Without another word, Nikki turned on her heel and ran through the ever-growing group of curious residents into the stairwell to get to Coppen's apartment as quickly as possible.
She effortlessly took several steps at once and was not even out of breath when she passed her surprised colleagues and re-entered the crime scene. The actor's body had been taken away in the meantime.
"There it is!" she shouted expectantly, pointing to the Boston phone book under the TV table.
While Mardas, who had rushed after her in the meantime, was still watching helplessly, Elizabeth was already beaming with pride at her daughter.
"Excellent, Nikki," she praised her daughter.
While Nikki slipped on latex gloves, Elizabeth addressed her former partner. "Coppens belonged to a different generation to us. He was a digital native, the first generation of children with the internet and cell phones. It's doubtful that he picked up a physical phone book. People have been looking for phone numbers online for a long time."
"I see," Mardas conceded. "So only old farts like me, who don't understand anything about modern technology, still look in the phone book?"
"Look on the bright side," Nikki interjected in the heat of her discovery. "We old farts can still spend an entire evening with a person without having to look at our cell phones once."
With these words, Nikki carefully took the phone book in her hands and opened it carefully. At first glance, she could only see that the thick reference book was obviously unused. The spine was intact, and the pages were smooth with no signs of wear. It also smelled fresh paper and a hint of printer ink.
"No snippets of Sanskrit codes?" Mardas asked with a sneer when Nikki still hadn't been able to find any possible clue to a new victim in the book.
Before any of them could say anything, the three of them noticed that something had been visible on one of the pages, which Nikki quickly leafed through. Something had been marked in red pen.
"Hold on, I'll turn back!" the young woman exclaimed, searching for the relevant page.
"The address of the next victim?" Mardas speculated. "Should it really be that easy now?"
It only took Nikki seconds to find the highlighted entry. She hurriedly read whose phone number the perpetrator had circled. Both Elizabeth and Mardas noticed that Nikki's mood had suddenly changed.
"What's the matter? Is it one of us?" Mardas wanted to know.
"No, not that one."
Only now did Nikki show her colleagues whose name had been framed with a thick red felt-tip pen.
Mardas read the entry out loud. "Dr. William Praetorius. Doctor of Surgery and General Medicine."
Elizabeth nodded silently before turning away from her colleagues, taking a few steps into the room with a petrified expression, and finally breaking her team's awkward silence with the words: "We're back to square one. It's a circle!"
xxx
What a good day for you today? Not so much, is it? It must have taken a lot out of you.
You know, we could have had it all so much easier if only you weren't so stubborn. But sometimes, it takes longer to see what's right. What the heck, things have turned out the way they have, and nothing else matters now.
How much longer will it be before you finally understand? You haven't understood it yet, have you? No, definitely not. Because you need more than one crucial skill: you're not creative!
Your logic is brilliant, but you need to interpret it better.
You see the facts, but you keep falling into the same trap. You simply can't put yourself in the shoes of people who don't see these facts. Because if you have no logic, you have to interpret. Yes, people are stupid. It's too stupid to know what you see.
But this very fact is, in turn, quite stupid for you ...
xxx
"We have to come up with something. We can't go on like this."
Elizabeth had had a strict few hours. The conversation with Nick had been unpleasant, but in the end, she had managed to appease her brother-in-law. She had relied on the fact that he had conceded to her that she could also investigate outside the box. But even if she had managed to save herself from further inconvenience for the time being, this did not change the fact that the air for her investigation had become thinner. With the clue at the scene of the last victim's crime pointing back to the first, Elizabeth found herself, in her brother-in-law's eyes, right back to where she had failed sixteen years ago.
"I'll be sixteen soon, then I'll be allowed a lot more," Caleb objected, still standing in his hotel room bathroom and talking to Elizabeth through the half-open door.
For her part, the captain had her sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning deeply as she thought aloud. "My case blew up in my face today," she reported. "Between you and me, I'm looking pretty stupid."
Now, Caleb stepped out of the bathroom. His blond hair was freshly washed and fell wildly on all sides. He was wearing the bathrobe the hotel had provided him with and trailing a trail of scent from his shower gel as he walked across the room in slippers.
"Your mother gave you this stuff," Elizabeth noted after realizing it wasn't the smell of the hotel shower gel. "It's a scent you'd give to a teenager who you'd see as a teenager. However, the teenager would see himself as an adult and choose a harsher fragrance. An outside gift-giver is unnecessary because the fragrance is too expensive. That's what mothers give."
Caleb took a look in the mirror, putting on a look he thought was particularly masculine, and then sat down on the bed next to the captain. "I won the shower gel in a raffle," he replied.
Elizabeth demonstratively lowered her head to her chest. "It seems I'm slowly losing my superpowers," she affirmed anxiously, then turned her gaze to the boy. "Do you still like me when I'm no longer solving every case, and I'm getting older and less capable?"
Caleb realized that Elizabeth wasn't joking but was plagued by severe worries. "I still like you when you have to pay for every stick of butter in the supermarket and rummage around in your coins for minutes. And when you complain to the editor of your TV guide that you can't understand movies because the music in the background is always too loud. And I still like you when you don't understand technological progress and keep telling me that everything used to be better, even though nothing used to be better."
Elizabeth smiled lovingly at Caleb. "And you'll look after me too?" she asked. "When I get dementia?"
"Of course, I'll take care of you, but if you get dementia, it'll just lower your mind to the level of my math teacher," the boy asserted confidently.
Elizabeth raised her eyes again and gritted her teeth. "You live a very lonely life if you're like me," she began to say without making it sound like an accusation. "When I see a person, I quickly recognize everything that has happened in their life. I see their strengths, their weaknesses, their abysses." She paused and pressed her lips together. "When I look at you, on the other hand, I see nothing but an almost blank sheet of paper. All I can see in you are your dreams, hopes, opportunities, and goals. If you like, your purity and innocence in your eyes allow me to fully engage with you."
"But I'm getting older," Caleb remarked calmly. "And apart from the fact that I'm not that blank and innocent, I'll disappoint you more and more. With every experience that shapes me and with every abyss I will look into."
There was silence in the room for a moment. Then she rose from the bed and looked deep into his eyes. "I promise you something now," she announced. "I will never be disappointed in you. And I will never let you down. At least not if I can help it. I won't let you down, I'll recognize your dreams, I'll stand by you when you want to achieve them, and no matter what else you do, I'll stand behind you and have your back."
Caleb was impressed. Of course, Elizabeth had always treated him with respect. But the seriousness with which she spoke to him now worried him. "You have real problems, don't you? Is there anything I can do to help?"
"It's not that easy. This case I'm working on has been gathering dust. And I can only take another step as the fall gets bigger. We've been watched; that shouldn't have happened. And then this murder happens. And no matter what I realize, it always brings me back to where I started."
Caleb remained silent. Unlike what you would expect from a teenager his age, he didn't seem overwhelmed by the seriousness of the situation.
"We usually have to come clean," Elizabeth continued. "But if we did that, it could have unforeseeable consequences. For both of us."
"Still? After all this time?" Caleb asked, full of doubt, but Elizabeth refused to be put off.
"You don't know everything," she admitted. "No one does. And this case -"
Elizabeth didn't continue. Her voice became brittle, her eyes clouded over, and tears welled up in her eyes.
"I'll talk to my mother," Caleb promised. "Right away, when I get home on Sunday."
"She won't understand. No one will understand. It could be a huge disaster."
Caleb took a deep breath. Then he crossed his arms resolutely and objected: "Come off it! You're acting as if we're felons."
"We are? I'm afraid I am one." She stood up from the edge of the bed and inevitably shook her head. "What follows a doctor who treats himself, a teacher who lectures himself, and an actor who plays himself?" she then asked, to Caleb's astonishment.
The teenager blinked a few times. "A man in a white coat coming to get you?"
Elizabeth nodded slightly before answering. "You might not be wrong about that."
"So, what happens next?" the teenager asked worriedly.
Instead of answering the question, Elizabeth grabbed her coat. "I have to go home," she explained.
"But we wanted to -"
"I know, but there's no other way. I'll call you in the morning. Just have a nice evening on your own."
"But I didn't come to Boston to be alone -"
"Please, CJ! I'll explain it to you eventually, but right now I can't. You just have to trust me right now."
Caleb didn't insist any further. He had never seen Elizabeth in such a state before. Before Elizabeth left the hotel room, she checked her costume in the mirror. Then she approached Caleb, who had also gotten up from bed, and took him in her arms without saying a word. Only then did she turn around and walk to the door of the room.
"Elizabeth!" Caleb stopped her. "I was joking, by the way. I wanted to tease you a little."
Elizabeth nodded, and, for the first time in over ten minutes, a small smile flitted across her lips as she asked: "Your mother gave you the shower gel, didn't she?"
Caleb stroked his hair sheepishly before admitting with a mischievous twinkle in his eye: "Of course!"
xxx
It was getting late, and the streets were quiet. People had retired to their homes, and even the dog owners had already taken their last walks of the day with their animals.
The sound of her footsteps was the only thing Elizabeth heard as she walked unhurriedly to her house. Her gaze was downcast, and the sneakers that were part of her camouflage still felt like a foreign object. She hadn't liked leaving Caleb behind, but the obvious answer to his question would soon be recognized by others. Elizabeth had no doubt about that.
I won't see him again. Maybe never again.
Some of the neighboring houses had their lights still on, and the flickering televisions could be seen through the windows as Elizabeth walked down the street.
The captain was just about to take her front door key from the pocket of her old jeans when she noticed something. A phaeton was parked on the side of the road right in front of her house. But it wasn't just any exclusive model car. It was the exact phaeton that Elizabeth had picked up a few days earlier by Levin Coppen and driven to Dr. Praetorius' body. A person, of whom only a silhouette was visible, was sitting behind the wheel, apparently waiting for Elizabeth to come home.
The captain stopped, pulled the hood of his sweater off her head, and looked demonstratively over at the car, whose headlights lit up for a second. Having voluntarily abandoned her disguise, Elizabeth approached the vehicle and opened the passenger door. Without waiting to be asked, she got in. "Chapeau!" she said, looking the person at the wheel in the eye with sincere respect. "That was really good."
"You weren't bad either," she received in reply.
Elizabeth waved her hand modestly. She noticed that the car's navigation system had been removed. "For not knowing anything about all that technical stuff, you sure know your way around satellite positioning," she noted.
"Occasionally, I learn something new, too," her counterpart parried with a grin.
"I really must praise you," Elizabeth now admitted. "I followed your plan like a fool!"
"Nonsense," she was corrected. "You weren't chasing the plan. You were the plan. But you're not bad either; I didn't mean the last few days. It was about the last few years! A real tour de force, nobody noticed anything."
"You tried everything, didn't you?"
"Of course I did. But you've adjusted to me. You're not that bad; I've had sleepless nights because of you. What was that all about back then? You know yourself that you can't escape your fate."
Elizabeth was absolutely calm. "I'm beginning to believe that, too," she admitted before finally getting to the point. "So, what happens now?"
A dry laugh escaped her counterpart. Then, the figure leaned back in their seat confidently, grabbed an object from their trouser pocket, and replied with relish: "That decision is now entirely up to you!"
xxx
"If you ask me how I feel about it, I'll tell you that it must be a mistake," Maggie explained as she presented Nick with the results of her lab analysis. "But I'm afraid that science doesn't leave us much room for error in this case."
Nick remained silent. With a petrified expression, he opened the file and took his time to read what the lab had found.
Mike was also in the room with Nick and Maggie. He sat silently at the back of Maggie's office. As if he were the powerless witness to a terrible tribunal.
Nick had decided that no one involved in this conversation so far was allowed to leave Maggie's office until all the necessary information had been gathered.
"It fits the picture," he then stated.
Maggie stood behind her desk and crossed her arms. "It fits your picture," she said.
Nick looked closely at the redhead and pressed his lips together. "If you'd shown me that yesterday, I wouldn't have said it yet," he confirmed. "But things have changed, Mags."
His gaze now wandered to Mike Fisher, who followed what was happening wordlessly and with a tense posture.
Maggie followed Nick's gaze intuitively and saw Mike's lackluster eyes. "Did you too -" she asked.
"Yes, I did," Mike confirmed tonelessly.
Maggie was obviously unsettled, then turned away from Mike in embarrassment and looked back at Nick. After a few seconds of tense silence, he reached for his cell phone.
"I assume you wouldn't mind if I sent Nikki to her?" he asked the group.
No one disagreed.
Nick gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. "Right then."
"Nick?" Nikki spoke up in surprise. "You're calling at this time of night? What's happened?"
Nick summarized in a few words how the case had developed and what role Nikki would play. After a few minutes, he ended the call before returning to his team. "It goes without saying that you'll keep quiet about this until she's arrested. Mike, send an unmarked car down her street to see if she's home."
Mike and Maggie could barely speak. Both had dry mouths and a significantly increased heart rate.
Nick took a deep breath and nodded to himself with a deep frown. "Let's hope this all turns out to be a big mistake," he concluded the conversation. "After all, hope dies last."