The Alphabet Murders

by Lars Schutz

  For a moment Jan dwelled on the thought. He clicked his tongue. ‘All I can think is that we’re intelligent apes whose minds are so degenerate that we can do terrible things to other members of our species.’

  ‘Faith, no matter what it’s in, can help.’ Timo slapped his palm against the table. ‘We both thought we were alone in this, and we probably desperately needed to talk to another person about it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘I wanted to do something. Call him to account. I had to do something – and in the end, I did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The monk’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I only knew that your brother gave you that used Golf II for your birthday. You were drunk when you made the first trip—’

  ‘I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since.’ Jan inhaled sharply, as though about to dive into a pool. ‘I’m sure Cain and Abel mean something to you. My guilt is even deeper.’ He was fighting the urge to gag.

  ‘The car accident?’

  Jan stared at the floor, eyes expressionless. He shook his head.

  The Cistercian swallowed drily. ‘Why, Jan?’

  Yes, why? The question Jan had been asking himself for years. He’d never found an answer that gave him any relief.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ asked Jan again, trying to give himself a short break.

  ‘Because first I wanted to check something that soon turned out to be true: your brother had an accomplice.’

  It was as if he’d opened a trapdoor underneath Jan. At first his brain couldn’t process the information. ‘Wha – what?’ he stammered.

  Timotheus continued: ‘I talked Kathi into letting me use Gero’s computer – told her I had a few files on there. The poor thing had other things to worry about at the time. I copied stuff onto dozens of discs. Plus, I found his emails. I noticed that in some of the photos he was in the picture and somebody else must have been holding the camera.’

  ‘Do you have a name? A picture?’

  Timo shook his head. ‘The emails were brief and cryptic. And the children and your brother were the only people visible in the images.’

  ‘But that would have been more of a reason to go to the police.’

  ‘You know I had my own problems with the police back then. I was a different person and my faith in your esteemed colleagues wasn’t the greatest. But that wasn’t the only reason. This accomplice had no idea anybody knew about him. He thought he was completely undetected. I wanted to use that and do my own investigations. I got involved with the scene, asked people about where the photos and videos came from.’

  ‘With no result—’ concluded Jan dully.

  ‘True. At some point my efforts petered out. I still have the discs, though. As a reminder. On the night Dr Ehrberg was murdered, I wanted to meet with somebody on that scene in Westerburg, but he never showed up. The fact that I couldn’t get anywhere – that’s the guilt on my conscience. I deserve to be in trouble because of that now.’

  ‘You’ve got to explain all this to the police. You can use me as a witness.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll finally find the accomplice. I should have done it long ago.’ A fresh layer of anxiety crossed Timo’s face like a veil. ‘Do you know whether he ever did anything like that to his son?’

  Jan shook his head. ‘I assume – I hope – that the images were everything. That he left Maik alone.’

  ‘These days I’m not so sure. I knew him for years. And I never suspected a thing.’

  ‘That’s what horrified me the most,’ said Jan. ‘The monsters aren’t lurking in remote forest cabins. They’re among us.’

  ‘I admire your courage, coming back here.’

  ‘And? Would you forgive me if this was a confession?’

  ‘There’s no right or wrong here. I can’t forgive you, even if I wanted to.’ Timotheus rose to his feet. ‘You’re the only one who can do that. Leave the past behind you, at last. Leave it here, where it belongs – here in Westerwald.’

  67

  ‘Grall, hang on a minute! Where are you off to?’

  Stüter grabbed his shoulder just as he was leaving the operations centre.

  He’d pressed the Gameboy into Miriam’s hand and sentenced her to stay inside the police station. She’d given an exasperated sigh, but quickly settled into her first round of Tetris.

  ‘What’s up?’ he snapped at Stüter.

  ‘I only wanted to apologise.’

  ‘After this mess with Rabea that’s only appropriate, but now’s not the right moment,’ replied Jan. ‘I’m going back to where she was found. Maybe the technicians overlooked something.’

  ‘I was worried about Frau Wyler. Apparently too worried. I confided my doubts about you, Herr Grall. My suspicion that you might be involved in the case.’

  Fine pinpricks dug into Jan’s chest. ‘And she believed you?’

  ‘Not at first. She took some convincing. Eventually it seems I was able to persuade her not to trust you.’ Stüter rubbed his face. ‘When she found out something yesterday evening, I guess that was why she didn’t tell you – and confronted the killer by herself.’

  ‘Ugh.’ He dropped his head and kneaded the back of his neck. He should never have been so secretive with Rabea about his past.

  ‘I can exclude your involvement now,’ said Stüter. ‘You weren’t here when Frau Wyler was attacked. I’m sorry I believed that of you. This case has brought all of us to our wits’ end.’

  Jan sighed. He didn’t hold it against Rabea for mistrusting him. It was his fault, and his alone. Now he might never be able to explain it to her.

  He held out his hand to Stüter, who shook it tentatively. ‘Time to put our disagreements aside. For Rabea.’

  ‘For Rabea.’

  68

  He’d started climbing on impulse.

  Before Jan could think twice about how dangerous it was in this weather, he was already clambering up the first rocky ledge. Several times he slipped on the icy basalt but he managed to reach the top of Wolfstein unscathed.

  He crouched down, turning up the collar of his coat against the whistling wind. The first time he’d climbed the rocks as a child, he’d felt as though he’d conquered Everest. Invincible.

  Today his feelings couldn’t have been more different. He’d come here alone, to where Rabea had been found. Trying to maintain the fiction that he was off the case, he could no longer work publicly with the investigation team.

  He was more isolated than ever before. Most distressing of all was that he’d lost Rabea’s trust. That she’d actually shared Stüter’s suspicions.

  What had she discovered? Had she actually found a connection between Tugba Ekiz and the killer? He shook his head, his eyes wandering over the white-powdered pines.

  Why had Rabea wanted to confront the Alphabet Killer herself? He didn’t know what he’d hoped to achieve by driving out here. The technicians had examined the scene millimetre by millimetre. Although they were only looking for individual pieces of evidence.

  Not for connections. Not for stories.

  There was an inconsistency in the killer’s actions, thought Jan. A mix of panic and planning. Being uncovered by Rabea must have shocked him to the core, but at the same time he didn’t want to break his pattern.

  In his haste the killer had managed to tattoo the ‘F’ on her body, but he’d forgotten another part of his signature: the literary quotation at the scene. Nor had he placed a piece of bark in her mouth, as with the other victims.

  And serial killers hated nothing more than changing their rituals.

  Lost in thought, Jan stared down at Wolfstein, which was permeated with small craters.

  He’d wondered many times about the bark, but still it made no sense. The botanist brought in by forensics had identified it simply as wood from a sycamore. That was all the information they had.

  It didn’t fit with the letters, with the victims, wi
th the quotations. The killer placed it on the corpses’ tongues. It might have some sexual symbolism, but Jan suspected it was more about the mouth as a means of communication. He’d literally put something into his victims’ mouths. He wanted to share something with the world, just like with the ‘Z’ outside Jan’s hotel room.

  It’s about me, he realised. But what?

  He thought about it. Held his breath.

  A piercing whine began to echo through his head. His heart boomed. It couldn’t be.

  He jumped up and began leaping down from stone to stone. A jabbing pain in his lower back and an increasing shortness of breath soon signalled that he ought to slow down.

  Hopping down to the next ledge, he lost his balance. His arms flailed, and he stretched out one leg to stabilise himself.

  Something slipped out of his trouser pocket.

  And his heart dropped.

  His phone landed on the stone beneath him, skittering down to the next until it finally shattered on one of the lowermost basalt rocks, a mosaic of plastic and glass.

  He scrambled clumsily down, falling to his knees, panting, before the remains of his phone. A single glance was enough, even for a Luddite like him, to see that it was a write-off. Even though these older ones were supposed to be robust. He took his SIM card out of the device and jumped the final metres into the snow.

  He had no time to worry about his phone or anything else. He had to find out. Had to be sure.

  Gero’s words flitted through his skull: ‘Best wishes on your birthday, little brother! How about we take this little sweetheart for a test drive?’

  He knew now what connected him to the sycamore tree.

  69

  The road towards Rennerod.

  The last time Jan had driven down it, many years earlier, it had been the middle of the night – and Gero had been in the passenger seat.

  The dark silhouette of the sycamore loomed beside the turn-off for another town. A gnarled giant of a tree, it towered above the surrounding roofs and foliage. The closer he got, the more its branches seemed to Jan like skeletal hands, reaching out to grasp him.

  He parked on the narrow, steeply sloping verge and climbed out. In his mind’s eye he could still see the burned-out Golf II crumpled against the trunk.

  The accident had done the giant no more damage than anything else over the past decades; probably it hadn’t even budged so much as an inch. He was a mere footnote in its existence. All Jan could make out was a faint shadow on the bark where it had been licked by the flames from the car – and that was most likely his imagination.

  He pictured how deep the roots must reach into the earth. They were like the past, he thought. Nobody could simply tear them up and think they could live on without them.

  From the side of the road, Jan couldn’t see any missing bark. He trudged around the tree, his soaked trainers sinking into the snow. With every step the ache in his thigh grew more intense. The old, long-faded wound. Nothing but a psychosomatic twinge, though he dulled it sometimes with painkillers.

  He’d never read the papers from back then, but he could well imagine the headlines: Family Tragedy – Car Accident: One Brother Dead, One Injured.

  Then he stopped short.

  The ‘Z’, uneven and light brown, was on the other side of the tree. A wound of peeled bark. Another letter.

  Jan lurched across to the sycamore and stroked the dry wood with the tips of his fingers, exactly where the Alphabet Killer had flayed the broad trunk.

  His throat tightened, and he exhaled jerky clouds of breath into the winter air.

  He understood.

  In the killer’s alphabet, the ‘Z’ wasn’t simply the final letter.

  It stood for revenge.

  70

  Being stuck in the middle of the most shocking serial murder case in recent German history was one thing above all else: incredibly fucking boring. Miriam’s eyes wandered around the operations room. The same as any other office. A moustachioed police officer whose name she’d already forgotten was on the phone. A PR woman was heaping three sugar cubes onto her spoon and stirring them into her coffee. All of it overlaid with the monotonous sound of tapping keyboards.

  Miriam yawned. She felt like she’d gone back in time to when she’d been an intern in her dad’s office. Dull days spent inputting numbers into Excel spreadsheets, but mainly just surfing the internet. Six months later her dad had lost his job at the logistics firm because his alcohol problem was getting worse.

  She swapped the Gameboy in her hands for her smartphone. Opening her browser, she typed news serial killer westerwald into the search engine. If she wasn’t going to find out anything new about the case here, then maybe the internet could tell her something.

  The very first hit was a bullseye: Breaking: Profiler Taken Off Alphabet Killer Case!

  Miriam scratched her head. That made no sense. Why hadn’t he told her anything?

  She tapped the link, which took her to the Wäller Zeitung website, and skimmed the article written by someone called Nora Schneill. The journalist cited confidential sources within the investigation team. According to her information, Jan had been dismissed from the team and sent back to Mainz because of deep-seated disagreements between the analysts and the local force.

  The atmosphere was tense, that was true. But why should that mean Jan was taken off the case? What was going on?

  The bald superintendent – Schlüter or something – stood up from his chair. He turned to a woman with curly hair, who had introduced herself to Miriam as the media liaison officer.

  ‘Ries!?’ he barked at her. ‘Did you see that bloody Schneill woman’s article? How could something like that get through? It’s a blatant lie!’

  Miriam rolled her eyes. So grumpy! Although it surprised her that the officer didn’t seem to know about Jan’s apparent dismissal.

  The media liaison officer remained entirely calm, and Miriam couldn’t help admiring her.

  ‘The Commander didn’t tell you?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows. ‘We’re cooperating with Frau Schneill. It’s all a ruse to lure the killer out into the open.’

  Stüter’s face went scarlet. With his spherical head, he reminded Miriam of the rage emoticon on her smartphone. ‘How are we supposed to communicate here if I, one of the senior investigators’ – he tapped his chest theatrically – ‘am excluded from fundamental decisions like that?’

  ‘Don’t make such a fuss! It wasn’t my idea. And anyway, you’d been sent home at the time.’ Ries raised her hands defensively. ‘Maybe it’s because of outbursts like this one that people don’t include you in stuff.’

  Miriam felt like she was in the middle of Criminal Minds. But she urgently needed the loo. She got to her feet as quietly as possible, and at that moment the phone on the desk began to ring.

  Miriam jumped.

  She stood transfixed, staring at the phone. In the general hubbub, the ringing went completely unnoticed. Twice. Three times. Four times. Who was being so persistent?

  Fine. She took a deep breath. Picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes, hello?’

  ‘Am I speaking with Frau Wyler?’ came a sonorous female voice.

  ‘Erm, I’m standing in for her.’

  ‘Oh, okay. I’m Frau Bischof, administrator at Mons Tabor High School. I only wanted to check whether the fax with the list of names came through all right.’

  Miriam’s heart began to beat faster. Suddenly she forgot how badly she needed to pee.

  Jan had already told the team they needed to find the clue that had led Rabea to the killer. Miriam was a total outsider, but she could put two and two together.

  ‘Could you please read the names aloud? That would be brilliant. What kind of list was it again?’

  ‘Oh, of course!’ Helpfulness seemed to be the administrator’s dominant characteristic. ‘All the people who applied to the literacy course but never showed up.’

  She rattled off the names. None of them was familiar
. What else had she expected? Miriam was about to hand the phone to one of the officers when she heard it.

  ‘I’m sorry, would you mind repeating that name again?’ she said, hesitantly.

  71

  8th December, late afternoon

  Back in Kirchstrasse. Back home.

  How many times had Jan been down this road? A thousand? Two thousand? On the back seat of his parents’ car, at first. With his brother. Playing with his Gameboy, dozing, messing around with plastic figurines. Then on his bike. Sometimes with a girl, either riding beside him or sitting on his bike, her arms wound around him.

  Eventually in cars with friends, taking him back from some party completely shitfaced. He could still remember exactly how he’d snuck in through the basement door and slept on the sofa in the den so that he wouldn’t wake his parents.

  He knew every tiny bump in the asphalt. Every trivial detail.

  On none of those journeys had he been so afraid as at this moment. He didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few minutes. Only one thing was clear: afterwards this place would never be his home again.

  The Mercedes jolted down the hill towards their house. Jan focused on breathing in and out. He couldn’t shake the feeling that his coat was strangling him.

  This was really happening.

  Kathi and Maik were in imminent danger.

  If his phone had still been working, he would have called for back-up. But there was no time for a detour to Hachenburg. He had to act.

  The ‘Z’ in the sycamore’s bark had made one thing clear: the reason the Alphabet Killer had chosen him as the final victim went much deeper than he’d first supposed.

  The murders weren’t about letters, rituals or hazy conspiracies. They’d been about him all along. Well, no. Not about him, but about Gero. After all these years, the killer wanted to call him to account for his brother’s death.

  Those closest to Gero had immediately come to mind. Stefan Schomar, Kathi’s new partner, had been a good friend of his brother’s. He had a motive. And he still had Gero’s old hunting equipment.