Until the Debt Is Paid (27 page)

Chapter 18

Jan’s heart skipped a beat. He had to be hallucinating. Betty. He had seen the photos of her corpse. With that melted chain around her neck.

“It can’t be,” he gasped.

“You really didn’t know?” A giggle echoed through the church. “Super Detective got conned by the girlfriend. That has to bruise a guy’s ego.”

“How did yo
u . . . 
?”

“A cadaver from the Charité,” she said. “There was a fire in an apartment building. The dead woman fit my build. So I faked my death.”

Her internship at the hospital
. She had told him about it. She probably took the dead woman from Pathology. The theft was surely reported, but no connection would ever have occurred to him.

“It was all just pretend?” he asked her. “All those happy times together.”

“Poor Janni,” she taunted. “It wasn’t your good looks that attracted me to you.”

It all fit. The lengthy evenings spent telling her about his work. The way she had listened so attentively. Sometimes she’d even had follow-up questions.

“So I was just the fall guy?”

“Don’t act so hurt,” she said. “You had your fun.”

Jan was trying to place Betty’s voice inside the church. She was somewhere out in front of him. In an alcove, beyond the column. She had to be aiming her shotgun, waiting for him.

“So where do we go from here?” he said, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Stupid question,” she replied coldly. “I’m going to kill all of you. By the time your fellow cops find out, I’ll be lying on a beach in the sunshine.”

“You’re not going to get out of this.”

She gave a loud sigh. “I’ve been planning this for years, Janni. If I hadn’t decided to kill the good Father Anberger here at church, I’d be on a plane and you’d be dealing with his corpse right now. But I found this place someho
w . . .
fitting. He was actually supposed to choke on that Bible of his, the one he used to chastise me with before he did the deed on me. But then I saw that crucifix.”

A bright light flashed through the church.

“Just a little souvenir photo,” Betty said.

He heard her cocking the shotgun.

“It was fun.”

Something hit the floor next to him. Jan turned, aiming his pistol. A bent candlestick.

He cursed at himself. The oldest trick in the world. He dropped to the floor. The same moment, a shot rang out. He felt the hot draft of small shot whizzing by his face. She’d missed. He raised his gun, shooting blindly in Betty’s direction. After the third bullet, he heard moaning. He rolled onto his side, turning to look and aiming his gun.

Betty fell to the floor. She was pressing a hand to her neck. Blood flowed through her fingers. His shot had struck the carotid artery. The shotgun lay next to her. He dropped his gun, ran to her. He pulled off his jacket and pressed it to her wound, but the stream of blood would not stop.

“No, goddamn it!” he said, frantic.

Betty’s eyes raised up to him. She appeared to want to say something, but nothing came from her mouth except a gurgle. Then she smiled. She squeezed his hand. And it was over.

Jan experienced the next few hours like some silent observer hovering above the chaos. When the police reached the crime scene, he was still sitting next to Betty’s corpse. Someone put handcuffs on him and led him out of the church. Outside, a sea of lights met him. Countless police vehicles and ambulances blocked the street. Sirens pierced the night’s silence. Men in uniforms and paramedics in white coats ran back and forth. Two people were loaded into an ambulance. Someone put him in the rear seat of a car. Then they drove off, away from the noise and the lights.

He spent the ride in total silence. He didn’t know how long it lasted, had no idea where they were going. The car stopped in front of a large building, and he was pulled inside and into a stark room. A man spoke to him, but he didn’t understand the words. Another man set a glass of water on the table in front of him. But Jan could not move. He felt nothing. No thirst, no hunger, no pain, no sorrow. His head was a vacuum, aside from one word that repeated relentlessly.

“Betty.”

Around noon, Jan emerged from his stupor long enough to recognize his former boss, Klaus Bergman. The man brought him a cup of coffee, and its aroma pulled him further into the present. For the first time, Jan noticed how tired and hungry he was. He reached for the cup, drank, and contorted his face in disgust. The coffee tasted terrible. He had grown too accustomed to his friend’s finer blend.

He dropped the cup in horror. Coffee flowed across the table, dousing Bergman’s jacket. Chandu. The last time he’d seen him, he lay bleeding in the church.

“What about—”

“They’re doing okay,” Bergman reassured him, wiping the coffee off his suit. “Your friend and that lunatic from Forensics are both alive. I don’t have the details on their injuries, but the bullet wounds weren’t critical.”

“Zoe took a full load of shot. People don’t survive that—”

“What part of ‘wounds not critical’ do you not understand?” Bergman cut in.

Jan stood. “I have to get to them.”

“The fuck you do. Just sit there on your butt and tell me a few things.”

“You don’t understand,” Jan told him. “The two of them got shot because of me.”

“I understand one thing: you’re not a doctor, and you can’t do anything for them at the hospital. I’ve given instructions that I be told of any change in their condition. They survived, so until I hear otherwise, they are not dead.”

Jan needed to see for himself that Chandu and Zoe were doing fine—but Bergman would not let him go. He had a tough time sitting down again. He rubbed at his face, weary. The last few days had taken all his strength. He was slowly perceiving the magnitude of what had taken place the previous night. He had shot his girlfriend dead. The fact that she was insane did not make it any better. He just wanted to get into bed and sleep for the next hundred years.

“Can I have something to eat?” he asked. “Otherwise I won’t be able to get out a clear sentence.”

Bergman, clearly irritated, stood and yanked the door open.

“You guys head over to the donut shop and grab a dozen,” he bellowed into the corridor. “Two vanilla for me.”

He slammed the door shut, sat back down.

“Okay, Jan,” he said gently. “Just start from the beginning.”

Jan started talking. About his escape. How Chandu had put him up. How Zoe and Max had teamed up with him. How they had tracked down the serial killer. He left out no details.

In the meantime, a coworker came in with a box of donuts. Jan scarfed down several without pausing his story. His stomach and his circulation thanked him. His account ended with the death of his former girlfriend. Then he turned to Bergman.

“I have a hunch, but it would be nice to know why Betty did it all.”

The chief of detectives sighed and laid a stack of notebooks on the table, all inscribed with the word “Diary.” Jan recognized Betty’s handwriting.

“We found them in her car,” Bergman said. “We’ve been analyzing the passages the whole night. In these journals, we found a life of misery for one Bettina Esel, who you knew as Betty Windsten. Many of the entries are horrifying. One of your coworkers puked his guts out after reading it.”

Bergman ran his fingers through his hair, as if he didn’t know where to begin.

“The sexual abuse started at thirteen. At first, only Bettina’s father was assaulting her. The mother knew about the rape but was too weak to get Horst Esel to stop.

“At fourteen, Bettina was sold for the first time. The client was Judge Holoch, who was into little girls. Her description of the rape is hard enough to bear, but it also gives some insight into Holoch’s true character. He had a great time beating her up. What started with a few slaps in the face turned into this orgy of beatings. Holoch let himself loose a little more with each visit, eventually putting her into the hospital. The parents, they just called the injuries an accident and got away with it.

“Then the writing style started to change. It became dry, almost matter-of-fact, as if she was some impartial third party, observing events from a distance.

“She had barely recovered when a new client came to her bed.”

“Michael Josseck,” Jan said.

“She described the building contractor as a fat stinking swine, though he didn’t hit her. Compared to Holoch, he was bearable.”

“So Holoch wasn’t coming to her anymore?”

“No. Our guess is that around this time he was taking it out on other girls, the ones you found in his photo album.”

“Did anyone find out who the girls were?”

“It’s still too early for that. I’ve formed an investigations team to find the women. I’m not too confident, though, since some of the photos are ten years old. Also, the facial injuries in the pictures are going to make it tough for any recognition software.”

“That explains why she beat Holoch to death, but why did she choose concrete down the throat for Josseck’s murder?”

Bergman hesitated again. Their discussion was clearly putting a strain on him. “The builder, he was into oral sex.”

“What was with those wood swords in her dad’s body, and flashy costume rings in her mother’s eyes?”

“Playthings.”

“Playthings?”

“When Josseck was satisfied with her, Bettina got a present. After one especially nasty rape, Bettina’s father gave her a wooden sword and her mother gave her some cheap rings.”

Jan shuddered. He was having a tough time keeping the donuts down. Who treats their own daughter like that?

“A year later, another client came,” Bergman continued. “Father Anberger.”

Jan groaned. He knew it.

“Father Anberger had been a friend of the Esels. He’d even baptized Bettina. But at some point he lost control of his sex drive and started doing things to her regularly. The really sick part was that he blamed Bettina for her sins. She was this devil in the flesh, come into the world to seduce him. What religious bullshit. Before getting raped, she would have to pray with him. After the rapes, he’d read from the Psalms.”

“What a life,” Jan said, shaken.

“A life is not what I’d call it,” Bergman added.

“How did she escape this living hell?”

“Thanks to her superior intelligence. Despite being sexually abused, she was an outstanding student. As the head of her class, she received a stipend to study medicine.”

“And her parents just let her go?”

“The journals don’t say exactly. But once she’d reached legal age, Holoch, Josseck, and Father Anberger lost interest in her. She was probably too old for them by then. If I had to guess, I’d go with her taking off for good in the dead of night. One day she was gone, and then she began her studies. By then her name was Bettina Windsten, though she doesn’t mention why she chose that last name.”

Bergman paged through his records.

“Over the next few years, she lived the life of a medical student and, in her free time, worked on planning the murders. She was going to make her rapists and her parents pay for her suffering. She went about it with mechanical precision. She made a list of subjects and skills she needed to learn in order to commit the perfect murder. These included certain medical techniques, and also criminal skills like scoping out weak spots in secure homes and opening locks.

“She picked out her male lovers for their usefulness to her. These included doctors and police officers but also small-time criminals, anyone she could learn something from.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself, Jan. She could act the part perfectly. Before you, countless men fell for her charms, and not one doubted she loved them.”

“Cold comfort.” Jan still couldn’t believe that it was all pretend. “So, I was just another thing on her list.”

Bergman paused. “Yes. With all you know about homicide investigations, you filled in one last blank.”

“Did she choose me because of Judge Holoch’s ruling as well?”

“She describes it as an ‘unexpected bonus.’ She hadn’t dared hope to get so lucky. With her homicide detective having a possible motive, she killed two birds with one stone.”

“That’s why she was so interested. The girlfriends I had up till then? Didn’t want to know a thing about what I did—but Betty used to ask me about it every night. One time I even gave her a tour of the Homicide offices.”