Grave Intent

by Alexander Hartung

  “God, so complicated. Why not just send you an e-mail?”

  Chandu laughed. “I suppose it would spare me some bumps and bruises, but sometimes the old tried-and-true methods are still the best.”

  “You mean slugging a guy in the nose, stuff like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  Zoe looked at her watch. “Being punctual is evidently not a strength of this Rat of yours.”

  “Oh, he’s been here a while now. He likes to probe his surroundings and study who he’s going to be talking to. If you weren’t here, he’d already have surfaced.”

  “I look that dangerous?”

  “In the age of automatic firearms, everyone is dangerous.”

  “I prefer a knife. Firearms are too vulgar for me.”

  “Here he comes,” Chandu said, gesturing toward the other side of the street.

  A short, skinny man was moving along the parked cars. His head darted from side to side as if he expected an attack from every angle. Every few steps, he pivoted as if he were being followed. He looked down the street, waited until a car went by, and ran across. He slowed his steps as he approached them.

  Zoe finally got a better look at the man. He had unkempt black hair streaked with gray and really needed a trip to the barber. He was unshaven and wore a faded black pullover. His front teeth protruded noticeably, but the most distinctive thing about him was his glasses, which were far too big for his haggard face, with lenses that looked about two inches thick.

  Chandu shifted his weight. With his legs spread apart and shoulders flexed back, he looked like a boxer before the bell sounded. This was his stance for intimidation.

  “Tim,” he said, his voice grave.

  Their contact raised a hand and was about to respond when Zoe landed a powerful blow right on his nose. Glasses and man flew backward.

  “What are you doing?” Chandu yelled. “You can’t hit him!”

  “I thought this was our way of greeting him.”

  “It’s not. Well, okay, in my case it’s different.”

  “Ah, you get to give him one and I don’t?”

  “We’ve known each other a long time.”

  “You only slug people you’ve known a long time?”

  “Normally I don’t slug anyone.”

  “Apart from Tim.”

  “Yes. But only sometimes.”

  “Then don’t get all worked up. I just wanted to take some work off your hands.”

  Chandu balled his fists and smacked at his own temples. “You’re going to drive me crazy before this is all over. I’ve knocked around with plenty of nut jobs in my time, but you? You beat them all.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot.” Zoe threw her head back, running fingers through her hair. “You really know how to charm a girl.”

  “What was that for?” Tim howled, holding his bleeding nose.

  “A misunderstanding,” Chandu said to smooth things over.

  Zoe came closer to have a look at his nose. “Not a big deal. A clean break. Won’t hurt by tomorrow.”

  “Thanks!” Tim shouted at her. “Makes me feel better already.”

  “Your glasses.” Chandu set the broken frame and cracked glass in Tim’s hand.

  “You know what a custom-made pair like this costs?” he said, waving the remains of his spectacles in Zoe’s face.

  “Two euros?”

  “Ah, she’s funny too. What rock did you find her under?”

  “She’s assisting with my investigation.”

  “Well, maybe you should start looking for a new partner.”

  “Tim, just calm down.” Chandu placed an arm around the little man. “Give me something good, and then you can head right over to the optician with your reward.”

  “What about my nose?”

  “That’ll need a doctor,” Zoe said.

  “A doctor? You really think I have health insurance?”

  “No big deal.” Zoe pushed up her sleeves. “I can set that beak of yours right here and now—”

  “No!” Chandu and Tim said in unison.

  “It’s fine like it is,” Chandu added.

  Zoe held up her hands. “Hey, I only wanted to help.”

  Chandu turned to Tim. “So. What do you have for us?”

  “Your call was a little short-notice. I take it you already know who the guy is in the police sketch?”

  “We do now. It’s a certain Robin Cordes.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He was caught up in a billing scandal. When it all blew up, one of the people involved sold him down the river. Robin ended up in the joint.”

  “That business with the billing,” Tim said, “that was only one of his gigs. Robin did whatever shady job brought in the dough. Push drugs, sell stolen goods, break into cars. Nothing huge. He always swam clear of the big sharks.”

  “You heard about any connection to a Dr. Valburg?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell, but I haven’t had much time to ask around.”

  “How did Robin do in the slammer?”

  “Not too bad, the way I hear it. He’s changed, apparently.”

  “Changed?”

  “Broke off all his old connections. No dirty dealings anymore. No drugs, nothing. Even declined an invite on one real lucrative job.”

  “How does he earn his dough? Collecting bottles?”

  “Word is, it’s poker games.”

  “Robin’s rigging poker games?”

  “No idea. The games could be bogus, or he could just be running no-limit games, or maybe he’s just a good player. But the man’s a ghost of his former self.”

  “You got any idea where he could be holing up?”

  “That brings us back to the problem of his avoiding all his old contacts. He’s withdrawn. Three years ago? I could’ve told you his favorite pub. But he hasn’t shown up there in a while. He still lives at the same place, though. Try there.”

  “It was a dead end. He’s apparently gone underground.”

  “In that case, it’ll be tough. Robin grew up on the street, knows his way around. If I hear anything, I’ll be in touch, but if he doesn’t want to be found? He’ll stay invisible.”

  Chandu reached in his pocket and pulled out two hundred-euro bills. “Consider it a down payment,” he said, pressing them into Tim’s hand. “When we nab Robin, there’ll be a bonus.”

  “Well, I should hope so,” Tim muttered.

  Chandu slapped him on the shoulder like a pal, which made Tim’s knees buckle. “Thanks, old buddy.” Then he grabbed Zoe by an arm and dragged her toward the car.

  “What was that for?” she said, trying to shake free.

  “I don’t want you kicking him in the nuts good-bye or whatever enters that mind of yours.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “I don’t buy it.” Chandu unlocked the car. He turned around, but the little man was nowhere to be seen. Only then did he release Zoe.

  “Maybe just a little kick,” she muttered as she climbed in.

  Max had booted up all his computers, grabbed the rest of the anchovy pizza from the fridge, and left Pinky and the Brain cartoons running on the TV. Armed with his favorite drink—Ovaltine and cola—he was now ready for battle.

  He logged in to the police server, started up the search program, and entered Robin Cordes’s cell-phone number. After a few seconds, a dialogue window appeared: No location found.

  “Damn it.”

  His phone rang.

  “Hi, Jan.”

  “Robin Cordes has gone underground,” Jan said. “Can you locate his cell phone?”

  “I’m striking out. Either he turned it off or he pulled out the SIM card.”

  “Will you get him back if he turns it on again?”

  “I’ll fire a stealth text at him.”

  “What kind of text?”

  “I send a text to Robin’s cell number. It won’t display and won’t chime—he won’t even notice he’s getting a message. But the text still arrive
s there and I get connection data about where the message went. But his phone has to be turned on for that. When he does, I got him.”

  “So you’ll know his whereabouts?”

  “More or less,” Max said. “If he has a GPS in his phone, it’s real precise. If not, it goes over the mobile network. In that case, I can only give you the nearest cell tower.”

  “And what if he never turns on his phone?”

  “We can forget about real-time locating.”

  “Which means what, we wouldn’t have him?”

  “Well, there’s something else I’ll try.” Max took a big bite of pizza. “I’ll look up any connection data from Robin over the last few days,” he said, chewing. “I’ll use that to build a profile of his routes. Maybe we’ll see other clusters apart from his home.”

  “Clusters?”

  “Places he’s visited more than once.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Depends on the amount of data. There’s a difference between taking a stroll now and then and driving around Berlin for ten hours. I’ll have more for you by tomorrow morning.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll be in touch.”

  Before Jan had even hung up, Max was tapping into the mobile provider’s database. He’d had this specific Trojan up and running before getting his internship with the cops. He could still hear his annoying neighbor’s shriek when he got a cell-phone bill for €12,427. Some things were just priceless.

  Max entered Robin’s cell-phone number and started downloading the data. Meanwhile he’d have to write a program that overlaid the cell phone’s points of contact on a map.

  A few hours later, he knew Robin’s favorite pub, where he liked to shop for groceries, and who his friends were. They would find him out there somewhere.

  A loud pounding ripped Jan out of his slumber. He turned to his alarm clock and realized he wasn’t lying in bed. The surroundings looked suspiciously like his living room, which meant he’d fallen asleep on the couch again. The harsh light of a floor lamp burned his eyes, and he was still dressed. Crime-scene photos were scattered across his stomach, and coffee had spilled all over the upholstery.

  “Excellent,” he grumbled. He rubbed at his temples to drive away his throbbing headache, but to no avail. He’d wanted to work through the night but fell asleep, despite the coffee. The last time he’d looked at his watch, it was two in the morning. He turned his head toward the kitchen. The digital clock flashed 4:57 a.m.

  Jan thought he’d been imagining the pounding, but it turned out someone was actually hammering on the door.

  “Jan, Jan!” Max’s voice echoed down the stairwell. “Are you awake?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered wearily. “Along with the rest of the building.” He heaved himself off the couch and opened the door. “Come on in.”

  “I got something.” Max ran over to the couch and slammed a stack of printouts down on the coffee table. “My breakdown, it’s done.”

  He sat on the couch and turned on his laptop. “Our route profile for Robin Cordes.”

  Then he sprang back up.

  “It took me several hours.”

  He paced back and forth.

  “But the work, it was so worth it.”

  He sat back down on the couch. “We have clusters.”

  He turned the laptop toward Jan, sprang back up.

  “Max, just . . .” Jan rubbed at his eyes. He was barely awake. Three hours of sleep was nowhere near enough. “Have you been sucking down energy drinks again?”

  The young hacker stopped abruptly. He didn’t seem to have an answer. After a few moments, he said, “No.”

  “Max,” Jan insisted. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Okay, maybe one or two.” He stared at the floor.

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “But they had this deal going,” Max said. “Buy a six-pack, get a second free.”

  Jan moaned. Twelve energy drinks. His young friend would be hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean for the next three days.

  “The stuff helps,” Max protested. “I worked straight through the night, and I’m not the least bit tired.”

  “I can see that.” Jan shuffled into the kitchen and turned on the coffeemaker. “How did you get in?”

  “Paper-delivery guy was in the building. I waited till he was done and I slipped right in.”

  Jan pulled a mug from the cabinet, wondering whether a person could sleep standing up. “Okay. Give it to me.”

  “What I did was, I marked all of Robin Cordes’s routes.” Max turned his laptop toward Jan again. On the screen was a city map covered with red lines.

  “Fascinating.” Jan turned back to his coffeemaker.

  “I thought so too,” Max replied, even more fired up now. “So I made a program that bolds the red lines for places Robin visited multiple times.”

  “Awesome.” Jan stretched, yawned.

  “That’s what I thought.” Max pointed to a spot on the screen. “Robin’s building is deep red. Other deep reds are the subway station, supermarket, and a newsstand.”

  “No surprises there.” Jan closed his eyes, inhaling the aroma of coffee. He was slowly returning to the world of the living.

  “Not really. But there are two unusual hits I’m seeing.”

  “And they are?”

  “Robin Cordes visited Dr. Valburg’s office—three days before the doctor died.”

  “Not bad.” It didn’t tell them anything about where Robin might be now, but it did reinforce the connection between him and Dr. Valburg. “The second hit?”

  “Now, this second one is weird.” Max zoomed in on the map. “Robin spent a lot of time near the old Tempelhof rail yards.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  “Three times a week.”

  “Always at the same time?”

  “Different days and different times.”

  “Nights too?”

  “Daytime only.”

  Jan took his coffee mug into the living room. “Anything unique about the rail yards?”

  “You know the nature park there, Schöneberger Südgelände?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “The switchyards there are now a kind of nature reserve slash open-air museum. There’s an old water tower, a steam locomotive, engine turntables. Everything to get a train fanatic’s heart racing.”

  “So a railroad museum?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What’s Robin Cordes doing at an open-air railroad museum?”

  Max shrugged. “Maybe he’s an old-time locomotive freak?”

  Jan shook his head. “Not one thing in Robin’s apartment pointed to that. He had no model trains or train pictures or any other of that railway-buff stuff.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you any more than that. This nature park is the only unusual thing on his route profile. His cell phone is still off; the last data is from the night before last.”

  “Are your dummy texts still active?”

  “Stealth texts,” Max corrected him. “And yes, they are. He turns on his phone, I’ll know.”

  Jan sighed. Couldn’t a suspect just once hide out in a kebab joint, a nice coffee shop, maybe even a strip club? Nope. It had to be railway museum.

  “A stroll through this nature railway park will do me good,” he said. Lies like that crossed his lips with such surprising ease. He emptied his coffee cup in one gulp. “Maybe I’ll even trip over a murder suspect.”

  The huge rusty tower rose high in the sky. Jan stood next to a group of schoolkids and followed their fascinated gazes upward. He had no clue what was so exciting about the decrepit old thing. It was a metal monstrosity that had once pumped water into steam locomotives.

  Jan shrugged and continued on.

  He had been strolling around the grounds for two hours now, but he’d found no trace of Robin Cordes. He had been playing the engrossed tourist, holding a map and taking photos with his phone.
He kept attaching himself to this or that little tour group so his meandering didn’t look conspicuous. He now knew that the construction of the railway yards had been completed in 1889, but they lost significance after Berlin was divided and were eventually abandoned. Forty-nine species of birds nested here and even more spiders, and over three hundred varieties of flowering plants grew on the grounds. People were not supposed to leave the paths so as not to disturb the wildlife.

  There was hardly a worse place to hide out. Jan had no idea what Robin Cordes could possibly have been doing here. He dialed Max’s number.

  “Yo!” Max answered. Obviously the energy drinks were still going strong.

  “I’ve just wasted two whole hours walking around this park—and found nothing. Can you tell me anything more about where Robin Cordes was hanging around here?”

  “Unfortunately not. I only get a bearing from two cell towers in the area. It keeps jumping around, which means he was there and he walked through the park.”

  “But why? There’s nothing here.”

  “Were you over near the garden plot?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “West of you,” Max said. “Cross over the tracks.”

  “The light-rail tracks?”

  “Exactly. Don’t get run over.”

  A garden plot was the perfect hideout. Tough to make out. Scarce security. Most of the garden sheds had only padlocks on the doors. Yet they had water and electricity.

  “How many plots are there?” Jan asked Max.

  “Two thousand six hundred.”

  “How many?”

  “Schöneberger Südgelände is one of the largest continuous garden plots in Berlin.”

  Jan groaned. There was no way he could check out all those tracts. “I’ll take a look around. Thanks for the info.”

  “Welcome.” Max hung up.

  With twenty-six hundred plots, random spot checks would have to do.

  Jan followed a path that led to a quieter part of the nature park. Once he’d determined that no one was around, he hurried into the forest and headed west. Soon he reached two rail lines. An S-Bahn light-rail train whooshed by him. He looked left and right but didn’t see another train. He tiptoed over the tracks, went down a little embankment, and found a concrete path. A man strolling with a Rottweiler eyed Jan suspiciously as he came bounding out from between two trees. The dog jerked back in fright and hid behind its master. This Rottweiler was clearly not trained as a guard dog.