‘Do you understand any of this?’
‘Not even a little.’ He shook his head without taking his eyes off the note for a second. ‘The box was at the spot corresponding to the coordinates on the corpse.’ He squinted, as though any beam of light would distract him from making sense of it all. ‘We find a clue, with which we can then draw up some new coordinates. And we also find an amputated hand. But why? What’s the point of this? Why is he so brazenly shoving his victims right under our noses instead of hiding them?’
‘Because he thinks we’re stupid. That’s what he wrote, after all. Or she.’
‘But why? Does he want to get caught? Or does he think he’s so superior that there’s no chance of that?’
Beatrice placed the lens cap carefully back onto her camera. ‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to send us off on the wrong track.’
‘With body parts?’
She looked at the dead hand. It was a left hand. There was an indentation on the ring finger, about three millimetres wide.
‘Well, by using body parts,’ she said slowly, ‘he can be sure that we really will follow the trail.’
Drasche appeared within the hour, wearing the same sour expression he always had when someone else had been the first to get their hands on a piece of evidence.
‘We were careful,’ Beatrice assured him. ‘Is there any news on Nora Papenberg?’
‘There was no sign of rape, nor any foreign tissue under her fingernails. We found some tyre tracks near the scene and on the way to the crag, but the results aren’t back yet. No footprints that could belong to the perpetrator, unfortunately. We’ll keep you posted. Where exactly did you find the container?’
Beatrice showed him the hollow in the rock. ‘We took photos while we were there.’
‘That’s better than nothing, I suppose,’ grumbled Drasche, pulling his gloves on. ‘At least he did me the favour of vacuum-packing the amputated body part. Conserved evidence – you don’t get that very often.’
Back at the office, Beatrice connected the camera to her computer. A few moments later, the pictures appeared on the screen, one after the other. The severed hand in its airtight container. While Beatrice clicked through the photos, Florin called Stefan Gerlach.
‘Even Hoffmann will have to realise that you don’t have time to type up reports right now,’ he explained, rolling his chair over to her side of the desk.
‘The box is a well-known brand, and mass produced.’ Beatrice pointed her pen at the website she had just called up. ‘This one here must be the same model as the one we found. The lid with the blue edge, you see? And the double lock on the longer sides. One hundred per cent air- and watertight, it says in the description. “Can easily transport liquids and store intense-smelling foods like fish or cheese without any unwelcome smells.”’
‘Perfect for body parts then. But our perpetrator took it one step further and vacuum-packed the hand just to be on the safe side.’
Beatrice looked back at the photos of the opened plastic container. ‘He didn’t want anyone to find it by accident,’ she pondered. ‘Not even a dog. And given that he doesn’t seem to rate the intelligence of the police very highly, he assumed it would take us a while.’
There was a knock at the door. Stefan poked his head in. ‘I hear there’s some boring typing work for me? Bring it on!’
‘You’re a star.’ Beatrice gathered the files up into a more or less orderly pile to hand over to her younger colleague, but his attention was now entirely absorbed by the photos on the screen.
‘Oh. That looks nasty. What is it?’
‘That’s what we’d like to know.’
‘A hand? Was it just lying around like that, packed up like it came from the freezer cabinet? Bizarre.’
Bizarre pretty much hit the nail on the head. ‘No, it was in a plastic container. There on the right in the photo, you see?’ Beatrice gave him a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘And now scoot, my dear. This isn’t your problem. Be thankful for that.’
But Stefan couldn’t tear his gaze away from the screen. ‘That seems incredibly strange. Doesn’t it remind you of something?’
‘No. Should it?’
Stefan leant over and pointed his finger at the rock hollow in which they had found the box. ‘Was it in there?’
‘Correct.’
He took a sharp intake of breath. ‘Then that’s the most perverse trade I’ve ever seen.’
‘The most perverse what?’
‘A trade. You take something out of the box and put something else back in. That’s how it works.’
Beatrice saw from Florin’s confused expression that he had understood just as little of Stefan’s observation as she had.
‘Oh. Sorry. You’ve never been geocaching, I guess?’
‘What’s that?’
Stefan looked from her to Florin and pulled up a chair. ‘It’s a kind of treasure hunt. Someone hides something, and others try to find it. The thing that’s hidden is called a cache, and this plastic container in the photo looks like a typical cache container. May I?’
Beatrice surrendered the mouse to him and shifted to the side so he could position his chair between her and Florin.
‘What did you call it again – a cash?’
‘Yes, that’s right. C-a-c-h-e, pronounced cash. People put all kinds of things in them.’
‘A treasure hunt,’ she declared. ‘Sounds promising. Do people use GPS for it?’
‘Oh, so you already know what I’m talking about then!’ said Stefan, disappointed.
‘No, not in the least. It was just a good guess. Carry on.’
‘Okay. So, first you sign up to the internet site, it’s called Geocaching.com. All the caches all over the world are recorded on it.’
‘Well I never,’ said Florin. ‘And lots of people do this?’
‘Absolutely,’ explained Stefan enthusiastically. ‘Millions of people, particularly in the US, but it’s getting more and more popular here in Austria. So, you register, under a nickname – mine is “Undercover Cookie”, for example.’
Beatrice couldn’t help grinning. ‘Lovely. I’m afraid that name might stick from now on.’
But Stefan wouldn’t be distracted. ‘Then you select a cache in the area you want to go to, save the coordinates in a specially designed GPS device and set off. Usually the destination will reveal a tin or a box, something watertight, and in it will be a logbook so you can make an entry. The bigger caches often contain objects that you can take with you if you replace them with something else. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a “trade”.’
Coordinates and watertight containers. It all seemed to fit. Beatrice clicked on the photo of the first message and zoomed in so they could read the text. ‘Are messages like this the norm too?’
‘Yes. That’s a cache note.’ He beamed first at Beatrice, then Florin, clearly proud of himself. ‘You find an explanation like this in practically every cache. It’s intended for people who haven’t yet heard of geocaching and stumble on a hiding place by chance. See, the owner mentions that here.’
‘Stop – use layman’s terms. The owner is the person who hides it?’
‘Exactly.’ Stefan gave Beatrice an apologetic look. ‘Abbreviations and specialist terminology are used quite frequently in geocaching.’ The mouse icon hovered over the photo of the cache note. ‘So, when he says this about the fingerprints – in one sense at least, you definitely won’t find any – he means the only ones will be those on the hand itself, right?’ he speculated.
‘It seems so.’ Beatrice had reached automatically for her notepad and was starting to jot down Stefan’s explanations. ‘He or she clearly has a sense of humour that takes some getting used to.’