to the people pulling the strings, they had threatened her and then had her transferred to Würzburg in Bavaria. Knowing that the statute of limitations never expired for murder, Nicola Engel had decided to put the case on the back burner until some later time when she would be able to expose what really happened.