In Free Fall (13 page)

Rita has gotten used to all this. She now means everything she says just as it sounds. She pulls the corners of her mouth down when she smiles. She breathes in, not out, when she says “yes,” which sounds like a disapproving “huh” that makes everyone she speaks to lose all desire to carry on talking. And when she is angry she presses her lips together as if a word starting with “B” were stuck in her throat. Bullshit. Bluster. Balderdash.

Both men and women turn to look at Rita in the street, and she does not take this as a compliment but as a reaction to her physical oddity. She buttons her shirts and coats to the top in all seasons. In summer she wears flowery dresses that hang below the knee, a length no dressmaker would call fashionable. On Rita’s body this type of dress has an effect similar to that of a campsite sticker on a Maserati.
A clever person has to laugh; stupid people get angry. Rita is fine with that. There are not many female detectives, and their colleagues claim they would faint at the sight of a drowned body. This is why Rita needs to package herself to display the superiority of mind over body. She wears ironic clothes and sarcastic sandals that are feared throughout the jurisdiction. When she enters a room at her workplace, all heads lower, as if the Latin teacher has just entered the classroom. If asked whether she has a sense of humor, she would answer that there is no sentence so foolish that a person could not say it in all seriousness. So why laugh?

The only thing that really interests Rita is police work. She is thirty-one, single, and childless. As a member of the murder squad, she encounters corpses every day and can examine wives battered to death, old people who have choked on their mashed potatoes, and suicide cases crushed by trains—without even thinking of fainting. She also has the young men in the police force well under control. At their morning meetings, she does not mince her words about their mistakes and failures. If anyone contradicts her, she points to a long list of cases in which she was right from the very start.

The cat is one of the few living beings whom Rita wishes well. When she holds the little animal on her lap, she can feel its warmth on her skin after a few seconds, unlike the warmth of a human being, which can take a few minutes to penetrate the clothing. Apart from that, the cat has a sensible job, unlike most people. It keeps the birds away from the windows of the ground-floor apartment. Rita tends to feel that she is being observed, and she can’t bear airborne spies.

After devouring her third egg, Rita gets up and puts the purring cat down on the chair she has just vacated. In the kitchen, she fills the feeding bowl with the ground chicken that she has bought by way of apology. Since a senior registrar and his head parted company during a cycling ride, Rita has hardly been home. Last night she stormed out of her office after the walrus-mustached police chief had called, and she woke after a few hours’ sleep feeling just as insulted. Even though she
has very little experience of politically sensitive cases, she was not surprised when the police chief bellowed through the phone, explicitly demanding that she conjure up a miracle. She did not mind staying late in the office and going back to work at seven the next morning. What made her bile rise up was that they wanted to put a higher-ranking detective on the case with her. Rita Skura is young, she is a woman, and the steel-cable killing is actually the first time she has led a murder investigation. Even if the whole thing were to blow up into a real crisis, even if the chair of the bristle-haired home secretary were to wobble, Rita Skura does not need help. She must deliver concrete results by this evening, otherwise Detective Chief Superinten dent Schilf, the very man to whose advice she owes her career, will be transferred from Stuttgart to Freiburg.

Schilf’s guest lectureship at the police college had been anticipated with great interest. He was preceded by his reputation as a veritable prophet of crime. He was said to avoid working in a team and was seldom seen at headquarters, and he solved his cases more or less in his sleep. They expected a magician. When Schilf finally stood before the class, a chill wind of disappointment swept through the room. In his early fifties, he behaved like an old man. Beneath the worn jacket, his shoulders drooped as if he were trying to counteract his height. Colorless strands of hair that had once been blond hung in his face. Standing stooped at the blackboard, he snapped pieces of chalk between his fingers. He kept interrupting his lectures for no apparent reason, swaying from one foot to another and listening with a shocked expression to something within himself, as if hearing the echo of a thunderclap that had happened long ago. When he continued speaking, he spoke in sentences that no one understood. “I have no memory—that is why I can see into the future.” Or, “Two contradictory statements are mostly right and wrong at the same time.”

Or his favorite: “Coincidence is the name given to the greatest human error.”

None of the students took his strange behavior as a disguise (they
were right). Rather, they believed, they were faced with the pathetic remains of a man who had once been successful (here they were wrong).

At first Rita had thought of him as a genius damned. After he had turned her from an innocent to a skeptic in one fell swoop during the first lunch break, she called him a damned genius. When he said good-bye to her after his final lesson, he took hold of her hands without ceremony, gave her a piercing glance, and said, “Rita, child, what hefty mitts you have!” She pulled her fingers free and retorted, “And what a wrinkled visage you have!” They looked each other in the eye and laughed. Rita has not seen him since.

Of course, she had liked the half-mad Schilf. And precisely because of this—exactly as she has learned from Schilf himself—she does not trust him. If there is one thing she does not need right now, it is the presence of a genius, especially one who sees through her system of coming to conclusions. Next to him, her diligence and carefulness will count for nothing. Ralph Dabbelink is her most important case to date. His death, which could hold the key to the hospital scandal, belongs to her.

Although it is already remarkably warm at seven in the morning, Rita pulls on a cardigan over her dress before she leaves the house. In her lipstick-red Corsa she drives to Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse, holds up her pass to the card reader, and parks under the moss-covered, corrugated iron roof. Ignoring the back door, she walks around the building to enter it—with shoulders thrown back and chin jutting forward—through the brick front entrance as she does every day.

[2]

AT RECEPTION, A MAN IS STANDING
with both hands on the counter, his forehead against the Plexiglas, as if he cannot keep himself upright any longer. Rita knows these blokes, and finds them repulsive. This one is tall and well built, someone who could easily have made something of himself. His hair is greasy, a dull street-dog yellow. His clothes must have cost a fortune; now they are smeared with blood and crumpled from head to toe. The man has clearly spent several days in them. Regardless of whether such people hand themselves over or are brought in, they cause the kind of trouble that never ends well.

Rita instinctively holds her breath to escape any whiff of alcohol fumes. The stranger does not even turn at the sound of her slapping sandals as she passes by. He stares ahead sightlessly. The duty officer raises his hand in greeting as he continues speaking into his telephone. Almost every morning, Rita climbs the stairs feeling relieved that she no longer has to deal with a certain type of everyday business.

She reaches her office on the third floor, a little breathless, takes off her cardigan, and falls into the black leather chair. Behind the frosted glass of her desk, she still feels like a child who is shuffling around the house in her father’s shoes for fun. She doesn’t mind. She knows very well that she has an office to herself at her current grade only because none of her colleagues wants to share one with her.
She loves this room, especially the under-floor computer cable that pops out through a hole in the carpet by a leg of her desk. Along with the rows of impeccably labeled folders on the shelves, it projects an atmosphere of professionalism in which Rita revels every morning, as if bathing in dragon’s blood before setting forth to do battle.

A fan of letters to be dealt with is spread out next to the keyboard. The window was open through the night and has let in cool air, which will last for a while between the thick walls of the building. Far beneath, the usual pack of sparrows twitters in the hedges that a former graveyard gardener tends with great care. Rita looks smugly across the parking lot at the treetops. They are so far away that feathered parasites cannot look in on her. If her office were on the ground floor, Rita Skura would bring her cat to work.

She looks through Dabbelink’s files for a bit. The photos have the most impact, and having seen them for a hundred times does not diminish their power to shock. Dabbelink’s head, wedged in the fork of a tree. The same head again, lying on a stretcher next to the twisted body to which it had belonged only a short while before. There is a length of spinal column sticking out of the body, white and clean. The loose ends of the carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus look like the tubes hanging out of a broken machine. The report by the forensic expert stated that the victim had noticed the trap at the final second, and lifted his head in shock—otherwise the cable would have split his skull. In retrospect, Rita is grateful to Dabbelink for this noble gesture. His condition is already problematic enough.

One of the documents that has just arrived is a report from the forensic laboratory. Delighted, the detective claps her hands like a little girl when she reads the results. Only under protest did the men securing the crime scene carefully transport two square meters of the forest floor, agitated ants and all, to the laboratory. Now they have the genetic profile of a man, who has not yet appeared in any database, but who will shortly be found. Found by her. Apart from this, an indignant Freiburg woman has filed charges against the as-yet-unknown person
because she found a pile of garbage in her compost bin on the morning after the murder. With that, Rita has almost everything she needs: the murder instrument and the murderer’s shoes, trousers, and shirt. Everything except the murderer himself, whose continued absence is almost beginning to take on a physical form. The hairs that were found pronounce him blond, and his footprints indicate that he is 1.9 meters tall and weighs 85 kilos. Definitely a handsome and clever murderer, not one of the poor devils that one puts behind bars with regret.

Rita will spend the morning in the hospital and will continue looking out for a man who matches the description. In the cardiology department, there is a rumor going around that someone had been threatening Dabbelink. But no one will say who or how. In a combustible situation like this, practically everyone could have had an interest in Dabbelink’s death: a pharmaceutical company with a priceless reputation to protect; a nurse who fears losing her job; Medical Director Schlüter, afraid that someone knows too much. Rita will grab hold of Schlüter once again before he can barricade himself in the operating theater. Ever since the university has started looking into disciplinary proceedings, Schlüter has been well-nigh invisible in his department. The criminal charges triggered by the hospital scandal were made anonymously. Schlüter claims that a rival heart specialist is trying to blacken his name.

Rita will question everybody she can get hold of today. In the afternoon she will drop by the cycling club once again. The detectives who are dealing directly with the hospital scandal update her around the clock. Rita tosses the documents onto the desk and stretches her arms. She thinks she will solve this case before Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf can buy his train ticket to Freiburg. At least she will not fail for lack of persistence.

She recognizes Sergeant Schnurpfeil’s knock. As always, he waits for a clear “Come in!” before he opens the door slightly, sticks his head in, and smilingly waits for the invitation to be repeated. Only when Rita has said “Yes, come on in!” does he gather up his bulk and bring it
to rest in the center of the room. Schnurpfeil is ten years younger than the detective and the only person in the precinct who, in his stoical manner, knows how to deal with her. The young female officers-in-waiting think he is the best-looking man at police headquarters. And yet he always seems uncertain, as if there were a frightened boy behind his mass of muscle, constantly worried that he will be asked to emerge one day. Even now, Schnurpfeil does not seem comfortable with the vantage point granted him by his height. When his colleagues ask him how he puts up with Rita Skura’s moods, he shrugs and says that she is clever and also a good detective. He cannot say whether her hair looks like a horse’s; and whatever else he thinks of her, he keeps to himself. The senior policeman is always sent when there is bad news. He knows that as well as she does. He stands next to the desk, twisting his cap in his hands. Rita has never yet offered him a seat.

“Schnurpfeil,” she says, looking as if she is still checking something in the file, “are you driving me to the hospital?”

“Yes,” Schnurpfeil replies. After some thought, he adds, “As well.”

He looks up and tries smiling once again. What his colleagues will never understand is that he likes talking to Rita Skura. He doesn’t mind formalities and thinks nothing of it when she addresses him in military fashion by his last name. After all, he is only a young senior officer, while she is an up-and-coming detective. He generally knows how to reply to her in a manner that will not agitate her, and he is proud of that.

“Break it to me gently,” Rita says, pushing her heavy curls off her forehead.

Rita can’t stand the summer, just as she cannot bear many other things. If it were up to her, it could be autumn or winter the whole year long. It’s easier to think when it’s cold and clothing is more sober.

“Three more senior doctors had their heads chopped off?”