JF04 - The Carnival Master (41 page)

‘Have you done this before?’ asked Suzi. Her hair had been coiled up behind her head and she undid it. A glorious red, but much deeper than Sylvia’s, the girl who had introduced him to his own hunger, so many years before.

‘Of course I have,’ he said. ‘Lots of times. Why don’t you get undressed? Let’s get started.’

‘Not yet,’ said Suzi. ‘I want to know if you’ve done this with other girls.’

‘Yes, sure. Loads of them. I told you.’

‘And they enjoyed it?’

‘Well. Maybe not as much as you will. They misunderstood.’

‘They didn’t want you to do it but you did it anyway?’

‘I don’t know … yes, I suppose so. What does that matter?’ Oliver frowned. This was ruining it. What did the stupid bitch have to talk for? He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. ‘You said in your reply that this is what you wanted. Let’s do it.’

‘You want to bite me?’

‘Yes,’ Oliver said, breathless. Lust and anger robbed him of oxygen. ‘I’m going to bite you.’

‘You want to make me bleed and tear flesh from my buttocks?’ Suzi drew closer to him. He could smell her body, her hair. ‘Like you bit the others?’

‘Yes …’ He started to pull at her blouse. He saw the swell of her breast. Full, warm flesh.

‘Not yet,’ she said firmly and pushed him away. ‘Tell me about them …’

‘I hurt them.’ Oliver felt the rage surge in him. ‘I really fucking hurt them and now I’m going to hurt you, you fucking slut!’ he screamed at her. ‘You’re just a tease and a whore, but now I’m going to teach you a real lesson. I’m going to bite you and fuck you and if you’re not quiet I’ll kick the shit out of you.’ He lunged at her, swinging his fist into the side of her face.

The blow didn’t connect. There was a sharp pain on the inside of his forearm where she had blocked the blow, followed by an agonising explosion in his groin as her knee slammed into it. The rage changed to confusion and then to fear as he realised that she had twisted his arm round behind him and slammed him against the wall. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see much either, with his cheek pushed hard into the wall. There were other noises. Crashes. Shouting.
The room filled with dark figures. They had guns. There were other hands on him now. Handcuffs. Suzi spun him around. She pushed the thick copper coils of hair from her face.

‘Now,
Hans
… now I’ll tell you my real name. Just like I promised. It’s Tansu Bakrac. Criminal Commissar Tansu Bakrac. And you, you perverted piece of shit, are under arrest.’

As they led him out of the flat, Oliver noticed that the doors off the hall were now open. Empty rooms. No furniture. That was where all the other police had been waiting; that was why she had led him directly into the bedroom: it was all a masquerade. They had probably recorded every word he had exchanged with ‘Suzi’ since they met in the hotel.

There were two other plain-clothes police officers waiting in the hall. Of course, Oliver knew the shorter dark-haired one who now looked at him in shock. ‘Suzi’ turned to the taller, blond-haired officer whom Oliver had not seen before and grinned.

‘That was some favour you asked …’

‘What’s up with you, Benni?’ Fabel asked as the uniformed officers led ‘Hans’ out to the waiting police cars. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘Shit …’ said Scholz, his expression still one of shock. ‘Bloody hell …’

‘What’s up?’ Tansu’s triumphant grin gave way to a frown.

‘Don’t you know who that is? You’ve just arrested Herr Dr Oliver Lüdeke.’

‘The forensic pathologist?’

‘One and the same. Now the crap is really going to hit the fan.’

‘A forensic pathologist …’ said Fabel. ‘Someone who would be an expert at excising an exact quantity of human flesh.’

Scholz had led the questioning but had asked Fabel to partner him. Not that it had done any good. Fabel’s dislike of Oliver Lüdeke had been instant and intense. He knew that he would have felt the same disdain for Lüdeke if he had met him at a cocktail party instead of as the chief suspect in an inquiry into two, and potentially three, horrific and brutal murders. Lüdeke had refused to answer any questions at all and had only been vocal in complaining about his unjustified detention.

‘I don’t need a weatherman to tell me that there’s a shitstorm heading our way,’ said Scholz to Fabel after they had terminated the interview. ‘He’s already been in touch with his lawyer – and you can bet the first calls his lawyer’s made have been to the State Prosecutor and the Police President. We’ve got to nail him quick.’

‘So you’re convinced he’s our man? Even though you know him personally?’

Scholz snorted. ‘
Especially
because I know him personally.’

‘You don’t like him?’ asked Fabel.

‘Oliver Lüdeke is good-looking, charming, rich, clearly highly intelligent, has a highly paid, prestigious job and is regularly seen in the company of a string of beautiful women. Of course I hate the bastard. But putting that aside, there are a whole lot of other reasons why I’ve never liked Herr Dr Lüdeke.
He’s an arrogant son of a bitch. No – more than that. He has this way about him … I don’t know, it’s difficult to explain. He doesn’t fit in Cologne. I know that doesn’t make sense but class means nothing here. Karl Marx was from Cologne, but he said he could never start the international revolution here … it would never catch on in a city where the labourer and the factory manager drink in the same pub. Take the other state forensic pathologists: great guys to work with. Great guys to get pissed with. But Lüdeke looks down his nose at you every time you speak to him.’

‘So you’re saying he’s a good suspect because he’s a snob?’

‘Snobbery doesn’t come close, Jan. With Lüdeke it’s more like we are all lower forms of life. It doesn’t take a stretch for me to see him as someone who believes others have been put on this Earth to provide him with what he wants out of life. And that would fit with a sexual predator who doesn’t give a damn about inflicting pain on those he uses to fulfil his needs. Or even killing them.’

‘He’s certainly the strongest suspect we’ve got so far. But if he’s as connected as you say he is, then we’re going to have to move quick to prevent him walking. What’s the situation with a warrant to get a DNA sample?’

‘Tansu’s chasing the State Prosecutor’s office,’ said Scholz. ‘We should get one in a couple of hours or so.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have another go at chummy.’

‘Oh shit …’ said Scholz, looking over Fabel’s shoulder. Fabel turned to see a heavy-set man in his fifties coming along the corridor towards them.
Fabel recognised the attitude of authority about him. When he reached them Scholz introduced Fabel to Cologne’s Police President, Udo Kettner.

‘This is an awkward situation, Benni,’ said Kettner. ‘Potentially very embarrassing. You don’t seem to have a lot to go on.’

‘He was about to attack Tansu,’ said Scholz.

‘You’ll find that difficult to prove.’

‘We have it on tape,’ said Fabel.

‘What you’ve got on tape, Herr Fabel, could be construed as entirely consistent with the nature of the advertisement he placed. He’s going to argue that the manner of his arrest amounts to entrapment. Added to which, he can claim that he did nothing wrong other than, as an unmarried man, meeting a young woman to explore a mutually consensual sexual encounter.’

‘I smell lawyer talk,’ said Scholz.

‘They’re on the way in …’ Police President Kettner said wearily. ‘I got a call within thirty minutes of Lüdeke being arrested. They’re going to challenge the legitimacy of the arrest and the set-up behind it.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Scholz.

Kettner grinned. ‘Lüdeke’s lawyers aren’t the only ones who can use a phone.’ He handed Scholz a document. ‘I thought a little leaning on the State Prosecutor’s office might speed things up. Here’s your warrant to obtain DNA. But for Christ’s sake, Benni, make sure you do everything by the book.’

Fabel, Tansu and Scholz sat in Scholz’s office. The latest ‘bull’ head watched them from the corner. Scholz contemplated it dourly.

‘We have only eight days until Women’s Karneval
Night,’ he said. ‘I hope to God Lüdeke is our guy. If that DNA doesn’t check out then we’re screwed.’

‘Even if it does,’ said Fabel, ‘it only ties him into the rape and battery of Vera Reinartz. He’s clearly a sexual sadist with a cannibalism fixation, but without a confession or other corroborating evidence we’ll never get him for the murders. And given Lüdeke’s arrogance and the hourly rate he’s paying his lawyers, we’re never going to get a confession.’

‘Forensics have turned up nothing. His office and apartment are both clean,’ said Scholz glumly. ‘The annoying thing is that the very weapon he’s used to slice chunks out of his victims may well be right under our noses. I’ve never had a suspect whose job it’s been to cut up human beings. It’s a forensic nightmare. If only Vera Reinartz or Andrea Sandow or whatever she wants to call herself had kept just one of those bloody letters.’

‘Even then that would only tie him directly in with the attack on her,’ said Fabel. ‘All we’ve got to link him to the murders is the similarity of m.o: the necktie around the victims’ necks and the biting. Circumstantial. Listen, Benni, we may never nail him for the killings, but if we get him for the Reinartz rape and assault, we can at least be content that we’ve taken him off the street for Women’s Karneval Night. We get a conviction and it’ll be a few Karnevals before he sees the light of day again. Only, of course, if we get a DNA match.’

The thought was interrupted by the pale schoolboy face of Kris Feilke appearing around the door.

‘We’ve got the bastard, Benni!’ Kris beamed. ‘We’ve got a perfect match. Oliver Lüdeke is the man who raped Vera Reinartz.’

Andrea opened the door of her apartment to Tansu and Fabel. She was dressed in a short skirt and loose black blouse. There was also a cluster of heavy costume jewellery at each wrist and her face was even more made up than the last time Fabel had seen her. She could not have presented herself more femininely, yet the sheer stockings only served to accentuate the heavy musculature of her thighs, the blouse the breadth of her shoulders and the make-up the masculine angularity of her features. What was it about Andrea Sandow, thought Fabel, that provoked such hostility within him?

‘I was just about to go out,’ she explained.

‘This won’t take long,’ said Fabel and made to enter the apartment. Andrea did not move.

‘I have an appointment. I can’t be late.’

‘We’ve got him, Andrea,’ said Tansu. ‘The man who attacked you eight years ago.’

‘You sure it’s him?’ Whatever Andrea was thinking, it didn’t penetrate the mask.

‘Positive,’ said Fabel. ‘We’ve got a perfect DNA match. It’s a man called Oliver Lüdeke.’

The mask shattered. Andrea gazed at Fabel in disbelief. ‘Oliver Lüdeke?’

‘You know him?’

Andrea stood to one side. ‘You’d better come in. I have to make a call – see if I can put back my appointment …’

Again, Maria found herself anchorless in time. She had no idea how long she had been asleep or unconscious. It could have been a few minutes
or a few days. Her first awareness on awakening was pain: in her ribs, in her face, and a hot, sharp tingling on her rasped skin. Maria grabbed onto the pain. It was the lesson that Vitrenko had taught her: that pain meant life.

She awoke to find herself lying on a mattress on top of a metal camp bed. They had dressed her again and her clothes smelled musty and dirty. There were several blankets over her and she saw that she was still in the cold-meat store. No, not still; she realised that they must have taken her out of the store to warm her up and stop her terminal decline into a hypothermic death. That would have taken time and skill. Maria rolled up the sleeves of her coat and jumper. She found what she was looking for on her left arm: a fresh puncture wound into a vein. Her brain was still running sluggishly and her head pounded but she knew what this meant: they would have administered a warm dextrose and saline drip to increase her core body temperature, and they would probably have put a mask on her to administer warm, humidified oxygen.

Maria knew that she was already a dead woman. And before she died there would be a lot of pain: both for Vitrenko’s enjoyment and to extract whatever information he could from her. But Maria was aware that what she knew was not enough for him to keep her alive. He was going to use her somehow to gain access to the dossier he was obsessed with. She had to escape: it was the only way for her to survive. And to stop Vitrenko from winning.

Maria still felt chilled to the core. She sat up on the edge of the bed and gathered the musty blankets around her. She removed her glove and waved
her naked hand through the air. The temperature in the cold store was tolerable. It would have taken a long time to remove the chill from the air. There were no heaters in sight but she surmised that they must have been used. Maria’s guess was that she had been taken out, treated for hypothermia and kept sedated somewhere until the temperature in the store had risen sufficiently. This was no longer a torture chamber, merely a place of confinement. For the moment.

Maria tried to stand but an electric shock of pain from her cracked ribs jolted her. She allowed her fingers to explore gingerly beneath her jumper. Her ribs had been strapped. She eased back on the camp bed and thought about Buslenko, someone who had existed for her only through Vitrenko’s masquerade. She lay still, looking up at the ceiling with its bleak, relentless neon light and mourned a man she didn’t know.

The door opened and a tall heavy-set man came in, carrying a bowl. Maria didn’t recognise him but he had a distinctly Russian or Ukrainian look. His hair was cropped short and his nose showed signs of an ancient break. He placed the bowl next to her bed and left the cold store without speaking. So there were others now. For all she knew, Vitrenko had left and was going about his more important business. Maria made a mental picture of the guard who had delivered the food. I’ll call him The Nose, she thought. She ate the stew. It was so hot that it burned her mouth but she didn’t care. She relished the scalding heat in her chest and belly and consumed every morsel.