Private Berlin (Private 5)

She startled, looked around, and then said, “Correct.”

Chris lived in a second-floor apartment on Gutenbergstrasse in the Charlottenburg district o

f the city. It was a slightly frumpy address for a man of Schneider’s age, but he’d loved the place because it gave him close access to the zoo and to Tiergarten Park, where he liked to run.

Mattie had not been to Chris’s place in more than six weeks. Her last visit weighed heavily on her mind as they used her key to open the door to the building. There was a courtyard with grass and raised garden beds. The one below Chris’s apartment had been freshly tilled. There were bags of tulip bulbs sitting near a hoe and shovel. A BMW motorcycle was parked on the grass.

Mattie frowned. She knew the superintendent of the building, a cantankerous man named Krauss. She’d never known him to allow motorcycles in his courtyard, or bikes for that matter.

She put that aside and led Burkhart up an interior staircase to a second-floor landing. She hesitated. At some level, she felt like this place was forbidden to her now, no matter what might have happened to Chris.

“That key doesn’t work on this door?” Burkhart asked. “Or are you worried Dietrich is going to have a shit fit if he finds out we’ve been in here?”

“Screw Dietrich,” Mattie said and rammed the key into the lock.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open.

CHAPTER 13

THE LEATHER COUCH and chairs had been overturned, the upholstery slashed, the stuffing torn out. Books littered the floor. The closets had been opened, their contents strewn all about.

Mattie smelled trash rotting and heard a cat mewing.

“Socrates?” she called, walking inside. “Here kitty.”

“This is a crime scene now,” Burkhart said. “We can’t go in.”

“It’s a tossed apartment,” she shot back. “Let’s figure out what they took.”

Mattie stopped and donned the same latex gloves she’d worn at the slaughterhouse. The cat had stopped crying.

Burkhart grimaced, but then followed her lead.

She walked gingerly through the debris, including shattered glass from picture frames. Several of the pictures showed Chris and Mattie, arms around each other, smiling as if they were the happiest couple on earth.

How had it all gone so wrong?

How had this happened? The chip. The hacking. And now his apartment is tossed. And why? What was Chris on to?

Mattie reached the alcove where Chris often worked at home. She spotted the smashed laptop on the floor and went to it. She crouched and used a pen to push aside the pieces, barely aware of Burkhart picking up a photograph of Chris and a young boy.

“Engel, is this—?” Burkhart began.

“Fuck!” Mattie cried, cutting him off. “They got his hard drive. Fuck!”

“All right, we know what they were after then,” Burkhart said, setting the picture down. “We’re out of here. We call Kripo.”

Mattie stood and pushed by him. “I’m finding his cat. You wait at the car.”

She did not wait for an answer, but instead walked down the hallway past the kitchen, where dirty dishes and takeout Thai food boxes contributed to a foul reek. She stopped breathing in through her mouth and went into the bedroom, which was painted bright white.

The comforter was bright white too. So were the drapes, which billowed with the gusts of wind and rain blowing in through the open French windows that overlooked the courtyard. Rain soaked the rug below the windows.

There was a wastebasket by the bed filled to the brim with papers, one of the few containers that had not been emptied in the entire apartment. Mattie crossed to it and saw several crumpled pieces of paper on top.

She was picking one up when she heard a meow. She looked over and saw Socrates, Chris’s charcoal and gray tabby, coming out of the bathroom.

Mattie took a step toward him, grinning. “There you are.”