Hard Rain

Eleven

The Istanbul Police Department was housed in a sullen poured-concrete building slapped together in the ’60s. Grime sweated from the pores of the flaking surface, the decades of ugliness accumulated within now seeping out. Bare trees lining the road out front shivered in the cold breeze. Beside the main entrance, a Turkish flag the size of a basketball court executed a lazy roll around the flagpole.

Emir pulled up as close to the front entrance as security allowed — around a hundred yards away. Traffic bollards prevented a closer drop-off, thwarting truck bombs and other special deliveries from being left at reception.

Captain Cain arrived as Masters and I walked to a brick bunker in front of the courtyard. We handed over our shields for inspection to a couple of swarthy uniform guys with MKEK submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Their peaked caps would have given a South American dictator a hard-on. They examined our credentials minutely.

‘Morning,’ said Cain.

‘Morning,’ Masters replied, providing enough of a greeting for the both of us. ‘We’ll just follow you.’

The captain nodded and said, ‘Cold, isn’t it?’

‘Freezing,’ agreed Masters, blowing into her hand.

The guards raised the boom and cleared us through. We followed Cain, and around five minutes later arrived at a reception desk on the second floor occupied by nothing but a small silver bell, outside a wood and frosted-glass partition. The bell gave a ping when Cain tapped it. The place reeked of male sweat, urine and the memory of disinfectant — so, basically, like every front-line police department anywhere in the world.

Detective Sergeant Iyaz appeared around a partition and gestured at us with a sign that said he’d be with us in a few minutes. There were no chairs to sit on, so Masters, Cain and I milled around while we waited for Iyaz’s return, watching various unsavoury characters come and go. And a few crooks as well.

Karli and Iyaz collected us and led us down the hall and around the corner to another office. It was small; room for a desk, a chair, a corkboard and enough oxygen for maybe one person at a time. Handwritten and typed notes, Post-its and scraps of paper scrawled with phone numbers and/or addresses, photographs of dead people and mug shots of others who looked like nasty pieces of work all fought for space with children’s paintings. On the desk there was a photo of a couple of smiling kids — the suspects responsible for the artworks, most probably — trays, accordion folders, and a huge, old-fashioned computer monitor running a Tetris screen saver. Detective Sergeant Karli stood beside the desk, hands on his wide hips, sucking on a mint, chasing it around his mouth with his tongue. He gave us a nod.

‘Did you get much from the cameras?’ Cain enquired before the show got under way, tabling the question for all of us.

Iyaz opened the tray on the CPU humming away beneath the desk and inserted a disk. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, disappointed. He tapped a couple of keys and the desktop’s DVD player came up. ‘Only three cameras work.’

I gave myself a little I-told-you-so moment even though I’d have preferred to be proved wrong.

The computer ran the footage as we crowded around the monitor. The cameras were old, and the resolution was so bad it looked like the lenses had been covered with nylons. The pictures were actually a series of greenish black-and-white stills, one taken every half-second, so that the resulting footage was grainy, dark and disjointed. A time code sat in the bottom right-hand corner, showing the date and time and counting off the seconds.

‘Did the hotel put this together?’ I asked.

Iyaz took a second or two to get my drift, then said, ‘No. We do it. We have all surveillance tapes. The pictures are bad.’

I’d have said ‘awful’, but that would just be me wearing my black hat. From what I could gather, the three working cameras were respectively positioned at the entrance to the parking lot, on a ramp, and on the level where Bremmel was found. The camera at the entrance showed an old, dark-coloured Fiat driving past; the second camera caught it on its way down, as did the camera on the parking level. A view of someone in dark clothing and ball cap followed, the cap’s brim shielding the face like the person knew not to look up. The figure was carrying a soft bag, walking beneath the third camera. Was this one of our killers? The time code jumped forward twenty minutes and someone wearing a ball cap and dark clothing walked back, head low, retracing their steps. There was a cut in the footage — the Fiat climbed up the ramp, blowing a little smoke, and exited the way it had come in. With a little enhancement, the vehicle’s number plate would be clearly visible.

‘The licence plate,’ said Cain, nodding at the screen, making the same observation out loud.

‘Yes. We checked. It is stolen,’ Iyaz replied, tossing a couple of screen-shots of the Fiat on the table, the now reasonably sharp licence plate having been worked over by a computer.

Running around Istanbul were probably half-a-million Fiats identical to this one — same model, same colour, same year of manufacture. Were we really looking at the vehicle used by Bremmel’s murderer? I gave that question some thought. Forensics would have been able to nail a fairly accurate time of death for Bremmel by measuring the decrease in his core body temperature. The timing of the vehicle’s arrival and departure would have to have tallied with that, straddling it. But was it just a coincidence that this automobile was stolen? There had to be plenty of auto thieves who weren’t butchers… ‘Were these the only working cameras, or were there others still taking pictures?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Iyaz. ‘There were other cameras.’

‘And none of them caught anything at around the same time? No other cars came and went? No other foot traffic?’

Iyaz knitted those brows of his together while the translator in his head went to work. ‘No,’ he replied eventually. ‘There was nothing else.’

‘Okay,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘So there is a good chance these are our suspects.’

‘Suspects? I’m only seeing one suspect here,’ Cain objected.

‘No,’ said Masters, ‘you’re seeing two.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘The first time we see the figure, he’s carrying a bag,’ Masters explained. ‘The second time we see him, he’s not carrying a bag. But no bag was found at the scene, therefore someone else is carrying the bag out, someone outside the camera’s field of view.’ The disk ran the footage again. ‘See? They’re wearing the same clothes and the build is roughly the same, so it just looks like it’s the same person — one killer, but, in fact, it’s two.’

‘You searching for this Fiat?’ I asked Iyaz.

‘Yes, of course.’

And when they happened to find it, I was pretty sure the vehicle would yield three-fifths of nothing, if the killers remained true to form. To date the killers had been so calculating, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d staged the parade in front of the surveillance cameras to confuse the investigation.

‘So a guy gets cut down to size in the early evening in a public place and no one notices?’ said Captain Cain.

‘Yeah, just like back in the States,’ I replied. ‘You’re making me feel homesick.’

Iyaz cleared his throat like he was making an important announcement. ‘We have found the woman Mr Bremmel was to meet at the hotel.’

‘Good work,’ Masters said.

‘She identify the corpse for us.’

‘Have you also questioned her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was she?’ Masters asked.

‘She was Bremmel’s assistant.’

‘She was the guy’s secretary?’ I was feeling a cliché coming on.

‘Yes,’ Iyaz confirmed.

‘Does she know who did this to her boyfriend?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘The real Mrs Bremmel, maybe, after finding out what her husband had been up to,’ Masters offered.

I remembered the time I found my own ex-wife in the shower buffing our marriage counsellor’s dick with her tonsils, and the subsequent beating I gave him. I wouldn’t have killed the guy — my ex wasn’t worth it — but I’d had first-hand experience with stuff like this and I knew it could get the blood circulating a little faster than normal. ‘How long had they been doing each other?’ I enquired. Iyaz knew what I meant.

‘For six month.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘We have asked her to stay in Istanbul. Her mother lives here.’

‘Can we question her?’ I asked.

Karli tic-tacked on this with Iyaz before answering. ‘Yes. It’s okay.’

‘Has the real Mrs Bremmel been informed of her husband’s death?’ Masters wondered.

‘That is being handled by your ambassador,’ said Karli.

It seemed the bones recovered from Bremmel’s one-way street were reason enough for the case to be dumped in our current basket of goodies after all.

DS Karli wrote the name and address of Bremmel’s PA on a slip of paper and handed it to Masters.

‘Going on previous experience around here,’ Cain noted, ‘there should be a Turkish police forensics report available on Mr Bremmel’s remains tomorrow, though DNA tests on those finger bones will probably take another couple of days, depending on the backlog. We should also see if we can’t get someone to give us an estimation for the size and weight of the two suspects on the tape.’

‘Yes, we can do that,’ offered Iyaz. ‘Also, we have begun a search in the water outside the Attaché’s residence. It will take time. The area to search is very big.’

‘Okay,’ I said, satisfied. We were all in danger of being professional.