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Bodenstein closed one eye and examined the spot he was pointing to through the magnifying glass.
    “It looks like … hmm … like two letters. Old Gothic letters. An … A and a B, if I’m not mistaken.”
    “You’re right,” said Kirchhoff, taking the magnifying glass from him.
    “What does it mean?” Bodenstein asked.
    “I’ll resign if it turns out I’m wrong,” Kirchhoff replied. “It’s incredible, because Goldberg was a Jew.”
    Bodenstein didn’t understand what was agitating the ME.
    “Don’t keep me on tenterhooks,” he said impatiently. “What’s so extraordinary about a tattoo?”
    Kirchhoff peered at Bodenstein over the tops of his half-moon glasses.
    “This,” he said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “is a blood-type tattoo, like the members of the Waffen-SS had. Twenty centimeters above the elbow on the inside of the upper left arm. Because this tattoo was a clear identifying mark, many former SS men tried to get rid of it after the war. This man did, too.”
    He took a deep breath and began to circle the autopsy table.
    “Normally,” Kirchhoff expounded, as if in a first-semester lecture in the auditorium, “tattoos are made by inserting a needle into the center layer of the skin, the dermis. In this case, the color has penetrated into the subcutis. Superficially, only a bluish scar was visible, but now, after the epidermis had been removed, the tattoo can again be seen clearly. Blood type AB.”
    Bodenstein stared at Goldberg’s corpse, which lay with its chest opened on the dissection table. He hardly dared think what Kirchhoff’s incredible revelation might mean or what consequences it might have.
    “If you didn’t know who this was on your table,” he said slowly, “what would you surmise?”
    Kirchhoff stopped in his tracks.
    “That the man in his younger days must have been a member of the SS. And probably from the very beginning. Later, the tattoos were done in roman letters, not in Old German script.”
    “Couldn’t it be a matter of some other harmless tattoo that over the years somehow … hmm … changed?” Bodenstein asked, although he had no real faith in this theory. Kirchhoff almost never made a mistake; at least Bodenstein couldn’t remember a single occasion when the pathologist had had to revise his opinion.
    “No. Especially not in this location.” Kirchhoff wasn’t offended by Bodenstein’s skepticism. He was just as aware of the implications of his discovery as everyone else present. “I’ve seen this sort of tattoo on the table before, once in South America and several times here in Germany. For me, there is no doubt.”
    *   *   *
    It was 5:30 when Pia opened the front door to her house and took off her muddy shoes on the enclosed porch. She had fed the horses and dogs in record time and was in a hurry to get into the bathroom to take a shower and wash her hair. Unlike her boss, she wasn’t upset about Nierhoff’s instructions not to start any investigations in the Goldberg case. She had been afraid that she might have to cancel her date with Christoph tonight, and that was the last thing she wanted to do. She had been separated from Henning for a year and a half now. The earnings from her stock portfolio had made it possible for her to buy the Birkenhof farm in Unterliederbach, and return to her profession in the criminal police. The icing on the cake was without a doubt Christoph Sander. They’d met ten months ago at a homicide scene at the Opel Zoo in Kronberg. The glance from his dark brown eyes had struck like a bolt of lightning. She was so used to finding a rational explanation for everything in her life that she was deeply confused by the attraction that this man had exerted on her at first sight. For the past eight months, she and Christoph had been … well, what were they? Lovers? Friends? A couple? He often spent the night with her. She went in and out of his house and got along well with his three grown