Crime (10 page)

The examining magistrate’s name was Lambrecht, and he was wearing a Norwegian sweater, although it was springtime. He suffered from low blood pressure, had felt cold his whole life, which was also why he was in an almost permanent bad temper. He was fifty-two years old, and he wanted clarity; things had to be orderly and he didn’t want to take any demons home with him from the office.

Lambrecht was a guest lecturer in trial law at the high school, and because of the real-life examples he used, his lectures had become legendary. He told the students it was a mistake to believe that judges enjoyed convicting people. “They do it when it is their duty, but they don’t do it when they have doubts.” The real meaning of judicial independence was that judges, too, wanted to be able to sleep at night. That was the point at which the students always laughed. Nonetheless, it was the truth; he had come across almost no exceptions.

The job of examining magistrate is perhaps the most interesting in the criminal justice system. You get a brief look into everything, you don’t have to put up with boring, long trials, and you aren’t obliged to listen to anyone else. But that is only one side of it. The other is the loneliness. The examining magistrate reaches his decisions alone. Everything depends on him: He sends a man to prison or sets him free. There are simpler ways of earning a living.

Lambrecht wasn’t exactly thrilled by defense attorneys. But then he wasn’t exactly thrilled by prosecutors, either. What interested him was the case, and he reached decisions that were hard to predict in advance. Most people complained about him; his massively oversize glasses and his pale lips gave him a strange look, but he commanded universal respect. At the celebration for his twentieth year on the job, he received a certificate from the president of the district court. The president asked him if he still enjoyed what he did after so many years. Lambrecht’s response was that he’d never enjoyed it. He was an independent man.

Lambrecht read the witnesses’ statements, and after he, too, failed to get the man to speak, he said he wanted to see the video. We had to watch it with him around a hundred times in succession. I could draw each frame by then; it went on for an eternity.

“Switch the thing off,” he finally said to the sergeant, and turned to face us. “Now, gentlemen, I’m listening.”

Kesting, naturally, had already provided the request for an arrest warrant, without which there would have been no meeting. He was applying for the man’s arrest for two instances of manslaughter, and stating that the man was a flight risk, as he had no provable identity. Kesting said, “It is certainly plausible that this was a situation involving self-defense. But excessive force was used.”

The prosecutor’s office was therefore going for a charge of so-called excessive self-defense. When you are attacked, you have the right to defend yourself, and there is no limit to your choice of means. You may respond to a fist with a cudgel, and to a knife with a gun; you are under no obligation to choose the mildest form of counterattack. But equally, you may not overreact: If you’ve already rendered your attacker helpless with a pistol shot, you may not cut off his head for good measure. The law does not tolerate such excesses.

“The excess was constituted by the man striking the knife that was already embedded in the victim’s chest,” said Kesting.

“Aha,” said Lambrecht. He sounded astonished. “And now defense counsel, please.”

“We all know this is madness,” I said. “Nobody is obliged to tolerate an assault with a knife, and of course he was allowed to defend himself in his fashion. And the DA’s office is certainly not occupied with these questions. DA Kesting is far too experienced to believe he could bring any such charge before a jury. He simply wants to establish the man’s identity, and needs the time to do so.”

“Is this so, Mr. Prosecutor?” asked Lambrecht.

“No,” said Kesting. “The prosecutor’s office does not file frivolous requests for arrest warrants.”

“Aha,” said the judge again. This time, it sounded ironic. He turned toward me. “And can you tell us who the man is?”

“Herr Lambrecht, you know I may do no such thing, even if I were able. But I can provide a viable address.” I had had another telephone conversation in the meantime with the lawyer who had engaged me. “The man can be summoned via a lawyer’s office, and I can verbally guarantee the lawyer’s agreement.” I handed over the address.

“You see!” exclaimed Kesting. “He declines to speak out. He knows much more, but he declines to speak out.”

“These legal proceedings are not against me,” I said. “But this is how we find ourselves: We do not know why the accused declines to speak. It’s possible he doesn’t understand our language. But it’s also possible that he’s declining to speak for some other—”

“He’s contravening paragraph one eleven of the law,” Kesting interrupted. “It is absolutely clear he’s contravening it.”

“Gentlemen, I would be grateful if you would take turns speaking,” said Lambrecht. “Paragraph one eleven states that every defendant must provide his or her particulars. In this, I agree with the district attorney’s office.” Lambrecht was taking off his glasses, putting them on again, taking them off again. “But this, of course, in no way constitutes a rule that justifies an order of arrest. Twelve hours are the limit during which a person may be detained simply for purposes of establishing the particulars of an identity. And these twelve hours, Mr. Prosecutor, have already long expired.”

“Besides which,” I said, “the accused is not always invariably obliged to provide all his particulars. If his truthful statements would expose him to the risk of criminal prosecution, he is allowed to remain silent. If the man were to say who he is, and if this were to lead to his arrest, then of course he has the right to remain silent.”

“There you have it,” said Kesting to the examining magistrate. “He will not tell us who he is, and there’s nothing we can do.”

“That’s how it is,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

The man sat on the bench, radiating indifference. He was wearing a shirt with my initials on it; I’d had it sent over to him. It fitted him, but it looked odd.

“Mr. Prosecutor,” said Lambrecht, “is there any prior relationship between the accused and the victims?”

“No, we have no such information,” said Kesting.

“Were the victims drunk?” Lambrecht was correct in this line of thought, too; in any situation involving self-defense, a drunk is to be avoided.

“Point zero four and point zero five blood-alcohol levels, respectively.”

“That’s insufficient,” said Lambrecht. “Have you found out anything about the perpetrator that is not yet in the files? Is there any evidence of another crime or another arrest warrant?” Lambrecht seemed to be ticking off a list.

“No,” said Kesting, knowing that every “No” was putting him further and further from his goal.

“Are there any ongoing inquiries?”

“Yes. The complete autopsy report has not yet been delivered.” Kesting was happy he had turned up something he could cite.

“Yes, well, the two of them are unlikely to have died of heatstroke, Herr Kesting.” Lambrecht’s voice now softened, a bad sign for the prosecutor’s office. “If the district attorney has nothing more to produce than what I have here on my table, I will now render my decision.”

Kesting shook his head.

“Gentlemen,” said Lambrecht, “I have heard enough.” He leaned back. “The issue of self-defense is more than clear. If someone is threatened with a knife and a baseball bat, if he’s stabbed and swung at, he is allowed to defend himself. He is allowed to defend himself in such a way that the attack is definitively ended, and the accused did no more than that.”

Lambrecht paused for a moment, then went on: “I agree with the district attorney that the case seems unusual. I can only say that I find the calm with which the accused faced the victims frightening. But I cannot recognize where the claim of excessive force resides. The correctness of this conclusion is also demonstrated by the fact that I would certainly have granted an order of arrest against the two attackers if they were in front of me now instead of lying on the pathologist’s table.”

Kesting clapped his files shut. The noise was too loud.

Lambrecht dictated into the records, “The district attorney’s request for an arrest warrant is hereby denied. The accused is to be released forthwith.” Then he turned to Kesting and me. “That’s all. Have a good evening.”

While the court recorder was preparing the release form, I went outside. Dalger was sitting on the visitor’s bench, waiting.

“Good evening. What are you doing here?” I asked. It’s unusual for a policeman to show such interest in the outcome of a legal proceeding.

“Is he out?”

“Yes. It was a clear case of self-defense.”

Dalger shook his head. “Thought so,” he said. He was a good policeman who hadn’t had any sleep for the last twenty-six hours. The business was obviously annoying him, and this was, obviously, equally unusual for him.

“What’s up?”

“Well, you don’t know about the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“The same morning your client was taken into custody, we found a dead body in Wilmersdorf. Stabbed in the heart. No fingerprints, no traces of DNA, no fibers, nothing. Everyone associated with the dead man has an alibi, and the seventy-two hours are running out.”

The seventy-two-hour rule states that the chances of solving a murder or manslaughter start to decline rapidly after seventy-two hours.

“What are you trying to say?”

“It was a professional job.”

“Stab wounds to the heart are not infrequent,” I said.

“Yes and no. At least they’re not this precise. Most people need to stab more than once, or the knife gets stuck in the ribs. It usually goes wrong.”

“And?”

“I have this feeling … your client …”

Naturally, it was more than a feeling. Every year, around 2,400 fatal crimes are recorded in Germany, approximately 140 of them in Berlin. That’s more than in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Cologne combined, but even with an annual success rate of 95 percent, that leaves seven cases a year in which the perpetrator is never caught. And here a man had just been released who fitted perfectly into Dalger’s theory.

“Herr Dalger, your feeling—” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he said, and turned away. I called after him that he should phone me if there were any new developments. Dalger muttered something incomprehensible, along the lines of “no cause … lawyers … always the same …,” and went home.

The man was released straight from the hearing room, he collected his money and the other objects, and I signed for him. We walked to my car and I drove him to the same station where he had killed two men thirty-five hours earlier. He got out without saying a word and disappeared into the crowd. I never saw him again.

A week later, I had a lunch date with the head of the corporate law firm. “So who is your key client who wanted an unknown man looked after?” I asked.

“I’m not permitted to tell you; you would know him. And I myself don’t know who the unknown man is. But I have something for you,” he said, and pulled out a bag. It held the shirt I’d given the man. It had been cleaned and ironed.

On the way to the parking lot, I threw it in the garbage.

Green

They had brought a sheep again. The four men stood around the animal in their rubber boots and stared at it. They had driven it into the courtyard of the manor house in the bed of a pickup truck, and now it was lying there in the drizzle on a sheet of blue plastic. The sheep’s throat had been cut and its mud-stained fleece was dotted with stab wounds. The crusted blood was gradually dissolving again in the rain, running across the plastic in thin red threads until it seeped away among the paving stones.

Death was no stranger to any of the men; they were livestock farmers, and every one of them had slaughtered animals before. But this dead body was giving them the shivers: The sheep was a Bleu-du-Maine, a vigorous breed with a bluish head and prominent eyes. The animal’s eyeballs had been gouged out and the rims of the dark eye sockets showed the frayed remains of the optic nerves and cords of muscle.

Count Nordeck greeted the men with a nod; nobody was in the mood to talk. He glanced briefly at the animal, shaking his head, then pulled a wallet out of his jacket pocket, counted out four hundred euros, and gave the money to one of the men. It was more than double what the sheep was worth. One of the farmers, capturing what every one of them was thinking, said, “This can’t go on.” As the men drove away from the yard, Nordeck turned up his coat collar. The farmers are right, he thought. I have to speak to him.

Angelika Petersson was a fat, contented woman. She had been the policewoman in Nordeck for twenty-two years, there had never been a killing in her parish in all that time, and she had never needed to draw her gun in the course of duty. Work was over for the day, and she’d completed the report on the drunk driver. She rocked her chair back and forth, enjoying the prospect of the weekend, despite the rain. She would finally get around to sticking the photos from her last vacation into the album.

When the bell rang, Petersson groaned. She pressed the buzzer; no one came through the door, so she got to her feet with a sigh and a curse and went out onto the street. She wanted to give an earful to the village boys who still thought this idiotic game of ringing bells was funny.

Petersson almost didn’t recognize Philipp von Nordeck standing on the sidewalk outside the guardhouse. It was pouring. Thick strands of wet hair hung down into his face, and his jacket was dripping mud and blood. He was holding the kitchen knife so tightly that his knucklebones stood out white. Water was running over the blade.

Philipp was nineteen, and Petersson had known him since he was a child. She walked up to him slowly, speaking to him soothingly and quietly, the way she had once talked to the horses on her father’s farm. She took the knife out of his hand and stroked his head; he made no protest. Then she put an arm around his shoulders, led him up the two shallow stone steps into the little building, and took him to the washroom.

“Just get yourself cleaned up; you look awful,” she said. She was no criminal detective, and she just felt sorry for Philipp.

He let the hot water run and run over his hands until they turned red and the mirror fogged up. Then he bent over and washed his face; blood and dirt sluiced into the washbasin and clogged the drain. He stared into the basin and whispered, “Eighteen.” Petersson didn’t understand him. She took him into the little guardroom where she had her desk. The air smelled of tea and floor polish.

“Now please tell me what happened,” said Petersson as she sat him down in the visitor’s chair. Philipp laid his forehead against the edge of her desk, closed his eyes, and said nothing.

“You know what, we’re going to call your father.”

Nordeck came at once, but the only thing Philipp said was “Eighteen. It was an eighteen.”

Petersson explained to the father that she would have to notify the local prosecutor’s office, as she didn’t know if something bad had happened, and Philipp wasn’t saying anything that made sense.

Nordeck nodded. “Of course,” he said, and thought, Here we go.

The district attorney mobilized two detectives from the nearest town. When they arrived, Petersson and Nordeck were drinking tea in the office. Philipp was sitting by the window, looking out, totally cut off.

The detectives gave him the usual formal notice that he was being taken into custody, then left him under Petersson’s charge. They wanted to go to the manor house with Nordeck to search Philipp’s room. Nordeck showed them the two rooms on the second floor that the boy occupied. While one of the policemen was taking a look around, Nordeck stood with the other in the entrance hall. The walls were hung with hundreds of antlers of native animals, and trophies from Africa. It was cold.

The policeman stood before the enormous stuffed head of a black buffalo from East Africa. Nordeck was trying to explain the thing with the sheep. “This is how it is,” he said, searching for the right words. “In the last few months, Philipp has killed some sheep. Well, he slit their throats. The farmers caught him at it once and told me about it.”

“Ah, slit their throats,” said the policeman. “These buffalo weigh more than twenty-five hundred pounds, don’t they?”

“Yes, they’re pretty dangerous. A lion doesn’t stand a chance against a full-grown specimen.”

“So, the boy slaughtered sheep, yes?” The detective could hardly tear himself away from the buffalo.

Nordeck took this to be a good sign. “Of course I paid compensation for the sheep, and we also wanted to have Philipp begin … But somehow we were hoping it would all blow over. We were wrong.” Better leave out the details about the stab wounds and the eyes, thought Nordeck.

“Why does he do it?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

“Sounds odd, no?”

“Yes, it’s odd. We have to do something with him,” Nordeck said again.

“Looks that way. Do you know what happened today?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, was it another sheep?” asked the detective. He simply couldn’t leave the buffalo alone, and had put his hands on the horns.

“Yes, one of the farmers called my cell phone a little while ago. He’s found another.”

The policeman nodded absentmindedly. He was annoyed at having to spend his Friday evening with a sheep killer, but the buffalo wasn’t bad at all. He asked Nordeck if he could go to police headquarters in town on Monday to give a brief statement. He’d had enough of paperwork and wanted to get home.

“Of course,” said Nordeck.

The second detective came down the stairs holding an old cigar box with
VILLIGER KIEL
on it in brownish-yellow lettering.

“We have to impound this box,” he said.

Nordeck realized that the policeman’s voice had suddenly taken on an official tone. Even the latex gloves he was wearing somehow conveyed a new formality. “If you think so,” said Nordeck. “What’s in there? Philipp doesn’t even smoke.”

“I found this box behind a loose tile in the bathroom,” said the policeman. Nordeck was angered by the very idea that there were loose tiles in the house at all. The policeman cautiously opened the box. His colleague and Nordeck leaned forward, then immediately recoiled.

The box was lined with plastic and divided into two compartments. An eyeball, somewhat compressed and still a little wet, stared out of each compartment. A photograph of a girl was glued to the inside of the lid—Nordeck recognized her immediately: It was Sabine, the daughter of Gerike, the elementary school teacher. She had celebrated her sixteenth birthday the previous day. Philipp had been there, and he had often talked about her before. Nordeck had assumed his son had fallen in love with her. But now he blanched: The girl in the picture had no eyes—they’d been cut out.

Nordeck, hands trembling, hunted for the teacher’s phone number in his address book. He held the receiver so that the policemen could listen in. Gerike was surprised by the phone call. No, Sabine was not at home. She had gone on directly after the birthday party to visit a friend in Munich. No, she hadn’t yet checked in, but that was nothing unusual.

Gerike tried to calm Nordeck: “Everything’s okay. Philipp took her to the night train.”

The police questioned two employees at the train station, they turned Nordeck’s house upside down, and they interviewed everyone who’d been at the birthday party. It all produced nothing about where Sabine might actually be.

The pathologist examined the eyes in the cigar box. They were sheep’s eyes. And the blood on Philipp’s clothing was animal blood.

A few hours after Philipp’s arrest, a farmer found another sheep behind his farmyard. He loaded it onto his shoulders and carried it down the village street in the rain all the way to the police station. The animal’s fleece was saturated; it was heavy. Blood and water streamed down over the farmer’s waxed jacket. He threw the carcass down onto the steps of the station house; the wet fleece smacked against the door and left a dark stain on the wood.

Halfway between the manor house and the village, which consisted of roughly two hundred low houses, a narrow path branched off and led to the abandoned reed-thatched Friesian house on the dike. By day, it was the focal point of children’s games; by night, couples met under the pergola. You could hear the sea from here, and the crying of the gulls.

The detectives found Sabine’s cell phone in the wet beach grass, and, not far from it, a hair band. Sabine had been wearing it the evening of her birthday, her father said. The area was sealed off and a hundred policemen combed the marshland with their bloodhounds. Crime-scene investigators in their white overalls were summoned and did a search for further evidence, but they found nothing more.

The army of policemen also attracted the press to Nordeck, and anyone who set foot out on the street got interviewed by them. Almost no one left the house anymore, curtains stayed closed, and even the village tavern remained empty. Only the journalists with their garish computer bags filled the tables in the bar, laptops open, cursing the slow Internet connection and stringing one another along with invented pieces of news.

It had been raining uninterruptedly for days, at night the mist pressed down heavily on the roofs of the low houses, and even the cattle seemed to be morose. The villagers talked about it all, and they no longer greeted Nordeck when they saw him.

On the fifth day after Philipp’s arrest, the PR man in the district attorney’s office issued a photograph of Sabine to the newspapers, along with an appeal for information as to her whereabouts. The next day, someone smeared the word
murderer
in red on the wooden gate to the manor house.

Philipp was in jail. For the first three days, he said almost nothing, and the few words he did utter were incomprehensible. On the fourth day, he pulled himself together. The police took his statement; he was open and answered their questions. It was only when they tried to talk about the sheep that he hung his head and fell silent. Naturally, the detectives were more interested in Sabine, but Philipp kept repeating his explanation that he’d taken her to the train station. Before that, they’d gone to the house on the dike and talked. “Like friends,” he said. Maybe that was when she’d mislaid her cell phone and the hair band. He had done nothing to her. There was nothing more to be pried out of him. And he didn’t want to speak to the psychiatrist.

District Attorney Krauther led the interrogations. He slept so badly in the course of those days that his wife told him at breakfast he was grinding his teeth at night. His problem was that nothing had apparently gone on prior to this. Philipp von Nordeck had killed some sheep, but that was no more than property damage, technically speaking, and an offense against animal-protection laws. There had been no claim for financial damages, the sheep had been paid for by his father, and none of the farmers had filed charges. Sabine had not, indeed, arrived at her friend’s in Munich. “But she’s a young girl, and the fact that she hasn’t been heard from could be for any number of innocent reasons,” Krauther said to his wife. The cigar box was no proof, in and of itself, that Philipp had murdered the girl, even if the examining magistrate had accepted the premise of the prosecutor’s application for an arrest warrant thus far. Krauther felt uneasy.

Because there weren’t many cases out here in the country that raised these sorts of questions, Philipp’s medical examination at least had gone quickly. No results indicating brain malfunction, no disease of the central nervous system, and no anomalies of the chromosomes. But, thought Krauther, he is, of course, absolutely insane.

When I had my first meeting with the district attorney, it was six days after the arrest, and the review of his remand in custody was due the next day. Krauther looked tired, but he seemed pleased to be able to share his thoughts with somebody. “Aberrant behavior,” he said, “has a tendency to escalate rather rapidly. If his victims have thus far been limited to sheep, couldn’t they now be people?”

Wilfred Rasch established a reputation unchallenged in his lifetime as the doyen of forensic psychiatry. The view that aberrant behavior intensifies over time is one of his scientific theories. But from everything we knew thus far about Philipp’s acts, it struck me as unlikely that we were dealing with such an aberration.

Before my conversation with Krauther, I had talked to the veterinarian who, on orders from Nordeck, had destroyed the animals’ remains. The police had had better things to do than interview this man, or perhaps quite simply nobody had thought to do so. The vet was a meticulous observer, and the incidents had struck him as so bizarre that he had written a short report on every dead sheep. I gave his notes to the district attorney, who made a rapid survey. Each sheep gave evidence of eighteen stab wounds. Krauther looked at me. The policemen had also mentioned that Philipp had uttered nothing but the word
eighteen
. So it might have to do with the number itself in some way.

I said I did not think Philipp exhibited deviant sexual behavior. The pathologist had examined the last sheep, but had found no evidence that Philipp had been sexually aroused by the killing of the animals. There was no sperm and no sign that he had penetrated the sheep.