swine. I know that you and he have had dealings in the past — I was just concerned that he was perhaps trying to get information out of you.’
‘Information about what?’
‘I don’t really know. All I do know is that, before you arrived, Muller-Voigt had been very persistent with Menke. He kept asking him about what extreme environmental groups the BfV were watching. Naturally, given Muller-Voigt’s colourful history, Menke wasn’t keen to share anything more than he had to.’
‘But Muller-Voigt is a senior member of the Hamburg government,’ said Fabel. ‘Whatever he was or wasn’t in the past, he is an elected and appointed public official. I would have thought we should be cooperating as much as possible.’
‘Of course…’ Van Heiden looked a little taken aback. ‘Of course we are cooperating. But Muller-Voigt’s questions were… I don’t know… they were irrelevant.’
‘Well, I can promise you that Muller-Voigt didn’t discuss anything like that with me in the lift. I got out at the Murder Commission, so we didn’t get a chance to talk much.’
‘Right…’ said van Heiden absently, rubbing his chin for a moment. ‘Right… I just wanted to ask. Muller-Voigt can be quite the slippery customer.’
Fabel didn’t know why he hadn’t told van Heiden what had really passed between him and Muller-Voigt. He just felt he had to keep it to himself, at least for the moment. He had, after all, promised the politician to keep everything unofficial and strictly to himself.
After van Heiden had left, Fabel supervised the management of the crime scene as he had before with so many crime scenes over the years. Holger Brauner arrived with his team and with his usual inappropriate good cheer examined the body, Tesa-taped anything extraneous on the victim’s skin, placed numbered tent cards, took photographs, zippered the remains of the young woman in black vinyl and removed her from the scene. The uniformed police kept the growing crowd of rubberneckers at bay. Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner turned up at the scene, took statements from the fisherman and started a door-to-door in the immediate area.
It was the carefully rehearsed choreography of the beginning of a new murder enquiry. And Fabel directed the dance in the faint grey drizzle. No horror this time; no dismemberment or stench of putrefaction. Just the sadness of a young life lost.
Another thing Fabel had never learned to get used to.
Chapter Eighteen
Fabel made it back to the Presidium just in time to catch the start of Anna Wolff’s briefing. He and Werner had left Glasmacher and Hechtner dealing with the follow-up at the crime scene.
Henk Hermann was also just on his way into the briefing room.
‘Hi, Chef,’ he said as he saw Fabel approach. ‘I checked out that address with the housing authority. There’s no record of any Meliha Yazar as a tenant and it’s only been vacant a month. If she exists, she was never there.’
‘She exists, all right,’ said Fabel. ‘And that means she has to have lived somewhere. Thanks, anyway, Henk.’
‘By the way, you know that wash-up on the Fischmarkt… the torso?’
‘What about it?’
‘I didn’t know Schleswig-Holstein have an interest in it too,’ said Henk. ‘What’s their involvement?’
‘Henk,’ said Fabel impatiently, looking through the open door to the conference room, which was already filling with officers, ‘I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about.’
‘There was someone from the Polizei Schleswig-Holstein — Kiel division, I think — up at the mortuary to look at the Jane Doe torso. A Commissar…’ Henk frowned for a moment as he forced the name into his recall. ‘A Commissar Honer, I think. He showed them his ID and said he’d cleared it with you.’
Fabel stared at Henk for a moment as he processed the information. ‘Get a uniform unit up there right now to get a description or better still a shot from CCTV. I gave no one the okay to view the body, Schleswig-Holstein or not.’
When Fabel walked into the Murder Commission briefing room it was packed with uniforms and detectives and Anna had started to match teams with addresses.
‘I thought you could do with an extra couple of bodies,’ Fabel said to Anna. ‘Your show, though.’ He turned to address the rest of the room. ‘Just to let you all know that the ante’s been upped. We have just found another body. This one really does look like it’s the Network Killer’s work.’
A collective groan.
‘Okay, okay…’ said Anna over the voices. ‘Listen up. If we’ve got another vic then it means we’re going to be under even more pressure to get this guy. We’re working on four addresses specifically. These aren’t the ones we had originally planned to hit…’
‘Oh?’ interrupted Fabel.
‘Chief Commissar Kroeger’s been back in touch,’ explained Anna. ‘His team are still working on the victims’ computers and cellphones, but they’ve been able to recover some partial exchanges with four males common to them all. And all on one website. Well, more than a website…’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, these weird sites where people have a kind of alternative existence. A virtual life, really. Run a farm without the smell, build a business empire in a fictional world, that kind of crap.’
‘I know of them, yes,’ said Fabel. He knew of them but couldn’t understand them; why people would want to waste so much of their time living in a fiction.
‘Well, this one is called Virtual Dimension. It’s part social networking site and part real-time virtual-life site. It claims to “consolidate realities”.’
‘What the hell does that mean? Why can’t these people speak plain German?’
Anna gave a don’t-shoot-the-messenger shrug. ‘According to the Virtual Dimension site, it deliberately merges this wacky virtual world with the real world. How it does that, I don’t know. It all sounds pretty flaky to me. Anyway, at least two of the women have interacted with a number of men, if they are men in real life, on Virtual Dimension. And of these men, four have had chatroom conversations elsewhere with one of the other victims.’
‘Mmm…’ Fabel nodded thoughtfully. ‘It sounds promising.’
‘Oh.’ Something had clearly just occurred to Anna. ‘Talking about virtual realities, that river cop we met down at the wash-up scene was looking for you.’
‘Kreysig?’
‘No, the other one, his deputy. Tramberger. He’s been in touch asking if we still want him to run the data through his “virtual Elbe” computer model.’
‘It can’t do any harm. Could you check with Holger Brauner and get the weight of the body plus a ballpark on how long it was in the water? Send that off to Tramberger and see if he can do anything with it.’
‘That’ll keep him happy. He’s very proud of his toy. Funny, he doesn’t strike me as the computer type.’
‘Who isn’t, these days? Anything else?’
‘Yeah. I made a few enquiries about the Pharos Project and I’ve got people coming back to me. But I’ve had my hands full with organising these raids. You say you’re happy to take one?’
‘Sure. What have you got?’
Anna handed Fabel a file and a warrant from the State Prosecutor’s Office. ‘It’s an address out Billstedt way. Between Horn and Schiffbek. The IP address belongs to a Johann Reisch.’
‘Because he pays the bills, it doesn’t mean he’s the only person using the computer.’
Anna shook her head. ‘According to the census, Johann Reisch, forty-five, is the sole occupier at this address. And this…’ she handed Fabel a printout of a web page, ‘… is Herr Reisch’s online persona.’ Fabel looked at the picture. A young man two decades away from his forty-fifth birthday, wearing sunglasses and with his muscled torso summer-shirtless, smiled at the camera under a foreign sun. The information on the page gave the name Thorsten66. ‘You happy to take this one?’
‘Okay,’ Fabel took the paperwork from her. ‘This is your show… Chefin.’
