“How dare you so blatantly circumvent the law against narcotics?”
Lina took a sip of coffee. With a sigh, she sat up straight and became serious.
“Franziska Leyhausen has disappeared,” she said and gave him
a brief recap, including her fruitless phone conversation with Klaus Beck. “I was just going to call Daniel Vogler,” she said and picked up the phone again. But then she had an idea. “Are you free right now?”
Max nodded warily. Such questions always needed to be faced guard-
edly, no matter who’s asking them. “How about coming with me to
see this Vogler? He constantly pops up in our investigations. It’s about time we meet him in person.”
“Do you think Frau Leyhausen went underground?” Max asked. Lina
was driving and Max wondered whether she could see anything at all,
since the tip of her nose almost touched the steering wheel.
“Well, there are some indications.” Lina said, frowning. “Hanno,
Alex, and Sebastian are quite sure, but I still can’t imagine she’s our culprit.”
“She could have gone into hiding even though she didn’t do it.”
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Maria C. Poets
“You’re right.” She signaled and turned left. The windshield wip-
ers squeaked softly. “I just hope she doesn’t try to hurt herself. She was a nervous wreck yesterday.” When the road was straight for a while,
she asked, “What’s new with you? Did you get anywhere with Niels
Hinrichsen?”
Max shook his head. “He was transferred to the psychiatric ward.
When he woke up this morning, he really freaked out. They had to
sedate him.” Max grimaced. “Supposedly they had no choice.” Lina
could see he didn’t share that opinion. “I visited him because I wanted to bring him fresh clothes, but he wasn’t responsive at the time.”
Lina kept following the GPS suggestions. The neighborhood
became more upscale, which reminded her of Birkner’s domestic
partner.
“Katja Ansmann received payments from Markman Solutions,”
she said.
For the second time this morning, Max gave her an irritated look.
Then it seemed to click: Katja Ansmann, Lina’s favorite suspect.
“Yes, so?” Max asked.
“The white-collar crime division has been investigating Markman
Solutions for two years. The good woman’s consulting firm was paid
twenty thousand euro a year and a half ago.”
“What does that tell us?”
“That she might have something to do with the data theft at
Wesseling & Kröger and thus also with Philip Birkner’s murder.” Max sighed, but before he could say anything, Lina added, “This woman has just as good a motive to kill Birkner as Franziska Leyhausen or Frank Jensen. Three million euro—and there’s the matter of the data theft.”
She took a deep breath. “Fine, I don’t particularly like her, whatever the reason may be, but we can’t simply leave her out when we investigate the case. We have to talk with her one more time.”
“And how do you plan to sell that to Hanno?”
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Dead Woods
Lina leaned forward and said, “Why do I have to? We would like
to ask the witness whether Philip ever told her anything about the
murder of Julia Munz; or whether she knows how Vogler and Birkner
got along; or if she knew of Tanja Fischer, her domestic partner’s lover.”
She grinned. “My own two or three questions won’t even be noticed.
Besides, her apartment is almost on our way.”
Max looked out the window into the rain and said nothing. Finally
he turned to Lina again. “All right. But first, we go to Daniel Vogler.”
Philip Birkner’s former employee lived in Großflottbek, an attractive bourgeois neighborhood in western Hamburg. Max whistled quietly
when they stopped in front of the new building surrounded by a mani-
cured, parklike garden. The door was opened by a pale and lanky man
in his early thirties. Vogler’s apartment was on the second floor, and it really looked as if he had just moved in and hadn’t bought all the furniture yet—exactly as Franziska Leyhausen had said. A large moving box stood in the hallway. There was no coatrack. Instead, two jackets were draped over a chair in a corner. A brief glance into one of the rooms showed Lina what he was mostly occupied with: three computer monitors, all running, and two calculators next to them on the table. There were CDs on the shelves, piles of magazines, and a laptop.
Daniel Vogler brought them to the living room. He sat down on
the only chair, while Lina and Max took the couch.
“Herr Vogler,” Max began, “We’re investigating a murder case. You
might have heard about the dead man in the Niendorfer Gehege. The
victim is your former employer, Philip Birkner.”
“Is that so?” Vogler said and lifted an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen him in years, not since the bankruptcy of