Bad Wolf (45 page)

“Oh my God,” he said when she was done. “That explains a lot. Especially Frank’s behavior.”

“Who would have given the order to eliminate Lessing?” Pia asked. “It couldn’t have been Engel, who was the head of the department; it must have come from much higher up. The president of police? The Interior Ministry? The National Criminal Police? And today, Behnke is still enjoying special protection. Considering everything he’s done, normally suspension would be too lenient a punishment. He would have been thrown out of the civil service for good.”

“We have to ask ourselves who would have benefited from getting rid of Lessing,” Christian deliberated. “What had he found out? It must have been something really explosive, something that could be a serious threat to one of the bigwigs.”

“Bribery,” Pia suggested. “Drug dealing. Human trafficking.”

“I’m sure that was his official undercover mission,” replied Christian. “No, it had to be something personal. Something that could ruin someone’s career.”

“We should ask Prinzler about it,” said Pia, casting a glance at her watch. “In exactly one hour. Are you going with me to Preungesheim?”

*   *   *

“I know that you didn’t want me to come here, but I just had to see you.” Wolfgang looked around with embarrassment, turning the bouquet in his hands.

“Just put it on the table. The nurses will find a vase later.” Hanna would have preferred to tell him to take the flowers away. White lilies! She hated that intense fragrance, which reminded her of funeral parlors and cemeteries. Flowers belonged in the garden, not in a small room that was badly ventilated.

Last night, she’d written Wolfgang a text message, asking him not to come to the hospital. It was unpleasant for her to be seen in this condition by any man who was not a doctor. She couldn’t imagine how she looked. She’d touched her face, felt the swelling and the stitches on her forehead, the left eyebrow, and chin. She wondered if the makeup artists would be skillful enough to conjure up a face suitable for television out of this disastrous battlefield.

The last time she’d looked in the mirror was in her dressing room at the TV studio that evening. Back then, her face had been flawless and beautiful, except for a few wrinkles. Now she didn’t want to see it; she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand the sight. She saw the appalled expression on her visitor’s face.

“Sit down for a moment,” she told Wolfgang.

He shoved a chair over to her bed and awkwardly took her hand. All the tubes running in and out of her body bothered him. Hanna could see him trying to avoid looking at them.

“How are you feeling?”

“Good would be a lie,” she croaked.

The conversation was strained, faltering. Wolfgang looked pale and bleary-eyed and seemed nervous. He had purple shadows under his eyes that she’d never seen there before. At some point he ran out of topics to talk about and fell silent. Hanna said nothing more, either. What could she tell him anyway? How shitty it was to live with a colostomy bag? How great her fear was of being disfigured and traumatized for the rest of her life? In the past, she would have confided in him, but now things were different. Now she wished someone else were sitting beside her and holding her hand.

“Oh, Hanna,” Wolfgang said with a sigh. “I’m so sorry that you had to go through all of this. I wish there was something I could do for you. Do you have any idea who did it?”

Hanna swallowed, fighting back the rising horror: the memory of pain and terror and the fear of death.

“No,” she whispered. “Did you know that Leonie Verges, my therapist, was murdered?”

“Meike told me,” he said with a nod. “It’s all so horrible.”

“I just don’t understand it. In my case, the police have two suspects.” Talking was tiring her out. “But I’m sure it wasn’t either one of them. Why would they do it? I used to work with them. Instead, I think it must be because of the story I was working on.…”

Suddenly, she had a suspicion—an appalling suspicion.

“You haven’t spoken to anyone about it, have you, Wolfgang?”

She tried to sit up but couldn’t. Powerless, she sank back.

Wolfgang hesitated. For an instant, his eyes shifted away.

“No. That is, only to my father,” he admitted, embarrassed. “He was not enthusiastic—and that’s putting it mildly. We had a big argument about it. He said that sometimes there are more important things than ratings. I can’t believe that he, of all people, would say that.”

He laughed out loud, but it was a forced laugh.

“He didn’t want his TV station to broadcast such unverified slander. He was really upset by those names. He’s terribly afraid of a lawsuit or bad PR. I’m … I’m really sorry, Hanna. Really I am.”

“All right.” Hanna nodded weakly.

She’d known Wolfgang’s father for thirty years, and could vividly picture his reaction. She knew Wolfgang equally well. She should have known that he would tell his authoritarian father about what she was working on. Wolfgang had a hell of a lot of respect for his father, and was at his beck and call for better or worse. He still lived in his parents’ villa, and he held the position of CEO only because of his father’s intervention. Even though Wolfgang did his job well and conscientiously, he lacked courage and the ability to assert himself. All his life, he’d been the son of the great media mogul Hartmut Matern, and in their friendship Hanna had always been the more successful, cleverer, and stronger one. Hanna knew that this didn’t bother him, but she wasn’t sure how he was handling the fact that even now, in his mid-forties, he risked being chewed out by his father in front of the whole crew whenever he made a mistake or ventured to make a decision on his own. Wolfgang never talked about this. In general, he never liked to talk about himself. If Hanna really thought about it, she knew hardly anything about him, because everything had always revolved around her: her show, her success, her men. In her boundless egotism, it had never occurred to her to think about Wolfgang, but now she was filled with regret, as she was about so much else she had done or not done in her life.

Her throat hurt from talking, and her eyelids had grown heavy.

“I think you’d better go now,” she murmured, turning her head away. “Talking is a real strain for me.”

“Yes, of course.” Wolfgang let go of her hand and got up.

Hanna’s eyes closed, and her spirit retreated from the intolerable glare of reality back to the twilight realm of a world in between, in which she was healthy and happy and … loved.

“Good-bye, Hanna,” she heard Wolfgang say, as if from a great distance. “Maybe someday you can forgive me.”

*   *   *

“Louisa? Louisa!”

Emma had searched the whole apartment. She’d only been in the bathroom a few minutes, and now the little girl was gone.

“Louisa! Grandpa and Grandma are waiting for us. And Grandma baked a carrot cake especially for you.”

No reaction. Had she run away?

Emma went to the front door. No, the key was in the keyhole, and the door was locked. She always did this now, because one time she’d accidentally locked herself out. Louisa had run around the apartment screaming in panic until Mr. Grasser appeared and opened the old-fashioned door using a picklock.

It just couldn’t be true. Emma needed to pull herself together and think calmly. But what she most wanted to do was scream. She always had to be so considerate of others—but sometimes she wondered if anyone was ever considerate of her.

“Louisa?”

She went into Louisa’s bedroom. The wardrobe wasn’t closed all the way. She opened the door and gave a start of surprise when she spied her daughter cowering under the clothes and jackets hanging inside. She had her thumb in her mouth and was staring into space.

“Oh, sweetie!” Emma squatted down. “What are you doing in here?”

No answer. The girl sucked harder on her thumb, at the same time rubbing her forefinger over her nose, which was already quite red.

“Don’t you want to go downstairs and see Grandma and Grandpa? Don’t you want any carrot cake with whipped cream?”

Vigorous head shaking.

“Wouldn’t you at least like to come out of the wardrobe?”

More head shaking.

Emma felt helpless, at a complete loss. What was happening to her daughter? Should Louisa be seeing a child psychologist? What fears were tormenting her?

“You know what? I’m going to call Grandma and tell her we’re not coming. And then I’ll sit down and read you a story. Okay?”

Louisa nodded timidly without looking at her.

With an effort, Emma got up and went to the telephone. Anger was now mixed with her concern. If she found out that Florian had actually done something to Louisa, then God help him!

She called her mother-in-law and said they couldn’t come to tea because Louisa wasn’t feeling well. She quickly cut short Renate’s disappointed laments; she had no desire to make excuses.

Louisa was still sitting in the wardrobe when she came back.

“What book do you want me to read to you?” Emma asked.

“
Franz Hahn and Johnny Mauser,
” Louisa mumbled without taking her thumb out of her mouth. Emma looked for the book on the shelf, moved the beanbag chair over next to the bed, and sat down.

It was extremely uncomfortable to sit on the floor in her condition. First her left leg went to sleep, then her right. But she bravely kept reading, because it was doing Louisa good. She stopped sucking her thumb, and then she crept out of the wardrobe and cuddled up in Emma’s arm so she could look at the book, too. She was laughing and enjoying the pictures, which she knew by heart. When Emma closed the book, Louisa sighed and closed her eyes.

“Mama?”

“Yes, my sweet?” Emma tenderly caressed her daughter’s cheek. She was so small and innocent, her soft skin so translucent that Emma could see the veins in her temples.

“I don’t ever want to go away from you, Mama. I’m so scared of the bad wolf.”

Emma caught her breath.

“You mustn’t be afraid.” She had to make an effort to keep her voice calm and sound firm. “No wolf is ever going to come here.”

“Yes, he does,” Louisa whispered sleepily. “Every time you’re away. But it’s a secret. I can’t tell you because then he’ll eat me up.”

*   *   *

In the morning, they had taken Bernd Prinzler before the judge and then transferred him from the holding cell at the police station, where he’d spent the night, to the remand prison in Preungesheim. It took almost half an hour before they brought him to the visitors’ room where Pia and Christian were waiting. The two guards who accompanied him were taller than Pia, but Prinzler was more than a head taller than they were. Pia was prepared for a difficult conversation. The man had years of prison experience, and the atmosphere of the prison wouldn’t intimidate him in the least—not like someone who had spent his first night in a jail cell and was feeling alarmed about being locked up. Men like Prinzler usually didn’t say a word; at most, they might refer all questions to their lawyers.

“Hello, Mr. Prinzler,” said Pia. “My name is Pia Kirchhoff, and this is my colleague Chief Detective Inspector Kröger. K-11 Hofheim.”

There was no visible emotion on Prinzler’s face, but in his brown eyes Pia saw an expression of concern and tension that surprised her.

“Please have a seat.” She turned to the two guards. “Thank you. Would you mind waiting outside?”

Prinzler sat down on the chair with his legs apart, crossed his tattooed arms, and fixed his steady gaze on Pia.

“What do you guys want with me?” he asked as the key turned in the lock from outside. “What’s this all about anyway?” His voice was deep and rough.

“We’re investigating the murder of Leonie Verges,” said Pia. “A witness saw you and a second man coming out of Ms. Verges’s house on the evening that her body was discovered. What were you doing there?”

“When we got to the house, she was already dead,” he replied. “I called one one zero from my cell and reported the body.”

After this promising beginning, he refused to answer any more of the questions that Pia and Christian took turns asking.

“Why were you at Ms. Verges’s house?”

“How did you happen to know her?”

“Your car was observed multiple times at Ms. Verges’s house. What were you doing there?”

“Who was the man who accompanied you?”

“When was the last time you spoke to Kilian Rothemund?”

“What were you doing on the night of the twenty-fourth of June?”

Finally, he deigned to open his mouth.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“That night, the TV host Hanna Herzmann was attacked, beaten, and brutally raped.”

Pia noticed a flicker in Prinzler’s eyes. His jaw muscles were tensing, and his neck muscles were noticeably taut.

“I have no need to rape women. And I’ve never beaten one, either. On the twenty-fourth I was at a bikers’ convention. There are about five hundred people who can testify to that.”

He still hadn’t denied that he knew Hanna Herzmann.

“On the evening mentioned, why did you accompany Kilian Rothemund to Ms. Herzmann’s house?”

Pia hadn’t expected Bernd Prinzler to be a chatterbox, but her patience, which is the highest virtue an investigator can have, was being sorely tested. Time was running out.

“Listen, Mr. Prinzler,” said Pia, taking an unconventional tack. “My colleague and I do not consider you a suspect in either case. I think you’re trying to cover up for someone or protect him. I can understand that. But we’re looking for a dangerous psychopath who abused, violated, and drowned a young girl before the Main spit her out like a piece of garbage. You have children yourself, and something like this could happen to them.”

Prinzler’s eyes showed surprise, and respect.

Pia went on. “Hanna Herzmann was bestially violated with the handle of an umbrella and so severely injured that she almost bled to death. Then they locked her in the trunk of her car, and she was very lucky to have survived. Leonie Verges was tied to a chair. Somebody watched her die of thirst; a video camera recorded and transmitted her agonizing death. I would be very grateful if you could somehow help us find and arrest the perpetrator or perpetrators and bring them to justice.”