‘So you’re convinced it was suicide?’
‘There’s no evidence to suggest it wasn’t. Why was he in the wheelchair?’
‘Some kind of motor neurone disease. Poor bastard.’
‘Then I don’t blame him. If it were me, I’d do the same before I couldn’t do it for myself. And, truth be told, these Exit Bags are not the worst way to go. You don’t want to be interrupted and saved, though. Pull through from an attempt with one of these and your brain’ll be mush.’
The officer from Kroeger’s Cybercrime Unit came in. She had been the one who had alerted Anna and had waited while the forensics had done their work. She was an unlikely-looking police officer, petite with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail and wearing jeans and a waist-length casual jacket. She looked as if she could still have been a student on her way to a lecture. Something about her reminded Fabel of his daughter, Gabi, who had the same auburn hair and who had expressed an interest in following her father into the Polizei Hamburg. Fabel noticed that the young policewoman worked at not looking at the dead man in the wheelchair.
‘You all right?’ he asked her.
‘Yes, Herr Chief Commissar. Sorry.’ She frowned. ‘I wondered if you still wanted us to take the laptop for examination?’
‘Of course,’ said Fabel. He looked again at the screen. Thorsten66, Reisch’s virtual-world persona, still wandered the counterfeit world of Virtual Dimension ’s New Venice. In one corner of the screen, beneath the photograph of the muscle-torsoed youth who Reisch had chosen because it reminded him of a younger, healthy self, were messages from other users, inviting Thorsten66 to parties by the lagoons, or to take part in the New Venice Olympics. It was no accident that Reisch had had this on-screen, in his line of sight, as he died. Maybe he really had believed that through an effort of will he could project himself, at the moment of death, into that ersatz but infinitely preferable reality.
The young cybercrime officer bent to close the laptop and remove it.
‘Leave it,’ said Fabel; then, more gently, ‘Leave it switched on. I’ll bring it out in a minute.’
On his way back to the Presidium, Fabel kept checking his rear-view mirror. But there was no sign of a VW four-by-four following him and he started to wonder if paranoia was infectious. Fabel always found strange the things that got to him about his work. Not always the exposure to violence or horror, or the constant exposure to all that was the worst in people: as he drove towards Alsterdorf and the Presidium, it was the image of a dying Reisch sitting in front of his computer wishing himself into a lie. It was the sadness, the vulnerability, the desperation that Fabel saw in his day-to-day work that troubled him most.
The entire team was again assembled and they went through the usual recap of the caseload as well as any new information on each murder. As had been agreed with van Heiden, Nicola Bruggemann had taken over as lead investigating officer on the Network Killer case.
Bruggemann’s build was what Fabel’s mother would have euphemised as mollig. But there was very little else about the Child Crime Principal Commissar that could be described as cuddly. Bruggemann carried her plumpness on a frame that was at least one metre eighty tall and with shoulders that would have put an American Pro-footballer to shame. Her black hair was cut short at the sides and thick on top, adding to the masculinity of her look. She was, Fabel knew, a no-nonsense Holsteiner whose manner could best be described as abrasive and her wit as acerbic. It was not the same kind of prickliness that Fabel encountered on a regular basis with Anna, more an uncompromising, direct professionalism. If they were all in the business of policing, then Nicola Bruggemann was the no-frills offer. Fabel had a great deal of respect for her as a colleague. As she ran through the progress of the Network Killer case, Fabel appreciated the way she made a point of asking him for authority to allocate resources and people. She was making a point: Fabel was still in charge.
After Bruggemann had finished summing up, Fabel briefly outlined what had occurred at the Reisch residence in Schiffbek. It was, he said again, unlikely that there was any relevance to any of the other enquiries.
Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner looked an unlikely team: Glasmacher was tall, blond and burly, Hechtner was small, dark and slight; Glasmacher was reserved, Hechtner was outgoing. Fabel had recruited and paired them over a year before and he was pleased at the way they had gelled as a partnership. Dirk always did most of the talking and he confirmed that the full report on the body found at the Poppenbutteler Schleuse had come in. Like the other victims, Julia Henning had been raped and strangled, and again there was no stranger DNA or trace to be harvested by the forensics team or the pathologist.
But the autopsy had revealed something different.
‘It would appear that she wasn’t as fresh as we first thought,’ explained Dirk.
‘Meaning?’ Nicola Bruggemann and Fabel asked the same question simultaneously.
‘Meaning that an analysis of the victim’s blood found evidence of cold storage. Not freezing, but that she had been kept at a very low temperature, like in a cold store.’
‘Someone was trying to confuse us about the time of death?’ asked Fabel.
‘It looks like it,’ said Thomas Glasmacher. ‘There’s no way of telling how long she was in the cold store or how long she was kept at room temperature afterwards. So yes, it looks like the killer has tried to confuse us about the time of death. And he’s succeeded.’
‘But why?’ asked Werner. ‘Why now? He’s never done anything like this before.’
‘Unless our guy feels he’s slipped up,’ said Dirk. ‘Or maybe he thinks he was seen. It could be that he’s trying to fudge the time of death so he can’t be pinned down to the scene of crime.’
Fabel thought about what Hechtner had said. ‘Possible, but it doesn’t gel with what we know about his modus. I don’t know, Dirk — it’s an odd change of pattern, that’s for sure.’
They left it for the moment and Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner went on to provide a report on the victim. It revealed nothing other than Julia Henning had been a pretty, bright but reserved and unattached young lawyer who had worked for a commercial law office in Hamburg, dealing mainly with copyright disputes. Thomas and Dirk had spoken to Julia’s parents, colleagues and friends, of whom there were comparatively few. Despite being attractive, Julia had had few boyfriends and had not been seeing anyone at the time of her disappearance. She had lived alone in the apartment at the address Fabel had been given by the woman at the docks and had not been seen since she’d left work on the Friday afternoon. She could have been killed at any time over the weekend.
One thing did stand out, however. When her apartment had been searched, everything had been in order. It was only as they were leaving that Dirk had suddenly realised that something was missing. Something that became instantly conspicuous by its absence. A computer. And all the Network Killer’s victims had connected with him on social networking sites.
‘So we thought, if she didn’t have a computer, maybe she had a web-enabled cell phone.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Fabel. ‘No cellphone, either.’
‘Julia Henning must have been the only twenty-seven-year-old in Hamburg without a computer or cellphone. So we pulled out of the apartment and sent in a forensics team. It’s pretty obvious that someone has been in there and taken her stuff, possibly our killer.’