Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(45)

If you keep your mouth shut, nothing will happen. If not, the police will find out what you lost that time in the barn when you screwed your underage pupil. Fond greetings from Snow White.




His mouth was suddenly dry as dust. He looked at the second page, which showed a photo of a key ring. Fear crept through his veins, and he broke out in a cold sweat. This was no joke. His thoughts raced. Who had written this? Who could have known about him and his slipup with that girl? And why the hell was this letter arriving now? Gregor Lauterbach felt like his heart was going to jump out of his chest. For eleven long years he’d succeeded in repressing those fateful events. But now it had all come back, so vividly that it seemed like only yesterday. He stood up and went to the window, staring out at Luisenplatz, deserted in the gradually lifting darkness of this dreary November morning. He breathed slowly in and out. Just don’t lose your nerve now! In a desk drawer he found the well-worn notebook in which he’d kept telephone numbers for years. When he picked up the receiver he noticed to his consternation that his hand was shaking.

* * *



The gnarled old oak stood in the front part of the large park, not twenty feet from the wall that surrounded the entire property. She had never noticed the treehouse before, perhaps because in the summertime it had been hidden by the thick foliage of the tree. It wasn’t easy in a miniskirt and stockings to climb up the rickety-looking rungs of the ramshackle ladder, which was slippery from the rain of the past few days. She hoped Thies wouldn’t choose this moment to come out of his studio. He would know at once what she was doing here. Finally she reached the treehouse and crawled into it on all fours. It was a solid box of wood, like the elevated blinds that hunters used in the woods. Amelie straightened up cautiously and looked around, then sat down on the bench and looked out the window in front. Bingo! She dug her iPod out of her jacket pocket and called up the photos she had taken last night. The perspective matched one hundred percent. From here there was a sweeping view over half the village; the upper part of the Sartorius farm with its barn and cowshed lay directly at her feet. Even with the naked eye every detail was crystal clear. If she assumed that the cherry laurel had been somewhat smaller eleven years ago, then whoever painted the pictures must have watched from this very spot.

Amelie lit a cigarette and braced her feet against the wooden wall. Who had been sitting here? It couldn’t have been Thies, because he was visible in three of the pictures. Had somebody taken photos from up here that Thies had found and made paintings of later? Even more interesting was the question of who the other people in the pictures were. Laura Wagner and Stefanie “Snow White” Schneeberger, that was obvious. And the man who had done it in the barn with Snow White—she knew him too. But who were the three boys? Amelie pondered as she took a drag of her cigarette and considered what she should do with what she’d discovered. The police were out of the question. In the past she’d had nothing but bad experiences with cops; that was one of the reasons she’d been shipped off to her father’s dump of a town, even though she’d heard nothing from him for twelve whole years except on birthdays and Christmas. Alternative two, telling her parents, who would also run to the cops, didn’t make any sense.

A movement in the Sartorius barnyard caught her eye. Tobias went into the barn, and a little later the engine of the old tractor started up with a clatter. He was probably going to spend the somewhat dry day cleaning up some more. What if she showed him the pictures?

* * *



Even though Dr. Engel had expressly stated that there would be no new investigation into the two eleven-year-old murder cases, Pia kept on working with the sixteen files. Mostly to distract her thoughts from the threat behind the succinct words of the zoning department. In her mind she had already furnished the new house at Birkenhof and made it into the tasteful and cozy home she had always dreamed of owning. Much of Christoph’s furniture fit wonderfully in her interior decoration dreams: the ancient, scratched refectorium table, where twelve people could sit comfortably, the well-worn leather sofa from his winter garden, the antique hutch, the charming recamier … Pia sighed. Maybe everything would turn out all right and the building office would send the permit so she could finally get started.

She went back to focusing on the documents lying in front of her, scanned a report, and jotted down two names. Her last encounter with Tobias Sartorius had left her with a strange feeling. What if he’d been telling the truth all these years, and he really didn’t kill those two girls? That would mean that the real killer was still running around loose, while the wrongful conviction had cost Sartorius ten years of his life and his father his livelihood. Next to her notes she drew a map of the village of Altenhain. Who lived where? Who was friends with whom? At first glance it seemed as though Tobias Sartorius and his parents had been respected and well-liked people in the village. But if you read between the lines, there was obvious envy underlying the words of the people questioned. Tobias Sartorius had been an extremely good-looking young man, intelligent, good at sports, and generous. He seemed to possess all the best qualifications for a brilliant future; nobody spoke ill of the star pupil, the sports ace, the heartthrob of every schoolgirl. Pia looked at some of the photos. What had it been like for Tobias’s plain-looking friends with their pimply faces to be constantly compared with him? How must it have felt always to stand in his shadow, and never have first choice of the cutest girls? Weren’t envy and jealousy preprogrammed? And then an opportunity had suddenly presented itself to take revenge for all the tiny defeats: “Yes, Tobias does have a violent temper sometimes,” one of his best friends had stated. “Especially when he’s been drinking. Then he can flip out completely.”