A girl with a chubby face appeared in the doorway, stopping abruptly as she saw Beatrice. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her eyes spoke of confusion, an impression that her lopsided glasses only intensified.
‘We have a visitor, Melanie.’ Carolin Dalamasso grasped her daughter gently by the shoulders and pulled her towards her. ‘This is Frau Kaspary.’
Beatrice pulled her bag over her shoulder and stood up, the photos in her left hand. The girl’s gaze flitted over to her, away, then back again. Although she’s not really a girl, thought Beatrice, in a few years she’ll be thirty. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Melanie.’ She stretched her right hand out, but Melanie didn’t take it. She didn’t say a word.
‘I think I’d better go then, but it’s possible that I might come by…’ Now. Beatrice unclasped the fingers of her left hand. Felt the photos slip away from her, heard the soft clatter as they fell to the floor.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
She bent over. The photos of Papenberg, Estermann and Beil were lying face up. The others had turned rear-side up as they fell. Beatrice acted as though she was trying to collect them together, but Carolin Dalamasso must have realised by now that she was taking too much time over it, that she was hoping—
A gasp. Beatrice looked up, directly into Melanie’s face, which was distorted into a grimace. She stared at the pictures and let out a howl, a long-drawn-out noise, like an animal. Her glasses fell to the floor.
‘Get out!’ hissed her mother furiously.
‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘Out!’
Melanie’s howl transformed into something more high-pitched, something more shrill. She covered her face with both hands, and her mother had to stop her from banging her head against the door frame.
‘I’ll be making a complaint about you!’
Beatrice closed her eyes and nodded wearily. ‘Contact Walter Hoffmann. He’ll welcome you with open arms, believe me.’
She practically ran from the apartment, the building, down the street, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of nausea.
There was no doubt that Melanie had recognised someone, and she hadn’t liked it one bit.
But there was nothing Beatrice could do with this information. She sat in her car, the photos still in her hand, the taste of bile forcing its way upwards into her mouth. She had no idea which of the photos had unleashed Melanie’s reaction. Had it been one of them, several of them, all of them? One thing had become completely clear: the Owner wasn’t killing his victims at random. The connection between them, however, was still enshrouded in darkness. And there was little hope that Melanie would be able to offer any explanations.
‘I might well have done the same thing.’ Florin was trying to comfort her, but she knew him better than that. From the very start he had only wanted to protect Melanie, not question her. His work had never resulted in a screaming girl. Or the threat of suspension.
‘Shinigami,’ she said, without responding to his words. ‘When is Stefan planning to come with the information?’
‘Any moment now. The site’s admin team is being very cooperative, he said. They’re sending us the email address the Owner used for his registration, as well as the IP addresses he logged on with. If it takes a while then that’s because the last login was over three months ago. The geocaching website gets a huge amount of traffic.’
Perhaps, thought Beatrice, this is a trace the Owner forgot to erase. We’re due a bit of luck.
Stefan indeed appeared just five minutes later, beaming contentedly: ‘The email address is gerold.wiesner@gmx.net. I found a Gerold Wiesner registered in Salzburg – he’s fifty-eight years old and works on the national Bundesbahn railways. Looks like we’ve hit the bull’s eye, people!’
They were tentatively hopeful, but even that was short-lived. Beatrice knew only too well how simple it was to open an account with Geocaching.com. And creating a fake email address wasn’t exactly tricky either. They went through the police records and soon found the information they needed: whoever had concealed himself behind the nickname ‘Shinigami’, it certainly wasn’t Bundesbahn employee Gerold Wiesner. On 25 February this year, he had fallen onto a power line while carrying out maintenance work at the central train station, just a few months before his retirement was due to begin. He was survived by a wife and two grown-up daughters.
25 February. Shinigami had registered on Geocaching.com on the 26th. He must have been sitting in front of the computer, the newspaper open next to him, and seen the report. He hadn’t even needed to make up a fake name. So simple. So unremarkable.
Her hope now rested on the IP address, but the Owner hadn’t shown any weakness there either: the computer he had used was in an upmarket Salzburg hotel, available for guests to use around the clock without having to pay.
‘Of course, people who visit the hotel café could theoretically use it too,’ explained the hotel manager. ‘It’s part of our service, you see?’
‘And if I were to ask you who used the computer on the twenty-sixth of February at 15.42, would you be able to tell me?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ If the manager’s regret wasn’t genuine, he at least acted it well.
‘I understand. The man we’re looking for must have also used the computer on the ninth, fourteenth and twentieth of March, and then a final time on the third of April. So it’s possible that someone may have noticed him.’
‘That’s true. I’ll check right away who was on duty in the café on those dates, then give you a call back.’
They were clutching at straws, nothing more than that.
And to the rest of you: TFTH. The Owner had known three months ago that he would kill Liebscher at the very least. He had thanked his pursuers for the hunt before they had even begun.
To Beatrice’s surprise, the hotel manager called back twenty minutes later. When the telephone rang she was talking to Bechner, asking him to check whether there might be another Gerold Wiesner who could be a suspect – she seemed to automatically assign all the menial tasks to him.
‘On two of the days you mentioned, Georg Lienhart was on duty,’ explained the manager. ‘He said he did notice someone. The dates may match up.’
‘Excellent!’ Beatrice signalled to Bechner, who was trying to use the opportunity to head back to his own office, that they weren’t yet finished. He sighed demonstratively; she beamed at him equally demonstratively.
‘Can I speak to Herr Lienhart?’
‘Yes, he’s right here.’
The waiter sounded very young, but on the ball. ‘There was this really tall man with a beard, and he never took his coat off even though it’s really well heated here. He ordered coffee and drank it really quickly, each time at the table next to the computer. Then he paid right away and left much more of a tip than most guests do.’ The boy fell silent for a moment, perhaps thinking about his unexpected financial windfall from the stranger. ‘Then he sat down at the computer and went to great lengths to spread himself out as much as he could, if you see what I mean. I thought right away that he’d kept his coat on for that reason, so it would be easier for him to keep the screen hidden.’
‘You didn’t happen to catch a glimpse of it regardless, by any chance?’
‘We’re told to be discreet.’
Beatrice could almost picture the young waiter in front of her, including his grin. ‘But you did it anyway, in keeping with the need for discretion, of course?’
Georg Lienhart hesitated. ‘No. Although I was of course curious about what all the secrecy was for. That’s why, after the man came back the second time, I opened up the browser history and had a look.’