Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(41)

“What’s up?” he asked.

With a frosty expression on her face, she asked, “When were you planning on telling me that Detective Inspector Behnke has been moonlighting against regulations at a bar in Sachsenhausen?”

Damn. It had totally slipped his mind, he was so wrapped up in his own problems. He didn’t ask where she had heard about it, and made no attempt to offer excuses.

“I wanted to talk with him first,” was all he said. “I haven’t had a chance to do that yet.”

“Tonight at six thirty you will. I’ve ordered Behnke to come in, sick or not. See about fixing this situation.”

* * *



His cell phone rang as he was heading for the exit at the customs checkpoint. Lars Terlinden switched his briefcase to the other hand and took the call. All day long he’d been at the beck and call of the board of directors in Zürich. A couple of months ago they’d been celebrating him like the Savior Himself for this very same deal, and now they wanted to crucify him. Damn it, he was no prophet. How was he to know that Dr. Markus Sch?nhausen’s real name was Matthias Mutzler, that he wasn’t from Potsdam, but from some village in the hills of southern Germany, and a con man of the worst sort? Ultimately it wasn’t Lars’s problem if the legal department of his bank didn’t do their homework. Heads had rolled, and his would be next if he couldn’t figure out a way to make up the loss, which totaled in the hundreds of millions.

“I’ll be at the office in twenty minutes,” he told his secretary as the milky glass pane slid open before him. He was exhausted, burned out; his nerves were shot and he was done with the world. All by the age of thirty. He could only sleep by taking pills, and eating was difficult, but drinking was okay. Lars Terlinden knew that he was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic, but he would worry about that problem later, when this crisis was over. Although there was no end in sight. The world economy was shaky, the biggest banks in the States were going broke. Lehman Brothers was just the beginning. His own employer, still one of the biggest Swiss banks, had let go five thousand workers worldwide in the past year. In the offices and corridors, naked fear about the future was the rule. His phone rang again, so he stuck it in his pocket and ignored it. The news of the collapse of Sch?nhausen’s real estate empire six weeks ago had come out of the blue; just two days earlier he had met with Sch?nhausen at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin for dinner. By that time the man had known for a while that bankruptcy was looming, that slippery weasel. At this very moment he was being sought by Interpol because he’d skipped out. After much effort Lars Terlinden had at least succeeded in securitizing a large part of the credit portfolio and selling it to investors, but 350 million euros were gone.

A woman stepped into his path. In a hurry, he tried to go around her, but she resolutely stood her ground and spoke to him. Only then did he recognize his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years.

“Lars!” she implored. “Lars, please wait!”

She looked the same as always. Petite and immaculate, her golden blond hair cut in a perfect pageboy. Light makeup, a pearl necklace on her suntanned décolletage. She smiled meekly, and that instantly made him see red.

“What do you want?” he snapped. “Did your husband send you?”

He never deigned to say the words “my father.”

“No, Lars. Could you stop for a moment? Please.”

He rolled his eyes and did as she asked. As a boy he had adored his mother, even worshipped her. He always missed her terribly whenever she went on trips for a few days or several weeks and he and Thies were left in the housekeeper’s care. He would have forgiven her everything in return for her love, but he never got more than a smile, lovely words, and promises. Only after a very long time did he realize that she could give him nothing more because she had nothing left to give. Christine Terlinden was an empty vessel, a shallow beauty with no personality to speak of, who had made it her life’s work to be the ideal wife for the successful CEO Claudius Terlinden.

“You’re looking good, son. A bit too thin perhaps.” Even now she was true to herself. After all this time she could only come up with this hackneyed phrase. Lars Terlinden had begun to feel contempt for his mother when he realized that all his life she had deceived him.

“What do you want, Mother?” he repeated impatiently.

“Tobias is back from prison,” she told him, lowering her voice. “And the police have found Laura’s skeleton. At the old airfield in Eschborn.”

He clenched his teeth. Suddenly his life raced backward at time-lapse speed. Here in the middle of the arrival hall at Frankfurt Airport he had the horrible feeling of shrinking to a pimply nineteen-year-old with naked fear breathing down his neck. Laura! He would never forget her face, her laugh, her carefree joy that had all come to such an abrupt end. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to Tobias again. His father had made all the decisions for him so fast, banishing him at once to the farm of some acquaintance in deepest Oxfordshire. Think about your future, boy! Stay out of this and keep your mouth shut. Then nothing will happen. Of course he had listened to his father. Had stayed out of it and kept his mouth shut. It was too late by the time he heard about Tobi’s conviction. For eleven years he had done everything he could to avoid thinking about any of it: that awful night, his horror, his fear. For eleven shitty years he had worked almost round the clock just so he could forget. And now his mother came sashaying up in her little fur coat and tore open the old wounds with her doll-like smile.