Private Berlin (Private 5)

There’s nothing else. I’ve seen to it all. I’m sure of it.

Unless Chris told someone where he was going?

No. It was personal. He came for me alone.

Given the lack of other evidence, I tell myself the police will soon let it go. A blood stain in an old slaughterhouse? They’ll think someone tripped and gouged their leg or something. Right?

I almost convince myself before doubt takes a stroll through my mind.

What if they were to keep looking?

This possibility agitates me so much I twist around to look into the rear of the van at the shape of the corpse in the tarp.

Every cell in my body wants to drive by the slaughterhouse to get another look, try to get a sense of the scope of the police action, but I know I can’t. Smart cops look for that kind of thing.

In the end, I tell myself to return home, or better to call and meet the woman who thinks I love her.

Put a sense of normality in my visible life, rebuild the mask once more.

I’ll come by tomorrow in a different vehicle.

If the police are gone, then I’ll dispose of the young genius’s body in the normal way and things will go on as they always have.

But if they’re still there, I’ll have no choice but to erase the slaughterhouse and all its dirty little secrets forever.

CHAPTER 12

“I SHOULD BE in there,” Mattie complained as Burkhart clicked open the doors of the BMW. The white panel van passing by barely registered in her brain.

Burkhart shook his head and climbed in.

Mattie got in angrily beside him. “I should.”

“No. Dietrich’s right. They need impartial people in there.”

“You’re saying I’m not impartial?” Mattie demanded.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Burkhart said, starting the car. “You couldn’t be. If you were impartial in this situation, I’d wonder about you as a human.”

Mattie did not know what to say. Burkhart turned on the windshield wipers, which slapped away the wet leaves.

Mattie threw up her hands. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t just—”

“We’re going to Chris’s apartment.”

Berlin is a huge city geographically, almost 341 square miles. And Chris Schneider lived far from Ahrensfelde, west of Tiergarten Park and the zoo.

It took them forty minutes to get there in the late-afternoon traffic. Mattie had gone quiet again, looking out at the cityscape as they crossed back from the old east into the west.

Mattie had lived in Berlin her entire life. She was a Berliner through and through. She loved the city, its architecture, people, art, laid-back attitude, and entrepreneurial spirit.

But now, in light of the mystery surrounding Chris’s disappearance, Berlin seemed suddenly to her to be an alien place inhabited by creatures who might cut a tracking chip out of a man’s back and feed it to rats.

They passed the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, the roofless grand entry hall and wounded spire of a church that somehow survived a bombing raid in 1943. The scorched ruins sat on a grand plaza beside an ultramodern belfry.

The ruins were among Chris’s favorite places in the city. He liked to sit and contemplate the spire, which looked like it had been cleaved in two by the bomb. One side collapsed and fell. The other still stood, jagged against the sky.

“Left on Goethe, yes?” Burkhart asked, shaking Mattie from her thoughts.