‘Thanks for stopping by, sir.’ I took a moment to flick through my notebook to help get my brain into gear for this impromptu visit. ‘Just at the moment, because we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re checking on everything – the deceased’s recent movements, people who worked for him, people he would have met. Sir, we noted from his flight record that he was an appi-8. He was a unique individual, and this is known to be a pretty hot part of the world. Put the two together and we imagined there might have been some call on the Attaché’s time from certain quarters.’
‘So, you think he might have been working on . . . special projects. Is that what you’re sayin’? Something that might account for the way he was killed?’
‘In a nutshell, sir,’ Masters said.
Stringer shook his big head from side to side. ‘Sorry, can’t help you
there. I can assure you that Colonel Portman was not on the Company payroll, though I can honestly say we’d have welcomed his input on a couple of things. He simply didn’t have the time. Too busy with the Turkish Air Force, I believe.’
‘We know about that,’ Masters confirmed.
‘Had he ever done
any
work for the Company in Turkey?’ I asked.
Stinger massaged his chin with that Christmas ham of his. ‘Hmm . . . Well over a year ago, he helped us out with an operation to find an al-Qaeda terrorist cell looking to cause some mischief around Incirlik Air Base.’
‘But nothing more recently?’ I asked, pushing. ‘Seems odd to us that a guy like Portman wouldn’t be involved in, if not black ops, then at least something brown.’
Stringer replied after a moment of what could have been irritation. ‘No, nothing. On official business or otherwise.’ He then glanced from me to Masters, waiting for a question. When none came, he stood. I noted there was no grunt this time. He got to his feet light as a blimp and almost as big. ‘Well, if there’s nothing more . . . ?’
I found myself wondering how much of this guy’s mannerisms was theatre – maybe he’d just been putting on a show. Why was I surprised? It was my experience that clowns didn’t usually make it to the corner offices in the Company’s executive structure.
‘I very much hope ya’ll catch this killer,’ Stringer added, adjusting his braces. ‘Like I said, if there’s anything I can help you with, you got my full cooperation. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have a luncheon engagement.’
In fact, there was something the Company could help us with, but I knew that before a man like Stringer would give, he’d have to receive. ‘Sir,’ I began, ‘we’re checking out a theory that there might have been two killers.’
‘
Two
killers . . .’ he repeated, nodding, considering the possibility, accepting the gift of information. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘When the assailants blew the Attaché’s safe, we believe they used blast blankets to deaden the sound. Those things are heavy. Add to that the rest of the stuff they left behind in the drain.’
‘I’ve seen the inventory,’ Stringer agreed. ‘So, all up, more than one person could carry. Makes sense.’
‘Special Agent Masters and I also believe they may have had a boat moored out in the Bosphorus as their base – used scuba gear, floated everything in, and maybe sunk everything they didn’t need or want to leave behind on the way back out.’
Stringer nodded again. ‘It’s still making sense.’
‘We’d like to know if the Bosphorus happened to be under any useful footprints on the night in question,’ said Masters, cutting to it.
‘Hmm . . .’ He pondered the request as well as its implications, drumming his huge fingers on the desk. This was always going to be a tough ask. While satellite photographs might allow us to identify such a boat, perhaps even helping us identify the killers, the downside would be – if it ever got out, and most likely it would – an admission that we were spying on Turkey, which was supposed to be an ally. ‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ he said finally, ‘even if there was a bird overhead at the time. Which I doubt,’ he added for safety.
Stringer was back-pedalling fast enough to win the Tour de France sprinter’s jersey.
‘Have you considered that they could also have been dropped off and picked up by legitimate vessels?’ he asked.
‘No, we hadn’t, sir.’
‘Something to think about, maybe.’ He cracked a knuckle. ‘Anyhow, I can certainly put your request to the people who decide these things,’ he continued. ‘Y’all just let me know if there’s anything else I can do.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s been great to meet you.’ With that, he gave us a wave and closed the door behind him as he left.
‘Y’all just let me know if there’s anything else I can do,’ Masters mimicked, ‘. . . so as I can sit on it.’
‘Where it’d have no chance of ever seeing the light of day,’ I added. I wondered what else he might have up there – a large boat came to mind.
‘So much for the full-cooperation bit. Especially when it comes to satellites.’
I sat on the corner of the desk, picked up a pen and used it to scratch the itch down inside my cast. Something was bugging me. I knew if I thought about it too hard, I’d lose it permanently, so I let it go – whatever it was. Maybe it would hit me over the head at 3 am.
Stringer. If
I
was head of CIA operations out this way, I would probably be pretty interested to know why a serious embassy asset was chopped into snack-size pieces, wouldn’t I? That got me to thinking: if I really was Stringer, and he was me, the only reason I’d play dumb would be because I had something I didn’t want me to know. That made me wonder what I knew that I wasn’t telling myself, and why the hell I’d allowed myself to put on so much weight.
The photo of Portman’s manservant, Adem Fedai, caught my eye, distracting me. Fedai had a pleasant face, but it was a head-and-shoulders shot. The guy could have been smiling sweetly while, unseen and out of frame, his hands held a little girl’s pet rabbit as it struggled under water. Jeffrey Dahmer had a pleasant face too. He –
A rolled-up ball of paper pinged off my head. ‘Cooper, you still with us?’ It was Masters, on the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece again. ‘It’s Cain. We’ve got another murder.’
T
he plant room was not much bigger than a phone booth, or maybe I just thought of it that way because of the absurd number of people trying to squeeze into it. The room was on the bottom floor of the Istanbul Hilton parking lot, which was underground a hundred or so yards away from the hotel itself. We were all there to see the one person who didn’t mind being crammed into the small space, on account of the fact that his head had been removed from his neck with a tree saw.
An ambulance had been called to the scene. A man I took to be the janitor was sitting in the back of the vehicle, being attended to by paramedics. The guy, an old man in faded grey coveralls with a blue Hilton logo on his breast pocket, was sucking oxygen from a mask attached to his face. He was shaking his head and gesticulating as he talked to the uniform cop taking his statement.
Masters and I had been called to the scene not because the victim was an American. And it wasn’t because he carried a Californian driver’s licence, either. The clincher was that he appeared to have a finger inserted in his anus. Someone else’s finger.
‘Looks familiar,’ said Captain Cain, stepping out of the plant room. ‘They were right to call us.’ The parking lot filled with silent lightning
as the forensics team took their digital snaps. ‘It’s similar to the Portman murder, but different. A variation of the MO – no systematic dismemberment this time – but the same casual über-violence. Along with the decapitation, both hands were severed. Smells like chloroform was again used to subdue the victim.’
‘Any bones missing from this one?’ Masters asked.
Cain shook his head. ‘No, they all appear to be present and accounted for.’ He rubbed the top of his head.
‘Maybe the killer was disturbed,’ Masters ventured.
Yeah, ‘disturbed’ was one way to put it.
‘I’m going to step way out on a limb here,’ he said, ‘and say the finger they found in his ass is one of Colonel Portman’s.’
Exactly how many human bones were out there doing the rounds in this city, being passed from one murder victim to the next? Unless they did things different here in Istanbul, not many, I’d have thought. ‘What’s the janitor’s story, Captain?’ I asked.
‘As far as I can make out, he’d come to the end of his shift and was locking up for the night. He found the door ajar, Goldilocks inside and the porridge all gone.’
Dropped on the floor beside the open plant room door, I noticed, was a broom with a wide bristle head. ‘Did the janitor leave the door unlocked?’
‘Must have,’ said Cain. ‘The lock wasn’t forced or drilled out.’
‘What about the murder weapon or weapons – anything apart from the saw left behind again?’
‘They’ve searched. Nothing else has been recovered.’
‘So then, what’s the connection between the victim and Portman, aside from what we already know?’ Masters asked.
‘You mean, aside from the fact that he worked for General Electric and was helping Portman with the F-16 upgrade?’ I said.
‘How do you know that?’ Masters turned to face me.
‘His California driver’s licence says his name’s Dutch Bremmel. There’s a Dutch Bremmel, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, working for TEI. Bremmel was General Electric’s man working with the
Turks. There were emails back and forth between him and Portman, as well as his business card in Portman’s Rolodex.’ Could be a coincidence, but I doubted it. ‘You didn’t happen to notice Bremmel’s name on Portman’s computer, did you, Rodney?’
Cain looked sheepish. If a tin can had been lying around on the ground, he’d have probably kicked it. ‘To tell you the truth, I haven’t managed to spend too much time with the Attaché’s files.’
I wasn’t trying to break the captain’s balls here. It wasn’t necessarily his job anyway. The one reason the name Bremmel had been fresh in my mind was that I’d only just finished browsing through www. recentlybutchered.com – Portman’s email correspondence.
Meanwhile, people were coming and going, making like sardines in Bremmel’s little booth. Any moment I was sure someone from the Guinness Book of Records was going to arrive and make the record official. Masters, Cain and I were standing around watching everyone else get their hands dirty. This wasn’t our country, nor was it our crime scene, but Bremmel was American. He was also ex-USAF, so arguably one of ours – OSI’s. It was an argument we’d lose, though, because of the ‘ex’. Bremmel was a civilian, which took him outside of our purview. But I figured that shouldn’t stop us from making an observation. ‘So we got Portman laid out like an Airfix model,’ I began. ‘And now Bremmel, a heavy hitter at TEI, the guy Portman was dealing with on a day-to-day basis, is sitting around with something that used to belong to the Attaché hidden in a dark place. Do you think the killers are maybe trying to tell us something?’
There were nods all round. The obvious will do that.
‘Did you say, “killers”?’ asked Cain.
I forgot I hadn’t brought the captain up to speed on our recent brainstorm. I was halfway through filling him in when Detective Sergeants Karli and Iyaz arrived to take control of the crime scene. They ignored us. The uniform taking tickets at the door for the show going on around Bremmel saluted and let them pass. Two minutes later they emerged and wandered over.
‘Thank you for being attending,’ said Karli. He put a clear plastic bag
containing what I assumed were Bremmel’s effects under an arm while he loaded a mint into his mouth. ‘This one and the other one . . . we thin they are related.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ agreed Cain.
‘Are you going to impound his vehicle?’ I asked.
‘Whose vehicle?’ Karli appeared confused.
‘The victim’s.’ We were in a parking lot. The most likely scenario was that Bremmel was down here either about to get into his car or leave it parked for the evening. If he was attacked near his car, there might be vital clues in the vehicle, or around it. Frankly, I doubted that, but in this game you have to have the bases covered.
Karli and Iyaz looked around, overwhelmed. They were surrounded by automobiles, most of which looked like they might have been driven by rich American executives like Bremmel.
Masters gave a helpful smile, reached across and, through the plastic evidence bag held by Karli, pinched the remote attached to a bunch of keys. An alarm chirped on a nearby late-model Lexus SUV, and its indicators flashed twice, zapping the cold cement cavern around us with bursts of orange light.
Iyaz immediately yelled at a uniform and pointed at the vehicle excitedly, as if concerned it might try to flee the scene. Uniforms began running towards the SUV until Iyaz started shouting at them some more to stop. One of them turned and raced back to an equipment bag, grabbed a roll of crime-scene tape from it, and sprinted off to the Lexus anew to start wrapping it up.
‘So when do you think we could see the movie?’ I asked the two detectives.
‘Movie?’ said Karli.
I gestured behind him with a tilt of my head, at the round surveillance camera pod wedged into a shadow like a large bug trying hard not to be seen.
‘Yes, yes. We know this,’ Iyaz informed me.
Sure you do. What the hell . . . I told myself to easy up on these guys. Just because the local flatfoots spoke English like three-year-olds didn’t
mean they were. To be fair, it took more than a couple of minutes to get your head around a crime scene, particularly one as bizarre as this. Bremmel’s body was seated, propped against the storeroom wall. His head was sitting beside him, resting on the clean-cut stump of his neck, one eye open and the other half-closed like he’d drunk a bottle of something on an empty stomach and was now paying for it. This lopsided stare was one I’d seen many times – like any moment the deceased would maybe snap out of it. But they never do. A moth had become helplessly trapped in the crimson pool of sticky blood covering most of the floor and was beating a wing furiously. A tree saw, most likely the instrument used for the heavy work, was embedded in the flesh below Bremmel’s collarbone as if the person sawing off his entire shoulder and arm had had a change of heart. Maybe, as Masters suggested, the killer had been disturbed. Bremmel’s severed hands were also sawn off his wrists and tossed aside. One was beside the body’s feet, the other had come to rest in a far corner amongst a collection of brooms, mops and buckets.
Iyaz stood beside me, looking about, hands on hips, while the teams that descend on a dead body got on with earning their pay. He then walked off to have a word with one of the forensics guys.
‘What do you think?’ Masters asked me.
‘I’m not sure what I think,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe it. Are you the Vin Cooper I know, or has an alien snatched your body?’
‘We’re not going to find anything the killers don’t want us to find, is what I think. There are no signs of a struggle, no witnesses, no easy clues like footprints or tyre skid marks, or handy buttons from the killer’s unique and expensive coat clutched in one of the severed hands.’
‘Okay, I get the picture. What about the surveillance TV footage?’
I saw that Iyaz had moved on to join a huddle comprising a couple of corporate types and a hotel security guy. One of the corporates pointed at the camera housing. ‘I don’t think we should get too excited about it,’ I told Masters. ‘This ain’t exactly post-9/11 downtown New York. I’ll bet that half the cameras in this place don’t work and the other half haven’t
been switched on – or the tapes are so old and worn, all they capture is snow.’
‘Nothing like a bit of positive thinking, Vin,’ she said.
I shrugged. Maybe I was just getting tired of hanging around a parking lot that smelt of blood, dust, old exhaust fumes and cold concrete. I needed to go get something to clean out my insides, perhaps a couple of nice, clean blocks of ice wrapped around two fingers of single malt, then have some shut-eye and put this day in the trash.
I caught Karli as he strode past, his pants hitched so high they looked like his butt cheeks were slowly eating them. ‘Detective Sergeant?’
Karli raised his eyebrow at me in the universal can-I-help-you? gesture.
‘Do you know why the deceased was down here?’ I asked.
He gave me the puzzled look that was starting to get on my nerves.
‘The deceased, the dead guy – Bremmel,’ I tried again. ‘Why was he down here in the garage?’
Karli called Iyaz over and the two went into a huddle. Eventually they came out of it. Iyaz said, ‘Mr Bremmel made a visit here.’
‘Who was he visiting?’
‘A woman. The hotel says Mr Bremmel came every second Friday afternoon for months to visiting her.’
So, every other Friday at the Hilton for a little afternoon delight. Dutch Bremmel had made a tradition of it.
‘Do you know who she is?’ I enquired.
‘It is Mrs Bremmel.’
‘His wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure it’s not his niece?’
‘I am sorry?’
‘Never mind,’ I said, waving away the cynicism. Men didn’t take their wives to hotel rooms during business hours to do the business. They didn’t take their nieces either, come to think of it. I knew very little about Bremmel beyond his connection with Portman, but I was learning fast. I knew, for example, something about his character. I also knew that
somewhere he
did
have a wife, otherwise there’d be little use for the dishonesty. ‘Where is the alleged Mrs Bremmel now?’
‘She has left,’ Iyaz replied.
‘What?’
‘Yes, gone.’ Iyaz didn’t seem to be getting my drift.
‘Do you have an address for her, aside from the one that came with her husband’s credit card?’
Iyaz caught on, suddenly looked nervous. ‘No. But we will find her.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said. They’d turn up with her just like they were turning up with Portman’s hired help. Which reminded me. ‘You managed to track down Colonel Portman’s manservant?’
‘Who?’
‘Adem Fedai.’ I wasn’t sure I had the pronunciation right. Maybe this time it was me who was sounding like a three-year-old.
‘No. Still we cannot find him.’
‘And you tried calling him on his cell phone?’
‘Yes, we tried. No good.’ He shook his head. ‘We checked with phone company. The phone was switched off.’
I shrugged. ‘Worth a try. And the surveillance footage?’ I clarified my meaning by pointing at the camera wedged up high where the wall met the ceiling.
‘Yes, yes . . .’ he said. ‘We will see tomorrow. We will call you. We need time.’
Time to what? I wondered.
I noticed the gathering was thinning out. The paramedics were pushing their gurney slow, unhurried, towards the plant room. An empty body bag was laid out on top. If they somehow managed to get their trolley into that small space,
I
was going to call the people at Guinness. I turned to leave.
‘Where’re you going?’ Masters quizzed.
‘Bed. Wanna join me?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t you ever give up?’