Read Online The Deceiver by Frederick Forsyth - Free Book Online Page B

with Frau Popovic, who was being comforted by the bookseller’s elderly wife, and the other went up. He touched nothing, just went down the passage and looked through the half-open door, gave a whistle of amazement, and came back down to use the bookseller’s phone. He did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that this one was for Homicide.
    According to procedure, he first called the emergency doctor—in Germany, always supplied by the fire brigade. Then he called the Police Präsidium and asked for the Leitstelle , the Violent Crime switchboard. He told the operator where he was and what he had found and asked for two more uniformed men. The message went up to the Mordkommission or Murder Squad, always known as “First K” on the tenth and eleventh floors of the ugly, functional, green-concrete building covering all of one side of the Waidmarkt square. The Director of First K assigned a commissar and two assistants. Records showed later that they arrived at the Hahnwald apartment at 10:40 A.M., just as the doctor was leaving.
    He had taken a closer look than the uniformed officer, felt for signs of life, touched nothing else, and left to make his formal report. The commissar, whose name was Peter Schiller, met him on the steps. Schiller knew him.
    “What have we got?” he asked. It was not the doctor’s job to do a post-mortem, simply to establish the fact of death.
    “Two bodies. One male, one female. One clothed, one naked.”
    “Cause of death?” asked Schiller.
    “Gunshot wounds, I’d say. The paramedic will tell you.”
    “Time?”
    “I’m not the pathologist. Oh, one to three days, I would say. Rigor mortis is well established. That’s unofficial, by the way. I’ve done my job. I’m off.”
    Schiller went upstairs with one assistant. The other stayed below to try and get statements from Frau Popovic and the bookseller. Neighbors began to gather up and down the street. There were now three official cars outside the apartment house.
    Like his uniformed colleague, Schiller gave a low whistle when he saw the contents of the master bedroom. Renate Heimendorf and her pimp were still where they had fallen, the head of the near-naked woman lying close to the door, under whose sill the blood had leaked outside. The pimp was across the room, slumped with his back to the TV set, the expression of surprise still on his face. The TV set was off. The bed with the black silk sheets still bore the indentations of two bodies that had once lain there.
    Treading carefully, Schiller flipped open a number of the closets and drawers.
    “A hooker,” he said. “Call girl, whatever. Wonder if they knew downstairs. We’ll ask. In fact, we’ll need all the tenants. Start to get a list of names.”
    The assistant commissar, Wiechert, was about to go when he said, “I’ve seen the man somewhere before. … Hoppe. Bernhard Hoppe. Bank robbery, I think. A hard man.”
    “Oh, good,” said Schiller ironically, “that’s all we need. A gangland killing.”
    There were two telephone extensions in the flat, but Schiller, even with gloved hands, used neither. They might have prints. He went down and borrowed the bookseller’s phone. Before that, he posted two uniformed men at the door of the house, another in the hall, and the fourth outside the apartment door.
    He called his superior, Rainer Hartwig, Director of the Murder Squad, and told him there might be gangland ramifications. Hartwig decided he had better tell his own superior, the president of the Crime Office, the Kriminalamt , known as the KA. If Wiechert was right and the body on the floor was a gangster, then experts from other divisions besides Murder Squad—robbery and racketeering, for example—would have to be consulted.
    In the interim Hartwig sent down the Erkennungsdienst , the forensic team, one photographer and four fingerprint men. The apartment would be theirs and theirs alone for hours to come; until, in fact, every last print and scraping,