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- Herausgeber: Alfredbooks
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
by Alfred Bekker The size of this book corresponds to 120 paperback pages. Harry Kubinke and Rudi Meier investigate a case in which a cat has photographed a dead body with a camera. Not only is the witness unusual, but the body remains untraceable at first. However, one by one the witnesses die. Kubinke and Meier investigate at full speed... Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell .
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Alfred Bekker
Kubinke And The Cat: Thriller
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Kubinke And The Cat: Thriller
Copyright
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Kubinke And The Cat: Thriller
by Alfred Bekker
The size of this book corresponds to 120 paperback pages.
Harry Kubinke and Rudi Meier investigate a case in which a cat has photographed a dead body with a camera. Not only is the witness unusual, but the body remains untraceable at first. However, one by one the witnesses die. Kubinke and Meier investigate at full speed...
Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell.
Copyright
A CassiopeiaPress book: CASSIOPEIAPRESS, UKSAK E-Books, Alfred Bekker, Alfred Bekker presents, Casssiopeia-XXX-press, Alfredbooks, Uksak Special Edition, Cassiopeiapress Extra Edition, Cassiopeiapress/AlfredBooks and BEKKERpublishing are imprints of
Alfred Bekker
© Roman by Author
© this issue 2024 by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich/Westphalia
The fictional characters have nothing to do with actual living persons. Similarities in names are coincidental and not intentional.
All rights reserved.
www.AlfredBekker.de
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Everything to do with fiction!
1
"A black cat crossed my path today," my neighbor told me. "I don't think that means anything good."
I was standing on the balcony of my Berlin apartment with a coffee cup in my hand, looking down on the hustle and bustle of the capital.
A day off. Doesn't happen that often for a chief inspector. But the mountain of overtime had to be reduced somehow.
My neighbor was a cab driver.
A Berlin cab driver with a Berlin snout.
And Muslim.
His father was Persian, his mother Turkish and he spoke exactly like someone who has spent their whole life in Berlin.
"Are you superstitious?" I asked, taking a sip of coffee.
"Why?"
"Because of the black cat."
"Are you serious now?"
"Mine."
"I'm not superstitious. But a believer. There's a difference."
"You believe in Allah."
"Yes."
"And black cats that bring bad luck."
"Not quite as strong, but yes."
"Is that compatible with Islam?"
"I have no idea. I'd have to ask an imam to judge that."
"Ah yes."
"Is that compatible with Christians?"
"Well..."
"You don't really know either, do you?"
"I don't think it's compatible. That's why it's called superstition."
"You're a commissioner, aren't you?"
"Detective Chief Superintendent," I said.
"Ditte amazes me. I always thought they had A-levels and studied."
"Yes, but not religious studies."
"But then you know that. I'm just a stupid cab driver, but you, Mr. Kubinke... Kubinke! Ditte is at your door."
"Say Harry to me. We're neighbors now."
"I am Reza."
"Pleasant."
"I applied for the apartment three times. They didn't want me. Probably because I'm Muslim and everyone immediately thinks I'm a terrorist."
"There are people with prejudices everywhere," I said.
"The apartment was offered again and again and I'm persistent. I'm from Wedding. I won't let it get me down, do you understand?"
"I see."
"Apparently nobody wanted the apartment. They just couldn't get rid of it."
"Well..."
"And that's how I got them after all."
"Congratulations."
"But just between you and me, Commissioner..."
"Harry!"
"So, Harry! Between you and me! What's wrong with this apartment? Why didn't anyone want it? It's all right. Price is fine, heating works, cable TV works..."
"Could have something to do with the previous tenant," I said.
"Uh-huh..."
"He was shot."
"Oh."
"And now the management has had difficulties finding tenants. At least that's what I've heard. When they heard about it, they canceled again."
"Why?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "Superstition."
"Like with the black cat."
"Exactly."
2
Two days later, I saw the black cat too. It had climbed onto my balcony and then onto the windowsill. From there, she looked inside my apartment.
She wasn't shy, yawned, showed her teeth and seemed to scrutinize me with her yellow eyes.
No, I thought. I'm not superstitious.
3
Another place, another cat...
The black cat approached the right rear wheel of the limousine with smooth movements. Its steps were completely silent. It remained motionless and pricked up its ears.
The broad, white collar formed a stark contrast to the pitch-black, silky fur. There was a thickening on the left side - a matchbox-sized, cuboid object.
It was a digital mini camera.
The small lens, which was only a few millimetres wide, pointed in the animal's line of vision. Every thirty seconds, this camera took a picture from the cat's perspective so that you could later see where it had roamed.
The cat crept carefully under the car. Her paws left tracks after she had walked through the dark red pool of liquid.
Then she reached an elongated human body. Blood had trickled from a wound on the temple. A pair of eyes stared fixedly at the cat. She looked back long enough for the camera's self-timer to activate according to its 30-second rhythm and capture her view of the scene on a data chip.
4
Lars Thölkes was an inspector with the Potsdam criminal investigation department. He had twenty years of homicide investigation behind him and had witnessed all the terrible things that had to be endured.
But the case Thölkes was confronted with on Tuesday began so bizarrely that he initially thought his colleagues were joking.
He leaned back and stroked his smooth, dark hair thoughtfully, the roots of which had already shifted upwards in an alarming manner.
His eyes were fixed on the woman who had taken a seat in front of him in the stuffy office that Lars Thölkes had had to himself since his belated promotion.
She was blonde. Her curly hair hung down over her shoulders in a wild, unruly mane. Her dress was very tight-fitting and hid almost nothing of what was underneath. A few stones and rings made it immediately clear that she was not living in poverty - just like the designer handbag.
"So your cat saw a murder," said Thölkes, stretching. One of the uniformed colleagues had questioned the woman first. Only then had she been passed on to the homicide squad and now had to report everything all over again.
"No, she didn't see a murder, she saw a man who had been murdered. A corpse with a bullet hole in the head," the woman corrected, somewhat annoyed.
Thölkes looked at the personnel sheet his colleague had created. Her name was Sabrina Kädinger, she was 26 years old and said she worked as a dancer in a club. She lived in Potsdam. Thölkes thought she was a high-class prostitute, and he was itching to enter her name into the data network system to see if she had ever been convicted of prostitution or at least arrested in a relevant context.
Actually, he was only interested in this to prove his own instinctive confidence.
She leaned forward. Her cleavage was shown off so well that Thölkes was distracted for a moment. A deep furrow formed between her eyes. "Listen, I was told you were with the homicide squad..."
"That's me too! Twenty years of solving murders!"
"I would appreciate it if someone here would finally take me seriously! I have a crime to report - and even if I'm not the witness myself, my cat is at least as credible."
"Where's your cat?" asked Thölkes.
"At home," she replied with a cutting undertone. "She doesn't like men with intrusive perfume. She always starts scratching and I wanted to avoid the risk of getting into trouble for it."
Thölkes sighed, "So let's start all over again."
Sabrina Kädinger rolled her eyes. "I don't know if you know what a cat cam is."
"Honestly, no."
"This is a mini camera that you attach to your cat's collar. An automatic trigger ensures that a picture is taken from the cat's perspective every 20 or 30 seconds. In this way, you can see where it has been, under which cars it has hunted for mice, which cellars it has entered and which other cats it has met."
Thölkes shook his head. "This must be the total surveillance state, where not even cats can meet the cat of their choice without the owners finding out!"
"You can make fun of it, Commissioner Thölkes. But I'm very serious. My cat discovered a dead man who had been shot during one of her forays. At least that's what it looked like to me as a layman. But you can see for yourself!"
She reached into her handbag for her purse. She then took a 1 GB chip out of the coin pocket. "I hope you have a computer here that's modern enough to read these things. They contain all the pictures from this trip. It even shows the time each time the camera was triggered."
Thölkes' face became more serious now. He took the chip and began to boot up his computer. Once that was done, he inserted the chip into the slot of the integrated card reader.
A short time later, the first images appeared on the screen. It was actually very easy to imagine what the cat's path had looked like from her perspective. It was crossing a road. You could admire tires and wheel flaps from a ground perspective, a close-up of a dog pile blocking a gutter, more or less well-shined shoes of men and women, a dog baring its teeth grimly and tearing at its collar and then lots of shots that had obviously been taken under parked vehicles.
"What do you normally do with these recordings?" asked Thölkes as he clicked along, more or less listlessly following the adventurous journey of a cat.
Sabrina Kädinger lifted her chin slightly. "There are people who post these pictures on the internet. But I find that sick..."
"You're just making a private slide show out of it?"
"Since I wouldn't even invite you if you were the last man on earth, you couldn't care less!" she said cuttingly and so harshly that Thölkes turned to her.
"Uh, you've got hair on your teeth!" he grinned.
"You'd better look the other way. It should be the next picture!"
Thölkes' face changed as he looked at the next picture. He changed the zoom so that it was larger. Then his eyes narrowed.
A man could be seen lying stretched out - apparently under a parked car. A lot of blood had apparently seeped out of a wound on his temple. A dark red pool could be seen on the ground, through which the animal had obviously stomped. Thölkes also looked at the next picture. The scene seemed to have been interesting enough for the cat to stay in this spot a little longer. There were four pictures in total, showing the dead man from slightly different perspectives. The face was particularly easy to recognize in one of them.
"You really seem to have stumbled across something," said Thölkes.
"That's what I say all the time."
"I'll download the pictures from your chip. Then you can take the data carrier back with you if you need your cat..."
"Do you think I'll let them out again any time soon?" Sabrina Kädinger cut him off. "What are you going to do now?"
"We will look for parking spaces within a certain radius of your home that could be a crime scene. And of course our specialists will look into the matter. If the man in the picture was a criminal or is stored in our archives for some reason, then there's a good chance we'll be able to identify him using an image recognition program."
"And if not?"
"Then that's no reason to give up. We'll find out who it is. I promise. Will you be home in the next few days?"
"I'm a dancer in a club and work in the evenings. You can almost always find me in my apartment during the day. Your colleague took the address."
Thölkes nodded. "We'll get back to you. I'm sure we will."
5
It was dark. The street lighting had been switched to economy mode. Between one o'clock at night and four o'clock in the morning, only every second light was on. It was a cold, damp night in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Potsdam. After the two hours we'd been out here, there was probably no one who wasn't freezing.
We were wearing Kevlar vests and were connected to each other by radio via headsets. The service weapon was ready to fire in my hand. Twenty BKA officers were involved in this operation on the premises of the forwarding company Broderich & Dirkens GmbH in Braden Straße in Potsdam. Frank Schachmann, an informant from the illegal art trade scene, had given us the location, time and people involved in a huge deal involving illegally imported Asian art. It involved art objects from the Khmer Empire in Cambodia, whose legendary capital Angkor was one of the most important metropolises in the world a thousand years ago, alongside Baghdad and Cairo. The turnover of the art mafia can now easily keep up with that of other branches of organized crime and occupies one of the top spots between the illegal trade in drugs, weapons, garbage, people and counterfeit money.
The profits were impressive and the risk of being caught was much lower than in the drug trade, for example, which was mainly due to the lack of art specialists.
Now we were waiting with our colleagues for the deal of the year that Frank Schachmann had revealed to us to actually go through and for us to spring our trap.
We had high hopes, as some of those involved were currently among the most active players in this illegal match. We hoped that by arresting them, we would finally be able to catch some of the people behind it. People who were keeping the art mafia alive with their money and their commissions, even if they themselves were scrupulously careful not to put themselves in the line of fire of the law.
