She had at first thought that Lina had come because
of her son. Marcel.
Marcel watched her silently when she sat down at the table across
from him. Lina looked back at him without saying anything, either. It seemed to irritate him that she was small, a woman, that she had come in alone, and now wasn’t saying anything. But there was something
else, something he was familiar with, though he couldn’t define it. It was the way she looked at him, provoking, testing, questioning, and
at the same time conveying a message he couldn’t ignore: Don’t mess
with me! He was confused. It was a facial expression he only knew from people he met on the street, people with the same background as his, people who spoke his language. Not something you’d expect from a
bitch cop.
“So?” Lina said.
Nothing happened for long moments other than the passing of
time. Finally Marcel looked away and Lina took an imperceptible
breath.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” she asked.
The boy didn’t make a peep. What do I care? his body said, as did the gesture with which he wiped his sleeve across his face.
“What did you do Thursday night after pestering the woman at
the Niendorf Markt subway station?”
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Maria C. Poets
No response.
“Maybe you took a walk in the woods?”
Marcel looked at her as if she were nuts.
“Did you want to pick your mother up from work?”
He was on guard immediately. “Leave my mother out of it.”
“Don’t worry. Your mother has an alibi. You’re the one who has to
explain some things.”
He knit his brow slightly, in a way that might have been threaten-
ing if he had been a foot and a half taller and wider.
“Where were you Thursday night between eleven thirty and one?”
A shrug. “No idea.”
“Better think about it. This time we’re dealing with murder.”
He flinched. For the first time, there was something like fear in
his eyes.
“Three of you—maybe even four, five, or six—beat a man to death.
All I want to know is who exactly did it.”
“We haven’t clobbered anyone. Damn! What kind of shit is this?”
His eyes were bigger now and his breathing was frantic.
“Why should I believe you? We have video showing how you went
wild at the subway station and harassed a woman. And there’s all kinds of evidence at the scene of the crime. It’s only a matter of time till we know who was there.” It was a cheap trick, but Lina was always amazed how well it worked. Marcel’s forehead beaded with sweat and he fidgeted in his chair.
“We haven’t killed anyone; for real, yo. We weren’t in the woods,
either, not really, only in the cemetery. Not even there. We wanted to go there but then that jerk in a BMW almost whacked Macki and so
we beat it, sauntered up the Tibarg, but there was nothing goin’ on, and it was late by then, and then my mom got hold of me and dragged
me home.” He finally took a breath. “We weren’t in the woods, believe me, and if there are some kind of prints, then someone’s tryin’ to plant something on us. For real.”
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Lina looked at the teen with a frown. She believed him, and she
never had thought that youthful hooligans had anything to do with
Philip Birkner’s death, but Marcel didn’t have to know that yet. “What’s that with the BMW that almost hit you?” she asked.
Marcel shrugged. “No idea.”
“Well, I’m asking because it might be a witness who could confirm
your statement,” she said and then started to get up from her chair, seemingly done with the interview.
“It was a dark one, an older model, BMW 3 Series, one of those
cars for old geezers. It had an HSV sticker.”
Lina tried to guess at what age Marcel considered you a geezer, but
couldn’t figure it out. “Did you recognize the driver?”
He shook his head.
“License plate?”
“Something with HH.”
How very helpful. How many dark 3-Series BMWs were registered
in Hamburg? Definitely too many—even if one limited the search to
those sporting a soccer club sticker, HSV.
Lina looked at the boy silently, with an unreadable expression. He
stared back, chewed on his lower lip, and his nostrils trembled slightly with each breath. Then he dropped his head and Lina knew that she
could get through to him now and that she had to say something this
very moment before he retreated again, resigning himself to a fate that had only bad things in store for him, one he was already sick and tired of. She was just bending forward and opening her mouth when she