I Am Your Judge: A Novel (48 page)

“I know who you are,” said Bodenstein. “It’s good that you called. I have a bone to pick with you.”

“About Mr. Gehrke. I know. I’m sorry. I had no idea that something like that would happen,” said Ms. Albrecht. She was mumbling as if she’d already had a couple of glasses of champagne. “But I’m calling about another matter. I have Helen Stadler’s diary, and I think there’s something in it that may be important to you. A death list.”

“A ‘death list’?” Bodenstein inquired. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A list of names. It starts with Ingeborg Rohleder. Then comes my mother’s name, then Fritz Gehrke’s son, and a couple more names that don’t mean a thing to me. Oh yes, Dr. Burmeister and Dr. Janning are on it, too.”

Bodenstein was speechless for a moment.

“Also, I’ve heard that Helen didn’t commit suicide,” said Ms. Albrecht. “She was murdered, and by a friend, at that.”

“Where is this diary now?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you had it.”

For a couple of seconds, it was deathly still on the other end, and Bodenstein was afraid that Karoline Albrecht had broken the connection.

“There’s a small problem. I had an accident, and now I’m in the hospital in Bad Homburg. The diary is probably still in my car, and I don’t know where they took it.”

“Where did the accident take place?” Bodenstein had quickly recovered. The station could find out everything else. She told him the site of the accident, her license number and make of car, and described the diary. Bodenstein thanked her and ended the call, then tapped in another number.

“Bodenstein from K-11,” he identified himself. “I need to track down a vehicle involved in an accident.”

Pia gave him a quizzical look.

“The accident happened recently, on the K 772 between Oberursel and the B 455. A black Porsche, license number F-AP 34 1. Yes, thanks, I’ll hold.”

“What’s up?” Pia silently mouthed the words, but Bodenstein motioned for her to hold on. He paced restlessly in the big office until the duty officer came back on the line.

“The vehicle was towed by H&K,” he said. “Usually, they store the accident vehicle in their own yard until an insurance adjuster arrives.”

“Very good. So where is the vehicle now?”

The officer gave him the address of the towing service. Bodenstein turned to his two uniformed colleagues, who were sitting on a sofa in a corner of the office and slurping coffee. He gave them the task of looking for a diary in Karoline Albrecht’s Porsche and bringing it to him in Höchst the fastest way possible. The two nodded and left, happy to have something to do. Then Bodenstein quietly informed Pia about what he had just learned.

Riegelhoff turned to them.

“I found what I was looking for,” he announced, taking a few pages out of a binder. “This is the OR protocol from the organ explantation. The names of all the participants are on it.”

Pia went over and took the papers from him. She sat down at the table and began to read.

“Professor Rudolf, Dr. Simon Burmeister, Dr. Arthur Janning, and—
Jens-Uwe Hartig
!” Pia gasped for air in disbelief. “Boss, check this out! Hartig is listed here as one of the surgeons in the organ explantation of Kirsten Stadler. Why did he lie to us?”

She shoved the pages over to Bodenstein.

“Probably because we’re still waiting for answers from the UCF, even today,” Bodenstein grumbled. “I’ll call Hartig and ask him.”

He tapped the speed dial for Hartig’s number. Hartig didn’t answer.

In the meantime, Pia wrote down all the names and demanded that Riegelhoff show her the other binders.

“Bring me all of them, please.” The lawyer shrugged, glanced at his watch, and then at his wife, still talking on the phone out on the terrace. “I hope it will help you.”

“There are way too many.” Pia looked somewhat hopelessly at her list, which kept growing longer. “And I bet we find another twenty names in that binder. Why were twelve surgeons necessary?”

“We’re talking about a multiorgan transplantation,” said the lawyer. “To do that, it has to go fast. Sometimes five or six teams are working in parallel on a bod … uh … on a donor.”

“He can’t possibly want to kill all of them.” Pia stared at the list of names.

“Maybe you can save yourself some work if the officers find the diary,” said Bodenstein as he looked at his watch.

“I’d rather not count on it,” Pia replied. She had an idea, and she looked at Riegelhoff. “Stadler’s objection was not to organ removal as such, but to the method and manner with which his wife was treated, isn’t that right?”

Riegelhoff nodded.

“So we have to concentrate on the decision-makers,” said Pia. “On anyone who gave false information to Joachim Winkler. Who at the hospital is responsible for such decisions? Who speaks with the relatives of the patient? Do the doctors do this?”

“Sometimes,” replied Riegelhoff. “But at a large hospital like the UCF, they have trained psychological personnel for such instances. People who arrange and coordinate the organ transplantations.”

“So in the case of Kirsten Stadler, who was it?”

“I no longer remember.” Riegelhoff pulled over one of the binders at random and opened it.

“That’ll take too long. It’s almost ten thirty. We’re running out of time.” Bodenstein shook his head. “I’m going to call Professor Rudolf. Maybe he’ll remember something.”

He went to the other end of the large office and tapped in Rudolf’s number. This time he was more successful.

“Please leave me alone,” said the professor when Bodenstein gave his name. “Kindly respect my grief.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” said Bodenstein. “The person who shot your wife has announced that tonight he will kill another person. In the meantime, we’ve learned that these murders have to do with events at the UCF that occurred ten years ago. At the moment, we’re at the law office that represented the UCF against Mr. Stadler, and we’ve already come across some names. Whom did the Stadlers deal with at the hospital? For instance, what’s the name of the person who was responsible for coordinating the organ removal?”

There was silence on the other end.

“Professor, please, help us,” Bodenstein said urgently. “Prevent another person from dying.”

Rudolf hung up without a word.

“What a shithead!” Bodenstein cursed. “That does it.”

“What are you going to do?”

Bodenstein punched in another number.

“I’m having him brought to the station,” he replied. “I refuse to let him shirk his responsibility.”

He ordered a team to bring in Professor Dieter P. Rudolf. Then he put away his cell and gave Riegelhoff a chilly stare.

“In the meantime, have you remembered what Fritz Gehrke might have wanted from you?” he asked sharply.

“No,” said Riegelhoff, lowering his eyes.

“I hope you don’t end up regretting this someday,” said Bodenstein.

“What am I supposed to regret?” asked the lawyer.

“The fact that you’re refusing to give us crucial information.” Bodenstein turned around. “Let’s go. We’re taking the documents with us.”

“And what about us?” Riegelhoff wanted to know.

“You can go on to your party,” said Bodenstein.

“But what if the sniper is targeting us? Will we have police protection, at least?”

“Sorry, can’t do that,” said Bodenstein, shaking his head. “If you’d been more cooperative from the start, then maybe the killer would be behind lock and key by now. That’s the chance you’ll have to take.”

*   *   *

They were done with dinner,
Tafelspitz
with potatoes and green sauce. Now they were sitting around the table in the dining room and drinking California red wine, a 2010 cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley.

He could read the label through the scope.

He could look at their plates, into their faces, at the backs of their friends’ heads who were sitting with their backs to the window and still holding hands.

He could see every detail. The woman had drunk a bit too much, her cheeks were flushed, and she was laughing a lot. She kept giving her husband loving glances, which he returned. Such harmony, such happiness. In the past, it might have moved him. In the past. When he had been like the man in the house. When he still had a family. Dreams. A future.

Snatches of words reached his ears, and laughter. The children were watching some sort of animated film and looked quite amused. An idyllic scene. A happy family in their new home, but after tonight, they would no longer be a family and they would never be happy again.

Now they were getting up. It was a little past eleven.

The women cleared off the table; the men disappeared into the garage and came back with fireworks. The children jumped up and hopped around excitedly. He could hear their bright voices.

The men went outside on the terrace, got the fireworks ready, sticking rockets into empty bottles, drinking beer, laughing. They had no idea that death awaited only fifty meters away.

The death that he would bring.

He was Death.

*   *   *

The first thing that Pia noticed was the handwriting. It was the same neat little girl’s writing she had seen in the surveillance notes that she had found in Mark Thomsen’s house. Pia had studied the piece of paper so long that certain graphological characteristics caught her eye at once: Instead of dotting the
i,
the writer drew a little circle, and the writing slanted back sharply to the left, the way left-handers often wrote. She leafed feverishly through the little black book. What should she look for? She needed names, but where was the list that Karoline Albrecht had mentioned?

Pia sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked car with Bodenstein. The two uniformed officers had returned from Höchst with blue light and siren on and turned over the diary to him. They had also picked up the document binders from Riegelhoff’s office and stowed them in the trunk of their cruiser. Their boss had taken a quick look in the black book and then handed it right back to her.

“I can’t make out the handwriting in this dim lighting, even with my reading glasses on,” he said. “Your eyes have got to be younger.”

“Only slightly,” she replied, and borrowed his reading glasses.

Mark Thomsen remained missing, Dirk Stadler had not returned his call, and now Jens-Uwe Hartig also seemed to have joined the ranks of those who had apparently been swallowed up by the earth. His house, his apartment, and his shop had been staked out, so far without result.

Just as Bodenstein slammed the trunk shut, Pia found the page. She jumped out of the car.

“I found it!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Ms. Albrecht was right. She wrote out an actual death list. Listen to this.”

She quickly read off the names that Helen Stadler had neatly numbered and listed.

1. Renate Rohleder (mother, dog)

2. Dieter Paul Rudolf (wife, daughter, grandchild)

3. Patrick Schwarzer (wife)

4. Fritz Gehrke (son)

5. Bettina Kaspar-Hesse (husband, children)

6. Simon Burmeister

7. Ulrich Hausmann (daughter)

8. Arthur Janning (wife, son)

9. Jens-Uwe Hartig (?)

“She even wrote down the addresses!” Pia shouted. She was shaking all over with excitement.

This was it! This was the breakthrough!

“Helen Stadler had spied on all the people she held responsible for her mother’s death. And now someone is carrying out what she had planned. I just don’t understand why Hartig’s name is on her list, too.”

“We can mull that over later.” Bodenstein opened the car door on the driver’s side and reached for the radio. “If the sniper keeps to the same order, then the next victim is somehow related to Bettina Kaspar-Hesse. Give me her address.”

“Sterngasse 118 in Griesheim,” said Pia.

Bodenstein called station dispatch and told them the name and address, repeating the woman’s name twice.

“Griesheim near Frankfurt or near Darmstadt?” he asked Pia.

“No idea, it doesn’t say!” she shouted. “Just ask them to find out where there’s a street by that name.”

She decided to call Kai, and she managed to reach him.

“In Griesheim near Frankfurt, there isn’t any Sterngasse,” one of the uniformed officers said. “I know that after spending ten years on the beat in Frankfurt.”

“No, not Offenbach!” Bodenstein said at the same time, his voice vibrating with impatience in the microphone. “
Stern
gasse, not
Stein
gasse, good grief.”

“I have Kai on the phone!” Pia shouted to her boss. “He’s still at work and is running a search.”

“When you two finally locate the place, send someone out there, and you’d better call first and say you’re coming. Tell the people there to turn off all the lights and get everyone into the basement until we arrive.” He ended the call. “Get in, Pia. Maybe we can get there in time.”

*   *   *

Twenty to twelve. The man and his pal had set up all the rockets and fireworks; in the house, the wife was opening the champagne. Through the wide-open terrace doors, he could hear the corks popping. The television was screeching with the broadcast of the New Year’s Eve party from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

The countdown started.

The children ran excitedly through the house; they’d put on their jackets. The friend went inside, perhaps to help the women with the champagne.

The husband stood on the terrace, one hand in his jacket pocket, in the other holding a bottle of beer. He took a swig, tilted his head back, and gazed into the clear night sky, in which rockets were prematurely exploding here and there. What must he be thinking? Probably something beautiful. He was proud of his house, it was a wonderful evening, he was in a good mood during those final minutes of his life. Yes, he was doubtless going to die happy.

In the house, the phone rang.

“Who could be calling at this hour?” shouted the man’s wife.

“Just pick it up. Maybe it’s your parents,” answered her husband with a grin.