He looked around to see Lieutenant Chieske and Sergeant Hoch push through the crowd in the hallway and pass by the patrolman guarding the door. In a moment, they were standing by him looking into the inner office.
“Messy,” Chieske said.
“Yah,” Karl responded.
“So what happened?”
Karl beckoned to a man sitting in the corner of the outer office.
“Who is he?” Hoch asked.
“This,” Karl said as the man approached, “is Stephan Burckardt, personal secretary to Master Schmidt. He was here when it happened. Tell it again, Herr Burckardt.”
“I was working at my desk,” Burckardt said, pointing to a small desk to one side of the room. “The master had dictated several letters earlier, and I was writing them out for his signature. I heard the noise. I knocked on his door…”
“The door into his office was closed?” Hoch interrupted.
“Yah.”
“Was that unusual in any way?”
“No.” Burckardt shook his head. “The master often closed his door when he wanted to concentrate on something. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Okay, you knocked on his door. Did you get an answer?”
“Uh, no.”
What then?”
“I, uh, I knocked again.”
“Did you say anything?” Chieske asked.
“I think I said, ‘Master Schmidt, are you all right?’”
“Then what happened?” Hoch again.
“I opened the door, and saw…” Burckardt swallowed hard, and waved a hand at the doorway.
“Did you go in? Did you touch anything?”
This time from Chieske. Karl saw that his two fellow detectives were alternating questions, not giving the secretary much time to think.
“Yah.” Burckardt swallowed again. “I, uh, I touched his neck, I think.”
“And after that?”
“I, uh, I was still in there when the mayor and he,” he pointed to Honister, “arrived.”
“The blood drops were still fresh when we walked in,” Karl added. “It had to have happened just a few minutes before we got here. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the shot.”
“But you didn’t hear it?” Gotthilf asked.
“No.”
“And neither did I,” Otto Gericke spoke from behind them. They turned toward him.
“I was just upstairs tending to my sister. She’s now a widow, and she is not taking this well. But her pastor, Dr. de Spaignart, has arrived, so I have left her in his care.”
Karl noticed a certain air about the mayor, what you might call a he’s welcome to her attitude, which for a moment seemed odd. But then, thinking of his own sister, perhaps he could understand.
“So this happened before you could talk to Herr Schmidt?” Byron asked.
“Yah.” Karl knew he sounded bitter. He had reason to. His whole case had just been shut down.
“Get lots of pictures, get the body to Doc Schlegel, and grab all the papers you can find.” Byron again. “Maybe you can still figure something out.”
“Right.”
The other two detectives left. So did the mayor. Karl was left to watch the photographers and wait for the medical examiner. He ignored the men in the hallway who were still looking in and talking not-so-quietly.
He pulled a search warrant from his pocket, looked over at the secretary.
“You have boxes here?”
“I think so.”
“Go find them. All the files and papers in this office are going to the Polizei station.”
* * *
Standing in the shadow of the Heilige-Geist Church, Gotthilf stared at where Dr. Schlegel was doing a preliminary examination of yet another corpse. Beside him, Byron was muttering one curse after another under his breath.
Gotthilf elbowed his partner. “Stop it. We don’t even know that that’s our guy.”
Byron snorted. “A one-eyed guy turns up shot to death in a back street of the old city. After everything that’s been going on, I somehow doubt that this is just some random guy who lost an eye somewhere somewhen. There can’t be that many one-eyed men around Magdeburg right this minute.”
After a moment of consideration, Gotthilf gave a reluctant nod of agreement.
“Nathaniel,” Byron called over to the police photographer who had finished packing up his equipment, “I need copies as soon as you can get them.”
The photographer touched the brim of his hat, and headed off, followed by his assistant.
Dr. Schlegel stood and wiped his hands on a towel. “Dead since before midnight,” he said, forestalling the detectives’ first question. “Probable cause of death, bullet wound to the head. I’ll examine the body in detail as soon as we get it back to the morgue, but the blood evidence indicates the bullet wound was not post-mortem, so I doubt I’ll find anything else. Assuming I don’t, you’ll have a report later today.”