"You don't need that anymore," Leonore told Caleb kindly, taking the cell phone from him and throwing it between the bushes. "So, Elizabeth, did you tell him everything?"
"That wasn't necessary. He found out for himself."
"What a stupid question, of course, he did. He is our son, after all." With that, she leaned over to Caleb and kissed him on the forehead.
"We've had to wait a long time for this, haven't we?" Elizabeth asked. "The three of us happily united as a family."
"I knew it all along," Leonore replied, beaming. "Not a single day has passed that I haven't imagined this moment."
The self-assured woman didn't seem driven. Completely relaxed, she sat in the driver's seat, turned as far as she could towards the captain and the teenager, and began to talk peacefully. "You just weren't ready to understand me back then. The world of idiots just hadn't made you desperate enough to be able to stand it anymore. I was so close to you in the early years. I watched you so often, and you never noticed me. I would have liked to smell you, but unfortunately, I couldn't get that close to you. Even you would have noticed."
"The problem wasn't my love for you," Elizabeth replied. "I would have gone anywhere with you. It was my love for our son. He should get a chance to do better than the two of us."
"You would have gone to prison for him, I know," Leonore acknowledged.
"But then I suddenly had to appear in court and exonerate you," Caleb realized. "And if I had appeared as a witness at the trial, Leonore would have recognized me immediately. "If I had just run off, she would never have found me."
"Now give it a rest, my sweeties," Leonore interrupted. "After all, I didn't give you a chance. The mother wanted to protect her son, and the son wanted to protect his mother. That was really sweet of you. You just forgot about the poor other mother who is longing for her little baby."
Only now did Caleb lose his composure. Angrily, he exclaimed: "So much so that you kill three people? Just to lure Liz into a trap she can only escape by handing her child over to a madwoman? How sick are you?"
Elizabeth gritted her teeth. Caleb also realized that his reckless emotional outburst had not helped his situation.
With an unmistakably diabolical undertone, Leonore replied: "How many more people do you think I would have killed to find you, my darling. Who cares about these ordinary people? I lived in India for years; over a billion of them are walking around. Where do you think I got my surgical skills from? Back at Molloy, I still had to improvise, but I prepared myself thoroughly on my return. I can't remember how many of these normal people I've cut up over the years so that everything would be perfect later. All these ants are nothing but a burden on our world! Teachers who teach children who are abused at home and just can't see it. Even though it's obvious. Judges who acquit murderers because they are too blind to see the evidence. There are idiots everywhere who make it impossible to bear this world. How stupid could that Praetorius be to think that I had fallen in love with him? Or that idiot from Coppens? The moron staged his own death for a few hundred dollars. Okay, Matthai was just unlucky with his name." Leonore looked at Elizabeth now. "Do you still conjugate verbs in Sanskrit?"
"Not for a long time; work and my family hardly leave me any time," the captain replied. "But the idea was excellent!"
"A plan, like a work of art. Isn't it? You have always said: let your opponent know what you're up to. But only when he realizes he can do nothing about it."
Elizabeth applauded appreciatively. "Very good!" she praised. "I knew in Praetorius' practice that no one was left to save. Because that would have meant that you would have given me a chance. And you would never have made a mistake like that."
"Not with a person of your intellect," Leonore admitted, nodding.
"You knew I wouldn't tell anyone about you because I had to protect CJ. You could be sure I would fall into the trap like a lemming."
"Honey, you were trapped before you even got to the office."
"That's the way it is with people like us. We each fight our own battles and are left to our own wits. And yours is simply better than mine."
Leonore smiled, flattered, stood up, and walked around the car to the trunk. She opened it by lightly pressing on the Volkswagen logo on the tailgate and took out two cans of gasoline. Elizabeth and Caleb couldn't see this from their position in the back seat.
"The sound of water in the background," Elizabeth called out loud enough for Leonore to hear. "A sleeping pill that puts us off for hours. Besides, the Phaeton was filled up today, even though it was half full last night. We're at our park bench on the New Hampshire border right now, right?"
Instead of answering, Leonore put the canisters down, went to the Phaeton's light switch, and activated its headlights. In the soft glow of the halogen spotlight, they could see that the three of them were at the exact spot on the bench where Leonore and Elizabeth had spent their most enjoyable hours together.
"This is a wonderful place, isn't it?" she asked as she opened the canister and poured its contents over the outside of the vehicle.
"It certainly is. It happened up here," Elizabeth added, ignoring the smell of gasoline that suddenly hit her nose.
"What?" asked Caleb nervously, who had also noticed the smell.
"Right up here, we decided to try to become parents together," Leonore answered the question as she opened the second canister. She planned to spread its contents around the interior of the Phaeton.
"That was the fascinating thing about your plan," Elizabeth added, instinctively reaching for her son's hand. "What follows the doctor who treats himself, the teacher who teaches, and the actor who plays for himself? Of course: the cop who searches for himself."
"That was original, wasn't it?" said Leonore happily.
"Yes, I have to admit, it was something," Elizabeth confirmed. "And I knew I couldn't stop it. No matter what I did, it would have come to this sooner or later. If not today, then in twenty years, when I got out of prison. I ran away from it, but you would never have given up."
"Of course not, darling. You know that without love, there is no life."
"But at least I knew one thing!" Elizabeth continued in a slightly different tone. "If I went along with your plan without resistance, as you had planned for me, then at least no more people would die."
Leonore temporarily placed the canister, which was still full, in the footwell of the passenger seat. "So you've finally realized it," she said, kissing the captain. "This is the best thing for us, and it would have happened eventually anyway."
"I even knew it would happen here. In our special place! There was only one thing I didn't know from the start." Leonore smiled again but, for the first time, slightly unsettled.
But after you saw my interview, you knew," Caleb added, raising his right hand triumphantly and chiming in with Elizabeth.
"What a clever son we have," Leonore remarked. She beamed admiringly at Caleb as she realized, "You didn't know when it was going to happen --"
"Pretty much eight hours after the interview first aired," Elizabeth confirmed. "Enough time to set up everything we needed."
The spotlights came on at that moment, and the bench was suddenly bathed in glaring light. All around the car, emergency vehicles were parked a hundred meters away, snipers had positioned themselves on the hill, and as far as the eye could see, there was no possible escape route.
"You knew I would do anything in this case," Elizabeth explained to the impressed Leonore. "To protect CJ and to keep our secret about Molloy's murder. You really don't have a single weakness except for one: your contempt for normal people! And if there's one of them you'd never have thought of in your life, it's the one who loathes me the most!"
At that moment, the voice of Rupert Mardas sounded from a megaphone.
"Leonore, get away from the car and release the hostages! It's over!"
Leonore pulled down the corners of her mouth in surprise and nodded slowly. "You were working with Rupert?" she asked. "Congratulations, he can arrest us both now."
Without showing the slightest hint of uncertainty, she assessed the situation. The spotlights, which Mardas had installed a few hours earlier so that Leonore hadn't noticed them when she arrived, shone directly into her face, obscuring her view of the RRT team. By now, the smell of spilled gasoline was everywhere, but Leonore had not yet lit an open fire. If she tried, the snipers would inevitably shoot her, and since the Phaenton had only been doused with fuel from the outside, Elizabeth and Caleb could have escaped from the vehicle safely afterward. Leonore was aware that any wrong move would mean her death.
"That interview was really damn clever of you, CJ," Elizabeth praised her son, who in turn kept a firm eye on her.
"Get away from the vehicle now and release the hostages," Mardas repeated.
"You used Michaelson and his TV colleagues to lure Leonore," the captain realized while Caleb slowly undid his seatbelt and stripped off the blanket. "She could see the location of the hotel window from the cut-off part of town, and thanks to the desk lamp, she knew which chain the hotel belonged to. So she knew where you were staying. And because your face had to be made unrecognizable, your T-shirt and wristwatch were included in the picture. Then you just had to wait a bit and leave the hotel."
Leonore showed no sign of uncertainty. She was still smiling good-naturedly.
"When you realized that Leonore was back and looking for me, you should have immediately stopped me from coming to Boston. But you didn't. So I concluded that it wasn't necessary because you knew you could protect me from her. That worked for fifteen years. But it was also clear that this whole story would never end until she finally got her hands on me. But we had to wait for her to do something that would get her arrested." Now, Caleb looked directly at Leonore. "Of course, you didn't expect me to stage this interview on purpose. That's why you couldn't have guessed I was prepared for you. It looks like your little son lured you into the trap."
Leonore smiled mildly.
"You open the doors now and let Elizabeth and the boy out of the car!" shouted Mardas.
She finally nodded towards the glare of the headlights and then walked slowly to the Phaeton's driver's door. She unlocked the doors to the back seat by pressing a button, and the locks were released with a discreet click.
"But I also need to make sure that you see through my plan," Caleb finished in the direction of his mother, Elizabeth. "That's why I said so much pointless crap in the interview that you couldn't help but wonder why I did it in the first place."
"Would you like to get out?" Leonore interrupted the two of them in the back seat.
Elizabeth also undid her seatbelt and threw the blanket on the floor. "But how could you have known at that point that Leonore was looking for you?" she asked Caleb as he carefully exited the car.
"Get away from the door!" Mardas shouted at Leonore in the meantime.
"Actually, that was easy," the teenager replied, carefully putting his left foot out of the car. "You hurt your head in your cell to inform this journalist of your arrest that very night. But why? I didn't even know you'd been arrested. We had an appointment the next day, and you didn't have a chance to call me from prison. You knew I would be worried the next day because you didn't get in touch. I would have sent you a text on your cell phone sooner or later. But that would have been with your colleagues at the BPD, then. They would have been interested in who was texting you and would have found me pretty quickly. They would have wanted to know who I was, and it wouldn't have taken long for everything to blow up. So you had to ensure I knew about your arrest quickly. Before I could send you a text. Incidentally, your lawyer was a moment quicker than the media. Irony of fate."
Caleb slowly exited the car and waited for Elizabeth to exit the Phaeton. Over the gasoline-soaked roof, he added: "That made it clear to me that whoever you wanted to hide me from must have been the reason for your arrest."
"Well done, darling," Leonore praised her son proudly without moving away from the Phaeton.
Rupert Mardas now cautiously approached the car. Two armed officers wearing bulletproof vests accompanied him.
"Before I came down to the morgue, I called Rupert and told him we'd be right up here on the hill in seven hours at the latest."
"Elizabeth, why do you always resist our happiness?" Leonore asked the captain, who was standing on the opposite side of the vehicle, protected from her grasp, with a sentimental undertone. We can still be happy together. Last chance, darling!"
"Let it go, Leonore," the captain breathed to Leonore. "We were born into this world, and there is no other. Let yourself be treated as your father suggested. I won't let you down."
"If you don't want us to be happy together, I'll just have to go ahead without you. You'll follow us. As soon as you finally realize it."
"Us?" Caleb repeated in surprise.
Just as Mardas had almost reached the three of them, Leonore grabbed Caleb's collar in a flash, pulled him towards her like a shield, and pulled her revolver out of her handbag without a second thought. Without any warning, she fired at the two officers, who were only hit in the bulletproof vests but were thrown to the ground by the force of the impacting bullets.
Mardas aimed his gun at Leonore's head but was unable to pull the trigger so as not to endanger Caleb. "It's too late," he shouted. "You're not getting away!"
"Poor, stupid Rupert," Leonore replied smugly. "Who says I want to escape?"
With that, she fired a shot in Mardas' direction. The sergeant dropped to the ground, and a shot discharged from his service weapon. The bullet hit Elizabeth's left leg, causing her to fall to the ground as well.
Finally, Leonore put her gun to Caleb's temple. "We're going without your mother," she breathed, still wholly calm and almost gracious.
"Shall I tell you something?" Caleb replied defiantly. "I've had enough of you!"
With these words, he pulled the empty ampoule with the broken lid out of his trouser pocket, turned around, pushed Leonore's hand with the gun in it away from him, and rammed the sharp fracture into his mother's cheek with all the force of his anger. When he then forcefully cut through her face with the glass, Leonore dropped the weapon with a shrill scream. Without hesitation, the teenager grabbed his mother's belt, causing her to lose her balance. The boy took advantage of this to throw her with all his might into the back seat of the Phaeton. He shut the door and stormed to the driver's seat, from where he tried to lock the child safety lock again. Leonore grabbed his wrist with unexpected strength as he reached into the car, resolutely wrapped the seat belt around his neck, pushed her upper body between the front seats, and finally reached the lever with which she could release the car's parking brake. The Phaeton immediately began to roll down the steep slope of the hill, at the foot of which the deadly speed of the river flowed behind a narrow road.
Mardas tried to jump into the car but could not reach it in time. The vehicle rolled unchecked towards the deadly precipice, and both Elizabeth and Mardas could do nothing but stand by and watch.