Sebastian Fitzek’s upcoming thriller, The Package, focuses on the only person to ever be able to survive a serial killer known as “the barber.” After withdrawing from the world as much as possible, she soon finds that taking in a package may lead to horrifying results.
FangirlNation.com was provided with a preview of The Package, available February 4, 2021.
Chapter 2
Two hours later
Taking hold of her wheelie case, Emma hesitated before entering room 1904, for the simple reason that she could barely see a thing. The little illumination that did penetrate the darkness came from the countless lights of the city, nineteen floors beneath her. The Le Zen on Tauentzienstrasse was Berlin’s newest five-star chrome-and-glass palace, with over three hundred rooms. Taller and more luxurious than any other hotel in the capital. And – in Emma’s eyes, at least – decorated with relatively little taste.
That, at any rate, was her first impression once she’d found the main switch by the door and the overhead light clicked on.
The interior design looked as if a trainee had been instructed to exploit every possible Far Eastern cliché when selecting the furnishings.
In the hallway, which was separated from the neighbouring bedroom by a thin, sliding door covered in tissue paper, stood a Chinese wedding chest. A bamboo rug extended from the door to a low futon bed. The lamps beside the floor sofa looked like the colourful lanterns that the toddlers carried on St Martin’s Day in the parade organised by the Heerstrasse Estate kindergarten. Surprisingly stylish, on the other hand, was a huge black-and-white photograph of Ai Weiwei that stretched from floor to ceiling between the sofa and fitted wardrobe. Emma had recently visited an exhibition by this exceptional Chinese artist.
She looked away from the man with the tousled beard, hung her coat in the wardrobe and took her phone from her handbag.
Voicemail.
She’d already tried calling him once, but Philipp hadn’t answered. He never did when on duty.
With a sigh she moved over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, slipped off her peep toes, without which she shrunk to the average height of a fourteen-year-old, and gazed down at the Kurfürstendamm. She stroked her belly, which still showed nothing, although it was a bit too early for that yet. But she was comforted by the idea that something was growing inside her, which was far more important than any seminar or professional recognition.
It had taken a while before the second line on the pregnancy test finally showed up, five weeks ago.
And this was also the reason why Emma wasn’t sleeping in her own bed tonight, but for the first time in her life staying the night at a hotel in her home city. Her little house in Teufelssee-Allee was currently like a building site because they’d started extending the loft to make a children’s room. Even though Philipp thought it might be a little overzealous to begin nest-building before the end of the first trimester of her pregnancy.
As he was working in another town again, Emma had accepted the overnight package that the German Association of Psychiatry offered all the guest speakers at the two-day conference – even those who lived in Berlin – as it allowed them to have a few drinks at the evening function in the hotel’s ballroom (which Emma was bunking off).
‘The lecture ended just as you predicted,’ she said in the message she left for Philipp. ‘They didn’t stone me, but that was only because they didn’t have any stones to hand.’
She smiled.
‘They didn’t take my hotel room away, though. The key card I got with my conference documents still worked.’
Emma concluded her message with a kiss, then hung up. She missed him terribly.
Better to be alone here in the hotel than alone at home amongst paint pots and torn-down walls, she thought, trying to put the best possible gloss on the situation.
Emma went into the bathroom and, as she took of her suit, looked for the volume control for the speaker in the false ceiling, which transmitted the TV sound.
Without success.
Which meant she had to go back into the living room and switch off the television. Here too it took a while for her to find the remote control in a bedside table drawer, which was why she was now fully up to speed about a plane crash in Ghana and a volcano explosion in Chile.
Emma heard the nasal voice of the newsreader begin a new item – ‘… the police have issued a warning about a serial killer, who…’ – and cut him off at the press of a button.
Back in the bathroom it was some time before she found the temperature setting.
As someone who felt the cold Emma loved hot water, even now in high summer, and it had been an unusually fresh and particularly windy June day at below twenty degrees. So she set the water to forty degrees – her pain threshold – and waited for the tingling sensation she always felt when the hot jet hit her skin.
Emma normally felt alive the moment she was enveloped by steam and the hot water massaged her body. Today the effect was weaker, partly because the dirt that had been hurled at her after the lecture couldn’t be washed away with water and hotel soap.
There had been furious reactions to her revelation that, even in the twenty-first century, people risked becoming the playthings of demigods in white abusing their power just because of sloppy misdiagnoses. The validity of her research findings had been questioned more than once. The publisher of the renowned specialist journal had even announced he would undertake meticulous review before he ‘might consider’ publishing an article about her work.
Sure, some colleagues had ventured their support after the event, but in the eyes of these few she’d still been able to read the unspoken reproach: ‘Why on earth did you put yourself in danger with this stupid experiment? And why are you risking your career and picking a fight with the bigwigs who run the clinics?’
Something Philipp would never ask. He understood why Emma had for years been fighting to improve the legal status of patients undergoing psychiatric treatment. Because of their mental illness they were usually viewed with more suspicion than patients who, for example, complained of faulty dental care.
And Philipp understood why she also took unusual, sometimes dangerous routes to get there. No doubt because they were so similar in this respect.
In his work, too, Philipp overstepped boundaries that no normal person would cross freely. In truth, the psychopaths and serial killers he hunted as chief investigator in the offender profiling department often left him with no other choice.
Some couples share a sense of humour, others have similar hobbies or the same political outlook. Emma and Philipp, on the other hand, laughed at completely different jokes, she couldn’t stand football and he didn’t share her love of musicals, and whereas in her youth she had demonstrated against nuclear power and the fur industry, he had been a member of the conservative youth association. What formed the bedrock of their relationship was empathy.
Intuition and experience allowed them to put themselves in other people’s souls and bring the secrets of their psyches to the light of day. While Emma did this to liberate the patients who visited her private practice on Savignyplatz from their psychological problems, Philipp used his extraordinary abilities to draw up behaviour and personality profiles. Thanks to his analyses, some of the most dangerous criminals Germany had ever known had been put behind bars.
Recently, however, Emma had been wishing that both of them would take a step backwards. She was continually nagged by the feeling that in their time off, which was fairly meagre anyway, Philipp was also finding it increasingly difficult to achieve the necessary distance from his work. And she was worried that they were well on the way to proving Nietzsche’s dictum about the abyss: if you gazed into it deeply and for long enough, it would start gazing into you.
Some time out, or a holiday at least. That would be enough.
The last trip they’d taken together was so long ago that the memories of it had already faded.
Emma lathered her hair with the hotel’s shampoo and could only hope that she wouldn’t look like a poodle the following morning. Her brown hair might be strong, but it reacted sensitively to the wrong products. It had taken numerous experiments and tears till she found out what made her hair shine and what turned her head into a ripped sofa cushion.
Emma rinsed her hair, pushed the shower curtain aside and was just wondering why such an expensive hotel hadn’t installed glass sliding doors when she was suddenly incapable of another lucid thought.
What she felt was fear.
The first thing that came into her mind when she saw the letters was run!
The letters on the bathroom mirror.
In neatly written letters, across the steam-covered glass, it read:
GET OUT.
BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
