Zons Crime: Fatal Puzzle Part 8

Thanks to the help of the smugglers, Dietrich had easily managed to enter and leave the city undiscovered. In the end he did have to sacrifice his family's amulet, but it had been well worth it. He could always ambush the smuggler and take it back, but he didn't have time for that now. Right now was the time to care for sweet Marie.

He had waited for her in the morning before sunrise and observed her while she walked to the well to get water. On her way back, the two heavy buckets full of water on her shoulders, she had been an easy prey. He had swiftly dragged her to a yard nearby and gradually poured a solid half-gallon of wine down her throat while pinching her nostrils shut. As with the other two girls, this proved to be a miraculous method. Marie had quickly become quiet and obedient. Then he stowed her away in a cart under some potato bags and sneaked her past the guard posts without a problem. His buddy the smuggler distracted the guard, who had no clue that Dietrich was transporting human freight out of the city.

While the girl was sleeping, Dietrich easily chained her up in his secret dungeon. It was located in the vaults deep under the Zollturm and had not been in use for several years. It could only be accessed from outside the city walls. The direct entrance from inside the city fortification had been walled up many years ago, when the city had decided to use the newly built Juddeturm as a prison instead. Since then, the dungeon under the Zollturm had gradually been forgotten. Dietrich had all the time in the world. n.o.body would disturb him while he prepared Marie for his nocturnal ritual. Full moon was tonight!

He trembled with arousal and ecstasy as he ran his fingers over Marie's face and neck. She was still asleep. He let his hands rest on her soft, round b.r.e.a.s.t.s and felt himself grow hard. It took great self-restraint not to thrust himself between her thighs and take her virginity. He grinned at the thought that he would be the first and last man to enjoy this tender flower. Too bad for Bastian Muhlenberg-this sweet little beauty was his! It was G.o.d's will.

But not yet . . . not yet. He had to shave her hair first, and carve his code into her scalp. Only then would he penetrate her and hear her screams. Eventually, he would choke her very slowly and watch her life vanish just as he attained his o.r.g.a.s.m. His lecherous thoughts made his hands shake in antic.i.p.ation. He had to leave quickly and finish the preparations. He would shave her just before midnight, but until then he must remain unseen and find a way to climb the Zollturm. It wouldn't be easy to climb its outside walls. He had done it once, the night Bastian Muhlenberg had surprised him. He wondered whether Muhlenberg now expected him to come climbing up the walls from the outside again, but he dismissed the idea.

Dietrich headed to the farmhouse that had served as his hiding place over the past weeks and sorted through the ropes and pitons for his nighttime ascent. In order to reach the top of the tower in complete darkness, each step had to be planned in painstaking detail. Only the full moon would illuminate his endeavors. Over the past weeks, he had managed to install ten pitons into the walls of the tower. They would help him attach his rope quite easily. Once on the top, he would surprise the guards and knock them out with his special whip. He hoped there wouldn't be more than two soldiers, otherwise he'd have a problem. Once the guards were taken care of, he would drag the unconscious girl to the top via an extralong rope and a winch. Marie, his third victim, represented the brightest star in the Raven, the star closest to its constellation neighbor, Virgo. That's why her physical presence was of the utmost importance for his ritual. Previously, a bowl of blood from his other two victims had been sufficient-and far easier to accomplish, of course. This night would be both Dietrich's most difficult ordeal and his most important achievement.

XXI.

Present

Emily was nervous. Detective Oliver Bergmann wanted to meet her at the Schloss-Cafe, allegedly to learn more about her research on the historic killer and his fatal puzzle. She thought she had already given him everything she had about the cases. The only thing she herself was still waiting on were the blowups of the last pages in Bastian Muhlenberg's notebook. She needed those prints in order to solve the riddle, and right now she had no additional information for the police. Oliver Bergmann had nevertheless insisted on a meeting, leaving Emily slightly confused, anxious, and flattered at the same time.

She recognized him immediately upon entering the cozy cafe. He sat bent over one of the tables, deeply immersed in the newspaper. Emily liked the little wrinkles that formed on his forehead while he was concentrating. They added a manly edge to his otherwise quite youthful-looking face. As she approached his table, he lifted his head and a bright smile washed over him. Emily felt magically drawn by his approving gaze and answered with a shy grin.

"I'm reading your latest article in the Rheinische Post. Great job!" he said and motioned for Emily to take a seat next to him.

"Thank you. It's basically the same article I gave you. The copy editor made some stylistic changes, but that's all."

"When are you expecting the blowups?"

"Any day now, I hope. I desperately need the last pages from Muhlenberg's notebook for my third part. I've really tried hard to solve the puzzle by myself, but no luck so far."

Oliver's cell phone rang. "Bergmann speaking."

It was the lab. They had finally completed the a.n.a.lysis of the filaments from the body in the forest and the ones from the two dead women in Zons. They were indeed identical. Adrenaline pumped through Oliver's veins. At last they were on to something!

A few days ago, the police had finally located the getaway car from the Body in the Woods case. Although several persons had clearly described it as a Ford Mondeo, investigations had been slow and tedious. Now the car had been found on an abandoned lot in an industrial zone not far from Zons.

Apparently there had been a short circuit in the distributor, and the car had failed the unknown driver. Oliver and Klaus had canva.s.sed every cab company in the broader area, hoping one of the drivers would remember having picked up someone from that spot. This morning they had been lucky: a cabbie from the nearby city of Dormagen had indeed taken a young man from the industrial zone to the Central Station in Dormagen. What was particularly exciting was that the car was registered under the name of Martin Heuer.

The same Martin Heuer who had borrowed doc.u.ments about the fatal puzzle from the county archive-and who had, by all accounts, disappeared off the face of the earth. Now he had resurfaced, or at least his car had.

While Oliver sat in the cafe with Emily, Klaus was at the precinct questioning the cab driver for details that might help them identify the cabbie's pa.s.senger. Initial clues suggested it could, in fact, have been Martin Heuer. His age, height, hair, and eye color matched perfectly. Still, they could only be certain once the cab driver had positively identified Martin Heuer in a photograph.

"What happened?" Emily asked. She had noticed Oliver's face turning red during the phone call.

"We're looking for a suspect and we just made an important discovery."

"I a.s.sume it's about the old guy from the county archive or someone who borrowed the doc.u.ments?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, that old guy is pretty creepy," Emily said, remembering his lascivious stares. "Although it would almost be too obvious. That only leaves someone else with knowledge about the historic cases. The media is already suspecting a copycat killer, someone with access to the archive doc.u.ments. I bet you've already thoroughly vetted the people who borrowed the material."

"You bet," Oliver answered and locked his eyes with Emily's. "Your name was on the list, too."

"Why, of course!" Emily laughed out loud and went on. "And you have my alibi. My name and Anna Winterfeld's name, right? Wait, no, it must have been Martin Heuer. Anna was on a business trip and Martin Heuer did me a favor and went there to pick up some doc.u.ments for me."

Oliver swallowed hard when Emily mentioned Martin Heuer's name.

"How do you know Martin Heuer?"

XXII.

Five Hundred Years Ago

After dark, Dietrich h.e.l.lenbroich left his hiding place at the farmhouse. He was breathing heavily under the load he carried, his left leg dragging behind as usual. In his condition it wasn't easy to transport the many ropes and pitons without losing time or emitting loud groans. His left hand ached. He had hurt himself earlier, while gathering the remaining sharp pitons. The cut was deep and bleeding strongly. He had bandaged the wound, but blood still seeped through the cloth and dripped to the ground in a thin trail, though he hadn't noticed that.

The moon was bright. Despite the gelid February night, Dietrich was sweating under the weight on his shoulders. If he wanted to be done by midnight, he had to hurry up. A rope fell off his shoulder and the pitons rattled to the ground. He ducked down quickly. d.a.m.n it! He had to be more careful or he would jeopardize everything. He let a few seconds pa.s.s.

Silence. Slowly he gathered the pitons and tucked them tightly to his jerkin. He had two hours left to attach them to the tower wall and carve his symbols in sweet Marie's scalp. He could hardly wait to shave her beautiful long hair and cut 1 8 Z in her skin. It was a divine miracle that all those beautiful young maidens were there to complete his puzzle.

This time, the pack of wolves came from behind, and quietly. They had followed the trail of his blood and remembered the scent of the human who, roughly a month ago, had killed one of them. Besides, they were ravenous. They split up and formed a half-circle around Dietrich-one wolf to the right, one to the left, and two directly behind the man. Then the leader of the pack jumped and threw Dietrich to the ground. At the same moment, another wolf leaped past Dietrich and attacked him from the front.

On his knees, Dietrich grabbed his knife. But before he could even raise it to sink it into one of the animals, he got tangled up in the ropes, and the leaping wolf aimed for his throat. Nightmarish pain swept through Dietrich's body when the wolf bit a chunk from his neck, severing his carotid artery. His senses faded away before he could even fathom what was happening. Dietrich h.e.l.lenbroich's soul vanished from this world without ceremony. The wolves dragged the torn pieces of his body deep into the woods, where they ate their fill. The next day, nothing was left of Dietrich h.e.l.lenbroich but a few dispersed bones.

XXIII.

Present

On his way back to the precinct, Oliver got a call from Klaus: Dietrich h.e.l.lenbruch, the archivist, had been taken into custody. That morning, Klaus had sent two officers to the county archive to make sure the case-related doc.u.ments were complete. When the officers began searching through old cardboard boxes, the creepy archivist totally snapped and a.s.saulted one of the officers.

They had desecrated his favorite painting with their dirty hands. He should have handed it over to a museum years ago. He knew that it was an antique and a unique piece, an original oil painting from the fifteenth century depicting a young couple from Zons. To be precise, it showed Bastian Muhlenberg with his fiancee, Marie Dunnbier.

Dietrich h.e.l.lenbruch was obsessed with this portrait. The lovers' dramatic story had always touched his heart. It was one of the reasons he had become such an expert in all things related to the historic Zons murder cases.

He would do anything to keep tending this small portrait. He had taken extraspecial care of it by wrapping it in an airtight container and keeping it in the dark to preserve it forever. And now this oaf of a police officer ripped open the archival packaging as if he were dealing with some ordinary book. Dietrich couldn't restrain himself. Furiously, he tried to wrest the portrait out of the officer's hand.

Which was why he was now sitting here in the interrogation room, facing the same two detectives who only recently had gladly listened as he'd revealed the story of the medieval killer and his fatal puzzle. Now they squinted at him as if he had committed a crime. Dietrich let out a deep breath. It didn't make any sense to him. He had helped them, had provided them with a list of names, and in exchange they wanted to steal his most precious possession.

The list of names . . . Deep down inside him, a doubt slowly took shape. Had he really given them all the names? What about the young man who had come by all those months ago, who had been so respectful and eager to learn from him? Had he forgotten to file that man's name because he had been so excited to finally get so much attention?

"Herr h.e.l.lenbruch, would you please explain to us why you attacked our colleague?" the younger of the two detectives asked. Dietrich let his head hang down. He was too confused and hurt right now. He wouldn't say a single word. They had stolen his painting!

It didn't take long for Oliver to realize that they were trying in vain to get information from the old archivist. Their suspect slumped with his head hanging down, entirely tuned out. It almost seemed as if he had fallen into a deep trance. Oliver shook his head. What was that weird old fellow hiding? Was he responsible for the killings after all?

Klaus tried over and over again to make him talk. But after an hour, they had Dietrich h.e.l.lenbruch taken back to his cell. They'd have to find another way to uncover the truth.

The prints had finally arrived! Feeling triumphant, Emily held the large brown envelope in her hands. As fast as she could, she ran up the stairs to her small studio apartment and, out of breath, she locked the door behind her. She closed her eyes. Suddenly she thought about Oliver Bergmann and their meeting last week in the cozy cafe around the corner. Her fingers dialed his number almost automatically.

"Hi, this is Emily Richter. I've just received the blowups of the pages from Bastian Muhlenberg's notebook. Would you like to look at them with me?"

Three hours later, Oliver and Emily were sitting again in the cozy Schloss-Cafe. Oliver knew he shouldn't have knocked off so early. Investigations were still in full swing. After Emily and Oliver had last met, police had expanded their search and were looking not only for Martin Heuer but also for his new partner, Christopher Wormann.

Their colleagues in Berlin were also now operating on the highest alert level. In the past three weeks, Christopher Wormann had been seen several times by reliable witnesses in Berlin, which seemed to largely exclude him from the circle of suspects.

Yet Oliver had two crucial arguments for why he didn't want to abandon Christopher Wormann as a suspect just yet. First there was the distance: while he had initially thought Berlin was too far away, there were, after all, fewer than four hundred miles between the capital and Neuss. By car or train, that ground could be covered in half a day, and by plane in not even an hour. And second, there was Anna Winterfeld, who claimed she had seen Christopher Wormann several weeks ago in Zons. She had been sitting with Emily in a cafe and was sure she'd recognized him as he walked past outside. Emily still believed this to be a flight of fancy, but Oliver wasn't ready to dismiss Anna Winterfeld's statement just yet.

He was so deeply lost in his thoughts that he only heard half of Emily's last sentence. He nodded instinctively and followed the movement of her hands, pointing at the table in front of them. She had drawn the city map of Zons and the constellation of the Raven on tracing paper and was now layering one over the other. And then she turned the star map 180 degrees around.

A seasoned expert in deciphering old German handwriting, Emily's cheeks colored with pride and excitement as she read aloud what Bastian Muhlenberg had written in his notebook five hundred years ago. Oliver listened carefully and grabbed a pen. He turned the two maps back to their starting positions and began annotating the corners of the city wall with the letters K, M, Z, and S respectively. Next to the segments he wrote the numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9, according to their lengths. Then he turned the map again by 180 degrees. What he saw left him amazed and astonished.

XXIV.

Five Hundred Years Ago

Bastian shook his head in wonder. He had discovered the truth, the missing piece of the puzzle. Everything made sense now that he had written down the first letters of the names of the four towers.

1 6 K.

Those were the symbols in Elisabeth Kreuzer's scalp. The 6 stood for the shortest segment of the city wall and the K stood for Krotschenturm, not for her last name. Why hadn't he seen this connection right away?

Same with the next column: 1 7 M. Here, the M did not represent Gertrud's last name, Minkenberg, but the Muhlenturm that was located at one end of the third-longest segment of the wall, just like the Z in 1 8 Z stood for the Zollturm and the house directly adjacent to it, at the second-longest segment: Marie's house!

Bastian had protected all the girls with a last name starting with Z while the killer couldn't have cared less what their names were. He was only interested in where they lived. d.a.m.n it! Why, oh why, had he not figured this out earlier? He could have saved Marie!

Desperate, Bastian stood and hurried out the door. Without a clear thought in his mind, he ran through the chill February night until he stopped, out of breath, in front of the Zollturm. He greeted the guards, walked through the city gate to the other side of the wall, and looked long and hard, up along the tower and into the sky.

Bastian raised his fists to the bright, round moon, its waning barely discernible at this point. "b.l.o.o.d.y Dietrich h.e.l.lenbroich! What have you done to her?"

Suddenly, he saw something black standing out against the wall of the tower. Depending on how he moved his head, it was there and then it wasn't. He walked closer to the wall and saw that climbing pitons had been rammed into the mortar joints of the construction.

"Good Lord! That's why he could surprise me that night on the Zollturm. He climbed up the outer wall!"

Bastian grabbed one of the pitons and with some effort pulled it from the joint. He held it against the light. This piton was made of iron. How could a simple farmer like h.e.l.lenbroich afford such a precious material?

Suddenly, Bastian remembered something. Down in the old dungeon under the Zollturm, not only were there chains, but there were also pitons in the mortar joints. The dungeon consisted of one big s.p.a.ce, and in order to keep the prisoners from attacking each other or escaping, they had been put in chains hooked to the wall by pitons.

Bastian walked further around the Zollturm. As far as he remembered, all entrances to the old dungeon had been walled up. But when he was standing in front of a heavy wooden door, he saw that it was leaning just a tiny crack open.

Bastian pushed open the door and sneaked inside. It was pitch-dark. The silence was absolute. He could only move forward slowly by groping his way along the wall. Suddenly his foot brushed against a bucket, and it fell over with a clattering noise. Alarmed, Bastian flattened himself against the wall and remained stock-still. If h.e.l.lenbroich was down here, he must have heard the noise. Bastian had to be prepared for anything.

Then he heard a low groaning from the far end of the wall. What was that?

He continued quietly forward, trying to hold his breath. Again he heard the groaning. It was almost inaudible. When his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, he saw a figure curled on the dungeon floor, arms chained behind her back. A figure he recognized. Marie!

He feared that h.e.l.lenbroich had tried to snuff the life out of his beloved as gruesomely as he had from his previous victims. With his heart in his throat and tears in his eyes, Bastian touched the exposed skin near her wrist where the chains had rubbed her skin raw, half expecting-and fearing-to find it cold. Thank G.o.d, Marie reacted in panic and defended herself ferociously!

"Marie, sweet Marie, it's me, Bastian. Fear not!"

But Marie acted as if she hadn't heard his words at all; she kept bucking against him until Bastian managed to pull the gag from her throat, and she let out a long, tortured scream that echoed against the walls of the dungeon. Then she fainted. Frantically, Bastian freed her wrists from the chains and carried her out into the fresh air. He put his head on her chest to discern her heartbeat. It was feeble, but it was there! He looked up to the sky and thanked G.o.d. He had found her, praise G.o.d in Heaven. He had found Marie, and she was alive.