Dead Woods (4 page)

“No. I didn’t pay attention to any of that. My tables were the ones behind them. All I picked up on was that at the end of the evening both of them were plastered and couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”

“Who? The two women?”

“No, the man and one of them.”

“So this was one of your tables?” Lina asked Sabrina Prost. She wondered whether the server responded to every “Prost” she heard at work (unless the more international “Cheers!” was used at the new Waldschänke).

“Only as long as the box office was open. Then it belonged to Antje’s area.”

“So, it’s possible that the three arrived together, but equally possible that the man and the two women came here separately. The man and one of them talk with each other . . . very intimately . . . and at one point, the second woman disappeared. The couple remained. Am I right so far?”

“They even left together. Rather late. They were the last guests. And like I said, they were really drunk, both of them.”

“They weren’t just really drunk, they were totally wasted,” said Jule.

Lina looked from one to the other. Sabrina shrugged. “All right, they were excessively tipsy.” She grinned. “The boss doesn’t like to hear that his guests are plastered. Doesn’t fit with the ambiance he wants to maintain.”

“When did the two leave?”

The women looked at each other. “We were out of here at twelve,” Sabrina said. “That means that the doors were closed at half past. Which means, they left a little before eleven thirty.”

Jule nodded. “They were made to leave,” she added.

Lina silently went through the notes she had taken. “Were you able to catch any of their conversation?”

Sabrina shook her head. “I was busy early in the night since I also had Antje’s tables. Later on I was serving in a different section.”

“Could you give a description of the woman who was on such good terms with the man?” Lina asked.

“Hm. Long hair, but she wore it up,” Sabrina replied. “A mousy blond, I’d say. Maybe brown. Rather small; at least smaller than him.” She pointed at the photo.

“Did you notice anything else? Was she wearing glasses? Did she have piercings? Makeup?”

“No, I don’t think so. Nothing unusual.”

“Wait a moment,” Jule cut in. “She wore glasses, didn’t she? The kind you can’t easily see, with wireframes.” Jule rested her arms on the counter and continued, “And her hair was black, medium length. She wore a fleece jacket and jeans. And clunky shoes.”

“No, she didn’t have glasses. I’m quite sure,” replied Sabrina.

“Yes, she did. I swear!”

Lina rolled her eyes. What witnesses said was usually about as reliable as the weather report for the coming week.

“How old was the woman? What’s your guess?” Lina asked, trying to refocus the two women.

“Maybe thirty. Or . . . what do you think, Sabrina?”

Her colleague nodded. “Sounds about right.”

Lina finished her notes on what the two had told her and then closed her notebook. She slid off the barstool. Amazed, the two employees looked down at her. Lina suppressed a grin and handed a business card to each of them. “Thank you very much for your help. If you remember anything else, please give me a call.”

When Lina was in the parking lot, her stomach started rumbling. She briefly considered going back in and treating herself to a hot meal, but then thought that would be too much for breakfast. She looked at her watch and then checked her notebook, where she had marked down the addresses of Ulrike Vogt and Antje Niemann. Niemann lived nearby, so Lina decided to take a chance—and to stop at a bakery on the way there.

Not long after, with a chocolate croissant in a paper bag on the passenger seat, she was looking for the right house number in a little wooded neighborhood. All around her were multistoried redbrick buildings from the 1880s with large green lawns, parking lots, and those pathetic playgrounds that make children wither like marsh marigolds in the desert. Lina parked and followed a narrow footpath. She found 5C at the last entrance and the name Niemann on the top nameplate. She pressed the button. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. Finally she took out her phone and called the number Bertram Vogt had given her. While it was ringing, she looked around. A woman with a stroller was coming from the other end of the path, from the direction of a little pedestrian zone and the Tibarg Center. She stopped and started to fumble through her handbag. When she opened her cell phone, Lina heard a slightly hoarse voice say, “Yes, hello.”

“Frau Niemann? This is Lina Svenson from Major Crimes, Hamburg. I am standing in front of your building right now.”

The woman with the stroller looked up. She said nothing more, but flipped her mobile phone shut and slowly walked closer. Her black miniskirt revealed long, slender legs. Her tight top and lilac-colored jacket of artificial leather seemed to be a bit much for a Friday morning.

“What do you want?” she asked. Now, when she was standing directly in front of her, Lina saw the blue eye shadow and heavily applied mascara, which could not hide the tiredness in her eyes. Her hair was tied in a loose ponytail. The child in the stroller was sucking on a bottle and staring at Lina.

“Is it about Marcel? What has he done now?”

Lina shook her head. “As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything.” Whoever this Marcel was, the woman in front of her seemed to have reasons to expect the worst. Lina held out her badge. “I’m investigating a murder. The victim attended last night’s concert at the Waldschänke, and I’d like to ask you a few questions, since you’re a witness.”

This apparently didn’t make the woman more comfortable. She seemed uneasy about being interrogated by the police in the middle of the day, even though the small, petite woman in front of her hardly looked like a cop.

“Would you mind coming in? I don’t want to talk about it out here,” she responded after a long pause.

“Of course.” The woman opened the door, pushed the stroller into the hall, and struggled to remove the shopping bags from the handle. Lina helped her by taking the bags so that she could carry the child, who so far had not said a word.

The apartment was on the fifth floor. They stood silently next to each other in the elevator, which smelled of a cleaning spray. The apartment was warm and stuffy. Frau Niemann motioned for Lina to deposit the shopping bags in the kitchen while she brought the child to the living room. Then the television could be heard—some children’s program—and Antje Niemann returned to the kitchen. She sat down at the table, took out a package of cigarettes, and lit one. Her artificial fingernails were decorated with tiny rhinestones.

“That boy will be the end of me. Youth Welfare and the fuzz are here all the time.” She flinched when she realized who stood across from her. “’Scuse me. I didn’t mean you.”

Lina waved it away. “No problem. I’m not that touchy.” She sat down next to the woman. “I’m not here because of Marcel.” She showed her Philip Birkner’s picture. “Have you seen this man before?”

Antje Niemann needed no more than a brief glance. “Sure. Last night. I noticed him the moment he came in. A real looker. And the way he smelled!” She sighed. “He paid for his ticket and went in. And later he sat at one of my tables, but unfortunately not alone.” She sighed again.

“You’re sure he came by himself?”

“Totally.”

“But he’d reserved two tickets. Did you mention that to him?”

“No, he said it himself, that he ordered two tickets but was only taking one. And he smiled sadly. I knew then that the guy had some trouble with his sweetie.”

“But he didn’t stay alone for long, did he?”

“You can say that again.” She laughed and sent smoke curls toward the ceiling. “Guys find consolation fast; they’re good at that, every single one of them.”

She seemed to speak from experience.

“Your colleagues told me that he was sitting with two women. Do you know who was there first, this man”—Lina tapped the picture—“or the two women?”

“No idea. I only noticed the two when I saw them sitting at the same table with that guy. One of the two actually left right away, as soon as the band stopped playing. She just had an apple juice spritzer and looked a little out of it. Then the guy and the other lady really started to enjoy themselves. Three, four glasses of wine—each. And they topped it off with a grappa at the end.”

“Did they have anything to eat?”

Antje Niemann thought for a moment. “He had a pizza, but she . . . I think, nothing.”

“Do you remember when he ate the pizza?”

“He ordered before the concert began, and I brought it to him shortly before the music started. I’d say around a quarter to eight.”

Lina jotted down the time.

“Did you, by chance, hear what the two were talking about?”

Antje Niemann shook her head. “No time for that, and I wasn’t interested anyway.”

The little kid showed up at the kitchen door. Still without saying a word, it snuggled up to its mother’s leg. Lina couldn’t determine whether it was a boy or a girl. The mother patted the kid’s head and said, “Go back in the other room, Charlene. Mama has to talk some more with the auntie here.”

Charlene didn’t react. She was still sucking on the bottle, which was almost empty now. Using her mother’s leg as a hinge, she swayed to and fro. Antje Niemann, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, sighed and picked the girl up.

“And the guy is dead now, you say?” she asked.

Lina nodded.

“Where did you find him?”

“In the Niendorfer Gehege, not far from the Waldschänke.”

“Oh, no. So nothing came from their billing and cooing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the way they were making out—still in the joint, when most of the other guests had already left. I had to tell them three times we were closing. Almost seemed as if they wanted to spend the night there. Finally they left. I can still see them staggering into the forest together.”

“So they didn’t call a cab? Could they have gone to the subway?”

“Don’t know. You can go to the subway through the forest; it’s actually a shortcut. It’s possible they wanted to go to Niendorf Markt . . . or to Hagendeel, but that’s farther away.”

“Which path, exactly, did they take?”

“Well, if you leave the Waldschänke, cross the street and go right. It’s the path that follows the street for a while.”

Antje Niemann stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and pulled her daughter closer.

“What did she look like? Could you describe the woman?”

“Hm, let me see. On the small side, dark hair, sturdy. She didn’t pay much attention to how she looked. She didn’t wear any makeup or anything. And her hair was messed up. She just used a regular rubber band to hold it back.” Then her face lit up. “Now I remember. I’ve seen her before. Yes.”

“You know the woman?”

“No, I don’t know her from Adam, but she’s been at the Waldschänke before. Wait. The concert was yesterday. It must have been on Wednesday or Tuesday, noonish. She had a caffe latte and a sandwich,” Frau Niemann said. She picked up a half-empty bottle of apple juice spritzer and poured some into a glass that had been used before. “She looked like one of those tree-hugging chicks, in hiking boots, rustic clothes, and a knapsack—you know what I mean. She wasn’t particularly special.” Antje Niemann shrugged, as if she could not imagine why a man looking like the one in the photo would be interested in such a woman.

“Was the woman alone on Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk with her?”

“No, just took her order and maybe said, ‘Enjoy’ or something when I brought the stuff to her. She paid right away. She did leave a tip. I liked that.”

“Did you see her arrive that day? Did she walk? Or did she come on a bike? In a car?”

Antje Niemann shook her head. “We’re always very busy at noon, so there’s no time to spy on our guests.”

Contrary to yesterday
, Lina thought.

Chapter 4

Police headquarters on Bruno-Georges-Platz was a giant, round structure with ten wings that jutted out so that from above the building looked like a stiff-legged sun. Max Berg took the elevator to the sixth floor, where the homicide division of the State Criminal Police was located. Six investigative teams worked in Major Crimes, each with five members, dealing with all murders and unsolved deaths in metropolitan Hamburg. Max shared an office with Lina and right next to them, reachable through a connecting door, was the realm of Chief Inspector Hanno Peters. The next room was shared by Chief Inspectors Alexander Osterfeld and Sebastian Muhl.

Max had just entered his office and removed his jacket when the phone rang. He saw on the display that it was forensics and picked up the receiver while still standing.

“What have you got for me?” he asked.

“We just noticed something really strange,” Reiner Hartmann said. “Stefan and Susanne are still out there and just called. Right at the scene of the crime, someone replanted a plant. It seems it was done after the victim had puked on it.”

Taken aback, Max sat down slowly. “What do you mean ‘replanted a plant’?”

“I mean that someone dug it up and replanted it away from its original spot, and did it carefully, by the way. Someone seems to have made an effort. Stefan thinks that the plant was rinsed off before it was replanted.”

“Wait a second—stop! You really want to tell me that someone runs through the woods in the middle of the night and washes plants? And then replants them?”

“Sorry. I only tell you what we find. It’s your job to figure out the reasons.”

Max closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “What kind of plant is it?”

There was a pause. “Well, the two are no experts on green stuff, but we’ll look into it.”

Berg was laughing. “You mean CSI can’t afford a book on the classification of plants?”

“We have two of those,” Hartmann said, defending his team, “but we don’t haul them to every crime scene.” He pretended to be insulted.

“Pray forgive me, oh lord of trackers.”

Hartmann was laughing.

Max had just put down the phone when Hanno came to the door. He looked at Lina’s desk, as he always did. On Lina’s desk, contrary to Max’s, creative chaos reigned, as she called it: scraps of paper, pencils, candy wrappers, and paper cups lay scattered about; papers and folders were stacked in several piles on the table, the windowsill, and even on the floor. Nevertheless, she always found what she was looking for immediately, to the great surprise of her colleagues. For a while, obeying Hanno’s order, she had grudgingly brought order to her desk. It had taken her twice as long to find things during those three weeks. Hanno finally gave in and allowed her peculiar system.

“Lina here yet?” Hanno asked.

Max was about to shake his head when Lina showed up at the door with a cup of coffee in her hand.

“Come to my office. Team meeting,” Hanno grumbled.

Lina rolled her eyes.

It was cool in Hanno’s office; the window was tilted open and one could hear traffic noise from outside. Alex, a lethargic man in his midforties who loved to hide behind paperwork but was otherwise quite agreeable, was still on vacation. Sebastian, a man with a handlebar mustache, the beginnings of a paunch, and a bald head, was already sitting in one of the chairs and shamelessly staring at Lina’s breasts. Lina ignored him and eased her knapsack to the floor without putting down her coffee. Hanno was watching her intricate maneuver suspiciously, fearing for his carpet.

When everyone was finally seated, Hanno cleared his throat and checked the sheet of paper in front of him. “Now, what have we got so far?”

Max summarized what clues had been found at the scene of the crime. Philip Birkner had lived thirty-four years. He died the previous night between eleven and three, most likely from a head wound caused by a blow with a blunt instrument. An abundance of different footprints had been noted at the scene of the crime. The rinsed and replanted plant was something neither he nor his colleagues could explain.

“Could it have been gang related?” Sebastian asked, concentrating on the most obvious clue: the many footprints.

“It’s possible, but neither money nor IDs were missing,” said Max.

“If all they wanted was to whack someone, money was of no interest to them,” commented Hanno. “They wanted to have their fun and Birkner crossed their path by accident.”

“Out there, in the woods?” asked Lina. “The spot where we found the body is pretty far from any subway station. Besides,” she added quickly before anyone could say anything, “he probably wasn’t alone.” She told them what she had found out at the Waldschänke and from Antje Niemann.

“This might be the woman he called shortly before the concert began,” Max said and told them about the number on Birkner’s call list that he had used quite often. “I’ve tried to reach her, but so far I’ve only gotten her voice mail. The number is registered to a Tanja Fischer, but nobody was home at the address in Eimsbüttel. I met a neighbor, but he’s never seen the woman.”

“It’s also possible that the returned ticket was just for show,” said Lina. “All three of the women I talked with thought Birkner and the unknown woman must have known each other. In any case, they soon got very intimate.” She took a sip of her coffee. “And at the end of the evening, both disappeared, quite inebriated, into the forest.”

“When was that?” asked Hanno.

“About half past eleven.”

“Could both of them have been attacked and only the woman escaped?” asked Sebastian.

“Why wouldn’t she call for help?” objected Max.

“Maybe she doesn’t have a cell phone,” Sebastian suggested. “There actually are people who don’t.”

“But at one point she would have been near a phone. I mean, the Niendorfer Gehege isn’t that big. And at that time, there still must have been people around.”

“Or she’s lying dead or injured somewhere in the woods and nobody has found her yet,” Lina said.

The room filled with an uncomfortable silence. “I can’t imagine that,” Max finally said. “The Niendorfer Gehege is pretty small and busy, and there’s almost no dense underbrush, at least not near the scene of the crime. If she were lying injured somewhere in the forest, she would have been found by now.”

“There remains the possibility that she lured Philip Birkner into a trap,” Hanno said, thinking out loud. “She picked him up at that bar, got him drunk, and then lured him into the forest where her accomplices waited for them.”

“And the motive?” Lina’s question echoed in the room. Nobody had an answer.

“Paid thugs? Russian mafia?” Sebastian finally speculated.

“Hm,” grunted Max.

“Why not? It’s happened before,” Sebastian continued.

“But the woman doesn’t fit in that scenario,” Lina said, backing up her colleague’s doubt. “According to the descriptions I got, the woman didn’t look like Russian mafia. More like a ‘tree-hugging chick’ as one of the servers called her.”

Hanno’s expression was pensive. “Max, you continue trying to reach this Frau Fischer. If we’re lucky, she’ll turn out to be the unknown woman. Lina, did you get the list with the advance reservations for the concert?”

Lina nodded and knew what was going to come next.

“Good, call them all. If we’re lucky, the two women are on the list. If not, maybe someone will be able to describe them accurately,” he said tartly, “or at least give a description that matches one of the three we have.”

Lina collapsed in her chair. Calling people on any kind of list usually had as much success as playing the lottery, but it took much more work. “There’re more than forty numbers,” she mumbled, but nobody volunteered to help her.

Max looked at his watch. “The public relations office will make a statement to the press in an hour. Should we mention the witness and ask her to contact us?”

Hanno thought it over quickly and then shook his head. “If she really is a witness, let’s hope she contacts us when she hears that someone died. Maybe she hasn’t found out yet. If she’s involved in the crime, our request to come forward won’t help.” He paused. “We’ve got to check the subway stations in the vicinity. Maybe the videotapes show some flipped-out adolescents.” He looked at the large map of the city on the wall opposite his desk. “Niendorf Markt and Hagendeel. I’ll arrange for us to get hold of the surveillance tapes. As soon as they arrive, you check them out, Sebastian. In the meantime, contact the beat cops and find out whether they noticed anything. Give them a description of the witness, too.” He continued studying the city map.

“And there’s also the matter of the plant. It’s strange. I’ve never come across such a thing.” He scratched his head. “There must be a forest ranger for a place like the Niendorfer Gehege. Max, find out who’s in charge and talk to that person. Maybe things like that are more common than we know.”

Hanno looked at his colleagues over the rims of his glasses. “How about the victim’s milieu? It seems obvious that he cheated on his domestic partner. Does she know about it?” He turned to Lina and Max. “What’s your impression of Frau Ansmann?”

Lina and Max looked at each other. “She was slightly underwhelmed by the death of Birkner, if you ask me,” Lina said. “I mean, he’s her partner and the father of her son.” She shrugged. “And if he cheated on her, she’d also have a motive.”

Hanno scratched his head. “Only if she knew about it.”

“I know, but nevertheless . . . ,” Lina replied.

“Did you check out her alibi?” Hanno asked.

“Not yet. But I have a funny feeling about that woman. Something isn’t right.”

“Yes, yes, your famous gut feeling,” Sebastian mumbled and Lina rolled her eyes. True, every investigator had a strange feeling every now and then. Sometimes it meant something, sometimes it turned out wrong, but Sebastian acted as if it were just one of her quirks.

Hanno ended the discussion. “Lina, if you feel that strongly, why don’t you pursue the matter? Check her alibi.” He grinned. “And your gut feeling.”

“Yes, my lord and master,” she mumbled, but so quietly that only Max could hear it. He grinned.

“How about personal enemies . . . old debts . . . unpaid bills?” their boss asked.

“Frau Ansmann suggested that we take a look at one of Birkner’s former employees, a Frank Jensen.” Max briefly reported what he had found out so far about the end of Birkner’s company. “In her opinion, Jensen was responsible for the bankruptcy. Birkner gave him a bad exit report, and he’s unemployed because of it.”

Hanno looked at him with a frown. “And that’s a legitimate motive for murder?” he asked.

Max shrugged. “You asked for open accounts. That seems to be one.”

Hanno groaned quietly. “Be careful with what you wish for. Sometimes you just might get it.”