It was his first time, and he was gravely worried that it would end in tragedy.
Although he’d been involved in solving many criminal cases, Roth had never visited a crime scene. Once he’d even flown with officers to the Côte d’Azur to help solve a case, but all he did was lead the police to a missing person and never got to inspect a crime scene. And nothing like a corpse, which he feared today.
‘Both vehicles identified,’ said Detective Hirsch next to him. ‘The taxi at the barn is registered to Franz Uhlandt, our suspect. The Renault behind the water tank belongs to Livio Kress.’
They stood alongside the already searched and secured construction trailer in the muddy yard of a former calf fattening facility in Liebenwalde, waiting for the SWAT team to report in over the radio.
Three heavily armed officers in black gear had just disappeared inside a battered old clinker-brick building.
‘Soyuz?’ Hirsch asked the team leader over his walkie-talkie.
‘Building secure,’ the man answered promptly. ‘Now opening the cold storage walk-ins.’
‘Hats off to you. I wouldn’t have predicted this,’ Hirsch openly admitted to Roth. ‘Looks like your hocus pocus did get us somewhere.’
He waved at Roth to follow him, and they walked up to the brick building.
‘Hypnotherapy isn’t hocus pocus,’ Roth countered. ‘If we hadn’t used regression, the patient wouldn’t have been able to remember any of the things that happened to him on the plane.’
‘Right, right. I know that and I have a ton of respect for your work, doctor. Though, just between us, I do think it’s a little weird when people start barking all at once or forget how to count like I’ve seen in those hypnosis shows. But, with a coma patient? Amazing.’
Roth rolled his eyes and sighed. They now stood at the entrance to the building with the walk-ins.
‘Medical hypnosis has nothing to do with any carnival fakery. And Dr Krüger isn’t lying in a coma. He’s locked in, so awake, and very easily put into a trance by means of sounds and voices.’
Hirsch laughed. ‘And in the process it occurred to him that we should be searching for his daughter here in the middle of nowhere?’
Roth followed him into a tiled outer room. He heard a cutting torch somewhere in the distance.
‘He made it clear to us that we had tried to trigger him with a perfume that someone had mistakenly told us was his daughter’s favourite scent. That someone was none other than Nele Krüger’s ex-boyfriend, the probable father of her child—’
‘… and we weren’t sure why he told us the wrong perfume, so we tracked his mobile phone here to his car because he hadn’t called us back; I know, I know, heard it already—’ Hirsch grabbed Roth firmly but not unkindly by the arm, preventing him from proceeding any further for the moment. ‘Look, I’m not going to fool you. I hate these kinds of ops. The chances don’t ever look very good when—’
Hirsch’s walkie-talkie crackled. The cutting torch was silent.
‘Detective?’
They were so close they could hear the team leader in person as well as over the speaker.
‘What?’ Hirsch said and ran out of the outer area and around the corner.
Roth followed him and saw the three officers standing with their weapons lowered before the welded-open steel door to an enormous walk-in.
‘Good God,’ said Hirsch, the first to reach the site.
‘How long did they have air in here?’ asked one of the three SWAT team men, but no one answered.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Roth heard as he tried glancing past the men and inside the room.
All that he saw was red and blood. And red. And more blood.
The most awful sight was her face, smeared so glossily, as if Nele had dipped her head in a blood-filed bathtub and then lain herself down to rest forever with eyes closed. Together with the other two corpses, one with a bashed-in skull, the other with its throat slit open, the three presented a still life of horror.
Roth retched, lost control of his stomach and probably would’ve thrown up if there hadn’t been that flash. The white flash distracted him so much that he even forgot his nausea.
The white flash… of Nele’s eyes.
‘She’s alive,’ he heard someone say behind him, and it was only later, when he was finally inside the walk-in, when he’d been kneeling next to Nele and feeling for her faint pulse, all while several of the men screamed at him for contaminating the crime scene, that he became aware that it was he himself who kept repeating the two words.
‘She’s alive.’
Over and over again, until Nele opened her mouth too, unable to scream, so weak and half-asphyxiated after so many hours using up nearly all the oxygen inside this chamber. Yet Roth didn’t even need to hear what she was saying. He could read it on her lips, and even if they hadn’t been moving, he would’ve been able to read her thoughts. A mother could only have one single thought in this situation.
‘Where is my baby?’ she asked him, and somewhere, far, far away, in another world outside this chamber of horrors, an officer was shouting for Detective Hirsch and saying: ‘Oh, God. Come on, get back here. You have to see this for yourself!’