Snow White Must Die (37 page)

“If you’d listened to me back then and buried the tire iron in the woods instead of grabbing it with your bare hands and throwing it in Sartorius’s cesspool, nothing would have happened,” she said. “But you wanted to be clever. And because of you Tobias went to prison. Because of you, not because of me!”

He flinched at her onslaught of words as if she’d lashed him with a whip. “I made a mistake, Dani! I was under so much pressure, my God!”

“You fucked an underage schoolgirl,” she reminded him in an icy voice. “And now you come here in all seriousness and demand that I get rid of an eyewitness, who happens to be a patient of mine and the son of our neighbor! What kind of person are you, anyway?”

“I’m not demanding that of you,” Gregor Lauterbach whispered. “I just want to talk to Thies. That’s all. He simply has to continue to keep his mouth shut. You’re his doctor, they’ll let you in to see him.”

“No.” Daniela Lauterbach shook her head. “I’m not going to get involved. Leave the boy alone. He’s got enough problems. Actually it would be best if you removed yourself from the scene for a while. Go to the house in Deauville until things have settled down here.”

“But the police have arrested Claudius,” Gregor Lauterbach told her.

“I know.” She nodded. “And I ask myself why. What did you really do on Saturday night, you and Claudius?”

“Please, Dani,” he pleaded. He slipped off the chair and got down on his knees before her. “Let me talk to Thies.”

“He won’t answer you.”

“Maybe he will. If you’re there.”

“Not a chance.” She looked down at her husband cowering in front of her like a scared little boy. Once again he had lied to her and betrayed her. Her friends had prophesied even before the wedding that it would turn out like this. Gregor was twenty years younger, he was strikingly handsome, an eloquent speaker, and possessed plenty of charisma. Women worshiped him because they saw something in him that he was not. Only she knew how weak he really was. That’s where she got her power, as well as from his dependence on her. She had forgiven him under the condition that nothing like that would ever happen again. A relationship with a schoolgirl was taboo. His ever-changing parade of lovers, on the other hand, didn’t interest her at all—she found it amusing. Only she knew his secrets, his fears and insecurities. In fact, she knew him much better than she knew herself.

“Please,” he continued to beg, looking at her with big, pleading eyes. “Help me, Dani. Don’t leave me in the lurch! You know what’s at stake for me!”

Daniela Lauterbach heaved a deep sigh. Her determination not to help him dissolved into thin air. As always. She couldn’t stay mad at him for long. And this time there really was a lot at stake; he was right about that. She bent down to him, stroked his head, and dug her fingers into his thick, soft hair.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do. But now pack your things and go to France for a few days, until everything is sorted out, okay?”

He looked up at her, grabbed her hand, and kissed it.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you, Dani. I don’t know what I would ever do without you.”

She smiled. Her anger at him had ebbed away. She felt a deep, peaceful joy rise up inside. Equilibrium had been restored, and she would conquer the threat from outside effortlessly—as long as Gregor was smart enough to appreciate what she was doing for him.

*   *   *

“The cultural minister?” Pia had expected a completely different answer from her colleague and was flabbergasted. “How do you know him?”

“My wife is his wife’s cousin,” Andreas Hasse explained. “We see each other a lot at family gatherings. Besides, we’re both in the men’s glee club in Altenhain.”

“Oh great,” said Bodenstein. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you, Hasse.”

Andreas Hasse looked at him and stuck out his chin defiantly. “Really?” he replied in a trembling voice. “I had no idea that
I
could disappoint you, since you’ve never shown any interest in me.”

“Excuse me?” Bodenstein raised his eyebrows.

And then it came bubbling out of Hasse, now that he realized his days in K-11 were numbered.

“You’ve never said more than three sentences to me. I was supposed to become the head of K-11, but then you showed up from Frankfurt, so arrogant and smug. First you turned the whole place upside down, as if it was all rotten—everything that we dumb hick policemen had done before. You don’t give a damn about any of us! Just a bunch of stupid cops, far inferior to the noble Herr
von
Bodenstein,” Hasse retorted. “You’ll find out soon enough where it gets you. People are already planning to pull the rug out from under you.”

Bodenstein looked at Hasse as if he’d spit in his face. Pia was the first to come to her senses.

“Are you off your rocker?” she laid into her colleague.

He laughed caustically. “You’d better watch out. At the station everybody has known for a long time that you two have something going on! That’s at least as much of a breach of regulations as Frank’s moonlighting job.”

“Shut your trap!” Pia snarled. Hasse grinned lewdly.

“I knew from the start that something was going on. The others didn’t notice it until recently, when you started calling each other by your first names.”

Bodenstein turned and left the house without a word. Pia made a couple more furious remarks to Hasse, then followed her boss. He wasn’t in the car. She walked down the street and found him over by the woods, sitting on a bench with his face buried in his hands. Pia hesitated, but then went over to him and sat down quietly next to him. The wood of the bench was glittering with moisture from the fog.

“Don’t listen to that crazy shit. He’s just a bitter, frustrated idiot,” she said. Bodenstein didn’t answer.

“Am I doing anything right?” he murmured dully after a while. “Hasse is plotting with the cultural minister and stealing transcripts from the files. Behnke has been working in secret for a year in a bar and I didn’t even know it. My wife has been cheating on me for months with another guy…”

He raised his head, and Pia had to swallow hard when she saw the expression of abysmal despair on his face.

“Why didn’t I see any of this? Am I really so arrogant? And how am I supposed to do my job if I can’t straighten out my own life?”

Pia regarded the sharp contours of his profile and felt genuine sympathy for him. What Hasse and other people interpreted as arrogance and smugness was just Bodenstein’s personality. He didn’t get involved, never took advantage of his authority. And even though he might be extremely curious, he would never dream of asking his subordinates indiscreet questions. That was not indifference, it was restraint.

“I didn’t know about Behnke’s bartending job either,” Pia said softly. “And the fact that Hasse stole the transcripts bowled me over too.” She grinned. “I didn’t even know about our secret relationship.”

Bodenstein uttered an inarticulate sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. Then he shook his head, discouraged.

“I have the feeling my whole life is falling apart.” He was staring into space. “I can’t think about anything but the fact that Cosima is cheating on me with another guy. Why? What was she missing? Did I do something wrong?”

He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands behind his head. Pia bit her lip. What should she say to him? Was there any consolation for him at all in this situation? She hesitated a moment and then put her hand on his arm and squeezed it gently.

“Maybe you did do something wrong,” she said. “But when there are problems in a relationship, it’s never the fault of just one person. Instead of looking for explanations, you should think about how you can fix things.”

Bodenstein rubbed the back of his neck and straightened up.

“I had to look at the calendar to remember when I slept with her last,” he said with sudden bitterness. “But it’s not easy with a small child who keeps running in.”

Pia was uncomfortable talking about this. Even though her own relationship in the past year had become much more intimate than before, she still felt it was embarrassing to talk about such matters with her boss. She got her cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and held out the pack to him. He took a cigarette, lit it, and took a few drags before he went on.

“How long has this been going on? How many nights have I lain beside her like a clueless dope while she was thinking about her other guy? The thought of it makes me sick.”

Ah, from despair gradually comes anger. That was good. Pia lit another cigarette.

“Just ask her,” she advised him. “It would be best to ask her right away. Then you won’t have to keep driving yourself crazy.”

“And then what? When she tells me the truth? Oh, shit! I’d like to … cheat on her too.” He broke off and ground the cigarette under his heel.

“Then do it. Maybe then you’d feel better.”

“Are you trying to give me advice?” Bodenstein looked at Pia in surprise, and a hint of a smile played around the corners of his mouth.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone else is giving you any,” she said. “In school I had a boyfriend who broke up with me. I wanted to kill myself, I was so unhappy. My friend Miriam forced me to go to a party with her, and some guy came over to me. He couldn’t stop complimenting me. So, okay. After that I felt better. There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

Bodenstein’s cell phone rang. At first he ignored it, but finally he took it out of his pocket with a sigh and answered.

“It was Fachinger,” he told Pia after he hung up. “Hartmut Sartorius called. Tobias has come home.”

He got up from the bench.

“I hope we can still catch him. Sartorius called two hours ago, but the detective on duty just told Fachinger now.”

*   *   *

The gate to the Sartorius place was wide open. They crossed the courtyard and rang the doorbell, but nothing happened.

“The door is ajar,” said Pia, and pushed it open.

“Hello?” she called into the house. “Mr. Sartorius? Tobias?”

No answer. She went a few steps into the hall and called his name again.

“He must have taken off.” Disappointed, she turned around and went back to Bodenstein, who was waiting outside. “And his father isn’t home either. What a pisser.”

“Let’s look around back in the yard.” Bodenstein pulled out his cell. “I’ll call for backup.”

Pia walked around the house. Tobias Sartorius had come back to Altenhain on the day of Laura Wagner’s funeral. He wasn’t at the cemetery, of course, but during the graveside ceremony the studio of Thies Terlinden had gone up in flames—with the help of an accelerant, as the fire department and the arson squad had determined. Didn’t it make sense that Tobias had set fire to the orangerie and then taken off?

“… no sirens, got it?” Pia heard Bodenstein say. She waited until he stood next to her.

“Tobias knew that the whole village would be at the cemetery and he could set the fire unobserved,” she told him her hunch. “I just don’t understand why his father called us.”

“Me neither,” Bodenstein admitted. He glanced around the barnyard. During previous visits the gate and all the doors had been carefully locked, which was understandable given all the threats and the attack on Tobias. How come everything now stood wide open? Just as they turned the corner of the house, they noticed a movement up in the farm area. Two men disappeared through the rear gate and a little later car doors slammed and an engine roared to life. Suddenly Pia had a bad feeling.

“That was probably Tobias and his father.” She reached inside her jacket and pulled out her service weapon from her holster. “There’s something fishy going on here.”

She cautiously opened the door to the milk room and peered inside. Then she went over to the old cowshed. At the open door they both signaled to keep quiet. Pia raised her pistol and went inside the stall. She looked around and froze. On a stool in the corner sat Tobias Sartorius. His eyes were closed and he was leaning against the wall.

“Shit,” Pia murmured. “I think we’re too late.”

*   *   *

Eight steps from the door to the wall. Four steps from the opposite wall to the bookshelf. Her eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness, her nose to the stale, moldy smell. During the day a little light came through a tiny crack above the narrow cellar window that was sealed off with something from the outside. At least she could tell whether it was day or night. The two candles had burned down long ago, but she knew what was in the box on the shelf. Four bottles of water were still left; she had to ration them carefully because she had no idea how long they would have to last. The crackers had slowly dwindled, just like the canned sausage and chocolate. That’s all there was. At least she would lose a few pounds while she was here, wherever “here” was.

Most of the time she was so tired, so tired, that she simply fell asleep without being able to fight it off. When she was awake sometimes she’d be overcome by such despair that she’d pound her fists against the door, crying and yelling for help. After that she would fall back into melancholy indifference, lying for hours on the stinking mattress, and try to imagine life outside, the faces of Thies and Tobias. She recited poems to herself from memory, she did pushups and tai chi exercises—not easy to keep her balance in the dark—or sang as loud as she could all the songs she knew, just to keep from going nuts in this dank dungeon.

Eventually somebody would come and get her out of here. She was sure of that. It couldn’t be right that the Lord would let her die even before her eighteenth birthday. Amelie curled up on the mattress and stared into the darkness. One of the last pieces of chocolate was slowly melting on her tongue. Simply chewing and swallowing it would have felt like a crime. A leaden fatigue was creeping up inside her, sucking her memories and thoughts into a black hole. Over and over again she brooded about what had actually happened. How did she get to this horrible place? The last thing she remembered was that she had tried in vain to reach Tobias. But she couldn’t think of why.

*   *   *