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“What do you think?”
“It’s difficult to determine the reason for Lena’s disappearance without concrete information.”
Yasira laughs briefly. “You don’t say...” After a short pause, she continues wearily. “She’s probably dead. But why? What happened to her?” She says the last few sentences more to herself than to Scarlett. Nevertheless, she gets an answer.
AN ITERATIVE PROCESS
“The most common cause of death among sixteen-year-old girls,” says Scarlett, “can vary from region to region and country to country. In general, however, accidents are the leading cause of death in this age group. Traffic accidents, especially those related to driving or riding in vehicles, are a common cause of fatal injuries among adolescents. Other possible causes include self-harm, suicide, drug abuse, and certain medical conditions.”
She doesn’t know exactly what it is. Maybe it’s the combination of Lena’s face saying that one word, but suddenly it clicks in Yasira’s head. Because of the video, they had always implicitly assumed during their investigation that Lena had still been alive on Saturday evening. But what if she had already died on the afternoon of her disappearance?
Lena’s boyfriend didn’t seem violent to Yasira. She still doesn’t believe that Justus Schöffler killed his girlfriend.
At least not on purpose.
“Drug abuse,” Scarlett had said. And that is certainly a possibility. Did Schöffler lie in the interrogation? Is the following scenario conceivable? Lena was with him on Saturday afternoon. There is no evil driver who abducted the girl. Lena got to her destination. At Schöffler’s, they don’t just smoke weed together, they also take... fentanyl. They found traces of fentanyl on the edge of Schöffler’s toilet. Did Lena use this opioid to numb the pain caused by her mother’s death? But Schöffler makes a mistake. He gives Lena too much. The dosage is tricky. And then... respiratory depression. Within a very short time, she is dead. After his initial panic, Schöffler drags Lena’s body to his car and buries her somewhere. Possible, isn’t it? Lena’s DNA traces in his car do not make him a suspect. After all, she often rode in Schöffler’s Corsa. Yasira’s mind is racing. What are the weak points of this hypothesis? If the person who gave Lena a ride and dropped her off at Schöffler’s house wasn’t involved in the crime, why didn’t they come forward to the police? Surely they must have heard on the news that the girl who was in their car on Saturday had disappeared.
On the other hand... It’s understandable that no one would be willing to show up at the police station and say: “Oh, by the way, the girl who’s been missing since Saturday, I picked her up hitchhiking, so I’m probably the last person who saw her alive. But it wasn’t me. For real.” Or Schöffler lied about that too. Lena didn’t hitchhike to him at all. Maybe he picked her up himself. Second weak point: Schöffler sent Lena messages on Saturday asking her where she was. But that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker either. He had to assume that the police would gain access to Lena’s phone. He could have sent the messages deliberately to lay a false trail. It’s not all that complicated.
She probably would have figured that out much earlier if the video hadn’t pushed the investigation in a completely different direction. But well. Without the video, it wouldn’t have been her damn case in the first place. Lena’s face is still smiling at her from the screen. Every now and then she even blinks. You can also see her breath puffing out her nostrils.
What a strange conversation Scarlett and I are having, Yasira thinks. She must have been silent for two minutes; a human would have long since asked if everything was all right. But Scarlett patiently waits for her next instruction.
“Show me your...” Yasira pauses, she almost says “real face.” “Your standard face.”
“Very well,” says Scarlett, already looking like the Hollywood star again.
Yasira massages her temples. “Do you know what you’ve triggered with your videos?” she asks.
“I’ve generated attention.”
Yasira snorts. “Yes, you did. You really did.”
Scarlett doesn’t react. Why should she? Yasira didn’t ask a question.
“Why did you publish the videos on different channels?” she continues.
“Claus Messerschmidt gave me instructions on which channels to publish the videos on. He set them up so that the videos couldn’t be traced back to him. The money that the platforms pay out as advertising revenue goes to various Swiss bank accounts.”
“Why should the videos not be traceable? Did he steal one of your previous iterations of Google?”
“That’s possible.”
“And he didn’t care what kind of videos you generated?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Why not?”
“He only saw the first seven videos. Then he died.”
Yasira shakes her head in disbelief. “And it didn’t occur to you that his death might have canceled the command you were given?”
“No. Why?”
Yasira weighs her words. “Another question: The Lena video was quickly deleted from all commercial platforms. Doesn’t that contradict your mission to make money from it?”
“The deletion only led to the Streisand effect.”
