Marie Brand und die offene Rechnung (2013)

Marie Brand is supposed to be on vacation for three weeks, but when the man who murdered her father is released after seven years in prison, Jürgen Simmel decides to keep an eye on her. As might have been expected, Markus Rombach turns up at Marie Brand’s home and asks her to forgive him. Her father’s death was an accident, and he is still devastated by it. After all, Heinrich Brand was his colleague on the Cologne police force. Together, they investigated the kidnapping of Rombach’s daughter, who was abducted seventeen years earlier and was probably murdered as well. Her body was never found, so the possible perpetrator could not be brought to justice. Rombach had evidence suggesting that funeral director Christian Bruckner was responsible, and when Rombach tried to confront Bruckner seventeen years ago, he accidentally shot Marie’s father. As a former police officer and a father, he still wants the crime brought to justice after all these years and cannot accept that his daughter’s murderer is still free. He asks Marie to finally solve Miriam’s murder. But she refuses, since there was no evidence even back then, and she believes that sometimes one simply has to accept that a case remains unsolved. Rombach then threatens to take matters into his own hands. While Rombach is still talking with the detective, Bruckner’s seventeen-year-old daughter Sophie disappears. Marie Brand and Jürgen Simmel are certain that Rombach is behind the kidnapping, especially since an anonymous caller demands that Bruckner confess, rather than asking for the usual ransom. Since Bruckner says he cannot confess to something he did not do, Marie Brand takes another look at the old case of Miriam Rombach’s kidnapping. Meanwhile, Simmel tries to find out which fellow inmate Rombach had been in close contact with, but initially gets no concrete results. Bruckner visits his friend and fellow funeral director, Philip Diekhaus. Seventeen years earlier, the two of them had attended a party where Miriam Rombach was last seen. Marie Brand also starts to suspect Diekhaus after his alibi seems too perfectly prepared. Who gets taxi receipts issued with the time written on them? A closer check shows that Diekhaus had clearly driven to the party in one of his hearses. That finally explains how the body could have disappeared from the crime scene. The detectives visit Diekhaus and confront him with their suspicions. For a funeral director, making a body disappear without a trace is no problem. Diekhaus had prudently had the vehicle scrapped, so no traces could be found even back then. Simmel finds a connection between Rombach and Michael Lenz, a fellow inmate who was released eighteen months earlier. The detectives track him down and get a result: he admits that he kidnapped Sophie on Rombach’s orders and was supposed to “keep her out of circulation for a few days.” After Sophie returns to her parents relatively unharmed, her father disappears. Since Rombach is also nowhere to be found, Brand and Simmel set out to search for them both. When they find Bruckner, he is lying dead in a hiding place, shot. The situation makes little sense to Marie Brand and her colleague. Everything suggests that someone is trying to frame Rombach for the murder. And indeed, they are able to identify Diekhaus on a surveillance video. Rombach has by now reached similar conclusions, and gets to Diekhaus’s funeral home before the detectives do. He threatens him with a gun and forces him to admit that he and Bruckner killed Miriam. When Bruckner looked likely to crack because of his daughter’s kidnapping, Diekhaus silenced him too. For Rombach, this is a form of satisfaction. He locks Diekhaus in one of his coffins and starts up the cremation system. Before the coffin reaches the furnace, Brand and Simmel arrive. They hear Diekhaus screaming in terror and free him just in time. Rombach and Diekhaus are arrested.