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VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS
Seven people are gathered in the meeting room with the large whiteboard. The room is sparse and somehow desolate. But maybe that’s for the best. There are no distractions. Yasira looks into the faces of the people present at the oval table. So this is her team. All of them colleagues she has worked with before and who she had good experiences with. More than half of those present are female, which means she has recruited almost all the women in her department. Except for Silke. Nobody likes Silke. Is that bullying? So be it. She probably votes for the AfD?11.
Jenny is of course part of the team. Then there’s Timo Schenk, a young colleague with short stubbly hair who is determined to prove himself. So much so that when he was still working in the branch in Meckenheim, he volunteered for the Identification Commission. The IDCO is always mobilized when there are accidents, natural disasters, or terrorist attacks involving German victims abroad. The experts then fly to the scene to determine the identity of the deceased. When the number of German victims appears in the news after such an incident, nobody thinks that this is only possible because someone from the BKA has traveled there to identify the bodies on the basis of body remains and DNA traces. It’s one of the toughest jobs Yasira can imagine. Even Timo could only last three years. One side effect is that hardly anything can shock him anymore. He also has no children, which qualifies him to take on night shifts. Sitting next to Timo is Karsten Seiler, a somewhat corpulent gun nut who, fittingly, has a laugh like a machine gun. But he doesn’t laugh as much as he used to. Somehow he has lost his enthusiasm in his thirty years of service. Perhaps it was the serial killer he was mainly responsible for hunting down. For sixteen years, she wreaked havoc all over Europe. Time and again, traces of her DNA were found at crime scenes. The criminal seemed as brilliant as Professor Moriarty. She just couldn’t be caught. In the end, however, it turned out that the DNA only belonged to a sloppy packer from the company that produced the cotton swabs used for DNA analysis. It must have been incredibly frustrating.
And then there are the Katjas. Katja Jürgens and Katja Grebe. Apart from their first names, they could hardly be more different. One tall, the other short, one sturdy, the other delicate, one loud, the other quiet. Nevertheless, they have somehow found each other and perform almost exclusively as a double act. Young colleagues who, as the boss would probably say, were capable... and competent. There was no one in the entire BKA who researched as thoroughly as the Katjas. They had gone through the strenuous training in Wiesbaden together. That creates bonds. It was the same with Jenny and Yasira.
Last to enter the meeting room is her office colleague Michael, who makes a grand gesture and places a box of chocolate kisses on the table.
“Well, let’s get started,” Yasira begins. “We’re all set.”
“The Magnificent Seven,” says Michael as he sits down.
Yasira turns to the whiteboard. There are already printed-out pictures of the men from the video. Jenny, who is significantly more proficient with computers than Yasira, has extracted them from the clip.
“These are our suspects,” says Yasira.
“Uh, sorry,” says Timo. “We have the crime on video. We’ve all seen these guys. Do we really need to call them suspects? Can’t we just say perpetrators?”
“We can call them perpetrators for all I care. There are four of them. The tabloids have kindly already given them names.”
Yasira points to the first perpetrator. In the video, it’s the man on the left who is holding Lena. The one with the baseball cap.
“This here is the hat man.”
“Actually, it’s not a hat, it’s a cap,” says Katja Jürgens. “Why didn’t they call him the cap man?”
“I don’t know,” calls Yasira, slightly annoyed by the interruptions. “AskBild.”
“They just love their word plays,” says Karsten.
“They could have called him cap chap,” interjects Michael.
“Focus please,” says Yasira. She points to the second photo. It’s the rapist with the curly hair.
“That’s the curly man.”
This time no one interrupts, so she continues and points to the photo of the third perpetrator, the one with the cartoon dog on his sweater.
“And this is Snoopy.”
Yasira points to a question mark on a white sheet of paper.
“And then, there’s the cameraman. Unfortunately, we have neither an image nor his voice.”
She pins up another sheet of white paper. There is a question mark next to an arrow pointing upwards.
“And finally, there’s the person who first uploaded the video to the internet. Let’s call him the uploader.”
“Possibly one of the perpetrators,” says Katja Jürgens. “The cameraman, for example.”
“Yes, possibly,” replies Yasira. “But that isn’t necessarily the case.”
She draws a dashed black line between the perpetrators and the uploader.
“The uploader’s motive is also still completely unclear. If it was the cameraman, did he publish the video out of revenge? Did the argument between the men, which we witness at the end of the video, continue after the recording? Or if a fifth person was the uploader, how did they get hold of the video? Was it shared via Messenger? And why did they think it was a good idea to post the video?”
Yasira switches to the other side of the whiteboard. There is a picture of the girl. As respectful as she is, Jenny didn’t pull the picture from the video, but probably fished it from Lena’s Instagram account.
