Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(124)
What had actually happened? They had spent a wonderful day in the snow under a steel-blue sky, had cooked and eaten a meal together and then made passionate love. Out of the blue Nadia had suddenly blown her top. But why? She was his friend, his best, closest, oldest friend, who had never abandoned him. Suddenly the memory shot through him like a bolt of blinding lightning. “Amelie,” he mumbled with stiffened lips. He had mentioned Amelie’s name because he was worried about her, and that was what made Nadia blow up. Tobias pressed his fists to his temples and forced himself to think. Gradually his foggy brain came up with the connections that he had been unwilling to acknowledge until now. Nadia had long been in love with him, but he had never realized it. How painful it must have been for her to listen to him recounting his numerous infatuations in minute detail. She had never let it show as she gave him tips and advice the way a good pal does. Tobias lifted his head in a daze. The storm had died down. He resisted the temptation to remain lying in the snow and hauled himself up to a standing position, his knees stiff. He rubbed his eyes. Impossible! Down there in the valley he could make out lights! He forced himself onward. Nadia had been jealous of his girlfriends, especially Laura and Stefanie. And when she had casually asked him at the edge of the forest whether he liked Amelie, he had guilelessly answered “yes.” But how could he have known that Nadia, the famous actress, would be jealous of a seventeen-year-old girl? Had Nadia done something to Amelie? Good God! The thought got him moving faster, sending him down toward the valley. Nadia had a head start of a night and a day. If anything happened to Amelie, then he would be to blame, because he had told Nadia about Thies’s paintings and that Amelie wanted to help him. He stopped and opened his mouth in a wild, angry wail that echoed off the mountains. He screamed until his vocal cords hurt and his voice gave out.
* * *
Dr. Daniela Lauterbach seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. At her office they thought she was at the physicians’ conference in Munich, but inquiries showed that she had never arrived there. Her cell phone was turned off and her car could not be found. It was so frustrating. At the psychiatric hospital they considered it possible that Dr. Lauterbach had picked up Thies. She was one of the doctors on call, and no one would have paid any attention if she entered a ward. But on that Saturday night she had not been on call for emergencies. She had faked the call so she could leave and then waited outside the Black Horse. Amelie knew her and had probably voluntarily gotten into her car. To throw suspicion onto Tobias, Dr. Lauterbach had shoved Amelie’s cell phone into his pants pocket when she drove him home later. It was a perfect setup, and other coincidences helped her out as well. The probability of finding Amelie Fr?hlich or Thies Terlinden alive was tending toward zero.
That evening at ten o’clock Bodenstein and Kirchhoff were sitting in the conference room watching the Hessen Journal news on TV, which had announced that the police were looking for Dr. Daniela Lauterbach and that Nadia von Bredow had been arrested. Reporters and two television teams were still hanging around outside the police station, greedy for news of Nadia von Bredow.
“I think I’ll go home.” Pia yawned and stretched. “Can I drive you somewhere?”
“No, no. You go ahead,” said Bodenstein. “I’ll take one of the official cars.”
“Are you okay so far?”
“So far, yes.” Bodenstein shrugged. “Life goes on. Somehow.”
She gave him another dubious glance, then grabbed her jacket and purse and left. Bodenstein got up and turned off the TV. All day long he had managed to banish the unpleasant encounter with Cosima from his mind through hectic activity, but now the memory came back in a nasty, galling wave. How could he have lost control like that? He switched off the fluorescent lights and slowly walked down the hall to his office. The guest room at his parents’ house tempted him as little as a tavern. He might as well spend the night at his desk. He closed the door behind him and hesitated for a moment in the middle of the room, which was bathed in a weak glow from the streetlights outside. He was a failure as a husband and a police officer. Cosima preferred a thirty-five-year-old to him, and Amelie, Thies, and Tobias were probably long dead because he hadn’t found them in time. The past lay in ruins, and the future didn’t look much rosier.
* * *
If she leaned down and stretched out her arm, she could touch the surface of the water with her fingertips. The water was rising much faster than Amelie had thought it would, and obviously there was no drain anywhere. Not much longer and they’d be sitting in the water up here on the bookshelf. And even if they didn’t drown, because the water would flow out through the sliver of a window near the ceiling, they would die from hypothermia. It was cold as hell. And Thies’s condition had worsened dramatically. He was shivering and sweating, his body hot with fever. Mostly he seemed to sleep, his arm wrapped around her, but when he was awake, he talked. What he said was so scary and sinister that Amelie wanted to cry.
As if someone had pulled aside a black curtain in her mind, her memory was again crystal clear and she knew how she had ended up in this hole of a cellar. The Lauterbach woman must have put some kind of drug in the water and in the crackers, because she had fallen asleep every time she ate or drank anything. But now she could remember what happened. Dr. Lauterbach had called her and waited in the parking lot, friendly and concerned, begging her to come along to visit Thies, since he was having such a hard time. Without hesitation Amelie got into the doctor’s car—and woke up in this cellar. In the condemned buildings in Berlin, the homeless shelters, and on the streets of the city, she thought she’d seen all the evil that existed in this world, but it had only been a pale glimmer of how cruel people could be. Living in Altenhain, this idyllic little village that she had considered so boring and desolate, were merciless, brutal monsters, disguised behind masks of bourgeois respectability. If she ever got out of this cellar alive, she would never trust anyone again for the rest of her life. How could a human being do something so horrific to someone else? Why hadn’t Thies’s parents ever realized what the nice, friendly neighbor woman had done to their son? How could a whole village look on in silence as an innocent young man was sentenced to ten years in prison while the true criminals got off scot-free? In the long hours of darkness Thies had gradually told her everything he knew about the gruesome events in Altenhain, and that was a lot. No wonder Dr. Lauterbach wanted him dead. The instant she had this thought, Amelie was filled with the shattering certainty that the two of them were going to die. The Lauterbach woman wasn’t stupid. She would have made sure that nobody would find them here. Or at least not until it was too late.