They left it for the moment and Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner went on to provide a report on the victim. It revealed nothing other than Julia Henning had been a pretty, bright but reserved and unattached young lawyer who had worked for a commercial law office in Hamburg, dealing mainly with copyright disputes. Thomas and Dirk had spoken to Julia’s parents, colleagues and friends, of whom there were comparatively few. Despite being attractive, Julia had had few boyfriends and had not been seeing anyone at the time of her disappearance. She had lived alone in the apartment at the address Fabel had been given by the woman at the docks and had not been seen since she’d left work on the Friday afternoon. She could have been killed at any time over the weekend.
One thing did stand out, however. When her apartment had been searched, everything had been in order. It was only as they were leaving that Dirk had suddenly realised that something was missing. Something that became instantly conspicuous by its absence. A computer. And all the Network Killer’s victims had connected with him on social networking sites.
‘So we thought, if she didn’t have a computer, maybe she had a web-enabled cell phone.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Fabel. ‘No cellphone, either.’
‘Julia Henning must have been the only twenty-seven-year-old in Hamburg without a computer or cellphone. So we pulled out of the apartment and sent in a forensics team. It’s pretty obvious that someone has been in there and taken her stuff, possibly our killer.’
‘The neighbours see anything?’
Thomas Glasmacher, the larger and quieter of the two answered. ‘No
… no one saw anything unusual or anyone they didn’t know come in or out. We found a shoebox full of receipts and warranties and we’ve been going through that. Also, we’ve asked her bank for full details of her outgoings. I’ll bet we’ll find a direct debit to a phone-service provider. But proving she had a computer and a cellphone doesn’t bring us any closer to actually finding them.’
Fabel grunted; they seemed to be perpetually scrabbling around in a fog.
‘There’s something about this one,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘It all smacks of someone trying to cover tracks and confuse times. As Werner said, why now? Why did he feel the need to make these changes with this one?’
They moved on to the Muller-Voigt inquiry. Werner ran through the progress to date. He confirmed what Astrid Bremer had already told Fabel about the fingerprints and the stray sample of grey fibre found at the scene. Fabel felt the tension in the room when Werner read from the report that only Fabel’s and the dead man’s fingerprints had been found on the weapon. Other than that, the investigation into the politician’s death also seemed to be stalling, despite it being obvious that Werner was pulling out all the stops to remove any suspicion, no matter how slight, that his boss might have been involved in the murder.
Anna Wolff then picked up the thread.
‘Muller-Voigt’s mystery woman is less of a mystery,’ she said. ‘But not much less.’
‘Oh?’ said Fabel, his interest pricked.
‘Muller-Voigt had a broad range of restaurants he would take women to. It would have made things easier if he had been more a creature of habit, but I have checked them all out. No one saw him with a woman fitting Meliha’s description. Then I thought that maybe she called the shots and decided where they should eat. And with her being Turkish, I thought I’d check out some of the Turkish restaurants in town. Believe me, there are a lot of Turkish restaurants in Hamburg. I took the liberty of pulling in a favour from uniform and circulated a picture of Muller-Voigt and a description of Meliha Yazar. We struck gold in Eimsbuttel — not something you get to say every day. There’s a restaurant on Schulterblatt in the Schanzenviertel and the owner swears Muller-Voigt and Meliha were regulars. He recognised Muller-Voigt’s picture but didn’t have any idea he was a politician, and he remembers Meliha because she spoke Turkish to him. He said she told him she was from Silviri, on the coast. She had been in a couple of times on her own, but there’s no credit card transaction recorded because either Muller-Voigt paid or she paid by cash. But I’m afraid that’s it — he couldn’t tell me any more. Although he did say their regular waiter is on holiday at the moment. But he’ll be back this week. The owner said he got the idea that the woman didn’t like being asked questions. Other than that, she was very friendly and he got the impression that they were a very close couple.’
Another amateur psychologist waiting table, thought Fabel. ‘Well, it’s something. It’s more than something — well done, Anna. At least now we can demonstrate that Meliha Yazar did exist.’
He resumed the formal procedure of the caseload recap, hoping that something would leap out at them. Usually the job of the Murder Commission was to find a commonality between cases, to establish links. The problem at the moment, thought Fabel, was that they kept tripping over commonalities and links where there should be none: the Network Killer case was unlikely to be related to the female torso washed up at the Fischmarkt; Muller- Voigt’s murder could be linked to the torso, but logically Daniel Fottinger’s death — his possible unintentional death — should have been separate from everything else.
But there were links. There was a commonality. Or at least there was a mass of coincidences that stretched the laws of probability beyond the credible.
Muller-Voigt’s missing girlfriend had been investigating the Pharos Project and the body on the Fischmarkt had been in the water for almost the same period that she had been missing. Muller-Voigt was a non-executive director of Fottinger Environmental Technologies, and both Daniel and Kirstin Fottinger were members of the Project. Even the Network Killer case had an unexpected, if coincidental, link to Pharos through the company that had developed Virtual Dimension. Then, of course, there was the fact that someone had done their best to implicate Fabel in both the Network Killer case and Muller-Voigt’s murder; and whoever had done that had enormous technological skills and resources at their disposal. Like the Pharos Project.
‘But what possible link could there be between the Pharos Project and women who have been targeted in a classic serial sex-offender way, raped and strangled?’ asked Nicola Bruggemann. ‘Ritual murders, I could believe. Elimination of ex-members would be probable, but we know that none of these women had any connection to the Project at all.’
‘Other than Virtual Dimension being owned by a Korn-Pharos company,’ said Werner.
‘True, but that’s not such a big coincidence. Between all the companies in the group, Korn-Pharos generates a hell of a lot of internet content.’
‘What about this guy Reisch, Jan?’ asked Werner. ‘His death could be seen as another coincidence. He was involved with Virtual Dimension too, and we know he had contact with the dead women. Maybe his suicide was guilt over their deaths.’
‘But he was physically incapable of committing the crimes,’ said Fabel.
‘I think Werner has a point, though,’ said Bruggemann in her deep contralto. ‘Because he was incapable of commission, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t involved in some way. Maybe he was part of a killing team, with some kind of folie a deux or folie a trois crap going on. Maybe he got some kind of vicarious cyber hard-on by having an accomplice commit the act for him.’
‘No. It doesn’t fit, Nicola. But we’ll explore it, anyway. Cybercrime Unit is doing a forensic search of his hard drive. Maybe we’ll find something there. But I think Reisch was just a poor schmuck who had been dealt the worst hand you can imagine. He just decided to throw that hand in. Or that’s my take on it, at least.’
‘What about the State Prosecutor’s Office? Are they closer to budging on warrants?’ asked Henk Hermann.
‘We simply don’t have enough on the Pharos Project. To be honest, the State Prosecutor’s Office is reluctant to take on the legal might of the Korn-Pharos Corporation without being totally sure of their ground.’ Fabel sighed. ‘I don’t blame them. We are talking about something with the resources of a small country behind it. We have to get more on Pharos. And something evidentially solid; not more coincidences.’
‘It’s odd,’ said Henk. ‘Usually we have an individual, a single person, at the top of our suspects list. But now, with all this, we’ve got a group of people, a pretty amorphous and anonymous group of people at that. It’s more like corporate crime.’
Fabel stared at Henk. So long that the junior officer started to look uncomfortable and eventually laughed nervously and said. ‘What?’
‘You’re right, Henk,’ said Fabel, animated. He stood up and grabbed the file that Menke had given him. ‘Crimes aren’t committed by corporate bodies. I read somewhere in here…’ He flicked determinedly through the pages of the BfV report. ‘Here it is… one of the cult’s philosophies stresses the importance of the egregore, the groupmind.’
