Outside, dusk had fallen, though it was only just past three. The fog had thickened, and the cars driving up to the gas pumps seemed to be emerging from another dimension. Szacki gazed at them absently, while sorting the various points in the investigation plan, rearranging them, and putting them in order of priority for action.
“Two things,” Szacki finally said. “We’ve already talked about Najman’s last day. I’ll question the widow and his staff, if he had any. He probably did, as he was often away. Check for his car on the surveillance cameras—see if he got to work, when he left, and how far we can track him. Apart from that, check up on him the usual way—everything we have on him in the database, criminal record, tax returns, former employment, accounting books, clients. Search the house and the office.”
Bierut diligently wrote it all down in a small homemade notebook, consisting of twenty-odd pieces of paper stapled together. Szacki thought it yet another eccentricity.
“What about the lye?” asked Bierut. “Check the stores?”
“Waste of time. You can’t prepare for that sort of murder in a weekend. And if somebody were planning it, they’d only have to go to a few supermarkets twice a week for a month to collect the necessary amount of drain cleaner. Let’s focus on people. And let’s gather information on all the places associated with the victim. He liked going for long walks, he liked the forest, he liked Warmia. And somewhere in this freaking backwoods they dissolved him.”
Bierut drew himself up proudly.
“You’re not from Olsztyn, are you?”
“Eighth deadly sin, I know,” Szacki said. He was starting to develop an allergy toward local patriots.
“More and more people are drawn here,” Bierut said, unperturbed. “And I’m not at all surprised. Did you know there are eleven lakes within the city limits?”
“That’s why rheumatism kills more people here than coronary disease. Let’s go.”
The fog must have been gifted with awareness, because rather than mindlessly enveloping him, it cunningly crept under his coat, pushing its way between the buttons of his jacket and shirt to wrap him in its cold, damp embrace. A shudder ran through him, as if he’d suddenly been thrown into icy water. He figured thermal shock would finish him off here long before the rheumatism.
They walked the short distance from the gas station to the city’s main crossroads. Although it didn’t seem possible, the traffic lights were even more of a pain for the pedestrians than the cars. Every vehicle that came through the junction was given the chance to drive off in any direction. So while the cars took their turns, the pedestrians waited, then had to sprint across because the green signal started to flash only seconds after it had come on. They’d just managed to reach the strip dividing the two streams of traffic when the light changed to red. Szacki merely continued at a faster pace, but Bierut grabbed his arm with an iron grip and held him back.
“It’s red,” he said, without even looking at the prosecutor.
Szacki realized there was no point in arguing.
Once they had finally crossed the street and were walking slightly uphill along Niepodległość Avenue, they passed a few prewar public-service buildings. First came a picturesque fire station, with the old garage doors painted red, and then a junior high made of the same redbrick. When they turned into Mariańska Street and reached the temporarily suspended roadwork, on the left were the scenic outbuildings of the old hospital, and on a hill to the right yet another post-German school, or at least that was how Szacki identified the architecture.
The entrance to the underground shelter had been painstakingly secured with plastic sheeting.
“Let’s go in through the hospital,” said Bierut.
He led them through a garden and on to a lab; it must have been one of the side entrances. Szacki was expecting an atmospheric neo-Gothic interior, but it was just a hospital with linoleum on the floor, suspended ceilings, and green walls with a wooden strip at waist height to prevent bed-wheel stoppers and stretchers from making holes in the plaster. They walked along part of a corridor and down some steps into the basement. It looked less neat, with a vaulted ceiling instead of the suspended kind, but it still wasn’t the post-German dungeon he’d been expecting, which would have brick walls and the names of the rooms painted in Gothic script.
Bierut took down the police tape on an ordinary door and they entered the cellar.
“What did this place turn out to be?”
“An air-raid shelter, built during the war for patients at the hospital and the rest home.”
“The rest home?”
“The building on the other side of the street is now a dorm for the nurses’ academy, but a hundred years ago they built it as an Armenhaus, an almshouse for people who needed permanent assistance and had no family. A fine example of state care for social outcasts.”
“So the Reich looked after its citizens.”
They went inside. Bierut flicked a switch, and the harsh light of police lamps dispersed the darkness. Usually Szacki had seen them hooked up to whirring generators, but here they were connected to the hospital’s electricity.
“In those days it was still the German Empire,” Bierut corrected.
“Well, exactly, in other words, the so-called Second Reich.” Szacki wasn’t going to let the local patriot off lightly. “I thought you knew the history of your lesser homeland. The Lesser Reich, we could say.”
The shelter wasn’t huge, and just past the entrance were the sanitation facilities, then a large space identical to the one where they’d found the skeleton.
“Are there many of these halls?” asked Szacki.
“This one and the other one, where we were before. Four entrances. One in the hospital, one in the dorm, and two emergency ones, in case the buildings collapsed. Bricked up long ago.”
“So they must have entered through the buildings.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Unfortunately there’s only one security camera at the dorm, by the watchman’s post, and in theory they’d have had to walk past it. But nobody in their right mind would go in through the dorm. There’s someone there round the clock; sure, maybe in the dead of night, but we all know college kids are up at all hours.” Bierut said this as if he himself had never been young. “The CCTV in the hospital is better, but it consists of several buildings from various periods, with about a dozen entrances, passages, and walkways—it’s a labyrinth. And the place is always on the move, new faces every day. Not much harder than disappearing in the crowd at a train station.”
It occurred to Szacki that it might not be so bad working with this rookie, who not so long ago had been booking drunk drivers and hunting down, no doubt doggedly, civil servants who crossed the road when the crosswalk lights were red.
They followed the familiar corridor, passing under the hole covered with plastic sheeting, from which the noises of the city were audible, and reached the hall where the bones had been found. Last time, by flashlight, this space had had a mysterious feel to it, a frisson of adventure, like something out of a young-adult novel. Now brilliantly lit, it looked typically gray and ugly; the police lamps had chased the mystery from the corners, replacing it with dust, mold, and rat droppings.
“Evidence?” asked Szacki.
“Gathered, but there’s nothing really, except for the usual crap you find in this sort of junk room. There are no fingerprints in the area where the remains were found, and none on the door either. But it’s the end of November, everyone’s wearing gloves. A bit of mud brought in, but no footprints that would lead to any conclusions.”
“A sack? A bag?”
“Whatever they dragged the bones in, they took with them.”
Szacki thought for a while.
“Any mud from the direction of the hospital or the dorm?”
Bierut stroked his mustache. In a characteristic gesture, he ran his thumb and index finger from his nose to the corners of his mouth, ending by straightening his fingers abruptly, as if tryin
g to shake something off. Szacki saw perplexity in this gesture.
“Prosecutor, none of us treated this as a crime scene at first. An old German, end of story. We came in, did a routine check of all the rooms, and the weather is as it is.”
Szacki nodded. He wasn’t going to start casting aspersions—he’d have behaved exactly the same way. He gazed at the rusted bed and thought about yesterday’s conversation with Falk. Some lunatic had gone to all this trouble to make sure Najman died in agony, by dissolving him alive in a substance for cleaning drains.
And now for the first scenario: The guy’s done his chemistry homework badly, and he’s surprised to find he’s left with a heap of bones. What can he do? Bury them, of course. Dig a five-foot pit, put the bones in a plastic bag, and toss them in—job done. Why hadn’t he done that? Perhaps he couldn’t. Because he committed the murder at some industrial site, where the ground was covered in asphalt or concrete. Or maybe because he didn’t want to. He was scared somebody would dig it up. Either way, he removes the bones from the crime scene. Why does he leave them here? If he knows this place exists, then he also knows nobody ever comes down here. He’s acting under pressure, in a state of stress, he’s got a bag full of bones, proof a crime’s been committed. He realizes the old shelter’s a good place, until he can think of somewhere better. First he just tosses the bag in there, but at the last moment he decides to take the bones out. If by some miracle a kid from the dorm finds them while groping a nurse in the dark, everyone’ll think it’s an old German. That’s almost what happened.
And scenario number two: The guy has done his chemistry homework well and was aiming to have nothing left of Najman but his bones. Maybe some Mafia ties would come to light, a gangster story—that would explain the wife’s strange behavior. Perhaps it was meant to be a message for the competition: Take a look at this. We know how to turn a guy into a study aid for medical students in a matter of days. Don’t get in our way. But then they’d have sent it to Najman’s associates in a box with a ribbon, or dumped it in a funny place, in the castle dungeon for example, so the media would have a ball. Leaving the message in a place where nobody had a chance to read it made no sense.
So scenario number two was out. He shared his conclusions with Bierut.
“We’re looking for someone from the hospital,” he said. “Someone who works here, or has done some work here, carried out repairs or installed electrical fittings. Someone who had a professional reason for being in the hospital, knew about the old shelter, and could get inside.”
“Set A.”
“Exactly.” Szacki liked Bierut’s logical mind. “And set B are people from Najman’s circle. Family, friends, colleagues, clients.”
Bierut rubbed the end of his mustache. A contemplative gesture.
“Both sets are difficult to determine precisely, by definition they’re incomplete, they may not have a common area. It would help to narrow things down somehow.”
“First of all, let’s do a profile. The crime is fanciful enough for a psychologist to have something to say. I know a crazy guy from Kraków who’s helped me out before.”
“We have a profiler on-site.” There was a mild hint of the injured pride of a local patriot in Bierut’s voice. What was that? You might not want to employ the services of a Warmian expert?
“I’d also like you guys to edit the press release. Remains found during roadwork were those of a resident of Olsztyn who recently went missing. The investigation is on track, luckily the perpetrator left plenty of forensic evidence at the crime scene, it’s a matter of days before an arrest will be made, we’re waiting for test results from the laboratory.”
Bierut shook leftovers off his mustache again. In other words, he wanted to say he didn’t agree, but he had a problem—he was a novice detective, and he knew about the prosecutor’s reputation. That was why he felt awkward.
“Shouldn’t we narrow down the range of suspects first?”
“We don’t know how long that’ll take, and the killer is under the greatest stress right now. I bet he’s sitting somewhere glued to the local news channels. He’ll hear that the case is being solved and the law’s on his trail. What would you do?”
“Protect myself in some way.”
“How?”
“Disappearing is always suspicious. Everyone will notice, everyone will remember during questioning that you suddenly weren’t at work. I’d think up an excuse, a family illness, rather than a funeral, because that’s too easy to check. I’d go to the boss and ask for a few days off, and then lie low. Then come back like normal if nothing happened. I’d realize the police were bluffing.”
“Spot on. So we’re not risking anything—that sort of information won’t make the killer disappear. And tomorrow we’ll check with the hospital personnel to see if anyone has asked for time off, or if anyone took a business trip to a conference they weren’t supposed to go to. Intuition tells me it’s someone who works here. You’ve got to know the building and its history. You’ve got to be up on anatomy, chemistry, and know something about the body, and about death.”
“A doctor?”
“I’d be surprised if it was an orderly. Can we get out on the other side?”
Bierut nodded, and they walked in the opposite direction, away from the hospital. The corridor ended in a stairwell, and they went up a few dozen concrete steps before Bierut let Szacki through a massive door and into the dorm. He had to switch on a flashlight because the light switch was on the far side of a smallish space, which must have served as a junk room for years. The two men were separated from the exit into the corridor by a stack of chairs, some rolls of carpeting, boxes, old mattresses, and a dozen old toilets and sinks.
“Do you think it’s a serial killer?” asked Bierut. “Like that pastor Pándy?”
András Pándy was a Belgian madman who had lived with his daughters, murdering the remaining members of the family, and then dissolving them in some sort of acid or lye. He was caught when his daughter finally blew the whistle after thirty years of an incestuous relationship.
“I have no idea. I hope not.”
There was no path through the garbage heap, and the short walk across the room required balancing on piles of junk. At first Szacki was worried about his coat, but after two steps he couldn’t have cared less about his wardrobe—his only concern was not to fall into one of the old crappers and break his leg. Finally, panting and cursing, he reached the other side of the room, only to realize that Bierut was still standing in the doorway where they’d come in.
“Everything OK?” asked Bierut in a tone devoid of concern.
Szacki calmed his breathing and said it was highly doubtful that anyone had entered the basement this way.
“Unless he was very fit,” said Bierut.
He cast Szacki a serious look and disappeared into the darkness. Furious, Szacki brushed off his coat, exited into the basement corridor, and found his way up to the ground floor of the old rest home. The dorm lobby was almost identical to the one at the high school on Mickiewicz Street—either it was designed by the same architect, or the Germans had built everything according to the same plan. He made a brief stop at a display case with information about the history of the building. From it he learned that the Reich had indeed built it as a refuge for citizens used up by life, with a garden and a park, but mainly in order to placate the general public, enraged by the erection of the immense town hall with its tower more reminiscent of a palace.
State care, snorted Szacki. Like hell.
7
On his return to the office he had a chat with Falk, asking him to come up with some case hypotheses. Falk reeled off some potential theories: Mafia score settling, a Warmian version of Hannibal Lecter, and personal revenge.
As he listened, Szacki wondered how much you had to hate someone to dissolve them alive. It couldn’t have been over a broken heart or an unpaid debt. How long would you have to nurture your hatred to inflict such an awful death on someone? The
re must be a very great injustice behind that sort of hatred. Had somebody lost everything they owned? Everything they loved? Everything that, from their point of view, constituted life? Lost it so totally and utterly that they had carried out this bizarre, violent revenge?
“All the answers are in Najman’s past,” said Szacki.
“Maybe not this time,” said Falk. “I know it’s a long shot, but the victim ran a travel agency—he sent people on vacation.”
“Seriously? You think someone dissolved him in acid because they’d gone to Thailand and the hotel windows overlooked a trash heap rather than a pool full of teenage girls in bikinis?”
Falk sat up straight, clearly offended by the mocking tone.
“I think strange things can happen in exotic destinations. People fall sick with dangerous diseases, children get lost in the jungle, there are accidents just waiting to happen. I can imagine a situation where a child gets poisoned because the hotel turns out to be at the back of a fertilizer factory. When he gets home, the client demands compensation because he needs the money for the child’s treatment in Switzerland. The agency refuses, the client loses his case because of Najman’s testimony, and the child dies after a long illness. For example.”
Szacki frowned.
“Far-fetched.”
Falk adjusted his cuffs to make them stick out of his jacket sleeves the regulation half inch. The gesture had the same effect as yawning, so Szacki adjusted his cuffs, too, making them stick out half an inch more because they were fastened with cuff links. Frankly, as the King of the Stuffed Shirts and the Prince of the Starched Collars, they were a perfect match.
“Far-fetched,” admitted Falk. “But his profession was unusual enough for it to be worth checking out. Exotic locations, trips away, plenty of contacts, lots of chance meetings.”
Szacki shrugged and went back to work. Falk tapped away at his laptop nonstop, like a stenographer. Szacki filled out a few forms and waited for Mrs. Najman to arrive, killing time by thinking and staring at the black-and-green hole outside. He was surprised to find that he was feeling anxiety. Not just excitement brought on by an interesting investigation, but anxiety. Either the crap-shit local weather was affecting his mood, or else he’d made a mistake.
Rage Page 11
