Family Ties (John Taylor Book 5) Read online

  On the other hand, he was glad she was not digging deeper into what was going on with Whitaker. He had only barely acknowledged the level of trouble Whitaker was in to himself, and he was happy he could spare Kara from the same worry.

  “I’ll call when I land and then every night. I’m pretty sure my cell will work over there, but if it doesn’t, I’ll give you a number you can reach me at when I call. If you can’t get hold of me or if it’s urgent, talk to the Senator. Knowing her, she’ll have ways of reaching me I couldn’t even predict.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I have Mary Jane, I have Senator, and I even have Aunt Deborah. She’s been asking me to have lunch with her since she learned of apartment. I promise I will get into no trouble while you’re gone.”

  Taylor grimaced at the mention of Whitaker’s sister. He had met her before he and Whitaker’s split, and she was nice enough to him then. She was younger than Whitaker, married, and lived in Baltimore. She had been hesitant at Taylor and Whitaker bringing Kara into their home before they were even engaged, let alone married, but she had been nothing but supportive of her unexpected niece, especially once she learned of how Kara had ended up with them.

  Unfortunately, she also rallied around her sister when Whitaker had left him, not that he blamed her.

  Actually, he was happy she was supportive of her sister and Kara, he just wished that support did not come in the form of hating Taylor so much.

  “That’s good to hear. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Kara said and hung up.

  Taylor’s next task could not be done over the phone. Kara’s mentioning of her aunt had been more on point than she knew, because that was Taylor’s next stop. He needed her to hear him out, which he knew she would not do over the phone. While she was not openly hostile to him, she was still hostile, and he needed her to get past that and answer a few questions to help him in his task to find her sister.

  Baltimore, Maryland

  By the time he hit the outskirts of Baltimore, Taylor had thought through what he would say to her and made a list of everything he needed to find out from her. He did not have any illusions that his test conversations with her in his head would be anything like how she would respond, but he wanted to have a game plan going in. Besides, it was hard to not dwell on unpleasant tasks.

  Taylor was inwardly thankfully when her husband answered the door. He was less openly hostile towards Taylor than his wife, although their interactions had been even more limited than those with Whitaker’s sister.

  “John,” Russell Tuttle said with surprise. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes, but I need to talk to Deborah. It’s about Loretta.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

  “It’s not like that. She’s gone missing in Germany, and I need some information about their great-Aunt.”

  “Oh, no. Is she okay?”

  Taylor did not know why that was the phrase everyone asked when they learned Whitaker was missing. How was Taylor supposed to know if she was okay or not if no one could find her? He did, however, manage to refrain from saying the comment aloud.

  “I don’t know. Can I come inside? It’ll be easier if I explain it to both of you at the same time.”

  “Ohh, sorry. Sure,” he said, stepping aside to let Taylor in and then rushing past Taylor to intercept his wife.

  “Deborah,” Russell said as they walked into the living room.

  She started to stand up the instant she saw Taylor, her brow furrowing.

  “Wait,” Russell said, holding up a hand. “He has news. Please hear him out.”

  To her credit, Deborah sat back down and stayed quiet. She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him, but she waited for Taylor to explain himself. If she did not hate him so much for breaking her sister’s heart, Taylor thought he would like the younger Whitaker sister. She was actually quite sensible and level headed. Most of the time, at least.

  “As I was telling Russell,” Taylor said, sitting on the footstool across for the couch where Deborah, and now Russell, sat. “Something happened while Loretta's in Germany. She’s gone missing.”

  “What do you mean, something happened?”

  “Your great-aunt, the one that Loretta went to see, was found murdered. They have her on video entering and then leaving the apartment around the time of the murder. The German police want her to answer some questions, but Loretta has dropped off the map. No one can find her.”

  “Murdered? How? When? Are they blaming Loretta for it?”

  Her angry expression instantly shifted, and she uncrossed her arms, reaching over to hold her husband’s hands.

  “I don’t know the how yet. When was two days ago. They made a point to tell me they only considered her a witness, but I am pretty sure that yes, they think she had something to do with it. I’m flying to Germany tonight to work with the German police to find her. I’ll know more then.”

  “You’re going to help them find and lock Loretta up?” Deborah said, her angry tone returning.

  “Deborah, I know I’m not your favorite person right now, but you don’t honestly believe that? No, I’m not going to help them lock her up. I’m working with them so I’ll have access. I’m going to find her, find out what happened, and do everything I can to keep her out of trouble.”

  She glared for another few beats before her expression softened.

  “Okay. What can we do to help?”

  “I want to find out about your great-Aunt. What little I know is from what Loretta told Kara.”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure I have much more to tell you. One thing is, she isn’t really our great-aunt. I’ve never been clear on the whole naming of degrees of relationships, but we’re something like second cousins once removed, or something like that. From what Loretta told me, this woman’s grandmother was the sister of our great-grandmother. I actually didn’t even know she existed until the woman called Loretta and offered to fly her to Germany. I know our great-grandfather emigrated from Germany, but no one ever talked about that, and it seems so disconnected I never gave it much thought.”

  “Did Loretta know about them?”

  “No. When she called me, she was just as confused. She’d never heard of this woman before, and half thought it was some kind of scam, except she looked into it and was able to confirm we are even related.”

  “Do you know what she needed Loretta to do?”

  “Not really, and I don’t think Loretta knew either. She wanted someone ‘outside the family,’ is how she put it, to look into... something. That part was kind of fuzzy for me. Loretta didn’t even really want to go, but I told her it would be a free trip to Europe and a way to get away from... you know. God, I feel so bad. I talked her into going.”

  “We both know that if Loretta really didn’t want to go, she wouldn’t. Your sister’s a lot of things, but weak-willed isn’t one of them.”

  “You’re going to find her and help her, right?”

  “Yes. I know she’s still pissed at me, but that doesn’t matter. I promise I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that promise.”

  “Well, I have a flight. Do you have Kara’s number at her new apartment?”

  “Yes. She called us when she found out she was moving and gave it to us.”

  “Her roommates’ mother will be looking in on them, but I told her to call you if she ran into any problems while I’m gone.”

  “We’ll take care of her. Just bring back my sister.”

  “I will.”

  Alexandria, Virginia

  It took Taylor longer to get back to his apartment than he had planned, leaving him running late to meet Graf at the airport. He had just enough time to pack a bag with enough clothes to last a few weeks since he did not know how long this would take. Traveling overseas required more than just grabbing his go bag and stepping out the door.

  Thinking of his go bag, he pulled the extra magazines he
had stored in it along with several other items he would not be able to take through customs. He put them all in the small gun safe along with his sidearm since he would not be allowed to carry a weapon while in Germany. He did keep his FBI badge. While it would not actually do anything for him, he could imagine some situations where getting professional courtesy from other countries' law enforcement might be useful.

  Taylor took a cab to the airport, both because he was running late and because he did not particularly want to deal with parking. He found Graf outside of security waiting for him.

  As Taylor feared, their tickets were for coach. Worse, he was in a middle seat, with Graf taking the isle. He was feeling somewhat homicidal by the end of the ten-hour flight, squished between the German officer and a fairly large man in a rumpled suit.

  Taylor spent most of the flight looking over the files Graf had brought with him on the case. Everything was laid out, as Graf had said in Solomon’s office, although they did provide some additional information that might end up being useful.

  Frieda Wissler, Whitaker’s relative, had been found deceased two days ago in her home by her doorman, who was letting in a regularly scheduled delivery person to drop off groceries and supplies for her. She was still in full rigor when the first patrolman arrived. Once the coroner put the time of death at the previous evening, they had pulled the security cameras from the building. They only had them at the entrance to the building, but that was enough to witness Whitaker's arrival and departure, right in the time of death window, just as Graf had said.

  Wissler had been stabbed once, right in the heart. The medical examiner notes said the knife had not hit any bone, sliding straight between the ribs at an angle in a single thrust. There had been no sign of hesitation in the stabbing. His conclusion found that the assault had most likely been carried out by someone with either extensive training or experience.

  Graf’s notes indicated that, while the apartment had been ransacked, nothing appeared to have been taken, although it went on to say that it was hard to be sure, given the condition Wissler lived in. Taylor asked him about that, but Graf said he would have to see it for himself. The file also indicated that the doorman found the door locked and intact when he had arrived, meaning no one had kicked it in, and whoever had killed her had locked it behind them when they left.

  The rest of the file detailed their efforts to find Whitaker. They had been fairly thorough, checking her hotel room, which was still reserved for another week. They had tracked all of her phone calls since she had flown into the country and put together a timeline of the week Whitaker had been in Germany before Wissler’s death.

  From the list of calls, it seemed readily apparent that Whitaker had been looking into the death of Frieda’s husband the previous month. Besides calls to Kara and her sister, Whitaker had called the Berlin medical examiner’s office, the morgue, a Berlin newspaper, and the local police precinct near Wissler’s apartment.

  Nothing in Graf’s notes indicated what she had found in any of those calls.

  “We didn’t look into them further than confirming they couldn’t give any information on her whereabouts,” Graf said when Taylor asked him about it.

  “Why not? Maybe she found something about Mr. Wissler’s death that could lead us to her.”

  “We are very familiar with the investigation into his death. Before engaging your Agent Whitaker to look into his death, Frau Wissler used every bit of leverage she had to try and get the case reopened. I’ve talked to the detective who handled the initial case, and there is nothing there. Heir Wissler was very old and died of a heart attack. There was nothing for Agent Whitaker to find.”

  “Unless there’s information missing, his death is the only thing that stands out. From your information on Wissler, I can’t see any reason she’d have been murdered. It’s the only thing notable to have happened to her recently, at least according to your notes.”

  “Which is one of the reasons we want to talk to Agent Whitaker.”

  Taylor let it drop since Graf had not said it out loud, he knew Graf thought Whitaker had killed Wissler. Everything in the notes he had been handed had suggested it. Graf was enough of a politician that he had not come out and say it, not even in the case file; being aware that once a US Federal Agent was accused of murder, it would bring the US State Department into play. Taylor could read between the lines enough to see where the investigation was leading.

  After the third read-through, Taylor put the case file away. While it did give some new pieces of information, it was too focused on Whitaker to tell Taylor what he needed to know. For that, he would have to wait until he got to the crime scene and got a chance to poke around.

  Chapter 3

  Berlin, Germany

  Taylor managed to get a few hours’ sleep on the flight. It wasn't really enough, but it allowed him to beg off when Graf suggested Taylor check into his hotel and get a few hours’ sleep before they started. While Taylor was tired, he was not going to put off the search for Whitaker. He had gotten enough practice going without sleep in the service. He was confident he would make it through, now.

  Seeing his urgency, Graf suggested they skip going by the station, and instead head straight to the crime scene. Traffic was fairly light as it was still early, in Berlin.

  The apartment building was a style Taylor had seen a lot over the years in Germany. Buildings rebuilt after the war quickly, and then flourished with Gothic embellishments to try and bring back the sense of ‘old Europe.’ From the cars parked and the high-end retail shops scattered among the residential buildings, it was clear this was a more affluent part of the city. From what he had been able to find on the internet about the Wisslers, this should not be surprising. The family was from old money dating back to the eighteen hundreds. True this was an outlying branch of the family, but still close enough that it stood to reason they had money.

  The doorman waved Graf through as he entered the lavishly decorated lobby. Considering how much Graf would have been in and out of the building during the initial investigation, probably even questioning the doorman at some point, that was not so surprising.

  The Wisslers’ penthouse condo was easy to identify as they stepped off the elevator since the door still had yellow tape stretched across it. Graf reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, opening the door. The apartment was very nice on the inside, at least to Taylor’s untrained eye, with what he would guess was expensive furniture. The place was also a mess. Clutter was stacked up on the table in the entrance hallway, and Taylor could see stacks of things on the floor in the room in front of him. The apartment was not hoarder bad, but if the Wissler’s had been given ten more years, it would have gotten there.

  A series of sticky notes lined the wall next to the front door. Taylor could not tell what they said since they were all in German, and he made a mental note to ask Graf about it. Taylor followed the detective through the front entryway into what would have been a living room or large sitting room at one time.

  Bookshelves stuffed with old books lined the walls, and the floors. A large overstuffed chair sat in the middle of the room, facing a fireplace with a small end table next to it, holding a lamp and a few books. Taylor knew this was where the old lady’s body was found from the reports he read on the plane, but the bloodstain across one side would have made that pretty obvious on its own.

  The floor around the chair was covered in loose papers and scattered books. A couple of intact stacks of papers and books suggested to Taylor that the mess was once collected in organized stacks, although the sheer volume would still have made the room feel cluttered. Someone had been looking for something and had torn through every piece of documentation they could find in their search, not giving a damn about the havoc they caused.

  “Her neighbor found her in this chair, several knife wounds to the chest. Our medical examiner said she would have probably died from the first stab since it nicked a large vein, but it was the second stab that killed her,
cutting through part of her heart. She was almost certainly dead when the assailant stabbed her the third time.”

  “The report said the stabs were more precise than aggressive or violent.”

  “That is correct. There were no hesitation marks, and the killer only stabbed far enough to hit what she, or he, was aiming at. No bruising from the hand or pommel impact, no twisting or wrenching. Just smooth in, smooth out.”

  “A professional?”

  “Possibly. She was very old and, according to her neighbors, had trouble walking and moving, meaning she almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to avoid the attack. The lack of defensive wounds on the hands suggests surprise, however.”

  “The report said there was no forced entry.”

  “Correct. The frame and lock are intact. There is an additional deadbolt, but my understanding is she found it difficult to lock and usually ignored it. The primary lock is old and well scuffed, making it difficult to tell if there was any attempt to pick the lock. I can say with fair certainty that brute force lock picking tools like a lock pick gun weren’t used, but that’s about it. Considering the higher profile nature of the case, I considered having the lock removed and examined at the lab, but my guess is the internal mechanism has decades of internal wear as well, again hiding anything of note. My best guess is the killer was someone who already had access to the apartment, but there remains a chance it was someone without access but with the requisite skill.”