Free I Am Your Judge: A Novel by Nele Neuhaus Page B

before. He had taken his suitcase and assured her that she didn’t have to worry about him. Antonia and her friend Lukas would drive him to the airport in the late afternoon and bring his car back to Birkenhof sometime later.
    “Of course, I understand about work,” he’d told her the night before. “In your place, I would have made the same decision.”
    He had long since realized that he’d be flying to Ecuador alone. Just as Henning had said. In principle, and Pia had to admit this, all three of them thought the same way. They were all 100 percent committed to their jobs.
    Back when she was still married to Henning, Pia had often felt annoyed that his work was more important to him than his private life. Henning hadn’t wanted her to get a job, but she’d spent weeks, alone and bored, in their apartment in Sachsenhausen. In the evening and on weekends, she’d gone to one of the dissection rooms at the Institute of Forensic Medicine just so she could see her husband. The last straw that had prompted their separation, in March now eight years ago, had been a cable tramway accident in Austria; specifically the fact that Henning had neglected to say good-bye to her when he left. She had moved out of the apartment—and he hadn’t even noticed until two weeks later. Subsequently, she had made the two best decisions in her life: to buy Birkenhof and to return to her old job with the criminal police. She wanted to be free, and she had promised herself never to put her own desires in second place again.
    Then she’d met Christoph and fallen head over heels in love, first with his chocolate brown eyes and then with his incredible personality, although in his own way, he was just as crazy as Henning. But the biggest difference was that now she, too, had a profession that she felt passionate about. She seldom saw her job as a constraint, and often enough, there were periods when she left work precisely on time and could devote herself to her animals and the farm. Yet occasionally situations like this would come up, of course, and Christoph never complained when she had to work almost around the clock. Nor would it ever occur to Pia to grumble when the zoo needed him on-site, as had often been the case in recent months while the new elephant house was being built.
    Pia stared at her face in the mirror and let out a big sigh.
    She had known that Christoph would understand and not be disappointed or angry, and although she was relieved, she was sad about his reaction. For the first time, they were supposed to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve as a married couple—but now she would sit around at Birkenhof while Christoph spent the holidays with strangers thousands of kilometers away.
    Just a little while ago, as he gave her one last hug before leaving to finish up some work at the zoo, she’d felt as if her heart were about to be ripped out of her chest. At that moment, she had doubted her decision. Could two dead people whom she didn’t even know be more important to her than the man she loved above all else? What if something happened to Christoph on the trip? What if the plane crashed or the ship sank and she would never see him again? How would she be able to stand that? She already missed him so much that the pain was physical. Ever since they met, they had never once been apart longer than a day.
    Pia got dressed and drew her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. So far, Bodenstein knew nothing of her decision to cancel her vacation. None of her colleagues expected that she would sacrifice her time off to assist in a homicide investigation, and apart from her boss, none of them would ever consider doing the same. She could still phone Christoph and tell him that she would fly with him after all. She turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs. Her cell phone was on the kitchen table. All she had to do was pick it up and press the speed dial to reach Christoph.
    But then she thought about the husband