Dead Woods (18 page)

Max could hear the “but” that the doctor left out. The physician glanced at the patient again. “You’ve seen it yourself. I wouldn’t have felt right if I just let him go home like that.”

Max was thinking of something else. “What did you do with his clothes?”

The doctor was about to shrug but then apparently remembered something. He went to the narrow locker next to the sink, opened it, and pointed to a green plastic bag. The odor of a used-up life drifted toward Max.

“I have to take this along,” he explained. “For the forensics team.” When the doctor frowned, he added, “I will obviously give you a receipt for it.”

The doctor shrugged. “Do what you’ve got to do. But you might want to bring him some replacement clothes.” He yawned again.

Max felt sorry for him. Even though he pretended not to be interested in his patients, it was quite obvious that he’d have liked to spend more time with them than his schedule allowed. Max nodded and said, “I’ll make sure he gets some other clothes.” He looked at Niels Hinrichsen once more. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

Dr. Schubert just nodded, exhausted.

The witness, who had unexpectedly turned into a possible suspect in the case, was a nervous wreck. Lina put a bottle of mineral water and a packet of peanuts in front of her. Franziska Leyhausen blew her nose, had some water, and, after hesitating at first, took a few peanuts.

When Franziska had calmed down a little, Lina asked, “Why did you go to the forest today?”

Frau Leyhausen sat straight up. “I still have to map the area; I’m far from finished.” She took some more peanuts. “When I arrive at the spot where . . . where I last saw Philip, I find this strange guy, this gnome. He’s kneeling on the ground and has a little shovel and an enchanter’s nightshade in his hand.”

“A what?” Lina asked, vexed.

“Enchanter’s nightshade,
Circaea lutetiana
. It’s a delicate plant of the evening primrose family with small white blossoms. It’s very common in Germany. So, the man’s holding the plant in his hand and it’s clear that he just dug it up and is about to replant it. I ask him why he’s doing that, why he’s transplanting it, and he tells me that he wants to save the plant. It’s growing so close to the path that people can easily step on it.” Franziska Leyhausen stopped to drink some water. “When I look around, I see that he’s transplanted quite a few other plants already.” She looked at Lina. “Among them the Aaron’s rod which I had shown Philip, but that one he must have replanted some days before.

“I asked him whether he had transplanted it, and he nodded. And at that very moment, you call me and tell me you’re investigating Philip’s murder and ask me whether I’ve noticed transplanted plants lately. And in front of me is this man with the dug-up enchanter’s nightshade in his hand.” She shivered. “The guy must somehow have figured out that I’m talking with the police. Anyhow, he suddenly yanks the cell phone out of my hand, throws it on the ground and tramples on it. I panic and try to run away, but he grabs my sleeve and doesn’t let me go. He tells me I shouldn’t be afraid. He’s just watching over the forest and he likes the woods as much as I do. I ask him why he replanted the Aaron’s rod and he says that the man had mucked it up and that I’d been mad at him about that, too. It took me a while to realize that he was talking about Philip. I hadn’t noticed that evening that he puked on the Aaron’s rod. I was just mad because he completely messed up my slacks.” Remembering the scene, she wrapped her arms around herself. “I realized that this troll must have been in the woods on Thursday night also, and he must have killed Philip. I’m panicking again. I just want to escape, but he’s holding me back, and then things happen fast. I kick him and he grabs me even tighter, and then suddenly both of us are on the ground. He . . . is lying on top of me and I almost throw up because of his stench. Then there’s suddenly a stone in my hand. I want to scream but I can hardly breathe, and the man above me says something that I don’t understand, and I hit him. Something warm is dripping on me. Then you are suddenly there and I think:
So now I’ve killed someone
. But it’s not true. I didn’t kill anyone.”

Lina and Alex exchanged glances. She obviously hadn’t killed Niels Hinrichsen, but Lina could see in her colleague’s face that he hadn’t yet taken the woman off his list of suspects in the Birkner murder. Franziska Leyhausen had been in the forest at the time of the murder and admitted that she attacked the victim at least once. Her claim that she went home afterward might be a lie. Lina bent forward to look at the biologist’s shoes—heavy hiking boots with mud still stuck to the sole.

“Did you wear these shoes last Thursday, too?” she asked.

Franziska Leyhausen nodded. “I went to the concert directly from work in the forest.”

“Then I have to ask you, unfortunately, to take them off. For forensics.”

Frau Leyhausen looked stunned. “But . . . these are my good hiking boots. I need them for my work. And how am I supposed to go home without shoes?”

Lina and Alex exchanged another glance. Then Alex got up and left the room. Arraignment or not—the district attorney had to decide.

An uncomfortable silence spread in the little room. Franziska Leyhausen opened her mouth a few times to say something, but closed it again. Lina felt sorry for her. To divert her, she asked how long she had known Daniel Vogler.

“For two or three years. We met online, on one of those dating sites.” She shrugged. “Daniel is a nice guy, but the relationship lasted only a few months.” She wiped her face. “Shortly after we met, he bought an apartment and told me I could move in with him. That was a little too fast for me.” With a crooked smile, she said, “That saved me two moves, since a few weeks later it was already over.”

Something clicked for Lina. “He bought an apartment? When?”

Frau Leyhausen was thinking. “Must have been about two years ago, but it still looks as if he just moved in. He still doesn’t even have a coatrack in the hall and his wardrobe consists of several boxes from the move.” She shrugged. “Well, it’s his place. And I’m not there that often.”

Lina rocked on her chair and thought. “Do you have any idea how he financed the place? Apartments in Hamburg aren’t cheap.”

“He mentioned an inheritance and . . .”

Alex came back in right then and Lina could see there was news. Without sitting down, he said, “Frau Leyhausen, please come with me. You’re going to go before a judge.”

The woman turned pale. “But . . . I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill Philip! I—”

“Frau Leyhausen,” said Alex, “the evidence speaks against you. You admit to having been with Philip Birkner at the time of his death, and you also acknowledge that you attacked him.”

“But . . .”

“In addition, there’s a witness who saw you hit Herr Birkner.”

Franziska Leyhausen turned to Lina for help, but all Lina could do was shrug. “I’m sorry,” she said, and added quietly, “I do believe you.”

Chapter 12

Much to the chagrin of Hanno and the relief of Lina, the judge released Franziska Leyhausen on condition that she not leave town and come back to police headquarters the next morning at eight o’clock sharp.

The Jarrestadt in Winterhude was a neighborhood with uniform dark redbrick buildings from the 1920s. Franziska Leyhausen lived in a small two-bedroom apartment overlooking a leafy inner courtyard on a quite side street. Lina and Alex had driven her there from police headquarters, and a forensics department car had followed them, just in case. Why would it be needed? Lina wondered. Did Hanno and Alex expect to find another corpse under Franziska Leyhausen’s bed? Or the murder weapon under the kitchen sink? The biologist wasn’t that stupid. The woman clearly felt uncomfortable about her escort, but she didn’t say anything as she walked, barefoot, along the short path to the door and then up the stairs.

Alex asked her to wait in the hallway and slowly walked through the rooms, looking around carefully. He opened a drawer here and there and checked especially closely under the sink. Lina, waiting in the corridor with Frau Leyhausen, rolled her eyes.

“What’s your colleague looking for?” Franziska asked, adding mockingly, “I might be able to help him. I know my way around here.”

Lina shrugged apologetically, but said nothing. The woman was right.

Finally Alex determined that the suspect could do no damage by entering the place where she lived, and he motioned to the two women to come in.

“Frau Leyhausen, we’ll have to take the clothes you wore last Thursday night with us.”

With a fatalistic sigh, the woman went into her bedroom. She opened the wardrobe and took out a pair of slacks, and added a bra, panties, and a T-shirt from a chest of drawers. “I’m not sure about the socks,” she said to Lina. “Do you want to take all of them along?” It was probably meant to be a biting remark, but she turned away quickly to hide tears.

Lina could imagine how embarrassing the situation was for her and said, “No. It’s fine if you pack socks you might have worn.” She added in a low voice, “Sorry, I have no choice.”

She stuffed the items, all freshly washed, into a plastic bag and tagged it for forensics. After that she looked quickly through the rooms herself. This was, she had to admit, one of the things she liked most about her profession: looking into the lives of others, into foreign worlds. That’s what she had imagined she would be doing when she had started to study ethnology after graduating high school, but it wasn’t like that. Here, in Franziska Leyhausen’s small living room, she found nothing foreign, either. On the contrary, it was as if she stood in the apartment of a friend, so familiar was the unconventional, motley décor: the thick woolen carpet on the polished floorboards, the many tea-light candles everywhere, and the collection of books on the shelves. A closed laptop sat on a small wooden table in a corner. On the corkboard behind it, she discovered a picture postcard of a hamster sticking out its tongue at a big backhoe and saying, “Ha-ha-ha.” Underneath, it said in thick red letters, “No industrial parks on green meadows.” Lina couldn’t help but grin. She had heard of occasions when the construction of commercial or industrial developments was prevented or at least delayed by some critter or other threatened with extinction. The investors either gave up on the million-dollar projects or paid enormous amounts to relocate the cute creatures. Would a woman for whom the survival of a little hamster meant more than profits and employment be capable of beating a man to death? Lina knew this was moot speculation. She knew that, basically, everyone is capable of everything. The only question is how soon someone reaches the point beyond which no other solution seems possible.

An hour later, Lina and Alex sat in the car again. As so often this summer, thick clouds were gathering over the city. It was still dry, but more rain was predicted for the night.

“By the way, Daniel Vogler went to the same school as Philip Birkner,” Alex said out of the blue after they had driven for some time. “I treated myself to the Julia Munz file this morning—the murdered classmate of Philip Birkner. I discovered Daniel Vogler among the list of witnesses. He passed his high school exit exam the same year as Philip Birkner, even though he’s two years younger.”

“So Birkner must have put in some extra time, no?”

Alex shook his head. “No, Vogler skipped two years. But the file doesn’t say whether Birkner and Vogler knew each other. The school, Humboldt Gymnasium, is quite large, and more than one hundred students graduated that year.”

“But did Vogler know the murdered girl?” Lina asked.

“At least by sight. They were neighbors, more or less.” Alex was checking the rearview mirror. “His testimony didn’t bring much. He was neither at the party Julia Munz attended before her death, nor did he belong to her clique. I wonder whether it relates to our case at all—the fact that Birkner and Vogler went to the same school.”

“It is strange, however, that we come across this Vogler again and again,” Lina said. “He was working at the dead man’s company, he went to the same school, and he’s a friend of a possible witness. Maybe we should look at him a little closer.”

“Well, I don’t believe that will lead anywhere,” Alex replied. “My money’s on Leyhausen. She admits she was in the wood with Birkner, and even owns up to beating him.”

“Kicking, not beating.”

“She probably kicked him
and
beat him. Birkner made advances. Maybe he groped her even more than she let on, and then she simply flipped out.” Alex shrugged. He slowed down in front of a traffic light.

“It could just as well have been Niels Hinrichsen,” Lina said. “He was also in the woods at the time of the crime.”

“And what would his motive be?” Alex asked. “He didn’t even know Birkner.”

“But he puked on this plant, the Aaron’s rod. That made Hinrichsen mad,” Lina responded.

“And that’s why he kills Birkner? Very convincing,” Alex said mockingly. “No judge will let us get away with that: murder in revenge for soiling a plant.”

Lina admitted that it sounded far-fetched, but Niels Hinrichsen did live in another world and possibly worked with a different moral compass. Who knows, he might value the life of a plant just as much as a human life.

The light changed to green and Alex accelerated. “Hanno thinks we should find out more about that old stuff, get ahold of old witnesses, friends of Birkner and Vogler, former classmates . . . To be on the safe side,” he added, though his expression indicated that for him the case was more or less solved.

Lina thought of her visit with Sonja Birkner, which she had almost forgotten. “Then we should also speak once more with Birkner’s brother and his sister-in-law. They went to the same school as Philip and were both just one class below him. Maybe they know something.”

Max was standing in front of a utilitarian, two-story apartment building of a co-op in Lockstedt, just a few streets away from the Niendorfer Gehege. According to the entry in the central register of residents, Niels Hinrichsen had lived here alone in a two-bedroom apartment since the death of his mother. Using the key that he had found among Niels Hinrichsen’s personal effects, Max unlocked the door. The stairway smelled of cleaning agents and the floor looked as if it had just been mopped.

He climbed the steps to the second floor. A pot with geraniums stood on the windowsill of the landing, and next to it a watering can. There were three apartments on the second floor, all with the uniform nameplates of the building cooperative. Niels Hinrichsen’s apartment was the one in the middle.

When Max opened the door, he was greeted by a musty odor. The apartment looked gloomy and run-down. It was obvious that it hadn’t been painted in decades. Max walked slowly from room to room and tried to imagine the person who called this home. The entire apartment had gray linoleum floors. The only rug was a threadbare one in the living room. There wasn’t even a small rug in front of the bed. Judging by the pattern, the curtains were from the seventies—so they were modern again. The only furnishings in the living room were a sofa, two chairs, and a chest of drawers with a TV on top. A painfully awful oil painting of a bellowing stag hung on the wall. The right side of the couch, most likely Niels Hinrichsen’s favorite spot to watch television, was noticeably worn out. A neatly folded woolen blanket rested on the left side of the couch. The tiny kitchen next to the living room was little more than a kitchenette. It was reasonably tidy and clean. An unwashed, chipped plate sat on the counter and next to it, a knife with a smear of margarine. The floor was stained and covered with crumbs. In the bedroom, only one-half of a very old double bed was covered with linens. They hadn’t been changed in a while and exuded the biting odor of sweat and loneliness.

He opened the wardrobe and found clean pants and shirts on coat hangers and neatly folded pullovers. He located two pairs of shoes, size 43, on a lower shelf and underwear and socks in drawers. He discovered an old traveling bag on top of the wardrobe and put some of the clean clothes into it to bring to Niels Hinrichsen in the hospital.

He found a thick illustrated book,
2000 Plants, Text and Images
, on a shelf in the living room. It too must have been from the seventies. The pictures had a blue cast and the pages were yellowed. It was an obviously often-read volume. Some pages were marked with bits of torn-out newspaper, and others were dog-eared.

The kitchen cupboards offered nothing interesting. A package of sliced bread, margarine. There were cheese and salami in the fridge. No steel pipe with traces of blood. No indication that Niels Hinrichsen had hidden other evidence here. Max briefly looked into the tiny, windowless bathroom. The sink and toilet bowl were old and cracked but, like the rest of the apartment, reasonably clean. Max took the toothbrush and toothpaste and added them to the other things in the bag.

When he left the apartment, he saw that the door to the right was ajar, though the security chain was attached. A gray-haired woman looked out suspiciously. In the background he could hear a radio playing elevator music.

“What’s your business in Herr Hinrichsen’s apartment?” She spotted the traveling bag and was about to slam the door. “I’ll call the police!”

Max brandished his badge and showed it to her. “Max Berg, Hamburg Major Crimes,” he said, introducing himself.

The woman scrutinized the badge skeptically. She was tall and skinny, and her gray hair was properly cut and combed.

“Did something happen to Niels?” she asked, looking at Max.

“He has a laceration, a cut on his head, and has to stay in the hospital for observation.” The woman’s first reaction had been to assume that something had happened to Niels Hinrichsen. She hadn’t asked whether he had done anything wrong, and now she looked alarmed. “It’s nothing serious. Don’t worry,” Max reassured her. Before she could ask more questions, he motioned to the apartment with his head. “Does he live here alone”—he glanced at the name tag next to her door—“Frau Meyer?”

Her expression brightened when he used her name and smiled. “Yes, ever since his mother died, eight years ago. He took care of her, as well he could, but he’s not the brightest, you know.”

“Does he do everything by himself, I mean keeping house and such?”

“You mean because the cleanliness isn’t up to scratch?” Actually Max had thought the opposite, that for a man with the mental capacity of a ten-year-old, who was taking care of himself, everything was quite as it should be. He nodded, nevertheless. “Well, more or less. He takes care of everything himself. I do his laundry, but he never changes when he should. Every now and then I mop through a little or clean his windows. Shopping, we do that together quite often. I tell him that I need him to help me carry my stuff and then I make sure that he buys some proper food for himself. He can’t cook, of course, but I bring him a plate of hot food every now and then, or he comes over for a meal.”

Max’s response was genuine. “That’s really nice how you care for him, Frau Meyer.”

“Well, you know, I promised his mother. She didn’t have it easy with the boy, and she was so worried what would happen to him once she was no longer around. He doesn’t have anyone else.” By now, she had released the security chain and had come out to the staircase. She was wearing a light, patterned summer dress and sandals and appeared to be a very lively person. “Who knows, otherwise the boy might have to be institutionalized, you know.”

“So are you his official caretaker?”

“Me?” The woman put a hand on her chest. “God forbid. No, we arranged that between us, Niels and I. When he gets mail from social services or whatever, he comes to me.” Then she frowned. “But what happened? You don’t just get a cut. Was he attacked?”

Max nodded slowly. “Something like that. But as I said, it’s nothing serious.” He smiled and asked, “Have you seen Herr Hinrichsen lately?”

Frau Meyer put a hand on her chin and wrinkled her brow. “Yesterday . . . was Monday. I was at the cemetery. And afterward, I walked around at the Aldi. I didn’t see him. Sunday. It was Sunday I saw Niels last. He came over for lunch—roast pork. You know, we both love that.”