Private Berlin (Private 5)

Genevieve, a beautiful young woman from Guadeloupe with smooth cocoa skin and long wavy hair, came to the door.

“I’m out a hundred and fifty euros,” Genevieve complained.

“We’ll compensate you for your time,” Mattie assured her.

Genevieve squinted and studied her. “Who are you?”

Michelle said, “Perhaps we’d better go inside.”

Genevieve shrugged and turned into the room, which was small and filled almost entirely with a bed. The walls were mirrors. So was the ceiling. There were reflections of the two naked women, Mattie, and Burkhart at every angle.

Michelle introduced the Private investigators and told Genevieve that they were here to find out what happened to Ilse Frei, and to Chris Schneider. Reluctantly Genevieve agreed to talk.

She corroborated much of what Tina Hanover had told them, but with more detail. She said that she was in the women’s locker room two weeks before when Ilse ran in shaking and crying. Ilse told Genevieve that she had just overheard a customer talking to one of the other girls in the lounge.

“Ilse said she did not know him by sight,” Genevieve said. “He looked completely different than she remembered him. But she thought she knew his voice.”

“Why?” Mattie asked. “Whose voice was it?”

Genevieve bit her lip before replying, “Ilse said she thought he may have been the man who killed her mother.”

Mattie absorbed that, her mind wanting to leap in a dozen directions, but she reined it in when Burkhart said, “But she wasn’t sure?”

“She was pretty sure,” Genevieve allowed. “But when we went back upstairs together to try to hear him again, he was gone.”

Mattie groaned. “So you can’t identify him?”

Perplexed, Genevieve looked at Michelle, who said, “If he’s the punter we think he is, he’s been here six or seven times in the past few years.”

“So you know what he looks like?” Mattie said, excited.

“Not exactly,” Michelle cautioned.

“What does that mean?” Burkhart said.

“We think it’s the same guy,” Michelle explained. “But he looks different every time he comes in. Sometimes he’s blond and blue-eyed. Other times brown with dark hair. His eyebrows. His cheeks. One time his hair was slicked black like a helmet. Another time he wore a devil’s beard and—”

Genevieve interrupted. “He was green-eyed and redheaded last week when I saw him, about eight days after Ilse disappeared.” Genevieve was openly agitated by the memory. “He’s a freak, you know? He likes to make you feel threatened. Gets off on it.”

“He give you a name?”

Genevieve’s eyes flashed darkly. “That night he called himself the Invisible Man.”

Michelle nodded grimly. “But we all call him the Mask.”

CHAPTER 82

ABOARD PRIVATE’S CORPORATE jet, returning to Berlin two hours later, Mattie finally got up the nerve to call Katharina Doruk.

She answered in an infuriated rave: “You hung up on me?”

“Calm down,” Mattie said. “We’ve made a break. A big one.”

“I don’t care!” Katharina shouted. “Where are you?”

“On the jet. We’ll land in half an hour.”

Katharina fumed, “You didn’t talk to Frankfurt Kripo?”