The early morning hiker walked past the Audi in the clearing. A ground mist shrouded the grass and the dew lapped at the bottom of his trousers. Something about the parked car snagged his curiosity and he peered through the driver's window. The woman's head was resting on the steering wheel and her blonde hair was stained by a large splotch of blood. Horrified the hiker ran back to his car, then drove to the nearest phone to call the police.
The first patrol car showed up some twenty minutes later. The two uniformed officers realized this was a crime scene and immediately called for back up rather than risk contaminating the clearing with any incidental investigation.
Within an hour a senior detective arrived to open the car's front door.
The driver held a gun. The entrance wound and bullet's trajectory were consistent with a self-inflicted wound. Only the dead boy in the trunk set this incident apart from the scores of other suicides occurring throughout the year in Hamburg.
Seeing the explicit photos on the floor of the car and how the dead driver was dressed, the senior investigator assumed this was a murder-suicide and hoped no one challenged his theory, since his holiday began this coming Friday.He stepped aside to allow the photographer to shoot the two dead men from every conceivable angle.
While other police officers gathered evidence around the Audi, cars were dispatched in opposite directions to ask anyone living nearby, if they had seen anything unusual yesterday. The first two houses were deserted as was the third, except the door to this mansion had been battered off its hinges. The officers radioed in their findings and soon the estate was crawling with police.
The empty house offered no connection between the two events other than the blood on the bedroom floor suggesting that violence had also been involved in the Von Hausen mansion. The Kripo senior inspector cordoned off this site as well as the sordid murder-suicide up the road. Soon a license trace revealed the driver to be Hans Roth.
Banker.
Bachelor.
Transvestite.
The nameless young boy in the trunk of the Audi appeared to be a Kalbfleisch and the inspector called up the Hamburg Stittpolizei to have someone from Vice identify the boy.
When the call came over the air, Alex Brucken was supervising security on the Reeperbahn. The murder-suicide in the Naturepark was too close to the Von Hausen mansion to be a coincidence. Without hesitation he volunteered for the assignment.
Some thirty minutes later the vice officer pulled into the clearing. He recognized the Audi from the Brookerkai, yet displayed no change of expression, when the chief inspector asked him, if he had seen either of the dead men.
Alex Brucken used a pencil to pick the cloth off the young boy's face and said, "He is a popular Kalbfleisch working Lange Riete. His name is Willi. He lives on Hafenstrasse."
"And the other man?" The inspector beamed with the satisfaction that his calling Vice had paid off so soon and pulled out his pipe.
"I have not seen her before," Alex Brucken lied, as his mind set up a tangent from Kurt Oster and Cali Nordsturm to the banker and the hustler, then Lukas and himself. His mouth went dry with the realization that his off-duty investigation had set up this murder.
The chief inspector packed the bowl of his pipe with Mellow Virginian tobacco imported from England, then held it like Basil Rathbone in HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, as he stated, "She is a he and also a banker, Hans Roth. He also had an identity problem. Sexual that is. We found pictures of Willi with another man. Obviously Hans here was jealous and killed his lover. then himself."
"Yes, that is what it looks like to me." Alex Brucken possessed an entirely different interpretation of the scene. At first he imagined Cali and Kurt had left these two corpses as a warning to Lukas Von Hausen, but that too was an easy 1-2-3. His part-time employer had a hand in this crime and he asked the police inspector, "Will there be anything else, sir?"
"No, we thank you for your help and your assistance will be mentioned in the report." The chief inspector had little time for Stittpolizei as they had a tendency to become involved with the criminal counterparts.
Leaving the clearing, Alex Brucken headed for the Von Hausen estate and discovered a squad of police officers and detective working the premises. The Vice officer flashed his credentials and bluffed his way to the entrance. He introduced himself to the officer in charge, then surveyed the front door, which had been smashed by brute force.
"Break-in?"
"Not just here. Both the second-floor bedroom and bathroom have been axed to pieces. At first we thought it was the usual summer robbery. People away on holiday. Junkies breaking in, except there are signs of struggle in the bedroom and blood on the floor. No bodies though." The officer checked his notebook, then said, "That's all we have presently. That and the family name. Von Hausen."
"Yes, I've seen pictures of him and his bride." It was a casual comment anyone in Hamburg would have made, but all Alex Brucken's plans for a quiet Saturday afternoon with his family had been wrecked and perhaps forever.
"Yes, the papers will have a party with this one being so close to the one up the road." the officer commented, then turned his head to a shout in the forest.
A policeman waved for them to come closer and the two men treaded their way carefully through the pine trees. The dead lower branches cracked off against their shoulders and the sticky fir tar stuck to their clothes. They reached a small mound, where an officer pointed to a bomb shelter's steel door.
"Ah, a souvenir of the Cold War," the officer in charge announced with the apathy of someone who has lived his entire life under the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
"Open it up." Alex was clearly overstepping his authority, though his fellow officer nodded to the uniformed policeman to obey the command of a higher authority.
The door was flung back and the dusty smell of a long-forgotten bunker swarmed over the three men. Alex flicked on a light switch at the top of the stairs. The bulb below glowed weakly. He walked down the stairs to a near-empty cell.
A few footprints marked the mud and several broken syringes were scattered around a slept-in cot.
"What do you think?"
""Nothing much. Looks like local addicts have been using the bomb shelter as a shooting den. I see no blood. Do you?"
The police officers played the flashlight beams around the shelter.
"Nothing."
"Good." Alex allowed them to leave first and picked up the syringes, suspecting that a blood test on the used needles was a link to Willi. He pocketed that evidence and asked himself why Lukas would have brought the hustler here.
Nothing was right.
They emerged from the underground and the three of them returned to the main house.
None of the numbers added up for Alex, but then that was, because he was short a few vital bits of information. Everything always was connected to the razor's edge of life or death and he would have to find out how or else he would find a rope tied around his ankle dragging him down with everyone else.
Needless to say there was no rest for the wicked.
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