was large and ballooned out as if pumped full of air; it gave Fabel the impression of an oversized space helmet, or the hood of one of those suits you saw worn by people who handled radioactive material. Reisch still sat upright, the neck brace of his wheelchair preventing him from slumping, his blank stare aimed at the laptop screen.
Fabel pushed two fingers into the flesh at the side of Reisch’s neck, just beneath where the drawstring had been pulled tight. He turned to Anna and shook his head.
‘Shit…’ Anna stared at the still-upright dead man. ‘Do you think someone’s killed him because of his connection to Virtual Dimension?’
Fabel did not answer. Instead, he flipped open his cellphone and called it in to the Presidium. He asked who was on forensics duty.
‘Keep the carer out of here, Anna,’ he said quietly after he hung up from his call. ‘But tell her that Reisch has passed away. Holger Brauner’s on his way with a team.’
After Anna and the uniformed officer left the room, Fabel took a closer look around Reisch’s desk. There was a postal packet that had been untidily torn open. Next to it lay what looked to Fabel like a small oxygen canister with a length of tubing attached. Fabel took a latex glove from his jacket pocket and, without slipping it on, used it as a shield while he rolled the canister around. It had the symbol He on it. Not oxygen, helium.
Fabel checked the laptop’s screen. When Reisch had died, he had been locked into Virtual Dimension. Now his avatar walked aimlessly through a surrealistically realistic world rendered by computer graphics. It had been what he had watched as he died. The last thing his dying brain would have registered. Even now, Reisch gave the impression of watching his cybernetic alter ego.
Once Brauner and his team had arrived, Fabel joined Anna and the uniformed officer outside. Brauner had only been in the house for fifteen minutes when he called Fabel back in.
‘You can forget this one, if you ask me, Jan,’ said Brauner. ‘Of course you’ll have to wait for the autopsy, but this is no murder. Well, it’s self-murder, but that doesn’t interest you.’
‘But someone tied that bag around his neck. If he did it himself, then as soon as he started to suffocate, the survival instinct would have kicked in.’
‘No it wouldn’t, Jan. That’s a so-called “ Exit Bag ”. A suicide kit. The fastening is a drawstring you pull tight yourself. And the “survival instinct” you talk about is called the hypercapnic alarm response. It’s the panic you feel when the level of carbon dioxide in your blood becomes dangerously high and your brain tells you that you’ve got to start breathing fast. He won’t have experienced that. That’s what the canister was for: you fill the bag or your lungs or both with an inert gas like nitrogen or helium. It confuses your brain and it overrides the hypercapnic alarm response. You just feel you’re breathing normally, no pain, no panic, then you pass out and never wake up. Believe it or not, you can buy Exit Bags on the internet, or download instructions on how to make one yourself. We’ve bagged up the postal packet it came in: you might be able to find out whom he ordered it from. And I guess you’ll find something about it on that…’ Brauner nodded towards the laptop on the table.
‘So you’re convinced it was suicide?’
‘There’s no evidence to suggest it wasn’t. Why was he in the wheelchair?’
‘Some kind of motor neurone disease. Poor bastard.’
‘Then I don’t blame him. If it were me, I’d do the same before I couldn’t do it for myself. And, truth be told, these Exit Bags are not the worst way to go. You don’t want to be interrupted and saved, though. Pull through from an attempt with one of these and your brain’ll be mush.’
The officer from Kroeger’s Cybercrime Unit came in. She had been the one who had alerted Anna and had waited while the forensics had done their work. She was an unlikely-looking police officer, petite with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail and wearing jeans and a waist-length casual jacket. She looked as if she could still have been a student on her way to a lecture. Something about her reminded Fabel of his daughter, Gabi, who had the same auburn hair and who had expressed an interest in following her father into the Polizei Hamburg. Fabel noticed that the young policewoman worked at not looking at the dead man in the wheelchair.
‘You all right?’ he asked her.
‘Yes, Herr Chief Commissar. Sorry.’ She frowned. ‘I wondered if you still wanted us to take the laptop for examination?’
‘Of course,’ said Fabel. He looked again at the screen. Thorsten66, Reisch’s virtual-world persona, still wandered the counterfeit world of Virtual Dimension ’s New Venice. In one corner of the screen, beneath the photograph of the muscle-torsoed youth who Reisch had chosen because it reminded him of a younger, healthy self, were messages from other users, inviting Thorsten66 to parties by the lagoons, or to take part in the New Venice Olympics. It was no accident that Reisch had had this on-screen, in his line of sight, as he died. Maybe he really had believed that through an effort of will he could project himself, at the moment of death, into that ersatz but infinitely preferable reality.
The young cybercrime officer bent to close the laptop and remove it.
‘Leave it,’ said Fabel; then, more gently, ‘Leave it switched on. I’ll bring it out in a minute.’
On his way back to the Presidium, Fabel kept checking his rear-view mirror. But there was no sign of a VW four-by-four following him and he started to wonder if paranoia was infectious. Fabel always found strange the things that got to him about his work. Not always the exposure to violence or horror, or the constant exposure to all that was the worst in people: as he drove towards Alsterdorf and the Presidium, it was the image of a dying Reisch sitting in front of his computer wishing himself into a lie. It was the sadness, the vulnerability, the desperation that Fabel saw in his day-to-day work that troubled him most.
The entire team was again assembled and they went through the usual recap of the caseload as well as any new information on each murder. As had been agreed with van Heiden, Nicola Bruggemann had taken over as lead investigating officer on the Network Killer case.
Bruggemann’s build was what Fabel’s mother would have euphemised as mollig. But there was very little else about the Child Crime Principal Commissar that could be described as cuddly. Bruggemann carried her plumpness on a frame that was at least one metre eighty tall and with shoulders that would have put an American Pro-footballer to shame. Her black hair was cut short at the sides and thick on top, adding to the masculinity of her look. She was, Fabel knew, a no-nonsense Holsteiner whose manner could best be described as abrasive and her wit as acerbic. It was not the same kind of prickliness that Fabel encountered on a regular basis with Anna, more an uncompromising, direct professionalism. If they were all in the business of policing, then Nicola Bruggemann was the no-frills offer. Fabel had a great deal of respect for her as a colleague. As she ran through the progress of the Network Killer case, Fabel appreciated the way she made a point of asking him for authority to allocate resources and people. She was making a point: Fabel was still in charge.
After Bruggemann had finished summing up, Fabel briefly outlined what had occurred at the Reisch residence in Schiffbek. It was, he said again, unlikely that there was any relevance to any of the other enquiries.
Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner looked an unlikely team: Glasmacher was tall, blond and burly, Hechtner was small, dark and slight; Glasmacher was reserved, Hechtner was outgoing. Fabel had recruited and paired them over a year before and he was pleased at the way they had gelled as a partnership. Dirk always did most of the talking and he confirmed that the full report on the body found at the Poppenbutteler Schleuse had come in. Like the other victims, Julia Henning had been raped and strangled, and again there was no stranger DNA or trace to be harvested by the forensics team or the pathologist.
But the autopsy had revealed something different.
‘It would appear that she wasn’t as fresh as we first thought,’ explained Dirk.
‘Meaning?’ Nicola Bruggemann and Fabel asked the same question simultaneously.
‘Meaning that an analysis of the victim’s blood found evidence of cold storage. Not freezing, but that she had been kept at a very low temperature, like in a cold store.’
‘Someone was trying to confuse us about the time of death?’ asked Fabel.
‘It looks like it,’ said Thomas Glasmacher. ‘There’s no way of telling how long she was in the cold store or how long she was kept at room temperature afterwards. So yes, it looks like the killer has tried to confuse us about the time of death. And he’s succeeded.’
‘But why?’ asked Werner. ‘Why now? He’s never done anything like this before.’
‘Unless our guy feels he’s slipped up,’ said Dirk. ‘Or maybe he thinks he was seen. It could be that he’s trying to fudge the time of death so he can’t be pinned down to the scene of crime.’
Fabel thought about what Hechtner had said. ‘Possible, but it doesn’t gel with what we know about his modus. I don’t know, Dirk — it’s an odd change of pattern, that’s for sure.’
