all-but-flat mineral water. Waiting for the drinks, she looked in the mirror behind the counter: short, tousled hair, dark circles below the eyes, a rumpled T-shirt. She hadn’t slept enough, as usual after working out. But six in the morning never was her best time. When she worked for the vice squad, the working hours had been more to her liking. She looked away, took the coffee and juice, and went back to the car.
Max drove while she sipped the hot coffee and felt her spirits
revive. Neither of them spoke. It was too early in the morning and too soon after a dead man was found. They were in no hurry since neither of them enjoyed thinking about what they might find at the address.
Even though the number of single households constantly increased,
they didn’t anticipate any such luck.
“Not a bad area,” Lina said when they approached the apartment
of the dead man. Hamburg Rothenbaum, fronting the Alster River,
was one of the best locations in town. To live in one of these well-kept Maria C. Poets
Art Nouveau houses, you needed to have a high-paying job or hail
from a rich family, maybe belong to the city’s moneyed nobility. The house Philip Birkner had lived in turned out to be a somewhat more
modest version of the surrounding luxury buildings, but it was still quite presentable, with its stucco facade and tall windows. The nameplate next to the doorbell had another name next to Philip Birkner:
Katja Ansmann. Max and Lina exchanged a glance.
They rang and the buzzer let them in. When they came closer to
the apartment on the second floor, they heard a child crying.
“Shit,” said Lina.
The woman who waited for them at the open door was beautiful—
slender and tall, with high cheekbones and blond shoulder-length hair.
That was the first thing Lina noticed. The woman was stunning. Lina
assumed that if she wore a suit, she’d look as if she were born to wear it.
Now she was wearing a bathrobe and looked like she had just come out of the shower. She carried a little child on her arm, who slept soundly against her neck.
“Frau Ansmann,” Max said. The woman scrutinized first him and
then Lina. Lina felt as if she were on display and the potential buyer did not like what she saw. Max whipped out his badge; Lina did, too.
“May we come in for a moment?”
“I don’t know . . . I have to take Leon to daycare and then go right to the office . . . I have an important appointment today,” she said before trailing off. But the look on Max’s face seemed to let her know that there were more important things than meetings with clients. She sighed, as if she were doing this favor for the detectives only reluctantly.
“All right, then, come in. But I don’t have much time.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it will take a while,” Max said evenly. The woman had taken his badge into her hands when he had shown it to
her. It was still in her palm as Max and Lina walked into her home.
Max hated moments like this, hated the split second when he saw the
realization in people’s eyes about why he was there.
6
Dead Woods
Frau Ansmann looked at the badge and swallowed. Silently, she
pressed the child closer to her chest and motioned Max and Lina in
and toward some chairs. She sat down on the sofa. The boy was still
on her arm. He had put a thumb in his mouth and was about to fall
asleep again.
“Frau Ansmann,” Max said quietly, “I assume that Herr Birkner is
your significant other.”
The woman nodded without taking her eyes off him.
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
The presence of the child was only going to make this harder,
thought Lina. She did not have to ask if Philip Birkner was the boy’s father. On the far wall were family portraits: the woman and Philip, the woman with the baby, the baby and Philip, the three of them. The black-and-white photos were taken by a professional and looked nothing like the usual family snapshots.
“Herr Birkner is dead.”
Slowly, as if in slow motion, Katja Ansmann covered her mouth
with one hand.
“It wasn’t an accident. We don’t know yet for sure how he died, but
his body was found at the Niendorfer Gehege this morning.”
“Where?”
“In the Niendorfer Gehege. Maybe you know the small grove in
the north of Hamburg.”
Frau Ansmann was about to shake her head—no, impossible; it was
not a district where Philip would be found; he couldn’t have been there.