Snow White Must Die (12 page)

“Whoa,” she said, simultaneously impressed and astonished. “That’s so cool.”

*   *   *

Fourteen well-worn file folders had been borrowed from the archives of Frankfurt police headquarters and were now in boxes next to Pia Kirchhoff’s desk. In 1997 the Division of Violent Crimes in the Main-Taunus region didn’t exist yet. In cases of homicide, rape, and manslaughter, Division K-11 in Frankfurt had been in charge until the reform of the Hesse state police a few years ago. But studying the documents would have to wait. Dr. Nicola Engel had called one of the useless team meetings that she loved so much, set to begin at four o’clock.

It was hot and sticky in the conference room. Since there was nothing spectacular on the day’s agenda, the mood of the participants ranged from sleepy to bored. Outside the windows the rain was pouring down from an overcast sky, and it was already getting dark.

“The surveillance photo of the unknown man is being released to the press today,” said the commissioner. “Somebody is bound to recognize him and call in.”

Andreas Hasse, who had shown up for work this morning, pale and taciturn, sneezed.

“Why don’t you just stay home instead of spreading your cold to the rest of us?” said Kai Ostermann irritably. He was sitting right next to Hasse, who didn’t answer.

“Is there anything else?” Dr. Nicola Engel’s attentive gaze moved from one person to the next, but her subordinates wisely avoided direct eye contact. She always seemed able to look right into their heads. With her seismographic senses she had been noticing the subliminal tension in the air for some time, and now she was trying to pinpoint the cause.

“I’ve gotten hold of the documents in the Sartorius case,” said Kirchhoff. “Somehow I have the feeling that the attack on Mrs. Cramer might be directly connected to the release of Tobias Sartorius. The people we talked to in Altenhain today recognized the man in the photo, but they all denied it. They’re trying to protect him.”

“Is that your view of things too?” asked Dr. Engel, turning to Bodenstein, who had been staring into space the whole time.

“That is entirely possible.” He nodded. “Their reaction did seem odd.”

“Good.” Dr. Engel looked at Kirchhoff. “Look through the documents, but don’t spend too much time on it. We’re also expecting to get the results on the skeleton from forensics, and that case takes precedence.”

“They hate Tobias Sartorius in Altenhain,” said Kirchhoff. “They’ve painted graffiti on his father’s house, and when we got there on Saturday to report the news of the accident, three women were standing across the street hurling curses at him.”

“I met that guy once.” Hasse cleared his throat a couple of times. “This Sartorius was a cold-blooded killer. An arrogant, smug pretty boy who wanted everybody to believe that he’d suffered a blackout and couldn’t remember a thing. But the evidence was clear. He kept lying all the way to the slammer.”

“But he’s served his time. He has a right to rejoin society,” Kirchhoff countered. “And the attitude of the townspeople makes me mad. Why are they lying? Who are they protecting?”

“You think you’ll be able to figure that out from reading the old files?” Hasse shook his head. “The guy killed his girlfriend when she broke up with him, and because his former girlfriend witnessed it, she had to die too.”

Pia wondered about this unusual display of fervor from her colleague, who was normally rather indifferent.

“That’s possible,” she said. “And he did ten years for it. But maybe the old records of the trial will tell me who pushed Rita Cramer off that bridge.”

“Do you really want to—” Hasse began, but Dr. Engel put a firm stop to the discussion.

“Ms. Kirchhoff will look through the documents until we have the facts about the skeleton.”

Since there was nothing else to discuss, the meeting was adjourned. Dr. Engel went back to her office, and the rest of K-11 dispersed.

“I have to go home,” said Oliver out of the blue, after glancing at his watch. Pia decided to drive home too, taking some of the files with her. Nothing of any importance was going to be happening here.

*   *   *

“Shall I carry the suitcase into the house, Minister?” asked the chauffeur, but Gregor Lauterbach shook his head.

“Never mind, I’ll get it.” He smiled. “You’d better be getting home now, Forthuber. I’ll need you at eight tomorrow morning.”

“Very good, sir. Good night, then, Minister.”

Lauterbach nodded and grabbed the small suitcase. He hadn’t been home in three days. First he’d had appointments in Berlin, then the cultural ministers’ conference in Stralsund where his colleagues from Baden-Württemberg and Nordrhein-Westfalen had squabbled fiercely about the establishment of guidelines to meet the need for teachers. He heard the telephone ring as he opened the front door and turned off the alarm with a flick of the wrist. The answering machine switched on, but the caller didn’t take the trouble to leave a message. Gregor Lauterbach set down his suitcase in front of the stairs, turned on the light, and went into the kitchen. He glanced at the mail piled on the kitchen table, neatly divided into two stacks by the housekeeper. Daniela wasn’t home yet. If he remembered correctly, tonight she was giving a speech at a physicians’ congress in Marburg. Lauterbach went farther into the living room and studied the bottles on the sideboard for a while before he decided on a forty-two-year-old Black Bowmore scotch. A gift from somebody who was trying to butter him up. He opened the bottle and poured a double shot into a glass. Since he’d become cultural minister in Wiesbaden, he and Daniela saw each other only by chance or to coordinate their appointment calendars. They hadn’t slept in the same bed for ten years. Lauterbach kept a secret apartment in Idstein, where he met a discreet lover once a week. He had made it crystal clear to her from the outset that he had no intention of ever divorcing Daniela, so the topic never came up when they were together. Whether Daniela had some sort of relationship going as well, he had no idea, and he wasn’t going to ask her about it. He loosened his tie, removed his suit jacket and tossed it over the back of the sofa, taking a sip of the whisky. The telephone rang again. Three times, then the answering machine went on.

“Gregor.” The male voice had an urgent tone. “If you’re home, please pick up. It’s extremely important!”

Lauterbach hesitated for a moment. He knew that voice. Everything seemed to be extremely important all the time. But finally he sighed and picked up the receiver. The caller wasted no time in pleasantries. As Lauterbach listened, he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He straightened up involuntarily. A feeling of foreboding attacked him as suddenly as a raptor.

“Thanks for calling,” he said in a hoarse voice and hung up. He stood there as if paralyzed in the dim light. A skeleton in Eschborn. Tobias Sartorius back in Altenhain. His mother had been pushed off a bridge by an unknown assailant. And a zealous officer from K-11 in Hofheim was rummaging through old files. Damn. The expensive whisky took on a bitter taste. He carelessly put down the glass and hurried upstairs to his bedroom. It might not mean anything. It could all be a coincidence, he tried to reassure himself. But in vain.

Lauterbach sat down on the bed, took off his shoes, and fell back onto the covers. A torrent of unwelcome images rushed through his head. How could a single insignificant error in judgment have produced such catastrophic repercussions? He closed his eyes. Exhaustion crept through his body. His thoughts slipped from the present along tangled paths into the world of dreams and memories.
White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony …

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

“The skeleton is that of a girl who at the time of death was between fifteen and eighteen years old.” Dr. Henning Kirchhoff was in a hurry. He had to catch a plane to London, where he was expected to testify as an expert witness at a criminal trial. Bodenstein was sitting in a chair in front of the ME’s desk, listening as Dr. Kirchhoff packed the necessary documents in his briefcase and held forth on fused basilar sutures, partially fused iliac crests, and other indicators of aging.

“How long has she been inside the tank?” Bodenstein interrupted him at last.

“Ten to fifteen years max.” The medical examiner stepped over to the light box and tapped on one of the X-rays. “She once had a broken arm. You can clearly see a healed fracture here.”

Bodenstein stared at the photo. The bones glowed white against the black background.

“Ah yes, and there’s something else that’s very interesting…” Dr. Kirchhoff wasn’t the sort of person to blurt out the information. Even when pressed for time he was still able to make his report suspenseful. He looked through a few X-rays, holding them up against the light of the box, and then hung up the one he wanted next to the negative of the humerus. “The first bicuspids on the right and left side of the upper jaw had been extracted, probably because her jaw was too small.”

“And what does that mean?”

“That we saved your people some work.” Dr. Kirchhoff fixed Bodenstein with his gaze. “That is, when we correlated the dental chart data in the computer with the list of missing women, we got a match. The girl was reported missing in 1997. We also compared our X-rays with antemortem X-rays of the missing girl—and look here…,” he said, hanging another negative on the light box, “here we have the fracture when it was still relatively fresh.”

Bodenstein was growing impatient, but it suddenly dawned on him who it was that the workman at the old airfield in Eschborn had happened to dig up. Ostermann had made up a list of girls and young women who had disappeared in the past fifteen years and were never found. At the top stood the names of the two girls that Tobias Sartorius had murdered.

“Since there are no other organic materials available,” Dr. Kirchhoff went on, “sequencing was impossible, but we were able to extract the mitochondrial DNA and got a second hit. As far as the girl from the tank is concerned, she’s…”

He stopped talking, went around his desk, and rummaged through one of the many mountains of documents.

“Laura Wagner or Stefanie Schneeberger,” Bodenstein surmised. Dr. Kirchhoff looked up with a peeved smile.

“You’re a spoilsport, Bodenstein,” he said. “Just for jumping the gun like that and messing up my story, I ought to keep you in suspense until I get back from London. But since you’re kind enough to drive me to the S-Bahn station in this awful weather, I’ll tell you on the way which one the skeleton belongs to.”

*   *   *

Pia Kirchhoff was sitting at her desk, brooding. She had stayed up late the night before studying the files and had stumbled upon several inconsistencies. The facts in the Tobias Sartorius case were clear, the evidence against him unambiguous at first glance. Yet when she read the transcripts of the interviews, Pia couldn’t help thinking of questions to which she found no answers. Tobias Sartorius had been twenty years old when he was sentenced to the most severe punishment under juvenile criminal law for the manslaughter of then seventeen-year-old Stefanie Schneeberger and the murder of Laura Wagner, also seventeen. A neighbor had witnessed the two girls entering the house of the Sartorius family within a few minutes of each other late in the evening of September 6, 1997. Tobias and his ex-girlfriend Laura Wagner had already had a loud argument out on the street. Before that all three had been at the fair where, according to witnesses, they had consumed considerable quantities of alcohol. The court had found Tobias guilty of killing his girlfriend Stefanie Schneeberger in the heat of the moment with a tire iron. He had then killed his ex-girlfriend Laura, who had witnessed the crime. Judging by the amount of Laura’s blood found everywhere in the house, on Tobias’s clothes, and in the trunk of the car, the murder must have been committed with extreme brutality. Clear indications of a gruesome killing had then been concealed. In a search of the property, Stefanie’s backpack was found in Tobias’s room; Laura’s necklace was in the milk room under the sink; and finally the murder weapon, the tire iron, was discovered in the cesspool behind the cow stalls. The defense argument that after the altercation Stefanie had forgotten her backpack in her boyfriend’s room was dismissed as irrelevant. Later, shortly after 11:00
P.M.
, witnesses had seen Tobias driving out of Altenhain in his car. But around 11:45 his friends Jörg Richter and Felix Pietsch said they had spoken with him at his front door! They said he was covered in blood and refused to come back to the fair with them.

Pia had stumbled across this discrepancy in the chronology. The court had assumed that Tobias removed the bodies of the two girls in the trunk of his car. But what could he have done in a mere three-quarters of an hour? Pia took a swig of coffee and rested her chin in her hand, deep in thought. Her colleagues had been very thorough, interviewing almost every inhabitant of Altenhain in the course of their investigation. And yet she had a vague feeling that something had been overlooked.

The door opened and her colleague Hasse appeared in the doorway. His face was a ghastly white; only his nose glowed red and inflamed from constantly blowing it.

“So,” said Pia. “Are you feeling better?”

In reply Hasse sneezed twice in rapid succession, then inhaled with a sniffle and shrugged his shoulders.

“Jeez, Andreas, go home.” Pia shook her head. “Climb into bed and get well. There’s nothing happening here anyway.”

“How far have you gotten with that stuff?” He nodded suspiciously toward the files stacked on the floor next to Pia’s desk. “Did you find anything?”

Again she wondered about his interest, but he was probably just afraid she was going to ask him for help.

“Depends on your point of view,” she said. “At first glance everything seems to have been very carefully checked. But something doesn’t quite jibe. Who led the investigation back then?”

“Detective Chief Superintendent Brecht from K-11 in Frankfurt,” said Hasse. “But if you wanted to talk to him, you’re a year too late. He died last winter. I went to the funeral.”