“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
