‘And the eye?’
‘Corroded away with forty per cent hydrofluoric acid. The substance Estermann drank was the same kind of solution, just less concentrated. Otherwise the Owner wouldn’t have been able to have his fun with him for as long.’ Florin laid both his hands on the table, spreading out his fingers, and stared at them as he spoke. ‘Hydrofluoric acid was a really good choice. In high concentrations, it can dissolve glass. But even strongly diluted it can eat through everything – skin and flesh. It even corrodes bone. Not very quickly, mind, but over time. Day after day, it eats away at the whole body.’ Taking a deep breath, he balled his hands into fists. ‘Do we have any new information?’
The change of subject made Beatrice lose her train of thought for a moment, but then she recovered herself. ‘The coordinates. Stefan did the research. This is Stage Five.’ She passed a printout of the Google Maps page across the desk to him.
‘Am Wallersee.’
‘Yes. A no-through road by a small wood, surrounded by fields. The nearest house is half a kilometre away.’
They set off forty minutes later. The way Florin was driving began to worry Beatrice just a few blocks down the road. He was driving much too quickly. Much too angrily.
‘Shall I take over?’ she asked, trying to sound casual as her hand gripped the armrest on the passenger door.
‘No.’ He beeped at a taxi driver who had swerved out of the bus lane.
When Florin was in this mood, it was futile trying to reason with him. Beatrice turned around to Stefan, who was slouched back in the rear seat, his arms behind his head and eyes closed. If he managed to get a few minutes’ sleep, even like this, it would do him good.
‘It’s really starting to get to me, Bea.’ She could only just make out what Florin was saying; his voice was almost entirely swallowed up by the cacophony of traffic. ‘When was the last time it took us this long to at least find a suspect?’ He was driving at a normal speed again now, only accelerating once they reached the autobahn.
‘You can’t compare this to other cases. Until now we’ve never had to deal with killers that act anything like this one.’ Even if she couldn’t manage to reassure him with her words, then at least she could reassure herself. ‘The Owner is organised and extremely well prepared. He’s… like a director, staging his own play.’
Florin didn’t respond. She looked across at him, his profile, the furrowed brow, mouth slightly open. Suddenly she felt the intense urge to stroke the hair off his forehead. She pulled herself together.
Wonderful timing, Bea, incomparable. So typical of you.
‘If we decided not to play by his rules, and not to follow his clues,’ she said, persevering, ‘then we would just be standing around empty-handed. Say if you think I’m wrong.’
A dark look was Florin’s only answer.
‘He’s not making any major mistakes. The only one I can think of so far is the bloody footprint in Sigart’s building. And even that hasn’t been of any use so far.’ She was silenced as Florin made a foolhardy attempt to overtake, cutting up a Jeep Cherokee with a Viennese number plate.
‘Are the victims just collateral? What do you think, Bea? Is he like the Washington sniper in 2002?’
A singer. A loser. A key figure.
‘No, he’s not. He…’ She tried to make sense of her thoughts. ‘He sees a link between his victims. Perhaps it’s a link that only he sees, and maybe it’s completely crazy, but for him, it exists. I’d bet anything on it.’
And he sees a link with me, she thought, even if it is one of a different kind. Kossar was right. Sooner or later, the Owner would make himself known to her.
Chapter 5
N47º 54.067 E013º 09.205
A light wind swayed the grass in the field where the police team had gathered. Drasche, who had installed navigation software on his mobile especially for this case, was engaged in a heated discussion with Stefan, whose Garmin GPS was showing a location that was around fifteen metres away from Drasche’s results for the exact same coordinates.
So far, neither of them had found anything, and the search dogs weren’t due to arrive for another half-hour.
Bushes, trees, a lake. There were no rocky crags or hollows that offered themselves up as hiding places. If the Owner had sunk the container in the water, then the coordinates they had worked out were useless anyway, regardless of whether they went by Stefan’s or Drasche’s results.
Cautiously, putting one foot in front of the other, Beatrice walked along the stretch between the two possible spots. The trees were dense, the ground soft. But there weren’t any indications that someone could have buried something here.
She took a few paces towards the lake, hearing the splash of the small waves which were being pushed by the wind against the water’s edge. With every step she made, her colleagues’ voices became quieter, their words less comprehensible. Beatrice stopped by a tree stump and sat down.
If I wanted to hide something here, how would I go about it?
She tried to focus on her surroundings, to shut out disruptive thoughts. Water. Trees. Earth. Yes, burying it was the most likely option.
Just a moment – the trees. Beatrice touched the raw bark of the tree trunk rising up directly next to her. There had been something on that list of caching abbreviations. She closed her eyes, concentrating. JAFT.
Just another fucking tree.
Tree hiding places were popular and common, and during her research Beatrice had stumbled across some very creative ideas – preserved roots, hollowed-out branches, nesting boxes mounted especially for the purpose of hiding a cache. It was certainly worth pursuing the idea.
The inspiration came completely out of the blue, at the very moment when Beatrice stood up to go back to the others. You know everything, and yet you find nothing.
We do know, she thought, but only because he’s telling us.
‘Florin!’ Twigs and dry leaves crackled beneath her feet. ‘We have to look upwards, to the treetops! We’ll probably need ladders.’ She positioned herself on the spot Stefan had marked and looked up at the branches of the nearest tree.
‘Why up there?’
‘The Owner told us. I just didn’t understand it.’ She turned to Florin. ‘“Chin up”, he wrote. Does anyone have binoculars with them?’
They discovered the cache – much to Stefan’s pride – directly by the coordinates he had dictated, fastened a good eight metres up a beech tree. The container was bigger than all the ones they had found so far, a box with the dimensions of a small television.
Stefan offered to retrieve it. He clambered up, accompanied by Drasche’s detailed instructions.
‘It’s attached to the trunk with gaffer tape,’ he called down to them from above. ‘I’ll cut it loose, then lower it down to you on the rope.’
Beatrice watched with mixed emotions as the container swayed its way down to them. Even before it had touched the ground, she was pretty sure what it contained. The size was about right, and the Owner’s words…
Even Drasche was impatient this time, and declared that he was prepared to open the box on location. ‘Without taking any risks and destroying important evidence, of course,’ he growled as Beatrice started to edge closer.
The box had four snap locks, which he undid one after another until the lid was open and the contents revealed.
She had guessed right. Chin up could be interpreted in more ways than one.