Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(114)

Bodenstein left it at that for the moment.

“So you received letters and e-mails,” he said. “What was in them?”

“That Thies knew everything. And that the police would not find out if I kept my mouth shut.”

“What were you supposed to keep your mouth shut about?”

Lauterbach shrugged and shook his head.

“Who do you think wrote these letters to you?”

Again a helpless shrug.

“You must have some sort of idea. Come on, Mr. Lauterbach!” Bodenstein leaned forward again. “Keeping silent now is the worst possible solution.”

“But I really have no clue!” said Lauterbach in impotent despair which was obviously not faked. Alone and backed into a corner, he showed his true colors: Gregor Lauterbach was a weak man, and without his wife’s protection he shrank to a spineless homunculus. “I don’t know anything else! My wife told me that there were pictures, but Thies couldn’t have written the letters and e-mails.”

“When did she tell you about the paintings?”

Lauterbach rested his forehead on his hands, shook his head. “I don’t remember exactly.”

“Try to remember,” Bodenstein pressed. “Was it before or after Amelie disappeared? And how did you wife know about them? Who could have told her?”

“My God, I don’t know!” Lauterbach wailed. “I really don’t know!”

“Think!” Bodenstein leaned back. “On the Saturday evening that Amelie disappeared, you went to dinner with your wife and the Terlindens at the Ebony Club in Frankfurt. Your wife and Christine left for home at nine thirty, and you rode back with Claudius. What did you do after you left the Ebony Club?”

Gregor Lauterbach paused to think. He seemed to realize that the police knew a lot more than he’d assumed.

“Okay, I think my wife told me on the way to Frankfurt that Thies had given the neighbor girl some sort of pictures and I was in them,” he admitted reluctantly. “She found out about them that afternoon, from an anonymous phone call. We didn’t have time to discuss it further. Daniela and Christine left at nine thirty. I asked Andreas Jagielski about Amelie Fr?hlich; I knew that she waited tables at the Black Horse. Jagielski called his wife and she told him that Amelie was at work. So Claudius and I drove to Altenhain and waited for the girl in the parking lot at the Black Horse. But she never showed up.”

“What did you want to find out from Amelie?”

“Whether she was the one who had written those anonymous e-mails and letters to me.”

“And? Did she?”

“I didn’t get a chance to ask her. We waited in the car, it was about eleven or eleven thirty. Then Nathalie showed up. I mean Nadia. Nadia von Bredow she calls herself now.”

Bodenstein looked up briefly and met Pia’s gaze.

“She ran around the parking lot,” Lauterbach went on, “looking in the bushes, and finally she went across the street to the bus stop. That was when we first noticed a man sitting there. Nadia tried to wake him up, but she couldn’t. Finally she drove off. Claudius called the Black Horse on his cell and asked for Amelie, but Mrs. Jagielski told him she’d left a long time ago. Then Claudius and I drove to his office. He was afraid the police would come snooping around. The last thing he needed was a police search, so he wanted to store some incendiary documents somewhere else.”

“What sort of documents?” asked Bodenstein.

Gregor Lauterbach resisted a bit, but not for long. Claudius Terlinden had secured his position of power over the years by bribery on a grand scale. Of course he’d always been wealthy, but he didn’t come into the big money until the late nineties, when he expanded his firm and took it public on the stock exchange. That was how he acquired major influence in the worlds of business and politics. He had done the best deals with countries against which an official trade embargo had been imposed, such as Iran and North Korea.

“He wanted to get rid of those documents that evening,” Lauterbach concluded. Now that he was no longer the immediate target, he had regained some of his self-confidence. “Since he didn’t want to destroy them, we took them to my house in Idstein.”

“I see.”

“I have nothing to do with the disappearance of Amelie or Thies,” Gregor Lauterbach declared. “And I haven’t murdered anyone.”

“That remains to be seen.” Bodenstein gathered up the pictures and put them back in the file. “You can go home now. But you’re under police surveillance, and we’ll be monitoring your telephone. I would also like to ask you to remain available. In any event, let me know before you leave your house.”

Lauterbach nodded meekly. “Could you at least keep my name out of the media for the time being?” he pleaded.

“That’s not something I can promise you.” Bodenstein held out his hand. “The key to your house in Idstein, please.”





Sunday, November 23, 2008



Pia had spent a sleepless night and was already on her feet when the call came at 5:15 A.M. from the surveillance team: Nadia von Bredow had just returned to her apartment at the West Harbor in Frankfurt. Alone.

“I’ll be right there,” said Pia. “Wait for me.”

She tossed the hay that she was holding under her arm over the door of the horse stall and put away her cell phone. The case wasn’t the only thing that had kept her awake. Tomorrow at three thirty in the afternoon she had an appointment for an inspection at Birkenhof by the zoning office of the city of Frankfurt. If they didn’t cancel the demolition order, she, Christoph, and the animals would soon be homeless.