Page 26 of Views
The morning brings a poll byBild, according to which eighteen percent of all Germans would be willing to join Active Homeland-Protection. A startling percentage. Yasira doesn’t know howBildclaims to have found this out so quickly.
“Probably through surveying their own employees,” Michael speculates over breakfast.
Yasira eats another dry roll while scanning the news sites on her phone.
The head of the CDU feels compelled to explain in an interview that the monopoly of violence naturally lies with the state, but that the concerns of the population must be taken seriously and that he certainly understands the impulse to want to defend one’s country.
In fact, Active Homeland-Protection is rapidly becoming a thing. Someone developed a logo. An A on an H, so that it looks like a two-story house with an attic. The whole thing on a small hill with grass around it. It doesn’t look martial at all. Almost cute. Compatible with the masses. Bear has found numerous imitators who announce in videos that they are joining Active Homeland-Protection. Among them are a few celebrities whose market value is not even enough forDancing with the Stars.
Most of the homeland protectors have weapons in their hands. Yasira sees an amazing number of crossbows. She has already come across them among the Reichsbürger. A crossbow does not require a firearms license, even though it is an absolutely lethal weapon. Some of the men, and they are almost entirely men, are already wearing shirts printed with the Active Homeland-Protection logo. Some of them are downright ridiculous to Yasira. One with sparse red hair and a strong Hessian dialect copies “Bear” down to the last detail. He ends his video seriously with the words “I’m going hunting. Call me Red Fox.”
“I wonder what they’ll call themselves when they run out of native predators,” Michael mocks.
By email, Jenny tells them both about a Telegram account of the Active Homeland-Protection, which is quickly gaining users. Of course, the chats are encrypted, but that obviously doesn’t matter since Jenny has simply joined the group. The administrator doesn’t seem particularly picky. He probably would have even accepted Yasira’s colleague with the username Jenny BKA. There are a lot of staunch-right slogans in the group, some hints about alleged sightings of the perpetrators, but nothing useful. Nothing concrete.
Yasira listlessly stirs her coffee as Jenny contacts her again. This time with some good news. The technical service has managed to crack Lena’s phone. Jenny is already working on an analysis, but Yasira wants to go through the device herself. There is nothing more revealing about a person than their unlocked smartphone. So after breakfast, they head back to Berlin. If it had been up to Yasira, they could have left before.
On the A2, Michael overtakes several police vans full of officers, presumably being carted to Berlin for tonight’s big demonstrations.
“Just in case you were wondering,” says Michael, “there’s a shittier job than ours.”
Yasira snorts. “I don’t know, sometimes I’d trade places.”
They’re barely back in their office when Jenny comes knocking. She’s taken over the Saturday shift. That’s not good for your relationship, Yasira thinks. But she doesn’t say anything, because of course Jenny knows that herself.
“I read your evaluation in the car,” she says instead.
“... but you want to have a look yourself,” says Jenny. “I know.”
And with a smile, she hands her friend the unlocked cell phone.
The first thing Yasira opens is WhatsApp. The chat with Schöffler starts almost exactly eight months ago. Apparently, they smoked weed together quite often—though it’s always just hinted at, never stated outright. Eventually they started exchanging kiss emojis and so on. On days when Lena had to cancel because her father “freaked out” again, the two of them would sometimes send each other nude pictures back and forth. What kind of crazy trend is this? Yasira realizes she must talk to her daughter to ensure she never engages in such nonsense. She sighs. This was going to be a conversation that would reliably end in an argument, including door slamming. Yasira continues to scroll through the chats. Lena also seems to have had frequent arguments with her father. Not unusual for a teenager, is it? It feels a bit wrong to pry into Lena’s most private correspondence like this, but she can’t afford to have these scruples. On Saturday afternoon, Lena called Schöffler. After that, she didn’t use her phone again and presumably set off to meet her boyfriend. By hitchhiking. Yasira shakes her head. She would have to talk to Zara about that too. Be that as it may. Schöffler sent several WhatsApp messages on Saturday evening asking where she was. But these messages, Jenny reports, were not read until she herself examined the phone. Everything else she finds in the chat history supports Justus Schöffler’s account. Unfortunately. It would have been too nice and easy. Why Lena left her phone at home remains unexplained.
The apps on her smartphone are the usual ones: Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram on the home screen. Yasira opens Instagram and is amazed by the number of followers Lena has accumulated. Apparently, thousands of people worldwide believe the best way to show their solidarity with the poor girl is by liking her profile. Whatever that’s supposed to achieve. Other apps include one for English vocabulary, a calculator, a calendar with hardly anything in it. A few games. Candy Crush and the like of that. Yasira opens the Photos app. She finds Lena with her brother, her father, dark-haired Emily... Interestingly, no photos with Schöffler. Why? Fear that her father might discover them? But sending nude photos... strange. Yasira continues to browse through everything she finds on the iPhone.
When she finally puts the phone down, she has a better feeling for who Lena is, but unfortunately still has no clue what happened a week ago on Saturday. Whose car did Lena get into? Obviously the wrong one. Unfortunately, Katja Jürgens hasn’t found any useful surveillance cameras. The only gas station that’s reasonably close by the Palmers’ actually has one, but it’s been out of order for the past two weeks. When things don’t go well, they really don’t go well. The outskirts of Halberstadt seem to be a good place for someone wanting to disappear.
After lunch, Yasira receives the forensics lab report. Nothing suspicious was found in Schöffler’s car. Of course there are fingerprints and DNA traces from Lena everywhere, but that is hardly surprising. The most interesting point of the report is that they found remnants of fentanyl in Schöffler’s house. On the edge of the toilet seat. Lena’s boyfriend probably meant to quickly flush the stuff down the toilet before his failed escape.
Yasira shows the report to Michael. “Well, Schöffler wasn’t only smoking pot.”
“Fentanyl,” Michael mutters. “We’ve seen that before. Wasn’t there a bunch of fentanyl deaths in Dublin the other day?”
“Yeah.” Yasira has read about it too. Two milligrams of the devil’s stuff is enough to cause a potentially fatal respiratory depression.
“Coolio died from that shit,” says Michael.
“Coolio?”
“Yeah, you know.Gangsta’s Paradise.And Prince, too.”
“ThePrince?” asks Yasira.
“You don’t have to be rich to be my girl,”sings Michael.“You don’t have to be cool to rule my world.”
“I think Matthew Perry took it too,” says Yasira.
“Who?”
