"I can't imagine she's hiding. But at least it's worth a try," said Joshua Price.
The gaunt Brit with the graying temples was Tanja Henderson's manager.
He had met the top model long before her big breakthrough. As a photographer, he had taken a series of pictures of the young Tanja for various mail-order catalogs. When the pictures of the young beauty were practically snatched out of his hands, he recognized her potential and signed her as a manager. "The house still belongs to the family, but no one has lived there for a long time," reported Price, who was on his way with Nick to the old estate where Tanja's grandmother Emma had lived.
The model had often told her manager that she had felt very much at home as a child. "I don't even know if the heating still works. And anyway, people in the village would have to notice if she was in the house." Joshua Price didn't seem keen on Nick's idea that Tanja might have staged her disappearance. "People who aren't in the fashion business always imagine it's all like a big theme park," he said in his charming accent. "As if the stars just see everything as a game. I need publicity, so I go into hiding just before the start of my new show. That brings me a few million dollars more. That's not how it works, detective."
The busy highway was clear of snow and ice, so they were making good time. It would only be another ten minutes before they reached the house.
"How's it going then?" the detective wanted to know.
Joshua pushed his passenger seat back a little further as he began to talk. "Everyone is replaceable. Everyone! Okay, scandals are good; I admit that. Drugs, sex, money - whoever is written about is always good in business."
"Something's been written about Tanja every day since she disappeared," Nick said with a frown.
"But not on the front pages because there's this serial killer! No one would stage it like that; the timing would be far too bad," Price defended his artist.
Nick adjusted the heating in the unmarked car a little warmer and countered: "But Tanja disappeared before the serial killer turned up."
Price just shrugged his shoulders. "Forget about the media," he continued. "It's like this: the broadcaster has to start recording the castings on time, the program slots are planned and have to be strictly adhered to. The production company rents the locations, hires the team, arranges for the candidates to travel, does advertising and promotional campaigns in the city centers - the whole program! They print posters with the jury on them; everything has to be ready before the recordings of the first castings begin. If Tanja doesn't show up in three or four days at the latest, the broadcaster has to insist on a new head of the jury."
"I've met the producer," Nick then reported. "He won't bat an eyelid before he replaces Tanja with someone else."
"That's it," Price stated, slapping his hands together involuntarily. "Gray just gets someone else; he doesn't care. And then Tanja misses out on a contract for a sum that the two of us together won't earn in four years. Tanja isn't hiding on purpose. Running away doesn't suit her personality at all. If she has problems, she faces them."
In the meantime, Nick left the highway and followed the instructions on his navigation system along a country road. Soon afterward, an old house appeared on the horizon.
Despite the poor weather conditions, it was clear to see that the building had become rather run-down in recent years. "Have you ever been here before?" he asked his companion.
"No, Tanja broke up with her family long ago," he told. "Her childhood wasn't as nice as you might imagine for a model. Don't think that beautiful people have it easier in life. Sure, they always have many people around them who are in demand and invited to all kinds of events. But Tanja still always felt lonely. She never believed people liked anything about her other than her looks."
Nick looked at the passenger briefly. "Can I ask you something personal?"
Price could imagine what the detective was talking about. "How did I manage to sign such a top model?" he asked with a grin.
Nick nodded in agreement. "I mean, surely everyone would like an artist like that?"
"In the meantime, yes, but that wasn't always the case. I just took Tanja out to dinner one evening. We had known each other for a while at the time. After dessert, I looked at her firmly and said: 'You have a choice. You can lead a great, exciting, unique life in the future. Enjoy the world and everything in it, eat caviar, and drink champagne. Or you can have your career managed by a crazy Englishman from now on."
Nick laughed as he parked his car some distance from the country house. "You left her no choice!"
They both got out of the car, grabbed their coats from the back seat, and inspected the house and its surroundings during the gathering dusk.
They noticed neither a vehicle in front of the property nor any lights on.
"So, strictly speaking, this operation here is purely private. I don't have a search warrant or anything else to allow me to enter the house," the detective briefed his companion on the next steps. "Well, let's first see if there's anyone in the house. If not, to be safe, we'll also search the surrounding area for possible hiding places that Tanja may have used as a child." While Nick now hid his hands in the warming pockets of his winter coat, shivering, he added: "It's probably a waste of time, but under the circumstances, we just have to try everything."
xxx
"Doesn't seem to be anyone there. I'll ring the bell anyway." Nick had first walked around the house to get a first impression. Joshua Price had not left his side. "Tanja tried to sell the house a few years ago," Price reported while the two men waited for someone to open the door. "But nobody wanted to buy it. It was all in a bad state. Tanja then left the house to her siblings." Joshua Price's eyes kept going over the façade of the weathered building.
At first, Nick had only looked for light or other signs that someone might be in the house.
Price, on the other hand, had now noticed something completely different. "That window over there, on the first floor," Price said, pointing. "It's broken at the bottom, see that hole? That should give us access to the window handle."
"Don't even dream about it!" Nick groaned, looking piercingly at his companion. "That would be breaking! You'll be arrested, and I'll lose my damn job." To his displeasure, he realized Price wouldn't settle for that.
"If Tanja is hiding here, then she's hardly going to turn on the light or open the door when someone rings the bell," Price replied.
Nick thought for a moment. "Then why don't you call for her," he suggested. "Surely she'd open the door for you."
Just as Price was about to comply with the request, the two men heard a difficult-to-define sound that could only have come from inside the house.
It was impossible to determine the exact cause, but one thing was certain: Nick and Joshua had heard something moving in the building.
"Tanja?" Price called out as loudly as he could and repeated the call after receiving no answer.
"Maybe something's just happened in the old building," Nick speculated with a frown, but Price turned quickly and stuck his hand through the hole in the first-floor window. "Damn it!" the detective hissed angrily and was about to stop Price when he had an idea of a smarter way to handle the matter.
He pulled his cell phone out of his coat pocket and dialed a number.
"How can I be at your service?" Daniela Castella asked after a few seconds.
"I'm sorry to call you about this, but I'm at her family's property with Tanja Henderson's manager. She may be hiding out in her grandmother's former house," Nick explained. "But now I see that I left the copy of the land registry extract at the BPD. I returned to my car, but the copy wasn't there either."
Castella was far too smart not to notice that there must have been something special about the call from her detective.
Under normal circumstances, Nick would never have called his Captain about such a simple matter. "Nick," she said in a straightforward tone. "What's going on with you?"
"Nothing at all, Captain," he replied in an undertone that suggested the opposite.
Castella didn't need to elaborate because a moment later, it became clear why Nick had called.
"Damn, what's he doing there?" the detective shouted into his cell phone with obvious feigned indignation. "He can't just get in through the window, damn it, why did I leave him alone at the house? I have to go there right away, Captain. I'll call you later!"
"You do that," replied the Captain with an appreciative smirk on her lips. "After all, if he breaks into the house, you'll have to go after him and stop him. And if he hides for some reason, you'll have to search every room for him. So go on, do your duty!"
xxx
"Be fucking quiet," Nick hissed through clenched teeth. "We don't know what's going on here. There could be someone lurking behind the door with a shotgun who thinks we're fucking burglars. Which, by the way, we are!"
"That's okay," replied Joshua Price, who had opened the front door for Nick from the inside after he had got in through the window. "Doesn't seem to be anyone here, though."
"There was a noise," Nick emphasized again, who hadn't drawn his gun but had put his right hand on the holster to be safe. "Damn, it's not even heated. No one lives here."
Nick crept slowly through the house, Price following him cautiously. They hadn't turned on the light, so they had to move carefully until their eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The living room smelled musty, the floor gave way slightly with every step, and several porcelain dolls were sitting on the chunky cupboard, clearly visible even in the dark. The faint light of the moon shone through the windows and illuminated the figures just enough to make out the unnatural smiles on their pale faces.
"She's not here. We'd better get out of here fast," Nick whispered, not taking his eyes off the possible danger zones of the building.
"Should I turn on the light?" asked Price, who seemed to be giving up hope of finding Tanja in this unreal place.
"No, we'll just get out of here quickly. I'll tell my Captain that I could only stop you from breaking in. That should take care of the whole thing."
"Okay, sorry to --" That was as far as Price got.
A noise, as if a heavy object had fallen to the floor, sounded from one of the upper floors and suddenly froze the two men in silence.
Nick and Joshua looked at each other with determined glances. Without needing to say anything, they had decided to continue their search.
xxx
"Shall I call for her again?" Joshua asked as the two men reached the top of the stairs.
Nick carefully tested the steps with his foot to see if they creaked. "No," whispered the detective. "If Tanja's up there, she can't run away. And if it's not her, we'd better stay silent."
Very slowly, Nick and Price put one foot after the other on the steps that led them to the first floor. The musty smell of the building was even more noticeable up there. Leaning against a wall was an old bicycle with spiders weaving their webs between the spokes. It didn't seem to have been moved for a long time.
Just as the men were about to start searching the rooms on the second floor, there was another noise that Nick could finally make. "The attic," the detective whispered, pointing to the closed hatch in the ceiling. "I'm going up there now; you stay here."
Henderson's manager was visibly unhappy with Nick's suggestion. "I'm coming with you," he objected. "It's too dangerous alone."
"Quiet now," Nick became clearer. Then he crept towards the hatch, constantly monitoring the areas where someone might be lurking unnoticed. He carefully fumbled with the cord that allowed him to open the attic hatch, checking its tensile strength. When convinced he could operate it safely, he pulled it carefully, and the hatch creaked open.
By now, anyone who might have been in the attic must have noticed the intruders, and Nick was well aware of this. The narrow ladder was the only way up, and the detective would have been defenseless against an armed attacker as soon as he had climbed it. The entrance was easily visible from any position in the attic, and Nick would first see his head sticking out of the hatch.
To be safe, he drew his weapon without taking the safety off. "All right!" he finally shouted upstairs. "Is someone there? Ms. Henderson, is that you?"
Joshua Price also crept up to the hatch but was rudely pushed away by Nick.
Once again, the detective shouted: "If there's someone up there, please come down! This is Detective Nick Simms of the Boston Police Department; you're in no danger!"
"Come on, I've had enough of this," the British man exclaimed in surprise, resolutely pushing Nick aside and climbing up the ladder himself without further ado.
Before the detective could hold him, Henderson's manager had already disappeared through the hatch.
"What the fuck --" Nick heard him exclaim shortly afterward; after that, he put his gun back in his holster and climbed up as well.
xxx
"It's like she's looking at you," Nikki said, impressed and whispering in awe without realizing it.
A young girl with long, dark hair sat at the desk, smiling happily and writing in her diary.
At first glance, you might have thought she was looking straight at you, but that wasn't possible. The child sitting right in front of Elizabeth and Nikki had been dead since the World War II.
"Anne Frank," Elizabeth said with a frown. "And not three yards away sits her murderer in his bunker."
Elizabeth had let it slip to her captain that she had deliberately chosen a public meeting place with her mysterious informant. She had wanted to visit the well-attended wax museum in Boston for a long time, and the opportunity had seemed favorable to finally fulfill this wish.
"At the opening, a visitor ripped his head off, and he's been sitting behind glass ever since," Nikki recalled after they had walked past the figures of Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl to the spot where the figure of Adolf Hitler sat in the Fuehrerbunker with his eyes downcast.
"That's very brave, fighting the Third Reich decades after it collapsed," Elizabeth replied, now turning her gaze respectfully to the wax replica of Sophie Scholl. "This woman was brave." She looked again through the protective glass into the bunker and said to the Hitler figure. "How many of your crazy followers today still have the special ammunition you had made for your henchmen back then?"
Nikki was unsettled. She looked around inconspicuously to see if visitors would reveal themselves as secret informants.
"Come with me," Elizabeth whispered to her daughter, taking her by the hand. "And always stay inconspicuous."
With that, they turned away and strolled unabashedly past the images of Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Pope Benedict, which many of the visitors used to take more or less original pictures that they would later post on social media. The two investigators chatted like tourists about everything that went through their minds when they saw the wax works of art. About how much more expensive a wax figure would be if you could also see their teeth, about the fact that most of the celebrities who were still alive had had personal face casts made of themselves, and about the artistic skill required to recreate historical figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach or Sigmund Freud long after their death and sometimes only based on oil paintings.
Elizabeth had read that a single guard figure cost two hundred thousand dollars and that visitor surveys were sometimes used to decide which celebrities were included in the exhibition and which were not. She and Nikki talked shop about every conceivable topic given the figures on display. About politics, sport, society, royalty, and even literature as they strolled past the wax figures of the famous writers. There was only one topic they didn't say a single word about: Jack, his gun, and the top-secret meeting with an insider from the far-right scene.
"The blue angel," Elizabeth exclaimed as they passed Marilyn Monroe by Marlene Dietrich.
With tails, a top hat, and a cigarette holder in hand, the diva sat there in a seductive pose, outshining not only the other figures around her with her glamor but even many of the real people could not resist the charisma of Dietrich in wax.
"She never let herself be pulled over by Goebbles," said Elizabeth approvingly. She approached the figure, picked up the top hat provided for the visitors, and sat down next to Dietrich.
"You two look great together," said Nikki, rolling her eyes.
"And, Marlene, have you got any inside information for me? Adolf hasn't said a word," the lieutenant whispered into the wax figure's ear just loud enough for Nikki to hear.
Before the younger woman, who was becoming increasingly uncertain, could say anything, Elizabeth put her top hat aside, bowed politely to Dietrich's wax figure, and then made her way into the room with the contemporary show stars.
"This is the right place!" said Elizabeth, inviting her daughter to sit beside her on a bench and direct her gaze to a monitor. "The first question," the lieutenant began, looking at Nikki seriously. "If our perpetrator has a rare Nazi weapon with original ammunition but only used it once during his entire brutal killing spree, should we assume that we're dealing with a murderer with political motives?"
Slowly, Nikki began understanding why her mother had taken her to the museum. "Probably not," she thought cautiously. "From his point of view, this weapon would be a clear statement that he wouldn't do without."
"Very well," Elizabeth replied, nodding slowly and asking, "To what extent have the American secret services infiltrated the right-wing scene?"
Nikki frowned a little. "Hopefully, well," she replied. "At least well enough that it would leak out if Jack was active in the scene."
Elizabeth agreed. "We should assume that, despite our skepticism. Now, the questions are getting a little harder, so let's continue: the previous victims were a Frenchman living in Boston, and the others were all Americans. Mixed social classes, none of the victims had any significant political involvement, and none were Jewish, Muslim, or homosexual. So how close is Jack's choice of victim to the ideologies of the right-wing idiots?"
Nikki's uncertain gaze shifted to the wax figure of the show host. She spontaneously stood up. "What would a right-wing terrorist want to prove with this choice of victim?" the detective pondered as she walked away.
"Exactly," replied Elizabeth. "We still don't have a single argument for political motives. And as far as arming violent neo-Nazis is concerned, those who have sharp weapons buy them on the black market. They then come from Eastern Europe or South America. I'm sure there are also a few old Nazis who collect historical weapons, but if they work, these guys certainly don't have the right ammunition to go with them."
"So you would rule out any connection to the neo-Nazi scene?" Nikki got to the point.
"Everyone in the SS had pistols," replied the lieutenant with a frown. "Most officers were arrested after the war and their weapons confiscated. But some managed to escape, keeping all their stuff with them. Weapons, ammunition, even their poison capsules. Do you know what our real problem is, Nikki?"
The young detective guessed what her mother was hinting at. "We're not looking for a neo-Nazi, but the descendant of a real Nazi," she replied.
Elizabeth pursed her lips and nodded in agreement. "The Waffen SS had around one million members at the last count. You know what that means?"
"Oh boy," Nikki understood. "This lead isn't getting us anywhere." Then she looked at her mother with narrowed eyes and claimed, "There's no informant. You just wanted to go to this museum, didn't you?"
"I told you I wanted to come here," Elizabeth replied proudly. "And if we can make Maura happy by showing her something that no one needs an informant for, then we'll kill two birds with one stone. We don't have to tell her."
"In that case, let's get on with it," Nikki replied with a wink. "I have a few more questions for George Clooney under these circumstances."
Elizabeth rolled her eyes, got up from the bench, and followed her daughter.
xxx
"Why are you hiding here?" Nick asked the man huddled up in the attic wrapped in blankets.
"Please don't shoot," he begged, confused.
The attic was dark and cold, but the man had made himself reasonably comfortable in his hiding place with a few candles that he had obviously found in the house.
"I haven't stolen anything! Nobody lives here anymore anyway."
Joshua seemed just as disappointed as Nick. "Have you been here long?" he asked.
"Just up here, really; I've hardly touched anything in the house!" the gray-haired man continued to defend himself. "The owners don't come here for a long time. Everyone in the village knows that they just let the house fall into disrepair. I don't have a home, and with the cold - well, I was thinking --"
"Nobody wants to hurt you," Nick reassured the homeless man, who was still holding his hand protectively in front of his face. "We're not here because of you; we're looking for a woman. Has anyone but you been here in the last week?"
Slowly, the man began to calm down.
When he had noticed someone sneaking around the house minutes earlier while walking through the lower floor, he quickly retreated to his hiding place in the attic. In doing so, he caused the noises that prompted Nick and Joshua to enter the house. "No, no one, I would have noticed," the homeless man replied without hesitation.
Nick believed him. "You can't stay here; it's trespassing," he explained in a friendly tone. "I could take you to a men's hostel or hospital if needed."
The homeless man immediately waved him off. "I'd rather freeze to death! Who are you anyway?"
Nick thought for a moment. Castella had already had enough trouble with Maura. He would settle the matter another way to spare her having to justify his difficult-to-explain intrusion into the Henderson family home. "All right," he said curtly. "We haven't seen you here, and you haven't seen us here either. Is that all right with you?"
The homeless man smiled broadly across his bearded face, showing off his not-quite-complete upper row of teeth. "So I can stay here?" he asked. "Until it gets warmer again?"
"On one condition," Nick concluded the conversation. "At least go down to one of the bedrooms. Your stay here won't become more illegal if you make yourself more comfortable. It's also less cold downstairs. Do you need anything else? Food, medication, help?"
"Give it a rest, young man. The people in the village will help me if I need anything."
Neither Nick nor Joshua had a good feeling about leaving the man behind. While the detective was still weighing up whether he had made the right decision, Joshua reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a business card. "Here, if you need anything, give me a call. The house belongs to people I know. If one of them shows up here, say I permitted you to be here. Then I'll get in trouble, not you."
The homeless man silently accepted the offer before Price and Nick finally took their leave, leaving him unmolested in his winter hideaway.