left the room. Arraignment or not—the district attorney had to decide.
An uncomfortable silence spread in the little room. Franziska
Leyhausen opened her mouth a few times to say something, but closed
it again. Lina felt sorry for her. To divert her, she asked how long she had known Daniel Vogler.
“For two or three years. We met online, on one of those dating
sites.” She shrugged. “Daniel is a nice guy, but the relationship lasted only a few months.” She wiped her face. “Shortly after we met, he
bought an apartment and told me I could move in with him. That was
a little too fast for me.” With a crooked smile, she said, “That saved me two moves, since a few weeks later it was already over.”
Something clicked for Lina. “He bought an apartment? When?”
Frau Leyhausen was thinking. “Must have been about two years
ago, but it still looks as if he just moved in. He still doesn’t even have a coatrack in the hall and his wardrobe consists of several boxes from the move.” She shrugged. “Well, it’s his place. And I’m not there that often.”
Lina rocked on her chair and thought. “Do you have any idea how
he financed the place? Apartments in Hamburg aren’t cheap.”
“He mentioned an inheritance and . . .”
165
Maria C. Poets
Alex came back in right then and Lina could see there was news.
Without sitting down, he said, “Frau Leyhausen, please come with me.
You’re going to go before a judge.”
The woman turned pale. “But . . . I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill Philip! I—”
“Frau Leyhausen,” said Alex, “the evidence speaks against you. You
admit to having been with Philip Birkner at the time of his death, and you also acknowledge that you attacked him.”
“But . . .”
“In addition, there’s a witness who saw you hit Herr Birkner.”
Franziska Leyhausen turned to Lina for help, but all Lina could do
was shrug. “I’m sorry,” she said, and added quietly, “I do believe you.”
166
Chapter 12
Much to the chagrin of Hanno and the relief of Lina, the judge released Franziska Leyhausen on condition that she not leave town and come
back to police headquarters the next morning at eight o’clock sharp.
The Jarrestadt in Winterhude was a neighborhood with uniform
dark redbrick buildings from the 1920s. Franziska Leyhausen lived in a small two-bedroom apartment overlooking a leafy inner courtyard
on a quite side street. Lina and Alex had driven her there from police headquarters, and a forensics department car had followed them, just in case. Why would it be needed? Lina wondered. Did Hanno and Alex
expect to find another corpse under Franziska Leyhausen’s bed? Or the murder weapon under the kitchen sink? The biologist wasn’t that stupid. The woman clearly felt uncomfortable about her escort, but she
didn’t say anything as she walked, barefoot, along the short path to the door and then up the stairs.
Alex asked her to wait in the hallway and slowly walked through
the rooms, looking around carefully. He opened a drawer here and
there and checked especially closely under the sink. Lina, waiting in the corridor with Frau Leyhausen, rolled her eyes.
Maria C. Poets
“What’s your colleague looking for?” Franziska asked, adding
mockingly, “I might be able to help him. I know my way around here.”
Lina shrugged apologetically, but said nothing. The woman was
right.
Finally Alex determined that the suspect could do no damage by
entering the place where she lived, and he motioned to the two women to come in.
“Frau Leyhausen, we’ll have to take the clothes you wore last
Thursday night with us.”
With a fatalistic sigh, the woman went into her bedroom. She
opened the wardrobe and took out a pair of slacks, and added a bra,
panties, and a T-shirt from a chest of drawers. “I’m not sure about the socks,” she said to Lina. “Do you want to take all of them along?” It was probably meant to be a biting remark, but she turned away quickly to hide tears.
Lina could imagine how embarrassing the situation was for her
and said, “No. It’s fine if you pack socks you might have worn.” She added in a low voice, “Sorry, I have no choice.”
She stuffed the items, all freshly washed, into a plastic bag and
tagged it for forensics. After that she looked quickly through the
rooms herself. This was, she had to admit, one of the things she liked most about her profession: looking into the lives of others, into foreign worlds. That’s what she had imagined she would be doing when
she had started to study ethnology after graduating high school, but it wasn’t like that. Here, in Franziska