Time Heals No Wounds (A Baltic Sea Crime Novel) Page 3

  “Your first case.” That sounded both appealing and disconcerting! With no clues, Hannes felt helpless. He looked at the barely visible path that led to the cliffs along the harbor. There was no trace of Fritz. Hannes called him, but his phone was still off.

  The restless night was now behind Merle. The eye of the storm seemed to hover just above her. For hours, she had listened in the dark to the whirling and howling and thunder. Merle had been afraid of thunderstorms her entire life, but that night, she would have given anything to be handed over to the forces of nature. Sometime in the morning, it had all subsided, and Merle had fallen into a dreamless sleep that lasted for hours.

  When she woke up, there was silence. Her right hand automatically reached for the bedside lamp. Then reality set in and drove the last sticky threads of sleep away. Wide-awake and panicked, she felt the adrenaline pulsing through her body and sat upright. She should not fall asleep! What if someone snuck in and found her completely defenseless? Her breath grew uneasy at the thought; she listened to the darkness. Then she reached out and was met with no resistance. A sob rose in her throat, and she did all she could to swallow the surge of despair.

  After all, she found herself on the same comfortable mattress she had seen in the soft glow of her watch when she’d first opened her eyes in this room two days ago. She had been surrounded by total darkness and had sensed a soft surface on which someone must have laid her. She had noted the stale taste in her parched mouth and felt relief when she ran her hands over two granola bars and a bottle of water. She had unscrewed the lid and quickly quenched her thirst.

  She had only gradually shed the feeling of being trapped in a dream. Where was she? In a hospital? Had there been an accident? She had shouted these questions into the darkness, but the silence that had followed seemed only more profound. Distraught, she had curled herself into a ball, her mind filled by a viscous fog.

  After an hour, she had been able to regain some of her determination and carefully scanned the room. Whenever she had bumped into something, she had cried out in fear. An object had rattled as she knocked it over. She had cautiously felt the object with her fingers, her time spent in the darkness as a teenager aiding her in the process. “A metal bucket!” she had whispered in surprise as she then felt the matching lid.

  She measured the room to be exactly sixteen small steps wide by twenty steps long. Apart from the bed and the bucket, she had found no other items. A spot on the wall had caught her attention. Her fingertips had sensed a slight unevenness—so slight, however, that Merle had almost ignored it. She had run her fingers up and down the narrow gap until she had been sure that she had found a door. The door to freedom, to light! But she had been unable to find a handle. Someone must have brought her here and locked her up! But who? And how? And above all, why?

  Again her fingers had run up and down the barely noticeable gap in the wall. It felt different: the wall was cool and smooth, not rough. “It’s the way out, it’s the way out,” she whispered over and over. But no matter how much she had scratched at the gap and no matter how much she had thrown herself against the possible door, her attempts were unsuccessful.

  The purpose of the bucket had become apparent when, two hours later, she’d had to go to the bathroom. Merle’s thoughts had then turned to the unknown person who had locked her up. She’d racked her brain in search of a clue, but her memory always faded after recalling the old tree she had been sitting against as she watched the sea.

  Merle moved along the bed until she came to a wall. She cautiously stood up and took several small steps from her sleeping spot. She was careful to keep one hand on the wall so she did not lose her bearings. She hated the darkness; her mind and body yearned for light. She felt defenseless and shuddered at the thought of everything that could be hiding in the dark. She needed to go to the bathroom. She moved to the corner of the room farthest from her bed where she had carefully placed the bucket and tightly closed the lid.

  “No one can see me!” she said as she pulled down her tight jeans and squatted over the pail. Then she froze. But what if? What if she had fallen into the hands of some perverted kidnapper who had installed a camera that could record her in total darkness? She forced the rising panic back down. Just as she was about to stand up, she heard a noise for the first time since the raging storm.

  Footsteps were slowly coming closer! Merle raced back to the bed, almost knocking over the bucket. She hit her shin against the wooden edge of the bed and crouched in a ball on the soft mattress. She pulled her legs close to her body and trembled. Cold sweat ran into her eyes as the noise of footsteps suddenly ceased at the exact spot where Merle had sensed the narrow gap in the wall many hours before.

  MONDAY EVENING

  Hannes leaned back in his seat and pressed his head against the window. The Ferris wheel slowly began to turn, lifting him with a swing into the darkening evening. The colorful sea of lights from the annual carnival glittered below. It was a sharp contrast to the solitude of the beach he had visited with Fritz that afternoon.

  Earlier, he had participated in a singles event and had tried hard to make the best of a bizarre game in which six males and six females were unleashed upon one another. He had ended up sharing his entire life story with five of the women and had been met with both approval and rejection. He’d been completely bored and walked off unnoticed, disappearing into the carnival crowd. The smell of roasted almonds, sticky cotton candy, sweat, and vomit wafted in the air.

  Hannes had left the fairgrounds and crossed the street to a gas station, where he bought a six-pack of his favorite beer and stuffed it in his backpack. He had already started heading toward the waterfront when, leaning against a tree, he had seen the blinking Ferris wheel. Floating just above everything else, it was exactly what he needed. He now sat in his seat, enjoying the distant mix of voices and carnival music, glad to have escaped the pushing and shoving of the fairgrounds below.

  His thoughts wandered back to the failed Singles Night. Those stupid questions! How do you answer a question like “So, who are you?” or “What do you do?” Who was he? He had been searching for the answer to that question for so long, and if he found it, he most certainly did not want to share it with the first stranger to come along.

  His gaze drifted to his reflection in the window of the gondola. Who am I? Name: Johannes Niehaus, known to all as Hannes. Age: thirty-two. Height: six foot two. Place of birth: some small town in the middle of nowhere. My dark-blond hair is never the way I want it, and due to a pigment disorder, I have one green eye and one blue eye. My ears stick out and have a tendency to blush when I’m embarrassed. I’m an athlete and a police officer, and I live in a small one-bedroom apartment. Pretty basic profile, he thought. But it was also a complicated question—the million-dollar question, so to speak. Who are any of us?

  A jerk and a terrified scream yanked him from his thoughts. The lights in the gondola flickered, and a brief look below revealed a pyrotechnic spectacle of flashing and dying lights. For a moment, the lights all shone without interruption, and a collective sigh of relief drifted up to him from the crowd. Then the power went out for good, and the fairgrounds and much of the city sank into darkness. His gondola remained stuck at the top at the highest possible position.

  He looked around the gondola for the first time. There were six seats, three on each side, five of which were occupied. Opposite him, a frightened young couple clung to each other. The guy in the seat farthest from him said, “Well, this fucking sucks!” and looked at the pitch-black fairgrounds below.

  The woman to Hannes’s right looked at the man in annoyance. “It’s just a power failure,” she said.

  “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, but a power outage on a Ferris wheel definitely sucks. Right?” the man said.

  “You got that right,” the other man said. “Hopefully, they have an emergency generator or something. But power outages usually only last a few minutes.”

  “Don’t jinx us,
” the woman said.

  “I was stuck for four hours on a train last year because of a power outage. In the dead of summer too!” the first man said.

  And while the story was eagerly shared down to every last detail, an uninterested Hannes let his thoughts wander.

  “Your first case,” Maria had said, and he was still uncertain whether he should be delighted or terrified. Up until now, he had led a rather innocuous life and had really only confronted crime on TV or in the paper. He had at first been euphoric when he arrived last night at the police station and was sent down to the beach.

  Once there, his euphoria had promptly subsided and was seamlessly replaced by violent nausea as he stood in the middle of a raging storm, looking at the corpse of a woman in a tattered business suit. She seemed to have been tossed around for a while by the wind and water before being deposited there. Her body, with its wounds and twisted joints, looked gruesome. Before Hannes was able to take a few steps back, he threw up in the seething water next to the body.

  “You still at it?” one of the forensics men yelled. “If you’re so squeamish, then keep your distance and don’t barf all over the crime scene!”

  His ears glowing, Hannes muttered an apology and walked away. Was this a scene he would have to get used to from now on? He couldn’t have had a worse start to his new career: half the station soon knew he had puked all over his first corpse. He rinsed his mouth out with salt water. In the distance, he could see two very old men being interviewed by a colleague. Another officer came up and provided Hannes with some background.

  “The one on the right stumbled upon the woman while he was out collecting amber; he’s supposedly an artist who lives in the area. The one on the left is a farmer who had been harvesting his field nearby and was dragged here by the artist. Both seem pretty flustered. How about you? Has your stomach calmed down?”

  “I feel so embarrassed,” Hannes said.

  “Nonsense! How do you think we reacted when we saw our first bodies? Some of these guys here had the exact same reflex as you—myself included. Next time, it’ll be easier. At the very least, you probably won’t heave on the body.”

  His frank words helped put Hannes at ease. Nevertheless, he continued to keep a low profile until the body was removed and was glad when he was finally able to go home. At first, he assumed he was only sent to the crime scene in order to observe, but Lauer told him later that morning that the dead woman’s case had actually been assigned to him and Fritz.

  “An unidentified victim and no leads—Fritz is the perfect man for the job. And I couldn’t think of a more fitting challenge for you to dip your toes into.”

  Hannes had spent the morning at forensics and tried several times to get in touch with Fritz. Thankfully, he had followed Lauer’s instructions and intercepted him at the port.

  Someone asked, “What are you doing up here?” and suddenly Hannes was back in the gondola. Everyone was staring at him.

  “Sorry, my mind wandered,” he said.

  “We hardly noticed,” joked the young woman next to him. She had long blonde hair and a pretty face, and came quite close to his idea of an angel. She wore a number of silver bangles on her left arm, and her tall, slender figure left nothing to be desired.

  The girl opposite him, however, seemed to have a somewhat sunnier disposition. “Let me summarize the last ten minutes for you,” she said, smiling to reveal a small gap between her front teeth. She pointed to the young woman. “That’s Elke. She just arrived in our beautiful city and wanted to get an overview of the urban jungle from up here. She has plenty of time for that now.” The woman giggled. “Our comedian’s name is Ben. He’s originally from Berlin and is a student at the university, right?”

  Ben nodded, and one of his blond dreadlocks fell into his light-blue eyes. He was wearing a faded green T-shirt with neon-yellow letters that read “Fuck the system before it fucks you!” His face was covered in blond stubble, and he had an elongated silver rod in his eyebrow.

  Placing her arms around her boyfriend’s shoulders, the woman continued, “This is Kalle. He was born here, and that’s why he doesn’t really appreciate this awesome view anymore. And I’m Ines. I just returned from a year abroad in Africa. We wanted to celebrate our reunion by going to the carnival.”

  “Celebrate!” said Kalle, wheezing.

  “Kalle’s afraid of heights. I convinced him to go on the Ferris wheel, and of course this happens.”

  It had grown so dark that he could barely see the others in the gondola, though the outlines of the booths and the rides were somewhat visible. A few spots were illuminated by the rotating blue lights of the various emergency vehicles.

  “I’m Hannes,” he said in an attempt to catch up. “I’ve lived here for six years. But this is the first time I’ve been stuck one hundred and sixty-five feet in the air.”

  “There are some pluses,” Ben said. “I’ve managed to get away from my girlfriend. She was making my evening a living hell. As far as I’m concerned, we can chill here for a while. Apparently, the cell network is overloaded and has also gone out, so for once, I’ll get some peace.”

  Elke cleared her throat. “Some boyfriend you are! Do you realize your girlfriend is probably worried sick?”

  Ben shrugged and made the gondola shake. “Whatever. We’re through. I would have told her that after coming here.”

  “As if that makes it any better!”

  “I’ve also done some ditching of my own tonight,” Hannes said, and he immediately felt as though Elke was making him her next target. “I was on one of those organized singles outings. Twelve lonely hearts in search of love. I escaped at the first opportunity.”

  “What made you go on that?” asked Ben. “You must be pretty desperate!”

  “I had no choice. It was a birthday present from my sister, and I had to promise her I’d actually participate. Which I did . . . for twenty-two minutes.”

  Ines laughed while Kalle continued to be preoccupied by his fear of heights. “Was it so bad that you actually counted the minutes?”

  “Overall, yes. I never thought I’d participate in singles events. I felt like some reject who had to pander to potential customers.”

  “Singles events? Plural? So that was not your first time?” Ben asked. “Who sent you on the other dates?”

  Shit, he had said too much. As a part-time police officer who would be investigating murders, he would have to choose his words more wisely.

  “No one. But since people have told me all sorts of amazing success stories, I thought it couldn’t hurt. However, my sister didn’t know I’d given up on this type of dating. Well, now I’m definitely not doing it anymore!”

  “Wait a minute,” Ben said. “The spirit is willing, but . . . You know the rest.”

  The guy was starting to pick on Hannes, but Elke saved him. “You, of course, have no need for that, right, Romeo?” she asked Ben.

  “If you knew,” he said and grinned. “I have a wealth of experience. My latest speed dating achievement is now somewhere down there wandering in the dark. So I’m the living counterexample to all the success stories.”

  “You can’t just go making generalizations,” Elke said.

  Ben shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. It’s hard to say. But whatever. Better alone than to give up and settle no matter what the cost.”

  Ines butted in. “Don’t limit yourselves. It worked for Kalle and me—we met each other on the Internet. So there’s also a success story sitting in this gondola.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Ben. “Obviously, it’s hard to say. Eighty percent of this gondola has had some sort of experience with dating services. Or . . .” Grinning, he turned to Elke. “Should we make that an even hundred?”

  “No! And just so you know: I’m not into boys, especially ones like you. So don’t even try it.”

  “Take it easy. I have nothing against you. And as for your orientation, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I’ve tried onli
ne dating services several times,” said Hannes, turning to Ines and Kalle, “but it was too overwhelming. I always mixed up the women I met. I once asked the wrong woman how her grandmother’s funeral went. I almost fell to the floor! Then I created an Excel spreadsheet with the most important facts about each of them. Before every date, I’d go over their information just to make sure I didn’t commit another faux pas.”

  The laughter shook the gondola.

  “How romantic!” said Ben, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “But not a bad idea. I’m going to remember that!”

  “That’s good, because no one in this gondola’s going home with you,” Elke said.

  “Don’t be so sure. Maybe I’m so fed up with women that I want to try something else.” Ben stared deeply into Hannes’s eyes and raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you ever take anything seriously?” Elke asked.

  “Sure, I’m just a little on edge because I finally decided to break up with my girlfriend. These last few weeks have been an utter nightmare, and I keep putting it off.”

  “On that note”—Hannes patted his backpack—“let’s toast! I have a six-pack in here. We may be high, but we don’t have to be dry.”

  This news seemed to bring even Kalle back to life. “I can throw in a bag of licorice and a few roasted almonds.”

  “A campfire in the middle, and this would be a perfect evening,” said Ben.

  Hannes opened five beers with a lighter and passed them around. They all clinked their bottles together.

  Ines snuggled with Kalle. “That hits the spot. By the way, we’ve been taking this all pretty well! Better than being stuck hanging in a roller coaster . . .”

  “How long have we actually been sitting in the dark now?” asked Hannes.

  “About half an hour,” Elke said and sipped her beer.

  Hannes was beginning to feel comfortable, and the conversation was starting to get lively. Ines shared a few anecdotes about her year in Africa, where she had been an aid worker. Hannes told them about his rather unexciting life as an athlete and police officer.