Snow White Must Die (8 page)

“The case was all over the headlines eleven years ago,” she could hear her boss saying. “Tobias Sartorius got a maximum sentence for one count of murder and one count of manslaughter after a trial based solely on circumstantial evidence.”

“Ah yes,” she murmured. “Now I remember. Double homicide with no bodies. Is the guy still in prison?”

“No. Tobias Sartorius was released last Thursday. And he’s back in Altenhain, staying with his father.”

Pia thought about this for a few seconds, then opened her eyes.

“You mean there could be a connection between his release and the attack on his mother?”

Bodenstein cast an amused glance at her. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“What?”

“Your shrewd insight never fails even when you’re half asleep.”

“I’m wide awake,” said Pia, fighting off another yawn.

They passed the sign at the town limits of Altenhain and found the address on the main street that Dr. Lauterbach had written down. Bodenstein turned into the unpaved parking area in front of the former restaurant. A man was busy applying white paint to cover up some bright red graffiti on the façade. It said
HERE LIVES A RUTHLESS KILLER
. The red letters still shimmered through the white paint. On the sidewalk near the driveway stood three middle-aged women.

“You murderer!” Bodenstein and Kirchhoff heard one of them yell as they opened the car doors to climb out. “Get out of this town, you piece of crap! Or you’ll be in for it!”

She spat on the ground.

“What’s going on here?” Bodenstein asked, but the three women paid no attention to him and simply walked away. The man had totally ignored the taunts. Bodenstein greeted him politely and introduced himself and Kirchhoff.

“Why were those women yelling at you?” Pia asked with curiosity.

“You’d better ask them,” the man said brusquely. He gave her an indifferent look and went on with his work. Despite the cold he wore only a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, jeans, and work boots.

“We’d like to speak with Mr. Sartorius.”

Then the man turned around, and Pia thought she recognized him.

“Weren’t you at Mrs. Cramer’s apartment building in Neuenhain yesterday?” she asked. If the man was surprised, he didn’t show it. He stared at her with his extraordinary sea-blue eyes, without smiling, and she felt suddenly flushed.

“Yes, that’s right. Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, of course not. But what were you doing there?”

“Visiting my mother. We had agreed to meet at a certain time, but she never showed up. I was worried.”

“Oh, so you must be Tobias Sartorius.”

He raised his eyebrows and his lips twitched derisively.

“Yes, that’s me. The killer of young girls.”

He was quite attractive in an unsettling way. The narrow white scar that ran from his left ear to his chin made a well-chiseled face more interesting instead of disfiguring it. Something in the way he looked at her prompted a strange feeling in Pia, and she wondered what might be the cause.

“Your mother had a serious accident yesterday afternoon,” Bodenstein said. “She was operated on last night and is now in intensive care. She’s in critical condition.”

Pia saw how Tobias Sartorius’s nostrils flared for a moment, and he pressed his lips together to a tight line. Then he carelessly tossed the paint roller into the paint can and went to the gate of the farmyard. The detectives exchanged a brief glance and followed him. The yard looked like a rubbish heap. Suddenly Oliver uttered a suppressed cry and abruptly stopped. Pia turned to her boss.

“What is it?” she asked in astonishment.

“A rat!” Oliver gasped. He had turned white as chalk. “The thing ran right over my foot!”

“No wonder, with all the filth in here.” Pia shrugged and wanted to keep going, but Oliver stood there like a pillar of salt.

“I hate rats more than anything,” he said, his voice quavering.

“But you grew up on a farm,” Pia countered. “There must have been an occasional rat there.”

“That’s exactly why.”

Pia shook her head in disbelief. She never would have thought her boss would have such a phobia.

“Come on,” she said. “They’ll run away when they see us. Garbage rats are shy. My girlfriend used to have two tame rats. But that was different. We used to—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Oliver took a deep breath. “You go first.”

“Okay, okay, no problem.” Pia smirked as Oliver followed on her heels. Ready to flee at any moment, he suspiciously eyed the heaps of trash on both sides of the narrow path that led to the house.

“Yikes, there’s another one! And a fat one at that,” said Pia, stopping short. Oliver ran into her and looked around in a panic. His usual composure was gone.

“Just kidding,” Pia said with a grin, but Oliver didn’t see anything to laugh about.

“You do that again and you’ll be walking home,” he threatened. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

They moved on. Tobias Sartorius had gone inside, but the front door was standing open. Oliver caught up with Pia at the stairs and climbed the three steps to the door like a hiker relieved to have solid ground underfoot after slogging through a swamp. An elderly man with stooped shoulders appeared in the doorway. He was wearing worn-out slippers, stained gray pants, and a threadbare knit cardigan that hung loose around his skinny body.

“Are you Hartmut Sartorius?” asked Pia, and the man nodded. He seemed just as run-down as his farm. Deep furrows were etched into his long, narrow face, and the only similarity with Tobias was his unusually blue eyes, although they had lost all brightness.

“My son tells me it’s about my ex-wife.” His voice was feeble.

“Yes,” said Pia with a nod. “She had a serious accident yesterday.”

“Please come in.” He led them down a narrow, dim hall into a kitchen that could have been cozy if it weren’t so dirty. Tobias stood by the window with his arms crossed.

“Dr. Lauterbach gave us your address,” Bodenstein began. He had rapidly regained his composure. “According to witnesses, late yesterday afternoon your ex-wife was shoved over the railing of the pedestrian bridge at the Sulzbach North S-Bahn station, directly into the path of an oncoming car.”

“Good Lord.” All color drained out of the older man’s gaunt face, and he grabbed for the back of a chair. “But … but who would do such a thing?”

“That’s what we want to find out,” said Bodenstein.”Do you have any idea who might have done this? Did your ex-wife have any enemies?”

“My mother didn’t,” said Tobias Sartorius from the background. “But I do. Just about everybody in this damned town hates me.”

His voice sounded bitter.

“Do you have anyone particular in mind?” asked Kirchhoff.

“No,” Hartmut Sartorius replied quickly. “No, I don’t believe anyone would be capable of something so terrible.”

Pia’s gaze fell on Tobias Sartorius, who was still standing by the window. With the backlight she couldn’t really see his expression, but from the way his eyebrows raised and his mouth twisted she could tell that he disagreed with his father. Pia could almost feel the angry vibes that seemed to emanate from his tense body. In his eyes blazed a long-suppressed fury like a tiny, dangerous flame that was waiting for a reason to flare up into a brushfire. Tobias Sartorius was definitely a ticking time bomb. His father, on the other hand, seemed tired and powerless like a very old man. The condition of the house and the farm spoke for itself. The man’s zest for living was extinguished, and he had barricaded himself behind the ruins of his life. Being the parent of a murderer was always horrible. But it must have been even worse for Hartmut Sartorius and his ex-wife, living in a village as small as Altenhain, with each day bringing a new gauntlet to run. Mrs. Sartorius hadn’t been able to take it anymore. She had left her husband behind, although undoubtedly with a guilty conscience. She hadn’t succeeded in getting a new start; the loveless void of her apartment clearly demonstrated that.

Pia looked over at Tobias Sartorius. He was gnawing absentmindedly on the knuckle of his thumb, staring into space. What was he plotting behind that blank expression of his? Was he upset about what he had done to his parents? Bodenstein handed Hartmut Sartorius his card, which the man glanced at and then put in the pocket of his cardigan.

“Maybe you and your son should go see your ex-wife. She’s really not doing very well.”

“Of course. We’ll drive over to the hospital right away.”

“And if you have any idea who might have done this, don’t hesitate to give me a call.”

Sartorius senior nodded, but his son didn’t react. Pia had a bad feeling. She hoped that Tobias Sartorius would not take it upon himself to search for the man who had attacked his mother.

*   *   *

Hartmut Sartorius drove his car into the garage. The visit with Rita had been dreadful. The doctor he spoke to refused to offer any sort of prognosis. She’d been lucky, he said, that her spinal column was virtually unscathed, but of the 206 bones in the human body about half of hers were broken. She had also suffered severe internal injuries when she fell onto the moving car. On the drive back home Tobias hadn’t uttered a word, merely stared glumly into space. When they walked through the gate and approached the house, Tobias stopped by the steps to the front door and turned up the collar of his jacket.

“Where are you going?” Hartmut asked his son.

“I’m just going to get some fresh air.”

“Now? It’s almost eleven thirty. And the rain is coming down in buckets. You’ll get soaked in this terrible weather.”

“For the past ten years I haven’t had any weather at all,” said Tobias. “It doesn’t bother me to get wet. And at this time of night at least nobody will notice me.”

Hartmut hesitated, but then he put his hand on his son’s arm.

“Don’t do anything foolish, Tobi. Promise me that.”

“Of course not. Don’t worry about me.” He gave a brief smile, even though he didn’t feel like smiling at all, and waited until his father went inside. With his head down he walked through the darkness, past the empty stables and the barn. The sight of his mother lying in the ICU with her bones crushed, attached to all those tubes and other apparatus, had hit him harder than he’d expected. Was this attack on her somehow related to his release from prison? If she died, which the doctors had not ruled out as a possibility, then whoever had pushed her off the bridge would have a murder on his conscience.

Tobias stopped when he reached the rear gate to the farm. It was closed, overgrown with ivy and weeds. It probably hadn’t been opened at all in recent years. Tomorrow morning he would start cleaning up. After ten years he had a tremendous longing to breathe fresh air and do his own work.

After only three weeks in the joint he could tell that he’d turn into a zombie if he didn’t make an effort to use his mind. His lawyer had informed him that he had no chance for early release; an appeal had been denied. So Tobias had begun taking correspondence courses from Hagen University, studying to become a locksmith. Every day he had worked for eight hours; after an hour for exercise, he sat up half the night over his books, in order to distract himself and make the monotony of the days more bearable. Over the years he had become accustomed to the strict regulations, and the sudden lack of structure to his life now seemed threatening to him. Not that he was homesick for the joint, but it was going to take a while before he got used to freedom again.

Tobias vaulted over the gate and stopped underneath the cherry laurel, which had become a huge tree. He turned left and walked past the driveway of the Terlinden estate. The double wrought-iron gate was closed; the camera on top of one of the gateposts was new. Right behind the house the woods began. After about fifty yards Tobias turned down the narrow footpath, called the Gouge by the locals, which wound through the village to the cemetery, past the rear gardens and backyards of the houses built so close together. He knew every angle, every set of steps, and every fence—nothing had changed. As a boy he and his pals had often run along this path, on the way to church, to play soccer, or to visit a friend.

He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. To the left old Maria Kettels had lived in a tiny cottage. She would have been his only defense witness, because she had seen Stefanie late that evening, but her testimony was not heard by the court. Everybody in Altenhain knew that Maria suffered from dementia and was also half blind. Back then she must have been at least eighty, and he was sure she must be in the graveyard by now.

Next to her property was that of the Paschkes. It bordered directly on the Sartorius land and was as neatly kept as always. Old man Paschke was in the habit of instantly spraying chemicals on any weed that poked up its head. He used to work for the city of Frankfurt and had access to the city supply depot. His neighbors who had worked for chemical giant Hoechst AG also had no qualms about using company materials to build and renovate their houses and yards. The Paschkes were the parents of Gerda Pietsch, the mother of Tobias’s friend Felix. Everyone in the village was related to someone who lived only a couple of blocks away, and everyone knew the family histories of everyone else. They also knew the darkest secrets, and liked to gossip about the transgressions, failures, and illnesses of their neighbors. Because of its geographically unfavorable location in a narrow valley, the village of Altenhain had been largely spared new construction. Hardly anyone ever moved there, so the village community had remained more or less the same for the past hundred years.

Tobias had reached the cemetery and pushed with his shoulder against the small wooden gate, which opened with a tormented screech. The naked branches of the mighty trees standing among the graves whipped back and forth in the wind, which was blowing up a storm. He walked slowly along the rows of graves. Cemeteries had never given him the creeps. He thought there was something peaceful about them. Tobias approached the church as the clock in the tower struck twelve times for midnight. He stopped, tilted his head back, and for a moment looked up at the squat tower built of gray quartzite.