Private Berlin (Private 5)

“So he said,” Katharina answered snippily. “I would have rather heard that from you, Mattie. You’re lucky the two of you weren’t arrested. A high-speed chase? You’re not cops.”

Mattie sighed. “I know. It was the heat of the moment, and then I was too exhausted to call. I needed to take Socrates home and tell Niklas what happened.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“He’s got Socrates.”

“And you?”

Mattie shook inside. She’d not allowed herself to reflect at all since arriving at the slaughterhouse. Now it threatened to spill out of her in a torrent.

“You want me to come over?” Katharina asked.

“I’ll be okay.”

“Burkhart said the guy on the motorcycle got the hard drive from Chris’s laptop,” Katharina said.

“Looked that way.”

“Nothing else?”

“The place was wrecked,” Mattie replied. “It was a little hard to figure—”

She remembered the crumpled paper she’d retrieved from Chris’s wastebasket just before the burglar attacked her. “Hold on a second.”

Mattie put the phone on speaker, dug out the paper, and unfolded it. She scanned the list in Chris’s distinctive scrawl. She smiled, but with little joy.

“Looks like the burglar missed something,” she said.

CHAPTER 19

“WHAT?” KATHARINA ASKED.

“A to-do list that Chris wrote,” Mattie said, picking up her phone, the paper, and the beer and heading toward her bedroom. “It’s dated last Tuesday and says he had an appointment with Hermann Krüger at eleven in the morning that day.”

“Not the wife?”

“No, it says H. Krüger, and it has an address on Potsdamer Platz, the Sony building, I think.”

“So, what, he meets with Hermann, tells him he knows he has multiple mistresses and consorts with prostitutes and…?”

“You’re assuming too much, Kat,” Mattie snapped. “Krüger’s name’s just here on a list. So is Cassiano’s. He was to meet with him at three that afternoon. And he has a third name here, Pavel.”

“Maxim Pavel?” Katharina asked, suddenly excited.

“Doesn’t say,” Mattie replied. “Why?”

“Because Gabriel was able to trace a series of phone calls Chris made last Monday and Tuesday to a Maxim Pavel. He’s a Russian ex-pat. Owns two or three nightclubs, including Cabaret.”

“The drag-queen show?” Mattie asked.

“Very successful business according to Gabriel. But there’s more. He evidently has ties to Russian organized crime.”

Mattie checked her watch. “It’s only eight o’clock; we could—”

“We already checked,” Katharina said. “Pavel’s away in Italy. Won’t be back until tomorrow morning.”

Mattie thought about that. “We’re going to need reinforcements.”