Berlin

Berlin enters the case as a point of origin in the inquiry into Johan Rilz, not as a setting for an on-page visit. Its importance lies in the gap between identifying Rilz as someone from the city and establishing whether investigators had verified his history with the police there.

Rilz’s Connection to Berlin

During courtroom questioning, Mickey Haller asks whether investigators had gone directly to the police in Berlin, described as the city Rilz was from. The answer is no. The exchange makes Berlin relevant through Rilz’s background and through the investigation’s choice not to consult local authorities; the evidence does not specify whether he was born there or how long he lived there.

A Cross-Border Investigative Gap

The question follows discussion of Interpol, described as linking police in more than a hundred countries and facilitating cross-border cooperation. Haller uses that context to distinguish the existence of international police channels from direct verification with Berlin police. The testimony establishes that investigators did not make that direct check, but it does not establish that they contacted Berlin through another route.

Role in the Courtroom Challenge

Berlin’s significance sharpens when Haller presents a translated newspaper article about Rilz alongside a photocopy of a page from Rilz’s passport obtained in the state’s discovery. The passport page shows that Rilz left France for the United States in March 2003, a month after the article appeared; the article’s reported age and description of Rilz as an interior decorator who made drug buys for the police support Haller’s identification of the subject as Rilz. The Berlin question thus sits within a larger challenge to how authorities established Rilz’s identity and past. It exposes a specific unpursued avenue of verification without, by itself, proving what Berlin police would have confirmed.