LENA
“Of course,” says Yasira.
“Smells like teen spirit,” says Michael.
“Maybe her favorite dress,” Michael says. “Apparently she’s got it twice.”
Yasira’s cell phone rings. It’s Katja Jürgens. Yasira hangs the dress back and puts the call on speakerphone so that Michael can listen in.
“Probably Mali,” says Katja.
“Mali?” asks Yasira.
“You wanted to know if our experts could match the perpetrators’ French to a specific region of origin, and that was the answer.”
“Probably Mali,” Yasira repeats.
“Correct.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh yeah. And Karsten lets you know that the beer bottles are ninety-nine percent certain to be Beck’s. He hasn’t found the crime scene. He said to tell you he’s still hiking.”
“Tell him to hike faster.”
“Will do.”
Yasira hangs up.
She sits down at her desk and opens the old MacBook. Of course it wants to know a password from her. She looks at her colleague.
“What’s the cat’s name?”
Michael thinks for a moment. “Minka,” he then says. He has an amazingly good memory for names.
Yasira types in “Minka” and the notebook actually unlocks.
“Bingo,” says Yasira.
“Why haven’t the village sheriffs taken the computer already?” asks Yasira.
“Because they’re village sheriffs,” says Michael.
Yasira nods. “The colleagues probably thought they were dealing with a runaway teenager. They didn’t know about the video.”
Yasira clicks around a bit on the computer.
Opens the mail program. But there’s not much to find.
A bit of school, a bit of . Lena doesn’t seem to have sent many emails.
Is email the next medium to die out? Unfortunately, Lena hasn’t synchronized her photos and Messenger with her notebook.
A thorough search of the computer would still take hours.
“Ask if we can take it with us . . .”
Michael leaves the room and returns shortly afterwards with a positive answer. Yasira has already packed the laptop. All in all, Lena seems to be a normal teenager.
They go back to the kitchen. For the entire half hour they’ve been here, Lena’s brother has been repeating the Prelude in E minor over and over again.
“Would it be possible to talk to Emil too?” asks Yasira.
Frank Palmer sighs. “He won’t talk to strangers since Lena disappeared. Your colleagues haven’t had any success either. Even before that, Emil was rather quiet. I’m sure he doesn’t know anything that could help you.”
“Can we try anyway?”
“I don’t think Emil . . .”
“I’ll be very careful. I promise.”
Frank Palmer hesitates. Then he shrugs his shoulders with a sigh and leads them both into the living room.
Emil immediately stops playing the piano and looks at the intruders with wide eyes.
But as his father had predicted, he remains silent when Yasira asks him a few questions about his sister and the day she disappeared.
Only when Yasira points to the instrument and asks: “May I?” Emil nods, stands up, and lets her take the piano bench.
Wordlessly, with a small gesture of her left hand, Yasira waves the two men out of the room.
Then she turns to the sheet of music. Bumpily at first, but then more and more fluently, she plays the Prelude in E minor herself.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Emil smiling.
“Did your sister perhaps tell you where she was going on Saturday?” asks Yasira as she continues to play. Emil shakes his head.
“Did she often just disappear at the weekend?”
A nod.
“Did she ever tell you where she was going?”
Head shaking.
“Do you know if she has a boyfriend?”
Shrugging shoulders.
They communicate in this strange way until Yasira has played the prelude twice. Then she gives up. Emil knows just as little about his sister’s whereabouts as his father does.
“That’s a beautiful piece you’re playing,” she says as they say goodbye. “Sad, but beautiful.”
In the hallway, she turns to Frank Palmer again. “If it’s all right with you, we’ll send a forensics team to go through Lena’s room thoroughly. It’s unlikely, I know, but we might find some fingerprints or DNA traces that don’t belong there.”
Frank Palmer just nods, resigned to his fate.
Yasira hands him her business card.
“If you think of anything else. Anything at all—give me a call.”
Lena’s father nods again.
“Could you . . .” he begins. “Could you tell the press to leave us alone?”
“Of course,” says Michael. “I can’t tell them to leave, but we’ll make it very clear that you’re not interested in an interview.”
At the front door, Yasira, following an impulse, asks Frank Palmer one last question: “Have you heard of Active Homeland-Protection? About a man who calls himself Bear?”
Palmer shakes his head.
“Should I? Means nothing to me. Never heard of it.”
On the short drive from the Palmers’ to their hotel, Yasira almost falls asleep.
She finds conversations like this incredibly draining.
In response to Michael’s usual question, she just shakes her head.
No hotel bar today. It’s been a long day.
Instead, Yasira goes to her small room. Although she’s terribly tired, she digs through Lena’s computer.
She used it mainly for school. The most telling data, photos, chats, and contacts are still slumbering in her uncracked phone.
Shortly after eleven, she closes Lena’s laptop and reads through her team’s reports on her cell phone.
Everyone has been working overtime and yet so far they have not been able to establish the identity of even one of the four perpetrators.
Katja Jürgens writes that they are of course continuing their search, but now fear that there may be no data on the perpetrators.
There could be any number of reasons for this.
The most likely are illegal entry or, of course, failure on the part of the authorities. Yasira bets on the latter.
There’s little concrete information about the uploader either; it’s apparently a trail that was deliberately obscured—that much Jenny can already tell.
To make matters worse, there are countless copies.
“IP hopping,” “proxy server,” and “gate network” are just three of the enigmatic technical terms Jenny’s email is teeming with.
About communicating with YouTube, she writes: “It’s the house that makes crazy people. ” At least that, Yasira understands.
Even though she’s very tired, she knows she’ll have trouble falling asleep. So she decides to take a hot bath to relax. She has just undressed when her phone rings.
It’s Frank Palmer.
“Hello Mr. Palmer,” she says, “what can I do for you?”
“I . . . I,” Palmer stammers. “I got a ransom demand.”