‘Frau Blüm?’ Fabel’s call was answered by silence. He scanned what he could see of the apartment. Next to the door was a chair and an occasional table. An expensive-looking woman’s coat was thrown carelessly onto the chair and an Italian leather handbag had been discarded on the table. Fabel’s grip eased on his Walther. He knew there was no one in the apartment. No one alive, at any rate.
The walls of the entrance hallway were a very pale blue and punctuated with large, original canvases: abstract studies in deep, tonal violets and reds that smouldered against the coolness of the walls.
As Fabel made his way down the hall he glanced to the left through the open, glazed double doors that led into the large living area. The room was empty. Again a tasteful coolness set the background for expensive furnishings and the occasional original work of art. In his quick survey of the room, Fabel thought he saw the stretched lines of a Giacometti sculpture. A small one, but it looked like an original. He walked on. To the right the bathroom. Empty. Next right the bedroom. Empty. The last door in the hall was closed and when he swung it open the room was in darkness. He reached in and slid a hand down the wall next to the door until he found the switch. The room flooded with light from a series of angled wall lights.
Horror.
Fabel couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been prepared for it. He had known she would be lying, dead, inside the apartment, and instinct had told him, when he saw this door closed and this room in darkness, that this is where she would be. But he still felt as if a truck had slammed into him.
‘Oh Jesus …’ It was as if the breath had been sucked out of Fabel’s chest. Nausea surged upwards. ‘Sweet Jesus …’
The room had been intended as a bedroom but had been redesigned as an office. There was shelving, stacked with books and files, on three of the walls. The fourth wall accommodated the window that ran almost the full length of the room and which was now concealed by closed vertical blinds. A wide beech desk with a laptop computer faced the window. As with the rest of the apartment the decor was restrained, tasteful and elegant.
In the centre of the room was an explosion of flesh, blood and bone. A woman’s body. Face down. The back had been sliced open by slashes that ran parallel to the spine. The ribs had been prised apart, exposing the raw interior of the abdomen, and the lungs excavated and thrown outwards.
She was naked apart from a pair of towelling slippers with corded soles. A towelling bathrobe, which matched the slippers, had been thrown into one corner of the room. Other than these items there were no clothes in the room.
Fabel noticed that as well as the devastation to the torso, there was a large plume of blood, issuing from the head, that spread across the pine flooring. The back of her skull was a matted mass of blood and auburn hair.
‘Oh fuck …’ Werner was now beside Fabel and spoke between nausea-suppressing gasps. ‘Oh fuck.’
Maria and Anna Wolff entered too. Anna suppressed a gagging sound and ran back along the hall. Fabel could hear her vomiting into the toilet bowl in Blüm’s bathroom. The Tatort scene-of-crime team would love that: contamination of a primary scene in a murder. Fabel couldn’t blame tough little Anna, though. He himself had to close his eyes for a moment and tried to wipe the image from his retina until he regained his composure. The thought of whether Anna was finished in the toilet flashed through his mind. He took a long, slow breath. He did not move closer to the body, again mindful of the need to preserve the primary locus, and when others started to crowd the doorway he ordered them back and out of the apartment.
Within an hour, the entire building was thronging with people. Fabel had asked the Uhlenhorst Polizeikommissar to order up more uniforms to carry out door-to-door enquiries. The Tatort team had arrived, headed up by Holger Brauner, along with Dr Möller, the pathologist. Fabel knew Brauner from previous investigations and regarded him highly. The only problem was that that arrogant asshole Möller always seemed to feel he was in competition with Brauner. The truth was, much as Fabel hated to admit it, that Möller was also an excellent pathologist and had a scalpel-sharp mind.
Fabel had secured the scene of crime and handed it over to the Tatort team. The protocol was that Brauner examined the scene first, without the body being disturbed, and only once he and his team were finished could Möller move in to do his examination. As a result Möller stood at the threshold of the apartment, fuming. For Fabel, it was the only high spot in the day.
Brauner emerged eventually. Ignoring Möller, he asked Fabel to come back inside. ‘There’s something you should see before we bag it for examination back at the lab.’
Brauner led him into the murder scene. Fabel had to pass the body, squeezing past two overalled Tatort scene-of-crime technicians. The team’s photographer was packing up his equipment and it was a tight squeeze in the room. Brauner led Fabel over to the desk and indicated the laptop computer. There was a recently sent e-mail open on the screen. It was the one the Präsidium had received just after eleven p.m. and which had led them here. Not only had the killer sent it from Angelika Blüm’s own computer, he had left it open and waiting for them to arrive.
‘The bastard!’ Fabel felt a black fury surge up from somewhere deep inside. He always prided himself on keeping calm, staying in control, but this guy had burrowed so far under his skin that all his usual defences had been totally overwhelmed. ‘The bastard’s taunting us. This is what he wanted, this is the precise scene he had in his head … me in this room with her body reading this fucking e-mail for the second time!’ Fabel turned to Brauner. ‘So he was here about eleven?’
‘Not necessarily. The e-mail was on a timed send. But there’s more.’ Brauner, carefully using a single latex-gloved finger, selected ‘hide application’ and the laptop’s desktop was exposed. Brauner clicked on a sequence of folders. They were all empty.
‘This is weird,’ said Brauner. ‘What kind of serial killer goes in and wipes all his victim’s computer records?’
‘Can I take the laptop in and let Technical Section have a look at it?’
‘No, not yet. We’ve dusted for prints but I want to open this up. Computer keyboards are as much cracks as buttons … all kinds of stuff gets trapped under the keys. With a bit of luck we might get a hair or some epithelials from our killer.’
‘I doubt it very much,’ said Fabel, dispiritedly. ‘This guy doesn’t make mistakes. Despite the messiness of the method of killing, it’s almost as if he kills in a forensic cleanroom. He leaves nothing of himself behind.’
‘It’s still worth a try,’ said Brauner, trying, but failing, to sound encouraging. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky.’
‘I doubt it. Can I tell Möller he can come in now?’
Brauner smiled. ‘I suppose so.’
On the way out to the corridor, Fabel checked on Anna Wolff, who was looking yellow-pale under her spiky black hair and the trademark mascara and flame-red lipstick.
‘I’m okay,
Chef
… Sorry. It just got to me this time …’
Fabel smiled reassuringly, ‘There’s no need to apologise, Anna, it happens to us all. Anyway, your penance will be bad enough: Brauner and the Tatort team are never going to let you live it down.’
Werner tapped Fabel on the shoulder. ‘You’re not going to believe this, Jan … we’ve got a time of arrival and a witness.’
‘Do we have a description?’
‘Not a great one, but yes we do.’
Fabel made an impatient face.
‘There’s a girl who lives on the floor below,’ Werner continued. ‘She’s about thirty and works for an advertising agency or something equally worthwhile and meaningful. Anyway, she’s got this new boyfriend. They had been to a health club for a workout and got back here before nine p.m. I get the impression the boyfriend was planning on another workout with her, the horizontal kind, but he’s not been around long enough to have been invited up. Anyway, he parked across the street about eight-thirty. They were sitting in his car with the engine off – he was obviously doing his best to persuade her to let him come up. It was then that they saw this guy arrive on foot. They didn’t notice a car, so if he had one he must have parked it some way away. They paid attention to this guy because, just before he pressed the entry button for one of the apartments, he made sure he had a good long look up and down the street. She said he even checked out the lobby through the glass doors.’
‘So she got a good look at him?’
‘As good as it could be at that distance.’ Werner flipped open his notebook to check his notes. ‘Tall and well built. She made a point about him having broad shoulders. He didn’t look out of place in this neighbourhood and was well dressed in a dark grey suit.’
Not my short, squat Slav with the green eyes, thought Fabel.
‘His hair was blond and cut fairly short,’ Werner continued. ‘But here’s the thing … she says he was carrying a pale grey raincoat that was draped over a large sports bag.’
‘The tools of his trade,’ said Fabel in a low, bitter voice.
‘The girl says she’s never seen him before tonight and the caretaker had only one suggestion for a possible tenant, but the girl knows that guy by sight and swears it wasn’t him. Anyway, the girl saw our man pressing one of the apartment buttons, so he’s unlikely to be one of the occupiers. We’ve still got a few apartments to check out, some of which are empty, but so far everyone denies having received a visitor fitting the description.’
‘Did anyone see him leave?’
‘No. And no one heard any sounds of a struggle or cries for help. It’s a pretty robust building, but you would have thought someone would have heard something.’
‘Don’t let the mess in there fool you, Werner. This guy is cool and has everything worked out to the last letter. We’ll wait for the full autopsy, but from the state of the back of her head, I reckon she was dead or close to it before she hit the floor. The bastard obviously introduces himself as a policeman, probably me, and lets her lead the way. While she’s got her back to him, wham – he’s smashed the back of her skull in. That leaves him all the time in the world to unpack his little kit and set to work.’
Werner stroked the bristle on his scalp. ‘This guy’s scary, Jan. He never seems to slip up. Except tonight he did. He didn’t check the street well enough. But other than a brief sighting from a distance, he’s left us nothing.’
‘We’ll see what Brauner and Möller have to say.’ Fabel slapped an encouraging hand on Werner’s meaty shoulders. ‘Maybe this has been his off-day.’
Back in the apartment, Fabel found Möller, the pathologist, was still standing beside the body, writing notes onto a clipboard. He turned to the two overalled Tatort technicians.
‘If the photographer’s through, you can take the body back to the morgue.’ As he spoke, Möller noticed Fabel and nodded. His usual brusque manner seemed to have left him and there was an almost doleful look in his eyes. This guy’s beginning to get to everybody, thought Fabel.
‘I don’t suppose you need my professional opinion to tell you that this is the same modus as the last two.’
‘No,’ said Fabel. ‘He sent me an e-mail from that computer over there.’
Möller shook his head. ‘Anyway, for the record, I’ll tell you that there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the same person or persons. Obviously I’ll give you a full report once I’ve done a complete autopsy. Take a look at this …’ The pathologist bent down and pointed with his ballpoint pen to the edge of where the flesh had been sliced and the ribs pulled back. Fabel bent closer to look. It was like something from a butcher’s shop. Focus, he kept telling himself, focus, don’t look at the person, look at the detail. Concentrate. But he still had to fight back the nausea.
‘See where our chum has made a bit of a mistake?’ With his pen Möller followed the line of a deep serration that ran off at an angle from the main slash. ‘You can see the shape of the blade. It’s a broad blade of a heavy gauge: more like a short sword or a very heavy hunting knife. I’ll get some shots of it during the autopsy.’
Fabel breathed in slowly before speaking. ‘Is that the only deviation from the main cuts?’
Möller scratched his grizzled beard. ‘Yes … That’s the thing. This has been no frenzied attack. He took his time.’ He pointed to the back of the head of Angelika Blüm’s body. ‘Again the fatal or near-fatal trauma to the back of the skull; again with a very heavy instrument with some kind of ball-shaped impact; and again the dissections to access the lungs and achieve this … well, trademark, I suppose.’
‘A hell of a trademark,’ said Fabel.
Möller didn’t reply immediately. He had been squatting down and now stood up with a groan. He gazed down at the body; it was as if he wasn’t seeing it, but looking beyond it. ‘This man’s physical strength must be considerable to say the least. Surgically, opening a body usually needs a sternal saw and mechanical rib-spreaders. This man slashes at his victims with amazing precision and then prises their ribs apart. He is very strong indeed.’
Maria entered the room and beckoned to Fabel. ‘
Chef
?’
He followed her into the living area. Holger Brauner was in the room with his team. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Fabel, indicating the coffee table with his gloved hand. ‘What do you see?’
Fabel stared at a large rectangle of pale wood. It looked solid and expensive. He shrugged. ‘Apart from a coffee table, nothing.’