Chapter 4

Mel entered the hotel room and immediately realized that she had been tricked, she quickly turned to leave the room again, but the hotel employee had already closed the door behind her. She looked again at the man standing at the open window, through which thick snowflakes were swirling in.

"Who are you? And what do you want?"

The man narrowed his eyes.

"Don't you recognize me? I recognized you right away in the restaurant tonight and could hardly believe my luck."

Mel eyed him from top to bottom, but didn't know how to classify him.

"Then I'll help them out a little bit. Emanuel Santos."

Mel bristled.

"You are not Emanuel Santos."

"That's correct. I'm the son of the man you sent behind bars for life and who died there a few months ago."

"Rico."

"Right. You haven't forgotten me after all."

He looked at his watch.

"As much as I'd like to keep chatting with them, we're running out of time."

He pointed to the open window, through which snowflakes continued to dance in and settle on the hotel room carpet.

"If you please."

"Look, I'm sorry about your father. I just..."

"Shut up."

Rico took a step towards her and hit her in the face without warning. Without her being able to stop it, tears came to Mel's eyes. But then she got angry, she wouldn't just go along with it. She took out her crutch and hit Rico in the face with it, so that he went down.

Then Mel was roughly grabbed from behind and pushed forward, so that she stumbled without her prosthesis and almost fell down. Angry, she took a swing and her elbow landed on the hotel employee's nose, but in the meantime Rico had picked himself up and before she knew it, he struck again. Mel lost her balance and crashed her head on the edge of the small dresser. A pain shot through her, then it went black.

When Mel woke up again, her head was pounding, she was dizzy and had the feeling that she was about to throw up. She quickly looked around for something suitable and discovered a bucket near her. After her stomach contents were in the bucket, she felt a little better.

Mel had no idea how long she had been unconscious. As she rubbed her bare arms from the cold, she found a Band-Aid on her left arm and when she removed it, a puncture from a cannula underneath. She was still wearing her short pajamas and was freezing horribly.

She inspected her prison attentively. It was a room without windows; cold light from a fluorescent tube illuminated the room, which was about twenty square meters in size. At either end were thick orange metal doors with levers. Mel was sitting on an old mattress, her crutches had been placed next to her.

A blanket and her hotel bathrobe lay at the other end of the mattress. Mel got up and wrapped herself in her bathrobe again, but it didn't make her much warmer. She picked up her crutches and walked to one of the doors. The cold concrete floor hurt under her bare foot. She tried to open the door, but the lever would not budge. She also pulled and pushed the lever at the other door to no avail. She quickly made her way back to her camp, but not before moving the bucket to another corner of the room. Resignedly, Mel dropped onto the mattress and pulled the blanket around her shoulders, freezing.

Mattes was sitting in the office with his colleague from the federal police, who was still viewing the videos around the airport and the hotel with colleagues. Markus Frings just didn't want to give up yet, the two men with the woman must have gone somewhere. Mattes was glad that he could at least rely on his colleagues. The detective's finger hovered in the air above his cell phone. He didn't want to call Steve, but he knew Steve was waiting for news. And therein lay the problem, Mattes had no news. He had called KTU five times now and they still had no results. He didn't understand that at all, he knew KTU as a reliable unit that delivered results quickly and well. Sighing, he lowered his finger to the 'call' icon on his smartphone. The call had not yet gone out completely when he heard Steve's voice.

"Mattes?"

"Hi Steve." Matt took a breath.

"Unfortunately, I don't have much for you yet. What we do know is that Mel was lured into another hotel room under a pretext. Based on the evidence there, she put up a fierce fight. Three different traces of blood were secured. She was then taken to the roof by an external crane. Here, however, her trail was lost. I have no idea where they went with her then. In addition, I am still waiting for the laboratory results on the DNA traces and fingerprints. I had a little hope that maybe someone would contact Cillian or you about a ransom. Cillian didn't get anything, did you?"

"No, no one has reported here. Why is the lab taking so long? Don't they know that every minute counts?"

"I don't know either Steve, otherwise my colleagues are really snappy."

"Okay, Mattes, will you keep me posted?"

Mattes confirmed this to him and hung up. Then he dialed the number of the Forensics manager. He did not want to be put off any longer.

When Chris re-entered the room shortly afterwards with some coffee, Mattes literally shouted into the phone. Markus and the other colleagues looked in amazement at the otherwise calm and well-behaved colleague. Then Mattes slammed the phone down on the fork and kicked over the wastebasket. Chris stepped closer and looked at his colleague.

"Okay, what happened?"

"The idiots lost the samples on Mel's case, and instead of telling me, they've been putting me off for hours, saying it's all being processed."

"You what?"

"Can you believe this? Chris, we have nothing, nothing at all to find Mel again."

The policeman ran his hand through his hair and then over his face.

"What am I going to tell Steve and Cillian?"