Family Ties (John Taylor Book 5) Read online

  Despite what Graf said, Taylor didn’t buy the random crime angle. He’d seen that type of lazy police work before by cops, wishing away leads as the most straightforward explanation to keep from having to follow things down harder paths. Sometimes they were right, but very often they’d been wrong.

  Even if the gunmen were just local criminals, they could have been hired by someone to do the dirty work. Considering that the dead men found on the scene with Sharp’s body were also supposed to be the same variety of criminals, that seemed even more likely. One coincidence Taylor could buy, maybe, but this many would have required astronomical odds.

  Sharp’s apartment was located not far from the historic center of Berlin, which would have put her close to the foreign office and similar governmental buildings. The complex itself was newer and more stylized, not the cement block house style that surrounded it and looked like it would cost a fair amount to Taylor’s admittedly untrained eye.

  An officer met them at the building with whatever paperwork Graf seemed to need to have the building maintenance man let them into her apartment. Taylor hadn’t seen Graf call ahead to have the paperwork waiting for him, but it fit in with the man’s personality.

  The apartment was tidy, modern, but somewhat bland. The furniture wasn’t the somewhat eclectic mix you’d get from someone who furnished it over time. Everything was almost certainly bought at once, and the apartment probably came furnished. There was very little personalization in any way. No pictures on the mantels, and nothing stuck to the fridge with magnets. If it wasn’t for the food in the fridge and the clothes in the closet, Taylor would have almost thought the apartment was unoccupied.

  Sharp was clearly fastidious. Taylor was used to living with Whitaker, who was very much a type-A personality that needed everything in its place, and yet their apartment had never looked like this.

  Taylor and Graf poked around for a while. Still, despite looking everywhere he could think of, nothing jumped out at him as being connected to Whitaker. Graf seemed to find it notable that there weren’t any documents or home office, but Taylor didn’t think that meant as much as Graf did. Her offices weren’t that far from here, and she probably would have kept most documents there. There was a dock for a laptop, but no laptop, which might not mean anything. Besides her office, she could have taken it with her wherever she went before ending up at the unrented apartment.

  Graf checked, and the techs hadn’t found one at the apartment, so if she did have it, she would have dropped it off somewhere else along the way, or someone had walked away from the scene with it.

  Eventually, the two gave up their search. If Whitaker had been at the apartment recently, she’d left nothing behind, and nothing suggested Sharp had left anything about what she was currently working on.

  The drive to the unrented apartment took longer since it was well out on the outskirts of town. Graf had someone trying to get a hold of the owner of the apartment, but that had turned out to be easier said than done. The apartment was owned by a company with a lawyer listed as the only name on the company’s paperwork. Graf had some people working on finding the lawyer and discovering who actually owned or worked for the company, but so far, they weren’t having any luck.

  Taylor noticed the area becoming noticeably seedier the closer they got to the apartment. It was a stark contrast from the sleek and clean buildings surrounding Sharps’ apartment. Stores, single-family homes, and coffee shops gave way to apartment complexes and factories. The well-cleaned sidewalks with their manicured trees and foliage became cracked and broken concrete without the odd dying bush.

  Graf didn’t seem bothered, however, so Taylor figured it was just a more blue-collar area of town and not outright dangerous. The apartment was a relatively small complex that couldn’t have more than half a dozen units in total.

  Residents and lookie-loos gathered around the perimeter, which was still roped off with police tape and watched over by a handful of uniformed officers. They knew Graf on sight, lifting up the tape without him having to flash a badge, waving Taylor in behind him.

  Since the coroner had already come and gone, there were no bodies in the apartment. What was left were large brownish stains covered the carpeting, it wasn’t hard to believe several people had died here.

  The apartment itself was a wreck. It wasn’t empty, but everything there was temporary. What was left of folding chairs, folding tables, and a few cots made up the room's furniture. The only thing that didn’t seem temporary was the refrigerator which sat perpendicular to the entry. The whole place was a wreck. The front room was scorched, clearly the place where Sharp had been killed. The walls were riddled with shrapnel impacts, and one of the interior walls was missing a large chunk, letting Taylor see into the other room.

  While the damage looked bad, whatever killed Sharp hadn’t been particularly large, at most a hand grenade or pipe bomb, since it hadn’t broken through the outside wall of the apartment. The refrigerator door swung open loosely hanging from a single hinge, the outside covered with both shrapnel impacts and bullets. The door opened out, facing the rest of the room when opened, effectively working as a shield to the explosive for anyone on the other side. Looking around the other side, only a few seemed to have gotten through the metal and thick insulation.

  Looking at the walls around where the fridge, which stood perpendicular to the front door of the apartment, there was an absence of scorching or damage that roughly corresponded to the shape of the door itself. If Taylor had to guess, someone had opened up the door of the refrigerator and used it as makeshift cover. Considering how open everything was and the lack of furniture, that had probably been a good idea.

  The explosive damage wasn’t the only damage. The wall around the front door and the opposing wall were riddled with bullet holes, along with a scattering of impacts in other parts of the room. From what Taylor could see a group from outside the apartment had assaulted people inside the apartment, culminating in a small explosive being tossed into the room at some point while at least one person, maybe two, inside the apartment, had used a makeshift shield to protect themselves.

  “Is there anything on who anyone here was, besides Sharp?” Taylor asked

  “No. We wouldn’t even have identified Sharp if you hadn’t known who she was. I’m sure we’ll get information back on them soon, but it’s a process and takes time.”

  “Nothing else that would tell us what was going on here?”

  “No. Beyond some clothes, personal grooming items, and weaponry, we found nothing here. Certainly, no documentation that would tell us who anyone here was. None of the victims carried anything beyond currency on them. If I had to guess, from the cots and other temporary furniture, I’d say this was a flophouse. Whoever these people are with, they weren’t local and needed a place to stay.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it. These guys are outside muscle brought in on a job, and they’ve been set up with an empty apartment. I bet we’re going to find that the apartment is owned by a dummy corporation that we won’t trace back to anyone, otherwise you would already know who owned this place.”

  “We know they’re working for someone, and clearly involved in some kind of criminal activity. The fact that they’re covering their tracks shouldn’t be that surprising.”

  “It’s more than that. If you add up the pieces we have, it suggests that there is something bigger going on here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at it. We know Sharp was helping Whitaker with her investigation into Fredrick Wissler’s death, an investigation during which the person who asked Whitaker to investigate it was murdered. Now the person helping Whitaker has also been killed in an apartment owned by a dummy corporation and being used as temporary housing for well-armed men, judging by the damage here. It’s a safe bet that the reason Sharp was here was because whoever was in this apartment was connected to Whitaker's investigation.”r />
  “We don’t know that. This could have been connected with something Sharp was working on separate from the death of the Wisslers.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. Sharp was consulting with your foreign services, not law enforcement. Plus, your government wouldn’t be sending a contractor out to situations like this, at least not without back up. If she had been here on official business, you’d have a record at least of her using law enforcement assets, and you would have known who she was. No, everything about this suggests she was doing something outside of her day job. I guess she could have been working on two separate cases outside of her day job, but that seems to be a stretch.”

  “Okay.”

  “Put it all together. If Sharp ended up here, in an apartment with out-of-town muscle owned by someone or someone’s prepared enough to have an unlisted apartment for them to use registered under a dummy corporation, then those someone or someone’s were involved in Fredrick Wissler’s death, since ultimately everything ties back into that initial event. Which means Whitaker was on to something.”

  “Which was?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure yet. My gut tells me it has to do with Fredrick Wissler’s Alzheimer's. He was starting to become erratic, and we know he was beginning to write things down. There was that box of his notes in the storage locker Whitaker had. He was beginning to keep records on something.”

  “We looked into the box it was nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing. Whitaker put that stuff in a storage locker and hid the evidence of it for a reason, we just don’t know how it fits into the entire puzzle yet. Like I said, we’re missing something, but it’s all connected. Fredrick Wissler was involved in something worth killing him for once he was no longer able to keep things together. His wife didn’t believe the official autopsy, and when she brought in an outside investigator, she was murdered. The investigator she hired is now on the run with hired muscle repeatedly showing up in her wake. The piece I’m missing is what Fredrick was working on or who he was working for before his mind went. My first guess would be it has something to do with the Wissler family since that’s the only people Fredrick seems to have worked for his whole life, but I can’t figure out how an old-money family like that would be involved in something like this or what they’d need to hide so badly, that they’d kill multiple members of their family.”

  “That’s quite the fantasy you've dreamed up, none of which has any kind of proof backing it up.”

  “True, but you have to admit it’s the only thing that seems to fit all these different facts. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “Maybe. Have you seen enough here?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor said, looking around the apartment one last time. “There’s nothing here.”

  Graf turned and walked out of the apartment, Taylor following in his wake.

  As they got to the car, Graf said, “My apartment is on the way back to the station from here. Would you mind if we stopped on the way, there are some files I need to pick up?”

  “No problem,” Taylor said.

  He wasn’t particularly paying attention as Graf drove back towards town, the buildings and surroundings gradually improving as they got closer to the center of Berlin. Instead, he was still chewing over what was going on. When he was laying the entire case out for Graf, he hadn’t said the one thing he was reasonably sure was true, but that he had no way of proving.

  Taylor was coming to the conclusion that everything tied together with the Wissler family and their money. Considering Fredrick’s only real connections were with the Wissler family, there didn’t seem to be anyone else that would care enough to kill him. With the information, he had now, nothing else made sense. Of course, why the family would want to kill one of their members, especially one whose disease would almost certainly kill him within a handful of years, eluded Taylor.

  More importantly, right now, it was just a gut feeling. Taylor had come to trust his gut over the years, but that wouldn’t actually help get Whitaker out of trouble. Plus, accusing a prominent family of murdering two of their own would mean any access he currently had would disappear. For now, all he could do was continue piecing the puzzle together and try to find something he could use to clear Whitaker's name.

  Graf’s apartment was more of a townhouse than an apartment, connected to several other units but with a front door that lead out on to the street. The inside was more fashionable than anything Taylor could have managed, with what seemed like high-quality furniture and well-spaced tasteful decorations.

  Taylor stood awkwardly by the front door while Graf moved into a room to the left of the door, which served as an office. A desk stood across from the entrance to the room while the walls were lined with bookcases and file cabinets. Graf walked over to the desk and started rummaging through a stack of papers on it, looking for whatever he needed.

  Something did occur to Taylor as he looked around the two rooms visible to him. While the style of the apartment as nice, it was also reasonably masculine. Taylor had never been one for decorating, and Whitaker was far from being a girly girl, but had someone come into their apartment when they still lived together, it would have been obvious a woman lived in the apartment. There were small things that differed when a woman lived somewhere from when it was just a man. Of course, the reverse was also true, but in this case, it was clear a woman didn’t live here.

  “Just you here?” Taylor asked, looking around.

  “Yes. I haven’t seemed to find the right person yet.”

  Taylor didn’t press anymore, but if he had to guess, he would have also bet that Graf was single. There wasn’t anything specific, aside from the long hours the officer seemed to put in, but Taylor was still confident he was right.

  “So you were saying, before, about your theory on what’s happening. Do you honestly think the shootout that killed Sharp is connected to the Wissler's?”

  “Yes. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “That’s just a guess, though. We’ve seen nothing that would actually prove a connection.”

  “True, at least not yet. We’ll find it, though. Besides the fact that there are too many people involved in this now to keep it a secret forever, it’s also too active. I don’t know what yet, but I’m fairly certain we’re headed towards something breaking.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “Because whoever’s behind the guys staying in that apartment has been too active and is ramping up their activity. I know you said the guys at the storage locker were just local criminals, but they didn’t just happen to be there, waiting for someone to open a storage locker. When we pulled in, there was another car loading stuff into a storage locker at the other end, and they looked like they’d been there for a while. Those guys never bothered them. They were waiting for someone to open that one locker. All of this feels like someone has a specific agenda.”

  “But wh...,” Graf started to say as Taylor's phone rang.

  “Hold on a sec,” Taylor said, pulling out his phone.

  Answering it, Bryant’s voice came through the other side, “Taylor?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “I got the information you wanted on those guys.”

  “Okay, although I might have sent you on a wild goose chase. I’m pretty certain those guys weren’t working for the Russians.”

  “You’re right about that, although one of them was former Russian army, which is probably where he got the tattoo, but that’s just a coincidence. These guys were muscle for hire operating all across Europe, mostly for criminal organizations. The other print you gave me belonged to a disgraced former French officer. You said there was a third shooter, and these two were known to operate with another retired soldier, this time from Germany. The German’s currently wanted by Interpol for the murder of a French labor activist who’d been causing trouble for a land developer. His death basically removed all opposition. Local authorities are fairly certain the developer was behind the man's murder,
and the German had been hired to do the deed, but he dropped off the radar before they could question him.”

  Taylor froze, his eyes traveling across to Graf’s back as the officer continued digging through papers on his desk.

  “Taylor, you still there?” Bryant said.

  Taylor still didn’t respond. His brain was slowly, painfully, clicking pieces into place, and cursing himself for being so thick. Graf had lied about the three gunmen. These weren’t local thugs. The two bodies they had were both foreign nationals. They were both known guns for hire, and from the sound of it were professionals brought in when something extra was needed.

  What they weren’t was local criminals. There was no way Graf had just made a mistake. He might have missed their military connection he might have missed their criminal history that went beyond local crimes. He wouldn’t have missed that they weren’t even German.