The yellow folder with the autopsy photographs was, as always, distasteful to Schmied. He went through it only briefly: pitiless images against a blue background, the sight of them bearable only if deliberately contemplated for a very long time.
Schmied thought of the many hours he’d spent in autopsy. Everything happened quietly there, just the sound of scalpels and saws, the voices of the doctors murmuring their shorthand into dictating machines as they handled the bodies with respect. Jokes around the autopsy table happened only in thrillers. The one thing he would never get used to was the smell, that typical odor of decay—almost every pathologist felt the same way. Nor was it possible to smear some Vicks under your nose, as certain trace evidence could only be deduced from the smell of the corpse. As a young prosecutor, Schmied had been sickened when the blood was ladled out of the bodies and weighed or when the organs were placed back in the body after the postmortem. Later he had come to understand that there was a specific art in sewing the corpse back up after autopsy firmly enough to prevent it from leaking, and he had realized that medical examiners had serious conversations about it. It was a parallel universe, just as his was. Schmied and the chief medical examiner were friends, they were almost the same age, and they never discussed their professional lives in private.
ADA Schmied sighed a second time, then signed the order of arrest and took it to the examining magistrate. Only two hours later, the judge issued the warrant, and six hours later, Boheim was arrested in his apartment. Simultaneously, searches were initiated in the couple’s various apartments, offices, and houses in Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin, and Sylt. The police had organized it well.
Three lawyers appeared for the arraignment, looking like alien beings in the examining magistrate’s little office. They were civil lawyers, highly paid specialists in corporate takeovers and international arbitration. None of them had appeared before a judge; the last time they’d been engaged with criminal law was when they were studying for their law degrees. They didn’t know what motions they should file, and one of them said threateningly that he might have to bring politics into this. The judge remained calm nonetheless.
Melanie Boheim sat on the wooden bench outside the door to the hearing room. No one had told her she couldn’t see her husband—the arraignment was not open to the public. On the advice of his lawyers, Boheim said nothing when the warrant was read. The lawyers had come with a blank check and certification from the bank that he was good for up to fifty million euros. The examining magistrate was angered by the figure; it reeked of the class system. He refused bail—“We’re not in America here”—and asked the lawyers if they wished to apply for a formal review of the remand in custody.
ADA Schmied had said almost nothing during the hearing. This was going to be a fight, and he thought he could hear the starting bell.
· · ·
Percy Boheim was impressive. The day after his arrest, I went to find him in the house of detention where he was being held, after having been asked by the chief counsel of his firm to take over the defense. Boheim sat behind the table in the visitor’s cell as if it were his office, and greeted me warmly. We talked about the government’s failed tax policies and the future of the car industry. He behaved as though we were at a stand-up reception and not preparing for a jury trial. When we got around to the actual matter at hand, he said immediately that he had lied to the police when they had questioned him, in the hopes of protecting his wife and saving his marriage. To all my other questions, his answers were precise, focused, and devoid of hesitation.
Of course he had known Stefanie Becker. She had been his lover; he had got to know her via an ad in one of the Berlin papers. He had paid her for sex. She was a nice girl, a student. He had thought about offering her a place as a trainee in one of his companies once she’d graduated. He had never asked her why she was working as a prostitute, but he was certain he had been her only customer; she was shy and it was only over time that she thawed out. “It all sounds ugly now, but it was what it was,” he said. He’d liked her.
On the day it happened, he’d had a meeting that ran until 1:20 and had reached the hotel somewhere around 1:45. Stefanie was waiting; they’d had sex. After that, he’d showered and then left immediately, because he wanted to have some time alone to prepare for his next appointment. Stefanie had stayed in the room in order to take a bath before she set off, and she had told him she didn’t want to be out of there until 3:30. He had tucked five hundred euros in her purse, which was their standard arrangement.
He had used the elevator next to the suite to go down directly to the underground garage; it would have taken him a minute, two at most, to get to his car. He had left the hotel at around 2:30 and driven to the zoological garden, Berlin’s biggest park, and taken a walk for the better part of an hour, thinking intermittently about his relationship with Stefanie and deciding that he had to end it. He’d left his cell phone switched off; he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed.
At four o’clock, he’d been at a meeting on the Kurfürstendamm with four other men. Between 2:30 and 4:00, he had met no one, nor had he had any phone conversations. And no one had passed him when he left the hotel.
Defendants and defense lawyers have a curious relationship. A lawyer doesn’t always want to know what actually happened. This also has its roots in our code of criminal procedure: If defense counsel knows that his client has killed someone in Berlin, he may not ask for “defense witnesses” to take the stand who would say that the man had been in Munich that day. It’s a tightrope walk. In other cases, the lawyer absolutely has to know the truth. Knowledge of the actual circumstances may be the tiny advantage that can protect his client from a guilty verdict. Whether the lawyer thinks his client is innocent is irrelevant. His task is to defend the accused, no more, no less.
If Boheim’s explanation was correct—that is, that he’d left the room at 2:30 and the cleaning lady had found the girl’s body at 3:26, then there was a little under an hour to deal with. It was enough. In the space of sixty minutes, the real perpetrator could have entered the room, killed the girl, and disappeared before the cleaning lady entered. There was no proof of what Boheim had told me. If he had kept silent during his first interview, it would have been easier. His lies had made the situation worse, and there was absolutely no trace of another attacker. Admittedly, I did think it unlikely that a jury would end up convicting him in a major trial. But I doubted that any judge would vacate his arrest warrant right now—a suspicion clung.
Forty-eight hours later, the examining magistrate called me to arrange a time for the formal review of Boheim’s remand in custody. We settled on the next day. I could have the file picked up by a courier; the DA’s office had approved its release.
The file contained new inquiries. Everyone in the victim’s cell-phone address book had been questioned. A girlfriend, in whom Stefanie Becker had confided, explained to the police why she had turned to prostitution.
But what was much more interesting was that the police had located Abbas in the meantime. He had a record—break-ins and drug dealing and, two years previously, an offense involving grievous bodily harm, a fight outside a discotheque. The police had questioned Abbas. He said he had followed Stefanie to the hotel once, out of jealousy, but she’d been able to explain what she was doing there. The interrogation went on for many pages, and the detectives’ suspicions were clear in every line. But finally when it came down to it, they had a motive but no proof.
Late in the afternoon, I paid a visit to ADA Schmied in his office. As always, he welcomed me in both a friendly and a professional way. He didn’t feel good about Abbas, either. Jealousy was always a powerful motive. Abbas could not be excluded as the alternative killer. He knew the hotel, she was his girlfriend, and she had slept with another man. If he had been there, he could also have killed her. I explained to Schmied why Boheim had lied, then said, “Sleeping with a student isn’t, finally, a crime.”
“Yes, but it’s not very attra
ctive, either.”
“Thank God that’s not the issue,” I said. “Infidelity is no longer punishable under the law.” Schmied himself had had an affair with a female district attorney some years ago, as everyone knew around the Moabit courthouse. “I can’t see a single reason why Boheim would have wanted to kill his lover,” I said.
“Nor do I, yet. But you know motives don’t count that much with me,” said Schmied. “He really did lie his head off under questioning.”
“That makes him suspicious, I grant you, but it doesn’t prove anything. Besides which, his first statement at the hearing is probably unusable.”
“Oh?”
“The police had already analyzed the phone records by then. They knew he’d had long conversations with the victim. They knew from the nearest cell-phone tower that his car was in the neighborhood of the hotel. They knew he had reserved the room in which the girl was killed. The police should therefore have interrogated him formally as the accused, but they only questioned him under the guise of a witness and only cautioned him as such.”
Schmied thumbed through the transcript of the interrogation. “You’re right,” he said finally, and pushed the files away. He disliked such little games by the police; they never really got anybody anywhere.
“Besides which, the weapon involved, the lamp the student was killed with, showed no fingerprints,” I said. The trace evidence had revealed only her DNA.
“That is correct. But the sperm in the girl’s hair came from your client.”
“Oh come on, Mr. Schmied, that’s just crazy. He ejaculates on the girl and then pulls on his gloves to bash her head in? Boheim’s not a moron.”
Schmied’s eyebrows shot up.
“And all the other traces, the ones that were lifted off water glasses, door handles, window handles, and so on, are perfectly explicable by the fact that he stayed in the hotel—they imply no guilt.”
We argued for almost an hour. At the end, Schmied said, “On condition that your client lays out his relationship to the deceased in detail at the hearing, I will agree that the arrest warrant may be withdrawn tomorrow morning.”
He stood up and held out his hand to say good-bye. As I was standing in the doorway, he said, “But Boheim will surrender his passport, pay a high amount in bail, and check in with the police twice a week. Agreed?”
Of course I agreed.
· · ·
When I left the room, Schmied was pleased that the affair would now die down. He had never really believed Boheim to be the perpetrator. Percy Boheim gave no appearance of being a raving madman who would crush the head of a student with a rain of blows. But, Schmied was also thinking, who knows his fellow human being? Which was why, for him, motive was very seldom the deciding factor.
Two hours later, just as he was locking the door to his office on his way home, his phone rang. Schmied cursed, went back, picked up the receiver, and let himself down into his chair again. It was the Homicide Division’s leading investigator on the case. When Schmied hung up six minutes later, he looked at the clock. Then he pulled his old fountain pen out of his jacket, wrote a brief summary of the conversation, and inserted it as the first page on top of the file, switched off the light, and remained sitting for some time in the darkness. He now knew that Percy Boheim was the killer.
The next day, Schmied asked me to come to his office again. He looked almost sad as he pushed the pictures at me across his desk. The photos clearly showed Boheim behind his car window. “There’s a high-resolution camera positioned at the exit from the hotel garage,” he said. “Your client was filmed leaving that garage. I received the pictures this morning—the Homicide Division called me last night after you and I had spoken. I wasn’t able to reach you again.”
I looked at him, puzzled.
“The pictures show Mr. Boheim leaving the hotel garage. Please look at the time on the first photograph; the video camera always stamps them in the bottom left-hand corner. The time is shown as 3:26:55. We checked the clock setting on the camera; it’s correct. The cleaning lady discovered the dead girl at 3:26. That time is also correct; it’s confirmed by the first call to the police, which came in at 3:29. I’m sorry, but there can’t be any other perpetrator.”
I had no alternative but to withdraw from the remand hearing. Boheim would remain in detention as a suspect until the trial.
The next months were taken up with preparations for the trial. All the lawyers in my chambers were working on it; every tiny detail from the file was checked and rechecked—the cell-phone tower, the DNA analysis, the camera in the garage. The Homicide Division had done good work; there were almost no mistakes we could find. Boheim Industries commissioned a private detective agency, but it came up with nothing new. Boheim himself stuck to his story, despite all proof to the contrary. And despite his miserable prospects, he remained good-humored and relaxed.
Police work proceeds on the assumption that there is no such thing as chance. Investigations consist of 95 percent office work, checking out factual details, writing summaries, getting statements from witnesses. In detective novels, the person who did it confesses when he or she is screamed at; in real life, it’s not that simple. And when a man with a bloody knife in his hand is bent over a corpse, that means he’s the murderer. No reasonable policeman would believe he had only walked past by chance and tried to help by pulling the knife out of the body. The detective superintendent’s observation that a particular solution is too simple is a screenwriter’s conceit. The opposite is true. What is obvious is what is plausible. And most often, it’s also what’s right.
Lawyers, by contrast, try to find holes in the structures of proof built by prosecutors. Their ally is chance; their task is to disrupt an overhasty reliance on what appears to be the truth. A police officer once said to a federal judge that defense attorneys are no more than brakes on the vehicle of justice. The judge replied that a vehicle without brakes isn’t much use, either. Any criminal case can function only within these parameters. So we were hunting for the chance that would save our client.
Boheim had to spend Christmas and New Year’s in detention. ADA Schmied had given him wide-ranging permission for conversations with his operating officers, accountants, and civil lawyers. He saw them every second day and ran his companies out of his detention cell. His board members and his staff declared openly that he had their support. His wife also visited him regularly. The only person he refused to be visited by was his son; he didn’t want Benedict to see his father in prison.
But still there was no ray of hope that broke through for the trial, due to start in four days. Aside from a few procedural motions, no one had a basic concept for a successful defense. A deal, otherwise a regular occurrence in criminal cases, was out of the question. Murder carries a life sentence, manslaughter a sentence of five to fifteen years. I had nothing that would allow me to negotiate with the judge.
The printouts of the video pictures were on the library table in my chambers. Boheim had been captured on them in piercing detail. It was like a pocket camera strip with six images. Boheim activates the exit button with his left hand. The barrier opens. The car drives past the camera. And then suddenly it was all completely clear. The solution had been in the file for four months, so simple that it made me laugh. And we’d all overlooked it.
The trial took place in Room 500 in the courthouse in Moabit. The state’s case was for manslaughter. Assistant District Attorney Schmied represented the prosecutor’s office himself, and as he read out the charges, the courtroom fell silent. Boheim took the stand as the accused. He was well prepared; he spoke for more than an hour without notes. His voice was sympathetic; people liked listening to him. He spoke with great focus about his relationship with Stefanie Becker. He left nothing out; there were no dark, shadowy areas. He described the course of their meeting on the day of the crime and how he had left the hotel at 2:30. He answered the relevant questions from the judges and the district attorneys both fully and precisely. He explaine
d both that he had paid Stefanie Becker for sex and why, adding that it would be absurd to assume that he would have killed a young girl with whom he had had no deeper relationship.
Boheim was masterful. The discomfort of everyone involved in the trial was evident. It was a strange situation. No one wanted to suspect him of murder—it was just that it couldn’t have been anyone else. Witnesses were not due to be called until the next day.
The tabloids the following morning led with such headlines as MILLIONAIRE NOT KILLER OF BEAUTIFUL STUDENT? That was one way of summing it up.
On the second day of the trial, they called Consuela, the hotel maid. Finding the body had taken its toll on her. Her statements about the time were credible. Neither the prosecution nor the defense had any questions for her.
After her, it was Abbas’s turn. He was in mourning. The court asked about his relationship to the deceased, in particular whether Stefanie had ever spoken about the accused and, if so, what she had said. Abbas had nothing he could report.
Then the presiding judge asked Abbas about his meeting with Stefanie in front of the hotel, his jealousy, and his spying on her. The judge was fair; he did everything to ascertain if Abbas had been in the hotel on the day of the murder. Abbas responded no to every question in this vein. He described his gambling obsession and his debts, said he had recovered now and had a limited work permit, which enabled him to wash dishes in a pizzeria to clear those debts. No one in the court believed Abbas was lying: Anyone willing to lay bare his private circumstances in such a way would be telling the truth.
ADA Schmied also tried everything. But Abbas stuck to his story. He was on the witness stand for almost four hours.
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