Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(50)

Wagner straightened up and turned to face her.

“Forensics has…” Pia stopped short. The baseball cap! The beard! There was no doubt. Before her stood the man she’d been looking for from the still photo taken from the surveillance camera footage.

“What?” He stared at her with a mixture of aggression and indifference, but then he went pale, as if he’d read Pia’s mind. He shrank back, and his guilty conscience was written all over his face.

“It … it was an accident,” he stammered, raising his hands helplessly. “I swear to you, I didn’t want it to happen. I … I only wanted to talk to her, really!”

Pia took a deep breath. So she had been right to assume there was a connection between the attack on Rita Cramer and the events of September 1997.

“But … but … when I heard that this … this filthy murderer got out of the joint and was back here in Altenhain, then … then all at once the memories came rushing back over me. I thought about Rita, I know her well. We were friends before. I only wanted to talk to her so that she’d make sure that son of hers got out of town … but then she ran away … and she took a swing at me and hit me … and all at once … all at once I got so mad…”

He broke off.

“Did your wife know about this?” Pia wanted to know. Wagner shook his head mutely. His shoulders slumped.

“Not at first. But then she saw the photo.”

Naturally Andrea Wagner had recognized her husband, just as everyone else in Altenhain had. She had kept quiet to protect him. He was one of their own, a man who had lost his daughter in a most gruesome way. Maybe they even considered the misfortune he had dealt the Sartorius family as some sort of poetic justice.

“Did you think you’d get away with it because the whole village covered up what you’d done?” Any empathy Pia had felt for Manfred Wagner had been swept away.

“No,” he whispered. “I … I wanted to go to the police.”

Suddenly worry and anger overcame him. He slammed his fist onto the workbench. “That lousy murderer has done his time, but my Laura is dead forever! When Rita refused to listen to me, I saw red all of a sudden. And the railing was so low.”

* * *



Andrea Wagner stood in the courtyard with her arms crossed and watched as two police officers led her husband away. The look she gave him spoke volumes. There was no remnant of affection between them, much less love. The children had to be the only thing that kept them together, or maybe it was the duties of daily life, or the sheer impossibility of imagining a separation, but not much more. Andrea Wagner despised her husband, who chose to drown his sorrows and problems in alcohol instead of standing up and dealing with them. Pia felt real empathy with the sorely afflicted woman. The future of the Wagner family didn’t look any rosier than their past. She waited until the patrol car left the property. Bodenstein had already been notified and would talk to Wagner at the station later.

Pia got into her car, fastened her seatbelt, and turned the car around. She drove through the small industrial park, which consisted mainly of the Terlinden firm. Behind a tall fence there were large workshops scattered among neat lawns and parking lots. To get to the main building, a big semicircular structure with a high glass fa?ade, the road led through barriers and gatehouses. Several trucks waited for admission at one of the gates, and on the other side one truck was being inspected by guards. The truck behind it honked. Pia had already put on her left-turn blinker to turn onto the B19 toward Hofheim, but then she decided to pay a brief visit to the Sartorius family and turned right instead.

The early morning fog had lifted and given way to a dry, sunny day—a breath of late summer in the middle of November. Altenhain seemed deserted. Pia saw only a young woman walking two dogs, and an old man standing in the driveway of his farm, his arms resting on the low gate as he talked with an older woman. She drove past the Black Horse, its parking lot still empty, and the church, then followed the sharp right-hand curve and had to brake because a fat gray cat was crossing the narrow road at a dignified pace. In front of Hartmut Sartorius’s former restaurant stood a silver Porsche Cayenne with Frankfurt plates. Pia parked next to it and entered the property through the wide-open gate. All the piles of rubbish and junk were gone, and even the rats seemed to have moved on to greener pastures. She went up the three steps to the front door of the residence and rang the bell. Hartmut Sartorius came to the door. Behind him stood a blond woman. Pia could hardly believe her eyes when she recognized Nadia von Bredow, the actress. Her face was well known all over Germany because of her popular role as Detective Inspector Stein from Scene of the Crime, set in Hamburg. What was she doing here?

“I’ll track him down,” she was saying to Hartmut Sartorius, who seemed more careworn than ever next to this tall, elegant figure. “Thank you. I’ll see you later.”

She barely glanced at Pia and walked past her without saying hello or even nodding. Pia watched her go, then turned to Tobias’s father.

“Nathalie is the daughter of our neighbor,” he explained before she asked, because he probably noticed the amazement in Pia’s face. “She and Tobias played together in the sandbox as kids, and she kept in touch with him through his whole prison term. The only person who did.”

“Aha.’ Pia nodded. Even a famous actress had to grow up somewhere, so why not in Altenhain?