First of all, they were to go through case records to find every similar unsolved case and to report all relevant information about each case to Himmler’s office and to the office of Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller of the Sicherheitspolizei, the security police. The matter was to be considered top priority and top secret. The news that there was a serial killer at large was to be kept from the public as long as possible.
Hans Bergemann stood at the bulletin board reading the police directive signed by Gruppenführer Müller. ‘What’s going on, Sergeant?’
‘What do you mean, Bergemann?’
‘You were there, weren’t you, when the decision was made?’
‘You read the directive, didn’t you, Bergemann?’
‘Yes, Sergeant, I did. But what are they thinking? When this gets out, there’ll be panic. That’s not—’
‘It’s not going to get out, Bergemann. That’s the point. As to what they are thinking, that is none of your business. One thing they’re thinking is you should get your nose to the grindstone and find this killer.’ Bergemann was becoming more and more like that goddamned Geismeier, asking questions when he shouldn’t, meddling in matters that were way beyond his responsibility. Yes, all right, he had been the one to discover that there was a serial killer. But the search for this monster was just getting started – the real work was yet to be done. Everyone had to do his part to solve it and to see that the story remained a secret. Was that entirely clear?
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ said Bergemann. Even his obedience came out sounding like an insult. Just like Geismeier, thought Gruber.
Gruber’s humiliation at Himmler’s hands had stung. But at the same time, when he gave it a bit more thought, he was glad the serial-killer matter was out of his hands. No one was going to escape this case undamaged. His best bet was to get back to finding Geismeier. That was where his career would be made. And he had already turned up some good leads, not the least of which was Lola Zeff. He had her address, and if, as he suspected, she was somehow connected to Geismeier, Gruber was one giant step closer to bringing that son of a bitch to ground.
Bergemann decided to tell Willi about the serial killer. Willi was liable to have some useful ideas about the case. As it happened, Willi already knew something about the case. The story was out, and he had been thinking about it plenty. It had brought to mind the attack on Lola.
‘That was at least four years ago,’ said Bergemann.
‘More,’ Willi said.
‘But they’re nothing alike,’ said Bergemann.
‘That seems true,’ Willi said. ‘We’ll see.’
‘These were all stabbings. Lola wasn’t attacked with a knife.’
‘That’s true,’ Willi said.
The leads in the case were few and insubstantial. Muddy footprints at one of the scenes suggested the murderer was not very heavy. He was young and fit and dexterous. The soles of his shoes were lightly worn, suggesting he was not impoverished, but there was nothing beyond that. As far as the killing went, his stabbing motion was always the same, stabbing upward with his left hand and downward with his right. He had used the same large knife in all the known cases, switching it from hand to hand, and then, when he was finished, cleaning the blade on the victims’ dresses, a chilling detail that revealed an odd cold bloodedness – odd in light of the fury that had gone beforehand. He went from collected to enraged and then to fastidious. He held the knife in his left hand while he cleaned it with his right. He did that in every case with ritualistic regularity. None of the women appeared to have been robbed. The victims had not been sexually violated. However, given how the stabbings were directed toward the victims’ pelvis and breasts, these murders had to be seen, in part at least, as sexual assaults.
Bergemann studied the victims’ photos. Though the women ranged in age from sixteen to forty, they all looked young and bore a superficial resemblance to one another. They all had light complexions and were slim-waisted and full-figured.
Bergemann travelled across town to meet with Erna Raczynski. It had been over a year since her attack, and the stab wounds she had suffered on her arms and shoulders had largely healed. She had been through multiple surgeries, but she still suffered muscle pain, and her doctors told her she probably always would.
The thirty-year-old housewife and mother of two small children had been walking from the streetcar to her home at five o’clock one morning after sitting all night with her ailing mother. The old lady was suffering from dementia, and Erna sometimes spent the night at her bedside. Just as she arrived at her own house, she was grabbed from behind, spun around, and stabbed. At that moment her husband, Horst, a streetcar conductor on his way to work an early shift, came out of the building. Erna screamed, fell backward against the iron fence, and was flailing against the slashing knife. Horst dived down the three stairs, knocking the murderer back and taking a serious cut to his arm. The murderer jumped up and ran off.
He had worn a dark shirt, a suit jacket and dark pants. He was in shadow and his face was mostly distorted with emotion. Erna described him as clean-shaven with a narrow face, a long nose, and thin lips. His hair was trimmed close on the sides and longer on top, what some called a Nazi haircut. When he grabbed her by the throat, his hands seemed soft, not hard or calloused. As she thought of it now, she started to cry.
‘She already told police investigators all of this,’ said Horst. ‘Does she really have to go through it all over again?’
‘I’m sorry, Frau Raczynski, but sometimes repeating a story jars something loose – a sound, a smell, words, gestures, something you’ve forgotten.’
‘A smell?’ she said.
‘Anything,’ said Bergemann.
‘He smelled like soap,’ she said. ‘Like he
