Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(111)
“We have to talk,” she said. “Reasonably.”
“I don’t have time right now,” he replied. “We’re in the middle of an interview. I’ll call you later.”
With that he punched off the conversation without saying good-bye. He’d never done that before.
They had left the valley and the bright sunshine was cut off. Gloomy gray fog surrounded them again. In silence they drove through Glashütten.
“What would you do in my place?” Oliver asked abruptly. Pia hesitated. She vividly remembered her disappointment when she learned about Henning’s affair with District Attorney Valerie L?blich. By that time they had already been separated for more than a year. But Henning had continued to deny it until Pia caught him and L?blich in flagrante. Had her marriage not already been in pieces, that would have been the last straw. In Oliver’s place she would never be able to trust Cosima again. When it came down to it, she had consistently lied to him. An affair was also something other than getting a little on the side, which under certain circumstances was excusable.
“You should talk to her,” she advised her boss. “After all, you do have children together. And twenty-five years of marriage can’t be swept away so easily.”
“A super piece of advice,” said Oliver mockingly. “Thanks a lot. So what do you really think?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Sure. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.”
Pia took a deep breath.
“When something is broken, it’s broken. And even if you patch it up, it’ll never be whole again,” she said. “That’s my opinion. Sorry if you were expecting something different.”
“I wasn’t.” To her astonishment Oliver even smiled, although not very happily. “Your honesty is what I especially appreciate about you.”
His cell rang again. This time he looked at the display first to save himself another unpleasant surprise.
“It’s Ostermann,” he said, and took the call. He listened for a few seconds and nodded. “Call Dr. Engel. She should be there when we talk to him.”
“Tobias?”
“No.” Bodenstein took a deep breath. “The cultural minister has turned up and is waiting for us, along with his lawyer.”
* * *
They conferred outside the door to the interview room in which Bodenstein had placed Gregor Lauterbach and his lawyer. He didn’t want a friendly, casual atmosphere; Lauterbach had to be made aware that he couldn’t expect special treatment.
“How do you want to play this?” Commissioner Engel asked.
“I’m going to put him under massive pressure,” said Bodenstein. “We don’t have any time to lose. Amelie has been gone for a week now, and if we expect to find her alive we can’t handle anybody with kid gloves.”
Nicola Engel nodded. They entered the sparsely furnished room, one wall of which was taken up by a one-way mirror. At a table in the middle sat Cultural Minister Lauterbach and his attorney, whom Bodenstein and Kirchhoff knew well; he was not going to make things pleasant for them. Dr. Anders defended prominent citizens, almost without exception, who were involved in murder and manslaughter cases. It didn’t bother him to lose trials, because he wanted most of all to get his name in the papers and hopefully bring his cases up for appeal before the federal supreme court.
Gregor Lauterbach recognized the seriousness of the situation and had decided to cooperate. Pale and visibly shaken, he related in a low voice the events of September 6, 1997. On that evening he had met his pupil Stefanie Schneeberger in the barn of the Sartorius farm to explain to her that he did not intend to start anything with a pupil. Then he went home.
“The next day I heard that Stefanie and Laura Wagner had vanished without a trace,” said Lauterbach. “Someone called us and said the police would direct their suspicions at Stefanie’s friend, Tobias Sartorius, for the murder of both girls. My wife found a bloody tire iron in our garbage can. I then told her that I had spoken with Stefanie because she had been pestering and flirting with me all evening at the village fair. It was clear to both of us that Tobias must have thrown the tire iron into our garbage can after he killed Stefanie in a fit of anger. Daniela wanted to prevent any gossip from focusing on me. She told me to bury the tire iron somewhere. I don’t know why I did it—it was probably a knee-jerk reaction—but I threw the tire iron into Sartorius’s cesspool.”
Bodenstein, Kirchhoff, and Nicola Engel listened quietly. Even Dr. Anders said nothing. With his arms crossed and his lips pursed he stared as if uninvolved into the mirror across from him.
“I … I was convinced that Tobias had beaten Stefanie to death with it,” Lauterbach went on. “He had seen us together, and then she broke up with him. By throwing the tire iron into our garbage can he wanted to cast suspicion on me. Out of revenge.”
Bodenstein looked at him sharply. “You’re lying.”
“No, I am not.” Lauterbach swallowed nervously. He looked over at his lawyer, but Anders was still raptly studying his own image in the mirror.
“We’ve discovered in the meantime that Tobias Sartorius had nothing to do with the murder of Laura Wagner.” Bodenstein spoke more aggressively than was his habit. “We found the mummified corpse of Stefanie. And we have retrieved the tire iron from our evidence room and sent it to the lab. They can probably still get fingerprints off it. In addition, the medical examiner has found traces of foreign DNA in the body. Semen. If it turns out that it’s yours, you’ll be in a hell of a mess, Mr. Lauterbach.”