I Am Your Judge: A Novel (40 page)

Bettina smiled and turned her attention to the quiche lorraine dough that she had taken out of the fridge. She still had a lot to do for the New Year’s Eve party tomorrow night. On the stove, the
Tafelspitz
—boiled rump filet, an Austrian specialty—was simmering away in a big pot. She had pondered quite awhile what to serve, and
Tafelspitz
was easy to prepare and tasted even better each time it was reheated.

“We’ll be celebrating Christmas in our new house,” Ralf had insisted last summer, when nothing seemed to be moving at the construction site. She had secretly had her doubts. But he had been right. They moved in on November 24 and unpacked the boxes in no time, hanging up their clothes in the closets and putting all the books on the shelves.

She heard the key turn in the front door.

“We’re home!” shouted Ralf, and then the children came running into the kitchen with shining eyes and red cheeks, elated about the trip to the pheasant run that Ralf had taken them to so Bettina could work in peace and quiet. They tore open the fridge, took out a bottle of multivitamin juice, and climbed up on the stools at the breakfast counter in the open-plan kitchen.

“Hey, sweetie.” Ralf came into the kitchen in his stocking feet, put his arm around her waist, and kissed her. “Mmm, something smells delicious.”

“That’s for tomorrow.” Bettina’s heart pounded as always when she saw her husband come in the room. “But I’ve got a surprise in the oven for the hungry mob.”

“I smelled it already.” Ralf looked through the glass in the oven door. “Pizza!”

“Pizza, pizza!” the children shouted with joy. “What’s on it, Mama?”

“Everything you like,” said Bettina with a smile. “Hurry and set the table and wash your hands so we can eat.”

She looked at her husband and he gazed back at her.

“I love this house,” she said. “But I love you a whole lot more.”

He took her in his arms and tenderly rubbed his cold cheek against hers.

“I love you, too,” he whispered. “And I always will, until the end of my days.”

*   *   *

“Damn it!” Bodenstein swore. “This is unbelievable. He locked us in!”

Thomsen had herded them into the basement furnace room. The fireproof safety door had closed behind them with a dull thud, and then the guy had turned the key in the lock. They were trapped. And the heat was turned off. It was cold in the small room, cold and dark.

Pia tried to get her shivering under control. Fear had surged into all her limbs. Thomsen had appeared to be a threat, but she had no idea they’d end up in a situation like this.

“Ostermann knows where we were going,” Bodenstein tried to reassure her as he felt along the wall for a light switch. In vain. It was probably on the outside. A little light seeped in through a small window in a barred air shaft.

Pia didn’t want to think about what might happen. What if the guy set fire to the house to get rid of all the evidence? Maybe he’d even flood the basement, like crazy Daniela Lauterbach had done that time in the Snow White case.

Pia took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. He’d said that nothing would happen to them. So she just had to believe him.

“Do you think this is our guy?” she asked. By now, her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. She found an empty bucket and turned it over to sit down on.

“He might be,” said Bodenstein. “He’s a good enough shot, anyway.”

“And he’s got nothing to lose,” Pia added. “Oh, crap!”

“What is it?” Bodenstein asked in annoyance.

“If only I’d had a chance to go to the john one more time. I really have to pee.”

“Then use the bucket,” Bodenstein suggested. “I won’t look.”

“Naw, I can hold it.” She tried to pull the sleeves of her jacket down over her freezing hands. “Thomsen really loved Helen Stadler. When I asked him about her, his face twitched.”

“Erik Stadler also liked his sister a lot,” Bodenstein argued.

“Sure, but that was brotherly love,” said Pia. “He suffered all those years because the family had been broken up. But he still managed to build up a successful company, and he has a girlfriend, hobbies, friends.”

“And the profile that Neff came up with fits him like a glove.”

“The profile is bullshit,” said Pia. “Besides, Stadler is much too frenetic and impatient. This Thomsen character seems more the type. He’s ice-cold. And a pro.”

“We shouldn’t forget about Jens-Uwe Hartig.” With his hands stuffed in his coat pockets, Bodenstein began pacing from one side of the room to the other, five meters forward, five meters back. Pia turned her head to watch him like a spectator at a tennis match. “He has basically given up everything in his life. Both professionally and privately. The desire for revenge must be boiling inside him. And if what Thomsen said is true, he knows how to shoot. For years, he and Helen talked about nothing but the past. In my opinion, that’s pathological. Normal people eventually look to the future after processing what has happened to them. Helen Stadler seems to have been incapable of doing that. And the same goes for Hartig.”

“Helen turned her purported guilt over the death of her mother into a lifelong obsession.” Pia nodded. “Almost as if she had wanted to take the blame.”

“She made it into something uniquely her own, like a terminal disease.” Bodenstein leaned against the wall. “There are plenty of people who constantly have some sort of disease in order to get attention.”

“I simply can’t understand how someone could immerse themselves in something like that—and for years.” Pia shook her head and pressed her knees together. Gradually her shivering diminished. Thomsen had locked them up so he could make his escape, not to do them any harm.

“The reality is,” Bodenstein replied, “that everyone else managed to cope with all these strokes of fate and learned to live with them, but Helen did not. We have to investigate Hartig more closely. Perhaps he sees it as his duty to take revenge on those who drove Helen to commit suicide.”

“And the grandparents, the Winklers,” Pia said, thinking out loud. “They blame themselves for turning their dead daughter over for organ donation. Their decision and its consequences eventually drove Thomsen completely over the edge.”

Her bladder was almost bursting. If she hadn’t been locked in here with Bodenstein, but with Kai or Christian, she would have had considerably fewer inhibitions about peeing in the bucket. In front of her boss, it would be extremely unpleasant.

“So, four suspects: Jens-Uwe Hartig, Mark Thomsen, Joachim Winkler, and Erik Stadler,” Bodenstein summed up. “The last three, at any rate, are familiar with firearms. That remains to be seen in Hartig’s case. All four have a relatively strong motive, probably the means, and possibly also the opportunity. Hartig and Stadler are single, so they can dispose of their time freely. Winkler is retired, and Thomsen works a shift job.”

“But it would take some time to study the victims and their day-to-day habits, and to find the right location for the strike.” Pia rubbed her palms together and stretched out her left leg, which was about to go to sleep. “And we shouldn’t forget about Stadler Senior. He was the hardest hit. Oh man, I can’t stand it any longer. Boss, please turn around.”

She stood up, flipped over the bucket, and pulled down her pants.

*   *   *

The team came to let them out at 4:40 in the afternoon, four and a half hours after Thomsen had locked them in the furnace room. Cem Altunay had brought along four uniformed officers. He was grinning when he shoved back the bolt and opened the door.

“Where the hell have you been?” Bodenstein acted as if Cem hadn’t shown up for an appointment.

“Unfortunately, we had to wait until we got a phone call telling us your whereabouts,” Cem replied. “Kai thought you were just having a leisurely lunch somewhere.”

“Pardon me?” Pia stared at her colleague, flabbergasted.

“Yeah, Thomsen called the station half an hour ago and told us that he’d locked you in the furnace room,” Cem went on. “He said the back door was open and the key was in it. Then he hung up.”

“I wonder why he did that?” Pia said, stretching her aching limbs.

“He noticed that the situation was getting dicey for him, and needed some time to collect himself,” Bodenstein guessed. “Let’s search the house. Cem, please inform the evidence team. I want them to turn this place upside down. And tell Kai to put out an APB on Thomsen right away.”

“He already has,” Cem said.

Upstairs on the kitchen table, they found their service weapons and cell phones right where they’d put them. The woodstove in the living room was putting out heat like a sauna, and Pia, who was chilled to the bone, quickly thawed out. Then she went through the house with Oliver and Cem. After separating from his wife, Thomsen had arranged the house to suit himself. In the living room were several weight machines and a treadmill instead of a couch and easy chairs; in another room were an empty desk, a rumpled bed, and a wardrobe with the doors standing open.

“He took stuff with him,” said Pia. “And clothes, too.”

“Thomsen is on the lam,” said Bodenstein with a grim expression.

“Detectives?” called an officer from upstairs. “Come up here and take a look at this!”

The three rooms and bathroom on the second floor seemed unused; they were stuffy and unheated. The young female officer led Pia and Bodenstein to the room next to the bathroom, which had probably belonged to Thomsen’s son, Benni. A single bed stood under the sloping ceiling, and above it hung yellowed posters from the 1997–98 season of Frankfurt United. On the wall next to the desk were six empty corkboards. Someone had obviously torn off in great haste the sheets of paper that had been posted on them, because here and there were pins with scraps of paper clinging to them, and the carpet underneath was also strewn with pins.

“This was on the floor behind the desk.” The officer was smiling excitedly as she handed Bodenstein the piece of paper. “Looks like he missed this one.”

“Take a look at this,” Bodenstein said after scanning the items and giving a low whistle. “It looks like a record of his shadowing activity.”

He handed it to Pia.

“It sure is.” She nodded. “A handwritten dossier on Maximilian Gehrke. His complete daily routine from May through August 2012. Somebody was watching him regularly, and for weeks at a time.”

“Thomsen is our man,” said Bodenstein with conviction.

“But take a look at the handwriting. It doesn’t look like a man wrote this. More like a young girl.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Bodenstein examined the six corkboards more closely. “They’re full of holes.”

“There are six of them,” Cem observed, deep in thought. “I wonder if that might mean something.”

“What do you think?” Pia wanted to know.

“Maybe one board for each victim,” her colleague replied somberly. “If so, then the sniper has two more people in his sights.”

*   *   *

Finally, the case was starting to move.

After twelve days with no leads, no clues, and not a scrap of success, the team now plunged into their work with feverish activity, newly motivated and driven by cautious excitement. Feeling tense but focused, they compiled the tiniest details, eliminated any contradictory modes of thinking, and recapped the facts. Even so, the picture that was emerging, from all the pieces of the puzzle they had so far, remained rather vague.

“By the way, the editor of the
Taunus Echo
denies having been in contact with Gehrke,” Bodenstein informed the rest of the team. “He claims that Karoline Albrecht, the daughter of victim number two, showed up at his office and demanded to see the obituary for her mother. Besides that one, he also showed her the other two that he had. And he made copies of them for her.”

“And what does Ms. Albrecht say to that?” Pia inquired. “Why would she go visit Gehrke?”

“Maybe she knew him.” Bodenstein shrugged. “He was an acquaintance of her father’s, after all.”

“I still haven’t been able to reach her., We don’t have her cell number.”

Outside the window, darkness had fallen long ago, but no one had any intention of going home. Not now, not when they were on the verge of a possible breakthrough. Somebody ordered pizza for everyone from the Italian place over on Elisabethenstrasse. They ate standing up or sitting at the tables in the operations room of the special commission, while Kai Ostermann summed up what they knew so far.

In the attic of Mark Thomsen’s house, two rifles and ammunition had been found, neatly stowed in a weapons cabinet. According to the documentation, one rifle and a handgun were missing. In addition, they confiscated a couple of document binders, but Bodenstein had no great hope of finding any decisive new revelations in them, because Thomsen seemed to have taken everything with him that was important. He’d certainly had enough time. The search for him and his dog was ongoing, and his photo had been given to the press. They had questioned his ex-wife, and what she told them confirmed not only his motivation, but also the profile that Kim had drawn of the perp. After the death of his son, the main thing Thomsen had on his mind was to denounce the unethical actions of the surgeons, and it had infuriated him that he couldn’t find anyone to agree with his concerns. In addition, he was an excellent sharpshooter who remained cold-blooded and calm even in high-stress situations. When they talked with his ex-wife, the real reason why he was no longer a police officer came to light. An incident, which she did not go into further, had led to his suspension, trial, and dishonorable discharge.

In the vague hope that Thomsen might make a mistake and seek shelter with the Winklers in Glashütten, they staked out the family’s house. They also phoned all the members of HRMO they could find through the Web site. But no one knew a thing. Mark Thomsen seemed to have vanished without a trace.

Although every indication seemed to point to him as the perp, Bodenstein didn’t forget about the other suspects. Erik Stadler had confirmed Patrick Schwarzer’s story, as well as the fact that there were not many people who knew about his mistake. The ER doctor and the EMTs, for instance, had been mad as hell when the drunken Schwarzer drove the ambulance into the ditch.