1636 The Devil's Opera (Ring of Fire) (65 page)

“Right. You stay right here, then. Don’t leave, but don’t come in the room, either.”

Karl turned toward the office doorway. He said over his shoulder, “I assume you’re coming with me, Mayor?”

“You assumed right,” was the response.

* * *

“He did what?”

Byron sounded stunned. Gotthilf didn’t blame him. He was shocked himself.

“According to the report, Schmidt blew his brains out with a pistol right before the mayor and Honister arrived for their meeting.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I wish I were. Karl sent for the photographer and for some help.”

Byron picked up his hat.

“Come on. We’ll go chip in.”

* * *

Karl Honister watched from the door as the photographer took pictures of everything in the office.

“I want close-ups of the head and body,” he called out. The photographer waved a hand in acknowledgment and murmured something to his assistant.

There was no question that Master Schmidt was dead. Bullet holes in the temple were usually a good indication that life was gone. Schmidt’s head had lolled back against the back of his chair, so that his vacant eyes stared toward the ceiling. His right arm hung over the side of the chair, with what looked to be a .32 revolver, similar to the one that Karl carried, lying on the floor below his fingers.

He looked around to see Lieutenant Chieske and Sergeant Hoch push through the crowd in the hallway and pass by the patrolman guarding the door. In a moment, they were standing by him looking into the inner office.

“Messy,” Chieske said.

“Yah,” Karl responded.

“So what happened?”

Karl beckoned to a man sitting in the corner of the outer office.

“Who is he?” Hoch asked.

“This,” Karl said as the man approached, “is Stephan Burckardt, personal secretary to Master Schmidt. He was here when it happened. Tell it again, Herr Burckardt.”

“I was working at my desk,” Burckardt said, pointing to a small desk to one side of the room. “The master had dictated several letters earlier, and I was writing them out for his signature. I heard the noise. I knocked on his door…”

“The door into his office was closed?” Hoch interrupted.

“Yah.”

“Was that unusual in any way?”

“No.” Burckardt shook his head. “The master often closed his door when he wanted to concentrate on something. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Okay, you knocked on his door. Did you get an answer?”

“Uh, no.”

What then?”

“I, uh, I knocked again.”

“Did you say anything?” Chieske asked.

“I think I said, ‘Master Schmidt, are you all right?’”

“Then what happened?” Hoch again.

“I opened the door, and saw…” Burckardt swallowed hard, and waved a hand at the doorway.

“Did you go in? Did you touch anything?”

This time from Chieske. Karl saw that his two fellow detectives were alternating questions, not giving the secretary much time to think.

“Yah.” Burckardt swallowed again. “I, uh, I touched his neck, I think.”

“And after that?”

“I, uh, I was still in there when the mayor and he,” he pointed to Honister, “arrived.”

“The blood drops were still fresh when we walked in,” Karl added. “It had to have happened just a few minutes before we got here. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the shot.”

“But you didn’t hear it?” Gotthilf asked.

“No.”

“And neither did I,” Otto Gericke spoke from behind them. They turned toward him.

“I was just upstairs tending to my sister. She’s now a widow, and she is not taking this well. But her pastor, Dr. de Spaignart, has arrived, so I have left her in his care.”

Karl noticed a certain air about the mayor, what you might call a
he’s welcome to her
attitude, which for a moment seemed odd. But then, thinking of his own sister, perhaps he could understand.

“So this happened before you could talk to Herr Schmidt?” Byron asked.

“Yah.” Karl knew he sounded bitter. He had reason to. His whole case had just been shut down.

“Get lots of pictures, get the body to Doc Schlegel, and grab all the papers you can find.” Byron again. “Maybe you can still figure something out.”

“Right.”

The other two detectives left. So did the mayor. Karl was left to watch the photographers and wait for the medical examiner. He ignored the men in the hallway who were still looking in and talking not-so-quietly.

He pulled a search warrant from his pocket, looked over at the secretary.

“You have boxes here?”

“I think so.”

“Go find them. All the files and papers in this office are going to the
Polizei
station.”

* * *

Standing in the shadow of the
Heilige-Geist
Church, Gotthilf stared at where Dr. Schlegel was doing a preliminary examination of yet another corpse. Beside him, Byron was muttering one curse after another under his breath.

Gotthilf elbowed his partner. “Stop it. We don’t even know that that’s our guy.”

Byron snorted. “A one-eyed guy turns up shot to death in a back street of the old city. After everything that’s been going on, I somehow doubt that this is just some random guy who lost an eye somewhere somewhen. There can’t be that many one-eyed men around Magdeburg right this minute.”

After a moment of consideration, Gotthilf gave a reluctant nod of agreement.

“Nathaniel,” Byron called over to the police photographer who had finished packing up his equipment, “I need copies as soon as you can get them.”

The photographer touched the brim of his hat, and headed off, followed by his assistant.

Dr. Schlegel stood and wiped his hands on a towel. “Dead since before midnight,” he said, forestalling the detectives’ first question. “Probable cause of death, bullet wound to the head. I’ll examine the body in detail as soon as we get it back to the morgue, but the blood evidence indicates the bullet wound was not post-mortem, so I doubt I’ll find anything else. Assuming I don’t, you’ll have a report later today.”

“Okay, thanks, Doc,” Byron said.

The two detectives stood and watched the medical examiner’s assistants load the corpse on a stretcher and place it in a wagon. Even after the wagon had been gone for some time, Byron continued to stand, staring at the blood that had pooled on the paving stones.

“We’re missing something,” the up-timer finally said. “With all that has happened, there’s something we haven’t picked up.”

* * *

The two detectives arrived back at the police station just as Karl Honister lugged the last box of files from Schmidt’s office to his desk. He set it down with a sigh.

“That’s all Schmidt’s stuff?” Byron asked.

“Yah.”

“Well, drag it all into the conference room. We’ll bring our files. There’s at least one piece of the puzzle missing, maybe more, and the three of us are going to go over all this stuff until we find it.”

Karl gave a long-suffering sigh, picked up the box he had just set down, and headed for the conference room.

* * *

The three detectives spent over thirty-six hours in that conference room. They reviewed every piece of paper they had. They compared notes. They talked. They argued. They shouted. They drew charts and circles and arrows on big pieces of paper. They drank—reluctantly—gallons of horrible station house coffee. They sent Peltzer out with a photo of the one-eyed man to have Demetrious confirm that he was the man the informer had been tailing.

Bill Reilly peered in on them every hour or so during the day, shook his head, and withdrew without saying anything.

They were dazed, not even sure what day it was, when it happened.

* * *

Gotthilf stared at the cold dregs of coffee in his cup. He sniffed it and shuddered, his acid-stoked stomach rebelling at the thought of pouring more of that noxious stuff into it.

“This stuff is even worse than Grade Four,” he muttered. He walked over to a window, popped it open, and tossed the dregs out right into a sudden gust of breeze, which carried the dark droplets back into the room. Many of the droplets landed on the hand holding the cup.

Gotthilf stood there, blinking, staring at his spotted hand. A thought wormed its way to the front of his mind, slowly, effortfully. When it arrived, he dropped the cup and turned back to the conference table, where he pawed through the piles of papers and files until he found what he wanted. He looked at the photograph, then at his hand, then back at the photograph, then back at his hand.

This cycle went on until Byron asked, “What are you thinking, partner?”

Gotthilf focused on the photograph. “Schmidt didn’t kill himself.”

It took a moment for that to register, then Byron straightened from his slouched position, and Honister raised his head from where it had been pillowed on his arms.

“What?” Byron again.

“Schmidt didn’t kill himself.”

“How do you know that?” Honister husked, trying to clear his throat.

Gotthilf looked at the other sergeant. “Was Schmidt right-handed?”

Honister looked in his notebook. “Yah.”

Gotthilf turned the photograph around.

“There’s no blood spatter on his hand.”

“There was blood spatter on the gun,” Byron said, looking for and holding up the report about that.

Gotthilf pointed to the photograph of the hand dangling just above the gun at the crime scene. “No blood on the hand. Blood on the gun but not on the hand means…”

“He wasn’t holding the gun!” the three of them chorused.

“So he was murdered,” Honister said. “How do we find the killer?”

“Who benefits from it?” Byron said. “And to find that…”

“Follow the money,” they chorused again, and dug into the papers before them with a new will.

Chapter 72

Gotthilf looked around the room. It looked like everyone was there. The last few days had been hectic; frenetic, even. But today’s meeting would provide closure to the events of the last few months, he thought.

He looked around at the room itself. They were in a lecture room at the hospital; appropriate enough, since the hospital expansion project seemed to have been the trigger for much of what had occurred since January. It amounted to neutral territory: not the mayor’s office, or the police station.

It was a bit sterile, though. Four bare walls, hardwood floors, big windows admitting light from the south. No decorations. Given that the room had to be able to be scrubbed down to up-time hospital standards, its utilitarian décor was understandable.

Facing him were several people—the interested parties, one might say.

Mayor Gericke was at one end of the arc of chairs. Beside him was a woman he had introduced as Frau Sophie Gericke verw. Schmidt. By the name everyone knew that she was his sister, the new widow of Georg Schmidt.

Gotthilf had heard that Frau Sophie had two young daughters at home. He was saddened at the thought that they no longer had a father; but the thought of the kind of man Herr Schmidt had proven himself to be tempered the sadness.

On the widow’s other side was Stephan Burckardt, Schmidt’s secretary.

The next group in the arc was Marla Linder and her husband, Franz Sylwester.

Next to Franz sat Gunther Bauer, the new project manager of the hospital expansion project, and beside him was Herr Schiffer himself.

There was no one alive in Magdeburg who had a legitimate connection to Herr Schardius who could represent his interests. He, of course, was dead, his wife had died before the sack, and he had no children. More distant relatives were too far from Magdeburg to attend this meeting, so Mayor Gericke had appointed Jacob Lentke to stand in for Schardius’ estate. He had his gouty foot propped up on a stool and his cane resting over his lap.

Facing that arc was a trio of
Polizei
behind a short table: Gotthilf on the left, Byron in the middle, and Karl Honister on the right.

Albrecht, Mayor Gericke’s secretary, entered the room from the door behind the interested parties, stepped around to whisper in Byron’s ear, then took a seat behind the mayor and picked up a notebook. He had been deputed by the mayor to take notes to document the meeting.

Byron looked to Mayor Gericke, and nodded. The mayor nodded back, and Byron looked first to Honister, then to Gotthilf.

Gotthilf felt his stomach muscles tighten, and he leaned forward just a bit. This was the end of the hunt, and he was ready.

“Thank you for coming today,” Byron began. “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Lieutenant Byron Chieske of the Magdeburg
Polizei.
This is my partner, Sergeant Gotthilf Hoch.” He gestured toward Gotthilf. Gotthilf nodded, and Byron concluded the introductions with, “And this is our associate, Sergeant Karl Honister.” Another gesture, this time toward Karl, who also nodded in response.

“You are all here, because you have all been touched in some way by events that occurred here in Magdeburg in the last few months; events which are connected in some way with either the late Herr Georg Schmidt, or the late Herr Andreas Schardius, or both.” Byron stopped at that point and looked to his partner.

Gotthilf let the pause extend a moment longer, making sure that everyone facing him felt a bit of tension as they waited for him to begin. “It all began,” he at length began, “when the contract for the hospital expansion project was awarded back in January to a consortium headed by Herr Georg Kühlewein and Herr Johann Westvol. There was another consortium competing for the project, of which Herr Georg Schmidt was a member. And it appears that Herr Schmidt did not take losing the contract with good grace. We don’t know—yet—how he made contact with them, but the information we have been able to develop leads us to believe that he hired two Italian criminals to come to Magdeburg to disrupt the hospital project with a view toward driving the consortium into either abandoning the project or into bankruptcy.”

Otto Gericke’s lips thinned, but he said nothing. Frau Gericke looked down at the clasped hands in her lap, but said nothing.

Herr Schiffer harrumphed. “Can I look to Herr Schmidt’s estate, then, to recover damages?”