“General Kiernan will get the message.”
She had no reply.
Brodie checked his watch: 9:34A.M.“We’ve got almost half an hour to kill. Let’s see if we can get in early to the room Butler set aside for us.”
Taylor nodded as they headed back to the elevator.
Neither Brodie nor Taylor was looking forward to watching hours of security footage that might or might not answer some of the many questions surrounding this case. The Berlin Police had already reviewed all the footage, as Jason Butler was eager to let them know, and maybe they were wasting their time. But in Scott Brodie’s experience, how hard you look at the evidence sometimes depends on how badly you want the answers.
CHAPTER 21
Jason Butler had provided them with a small office on the embassy’s fourth floor. The room held only a desk and a few chairs, and was also being used to store cartons of paper; the lifeblood of a bureaucracy. Brodie and Taylor flipped through Harry Vance’s CID case reports they’d just gotten from Sergeant Hodges while waiting for someone from the Berlin police force to arrive with the video surveillance footage.
The door opened and a gaunt young man entered carrying a satchel and introduced himself as Berlin Police Officer Franz Lindoff.
As Lindoff set up his laptop, he informed them, “You must not touch the hard drive.”
“Why not?” asked Brodie.
Lindoff, in the long German tradition of not asking or answering questions that began with “why,” replied, “They tell me, so I tell you. If you touch it, I will tell them.”
“Right. You’re just following orders.”
Lindoff plugged in the drive, then took a seat on a chair against the wall and began fiddling with a tablet. Taylor pulled her chair up to the laptop and started scrolling through the files as Brodie sat beside her. They had footage for all three requested metro stops, and each file appeared to contain two-hour blocks of footage.
“Let’s begin at the beginning,” said Taylor. “Schönhauser Allee, Saturday, sixA.M., the day before the murder.”
She opened the video file, which showed a wide-angle, black-and-white shot of a city street corner in the early morning hours. The angle afforded a view of the intersection, where a few delivery trucks and cars rolled through, with very light pedestrian traffic.
Taylor ran the footage at high speed, and whenever they saw a figure enter the frame she slowed it down. They went through the files, looking for Harry Vance, and the images became color after sunrise, when the road and foot traffic picked up. By 8:30A.M.the rain had started, and people were carrying umbrellas, which made IDing them even harder. Officer Lindoff checked his watch. “How long?”
“As long as it takes,” said Brodie.
Lindoff sighed loudly and went back to his tablet.
Taylor asked Brodie, “Would you even recognize him if you saw him? And I’m sure there are multiple entrances to this station that the camera doesn’t cover.”
Brodie nodded. “Okay. New strategy. Harry entered the hookah lounge at about threeA.M., give or take. It’s a five-minute walk to there from the Neukölln metro. Coming from Prenzlauer Berg, let’s say that’s a twenty-minute trip from stop to stop. So he could have entered one of these metro stops around two-thirtyA.M.”
Taylor took out her phone and pulled up a map of the metro system. “Forget Eberswalder Straße. There’s no way to go from there to Neukölln without a transfer, so he probably didn’t use that station. The other two stops are direct and are on the same line. Schönhauser is one stop before Prenzlauer if you’re headed in the direction of Neukölln. Pick one.”
“Prenzlauer,” said Brodie, on a hunch and also because he couldn’t pronounce Schönhauser.
Taylor pulled up a new file. “Prenzlauer Allee. TwoA.M.”
The footage showed another black-and-white night vision shot. This security camera appeared to be situated over a street-level staircase that went down to the recessed tracks. In the foreground was the top of the stairs, and beyond that was the sidewalk and a wide road. On the other side of the road was the entrance to a small side street.
They began watching. Brodie said, “Remember, light-colored camel-hair coat and a flat cap.”
“Also remember, if it was obvious, Berlin PD would have spotted him already.”
They watched as people went up or down the metro steps. It was a cold winter night in Berlin, and the foot traffic was minimal. They sped through the footage. No sign of Harry.
“Wait,” said Brodie. “Back up.”
Taylor rewound the footage.
“There.”
