Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(34)
“So.” Dr. Engel took the floor, since Bodenstein failed to do so. “The skeleton from the airplane hangar turned out to be Laura Wagner from Altenhain, who has been missing since September 1997. The DNA was a match, and the healed fracture of her upper arm matches the X-ray taken before she died.”
Kirchhoff and Ostermann already knew the contents of the forensic report, but they listened patiently until their chief finished her lecture. Was Dr. Engel bored with her job? Was that why she kept interfering with the work of K-11? Her predecessor, Dr. Nierhoff, had put in an appearance only once in a blue moon, primarily when an especially important case needed to be solved.
“I just wonder,” said Pia when Dr. Engel had finished, “how Tobias Sartorius could have driven from Altenhain to Eschborn, broken into a secure, locked military site, and managed to get the body into an underground tank, all within forty-five minutes.”
There was silence around the table. Everybody looked at Bodenstein.
“Sartorius allegedly murdered the two girls in his parents’ house,” Kirchhoff clarified. “He was seen by the neighbor when he first entered the house with Laura Wagner and later, when he opened the door for Stefanie Schneeberger. The next time he was seen was around midnight when his friends came to pick him up.”
“What are you getting at?” Dr. Engel wanted to know.
“It’s possible that Tobias Sartorius was not the perpetrator.”
“Of course he was,” Hasse countered at once. “Did you forget that he was convicted?”
“In a trial based purely on circumstantial evidence. And I ran across several inconsistencies when I studied the documents. At a quarter to eleven the neighbor saw Stefanie Schneeberger being let into the house by Tobias Sartorius, and half an hour later his car was seen by two witnesses in Altenhain.”
“So?” said Hasse. “He murdered the girls, put them in his car, and took the two bodies away. They reconstructed it.”
“At that time it was assumed that he had disposed of the bodies somewhere nearby. Now we know that this was not the case. And how did he get onto the closed military site?”
“The young people have always gone out there to party. They must have known about some secret entrance.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Kirchhoff shook her head. “How could a man who’d been drinking heavily accomplish all that? And what did he do with the second body? We didn’t find that one in the tank! I tell you, the time frame is much too tight!”
“Ms. Kirchhoff,” Dr. Engel chided. “We’re not doing an investigation here. The perpetrator was caught, convicted, sentenced, and has served his time. Now I want you to go see the parents of this girl and tell them that the mortal remains of their daughter have been found. And that’s the end of it.”
* * *
“And that’s the end of it!” Kirchhoff mimicked her boss. “I have no intention of letting this matter rest. It’s obvious that a sloppy investigation was done at the time, and the conclusions were totally arbitrary. I’m asking myself why.”
Bodenstein, who had let her drive, didn’t reply. He had folded his long legs into the uncomfortably cramped Opel, closed his eyes, and said not a word during the whole trip.
“Tell me, Oliver, what’s going on with you?” Pia asked at last, slightly miffed. “I don’t feel like driving around all day with somebody who’s as talkative as a corpse.”
Oliver opened one eye and sighed. “Cosima lied to me yesterday.”
Aha. A family problem. As expected.
“And? Who hasn’t lied occasionally?”
“Me.” Oliver opened his other eye. “I have never lied to Cosima. I even told her about the Kaltensee case.”
He cleared his throat and then told Pia what had happened the day before. She listened with growing discomfort. It certainly sounded serious. Yet even in this situation Oliver’s noble sense of honor gave him a guilty conscience, because he had snooped for evidence in his wife’s cell phone.
“There’s probably a completely innocent explanation for all of this,” said Pia, although she didn’t believe it. Cosima von Bodenstein was a beautiful, temperamental woman who was financially independent because of her job as a movie producer. Lately there had been some friction between her and Oliver—Pia had noticed that—but her boss hadn’t seemed to take it seriously. How typical that he was now dumbfounded. He lived in an ivory tower. It was even more astonishing considering how fascinated he was by the abysses he witnessed in other people’s relationships every day. Unlike Pia, he seldom let himself get emotionally involved in a case. He seemed able to maintain a distance that she found rather self-righteous. Did he think that something like this couldn’t happen to him? That he was somehow above such mundane matters as marital problems? Did he really think that Cosima was satisfied just sitting around the house with a small child, waiting for him to come home? She was used to a whole different kind of life.
“But she’s going out to meet somebody and telling me she was somewhere else entirely,” he argued. “That sounds suspicious to me. What am I supposed to do?”
Pia didn’t answer right away. In his situation she would have done everything to find out the truth. She probably would have confronted her husband at once, creating a scene with yelling and tears and accusations. It would be impossible for her to act as if nothing had happened.