Erased E-Book

Patrick Hofstetter

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

A CEO is found dead in his office. Within hours the company begins to fracture. Secrets surface. Loyalties shift. Fear spreads. Detective Brandt enters a world of corporate suspense where pressure and silence are more dangerous than any weapon. The real threat is not who committed the crime but what the company is desperate to hide. A tense psychological thriller about guilt, power and the cost of truth.

Leseprobe

To Nikita & Kateryna

The elevator hummed to a stop on the sixth floor, and Sabine Krämer caught her reflection in the steel panel: hollow eyes, a mouth pressed thin, hair she had meant to tame days ago. Monday. The word itself felt like weight. She inhaled sharply, squared her shoulders, and stepped out.

The corridor was deserted. Too quiet. Only the distant thrum of the ventilation system followed her, and the crisp echo of her heels. A knot tightened in her stomach as she neared her boss’s office—an instinctive recoil she had never been able to unlearn.

Today, the feeling was stronger. Like a warning.

She pushed open the glass door.

And froze.

Johannes Riedel sat in his leather chair, leaning back as if caught mid-thought. But his head lolled too far to one side, his mouth hung open, his eyes stared past her— blank, unseeing.

A stillness that was absolute.

A stillness that did not belong to the living.

Sabine didn’t scream. Didn’t move. Her fingers clenched around her handbag strap until they ached. A part of her still expected him to snap upright, bark an insult, demand coffee, tear into her with that clipped, cutting voice—

But he remained motionless.

Only when her heartbeat stopped ringing in her ears did the truth settle in:

Johannes Riedel was dead.

And then, against every rule of decency she had ever learned, something flared inside her.

Not fear.

Not grief.

Relief.

A tiny, treacherous spark of freedom, warm and dangerous.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Markus stepped inside, and his face drained of color when he saw Riedel— though not from sorrow. Something flickered there. Shock, yes. And something disturbingly close to the emotion burning in her own chest.

“Shit,” he breathed. Nothing more.

One by one, the others drifted in, drawn by the silence. Not one of them cried out. Nobody rushed forward in panic. They stood as if they had rehearsed this moment, each carrying their own private history with the man now slumped before them.

Sabine’s gaze drifted to the computer screen.

The cursor blinked in a half-written message.

If you’re reading this, then you know that—

And nothing else.

Her pulse spiked.

Know what? Know who? Know about whom?

Before she could reach for the mouse, a hand landed on her shoulder—warm, heavy.

Markus. His face sheened with sweat.

“Don’t,” he whispered. Almost pleading.

“Why?” The word slipped out, sharp and low.

He didn’t answer.

But the way he avoided the screen told her enough: He feared what might come after the unfinished sentence.

Across the room, eyes met eyes. Suspicion moved like smoke between them—thin, curling, impossible to grasp. No one trusted anyone. Sabine felt it seep into her skin.

A cold realization formed.

The police would come. They would ask questions. They would look for motive.

And everyone here had one.

But Sabine’s fear wasn’t the fear of a murderer. It was the fear of someone who knew precisely how fragile truth could look under fluorescent lights.

It wasn’t the dead man that terrified her.

It was the possibility that someone would think she had killed him.

And as she stared at the blinking cursor, at the sentence frozen mid-breath, she sensed something darker:

This Monday wasn’t going to end.

Not until the unfinished message found its ending.

Not until the truth surfaced.

Not until someone—maybe her—became the prime suspect in a murder she wasn’t even sure was a murder.

Markus Heller pushed through the stairwell door two minutes after Sabine, his pulse already too fast for the early hour. He had rehearsed half the night—lines he intended to deliver to Riedel with a steadiness he did not feel.

I won’t accept your humiliations anymore.

I demand an explanation.

If you mock me again in front of the team, I’m done.

Had he believed he would actually say them? Maybe. Until he didn’t sleep. Until the tension beneath his skin built like static. Until the phone call.

He shoved the memory away as he stepped into the corridor.

Something was wrong.

The light felt colder than usual, the silence pressed in like a warning. A cleaning cart sat abandoned by the glass door—strange at this hour—but he dismissed it. His focus had narrowed to a fixed point ahead: Riedel’s office.

Markus entered the open space.

And stopped breathing.

Sabine stood a few meters away, rigid. But Markus barely registered her. His eyes locked on the figure in the chair—head tilted, mouth slack, eyes glassy.

Riedel.

Dead.

The world didn’t lurch. Didn’t fracture. Instead, a thought snapped into place with unnerving clarity: It’s over.

The man who had called him “an overpromoted intern” in front of the entire floor. Who had dangled a promised promotion for months, only to yank it away with an indifferent shrug. Who had watched him break and then acted bored by the spectacle.

Gone.

His shoulders sagged. Only then did he realize how tightly he had been wound.

He set his briefcase down. Too loud. He winced.

Sabine glanced at him, eyes wide—not with grief, he noticed, but with something dangerously close to understanding.

His gaze drifted to the desk. The computer screen glowed softly, casting an eerie wash across the dead man’s face.

A message.

Half-written.

If you’re reading this, then you know that—

Markus felt his throat close.

Who was he writing to?

And—what did they know?

Sabine took a tentative step toward the mouse. Instinct kicked in before thought. He reached out, pressed a hand to her shoulder.

“Don’t,” he whispered. Too urgent. Too revealing.

She jerked slightly. “Why not?”

Because the message might have been meant for him. Because of the phone call.

The memory surged: his phone vibrating past midnight, the display showing an unknown number. The voice, unmistakable even slurred with fatigue or drink:

“Heller… tomorrow… we need to talk. There’s something you should know. If things go wrong—”

Then a sudden noise. A sharp inhale. The line had gone dead.

He hadn’t told anyone.

He wouldn’t. Not now. Not ever—unless he wanted to see his world collapse around him.

Behind them, footsteps multiplied as the others arrived. Murmurs spread like ripples.

“Heart attack?”

“Maybe…”

“Or maybe not.”

Markus kept his eyes fixed on the blinking cursor. The unfinished sentence pulsed like a threat.

He swallowed hard.

He had a motive. Everyone knew that.

But he also had something worse— a secret tied to the last hours of Johannes Riedel’s life.

And as the room filled with whispering colleagues and the faint siren of an approaching ambulance, Markus knew he had already made his first mistake:

He had come back.

He had stepped into the scene.

And somewhere inside that unfinished message, his name might be waiting.

Helena Voss didn’t believe in premonitions—yet something tightened in her chest the moment she stepped off the elevator. Mondays were usually bad, but this one felt wrong in a way she couldn’t name.

She crossed the corridor, logged into her mental checklist of system backups, server audits, and data access reviews. Routine. Predictable. Safe.

But the moment she entered the open-plan office and saw the cluster of people frozen around Riedel’s chair, her breath halted.

Johannes Riedel sat slumped, eyes open, mouth slack.

Dead.

Helena didn’t gasp. She didn’t move. She had seen death before—her father at the kitchen table, head bowed over his last cup of coffee. The expression was the same. The finality, the emptiness.

But unlike then, Helena felt nothing here.

No grief.

Only clarity.

She approached slowly, her gaze landing first not on the body, but on the desk.

Two glasses.

One half-empty.

One barely touched.

Her pulse flicked like a glitch in a code stream.

Because she remembered last night.

She had been the last to leave the IT floor. When she passed Riedel’s office, the door hadn’t been fully closed. Light spilled into the dark hallway—and she had glanced in just long enough to see the scene.

Riedel.

Sitting where he now sat.

A second man standing across from him, backlit, features hidden.

And two glasses between them.

They hadn’t sounded like colleagues.

They had sounded like opponents.

Everything sharp, clipped—words used like tools meant to cut.

She hadn’t recognized the voice. She hadn’t lingered. She had walked away, pretending she heard nothing, saw nothing.

Now, staring at that same desk, she realized:

the second glass should not be here this morning.

Someone had returned—or never left.

A ripple of unease moved through the room as colleagues whispered behind her.

“Heart attack?”

“Doesn’t look like it…”

“Who found him first?”

Their voices blurred. Helena focused on the computer screen.

A message. Incomplete.

If you’re reading this, then you know that—

A message addressed to someone.

Someone specific.

Her skin prickled.

Because she could access every one of Riedel’s accounts.

Every inbox.

Every draft folder.

Every server log.

If she wanted to know who he meant, she could find out. But she wouldn’t say that aloud. Not here. Not now. That knowledge made her too valuable—and far too vulnerable.

Behind her, Keller muttered instructions. Sabine and Markus kept stealing glances at the screen, as if hoping the half-sentence might somehow complete itself.

Helena folded her arms, letting her eyes scan the faces around her.

Everyone looked guilty.

But only she knew there had been someone else—someone from outside this office—here last night.

Someone who drank with Riedel.

Someone who argued with him.

Someone whose face she had not seen.

A real threat.

A real suspect.

She swallowed the truth before it could rise to her lips.

Let them circle each other with suspicion. Let them guess. Let them worry.

She would keep her secrets.

She always did.

Because in this room full of motives, only she knew something none of the others did:

Riedel hadn’t been alone before he died.

And whoever had been with him…

might still be inside the building.

Keller stepped into the office with the heavy, deliberate tread of a man who had seen death before and never grew used to it. His gaze landed instantly on the body.

Riedel.

Head tilted.

Eyes fixed.

A stillness that spoke louder than any alarm.

The employees clustered nearby fell silent as Keller approached—people always quieted when he entered a room. His broad shoulders, gravel-deep voice, and everclinking key ring had that effect. Most of them thought he was muscle without a mind. Most of them were wrong.

He scanned the scene with practiced precision.

No overturned chair.

No signs of struggle.

No shattered objects—

Then he saw it.

A glint. Barely visible on the carpet beneath the desk.

Keller crouched slowly, blocking the view from the others. Between two fibers of cheap office carpet lay a shard of glass—thin as an eyelash, sharp as suspicion. He plucked it up with a movement so small no one noticed.

He slipped it into his pocket.

The glass didn’t belong to Riedel’s usual drinking habits. It belonged to something—or someone—else.

A foreign presence.

A memory stabbed through him. Last night. The camera feeds downscaled due to Riedel’s ridiculous “manual recording only” policy. No continuous footage. No automatically saved streams. A security system sabotaged by the man who now lay dead.

That was when Keller had noticed it:

A figure in the hallway, half in shadow, too swift, too deliberate to be cleaning staff. Someone who didn’t belong. Someone whose steps echoed like they owned the place.

He had paused. Watched.

And done nothing.

He told himself the visitor was authorized. That if Riedel wanted secrecy, it wasn’t Keller’s business. That he wasn’t a cop anymore. That he didn’t need another mess on his record.

But now Riedel was dead.

And Keller’s inaction tasted like guilt.

Behind him, someone whispered. “Could be a heart attack.”

Keller let out a low grunt. “Maybe.”

But he didn’t believe it. Not with a missing glass, a stranger in the building, and a shard that shimmered like evidence no one else was supposed to see.

His eyes swept the room—Sabine rigid with tension, Markus jittering with nerves, Helena calculating silently, the intern staring at the floor, Claudia poised and watchful, and a man he didn’t recognize lingering near the entry.

Too many secrets in one room.

And Keller now held one more.

He straightened up, voice firm. “No one touches anything. No one leaves.”

They obeyed, though not because they trusted him— because they feared what the scene implied.

The blinking computer screen caught his attention next.

If you’re reading this, then you know that—

A message cut short.

A warning frozen mid-sentence.

Keller stared at it, the weight in his pocket growing heavier by the second.

He wasn’t covering for a murderer.

No—his guilt lay elsewhere.

He had let danger walk freely through this building last night.

And now, with a corpse in the room and too many motives in too many faces, Keller realized the most terrifying possibility:

The stranger might still be inside.

Lukas kept his head down when he stepped off the elevator, a stack of freshly printed documents clutched to his chest. Two weeks into his internship, and he still felt like a misplaced file—awkward, unnecessary, one nudge away from sliding off the desk entirely.

The hallway was unnervingly quiet.

No barked orders.

No impatient footsteps.

No Riedel.

He hesitated before pushing open the glass door.

Inside, the room felt frozen. Sabine stood stiff as a pole, Markus pale and twitching. Others hovered in a tense semicircle.

And in the center—

Riedel, draped across his chair like a discarded marionette.

Lukas inhaled sharply, the papers in his hands trembling.

He expected someone to scream. To panic. To run.

No one did.

They just watched.

As if they’d been waiting for this.

He swallowed and took a timid step forward. His eyes moved across the office in small, nervous flicks—he wasn’t sure where to look, so he looked everywhere.

That’s when he noticed the glint on the carpet.

But before he could take a closer look, Keller bent down, blocked his view, and pocketed whatever it was. Lukas said nothing. Interns didn’t question men like Keller.

His gaze shifted to the desk—and stopped.

Two glasses.

One with dark streaks clinging to the rim.

One nearly untouched.

His pulse jumped.

Because yesterday evening, when he had worked late to finish a print job, he’d brought some forms to Riedel’s office. The door was ajar. A single glass sat on the desk then—he remembered it because he had been terrified of bumping into it and causing a scene.

One glass.

Now there were two.

He opened his mouth.

No sound came out.

Would anyone listen anyway? He was the intern—the background noise of the company, someone people spoke past rather than to.

He tightened his grip on his papers and glanced toward the hallway. There, just before the commotion started, he had seen the cleaning woman—Marija—pushing her cart toward the office. She seemed hurried. Nervous, even.

But Lukas wasn’t sure; adults always seemed nervous around Riedel.

He tried again to speak.

“I… uh… yesterday there was only—”

But Keller barked an order at that moment, drowning him out, and someone else shouted a question, and suddenly the room was a hive of half-whispers and half-truths. No one even realized he’d said anything.

So Lukas closed his mouth.

But the facts burned in his mind, solid and unmistakable:

There had been only one glass last night. Now there were two.

Someone else had been with Riedel.

And Marija had been here, moments before it all unraveled.

He wanted to tell someone.

He wanted to be brave.

But bravery wasn’t what interns survived on.

Silence was.

So Lukas stepped back, clutching the truth that no one else seemed to see.

And in a room full of louder, older, more confident liars, the quietest witness held the most important clue.

Claudia Mertens arrived later than most—a calculated lateness, the kind that signaled control rather than delay. Her heels clicked down the corridor with the confidence of someone who always knew more than she said.

She sensed the tension before she saw its cause.

A charged stillness.

A collective intake of breath.

Then she entered the open-plan office.

Riedel lay in his chair, frozen mid-expression, eyes like glass marbles staring at nothing.

Claudia didn’t gasp. Didn’t flinch.

Her pulse didn’t even stutter.

So, she thought. It finally happened.

The others were already gathered—Sabine pale and taut, Markus restless, Helena watchful, Keller looming, the intern shrinking into himself. A visitor she didn’t recognize stood awkwardly near the door.

Claudia stepped closer, surveying the scene the way a surgeon examines a patient—precise, clinical, detached.

Two glasses on the desk.

A blinking cursor on the monitor.

If you’re reading this, then you know that—

A dangerous sentence, she decided. An unfinished weapon.

But for whom?

Her eyes drifted across the room. Each person carried their secrets like shadows. And she knew every one of them.

That was her real job—not paperwork, not payroll, not performance reviews.

Power.

Observation.

Documentation.

Claudia kept private files the way some people kept photo albums—meticulously curated, constantly updated, held close. Every complaint whispered, every argument overheard, every medical leave, every confession made in desperation. She collected them all.

And Johannes Riedel had used her knowledge like ammunition.

“You give me the leverage, Claudia,” he once told her, “and I’ll apply the pressure.”

He had destroyed more employees than he had promoted. Some broke quietly. Some broke loudly. Some vanished.

And Claudia had smiled and taken notes.

But even she had limits.

She could feel the words Riedel had spoken just days ago pulsing behind her eyes:

“Helena needs to go. She knows too much.”

Claudia had nodded, though she disagreed. Helena was useful. Sharp. Predictable.

Then yesterday:

“Keller talks too much. Find a way to… tame him.”

Again, she had nodded. But in that moment something inside her had shifted—a hairline fracture in her obedience. She knew the pattern. She had seen Riedel ruin people systematically. Eventually he would turn on her, too.

She had prepared for that moment.

She always prepared.

As she scanned the faces around her, she knew exactly what they saw in hers:

A threat.

A strategist.

A woman who could orchestrate a downfall with a single memo.

The perfect suspect.

She didn’t mind. In fact, she welcomed it. Fear was a powerful shield.

Keller moved, murmuring orders. Others whispered theories. Tension climbed like static against the ceiling.

Claudia folded her arms, feeling the weight of her private archives, her quiet authority.

She was not the killer. She didn’t need to be.

Manipulators rarely touched the blade—they only guided the hand that held it.

But as she looked again at the screen, at the half-written message pulsing like a heartbeat, a thought crept in:

If anyone in this room could ruin them all without lifting a finger, it was her.

And Riedel had known it.

Now he was dead.

And for the first time in years, Claudia felt something like freedom slide under her skin.

Not relief.

Not joy.

Possibility.

Adrian Scholz hated glass buildings.

Too reflective. Too exposed.

Companies that built walls out of windows always claimed they had nothing to hide.

He knew better.

The Noveris AG was exactly that kind of building.

He stepped through the revolving door shortly before half past eight. The receptionist barely noticed him—good. He preferred it that way. He signed the logbook:

Adrian Scholz — 08:30 — Meeting with Riedel

A meeting no one had arranged.

At least, no one inside the company.