There were the twelve bones taken from Portman. The phalanges of his right hand recovered from Bremmel accounted for three of them. If Masters was right and the bones were removed in order to be left on future victims, there were as many as nine more murders to come. Adding Portman himself and Bremmel, the body count would be eleven. Was the number meaningful? Was the interval between the murders – three days – significant? Were the types of bones taken from Portman relevant? What about the bones removed from Bremmel’s butt? Were the killers really saying ‘fuck you’ in a playful, psychopathic let’s-have-fun-with-the-flatfoots kind of way?
I went through all these questions so many times I started to feel like I was running in circles. At that point I realised I probably was. I stopped, opened my eyes to the world around me and realised I was looking out across the Bosphorus. I leaned on a rusted railing and scoped the surroundings to get my bearings. The sun was due to rise, Masters was nowhere to be seen, and I was completely lost.
A horn tooted and a cab drove up. The driver leaned across and shouted out through the passenger-side window at me. ‘Taxi!?’
I recognised the guy and hadn’t expected to. I walked over. ‘Emir, right?’ I said.
Hearing his name surprised him. ‘Yes, sir, how do you know this?’
‘You took me to the US Consulate-General yesterday, remember?’
‘Oh yes, that was me, sir. Where you going now? The consulate?’
‘You following me?’ I asked. I didn’t believe he was. I could see from his face he had no recollection of the fare. Maybe all we non-moustachioed Americans looked alike to him.
‘No, sir.’ Then he thought about my question and said, ‘Unless you like me to follow you.’
I put an end to the immediate conversation and climbed in the back seat. It was coming up to 07:00 and I was feeling a little behind schedule.
‘You know the Hotel Charisma, in the Sultanahmet?’ I said.
‘Yes, I know it. It is far,’ he replied. ‘You came from there? You have run a long way. Do you mind putting on the seat?’
Putting on what? I wondered.
Emir passed back a green towel, solving the mystery. ‘I want to keep taxi nice for tourist.’
I shrugged. My legs were sticking to the thick, shiny plastic encasing the seats. I sat on the towel.
‘American?’ he asked, leaning back, talking out the side of his mouth.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Americans – good people. You like Istanbul?’
‘Emir. You got any Turkish music?’ If I didn’t shut the guy up, he was going to tell me again that a stay in Istanbul was never long enough if I ever had to leave, and I could do without the déjà vu.
I was starting to cool down when Emir pulled up to the Hotel Charisma, just as Masters stepped out the door and checked the street for cabs. She waved at Emir as he pulled over. I handed him a ball of money, forgot about the receipt, and hopped out.
‘What took you, Vin? I’ve had breakfast and a shower. And getting a cab ride . . .’ She shook her head and tut-tutted. ‘You must be really unfit,’ she said as she made Emir’s day and climbed in.
Back to evens, not that I was keeping score.
I was maybe forty minutes behind Masters by the time I made it to the consulate-general, but she wasn’t there. I killed a half-hour chasing up Portman’s flight log from Andrews AFB Flight Records Office. They said it was going to take them some time getting back to me. How much time did it take to punch a code on a keyboard, copy the information and send it online? Days, apparently.
I dialled the number Cain had given me for Doctor Aysun Merkit. Her secretary answered. From the sound of the voice, it was either a guy who answered or an old lady who chain-smoked. This being Turkey, my money was on the smoker. She told me the doctor wasn’t in, but I was happy to settle for an appointment with her in the mid afternoon.
Next, I sniffed around TEI, otherwise known as Tusas Engine Industries, where Bremmel worked as General Electric’s point man on those engines. Bremmel wasn’t a resident of Istanbul. According to records accessed with a little local police cooperation, he lived with his wife in Eskisehir where TEI was headquartered, a city more or less 120 miles south-east of Istanbul. I also knew from his email exchanges with Portman that Bremmel spent a fair bit of time at the Incirlik Air Base, close to the border Turkey shared with Iraq, where the work of those F-16s was being performed. ‘Bremmel’ wasn’t exactly a common name in Turkey, and I located his home phone number through an online directory. Hired help at his home informed me that Mrs Bremmel had gone home to Seattle to visit relatives – which was a long way from jumping on her husband in a room at the Istanbul Hilton.
I went back to skimming through Portman’s emails. An hour and a half later I pushed back from the desk for a breather, no closer to any kind of breakthrough. From the thousands of items, I could see that Emmet Portman and Dutch Bremmel were reasonably friendly, though not overly chummy. The relationship between the US Government, TEI and the Turkish authorities, which included its Air Force and various government ministers, was a gauntlet of protocol issues, complicated by the usual supply-and-demand headaches – the wrong parts in inventory, aircraft with incorrect serial numbers delivered for upgrade, and so on and so forth – and every one of these stumbling blocks and hiccups was accompanied by at least thirty to forty email exchanges. There were hundreds of emails between Ward Burnbaum, who represented the interests of the US State Department, and Portman. I skipped through a few dozen at random and found nothing I wouldn’t have expected.
Masters walked in with red circles on her cheeks, blowing into her hands to warm them. I closed the link. I’d have to find time to come back to the emails on some other occasion.
‘Jesus, the weather has turned,’ she said. ‘It’s damn well freezing out there. Hope for your sake that’s a winter T-shirt you’re wearing. You ready to go?’ She was waiting at the door, holding it open.
The clock in my head said it was just after eleven, confirmed by the time displayed on the computer screen. We had an appointment to review the surveillance footage. I took my jacket off the back of the chair, put it on and zippered it up as we walked towards the elevator. ‘Where you been?’ I asked.
‘Got a call first thing from the leasing agent. Not the person I spoke to yesterday – the general manager. He rang to tell me they’d had a break-in at their office about a month ago. I went to see him. They had computers stolen, files broken into and papers strewn about. Some keys were also taken. One of them was the front-door key to Portman’s place. The manager also went to check on Portman’s lease yesterday after I called, and found the file gone. He doesn’t know whether it was stolen during the break-in. Seems he didn’t believe our call about Portman was a coincidence.’
‘My kind of guy,’ I said. ‘Did the police pay them a visit afterwards and dust things down?’
‘Yep.’
‘And found absolutely nothing?’
She shrugged. ‘More or less. Lifted plenty of prints, then they fingerprinted the staff for comparison purposes. They said it would take some time to identify whose prints belonged to whom, there being plenty of staff pawing the files. There might be unidentified latents amongst them, but, you know – it’s the usual story.’
The usual story was that unless those unidentified prints came with a police record, they’d most likely stay unidentified. ‘Did the file removed include plans of Portman’s place?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’
‘They lost anyone else’s particulars?’
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘And someone in the office hasn’t just mislaid Portman’s file?’
‘Not a chance. I was there this morning. The boss runs a tight ship. The staff have to sign for every pencil they take from the supply cabinet.’
‘So the front-door key was stolen. If we believe the killers did the break-in, why didn’t they just use it instead of coming in via the drain?’
Ma
sters shook her head.
The elevator was waiting on our floor. As we headed to ground, I watched the floors peel off on the overhead digital display.
‘There was a lot of premeditation, a lot of planning going on before the murderers struck,’ Masters noted. ‘If these are serial killings, is that level of preparation and plotting usual?’
‘Don’t know. That’s one for the forensic shrink. We’re seeing her this afternoon at 15:00 hours, by the way.’ Masters was right. There didn’t seem to have been a lot left to chance. ‘We know what Bremmel was doing in the Hilton parking lot,’ I went on, ‘but I’d like to know whether he was keeping to a schedule and whether the killers caught him trying to keep it.’
Outside, it was cold. My breath steamed in front of my face.
‘Over here! Over here!’
I recognised the voice, which gave me the opportunity to ignore it and head in the other direction.
‘Vin,’ Masters called out after me. ‘Where are you going? I’ve hired us a driver.’
Emir. I knew he’d be standing by his cab, waving. I turned. Yep, I wasn’t disappointed.
‘Hello, hello. Please to get in where it is nice and warm.’
I slid in beside Masters, where it was still chilly, and a long way from nice.
‘Where to, lady boss?’ said Emir out the side of his mouth, his moustache pawing at the air beside his cheek as he spoke.
‘Lady boss?’ I enquired.
‘You know it,’ replied Masters. She gave him an address.
Emir swung us into the traffic and headed generally north across town, through a network of back streets, then onto a highway and over a bridge spanning a wide estuary to another area of the city entirely. Once into the rhythm of the journey, Emir felt the need for conversation. ‘Are you married?’ he asked.
‘To each other?’ Masters was waving in front of her face like she was brushing away an unpleasant smell. ‘No, no . . . but I’m engaged. Not to this guy . . . Actually, I met my future husband right here, in Istanbul.’
I knew what was coming next. ‘Istanbul is the city for lovers,’ I said, intoning it in unison with Emir so that Masters received this well-known fact in stereo. My reward for this was The Look.
‘And you my friend sir?’ he asked, running it all together.
‘Me? Married?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do I look married?’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘There goes your tip.’
‘I would like to have many, many wives,’ Emir announced, ‘like the sultans.’
‘You would, huh?’
‘Many,’ he said, nodding vigorously and rolling his eyes like he was seeing himself surrounded by a bevy of Barbara Eden lookalikes.
‘Should I spoil it for him now?’ I asked Masters.
‘There you go, Vin. Proving to me again why we were never going to make it.’
‘’Cause I think that having one wife is tough enough, and that a nag of them – or whatever the collective noun is – might possibly be the worst idea anyone ever came up with? And I thought it was because I lived in Washington and you lived in Germany.’
‘No, it’s because you’re damaged, Vin,’ she replied. ‘You see everything through the prism of your own experience, and assume that’s just how it’s going to be for everyone else.’
I could have bitten, could have arced up at Masters and told her that you had to learn from something and that experience was as good a teacher as any – and probably better than most. But I let it slide. She was younger than me and yet to sit in Experience’s classroom on marriage. Meanwhile, Emir had shifted gear and was now giving us a guided tour of the sights. But neither Masters nor I was listening. We’d retreated to heal our cuts and bruises in silence.
Eleven
The Istanbul Police Department was housed in a sullen poured-concrete building slapped together in the ’60s. Grime sweated from the pores of the flaking surface, the decades of ugliness accumulated within now seeping out. Bare trees lining the road out front shivered in the cold breeze. Beside the main entrance, a Turkish flag the size of a basketball court executed a lazy roll around the flagpole.
Emir pulled up as close to the front entrance as security allowed – around a hundred yards away. Traffic bollards prevented a closer drop-off, thwarting truck bombs and other special deliveries from being left at reception.
Captain Cain arrived as Masters and I walked to a brick bunker in front of the courtyard. We handed over our shields for inspection to a couple of swarthy uniform guys with MKEK submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Their peaked caps would have given a South American dictator a hard-on. They examined our credentials minutely.
‘Morning,’ said Cain.
‘Morning,’ Masters replied, providing enough of a greeting for the both of us. ‘We’ll just follow you.’
The captain nodded and said, ‘Cold, isn’t it?’
‘Freezing,’ agreed Masters, blowing into her hand.
The guards raised the boom and cleared us through. We followed Cain, and around five minutes later arrived at a reception desk on the second floor occupied by nothing but a small silver bell, outside a wood and frosted-glass partition. The bell gave a ping when Cain tapped it. The place reeked of male sweat, urine and the memory of disinfectant – so, basically, like every front-line police department anywhere in the world.
Detective Sergeant Iyaz appeared around a partition and gestured at us with a sign that said he’d be with us in a few minutes. There were no chairs to sit on, so Masters, Cain and I milled around while we waited for Iyaz’s return, watching various unsavoury characters come and go. And a few crooks as well.
Karli and Iyaz collected us and led us down the hall and around the corner to another office. It was small; room for a desk, a chair, a corkboard and enough oxygen for maybe one person at a time. Handwritten and typed notes, Post-its and scraps of paper scrawled with phone numbers and/or addresses, photographs of dead people and mug shots of others who looked like nasty pieces of work all fought for space with children’s paintings. On the desk there was a photo of a couple of smiling kids – the suspects responsible for the artworks, most probably – trays, accordion folders, and a huge, old-fashioned computer monitor running a Tetris screen saver. Detective Sergeant Karli stood beside the desk, hands on his wide hips, sucking on a mint, chasing it around his mouth with his tongue. He gave us a nod.
‘Did you get much from the cameras?’ Cain enquired before the show got under way, tabling the question for all of us.
Iyaz opened the tray on the CPU humming away beneath the desk and inserted a disk. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, disappointed. He tapped a couple of keys and the desktop’s DVD player came up. ‘Only three cameras work.’
I gave myself a little I-told-you-so moment even though I’d have preferred to be proved wrong.
The computer ran the footage as we crowded around the monitor. The cameras were old, and the resolution was so bad it looked like the lenses had been covered with nylons. The pictures were actually a series of greenish black-and-white stills, one taken every half-second, so that the resulting footage was grainy, dark and disjointed. A time code sat in the bottom right-hand corner, showing the date and time and counting off the seconds.
‘Did the hotel put this together?’ I asked.
Iyaz took a second or two to get my drift, then said, ‘No. We do it. We have all surveillance tapes. The pictures are bad.’
I’d have said ‘awful’, but that would just be me wearing my black hat. From what I could gather, the three working cameras were respectively positioned at the entrance to the parking lot, on a ramp, and on the level where Bremmel was found. The camera at the entrance showed an old, dark-coloured Fiat driving past; the second camera caught it on its way down, as did the camera on the parking level. A view of someone in dark clothing and ball cap followed, the cap’s brim shielding the face like the person knew not to look up. The figure was carrying a soft
bag, walking beneath the third camera. Was this one of our killers? The time code jumped forward twenty minutes and someone wearing a ball cap and dark clothing walked back, head low, retracing their steps. There was a cut in the footage – the Fiat climbed up the ramp, blowing a little smoke, and exited the way it had come in. With a little enhancement, the vehicle’s number plate would be clearly visible.
‘The licence plate,’ said Cain, nodding at the screen, making the same observation out loud.
‘Yes. We checked. It is stolen,’ Iyaz replied, tossing a couple of screen-shots of the Fiat on the table, the now reasonably sharp licence plate having been worked over by a computer.
Running around Istanbul were probably half-a-million Fiats identical to this one – same model, same colour, same year of manufacture. Were we really looking at the vehicle used by Bremmel’s murderer? I gave that question some thought. Forensics would have been able to nail a fairly accurate time of death for Bremmel by measuring the decrease in his core body temperature. The timing of the vehicle’s arrival and departure would have to have tallied with that, straddling it. But was it just a coincidence that this automobile was stolen? There had to be plenty of auto thieves who weren’t butchers . . . ‘Were these the only working cameras, or were there others still taking pictures?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Iyaz. ‘There were other cameras.’
‘And none of them caught anything at around the same time? No other cars came and went? No other foot traffic?’
Iyaz knitted those brows of his together while the translator in his head went to work. ‘No,’ he replied eventually. ‘There was nothing else.’
‘Okay,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘So there is a good chance these are our suspects.’
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