Grave Intent

by Alexander Hartung

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m sorry.” Quast pulled a stun gun from behind his back and pressed it to David’s neck.

  A sharp pain seared through David’s insides and he screamed. The pepper spray fell from his fingers. He wanted to reach for his weapon, but he couldn’t control his hand anymore.

  His legs buckled, and he fell to the floor. Then everything went black.

  “O Saint Hacker Maximum, do share your wisdom with us,” Zoe teased.

  Max was leaning back on the couch, enjoying his moment of triumph. “Moritz Quast worked for a health insurer before his stint as a car salesman.”

  “And?” Chandu asked after a moment of silence.

  “He was let go because he did something crooked.”

  “Maybe give us something a little more concrete?” Jan asked.

  “Moritz Quast was mixed up in an accounting scandal. A few others were in on it with him—including some doctors. They billed for expensive meds without ever prescribing them.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?” Jan asked.

  “A few thousand euros per man. Their little racket was blown because one of the medications wasn’t approved in Germany. As a result, one of the doctors got banned from practicing and three received suspended sentences—along with Moritz Quast. After that, he started working as a car salesman.”

  “Nice little story,” Zoe said. “How does it get us anywhere?”

  “The exciting part’s still to come, you see,” Max said, grinning. He loved these moments, when a case started coming together. “Twelve doctors were investigated. One of them was Bernhard Valburg.”

  “Was he involved?” Jan asked.

  “He was not. They couldn’t prove he had actually prescribed any of the meds, so they let him go.”

  “But now we have a connection,” Chandu said.

  “It’s too thin for me,” Jan said. “Sure, the health insurer lost some money, but that doesn’t turn anyone into a murderer. And Bernhard Valburg didn’t even take part.”

  “Sure, but a connection between a doctor and a health-insurance employee is far easier to imagine than one between a doctor and a car salesman.”

  “Good point,” Jan agreed. “I’ll pay the insurer a little visit tomorrow. See what I can dig up—”

  Jan’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and raised his eyebrows, his voice conveying his surprise as he answered the call. “Jan Tommen.”

  The caller was shouting into the receiver.

  “What? There’s no way, how—” Jan got cut off. “I’m on my way!” He hung up, pocketed his phone. “Come on,” he said to Chandu as he grabbed his jacket.

  “You two remain on standby,” he said to Zoe and Max. Running out the door, he fumbled for his car keys. Max had never seen him so frantic. “I’ll call in from the car!”

  Chandu ran out behind him. As the door slammed shut, Max was left scratching his head. He had no idea what had just happened, but it did not bode well.

  Chapter Five

  Spotlights illuminated Moritz Quast’s grave. The site was completely cordoned off with police tape. Crime-scene investigators searched the paths around the spot where the corpse had been found. It was shortly after two a.m.

  Jan observed the dead man as he was being lifted out of the grave. Moritz Quast’s face was crusted over with dried blood and earth. His eyes were closed. He wore only pajama pants. No shirt, no shoes. The murderer had caught him sleeping.

  The cause of death was obvious. Moritz Quast’s head had been bashed in. Jan could see pieces of his skull. Not a pretty sight.

  Fabian sat on a bench not far from the grave. The cop’s head was down and he stared at the ground. He’d thrown up when he’d laid eyes on the corpse. Even in the most gruesome situations, he had always had a casual remark at the ready. But the death of Moritz Quast had silenced him. Beneath his macho facade, the fast-food binges and sexist comments, Jan’s former partner was a dependable cop. He would never have risked the life of an innocent man through simple negligence.

  Jan sat down next to Fabian on the bench. Under other circumstances this would have been a nice spot, on a green, surrounded by big chestnut trees.

  Jan said nothing. He would leave it to Fabian to do the talking whenever he was ready. Meanwhile, the search of the site continued full bore. Flashing cameras made the night flicker. Footprints were secured and possible clues marked around the grave.

  Chandu had gone over to Moritz Quast’s house and was speaking with the investigators there. Zoe was sharpening her knives over at Forensics, and Max was trying to find out more about the billing-fraud incident. It was going to be a long night.

  “I don’t know how the bastard got into the house,” Fabian began without lifting his head. “We couldn’t reach Quast—not on the radio, not on the phone. So I had the young ’un go cover the back door and I went in the front using my key. I turned on the light and called for Quast, but got no answer.” He paused. “Before searching the house, I wanted to let David in. I was going through to the kitchen when that bastard got me with the stun gun.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, zilch.” Fabian lifted his head and threw his hands up in despair. “There was not the slightest sign of an intruder breaking in. The doors were locked, no footprints in the apartment. Nothing suggested we weren’t alone. Maybe Moritz Quast took a sleeping pill. I woulda in his position. No sign of imminent danger, so I went to the kitchen. That son of a bitch knew exactly where he had to stand so I couldn’t see him.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The kid had must have heard me hit the floor. He got suspicious, went around the house, and came through the front. The bastard caught him with one there too. David hit his head against the coffee table going down.”

  “Did he see him?”

  “That hit he took on the head had to be nasty. He kept stammering about how Quast was saying he was sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “No idea. He could have been imagining Quast when he was unconscious.” Fabian shrugged. “Don’t know any more than that. Ask him yourself when he’s back on his feet.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the hospital. They sewed him up with twenty stitches and examined his head.” Fabian exhaled loudly. “When I woke up and saw that blood on his face, I almost had a heart attack. Thank God it’s not so bad.”

  He shook his head, stared at the ground again. The pain of his failure was etched in his face. Serving with that young kid wasn’t easy, but Fabian would have thrown himself in front of any bullet fired at his trainee. He would’ve died rather than put David in danger.

  “I only woke up about twenty minutes later, so I’m told,” Fabian went on. “The fucker had tied us up with zip ties. It took us another twenty minutes to get the goddamn things off. We sounded the alarm. But Moritz Quast was nowhere to be found. Later we got the radio call that they’d found his body in the grave. No sign of the murderer.”

  Jan placed a hand on Fabian’s shoulder, one friend to another. Nothing he could say would help his former partner. But Jan wanted him to know that he was on Fabian’s side.

  Fabian would never forgive himself—for the death of Moritz Quast or for letting David get wounded. Whether the department pronounced him free of fault was irrelevant. The only thing that could help Fabian was seeing the murderer behind bars.

  So Jan would see to that.

  After three hours of detective work at the cemetery, Jan arrived back at Homicide. The sun was coming up, and he looked as tired as he felt after a night of no sleep. He yawned, stretching his arms above his head. He headed for his office, where Bergman was already waiting for him, leaning against a column. Even at this hour he was neatly dressed, his hair perfect and his shoes shining.

  Jan, on the other hand, looked like a man sorely needing a shower. His clothes were filthy, and he had what felt like three feet of earth caked to the soles of his sneakers.


  Bergman lifted up a printout from a website. “The Grave Killer Strikes Again!” he read out loud. Under the lurid headline was an image of an old-style cross standing at an empty grave.

  “I haven’t told the reporters a thing,” Jan protested.

  “I know. But the days of calm are over. Once again,” he added, referring to their previous case. “Meaning, in plain language: I’m going to have the police chief, the mayor, the attorney general, and God knows who else calling me within the hour. So what do we have?”

  “Not much,” Jan said reluctantly.

  “We have two dead bodies,” Bergman corrected him. “And one was under police protection.”

  “Fabian, he was trying to—”

  “I know,” Bergman snapped, cutting Jan off. “I talked to Gisker. Nevertheless, he won’t get around an internal-affairs investigation. Plus I’m assigning him a few days’ leave of absence.”

  “I don’t think that—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with fairness. A man under police protection was murdered. We can’t carry on as if nothing happened. Find the murderer, and Gisker gets back in the game.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing this whole—”

  “I’m assigning you more people.”

  “More people?”

  “Don’t question me,” Bergman snapped again, sounding offended. “I’m giving you Patrick Stein and his team. I want you to lay all your findings on the table for them. I want you all on the same page by the end of the day. Maybe you overlooked something. You’re still the lead. But a special team of four people with only one criminal detective? No way I can sell that.”

  Jan grumbled, but he was secretly glad for the support. What had initially looked like a bizarre homicide by a maniac was fast developing into a serial-homicide situation. And the way the murderer had neutralized Fabian and David pointed to one clever and extremely dangerous killer.

  “What’s next for you?” Bergman continued.

  “I’ll go take a look at Moritz Quast’s house. It’s most likely the scene of the crime.”

  “I want a report on my desk every evening at seven p.m.” Bergman ended their conversation with a curt nod and started back for his office. “I hope you don’t have any vacations planned,” he shouted back Jan’s way.

  Jan sighed and pulled out his cell phone. The initial autopsy report should be ready by now. Hopefully the second victim would give them more to go on.

  Bergman opened his office door. “Stein!” he roared down the hallway and slammed the door shut again.

  Thirty seconds later, Patrick Stein came inside and sat down in the chair across from Bergman’s desk.

  “This grave-killer case is turning into a major problem. We have two dead and no leads.” His displeasure was clear. “Now I have to put more people on the case. Thus my first question: you have any problem working under Jan?”

  “No,” Patrick said.

  “No? Your animosity was known well beyond the walls of Homicide. A little birdy told me that you two get along now, but to be honest, it’s tough for me to believe.”

  “We talked things out. Didn’t happen overnight. But we did.” Patrick shrugged. “Maybe it took an extreme case, like the last one, for us to resolve our differences.”

  Bergman scrutinized Patrick. His pomaded hair, his perfectly fitting suit. Smart. Correct down to the tips of his no-doubt-manicured toenails. Yet without instincts and as stubborn as a mule. “Jan is our best detective—but to put it tactfully, he isn’t very systematic in his approach. Writing reports, reading documents, and studying lists of suspects are not his strong suit. So I need someone who likes to do those things.” Bergman looked Patrick in the eye.

  “I’d have no problem with that.”

  “Just so we don’t misunderstand one another, Stein: you really screwed things up in that last case. What I really should do is have you directing traffic all day, out on the city bypass. But the thing is, detectives don’t exactly grow on trees. This grave-killer case is your chance to redeem yourself. Jan needs someone like you, but it remains his case. You’ll have to take a subordinate role.”

  Bergman folded his hands across his chest. “We have no more resources, so I phoned around a little this morning. A former colleague is giving us a few men from security services, and we’re getting interns from various departments, plus trainees from Admin and even a few academy students. Your task will be to build a team from this motley crew. Most have no clue about police work, but they’ll do for making calls and combing through documents. Throw yourself into it. And we’ll forget the past.”

  Patrick stood and nodded to his boss. “You can depend on me.”

  “Don’t screw this up,” Bergman said.

  Once Patrick was gone, Bergman leafed through Jan’s report on Dr. Valburg’s death. He would never have tolerated such slipshod style from anyone else. It was yet more proof that Jan was still not his old self. His scars were still too raw. Patrick was the last thing Bergman would be able to give Jan. He just hoped it would prove to be enough.

  Moritz Quast’s corpse lay uncovered on the dissecting table. His eyes were closed, and his face had been cleaned of dried blood after the crime-scene analysis was completed. His whole body had been shaved and washed. Chest and abdominal cavities were opened.

  The formalities had been taken care of. Height, weight, body temp, scars, tattoos—Zoe had duly recorded it all.

  Now the real fun began: the internal inspection. Zoe bent over the corpse. One glance at liver and lungs showed her that Moritz had been no slouch when it came to enjoying himself.

  “Additional info on topic of poisoning,” Zoe said into a dictating machine she operated with a foot pedal. “No visible evidence from the external inquest. No dilated pupils as from atropine or cyanide, no contracted pupils as with opiates. No visible signs of injection to be found. The coloring of livor mortis normal. No foaming around the mouth is visible, also no blisters suggesting intoxication. Stomach and intestines are being analyzed for traces of poison. Regarding the internal inquest, no unusual discoloration or internal burning to be seen. Liquor, vitreous fluid, venous blood, and hair have already been taken to lab, as well as blood from heart and the urine. Tests on liver, brain, and kidneys to follow, along with those of stomach contents. This concludes analysis findings as of June twenty-seventh, eleven sixteen a.m.”

  She stopped recording and was reaching for a scalpel when her phone rang. She went over to the storage table and then groaned when she saw the screen. Jan always knew just the wrong time to call. Since her gloves were smeared with blood, she turned on speaker mode by tapping with her scalpel. “Not done yet,” she said, and went back over to the corpse. “I have both hands down inside his organs.”

  “I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. I just need the most important stuff. How Moritz Quast was murdered, if it was the same perpetrator.”

  Jan sounded like he was calling from a car.

  “His head got smashed in after midnight. I haven’t analyzed the wound yet, but I’m guessing it’s a hammer. Could be the same murder weapon used on the first victim.” With a flick of her hand, Zoe sliced off a piece of the liver and held it up with tweezers. “But there is one other little thing.”

  “What?”

  “His tongue was cut out.” She placed the sample in the petri dish.

  “Why?”

  “What am I, some shaman who can ask the dead?” She frowned. “You should probably go question the lead detective. Name of Tommen or something like that.”

  “Postmortem again?”

  “Yep. We only noticed it here in autopsy on account of no blood in his mouth.”

  “Self-defense wounds?”

  “Nothing I can see.” She took a glass lid and covered the sample. She’d wipe her bloody fingerprints off the glass later.

  “Signs of being tied up?”

  “Nope.”

  “Was he killed while sleeping?”

  �
��Possibly. The perp might have surprised him—that or drugged or poisoned him. Even if there are no signs of a poisoning, I’ll run the whole gamut.”

  “Signs of being dragged?”

  “No.”

  “So the murderer packed up Moritz Quast like he did before and got him to the cemetery. Are there pressure marks?”

  “Huh?”

  “If Moritz Quast was carried in, say, a crate or box, there might be pressure marks proving that.”

  “You watch too much TV,” Zoe said. “That’s how it works on bad crime shows. Reality is different.”

  “How about any residue from packing materials?”

  “I can tell you more about that once we’ve analyzed the clothing under a microscope. That will take a couple days.” Zoe leaned back over the corpse. “A little more brain and the stomach contents, then I’ll get started on my jigsaw puzzle,” she said.

  “Puzzle?”

  “You do not want to know.”

  “Oh,” Jan said. He always did upset easily. “Till next time,” he said and hung up.

  Zoe pushed the big magnifying glass into position over the head and, using her scalpel, excised a portion of brain. The back of the head was smashed something awful. It would take hours for her to piece it all back together and make an impression of it. But then she’d know if a hammer had been used as the murder weapon again. Humming happily, she placed the sample in the petri dish and grabbed a large container for the stomach contents.

  Moritz Quast’s house had been cordoned off. A few photographers and rubberneckers stood behind the police tape. The media had gotten wind that the cemetery was where the body had been found. There was little for them to see here at the house.

  Chandu was holding a cup of coffee, waiting for Jan at the backyard gate.