Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(65)

It had low ceilings and looked like a hoarder’s paradise, but my best thinking took place in the old chair behind an older desk or on the ancient couch.

I’d no sooner sat down than my phone rang. “Suzanne Liu?” I groaned, seeing the caller ID. “I’m not taking this.”

I thumbed Decline. Almost a minute later, the phone beeped to alert me to a voice mail. I ignored it.

Then the texting started. Seven messages, and all long. I scanned the first one, then read it and the six after it closely.

In each of the texts, Liu raised issues with the way Tull had written his second book, pointing out blatant errors and false statements. The editor finished by imploring me not to exclude the writer as a suspect in the murders.

Things are not as they seem, she wrote. Not with Thomas Tull, Dr. Cross.

I sighed. On the corner of my desk in a neat stack were Thomas Tull’s three books. I picked up the only book of his I had not looked at in depth, Noon in Berlin.

Like the others, the writing pulled the reader in and did not let go. I think I’d read twenty pages before I picked my head up, realizing I’d been utterly fascinated with his description of the victims meeting for a noontime tryst at an apartment near the Tiergarten in Berlin only to be murdered while they made love, both struck with darts that contained powerful animal tranquilizers, enough to stop their hearts in seconds.

From there, Tull jumped to the point of view of Inspector Ava Firsching of the Berlin police, the female detective that the writer had gotten involved with on this case. As Tull depicted her, Firsching was in her early thirties, tough, dedicated, and in the midst of what would be the case of her career.

I read another two chapters and came across another name: Hauptkommissar Horst Martel. Tull portrayed Martel as Firsching’s foil inside the department, a strictly by-the-book cop, too rigid to try creative ways to deal with the string of lovers being murdered at noon in the German capital.

I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight in DC, nearly eight in the morning in Berlin.

On a whim, I Googled the phone number of the Berlin City Police and found it and something better, the number for the major-crimes unit. I called it and was not surprised that it was answered. Eight o’clock in the morning, cops answer. Later, when things get hectic or nuts, sometimes they don’t.

Luckily, the detective I got spoke English, but he said he was sorry to inform me that Hauptkommissar Martel had retired the year before. When I asked where Martel had retired to, he said he thought he was still in Berlin.

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?”