Marie Brand und der Tote im Trikot (2021)

For two years, cyclist and Olympic hopeful Stefan Lürs had been considered missing. Now his body has been found, following an anonymous tip, very close to his training stadium. The first question for Detective Marie Brand is why the tip came now. His family never filed a missing-person report, having assumed that Stefan wanted to escape the pressure to perform and build a new life abroad. His last signs of life came from Barcelona. The ensuing investigation leads Brand and her colleague Jürgen Simmel to the dead man’s stepfather. Family relations are somewhat strained: after his wife’s death, Joachim Novotny raised his stepsons alone from the age of ten. Although Sebastian and Stefan were twins, Sebastian had always lived in Stefan’s shadow and did not have a particularly close relationship with his father. Stefan’s former coach, Ralf Krieger, confirms to the investigators that his protégé desperately wanted to get away from his stepfather, whom he felt was exploiting him by consistently turning his fame and success into money. The autopsy reveals that the victim suffered from severe hip osteoarthritis, which would eventually have ended his athletic career. To prevent that from happening too soon, Stefan had been given strong painkillers. He was able to evade athletic drug tests because his twin brother always submitted the urine samples for him. Brand and Simmel find another potential source of conflict in the relationship between Stefan, his coach, and Sybille Reif, who maintained Stefan’s website. She had always hoped to be with Stefan, but then realized that her idol was apparently gay and had begun a relationship with Ralf Krieger. Krieger says he had a family he did not want to put at risk and did not want to continue the affair. But he says he could never have hurt Stefan. Brand discovers that Julia Krieger knew about her rival. Another suspect is Tharde Rickling, who had to abruptly end his professional athletic career after a collision with Stefan during training. During the investigation, Sybille Reif is found dead on the banks of the Rhine. The detectives cannot tell whether she jumped from a bridge of her own accord or was pushed. But since she had apparently given the police the tip about where to find the body, Brand does not find suicide plausible. After Stefan disappeared, Reif had turned to his brother, but she always saw Stefan in him, which put a strain on their relationship. Brand had noticed that the young man seemed to be under considerable psychological pressure. She wants to talk to him and arrives just as Sebastian loses control and threatens his stepfather. In this highly emotional state, he speaks for the first time about what happened two years earlier. He had been so disappointed that Stefan wanted to abandon him, and they had had a furious argument. Suddenly, Stefan had collapsed and stopped breathing. Sebastian did not know what to do, so he called Sybille Reif. She then told him to bury the body. Lately, Sybille had been demanding more and more of him, and he had been expected to become more and more like Stefan, so during an argument he pushed her off the bridge.