I Am Your Judge: A Novel (30 page)

“I do have some information of interest for you,” Karoline Albrecht heard Faber’s colleague say as the inspector was about to leave. “We’ve learned the identity of an attorney who represented the clinic against the Stadler family back then. His name is Dr. Peter Riegelhoff. Maybe he knows more about what happened.”

Stunned, Karoline gulped for air. That was something she had told Faber earlier in the day, after he assured her that she could speak to him in confidence. What a devious shithead! A bad feeling crept over her. What else had she told that journalist? Had she mentioned any other names? What if that caused problems for the police?

“I hope that you and Mr. Faber do not try to investigate on your own,” the inspector said to the reporter. “That could have fatal consequences. And it’s dangerous. Tell Mr. Faber that he must honor our agreement. Good evening.”

With that, he turned away and strode off.

Karoline watched him go. Should she stop him and tell him that she’d talked to Faber? But what could she say that he didn’t already know? All her information came from Renate Rohleder, who had gotten it from the police. She stepped outside into the fresh air, pulled up the hood of her coat, and watched Bodenstein and his red-haired boss get into a black car.

No. It was way too soon to bother the harried inspector with some vague theory of hers.

*   *   *

Relieved, Pia sat down between Cem and her sister on the sofa. Lydia sat down across from them in an easy chair. In a calm voice, she told them what had happened on September 16, 2002—how she had gotten the desperate phone call from her grandson, Erik, who sobbed that his mama had collapsed and wouldn’t wake up.

“My husband and I drove to Niederhöchstadt at once to pick up the children,” she said. “And then we drove to the hospital where Kirsten was taken. Erik and Helen were completely out of it, Dirk was abroad and couldn’t be reached by telephone. At the hospital, they informed us that Kirsten had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and had been without sufficient oxygen for too long. She was brain-dead. We were completely in shock and couldn’t comprehend what the doctors were saying. Kirsten was in the ICU and looked as if she were asleep. She was on a respirator, but her skin was warm. She was even sweating and … and her digestion was functioning.”

Lydia Winkler paused briefly and swallowed hard. Then she took a deep breath and went on.

“The doctors told us frankly that the hemorrhage had irreparably damaged large parts of her brain stem and the cerebrum. They began to pressure us to make the decision to release her organs for donation. It … it seemed like murder to us to cut her up and let her organs be removed, because she … she seemed so alive.”

The woman’s voice broke again, and she fought back tears. The pain was deep-seated; what had happened was still so present, as if it had occurred only a short time ago. Dirk Stadler had been on the other side of the world and couldn’t be reached, and the Winklers were completely overwhelmed as the doctors at University Clinic Frankfurt pressured them to make a decision. They had never spoken with their daughter about organ donation and didn’t know whether she possessed an organ donor card or had made a provision in her will.

“We begged them to wait for Dirk, but the doctors pressured us even more. They wanted us to feel a moral obligation, telling us about patients who could be helped. They were relentless.” Lydia twirled her reading glasses between her fingers and forced herself to continue her story. To make matters worse, Erik, then seventeen, had overheard a conversation between two doctors and understood that they had given up on saving his mother’s life. The measures taken in intensive care were aimed only at keeping her organs functional.

“The boy went crazy,” Lydia recalled. “He threw a fit, yelling and screaming. We couldn’t calm him down. At some point, they sent us all home. And when my husband and I arrived at the hospital the next morning, we learned that the doctors had taken matters into their own hands. During the night, they had taken out everything from our child that could be taken out, even … even her eyes and bones! She had been literally eviscerated.”

She paused briefly and grimaced. It was clearly proving very hard for her to maintain her composure.

“The way she looked as she lay in the morgue, nothing but an empty shell; it was horrendous. They had sealed up her empty eye sockets,” she said in a trembling voice. “And she looked as though she’d suffered tremendous pain. We had wished a peaceful death for Kirsten, going to sleep surrounded by family after the life-support systems were turned off, but that was not to be.”

Dirk Stadler returned the next day from the Far East, and they presented him with the authorization to remove organs, signed by his father-in-law. Joachim Winkler had protested again and again that he never signed such an authorization, merely a power of attorney for the treatment, because at the time she was admitted, Kirsten Stadler was no longer able to make any decisions for herself.

“But there was his signature in black-and-white,” Lydia continued. “They had deceived us, but in the end, it was our word against theirs. Later they claimed that because of the extreme emotions of the situation in which we found ourselves, my husband probably hadn’t listened properly. That made him terribly bitter, because he couldn’t prove they were wrong.”

“Is that why your son-in-law sued the UCF?” Cem asked.

“Yes, that was one of the reasons,” said Lydia. “But we were most concerned about how Kirsten was treated there. She stopped being a human being in the eyes of the doctors when it was clear that she would die. They were like vultures. It was simply revolting the way they dug everything out of her body. It was so … so disrespectful!”

“How was the lawsuit resolved?” asked Cem.

“Dirk and the clinic later reached an agreement out of court. He received a payment for damages, and the clinic paid his legal fees. For me, that’s the same as an admission of guilt.”

Pia secretly revised her overhasty judgment about Joachim Winkler. At the same time, she recognized that the man had the perfect motive for the murders. The only question was whether a seventy-year-old would be physically capable of committing those murders.

“Your son-in-law told us that you and your husband are active in a type of support group,” Pia now said.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Lydia Winkler. “After Kristen’s death, we felt like we’d been turned to stone. There was no one we could talk to about our doubts and our guilt feelings. Our granddaughter found the group on the Web. HRMO is an association of relatives who have had similar experiences to ours. Parents whose minor child has been released for organ donation after an accident, spouses, parents of grown children. No one is prepared for a situation in which they have to make a decision of such consequence. To see your loved one no longer as a human being, as a dying person, but merely as … as inventory, as a warehouse for replacement parts, that’s the worst thing anyone can experience. Death is bad enough; when it’s handled with such a lack of dignity, then it’s something you can never forget. Even today, ten years later, I still dream about what happened almost every night, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that Kirsten helped some other people to live. Her life was not saved, and as a consequence, Helen was also destroyed.”

*   *   *

His fourth victim was finally deemed worthy of a special report by the television stations. They reported live from the press conference held by the police. The press was now calling him the “Taunus Sniper.” Who had come up with such a histrionic name? He listened to the broadcast and confirmed his suspicion that the police investigators were clever.

“At the moment, we are assuming that the crimes are related,” said the lead investigator, a good-looking man with a striking face and a sonorous baritone voice. He would have fit in well with the cast of one of those American TV series like
Criminal Minds
or
Cold Case.
“The motive of the perpetrator is revenge, but his victims are not the actual targets. Their relatives are the real targets.”

“Congratulations, Mr. von Bodenstein. You’re on the right track.” With a mocking smile, he raised his beer bottle in a toast to the inspector on the screen. Then he took a big swig and bit into his cheese sandwich.

Finally the police were doing what he’d long expected them to do: They were asking the public for help, looking for witnesses, and presenting an astounding number of facts about the four victims. They had now revealed the precise circumstances of the murders as well as dates, times, and locations. They even showed portions from Google Maps, just as they did on the TV program
Germany’s Most Wanted.

He leaned back and thought it over. His pursuers were coming closer, yet they were fairly clueless, and that was good. They wouldn’t catch him too soon, although the air was growing thinner for him each day, and in the future, he would have to be even more careful. He should have allowed himself more time. Something he hadn’t thought about was the panic that had been stirred up. In the introduction to the show, the TV people had interviewed a restaurant hostess, a retailer, the director of a shopping center, and a bus driver. Everyone feared being the madman’s next victim, so almost no taxis or buses were running, taverns had closed because their patrons were staying home, and packages were stacking up at delivery services because the drivers refused to work. The whole thing had assumed proportions that he hadn’t foreseen, but it left him just as cold as the descriptions they had given of him. He didn’t give a damn if they considered him a lunatic, a maniac, a psychopath, or an ice-cold killer. One day, he would explain his motives, even if he had to wait until a courtroom appearance. He grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. In the sudden silence, he heard the rain drumming against the windowpanes. He would see the whole thing through to the end. He had given his word.

*   *   *

Joachim Winkler had the perfect motive; there was no doubt about that. The more his wife told them about her husband and his deep despair, the more obvious it was to Pia that he could be their perp. Consumed by self-reproach, pain, and impotent rage, he’d been living under a tormenting, irrational guilt. There was no proof that he had been deceived by the doctors at the clinic when he had signed a putative power of attorney for Kirsten’s treatment. For a know-it-all, self-righteous person like Winkler, this had probably been the bitterest defeat that he could suffer. And he knew all the people who had been involved with his daughter’s death. Lydia Winkler stated that her husband had pursued the suit against the UCF with true obsession. From that point on, his whole life had been shaped by his wish for retaliation.

“Thank you for your candor,” said Cem kindly and sympathetically, as was his way. “I can imagine how difficult it must be for you to speak about all this.”

“I hope it will help you make some progress in the case,” replied Lydia Winkler with a sad smile.

She got up from the sofa. The TV in the next room was turned off, but Joachim Winkler did not reappear.

“Does your husband happen to own a gun?” asked Pia, following a hunch.

“Yes, several,” Lydia said with a hesitant nod. “He used to be a good sharpshooter and passionate hunter. But that was a long time ago.”

“Could we take a look at the weapons?”

“Of course.”

They followed her through the kitchen into a large double garage, occupied only by an older-model white Mercedes. Next to a workbench and a deep freeze stood a metal gun cabinet. Mrs. Winkler took a key from a drawer in the workbench and opened the cabinet. Five rifles. Four repeating rifles and an air rifle. Pia pulled on latex gloves and took out one weapon after another, looked in the barrels and the magazines, and sniffed them. Mrs. Winkler watched her do this with growing distress.

“Do you think that my husband had something to do with these murders?” she asked, upset, as Pia put the last rifle back in the cabinet and shook her head. None of these guns had been used recently.

“We’re not drawing any conclusions,” Cem hastened to say. “But we are duty bound to follow up on every lead.”

Mrs. Winkler closed the gun cabinet and glared at Pia.

“My husband has Parkinson’s. Without his pills, he can’t even shave himself.” She pressed a switch, and the garage door rattled open. “I’m sure you can find the way to your car. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” replied Cem. “And once again, many thanks.”

Lydia Winkler nodded mutely, her hand on the switch. The garage door instantly closed behind them.

“She was pissed off,” said Kim as they trudged through the snow along the driveway, which had not been shoveled.

“I couldn’t care less,” said Pia. “The old man has a motive and is boiling with hatred. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s involved somehow.”

“He has Parkinson’s,” Cem reminded her.

“So what? That simply means that he couldn’t do the shooting himself. But he could certainly do the planning and surveillance.”

They reached the car. Cem took a whisk broom out of the trunk and swept the snow off the windshield and rear window as Pia and Kim got in the car.

“The perp
must
be closely associated with Kirsten Stadler,” said Pia after Cem got in and started the engine. “Widower, son, parents. They all have a motive, and maybe even two motives because of Helen’s suicide. We have to check the alibis of all of them.”

*   *   *

“He’s been there since seven fourteen
P.M
. and hasn’t left the apartment,” reported one of the two officers who had been staking out the building on Adlerflychtstrasse in the North End, where Erik Stadler lived.

“Is he alone?” Bodenstein asked.

“No idea,” replied the uniformed officer. “There are ten apartments in the building, so there’s constant coming and going.”

“How did he arrive? In a car, on foot?”

“On foot. He was wearing jogging clothes.”

“Okay.” Bodenstein looked up at the brightly lit penthouse. “Then let’s go in.”