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

Rudolf, isn’t here yet, and as far as I know, he hasn’t been informed. I say this only so that you’ll be prepared.”
    “Thank you,” Pia said. This was completely different from doing crime-scene work at some anonymous place. Here, they were in the presence of family members who were in shock. She was glad that a crisis intervention team had arrived, along with a psychologist and a pastor.
    “Hello,” she said as she entered the kitchen.
    “Hello, Ms. Kirchhoff,” Frederick Lemmer said, looking up and nodding to her. “She’s been dead for about an hour,” said the ME. “A single shot that struck the right side of her head. She must have been turning her head left at that instant. The bullet exited at about the same height and went through a cupboard door. In my opinion, the same caliber as the one yesterday.”
    The woman lay on her back. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped apron over a brown sweater and a thin knitted cardigan. Her facial features were almost beyond recognition, so destructive had been the effect of the bullet. There was blood and brain matter all over the cupboards and all the way up to the ceiling. Pia had learned in her day-to-day experience as a homicide investigator, as well as in numerous police courses and seminars, to keep her head functioning in situations like this and to close her heart, but the sight of the bag of flour in the victim’s left hand made her swallow hard. Her eyes took in the rest of the room. On the counter below the window stood sugar and butter, eggs, crumbled chocolate, and shredded coconut, along with a bowl, a mixer, and metal cookie cutters—Christmas trees, animals, stars.
    “She was just getting ready to bake Christmas cookies,” Pia said in a hoarse voice. Rage flared up inside her. How ice-cold would a person have to be to do something like this so close to Christmas and in the presence of a child?
    Somewhere in the house, a phone rang, but no one picked it up.
    “Are you guys finished?” Pia asked her colleagues from the evidence team.
    “We’re done with the body,” said one of the officers.
    “You, too, Dr. Lemmer?”
    “Yes.” The ME closed his bag and stood up.
    “Then I’d like the body to be transported immediately,” Pia ordered. “And get a crime-scene cleaner in here right away. Things are already bad enough for the family.”
    “Will do,” one of the officers said with a nod. “I’ll tell the morgue guy outside.”
    Pia stayed behind in the kitchen alone. She examined the shattered pane in one of the rectangular wooden lattices of the window, through which the cold wind was blowing. Death had occurred in a fraction of a second, and Margarethe Rudolf had felt nothing—no fear of death, no pain. From one moment to the next, her life was over. But her granddaughter had witnessed the whole thing.
    Pia glanced at the clock. Eight thirty. Where was Bodenstein?
    She had to talk to the girl and her mother, although she would have preferred to be spared the task. But there was no sense in putting it off any longer.
    Pia heard loud voices outside. She went into the hall and saw a slim, white-haired man in a dark coat who was trying in vain to get past two officers. “Let me through at once! This is my house!” the man cried in outrage. “What’s going on here?”
    Pia went over to him, and the two officers stepped aside.
    “Dr. Rudolf?”
    “Yes. And who are you? What happened? Where’s my wife?”
    The men from the morgue carried in the zinc coffin to remove the body and then paused respectfully.
    “I’m Chief Detective Inspector Pia Kirchhoff,” Pia said. “Could we please speak privately—?”
    “First I want to know what’s going on here,” the professor interrupted her. Fear flickered in his eyes behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. “My daughter’s car is outside. Where is she?”
    In the doorway of the living room, a woman with blond hair appeared. Pia judged her to be in her early to midforties.