Todesurteil - Nemez und Sneijder ermitteln (2021)

Sabine Nemez and Maarten S. Sneijder investigate their second case together. Until recently, Sabine Nemez was a police officer with the Criminal Investigation Service, and she has been accepted into the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) academy in Wiesbaden, where forensic psychologist Maarten S. Sneijder is training her to become a criminal profiler. At the very start of her training, Nemez learns that her boyfriend, Erik Dorfer, a BKA criminal inspector, was shot in the line of duty and admitted to intensive care with a severe head injury. Erik soon succumbs to his injuries. Deeply shaken and shocked, Nemez nevertheless continues attending Sneijder’s classes under pressure from him. There, he sets his students to work on three unsolved murder cases—cases involving extremely brutal perpetrators that he also intends to use as examples of the work they will be doing over the next thirty years. Nemez is immediately troubled by the question of whether her boyfriend had worked on one of these cases. She asks Wessely, a BKA employee in Wiesbaden, who can only tell her that Erik Dorfer had indeed recently been working on reviewing old cases. As Nemez searches for further connections, the Wiesbaden BKA is contacted by the Austrian police. A ten-year-old girl has gone missing there, and spyware found on her laptop has been traced to the BKA in Wiesbaden. Sneijder suspects that his unsolved cases are connected to this one, and immediately travels to Vienna with Nemez. Before the current abduction, there had been two missing-person cases there that recently ended with the victims being found dead. Both young girls were missing large patches of skin from their backs. To prevent the missing Klara from suffering the same fate, they need to find the perpetrator quickly. Klara had been exchanging conspicuous emails with celebrity lawyer Michael Laszlo, who lives near her; the bodies of the two previous victims were also found just a few kilometers from his house. These are enough clues for Sneijder to investigate the man. Acting unconventionally and without official authorization, he and Nemez break into Laszlo’s villa while he is away and search the premises. Eventually, they find his secret shrine: a horror cabinet of tattoos on human skin, bearing images from Dante’s Inferno. Unfortunately, their hope of finding Klara there is not fulfilled. Laszlo is then arrested and interrogated. As she considers the unsolved murders from Wiesbaden and Klara’s abduction, Nemez desperately searches for a connecting element, since Sneijder is firmly convinced that the cases are linked. Sneijder, however, recalls the interrogations of the suspects, who had all said they considered their perverse acts to be art: the clean cuts, the extraction of bones, and so on. The “artworks” in Laszlo’s possession are evidently about transformation—about how the tattoo worked into the skin “changes” over time. As Sneijder tries to put himself in the perpetrator’s shoes during this stage of the investigation, he ultimately even manages to free Klara. Meanwhile, Nemez meticulously analyzes the old case files. She discovers that years earlier, all the victims had served as jurors in a trial in Vienna concerning the killing of a child murderer, and had ultimately made it possible for the suspected perpetrator to be acquitted. This leads the trail back to Wiesbaden. Not only did the spyware come from there; BKA officer Conrad Wessely also lives there. He is the father of a girl who was murdered in Vienna and is believed to have been a victim of Michael Laszlo, who was acquitted thirteen years ago. Using his police resources, Wessely had deliberately selected perpetrators with psychopathic tendencies and manipulated them into choosing specific victims and “punishing” them on his behalf. Wessely had planned his sinister act of revenge with the girl’s mother, who poisons herself when she realizes that Sneijder has exposed her. During questioning, Wessely shows no remorse and says that he had merely given the perpetrators the opportunity to indulge their desires. Since his colleague Erik Dorfer had already been on the trail of the whole scheme, Wessely had silenced him.