When a driver for a ship chandler gets in trouble with traffic police, a policeman ends up dead. Against the rest of the police force, Borowski is determined that the driver is not the killer. Meanwhile, in order to avoid suspension for chaining up a reluctant murder witness on a brothel roof naked, Borowski has meet with psychologist Frieda Jung.

The carefully draped corpse of 16-year-old student and talented pianist Rita Koehler is found on a grand piano in a concert hall, her body apparently embalmed. Could it have been assisted suicide? The body of an old man, also prepared, is then found - Karl Hahnemann, born in 1923. What did Rita and Hahnemann have in common? Both had a talent: Rita in music, Hahnemann a gifted chess player. A third victim makes it inevitably clear to the investigators that they are dealing with a serial offender: when the seven-year-old, highly talented Björn disappears, Borowski, his colleague Alim Zainalow, and police psychologist Frieda Jung urgently need to decode a pattern in order to track down the perpetrator.

On the day that Ulrich Wahl is called at home by his young Cuban lover Teresa, his fears are confirmed. Covered in blood and completely distraught, she begs him for help. There is a dead person in her secret love nest must go. Wahl feels compelled to act, else the fragile construction of his double life would shatter into pieces. The corpse that Chief Inspector Klaus Borowski confronts Ulrich Wahl with is not the dead man from his lover's apartment. It is a security guard who was found run over on a construction site by the entrepreneur Wahl. Borowski registers Wahl's cool response to the news. The security guard Bernd Ruda was run over with the car of Thorsten Brück, Teresa's husband. Brück also works for Wahl, but has now disappeared. When Wahl is then blackmailed, he confides in the inspector: someone blames him for the death of the security guard and is blackmailing him with it. But why is Wahl telling the commissioner about it?

A new case confronts Commissioner Borowski with grisly finds. In Kiel, the remains of human bodies appear in the sewers - teeth, hair, hip joints. They come from several bodies, and show clear traces of acid. Inspector Borowski and his colleagues are puzzled: where did the remains come from, how did they end up in the sewers, and how many people did they belong to?