“All over. My folks moved from Seoul to LA in the late seventies when I was three, ran a grocery in K-town until it got burned to the ground in the ’92 riots, then we moved to a suburb of Phoenix. I did my undergrad at Yale, and my law degree at Stanford, then joined the FBI soon after. Been in New York my entire career.”
Brodie said to Taylor, “A Yalie. I think we found our CIA plant.”
Kim laughed. “Those geniuses tried to recruit me in college, actually. They showed up at our senior year job fair. Thought I was Chinese.”
They took the elevator to the ground floor and walked to the rearentrance, where the Marine guard again saluted them. Brodie and Taylor returned the salute as they exited and headed toward the parked Mercedes, where Ulrich was standing and smoking a cigarette.
Brodie introduced Ulrich to Kim, then climbed in the front passenger seat as Taylor and Kim got in the back. Ulrich swung the car around and radioed someone, and the security bollards lowered. He pulled onto the road. “We go to your hotel?”
“The park across the street from the hotel,” said Brodie.
Ulrich nodded and headed toward Körnerpark, where Harry Vance had gone alone, in the dead of night, for reasons unknown to Brodie, but known to Harry Vance. If Vance was there to meet someone, that someone was Fate.
The embassy briefing had been, as expected, a little substance and a lot of nothing. There were no answers to be found in a conference room full of competing egos and turf war pissing matches. Scott Brodie had no idea where this investigation would ultimately lead, but in a homicide case the road to justice always begins where the victim’s life ended.
CHAPTER 9
Ulrich drove his American passengers to Körnerpark and Brodie told Ulrich to drop their bags off at the Art Hotel, and he was free to go.
Brodie, Taylor, and FBI Agent David Kim joined Berlin Police Captain Omar Soliman on an open expanse of frosty lawn in the northeast section of Körnerpark. At the perimeter of the block-square, sunken park, tall, bare trees towered above the twenty-foot-high retaining wall that marked its boundary. Nearby was a circular pool with a fountain that had been turned off and was filled with rainwater and dead leaves.
Brodie imagined this was a popular spot for locals on warm days—and when it was not the secured scene of a homicide. Now they were the only ones here.
Detective Soliman pointed to five white flags stuck in the frigid grass—one for Harry Vance’s head and one for each of his extremities. “The right leg,” said Soliman, “was bent to the side. And his left arm was above his head. This is consistent with a gunshot striking him in the right temple while he was facing north. He fell back and to the left.” He added, unnecessarily, “Due to the deceleration forces of the bullet strike.”
Taylor pointed to a line of yellow flags leading north from the site of the body. “What do those indicate?”
Soliman replied, “Footprints leading toward the body, then away from the body. Our forensic people created plaster casts on Sunday when the impressions were fresh. We also found muddy shoe or boot prints going up the stairs of the park’s northern entrance over there. They end at the curb. We believe that after the killer shot Mr. Vance, he may have given the murder weapon—the rifle—to an accomplice so that he would be clean whenhe descended into the park to check that the victim was dead, take his cell phone, and perform the mutilation.”
Perform the mutilation.That made it sound somehow both clinical and barbaric.
Soliman added, “Then the killer left using the same stairway and, we believe, got into a waiting vehicle.”
Kim pointed to a line of blue flags leading in the opposite direction. “And those are the victim’s footprints?”
“Yes,” said Soliman.
Brodie spotted a few red flags at various distances from where the body had been, which he knew without asking were markers for blood splatter.
Brodie looked around the park. It was a relatively straightforward crime scene and a relatively simple kill. Victim approached from the south, was sniped from somewhere to the east, and then the killer entered and exited the park from the north. The heavy rain and cold weather on the day before the murder would have kept visitors out of the park and also created something of a clean slate for the footprints of the victim and of the killer to be formed, then documented. Not much different from how a crime scene was processed back home.
Brodie looked to the eastern edge of the park, which sloped up toward street level and was the only side without a retaining wall. An iron fence separated the park from the sidewalk. “Let’s take a look at where you believe the shooter fired from.”
Captain Soliman nodded. “Follow me.”
Brodie, Taylor, and Kim trailed Soliman along a paved path that sloped upward to an opening in the iron fence on the east side of the park, where a strip of yellow crime scene tape stretched across the entrance. The tape was printed with German words beginning withACHTUNG!, which always gets everyone’s attention. A Berlin Police officer stood nearby.
It had been over forty-eight hours since the discovery of the body, and this was an unusually long time to maintain a closed crime scene in a public place, so Brodie assumed they were still running crime scene analysis and forensics. Or maybe they had kept the park closed for the benefit of their American guests, to show how cooperative they were being. TheBerlin Police probably cared more about maintaining good optics with the Americans than they did about inconveniencing the residents of Neukölln.
They ducked under the tape and stepped onto a small cobblestone side street. Soliman turned right and they followed him for about thirty feet. “Based upon analysis of the bullet’s trajectory,” he said, “we believe the killer stood approximately here, and fired the bullet from a height of one point six meters. That would mean the killer stands at a height of approximately one point eight five meters.”
Brodie nodded. A little over six feet tall. Statistically above average height for an Arabic male. Or for anyone. He turned around and looked at the rows of five-story apartment buildings across the street. The cobblestone road was narrow, and the buildings were only about twenty-five feet from the edge of the park.
Brodie looked down into the park where Harry Vance had been standing when the small bullet entered his skull and ended his life. Did Harry have a split second of understanding of what had just happened to him? Probably. The bullet-pierced brain took a few long seconds before it stopped processing information. Maybe longer.
Brodie said to Captain Soliman, “I assume you scoured this area for a shell casing?”
“Of course.” He added, as though giving a classroom lesson, “No professional assassin would leave an ejected shell casing behind.”
