The Ice Queen: A Novel (17 page)

Utter silence descended upon the autopsy suite. Pia looked at the two men expectantly.

“Well, and then what?” Henning asked in a condescending tone. “What’s the big deal?”

“Don’t you get it?” Pia was miffed by his reaction. “That’s the proof that the guy you had on the table here was definitely not David Josua Goldberg.”

“That’s nuts.” Henning shrugged, unimpressed. “So where’s that DA? I can’t stand people who show up late.”

“Here she is,” a female voice replied. “Good morning, everyone.”

District Attorney Valerie Löblich strutted in with her head held high, nodding to Ronnie and ignoring Pia, who again registered with interest Henning’s obvious discomfort.

“Good morning, Ms. Löblich,” was all he said.

“Good morning, Dr. Kirchhoff,” the DA replied coolly. The formality with which they greeted each other prompted Pia to grin. She recalled her last meeting with DA Löblich, which had taken place in the living room of Henning’s apartment, a situation that could only be described as extremely compromising. At that time, both Valerie and Henning had been wearing considerably fewer clothes than today.

“We might as well get started.” Kirchhoff avoided all eye contact with DA Löblich and Pia as he launched into frenetic activity. When Pia had caught them in the act, he had assured her that despite concerted efforts on the part of Löblich, that was the only time they’d slept together—she knew that the DA blamed her for that. Today, she stayed in the background while Henning performed the external postmortem examination, dictating his comments into the microphone attached to his lapel.

“Now she’s picked up a judge,” Ronnie whispered to Pia, nodding toward the DA, who, with arms crossed, stood right next to the autopsy table. Pia shrugged. She really couldn’t have cared less. A slight ache in her thighs and back reminded her of the passionate night she’d just spent with Christoph, and she calculated when he would be landing in Capetown. He’d promised to send her a text as soon as he got there. Was he thinking about her? Pia’s thoughts wandered off. She was hardly following what Henning was doing.

He extended the brutal cut that the murderer had inflicted on the girl, removed the individual organs, and then dissected the heart. Ronnie took samples from her stomach contents to the lab on the top floor. The whole time, nobody said a word, except for Henning, who was narrating his work in a low voice for the autopsy report.

“Pia!” he called out loudly. “Are you asleep?”

Rudely yanked from her reverie, she took a step forward. At the same time, the DA stepped closer to the table.

“You need to look for a knife with a hawkbill blade about four inches long,” Kirchhoff told his ex-wife. “The perpetrator made the cut with a great deal of force and without hesitation. The blade injured the internal organs and left incision marks on the ribs.”

“What’s a hawkbill blade?” the DA asked.

“I’m not your private tutor. Do your own homework,” Kirchhoff snapped, and Pia suddenly felt sorry for Valerie.

“A hawkbill blade is curved like a half-moon,” she explained. “They’re originally from Indonesia and were used by fishermen. Blades like that aren’t suitable for cutting, but they are used exclusively as combat knives.”

“Thank you.” DA Löblich nodded to Pia.

“You can’t buy a knife like that at the supermarket.” Kirchhoff’s mood had abruptly deteriorated. “The first time I saw knife wounds like this was in victims of the Kosovo Liberation Army.”

“What about her eyes?” Pia was trying hard to remain objective, but she shuddered at the thought of how much the woman must have suffered before she died.

“What about them?” snapped her ex-husband irritably. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Pia and the DA exchanged a meaningful glance, which did not escape Henning. He began examining the woman’s abdomen, taking samples and muttering incomprehensibly to himself. Pia pitied the secretary who would have to type up the autopsy report. Twenty minutes later, Kirchhoff inspected the bluish lips of the dead woman with a magnifying glass, then thoroughly examined the oral cavity.

“What is it?” Valerie Löblich asked impatiently. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“Please be patient for a moment, dear District Attorney,” Kirchhoff replied sharply. He grabbed a scalpel and dissected the esophagus and the larynx. Then with an expression of extreme concentration, he took several samples with cotton-tipped swabs and handed one after the other to his assistant. Finally, he picked up a UV lamp and shone it in the mouth and in the opened esophagus of the dead woman.

“Aha!” he said, straightening up. “Would you like to look, District Attorney?”

Valerie Löblich nodded eagerly and stepped to his side.

“You have to look very closely right here,” said the pathologist. Pia had an idea what there was to see there, and she shook her head. Today, Henning was really taking things too far. Even Ronnie knew what was going on and, with effort, had to suppress a grin.

“I don’t see anything,” said the DA.

“Don’t you notice the bluish shimmering areas?”

“I do.” She raised her head and frowned. “Was she poisoned?”

“It depends. I can’t tell at the moment whether the semen was poisoned or not.” Kirchhoff smirked. “But we’ll be able to determine it in the lab.”

The blood rushed to the DA’s face when she realized she’d been the victim of an inappropriate joke. “You know what, Henning? You’re an asshole!” she hissed furiously. “The day when you’ll be lying on this table yourself will come sooner than you think if you keep this up!”

She turned on her heel and marched out. Kirchhoff watched her go, then shrugged and looked at Pia.

“You heard it,” he said with an innocent expression. “A blatant threat of murder. Oh well. Those DAs just don’t have a sense of humor.”

“That wasn’t very nice of you,” Pia replied. “Was she raped?”

“Who? Löblich?”

“Not funny at all, Henning,” Pia said sharply. “Well?”

“My God!” he exclaimed with unusual vehemence after he made sure that his assistant wasn’t in the room. “She’s such a pain in the butt. She just won’t leave me alone. She keeps calling and babbling all sorts of crazy stuff.”

“Maybe you gave her cause for false hopes.”

“You’re the one who gave her cause for false hopes,” he countered. “Since you forced me into a divorce.”

“I think you’re imagining things.” Pia shook her head in astonishment. “But after your performance today, she’s probably lost all interest in you.”

“I should be so lucky. She’ll probably be back here in an hour.”

Pia scrutinized her ex-husband.

“I bet that you lied to me,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked, feigning innocence.

“The little intermezzo last summer on the living room coffee table—that wasn’t the only time you cheated on me. Am I right?”

Kirchhoff suddenly looked guilty. But before he could say anything, Ronnie came back into the autopsy suite, and Henning switched instantly to his professional tone of voice.

“She was not raped. But she had oral sex before she died,” he explained. “Afterward, the other injuries were inflicted, and they were fatal. She bled to death.”

*   *   *

“Monika Krämer bled to death from the deep wounds she suffered from a knife with a hawkbill blade,” Pia reported to her colleagues an hour later in the conference room. “Traces of semen were found in her oral cavity and esophagus. Since we have Watkowiak’s DNA in our computer, we should know in a matter of days whether the semen is his. We’ll have to wait and see if the DNA of a third person is present in the traces, fibers, and hairs. Our colleagues in the crime lab are working at top speed.”

Bodenstein cast a quick glance at Chief Commissioner Nierhoff and hoped that his boss realized how extremely thin the evidence was so far. Downstairs, all the reporters had gathered, waiting to hear Nierhoff brag about how fast the police had solved the murders of Goldberg and Schneider.

“The man got rid of the woman because he’d told her earlier about the murders he’d committed.” Nierhoff got up. “Clear proof of his propensity to violence. Good work, colleagues. Bodenstein, remember that I want to see you at twelve o’clock in my office.”

Then he left the room, hurrying to the press conference without insisting that Bodenstein accompany him. For a moment, no one spoke.

“I wonder what he’s going to tell them downstairs,” said Ostermann.

“No idea.” Bodenstein had given up. “But at this point, a false report of progress won’t do any harm.”

“So you don’t think Watkowiak murdered Goldberg and Schneider?” asked Fachinger hesitantly.

“No,” Bodenstein replied. “He’s a habitual criminal but not a murderer. I also don’t think he killed Ms. Krämer.”

Fachinger and Ostermann looked at their boss in astonishment.

“I’m afraid that a third individual is involved. But somebody doesn’t want us to keep snooping around, so it’s important to find a suspect fast and pin the murders of Goldberg and Schneider on that person instead.”

“You’re thinking that the murder of Monika Krämer could be a hired job?” Ostermann raised his eyebrows.

“I’m assuming something like that,” said Bodenstein. “Given the professional MO and the use of a combat knife. The question is, Would Goldberg’s family really go that far? After all, inside of twenty-four hours they had mobilized the NCP, the Interior Ministry, the American general consul, the Frankfurt president of police, and the CIA in order to prevent a certain fact from being made public. But we had already figured it out—namely, that the murdered Goldberg was anything but a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.” He gave his colleagues an urgent look. “One thing is clear: Somebody who has a lot to lose will stop at nothing. That’s why we have to be very, very careful not to endanger any more innocent people while conducting this investigation.”

“Then it may be a good thing that Nierhoff is announcing that we’ve found the perp,” Ostermann opined, and Bodenstein nodded.

“Precisely. That’s why I’m not trying to stop him. Whoever ordered the murder of Monika Krämer will think that he’s safe.”

“By the way, we found several old text messages on Watkowiak’s cell phone,” Pia said. “All in uppercase and lowercase, and not once did he call Monika “sweetheart.” The texts we found weren’t from him. Somebody bought a cell phone, probably a prepaid one, under a false name and sent the texts to Monika Krämer in order to divert suspicion and place it on Watkowiak.”

Everyone understood the implications of this theory, and for a moment there was silence in the room. Watkowiak, with his lengthy rap sheet, was a highly plausible murder suspect.

“So who even knows that we’re considering Watkowiak as the perp?” Fachinger asked. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff exchanged a quick glance. That was a good question. No, it was
the
question that had to be answered in the event Watkowiak was not the person who had first blinded and then literally butchered Monika Krämer.

“Vera Kaltensee and her son Siegbert know,” said Pia, breaking the silence. She was thinking about the security men in the black uniforms at Mühlenhof. “And probably the rest of the Kaltensee family, as well.”

Bodenstein disagreed with her. “I don’t believe that Vera Kaltensee had anything to do with this. Something like that doesn’t seem to fit her demeanor.”

“Just because she’s a big philanthropist doesn’t mean she’s an angel, too,” Pia retorted. She was the only one who knew why her boss was trying to see the old woman in a good light. Due to his work, Bodenstein was familiar with all levels of society, from the dregs all the way to the upper class, and yet he was still inevitably tied to the class consciousness of his upbringing. His whole family belonged to the aristocracy, just as the former baroness of Zeydlitz-Lauenburg did.

“Is anyone interested in the lab results?” Ostermann patted the file folder lying in front of him.

“Of course.” Bodenstein leaned forward. “Is there anything about the murder weapon?”

“Yes.” Ostermann opened the folder. “It was definitely the same weapon. The ammunition is quite special: in both cases, a nine-by-nineteen-millimeter parabellum round, manufactured sometime between 1939 and 1942. The lab was able to determine this from the alloy, because it hasn’t been used since then in this particular combination.”

“So our killer uses a nine-millimeter weapon and ammunition from World War Two,” Pia said. “Where would someone get hold of something like that?”

“You can order such things on the Internet,” said Hasse. “Or get them at gun shows. I don’t think it’s as unusual as it seems.”

“Okay, okay,” said Bodenstein, cutting off the discussion. “What else have we got, Ostermann?”

“Schneider’s signatures on the checks were genuine. And the graphologist says the mysterious number was printed by the same person. The DNA on the wineglass in Goldberg’s living room belongs to a woman, but no match was found for the DNA or the fingerprints. The lipstick is nothing special—a common product by Maybelline—but besides the lipstick, traces of acyclovir were found.”

“And what’s that?” asked Fachinger.

“A medication that combats herpes, or cold sores, on the lips. It’s one of the ingredients in Zovirax.”

“Well, that’s certainly news,” Hasse grumbled. “The murderer was found guilty because of herpes. I can just imagine the headline.”

Bodenstein couldn’t help smiling, but his smile vanished with Pia’s next words.

“Vera Kaltensee had a Band-Aid on her lip. Of course she’d put lipstick over it, but I noticed it. Remember, boss?”

Bodenstein frowned and gave Pia a dubious look.

“Possibly. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and the chief commissioner’s secretary stuck her head in.

“The chief commissioner is back from the press conference and is expecting you, Mr. Chief Inspector,” she announced. “Urgently.”

*   *   *

There was no question about what his assignment entailed. He absolutely had to locate the chest. Why was not an issue. He wasn’t being paid to speculate about motives. He had never had scruples about following an order. That was his job. It took an hour and a half before Ritter finally left the ugly yellow-painted apartment house in which he’d been living since his fall from grace. The man watched with spiteful satisfaction as Ritter crossed the street to the S-Bahn stop at Schwarzwaldstrasse with a laptop case slung over his shoulder and a cell phone pressed to his ear. The days of being chauffeured around were over for this arrogant guy.