Frauleinstein

Chapter XIII: Meanwhile, Back in Bistritz... Part I

Chapter XIII

Meanwhile, Back in Bistritz...

Officer Dancescu approached Detective Miklos, seated at his desk.

"I thought you might like to know; Barbu has gone home to rest," Dancescu told him.

Miklos looked up from his current task, typing a report in his typical one-finger style. "Why the hell would I want to know that?"

"The guy went through a traumatic experience," Dancescu reminded him.

"The guy's an idiot," Miklos summarized rather bluntly. "The only description he can give us of his assailant? 'Big! Horrible!' he screams before breaking down in tears. Everyone is big compared to Barbu! And what the heck is 'horrible' supposed to mean? Then he witnesses two others break into the morgue, but he can't give a description because he didn't see their faces!"

"Well, he was handcuffed in a drawer," Dancescu said, feeling perhaps not everything was Barbu's fault.

"So what did they talk about, I ask him?" Miklos continued in his ranting reminiscence. "Brains, he tells me! They talked about brains, and that's the last thing he can tell me before he breaks down and sobs again. So who are my suspects, zombies?"

Dancescu figured it might be a good idea to change the topic. "So, the Forensics guys found something interesting. Whoever broke into the morgue wore surgical gloves, so there were no fingerprints. But he left the gloves behind, and guess what?"

"Fingerprint on the gloves?" guessed Miklos.

"Bingo!" Dancescu told him.

"Check it against our database," Miklos suggested.

"Already done. We tried the local and national databases but no luck, so we tried Interpol. Again, no matches. But Interpol's been scanning older cases into a new archive, and suggested we try it. And we found a match!"

"Fantastic!" said Miklos as he stood and grabbed his hat. "So, who's our perp?"

Dancescu suddenly seemed a lot less enthusiastic. "That's where the trail runs cold, unfortunately. Crime was never solved. No name was ever associated with the print."

Miklos dropped his hat and sat down again at his desk. "Okay. Get whatever you can about the crime and we'll see if it gives us any ideas."

"Did that too," said Dancescu. "But I don't think you'll get any leads from this one. Strange crime. Took place in Berlin. Seems a fight broke out in a church in the middle of the night. Investigators described it the next day as a battle scene. No bodies, but lots of broken gargoyles for some reason. The fingerprint came from a gold collection plate that was embedded in a wall."

"So how can there be no leads?" asked Miklos. "Sounds like there should be mounds of evidence!"

"I imagine there was at the time, but there's no way to follow up now. All the witnesses are gone, mostly dead I expect. And the church itself was torn down to build condos twenty or thirty years ago."

"Thirty years ago?" said Miklos, a note of confusion in his voice. "Wait a minute, when did this crime take place?"

"That's the really weird thing," Dancescu told him. "It happened in 1948! So you can see, there's no way to investigate it now."

"1948!" yelled Miklos. "Are you telling me, whoever broke into our morgue last night was also responsible for destroying a church in Berlin almost seventy years ago?"

"Yeah. Weird, eh?" replied Dancescu. "But like I said, no identification, and no other possible way to connect the crimes."

"But don't you see how this limits the suspects?" Miklos exclaimed. "Assuming the guy wasn't a child when he was flinging collection plates and destroying churches in 1948, whoever we're looking for must be at least 90 years old by now!"