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By Root 1045 0

train, bus or car. Unless he hijacked a car or had one waiting, that choice was unlikely because he couldn’t get a rental car without drawing attention to himself simply by the rental process itself. That narrowed the alternatives to bus or train. A problem for the police, because two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt. And even though every bus had been searched, it was possible that somehow they could have slipped through. It was the same with trains. Searching of them had only begun once the station was cordoned off at 7:45. In the thirty minutes from 7:15 to 7:45, roughly the time between when the murders had taken place and the station was cordoned off, sixteen trains had left Frankfurt. Bus tickets had to be secured before boarding, and no ticket agents of bus lines at Hauptbahnhof had sold tickets to anyone resembling Von Holden. Train tickets, however, could be, and often were, purchased on the train after it had left the station. Nothing would be left to chance—Frankfurt police would drag the city to find if he was holed up there, the airport would be watched for Mays—buses and trains would continue to be searched. Still, it was Remmer’s gut feeling that Von Holden had taken one of the sixteen trains that had left before the station was cordoned off.

“What did they say she looked like?” Osborn pushed through the witnesses and up to Remmer. He was incensed and anxious at the same time.

“The descriptions of the woman varied,” Remmer said quietly. “It might have been Ms. Monneray, it might not.”

“Here! This man saw them!” A uniformed cop was pushing through the crowd with a thin black man wearing an apron.

Remmer turned as they came up.

“You saw them?”

“Yes, sir.” The man insisted on looking at the floor.

“He served the woman coffee about seven-thirty,” the policeman said, standing tight against the black man and towering over him by nearly a foot.

“Why didn’t you speak up at once” Remmer asked.

“He’s Mozambique. He’s been beaten up by skinheads before. He’s afraid of anyone white.” ‘

“Look,” Remmer said gently. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Just tell what you saw.”

The black man raised his eyes, looked at Remmer, then looked back to his feet. “The man order kaffee for woman,” he said in broken German. “She very pretty, very scared. Hands shake, hardly drink kaffee. He go away, then come back with newspaper. Show her paper. Then they go off—”

“Where, which way did they go?”

“There, to train.”

“Which train?” Remmer gestured to a maze of waiting trains.

“There, or there. Not sure.” The black man nodded in the direction of one track and another beside it and shrugged. “Didn’t look much after they go.”

“What did she look like?” Osborn was suddenly face to face with the black man; he’d held back long enough.

“Take it easy, Doctor,” Remmer said.

“Ask him what color hair she had,” Osborn pressed. “Ask him!”

Remmer translated into German.

The black man smiled faintly and touched his own hair. “Schwarz.”

“Jesus God—” Osborn knew what it meant. Black. Like Vera’s.

“Let’s go,” Remmer said to Osborn, then turned and pushed through a crowd of police and onlookers. A moment later they slammed into the stationmaster’s office, with Remmer glancing at the clock as they came in. It was 8:47.

“What trains left tracks C 3 and C 4 between seven-twenty and seven-forty-five?” he demanded of the surprised stationmaster. Behind him was a wall map of Europe, lit with a myriad of little dots and showing every rail line on the continent. “Much schnell!” Remmer snorted. Hurry up!

“C 3—Geneva. Inter City Express. Arrives fourteen-six with a change in Basel. C 4. Strasbourg. Inter City. Arrives tea thirty-seven with a change at Offenburg.” The numbers rolled out of him like information stored in a computer.

Remmer bristled. “Switzerland France. Either way they’re out of the country. What time do the trains reach, Basel and Offenburg?”

Within minutes Remmer had taken over the station-master’s inner office and alerted the police in the German town of Offenburg, the Swiss cities of Basel and Geneva, and the