Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(123)

“You don’t understand!” Nadia von Bredow countered with sudden bitterness. “You have no idea what it’s like to be constantly rejected!”

“And now he has rejected you again, right?” Bodenstein watched her face sharply, registered the play of emotions ranging from hatred to self-pity to furious spite. “He feels deeply indebted to you, but that’s not enough. He loves you as little today as he did then. And you can’t keep hoping that someone will get rid of your competition for you.”

Nadia von Bredow stared at him, full of hate. For a moment it was dead quiet in the interview room.

“What have you done to Tobias Sartorius?” asked Bodenstein.

“He got what he deserved,” she replied. “If I can’t have him, nobody else will either.”

* * *



“She’s a total nut case,” said Pia, stunned, as Nadia von Bredow was taken away by several officers. She had thrown a fit and started screaming when she realized that they weren’t going to let her go. Bodenstein had justified the arrest warrant with flight risk, since Nadia von Bredow did own houses and apartments abroad.

“She’s a psychopath,” he said now. “No doubt about it. When she realized that Tobias Sartorius still didn’t love her despite everything she’d done for him, then she killed him.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“I’m afraid he is.” Bodenstein got up from his chair as Gregor Lauterbach was escorted in by an officer. His lawyer appeared seconds later.

“I want to speak with my client,” Dr. Anders demanded.

“You can do that later,” said Bodenstein, assessing Lauterbach, who was looking miserable as he sat hunched on the plastic chair. “So, Mr. Lauterbach. Now let’s talk turkey. Nadia von Bredow has just seriously incriminated you. On the evening of September 6, 1997, in front of the barn on the Sartorius farm you killed Stefanie Schneeberger with a tire iron, because you were afraid that she was going to tell your wife about your affair. Stefanie had threatened to do just that. What do you say about that?”

“He has nothing to say,” his lawyer replied in place of Lauterbach.

“You suspected Thies Terlinden of being an eyewitness to what you’d done and put pressure on him to keep quiet.”

Pia’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the display, got up, and moved away a few yards from the table. It was Henning. He had analyzed the medications that Dr. Lauterbach had been prescribing for Thies for years.

“I spoke with a colleague from psychiatric cardiology,” said Henning. “He is very familiar with autism and was shocked when I faxed him the prescriptions. These drugs are absolutely counterproductive for the treatment of a patient with Asperger’s.”

“In what way?” Pia asked, plugging her other ear with her finger because her boss had raised his voice and was firing all his cannons at Lauterbach. His lawyer kept shouting, “No comment!” as if he were already in the middle of a press conference in front of the courthouse.

“Combining a benzodiazepine with other centrally active pharmaceuticals such as neuroleptics and sedatives will amplify their effects reciprocally. These neuroleptics on the prescription are actually used for acute psychotic disorders with delusions and hallucinations; the sedatives are used for calming; and benzodiazepines are used for relief of anxiety. But the latter have another effect that could be interesting for you: they work as an amnesic. That means that the patient has no memory while the drug is in his system. Any physicians who have prescribed these medications to an autistic patient over a lengthy period should have their license revoked, at the very least. Such action is tantamount to causing grievous bodily harm.”

“Can your colleague write a report for us?”

“Yes, certainly.”

Pia’s heart began to pound from excitement when she grasped what all this meant. Dr. Lauterbach had stuffed Thies full of consciousness-altering drugs for over eleven years in order to keep him under control. His parents might have believed that the prescribed medications would benefit their son. Why Daniela Lauterbach did this was perfectly obvious; she wanted to protect her husband. But suddenly Amelie showed up, and Thies stopped taking his medications.

Bodenstein opened the door; Lauterbach had hidden his face in his hands and was sobbing like a child, while Dr. Anders packed his briefcase. An officer came in and led the weeping Gregor Lauterbach away.

“He confessed.” Bodenstein seemed extremely pleased. “He murdered Stefanie Schneeberger. Whether it was in the heat of the moment or with premeditation really isn’t important. Tobias is innocent in any event.”

“I knew that the whole time,” Pia said. “We still don’t know where Amelie and Thies are, but it’s clear to me who was trying to get rid of both of them. We were on the wrong track the whole time.”

* * *



It was cold, cold, cold. The icy wind howled and raged, the snowflakes stung his face like tiny needles. He could no longer see a thing, everything around him was white, and his eyes were watering so badly that he was almost blind. He could no longer feel his feet, nose, ears, or fingertips. He staggered through the snowstorm from one reflective road marker to the next to keep from losing his orientation entirely. He had no more sense of time and just as little hope that a snowplow might come by. Why did he keep walking at all? Where did he want to go? He could hardly pull his feet out of the snow, they were frozen to clumps of ice in the thin gym shoes. It took a superhuman effort to fight his way step by step through this white hell. He fell again and landed on all fours in the snow. Tears ran down his face and turned to ice. Tobias fell forward and just lay there. Every fiber of his body was in pain; his left forearm which she had struck with the iron poker was completely numb. She had attacked him like a madwoman, hitting and kicking him, spitting on him in an apoplectic, hate-filled frenzy. Then she ran out of the cabin and simply drove away, leaving him behind in the middle of nowhere in the Swiss Alps. For hours he had lain naked on the floor, unable to move, as if in shock. At the same time he had hoped and feared that she would come back and get him. But that didn’t happen.