Damn it, what wouldn’t I give for a cigarette at this moment...
Instinctively, I felt for the nicotine patch on my right arm. I was holding the phone wedged between my chin and my neck.
‘That’s a low blow, Alex,’ Nicci said after a short pause. ‘You didn’t even leave Julian enough money for a cab.’
‘Because I’ve lost my wallet someplace. Shit happens, for God’s sake.’
‘In your world, Alex,’ she replied, ‘in your world disasters follow one another in quick succession. It’s those bad vibes of yours.’
‘Please don’t start that again!’
My hands were trembling. I tried to calm down by wrapping them more tightly around the steering wheel. My nerves had got even worse since I’d tried to give up smoking.
In spite of that itchy plaster on my triceps.
‘It’s your negative energy,’ she said, sounding almost compassionate. ‘You positively attract evil.’
‘I only write about it. I report the facts. There’s a psychopath on the loose who destroys families in such an atrocious way, even the scandal sheet I work for doesn’t dare print all the details.’
He plays the oldest children’s game in the world – hide-and-seek – and he plays it until an entire family comes to grief. He plays it until death.
My eyes strayed to the old newspaper lying on the passenger seat. I had written the headline myself:
THE EYE COLLECTOR STRIKES AGAIN!
CHILD NO. 3 FOUND DEAD
Like my former occupation as a police negotiator, my job at the paper had often taxed my powers of endurance to the limit. But the case of the Eye Collector had lent a new dimension to the word horror. He killed the mothers of the children he kidnapped and then gave the fathers a few hours to find their offspring before they asphyxiated in a hideaway to which he’d conveyed them. Throw in the fact that the psychopath removed the left eye from each little corpse, and you had a case which truly transcended the bounds of what was conceivable.
Nicci continued to pontificate. ‘Negative thoughts find expression in reality,’ she said. ‘Positive thinking breeds positive experiences.’
‘Positive thinking? Are you completely off your trolley? The Eye Collector has already struck three times.’ Six dead: three women, two little girls, one boy. ‘You think the madman will stop if I pull over on to the hard shoulder and meditate for a bit? No, better still, maybe I’ll simply place an order with the Universe, like it says in that book on your bedside table.’ I was talking myself into a rage. ‘Or I’ll call one of those astrology hotlines you waste a fortune on. Maybe the housewife at the other end take a quick look at her tea leaves and see where the Eye Collector is hiding?’
A click signalled an incoming call. I removed the mobile from my ear and checked the display.
‘Don’t hang up,’ I told Nicci, and gratefully put her on hold.
79
‘Hello, Alex. It’s me, your favourite trainee.’
Frank Lahmann.
If he’d caught me at a better moment I’d have said, ‘Favourite trainee? You mean you’ve quit?’ But I wasn’t in the mood for banter, so I left it at a curt ‘Hello.’
‘I hate to disturb your slumbers, Alex, but Thea wants to know if you’ll be attending the midday conference.’
Most of my colleagues on the paper had problems with Frank’s bumptious manner. Personally, I was fond of the twenty-one-year-old rookie, perhaps because we shared the same wavelength spanning the generation gap between us. Most of the young staff in our editorial offices were there for the wrong reasons. They thought it was cool to work in the media and hoped one day to be in the public eye as much as the stories they worked on. Frank was different. Journalism was a vocation to him, not a job, and he would probably have stuck with it even if the paper had cut his salary. Considering the amount of voluntary overtime he put in, his current hourly rate was on a par with that of a Somalian field-hand.
Once upon a time, when I was reading a novel and came across the words ‘You remind me of myself at your age’, I would roll my eyes and dismiss them as sentimental rubbish. A month ago, however, when I found my trainee’s sleeping bag in the copy room, I caught myself thinking just that. Frank reminded me of myself as a trainee policeman: utterly obsessed, pathologically hard-working, and – on occasion – thoroughly disrespectful to my mentor.
‘I’m to tell you’d better come up with a few facts that haven’t been gathering dust on our competitors’ websites. Otherwise – and I quote the she-dragon’s actual words – “I’ll have his guts for garters.”’
Frank sounded even more wound-up than usual, probably because of all the cups of coffee he was bound to have already poured down his throat.
The editorial conference.
I groaned softly. ‘Please tell our esteemed editor I won’t be able to make it today.’
Yet again...
He chuckled. ‘Well, it’s your funeral, but woe betide you if Thea takes it out on me and sends me to cover the Angling Club’s annual press conference or some such crap.’
‘She can forget that. I need you today.’
Frank let loose a nervous cough. At that moment he was presumably peering over his computer screen at the editor’s glassed-in office and looking conspiratorial.
‘So what do you want me to do, Mr President?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘Go to my desk. In one of the drawers – the bottom left, I think – you’ll find fifty euros and a credit card with a rubber band round them.’
All I heard for a while was a hiss of static and the noises typical of an open-plan newsroom.
‘Who are you trying to impress? There are only twenty euros and a green Amex. It’s not even gold.’
‘I need you to bring them to me, pronto. I’ve lost my wallet and I’m nearly out of petrol.’
‘Your wallet, eh? What a bugger.’
I heard an office chair creak and had a vision of Frank sitting down at my desk in his standard telephone pose: mobile clamped between chin and collarbone, both elbows on the desk and hands clasped behind his shaven head.
‘Did it at least contain a photo of a child?’
Of Julian?
‘My wallet, you mean? No.’ I was faintly puzzled.
‘That’s bad. Very bad.’
He cleared his throat, always a prelude to a monologue on his part. The driver of the minibus just ahead of me switched lanes for no good reason, distracting me, and I missed the chance to nip Frank’s lecture in the bud.
‘According to a study undertaken by the University of Hertfordshire, lost wallets and purses tend to be handed in to the police if there’s something personal in them. Snaps of little children, wives or puppies, for example.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said, but he didn’t appear to notice the sarcasm in my tone.
‘They dropped no less than 240 wallets to see how many of them were—’
‘Frank, that’s enough, okay? I really don’t have time for this crap.’ The tone of my voice got through to him. ‘Grab the money and get going.’
I told him the address. ‘And hurry,’ I said. ‘I think it’s starting again.’
The line suddenly went dead. I was afraid I’d driven into a dead zone. Then I heard a faint rustle at the other end of the line.
‘The Eye Collector?’ said Frank.
‘Yes.’
‘Shit,’ he whispered. He was still too young and too new to the game to greet the news in a blasé or hard-boiled manner. That was another thing I liked about him. He knew when the time for schoolboy levity was over.
It was a year since I’d fished Frank out of a shoal of job applicants. I did so despite opposition from Thea, who would have preferred to engage some cute dolly bird from the German School of Journalism in Munich, not a ‘tenderfoot’, to quote her reaction to his photograph. ‘He looks like a youngster on a cereal packet. No one’ll take him seriously.’
But Frank Lahmann had been the only applicant to stake his
claim with a story rather than a CV. His report on the serious neglect of patients with Alzheimer’s in private nursing homes ended up on page four of our paper. Furthermore, he was an absolutely ace researcher. Even if he did insist on taking every opportunity to air the useless knowledge he gleaned from news agencies, libraries and the Internet, regardless of how appropriate it may be.
‘See you in fifteen minutes,’ I said, and switched back to Nicci, who – to my surprise – was still on the line.
‘Look, I’m sorry you’re having to collect Julian,’ I said, trying to sound friendly. The rain had grown heavier again, the temperature was just above freezing, and a driver in a hat was crawling along ahead of me. ‘I promise it won’t happen again, but I’ve really got to go and do my job now.’
Nicci sighed. She, too, seemed to have calmed down a little in the interim. ‘Oh, Alex, what’s happened to you? You could write about so many things. Love and happiness, for example, or people whose selfless thoughts and actions change the world.’
I was driving past some allotments. The asphalt ran out and the road ended in a potholed forest track. I had often played tennis near here in the old days, so I was familiar with the area. It wasn’t the direct route to Kühler Weg, but in cases like this it could be an advantage not to blunder in through the front door.
‘But that incident...’
The incident on the bridge.
‘... it destroyed something inside you. You were acquitted on all counts, but not by the court in your own head, am I right? We went over it again and again: you acted in good faith. You were right to do as you did. There was even an amateur video that corroborated your evidence.’
I silently shook my head.
‘But instead of accepting it as a stroke of fate and changing your life, you go on chasing after criminals. Not with a gun, maybe, but with a dictaphone and a ballpoint. You’re still dredging the depths.’ Nicci’s voice shook. ‘Why? Tell me! What fascinates you so much about death that you neglect your own child, your family – even yourself?’
My trembling hands tightened on the steering wheel.
‘Is it because you want to punish yourself? Do you seek out evil because you think you’re an evil person?’
I held my breath and said nothing, just stared through the windscreen and thought hard. When I finally tried to answer, I found that the woman who used to believe that only death would us part had hung up.
To judge by the hoof prints, the track had dwindled to a path used by riders only. On my left was a succession of small allotments; on my right were the Borussia tennis courts. Ignoring the sign that denied access to motor vehicles of all kinds, I coaxed the jolting Volvo slowly round a bend.
The worst of it is, I thought as I spotted the flashing lights of the convoy of patrol cars that was blocking the access to Kühler Weg some 200 metres away... the worst of it is, there’s a smidgen of truth in Nicci’s cockeyed view of the world.
I reversed the Volvo and parked it alongside the muddy wire-mesh fence that separated the track from the deserted tennis courts.
There were reasons why I’d spent so many years with Nicci despite our differences – despite our everlasting arguments over how to bring up children and plan our future together. Although we’d been living apart for the last six months, she was, of course, still closer to me than any other adult on this planet.
I got out, opened the boot, and took out my crime-scene kit.
She sees through me, I thought as I put on the protective clothing designed to prevent me from contaminating a crime scene: a snow white plastic coverall and a pair of pale green plastic overshoes, which I pulled on over my old, worn Timberland boots.
Evil does attract me.
Irresistibly.
And I don’t know why.
I shut the boot and peered along the track leading to the crime scene. Then I turned and disappeared into the trees.
78
(44 HOURS 6 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
PHILIPP STOYA
(DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT, HOMICIDE)
Stoya could hear the dead woman’s screams as he looked into her eyes. He sensed the mute reproach, of which the lecturer on forensic medicine had always warned his students at police college. Even if you succeeded in detaching yourself sufficiently from the horror that occasionally overwhelms the most hardened detective at the sight of a corpse – even if you tried to tell yourself you were looking at a piece of evidence, not an individual, when confronted by a body violated, abused, robbed of life by human hand and abandoned like garbage to insects, the elements and marauding animals – you couldn’t fail to hear the admonitory cries hurled by corpses at those who discovered them. The bodies screamed with their eyes.
Philipp Stoya was tempted to turn away and put his fingers in his ears because the scream was louder than usual today.
Lucia Traunstein was barefoot and wearing only a flimsy dressing gown with no bra or panties beneath it. A young woman, she was lying where her husband had found her outside their urban villa that morning: on the lawn not far from the garden shed. Although her legs were splayed, revealing an almost completely clean-shaven crotch, a sex crime could probably be dismissed from consideration.
The missing twins, Toby and Lea, and the stopwatch in Lucia’s hand told another story.
A story told in the Eye Collector’s demented language, thought Stoya.
The post-war era’s most horrific series of murders had begun three months earlier, when Peter Strahl, a forty-two-year-old bricklayer, arrived home after spending the preceding few weeks on a large-scale construction site in Frankfurt. His marriage had suffered for years from his regular absences, and so, having been away on the job even longer than usual, he had come bearing some little peace offerings in the shape of flowers for his wife and a plastic doll for his daughter Karla. He never got to present them with those gifts. He found his wife lying dead in the hallway with a broken neck, clutching something in her hand. It proved to be a stopwatch; a standard model widely sold all over Germany.
When forensics detached the dead woman’s fingers from this timer, it set the digital display in motion, the figures counting down to zero.
A bomb was initially suspected, so all twelve flats in the high-rise building were promptly evacuated. The cruel truth of the matter, however, was that the countdown related to Karla. The little girl had disappeared without trace. Neither the police nor her frantic father succeeded in finding the hiding place to which her psychopath abductor had taken her – a hiding place in which she was murdered when his forty-five-hour deadline ran out. This was the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the pathologist’s findings. The location where little Karla was found, a field on the outskirts of Marienfelde, was definitely not the murder scene because there was no water in the vicinity. It was assumed by the public that the Eye Collector asphyxiated his victims in his hideaway. Although this was essentially correct, one important pathologist’s finding was suppressed for tactical reasons: the children were drowned. Traces of chemicals were found in the foam that builds up in the bronchial tubes when drowning people instinctively inhale water. Since these were present in all the kids he killed, it was assumed that the Eye Collector had taken the children to the same place. Analysis of the water, and of impurities on his victims’ skin, indicated that they were not drowned in free-flowing water, but this did little to narrow down the search for his hideaway. Any house with an indoor swimming pool would have fitted the bill.
Even a fucking bathtub would do, thought Stoya.
Only one thing was certain: neither Karla, nor the two children who were murdered a few weeks later, Melanie and Robert, had been killed outdoors. Nor had their left eyes been removed where they were found...
‘I’ll kill the swine,’ Stoya heard a voice behind him growl as he knelt, motionless, beside the body. Not even death had succeeded in depriving Lucia of the well-toned, diet-conscious sex appeal often found in women whose husbands are considerably older, uglier and ?
?? last but far from least – wealthier than them. As the owner of Berlin’s biggest dry-cleaning chain, Thomas Traunstein could definitely have afforded more than one house and more than one woman like Lucia.
‘I’ll kill him, I swear!’
The detective leaning over Stoya’s shoulder could scarcely stand up in the tent that forensics had erected over the body a few minutes earlier. Nearly two metres tall, Mike Scholokowsky was the kind of friend you called when you were moving house and needed someone to carry a refrigerator up five flights of stairs.
‘Or her,’ Stoya murmured softly. His knee joints creaked as he slowly straightened up, staring intently at the dead woman.
‘Huh?’
‘You said him, Scholle. It could be her. We still don’t know the perp’s sex.’
None of the victims had been particularly big or strong, so they couldn’t have offered serious resistance. The absence of any signs of a struggle suggested that the murderer had taken advantage of the element of surprise. Whoever was responsible for the death of Lucia Traunstein and the abduction of Toby and Lea might be either male or female, maybe even one of a team. Professor Adrian Hohlfort, the profiler who was working with the police on these cases, had already told them as much. But not, alas, anything more than that.
Scholle sniffed and kneaded his double chin, staring at the woman whose head was lolling sideways at a grotesque 90-degree angle. Her neck was obviously broken, another pointer to the Eye Collector’s modus operandi.
The victim’s wide-open eyes were staring past the two detectives at the wall of the tent.
No, not staring. Screaming.
‘Fuck it, who cares?’ Scholle literally spat the words into the cold air. ‘I’ll take down the Eye Collector even if he turns out to be goddamned nun.’
Stoya nodded. As head of homicide he should have insisted his subordinate be more objective. Instead, all he said was, ‘And I’ll help you.’
I can’t take it any more either. I’ve had it up to here. This time they must win the Eye Collector’s perverse game of hide-and-seek and catch him before his ultimatum expires and another jogger stumbles over yet another child’s corpse.