Triple Cross

It took me about ten more minutes to find a Horst Martel living in the Kreuzberg section of the German capital. A woman picked up on the third ring.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“My name is Alex Cross,” I said. “I work as a psychological and investigative consultant to the FBI and the Washington, DC, police department. Is Horst Martel in? I would like to talk with him about a case I’m working on.”

“Horst is retired,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s about a case he worked on. It became a book.”

“Noon in Berlin,” she said sourly.

“That’s right. I’d like to talk to him about it. Well, about Thomas Tull, really.”

The line went silent.

CHAPTER 72

“HELLO?” I SAID AND was about to hang up when I heard muffled voices in the background. She had not hung up, just put the phone down.

A few moments later, I heard someone pick up the phone. In heavily accented English and with a suspicious tone, a man said, “I am Horst Martel. Who are you?”

I identified myself again and said, “If you’re doubting my standing with the FBI or the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, Herr Martel, I can get my liaisons to call and vouch for me.”

“Not necessary, Dr. Cross,” Martel said. “My wife just Googled you. What do you want to know about Thomas Tull? And for what reasons?”

For the next ten minutes, I described the Family Man murders. I told him that Tull was writing about the case and, largely due to his former editor, was also a suspect.

“Ja, ja, of course he is a suspect,” said the former Berlin police inspector. “That is his pattern, I think. Well, I know here that was also true.”

“Wait,” I said. “You suspected Thomas Tull in the noontime murders?”

“Ja, ja,” Martel said. “He was already in Berlin when the first killings occurred. Not far from where it happened.”

Was that in the book? I didn’t think so. I thought he’d written that the first murders took place before his arrival in Berlin. “Why did you consider him a suspect?”

“Because he tried to—how do you say it—insert himself into the investigation within two days of the first murders.”

I was frowning so hard, my eyebrows hurt. That was definitely not in the book. In fact, he’d kept himself completely out of the narrative in the pages I’d read. “Let me understand,” I said. “Tull decided to follow the case within forty-eight hours of the first murders?”

“Correct,” Martel said. “He, uh—how do I say it?—claimed he had the extrasensory perception that the case might be important. You know, the feeling in the stomach?”

“I know that feeling.”

“I had this same feeling about Tull. From the beginning, he made me feel this way, even after we cleared him.”

“He had an alibi?”

“Cell phone records that showed him in another part of the city at noon,” the retired police commissioner said. “And timestamped credit card receipts.”

I thought about the fact that Tull had used his cell phone data to prove he was nowhere near the Kane house the night that family was murdered. Was it a coincidence? Or was Tull gaming the system somehow?

Get away with it once, you’ll definitely try again.

“So you let him into the investigation?” I asked.

A little bitterly, Martel said, “I was against it because we could not find CCTV footage of him to absolutely corroborate his whereabouts at the time of the killings. But my superiors said he was in a park having a beer, not many cameras, and they knew of his previous book and thought it might reflect well on the Berlin police department to have someone of Herr Tull’s, uh, reputation to tell the story.”

“Did Tull eventually solve the killings?”

He snorted. “Thomas Tull? No.”

“The way he writes it, Ava Firsching decides on her own to go back to the zoo to look at vendors.”

“You will have to ask her, but we were going back and looking at a lot of the evidence by then. The zoo would have been studied again by someone.”

“What about the guy you ended up catching?”

“Dietrich Frommer.”

“Any doubt it’s him?”

“None.”

“Could he have been framed?”

The retired police inspector made a dismissive noise in his throat. “Frommer believes so, but the evidence says it is him. Frommer had supplies of the tranquilizer. He knew the first woman to die from the gym where he exercised, Gerta Waldemar.”

“Didn’t you find the dart gun?” I asked.

“In a crawl space under his home, wiped clean. He claimed he had never seen the weapon before in his life.”

“You said the evidence says it is Frommer. What does the sick feeling in your stomach say?”

Martel paused for several moments. “That if Frommer is telling the truth, Tull was somehow involved. At the very least, I feel Tull was pushing the investigation in directions he wanted it to go from very early on.”

“Through his relationship with Inspector Firsching.”