The woman spoke very softly and Lina found it difficult to understand her. “She told me what happened yesterday. That she was in a fight with someone in the forest.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“Last night. She called me around seven thirty. Poor woman. She
was beside herself, but I had an important appointment and couldn’t
get together with her.”
“Did she also tell you what caused the scuffle last night?”
Barbara Schönbek hesitated. “You mean the situation with Philip?”
When Lina didn’t answer, she sighed. “She told me on Friday that she went into the woods late at night, drunk, with the man we met at the concert, that she kicked him, and that she left him there by himself, more or less helpless. When she heard that a dead man had been found in the Niendorfer Gehege, she couldn’t take it. She felt responsible for what happened.” Lina could hear a door opening and the quiet creaking of a hardwood floor. “I told her to go to the police, but she didn’t want to. She was afraid they’d arrest her and then she made the excuse that it wasn’t even definite that the dead man really was the Philip she’d met at the bar.” She paused again and then asked, “And why are you
looking for her now? Didn’t she come by this morning?”
“No.” Lina closed her eyes. “When she spoke with you yesterday,
did she maybe hint that she . . . might go on a trip?”
The woman on the other end of the line laughed briefly. “You
mean that she’d go underground? No, she said nothing like that, and I can’t imagine that she’d go on a trip right now.” She sounded worried, but Lina wasn’t sure how authentic it was. After all, this was the friend of a murder suspect. It was quite possible that Barbara Schönbek was covering for her friend and was telling tall tales to the police.
“Could you give me names of other friends or relatives with whom
Frau Leyhausen might stay? Maybe there’s a vacation home somewhere
she’d use. Does she have siblings—”
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“Forget about family members. Franka has almost no contact with
them. She visits her parents once a year, if at all, and hasn’t seen her brother in ages.” There was a swooshing noise, as if Barbara Schönbek was filling an electric kettle. “I’d try Daniel Vogler if I were you, her ex-boyfriend. They still do many things together. Maybe he knows
something.” Lina didn’t let her know that she had already talked with him. “There’s also Marlies, Iris, maybe Jens, yes, and Michael. Franka knows quite a few people, but I only know the first names of most
of them.” Lina had jotted down the names. She could look for the
phone numbers later, in Franziska’s address book or the phonebook.
She tapped her pencil against the notepad and overheard Max on the
phone, thanking and saying good-bye to someone before he put down
the receiver. He’d probably drawn another blank.
“Anyone else?” she prodded, and when Barbara Schönbek said no,
she thanked her and asked her to call if she happened to hear where
Franziska Leyhausen might be. Her “Yes, I’ll call” didn’t sound very convincing.
Lina put down the receiver. What did Franziska Leyhausen do last
night after she and Alex had left? That was around seven in the evening and she had called her friend shortly afterward. And then?
Lina got up and went two offices down the hall to the one that
Alex and Sebastian shared. Alex wasn’t back yet, but Sebastian had just picked up the receiver and looked up when she came in.
“Barbara Schönbek just called,” Lina explained. “She talked on the
phone with Franziska Leyhausen last night, around seven thirty.”
Sebastian looked at her as if he didn’t know why that should con-
cern him.
“Do you know whether Leyhausen called anyone else after that?”
she asked.
Her colleague frowned. “How should I know? Am I Jesus?”
“Checking the call history of a phone doesn’t require divinity,”
Lina replied. “So, did she?”
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“Her phone has no call history. She has one of those ancient ones;
it still has a cord.”
“Did you already request the data from the telephone company?”
Sebastian groaned, as if her dumb questions hurt him. He rum-
maged among the papers on his desk and said at last, “I think so. Alex looked into that.” He stopped searching, brandished the receiver, and pointedly looked at Lina. “Anything else?”
She shrugged and left him to it.
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Chapter 14
Franziska Leyhausen hadn’t shown up by Thursday morning. She had
neither used her bank card to get money, nor booked a flight abroad, nor rented a car. None of