Eye Collector, The Read Online Free PDF

morning: on the lawn not far from the garden shed. Although her legs were splayed, revealing an almost completely clean-shaven crotch, a sex crime could probably be dismissed from
consideration.
    The missing twins, Toby and Lea, and the stopwatch in Lucia’s hand told another story.
    A story told in the Eye Collector’s demented language, thought Stoya.
    The post-war era’s most horrific series of murders had begun three months earlier, when Peter Strahl, a forty-two-year-old bricklayer, arrived home after spending the preceding few weeks
on a large-scale construction site in Frankfurt. His marriage had suffered for years from his regular absences, and so, having been away on the job even longer than usual, he had come bearing some
little peace offerings in the shape of flowers for his wife and a plastic doll for his daughter Karla. He never got to present them with those gifts. He found his wife lying dead in the hallway
with a broken neck, clutching something in her hand. It proved to be a stopwatch; a standard model widely sold all over Germany.
    When forensics detached the dead woman’s fingers from this timer, it set the digital display in motion, the figures counting down to zero.
    A bomb was initially suspected, so all twelve flats in the high-rise building were promptly evacuated. The cruel truth of the matter, however, was that the countdown related to Karla. The little
girl had disappeared without trace. Neither the police nor her frantic father succeeded in finding the hiding place to which her psychopath abductor had taken her – a hiding place in which
she was murdered when his forty-five-hour deadline ran out. This was the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the pathologist’s findings. The location where little Karla was found, a field
on the outskirts of Marienfelde, was definitely not the murder scene because there was no water in the vicinity. It was assumed by the public that the Eye Collector asphyxiated his victims in his
hideaway. Although this was essentially correct, one important pathologist’s finding was suppressed for tactical reasons: the children were drowned. Traces of chemicals were found in
the foam that builds up in the bronchial tubes when drowning people instinctively inhale water. Since these were present in all the kids he killed, it was assumed that the Eye Collector had taken
the children to the same place. Analysis of the water, and of impurities on his victims’ skin, indicated that they were not drowned in free-flowing water, but this did little to narrow down
the search for his hideaway. Any house with an indoor swimming pool would have fitted the bill.
    Even a fucking bathtub would do, thought Stoya.
    Only one thing was certain: neither Karla, nor the two children who were murdered a few weeks later, Melanie and Robert, had been killed outdoors. Nor had their left eyes been removed where
they were found...
    ‘I’ll kill the swine,’ Stoya heard a voice behind him growl as he knelt, motionless, beside the body. Not even death had succeeded in depriving Lucia of the well-toned,
diet-conscious sex appeal often found in women whose husbands are considerably older, uglier and – last but far from least – wealthier than them. As the owner of Berlin’s biggest
dry-cleaning chain, Thomas Traunstein could definitely have afforded more than one house and more than one woman like Lucia.
    ‘I’ll kill him, I swear!’
    The detective leaning over Stoya’s shoulder could scarcely stand up in the tent that forensics had erected over the body a few minutes earlier. Nearly two metres tall, Mike Scholokowsky
was the kind of friend you called when you were moving house and needed someone to carry a refrigerator up five flights of stairs.
    ‘Or her,’ Stoya murmured softly. His knee joints creaked as he slowly straightened up, staring intently at the dead woman.
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘You said him, Scholle. It could be her. We still don’t know the perp’s