Private Berlin (Private 5)

“Coffee’s fine for right now,” Morgan said, taking a seat at the lounge table. “And I would appreciate a briefing, but first, because it was bugging me the entire flight, why did you and Chris break off your engagement?”

Mattie made a puffing noise and looked away from him. She rarely talked about her personal life except with Katharina and her aunt. But her boss had just flown thirteen hours to help her find Chris. She figured an honest answer was the least she could offer.

In a strained voice Mattie said, “We had a whirlwind romance shortly after you hired me. We were engaged in six months. But I eventually found out that Chris was a troubled man, Jack. There was a part of him that I could not reach, that I could not know. He never talked about his childhood. But there was something from that time that haunted him. The longer I was with him, the more I could feel how large a space it occupied in his soul. I pleaded with him to tell me, but he refused. Finally I decided I couldn’t marry a man with so much unknown inside him, no matter how much I loved him. It wouldn’t have been fair to me. And it would not have been fair to my son, Niklas.”

“So you ended it?”

Mattie nodded. “One of the mo

st difficult things I’ve ever done.”

“How’d Chris take it?”

“Like he’d been expecting it. He said he didn’t blame me, and that he still loved me.”

“No idea what this secret was that he carried?”

“I just know that he used to have these nightmares. They’d come in waves. And he’d start crying in his sleep, calling for his mother. Sometimes screaming for her.”

“You ever ask about the nightmares?”

“Only if I didn’t want him speaking to me for a few days,” Mattie replied, pouring coffee into a mug and offering it to Morgan.

He took it. “I knew he grew up in East Berlin and that his parents died when he was eight or nine. And he grew up in an orphanage out in the countryside, right?”

Mattie nodded. “That’s about all he ever tells anyone. He once told me that the past is best forgotten, but I don’t think he’s ever forgotten. He just won’t tell anyone about it.”

CHAPTER 22

KATHARINA DORUK ARRIVED at seven fifteen. Dr. Ernst Gabriel checked in at half past the hour. So did Tom Burkhart.

Together they and Mattie briefed Morgan on what they’d found so far, including the slaughterhouse, Chris’s scheduled meetings with soccer star Cassiano and billionaire Hermann Krüger in the days before he disappeared, and the various phone calls he’d made to the nightclub owner Maxim Pavel and others.

For a man operating on just a few hours’ sleep, Mattie thought Morgan acted soundly when he decided to split the investigation three ways.

Katharina would take the lead on Hermann Krüger.

After he arrived from Amsterdam later in the morning, Daniel Brecht would begin working the Cassiano angle with Morgan helping. Private’s owner had conducted several major sports investigations in the past. Brecht spoke six languages, including Portuguese, the Brazilian striker’s only tongue.

Gabriel would track Chris’s movements in more detail while Mattie and Burkhart continued shadowing the official police investigation and pitching in on the other veins of inquiry as needed.

But when Mattie and Burkhart were preparing to leave for their scheduled meeting with Dietrich, her cell phone rang. It was the high commissar himself.

“I’m calling you under orders from my supervisor,” Dietrich said, the annoyance evident in his voice. “Our meeting at my office is canceled.”

“What?” Mattie said, growing angry. “You said—”

Dietrich cut her off. “What I am about to tell you is not, I repeat, not for public dissemination. Are we clear?”

That took Mattie aback. “Yes.”

Dietrich cleared his throat. “As you might imagine, because of the nature of the building we found a great deal of blood evidence, so much that I decided to take twenty random samples and have them run overnight. Of the twenty, twelve were animal—four swine and eight bovine. The remaining eight were human. I’m sorry to say that four small spatters have been identified as Chris Schneider’s. The other four were completely unlike one another.”

Mattie froze, blinking, trying to understand what he was telling her. “You found blood from four other people besides Chris?”

Dietrich hesitated, coughed, and then replied, “That is correct, which is why we are returning to the slaughterhouse this morning. And it turns out our forensics teams are under heavy demand at the moment. Though I am opposed to this, my supervisor would be pleased if Private Berlin’s forensics team could help us examine that slaughterhouse in more detail.”

“We’ll be there in an hour,” Mattie promised, and hung up.