Except Tull had this compelling, propulsive narrative style that sucked me in and made the story come alive with three-dimensional characters who were constantly surprising me and twists I never saw coming. He also had a knack for interpreting the evidence and describing the way each of the murders must have happened.
Tull opened the book with the fourth victim, the one he’d known personally.
A year after an unwanted divorce had left her heart-broken and alone, Emily Maxwell was looking forward to her customary hot bath after a day on her feet seeing to the needs of Boston readers. She was usually home in her apartment in Cambridge’s Ward Two neighborhood by six thirty in the evening, and after she fed her Siamese cat, Jimbo, and ate, she’d take her bath.
That evening, Emily picked up a Caesar salad with salmon at the Whole Foods near work. After feeding the cat, she ate the salad and had a glass of white wine before filling the tub. She checked the locks on her doors and then the thirty-nine-year-old felt safe enough to pour herself a second glass of wine and go to her bathroom for what she called a “full decompression session.”
The music went on first, a playlist on her iPod that featured soft-rock hits by bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, tastes she’d inherited from her parents. She connected the iPod to a black JBL portable speaker plugged into the wall about two feet from the tub and sang, “You can go your own way!” as she climbed into the hot water.
Poor Emily Maxwell would not get out of the tub alive. Somewhere between seven thirty and nine o’clock that evening, the plugged-in speaker entered the tub water and sent one hundred and ten volts of electricity shooting through the bookstore clerk.
As the speaker dropped, Emily must have had a moment of clarity and horror before the current blazed through the electrochemical machine that was her body, short-circuiting her broken heart.
“The Boston PD said Emily’s death was an accident,” Tull wrote, “but my gut said it was murder.”
My cell phone rang. Bree.
“How’s New York?” I asked.
“Making headway, actually,” she said. I heard the sounds of a restaurant in the background. “But having a dinner here isn’t half the fun it would be with you.”
“Well, I wish I were there,” I said. “Where are you eating?”
“La Grenouille,” she said. “My target often eats here, but not tonight.”
“What are you having?”
“Haven’t ordered yet, but I’m thinking the saffron lobster bisque to start, then the oxtail in burgundy sauce, and a lemon tart with meringue for dessert.”
“You’re liking this whole expense-account thing.”
“I am.” She laughed. “One of the best perks of this job. How was your day?”
I told her in general terms about the visit from Thomas Tull’s editor and her contentions about the author and his previous three books.
“You’re going to read them all?” Bree said. “They’re doorstops, aren’t they?”
“Close,” I replied.
“Anything jump out at you yet?”
I looked at the cover of Electric. “Maybe. He sells it as pure nonfiction, but some of the details and the way he describes the murders seem fictionalized to me, or at least speculative.”
“How so?”
“At times, he kind of zooms in and puts you right there in the scene as the crime unfolds. But of course, that can’t be an exact replication.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Bree said. “He’s probably extrapolating from the available evidence, and that’s always a somewhat subjective call.”
“I’m going to take a look at the other books before I snooze. Got to be up early for Jannie’s race.”
“She excited?”
“Actually, she’s calm, cool,” I said. “Nana, Ali, and I will be nervous wrecks. And Damon’s coming!”
“Oh, a family reunion without me.”
“I’m FaceTiming you the race.”
“Not the same, but it will have to do.”
“I’ll call you when they’re heading to the blocks,” I promised. “Around eleven a.m.”
“Oh, here comes my waiter. Love you.”
“Love you too,” I said. I hung up and glanced at the wall clock before picking up Tull’s second book.
CHAPTER 22
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF Noon in Berlin echoed Electric.
Early on, for example, the killer left little or no evidence at the scenes. And the police bungled the initial investigations before Tull entered the picture, retraced their steps, and found previously unknown clues or hidden aspects of the victims’ lives that opened up a new avenue for the probe and gained him insider status.
Noon in Berlin, however, was written in a completely different tone than the first book. And the story was an unexpected tale of eroticism and savagery that shocked me again and again in the hundred pages I read that night.
Tull wrote that he’d learned of the story while he was on tour for the German-language debut of Electric.
The Berlin victims had all died as couples—illicit lovers, in fact, some straight and some gay, all of whom had had their trysts at noon in various hotels and pieds-à-terre around the German capital.
The first couple was discovered in a one-bedroom apartment in southeast Berlin not far from Treptower Park. Edgar Bruner was found naked, gagged, and tied to the four posts of the bed. His Russian mistress, Katya Dubosholva, was collapsed on top of him and also naked. Each had been shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart from a gun normally used by veterinarians, wild-game biologists, and the like to subdue dangerous animals. Tull wrote that “each dart at that crime scene contained enough tranquilizer to take down a bull elephant.”
Apparently, within a second of being shot, the mistress had fallen on top of her lover, pinning him, before she died of a heart attack. Then her lover was shot. At close range.
The second couple in the series, both suburban women, were married to men and had children. They were killed in an apartment in west Berlin, not far from Tiergarten and the zoo, shot with the same kind of tranquilizer dart as the first couple as they lay beneath the sheets.
Tull was allowed to observe the investigation in part because of the success of Electric. He learned that the Berlin police had focused heavily on CCTV cameras, trying to spot the killer on the way to and from each apartment. When that proved fruitless, the lead investigator, Inspector Ava Firsching, began to focus on the tranquilizer and its origin.
Her rationale was simple and smart. Inspector Firsching figured the killer had to have access to drugs normally used to tranquilize large animals. She and Tull went to the Berlin Zoo and talked to veterinarians and handlers. They learned that tranquilizer darts often contain benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that depress the nervous system.
“Administered at proper doses,” Tull wrote, “these drugs will not kill humans or animals. But increase the doses or combine them with alcohol or opiates, and the risk of death rises dramatically. In toxicology screens that Inspector Firsching ordered, the German national crime lab found high doses of the benzodiazepine midazolam mixed with higher doses of the opiate fentanyl. The lethal cocktail caused almost immediate cardiac and respiratory failure.”