Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(99)

Pia picked out the four pictures that showed the murder of Stefanie Schneeberger.

“And who is that?” She tapped her finger on the person Stefanie was embracing. J?rg Richter hesitated.

“That could be Lauterbach. Maybe he went after Stefanie.”

“What exactly happened that evening?” Bodenstein asked.

“There was the fair in Altenhain,” Richter began. “We were out all day and had drunk a lot. Laura was jealous of Stefanie because she’d been elected Queen of the Fair. Then she probably wanted to make Tobi jealous and flirted with us like crazy. She made us really hot. Tobi was working at the drink stand in the tent, with Nadia. At some point he left; there must have been trouble with Stefanie. Laura ran after him and we ran after her.”

He paused.

“We went up the hill, taking Waldstrasse, not the main road. Then we sat around in the back of Sartorius’s place. Suddenly Laura came through the milk room into the stable. She was howling and her nose was bleeding. We started pestering her until she got mad and punched Felix. And somehow … I don’t remember now exactly how … the situation escalated.”

“You raped Laura,” Pia stated in a factual way.

“She had been teasing us nonstop all evening.”

“Was the sexual intercourse with her consent or not?”

“Well,” said Richter, biting his lower lip. “Probably not.”

“Which of you had sexual intercourse with Laura?”

“I did, and … and Felix.”

“Go on.”

“Laura kept hitting and kicking us. Then she ran off. I went after her. And suddenly Lars was standing there. Laura was lying in front of him on the ground, and there was blood everywhere. She probably thought he wanted something from her too. She tripped and hit her head on the rock used to block the gate. Lars was totally shocked; he stammered something and then ran off. We … we panicked too and wanted to run away, but Nadia was very cool-headed, as always, and said we should make Laura disappear. Then there wouldn’t be any evidence.”

“Where did Nadia suddenly come from?” Bodenstein asked.

“She … she was there the whole time.”

“Nadia watched while you raped Laura Wagner?”

“Yes.”

“But why did you want to get rid of Laura’s body? Her death was an accident.”

“Well, we had … raped her, after all. And then she was lying there. All that blood. I don’t know why we did it.”

“What exactly did you do then?”

“Tobi’s Golf was parked there, with the key in the ignition, as always. Felix put Laura in the trunk, and it was my idea to take her to the old airfield in Eschborn. I still had the keys because we’d been there a few days before, doing a little racing. We threw her down the hole and drove back. Nadia waited for us. Nobody at the fair had noticed that we were gone. Everybody was pretty drunk by then. And later we went to Tobi’s place and asked him if he was coming back to the fair with us. But he didn’t want to.”

“And what about Stefanie Schneeberger?”

None of the three knew anything. In the pictures it looked like Nadia had hit Stefanie with the tire iron.

“Anyway, Nadia hated Stefanie like the plague,” Felix Pietsch spoke up. “After Stefanie moved to town, Nadia couldn’t get anything going with Tobi; he fell for Stefanie like a ton of bricks. And then she also snapped up the lead role that Nadia wanted to play.”

“That evening at the fair Stefanie had been flirting a lot with Lauterbach,” J?rg Richter recalled. “He was completely nuts about her; anyone with eyes in his head could see that. Tobi had caught the two of them making out near the tent, and that’s why he went home. The last time I saw Stefanie was with Lauterbach near the tent.”

Felix Pietsch confirmed this with a nod. Michael Dombrowski didn’t react at all. He hadn’t said a word but just sat there, pale and staring into space.

“Could Nadia have known about these paintings?” Pia asked.

“That’s very possible. Tobi told us last Saturday what Amelie had found out. About the pictures and that Lauterbach seems to be in them. Tobi must have told Nadia about it too.”

Pia’s cell hummed. She recognized Ostermann’s number and took the call.

“Excuse me for bothering you,” he said. “But I think we’ve got a problem. Tobias Sartorius has disappeared.”

* * *



Bodenstein stopped the interview and went outside. Pia gathered together the photos, put them back in the plastic folder, and followed him. He was waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed.

“Nadia must know what the pictures show,” he said. “She was at Laura’s funeral this morning, at the same time Thies’s studio burned down.”

“She could also be the woman who passed herself off as a policewoman to Barbara Fr?hlich,” Pia speculated.

“I think so too.” Bodenstein opened his eyes. “And to make quite sure that no more paintings would turn up, she set fire to the orangerie while the whole village was at the cemetery.”

He pushed off from the wall, walked down the corridor and up the stairs.

“She wouldn’t want anyone to know that Amelie had found out the truth about the disappearance of the two girls in 1997,” said Pia. “Amelie knew Nadia and had no reason not to trust her. Nadia could easily have thought up some pretext on Saturday night to lure the girl out of the Black Horse and into her car.”