I Am Your Judge: A Novel by Nele Neuhaus Read Free Book Online Page B

underground garage, to drive back to Oberursel. Baking cookies with Grandma—that was something Greta still loved doing at thirteen.
    “Do you really want to stop working?” she asked her mother as Karoline maneuvered the black Porsche out of the parking spot.
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” Karoline gave her daughter a sidelong glance and saw the doubt in her eyes.
    The girl sighed.
    “I like it at the boarding school, but it would be much nicer if I could live with you and Papa—during the week, too. But…”
    “But what?” Karoline stuck the ticket in the reader, and the gate rose up.
    “Papa said that the world would have to end before you would ever stop working,” replied Greta.
    *   *   *
    Bodenstein and Pia were feeling rather frustrated when they arrived back at the station in Hofheim. A photo of Ingeborg Rohleder hung on the bulletin board in the conference room, and next to it, Ostermann had written her name and the time of the murder. That was all they had. The canvassing of the neighborhood, which some of their colleagues had done, had turned up nothing. The statements of witnesses had been helpful only in pinning down the exact time of the fatal gunshot. No one had seen the shooter. Evidence techs had searched the crime scene meticulously within a radius of 250 meters, but except for the faint impression of the bipod, they had found nothing: no fibers, no shoeprints on the frozen ground, no cartridge casing, no skin scrapings, and no hair. The perp remained a phantom, and his motive a riddle.
    “How should we proceed now?” asked Ostermann with a rasping cough.
    “Hmm.” Bodenstein studied the map on the wall and rubbed the back of his neck in thought. Where did the perp escape to? Was he audacious enough to get away by crossing the playground and the Rhine highway and walking right past the Eschborn police station? Or did he take the Lahnstrasse, then the footpath to the viewpoint, and get into a car there? Those were undoubtedly the two fastest escape routes, but there were other options as well. Walking to the parking lot near the swimming pool, for instance, or going farther, past the tennis courts to the fairground, which was used for parking by the employees in many of the surrounding businesses. In any of these places, he could have unobtrusively gotten into a car and disappeared down the road.
    “We should inform the public and ask for help,” Pia said, and Ostermann nodded in agreement. “We’re probably not going to find any more facts relevant to the crime than what we already have.”
    Inwardly, Bodenstein argued against it, because he was afraid of the immense amount of time it would take to handle the usual phone calls from idiots and all the phony leads that would have to be checked out. He really couldn’t afford wasting any time, given the extreme shortage of investigators at his disposal, but there seemed to be no alternative. Pia was right—at the moment, they weren’t expecting to turn up any more facts. Still, there was a slim chance that someone may have seen something that had seemed unimportant at first.
    “Okay,” Bodenstein said at last. “We’ll go to the press. And hope for the best.”
    *   *   *
    The spot was ideal. The fir branches hung low over the flat roof covered with moss, and the road was a dead end. By six in the evening, it was pitch dark. On the right side of the road were only meadows, and her house was the last one, right at the edge of the little wood located between the outskirts of the village and the old state road to Königstein. She had turned on the light in the kitchen ten minutes before and then gone upstairs. The old house had huge, old-fashioned lattice windows and no roll-down shutters, only wooden folding shutters, which seemed to be only for decoration; they probably hadn’t been closed in years. From his perspective, the house looked a lot like a dollhouse. He could see into every window and follow exactly what