Schäfer found the prospect highly unlikely.

“—and your massage therapist is a woman, hers a man. You’re both shown into a small, dimly lit room with some sort of bed-like device. You undress, and then you let a total stranger rub their oily hands up and down your naked body. You can smell the rose oil, meditative seductive feel-good music is playing, while you lie on your separate beds thinking, ‘Oh, that’s great, please don’t stop, yes, right there, oh, that feels so good.’ ”

“You’ve got mustard on your chin.” Schäfer looked at her matter-of-factly and pointed to the yellow stain.

She found a crumpled napkin in the Subway sandwich bag in front of her and wiped the mustard off while she continued to build her case.

“Afterwards, you and Connie meet up, pay the check, and tell each other how wonderful it was. You’ve never felt better, and no one seems upset by the fact that the other person has just been physically satisfied by a stranger. Quite the contrary, in fact. You actually agree that you really ought to do this more often.” She turned up the palms of her hands and shrugged wildly, implying that you had to be exceptionally stupid not to see the logic of her argument.

Schäfer blinked a couple of times. “So, you’re saying that getting a massage should be as forbidden as having sex with someone other than your partner?”

“No, dummy. I’m saying that both ought to be equally legit.”

Erik Schäfer’s eyes widened.

“It’s a scientific fact,” she continued. “Marital bliss increases with fewer restrictions in a relationship; couples would be far less likely to split up if especially the wife was allowed to hook up with someone other than her husband.”

“You’re full of shit!”

Augustin laughed out loud.

“This is all just because you think like a man,” Schäfer went on, referring to the fact that in her twenty-eight years, Lisa Augustin had scored more women than he had in nearly twice that amount of time.

“You don’t believe me?” She turned 180 degrees in her chair and was starting to pound the keyboard on her computer to find the evidence for her claim when Schäfer’s phone rang.

“Saved by the bell,” he laughed, and answered the call. “Hello?”

“Hi, there’s a woman down here who wants to talk to you.” The voice on the other end belonged to a receptionist on the ground floor of police headquarters.

“What’s her name?”

“She won’t say.”

“She won’t say?” Schäfer echoed. “Why the hell not?”

Augustin stopped typing and looked up at him with a frown.

“She’ll only say that she has something important to show you. Apparently it’s about one of your murder investigations from three years ago.”