Until the Debt Is Paid (20 page)

The air in Patrick’s apartment was stagnant. It smelled like fried meat. On a wall, jackets hung in a precise row. Next to them stood an empty umbrella stand and a little cabinet of worn slippers. The laminate flooring was shiny, as if making up for the apartment’s odor. When Jan came into the living room, Chandu was sitting at a desk. He had connected his laptop to Patrick’s computer and started to copy files. Max had gotten them set up so that the hard drive would download without Patrick noticing it was copied over.

Jan took a good look around the room. The walls were covered with bookshelves holding stacks of legal journals, scientific magazines, travel guides. An old leather couch and the computer desk were the extent of his dull furnishings. Only a picture of Patrick and his sister gave the living room a personal touch. Patrick looked to be about fourteen years old, his sister just a little younger. They were darkly tanned, sitting near a cliff. Behind them lay the blue sea of what looked like the Adriatic. Their smiles were those of two happy teenagers who had no clue just what sort of troubled fate might await them.

“What are we looking for?” Chandu said, interrupting his thoughts.

“We need the data on that computer.” Jan slipped on a pair of gloves. “Also crucial are any handwritten notes or anything else that could connect him to the murders. You keep looking in here. I’ll be in the next room.”

Jan went into the bedroom. The room was bleak. A simple bed with a blanket and an armoire were the only furniture. The bed linens were faded, the pillow shabby. A large punching bag hung in a corner of the room. A pair of boxing gloves and a towel lay on the floor. Jan pulled his cell phone from his pocket so he could document it all. He had to record everything. Interpreting it would come later.

Jan opened the armoire to find a jumbled mess of underwear, socks, and T-shirts. Defying this chaos, two dark suits and four ironed shirts were neatly draped on hangers.

The mess of clothing bothered him. He had always considered Patrick a middle-class conformist, the type who sorted his socks. Evidently that was only an appearance he wanted to maintain. Jan took photos of it all and went back into the living room.

Chandu had laid a photo album out on the table and was taking shots of the pages. Most of the pictures were faded and old. Many of them featured Patrick’s sister.

“He seems to really have liked her,” Chandu said. The album was tattered like it got used a lot.

“We still have twenty minutes,” Jan said, looking at the clock. “I’m going into the bathroom to see what I can find.”

The bathroom was small and much too warm. A ratty bathrobe hung on the door. The moldy smell of the shower curtain was partly masked by Patrick’s aftershave. To Jan it was too tangy and too cheap, yet somehow it fit the bleak apartment. He opened the cabinet under the sink. There were cotton swabs, hankies, a little first-aid kit, and a package of aspirin. While taking photos, he noticed a black plastic bag stashed behind the first-aid kit. He carefully extracted the bag and opened it. Seeing the contents, he let out a low whistle. He grabbed his camera and took photos. Maybe this was the proof they needed.

Chapter 13

The image Max projected on Chandu’s wall showed a black plastic bag full of pills and vials.

“Okay,” Zoe began. “We got ecstasy, marijuana, blister pack of Valium, and two vials of knockout drops, probably benzodiazepine.”

“Your colleague likes to party hard, looks like,” Chandu said.

“Indeed he does,” Zoe said. “With that much ecstasy, he won’t be coming down for six months.”

“I don’t believe he’s taking drugs,” Jan said.

“Why not?” Chandu said.

“So why have all that stuff in his bathroom?” Zoe added.

“If Patrick was on ecstasy, I would’ve noticed somehow. To me it looks more like he busted some dealer.”

“And kept the stuff for himself?” Chandu asked. “But why?”

“It was the best way to get the drugs. You can’t get knockout drops and ecstasy at the pharmacy. Say he took it from the evidence room. It would have been noticed. Patrick probably knew a dealer. He relieved the guy of his goods.”

“Not a bad theory,” Zoe said, “but what does it prove?”

“It proves that Patrick could be our serial killer. If he was taking the ecstasy himself you could say it’s an unfortunate coincidence, but if he’s drug free, why’s he stashing the stuff away at his place?”

“But we don’t have any other evidence,” Chandu said. “There was nothing else in that apartment that could connect him to the murders. No picture of the victims. No bloodstained clothing or anything else suspicious.”

“Maybe, thoug
h . . .
” Max ventured. All heads turned to him.

“I checked out his hard drive. There weren’t any fishy docs or incriminating photos, but part of the hard drive is encrypted.”

“Can you decrypt it?” Jan said.

“The problem is, you can’t copy the encrypted partition. You’d have to install a password cracker. That would have taken a long time at first, and Patrick would’ve noticed, anyway.”

“Damn it,” Jan said. “So we’re still not a step further.”

“But we can assume, from this, that Patrick is involved.”

“It’s not enough,” Jan said. “We need something concrete, otherwise I don’t dare break cover.”

Jan’s cell interrupted them. For a moment, everyone just stared at the small, ringing device.

“I thought only we had your number,” Zoe said to break the silence.

“Might be the phone company,” Max said.

Jan took the call. “Hello?”

“Hello,” answered a faint voice, a woman. “Are you the man who gave Manuel his number?”

“And who are you?”

“Sarah Esel.”

“Sarah Esel?”

“He’s here.” Sarah Esel was crying. “I don’t know how he found us, but he’s torturing my husband, to death, here in the living room.”

Jan set the cell phone on the table, switched to speaker.

“Who’s trying to kill your husband?”

“No idea. He’s wearing a mask. I can’t make out his face.”

“Where are you?”

“In Charlottenburg. We just ate. Then suddenly he was standing there in the living room and he attacked Horst with a stun gun.”

As if confirming it, a loud scream interrupted their call. Sarah started wailing hysterically.

“Frau Esel. Tell me where you are. Your street address.”

Jan turned to Max. “Call Homicide. Use your cell, get connected to Patrick Stein.”

“Help me. I’m lying under the be
d . . .
” Sarah let out a loud scream. “Let me go,” she pleaded. A loud slap followed. The attacker must have hit her in the face.

“No. Please no,” Sarah pleaded. “I’ll do anythin
g . . .
” Her pleading descended into shrieks of pain.

“Frau Esel,” Jan yelled out, but the woman couldn’t get to the phone. The call stayed connected, transmitting Sarah Esel’s suffering till the very end.

Her death didn’t come for seventeen minutes.

Then someone took the phone. Faint panting came over the line.

“You hear me, you twisted bastard?” Jan said.

Silence.

“I will find you. You can put all the blame you want on me, but I will get you.”

The call ended. The murderer had hung up.

Max came out of the bathroom at Chandu’s place, wiping his mouth. He’d just vomited for the third time, and it looked like it wouldn’t be the last. His face was waxen, like a corpse’s. Sweat stood on his forehead and his eyes were red. Zoe wasn’t doing much better. She kept sipping at her cup even though it had been empty a while. Her hand trembled as she directed a cigarette to her mouth.

“Fucking hell,” she mumbled. She pressed the half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and hurried to light up a new one.

Chandu was sitting on his sofa, staring at the floor with vacant eyes, as if the woman’s shrieking had provoked some long-forgotten memory in him.

The murder had shaken up Jan too, but then he had already seen some fucked-up things in his life. He envied his friends, that they could still feel so much horror. Their world was a nicer place. They had not yet stared into the abyss.

Jan loved his work, but it exacted a price. It was physical at first, and then emotional, as each new death ripped a little more from a detective’s soul. His fellow cop Simon hadn’t been able to stand it. After twenty-four years on the job, every murder had cut into the folds of his face. He was at his end. He’d already had one nervous breakdown. If a second one had come, Bergman wouldn’t have been able to contain the problem. So he’d offered Simon an early retirement. At fifty-one.

Jan had never gone in for philosophy much, but he once read a famous quote from Nietzsche that made him feel close to that unhinged detective now: “He who fights monsters should watch out that he himself doesn’t become a monster. And if you stare into an abyss long enough, the abyss will stare back into you.” Many people knew the saying. But few grasped the reality behind it. Jan did. Simon too.

“Patrick Stein wasn’t at CID.” Max’s voice jolted Jan from his dark thoughts. “I called the homicide squad during the murder. He’d been gone for an hour.”

“Fuck,” Zoe said and sipped at her empty cup.

“I’ll call a few guys,” Chandu said. “Real nasty types. Then we’ll wait for the bastard. An hour later? Whatever is left of him will deliver us a detailed confession.”

“That does not help us,” Jan said.

“Forget about human rights, man. That woman’s screaming is still ringing in my ears. We stick him on a spit and let him roast in the sun.”

“We do not know if it was Patrick.”

“Jan, come on,” Zoe fumed, blowing her angry smoke into the room. “How much proof do you still need? Let’s mess up this scumbag for good.”

Jan held up his hands to calm the others down. “Patrick may be implicated, but what if he’s hired some hit man to do his dirty work for him? What if there are more on the hit list? The killer could already be staking out the next victim.”

“I’m not going to listen to this shit anymore,” Chandu said, standing up. “Bastards like this deserve to be taken out.” He grabbed his jacket from the chair. “I need fresh air, otherwise I’m taking me and my gun and heading over to CID.” The door banged shut.

“He’s right,” Zoe said. “I can’t imagine, not even in my darkest thoughts, just what he was doing to her. Give me one reason why we shouldn’t send Chandu after Patrick. We just prove Patrick guilty, he goes to the pen. Either he’ll be declared mentally incapable at trial or he’ll go inside and walk after fifteen years, strolling the streets of Berlin as if nothing ever happened. You call that justice?” Her face was flushed with rage.

“Nothing is simple,” Jan said, glaring at her. “It drives me crazy when I find a child’s body and know that, even if I find the murderer, they’ll be set free again at some point. But people like you and me, we have to separate ourselves from the lowlife scum. If we use the same methods, we’re no better. Then everything’s just a huge heap of scum.”

“You don’t think he deserves to die?”

“Of course he deserves to die!” Jan roared. He kicked the table. “But I’m still a cop and not some goddamn avenging angel. Sure, it’s tough on me in moments like this, but I do believe in the system. I will prove Patrick guilty of murder. Then I’ll hand him over to the authorities and watch him marched into the pen.”

“I’m going back to work.” Zoe stood. “Two corpses will definitely be coming in within a few hours, I can tell you that.”

As she was leaving, she turned to face Jan. “I’ll send you a few nice color pics. Then you can ask yourself whether we should take out the bastard or not.”

And the door banged shut again.

Chandu parked his latest car in the visitors’ parking lot and got out. He walked a narrow path between two oaks and reached the brightly lit entry area. A checkered pattern of paving stones showed him the way, past precisely trimmed hedges. A broad door with motion sensors opened up. Chandu waved at the woman at the entrance desk, who smiled back. He breathed in the odor of cleaning agents mixed with the scent of the fresh flowers that filled the terra-cotta vases. The deep red light of a beautiful sunset streamed through the windows.

Chandu crossed the big, open hall and stepped onto a balcony with a view of forest. Sometimes he missed his homeland, Rwanda. Especially during Berlin’s cold winter months. Yet this vista of leafy trees relieved his longing for the more open canopy of the savanna. Whenever it all became too much for him, he got in his car and left the city behind him. He marched beyond the paths and into forest, searched out a big tree, and lowered himself down beneath it. Soon he found his burdens eased.

At the edge of the balcony sat a dark-skinned woman in a wheelchair. She appeared to be bathing in the light of the setting sun. Chandu stood behind her and kissed her on the forehead.

“Hello, Mama.”

“Chandu.” She smiled without averting her gaze from the sun.

“I knew that I’d find you here. Not a cloud in the sky, and look at this view stretching over the forest, all the way to the horizon.”

“The sunset is lovely here,” she murmured, as if in a dream. “When you kids were young, we’d always go out in the early evening and wait till it grew dark. You’d all watch with your eyes aglow as the great red ball sank beyond the sand dunes. You kids never wanted to leave there until the last ray of sun had vanished. Your brother always carried your sister; you walked along with me, holding my hand. You still remember that?”

Chandu gently stroked her hair. “It’s been a long time.”

“Sometimes I still dream about her. How she ran through the hut, with that wild hair of hers and her joyful laugh. She could not sit still for one second.”

Chandu closed his eyes and tried to block out the images of his sister. The memory was just too painful.

He changed the subject. “How are you doing, Mama?”

“You haven’t come to visit for a long time now.”

“I’ve been very busy. I haven’t even had a chance to work. I must help a friend who’s gotten into some trouble.”

“The main thing is, don’t get yourself in trouble,” his mother said, her tone full of warning. “You still working for this debt collector?”

“No,” he reassured her. He didn’t like lying to his mother. But this nursing home was not only the best in Berlin, it was the most expensive. He couldn’t have paid for one week here doing a normal job, so he had to work where he could make big money. And the Berlin underworld had more than enough options to choose from.

“You do not need to worry yourself.”

She reached up to squeeze his hand. “You are the only one I have left, Chandu. I just want you to be well.”

“I know, Mama. I’m doing well.”

“You still have some time?”

“The whole evening.”

She beamed. How easy it was to make her happy.

“Then let’s stay out here. Until the sun goes down. Like we used to. When we four were all still together.”

Chandu placed his hands on her far-too-scrawny shoulders. He raised his gaze to the sun, feeling grateful that he was standing behind her. This way, she could not see his tears.