by Daniel Blake
He hung up and dialed the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore, number helpfully supplied by Kwasi’s incredible memory. No, the receptionist said, we didn’t have a Regina King staying last night. Yes, sir, she was absolutely sure. Not in the general register, and not under the National Council’s discount rate block booking.
Could she have registered under a false name? Patrese asked.
Yes, the receptionist said, but only if she had a fake ID too: each guest had been obliged to present some form of photocard. The receptionist had a copy of the National Council’s own attendee list, and there was no Regina King on that either.
Patrese thanked her and hung up.
Regina had told Kwasi she was going to Baltimore. He’d dropped her off at Penn Station. She hadn’t gone to Baltimore. She’d gone to New Haven. Trains from Penn Station ran to New Haven too.
Time to go to Penn Station.
Patrese stepped back inside the apartment. Kwasi was sitting at a computer. Patrese noted without surprise that there was a chessboard on the screen.
He explained what he’d found out from the Hyatt receptionist, and said he was going to Penn Station to try to find out where Regina had gone from there. ‘I’ll give you my cell number. You got a pen?’
‘Tell me. I’ll remember it.’
Patrese did, and he had no doubt that Kwasi would.
‘Will you come back when you’ve finished?’ Kwasi said. He sounded so like a little boy lost that Patrese instinctively put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Sure, Kwasi. Sure I will.’
Penn Station was no one’s idea of a grand railway terminus, the kind of place movie crews would dress up in period detail and have steam trains come hissing to a halt beside men in thick tweed suits. It was a catacomb, mostly underground and as bland as it was dark. Armed police stood with their feet wide apart and tried to look as though they weren’t dying of boredom. The government had warned of terrorist attacks on transport hubs a few weeks back, so everyone was going through the motions of pretending to do something about it.
A bomb in this place might actually improve it, Patrese thought.
He found his way to the control center after a couple of wrong turns and a station worker who’d been less impressed by a Bureau badge than Patrese would have liked. The control center was half movie theater, half trading floor: rows of workstations, many of them empty, and an enormous wall covered in intricate maps of the railway system. Trains inbound and outbound were marked by little symbols in various colors. It looked pretty busy even now, midway through a Sunday afternoon. God alone knew what it must be like during a Monday-morning rush hour.
The train to Baltimore that Regina had said she’d catch had left at ten o’clock. The train to New Haven had left at exactly the same time: ten o’clock, on the dot. Patrese asked for CCTV footage of both platforms from the moment the gates had been opened until the moment the trains had departed. The angles weren’t great and the picture resolution left much to be desired, but after going over the footage in fine detail, often asking to rewind a frame two or three times, Patrese had to accept a simple fact. Regina had been on neither of those trains.
He looked at other services that had departed at round about the same time: the Adirondack line up to Montreal, the Empire service to Buffalo and Niagara, the Vermonter to, well, Vermont, and a plethora of smaller commuter trains. No joy on any of those either, nor on the next two trains to New Haven and Baltimore respectively, nor anywhere on the station concourse between 9.45 and 10.00.
Kwasi had dropped his mother off at Penn Station at 9.45 yesterday morning. She’d gone inside, vanished into thin air, and rematerialized without her head in New Haven almost eighteen hours later.
9
There was a crowd of perhaps twenty people outside the main door of Kwasi’s apartment block by the time Patrese returned there, and they weren’t part of the Hallowe’en parade. As Patrese got out of his car and walked toward the building, large lenses swiveled to follow him for a moment before being lowered. The photographers clearly deemed him of little interest. Fine with him.
The toothpaste-ad doorman was standing just inside the door, eyeballing the posse of reporters with a sailor’s determination to repel boarders. Patrese didn’t want to have to flash his badge in case the reporters saw and clocked who he was, but Toothpaste Man recognized him from earlier and unlocked. Patrese slipped inside, checking out the nameplate on the man’s lapel: BEN SHERWOOD.
‘Thanks, Ben,’ he said. ‘I’m Franco Patrese, FBI. You know why they’re here?’
‘Saw it on the news. Damn shame.’ Sherwood gestured toward the reporters. ‘Freakin’ vultures.’
‘They’re only doing their job.’
‘Flockin’ round when someone’s dead, waiting to get fed. Like I said. Vultures.’
‘Any of them tried to get in?’
‘Not yet. They can try all they want. I know all the residents by sight, and if I don’t know you, you ain’t comin’ in.’
‘Good man. I’m going back up. You have any problems, give me a shout.’ Sherwood had a pad on his desk; Patrese jotted down his cell number.
‘Will do. I’ll ring up to Mr King, let him know you’re on your way.’
Kwasi was waiting at the door of his apartment. Behind him, a phone was ringing.
‘Been like that the last twenty minutes,’ he said.
‘You answered any of them?’
‘First couple of times. People jabbering about my mom. I hung up.’
‘Good. Let me deal with this.’ Patrese walked over to the phone, crouched down and pulled the jack from the wall. The phone stopped ringing.
On Kwasi’s fifty-inch plasma TV, Fox News’ Chris Wallace was interviewing a young woman with limpid eyes and a cascade of black hair. A caption appeared as she spoke: INESSA BAIKAL, US WOMEN’S CHESS CHAMPION.
‘What it means for his title defense, no one can yet know,’ she said. ‘For a world championship match, you need to be at your absolute peak, total concentration. Even for someone like Kwasi, who’s so good at shutting things out, you have to ask: Will he be in the right frame of mind? Could anyone be in the right frame of mind after something like this? He’s so strong, mentally, but this is so … so awful.’
‘You know him better than most,’ Wallace said. ‘You used to date him, is that right?’
‘That’s not right,’ Kwasi said from beside Patrese.
‘You want to switch over?’
Kwasi shook his head. ‘Everyone got an opinion about me. I’m used to it.’
On the TV, Inessa said: ‘Date him? A couple of times, sure, but nothing too serious.’
‘How will he be dealing with this?’
‘Badly, I think. They were so close, Kwasi and his mom. They were inseparable. I— I can’t imagine what he must be going through right now.’
Kwasi had had enough. He picked up the remote and muted the sound. Inessa talked silently on.
‘No, bitch, you can’t imagine,’ Kwasi said to her image. ‘You know shit about me, you know shit about chess. So shut the fuck up.’
Patrese pointed at the caption. ‘Says she’s the national women’s chess champion.’
‘So?’
‘So she must know something about chess.’
‘She knows nothing about chess. She’s a woman.’ There was real anger in Kwasi’s voice now. ‘National women’s champion means fuck all. You know her ranking? She’s the 812th best player in the world. She knows nothing about what it takes to be world champion. And she knows nothing about me.’
‘You don’t think women are good at chess?’
‘I know they’re not good at chess.’
‘Why?’
‘Too emotional. Chess is rough and hard. You have to be a man to win. Control your feelings, be a machine. You let feelings and emotions in, you’re fucked. The only women who can ever play well are those who change their character, suppress their natural instincts, take on a man’s qualities. And she’ – h
e flicked his hand dismissively toward the screen – ‘she’s too busy lying round on the beach in her underwear, doing photoshoots for fashion magazines and pretending she’s a model.’
Wow, Patrese thought: it was like listening to some bitter old misogynist of a bachelor uncle rather than a black kid with dreadlocks. He wondered how many of Kwasi’s sponsors would drop him in a heartbeat if they heard him talk this way. And he wondered, too, what exactly had happened between Kwasi and Inessa.
Probably not the best moment to ask.
Kwasi and Regina had been inseparable, and now she was dead. In the circumstances, a little spleen was no bad thing.
Kwasi stared at Inessa, who was giving a coquettish smile as Wallace ended the interview.
‘Bitch,’ he spat.
Thinking that it might prove a welcome distraction, Patrese took Kwasi up on to the roof to watch the parade. Hallowe’en on Sixth Avenue wasn’t a bunch of schoolkids dressed up as zombies and trick-or-treating: it was a three-hour extravaganza like nothing else on earth, apart perhaps from Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
In fact, Patrese remembered, the 2005 parade had been a gathering point for those New Orleans residents living in airport hotels near JFK after Hurricane Katrina, having been displaced from their homes two months before by that iconic catastrophe through which Patrese had hunted another serial killer. The parade organizers that year had put on a mock-up jazz funeral with a second-line band and dancers, and all those folks whose houses had been washed away and who weren’t used to fall temperatures south of the eighties, all those folks knew that George W. Bush might not have cared about them, but New York sure did.
Now the crowds on Sixth Avenue were ten deep, and they cheered the parade as though every passing costume was the winning play in the Super Bowl. The dancing skeletons came first, as they always did, a reminder that tonight death danced only to celebrate life. After them came giant illuminated caterpillars; a Statue of Liberty stabbed in the chest; a group of bulldogs on leashes all dressed as Batman. Giant Scrabble tiles rearranged themselves time and again to spell different words. Decks of playing cards – not tarot ones, Patrese saw – shuffled up the avenue.
‘Look!’ Kwasi shouted suddenly. ‘Look!’
Two armies of chess pieces were coming past, one black and one white: adults as pieces, children as pawns. They threw candy to the crowd and posed happily for photos. Kwasi was rapt.
Patrese thought back to his childhood, when he and his buddies had daubed their faces with chalk, put on some of their moms’ lipstick and rung a few doorbells.
‘You ever go trick-or-treating as a kid, Kwasi?’
Kwasi watched the chess pieces disappear into the distance before answering.
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
‘Why not?’
Kwasi shrugged. ‘Just seemed silly.’
‘What about your friends? They must have asked you to go with them.’
‘You have a happy childhood, officer?’
‘Franco. Please, call me Franco.’
‘You have a happy childhood, Franco?’
Patrese thought for a second. ‘Most of the time.’
‘Good for you. Me? Never had one.’
‘Never had a happy one?’
‘Never had one, period. I’m the youngest world champion in history. I had to fight every day for it. I became a soldier too early. That’s the price. I had no childhood.’
10
Monday, November 1st
For the second morning in succession, Patrese was woken in a hotel room by a phone call. This time, however, he didn’t have a hangover, and he knew who was calling: KIESERITSKY flashed up on his cellphone’s display screen.
It was half past six. She wouldn’t be calling to ask how he’d slept. He picked up.
‘Hey, Lauren. You found John Doe?’
‘Damn straight. Darrell Showalter. A monk who teaches school in Cambridge.’
‘As in Cambridge, Massachusetts?’
‘As in Cambridge, England.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. Yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts.’
‘You sure it’s him?’
‘Pathologist found a small birthmark on the ankle: could have been livor mortis until you knew better.’ After death, with no heart to pump it round the body, blood settles toward the parts of the corpse nearer the ground, causing a purplish-red discoloration of the skin. ‘One of the other teachers came up in the middle of the night to give us an ID. You want to go and talk to the school, they’re waiting for you.’
Monday-morning traffic on the eastern seaboard meant it took Patrese four hours to get to Cambridge, and he knew it could have been worse than that.
He’d finally taken his leave of Kwasi at around ten the previous evening, and had found a hotel off Washington Square that had charged him – which was to say, had charged the Bureau – a couple of hundred bucks for a bed less comfortable than a landmine, a shower smaller than Gary Coleman, and Art Deco furniture less tasteful than Trump Tower. By that stage, however, Patrese had been beyond caring.
He’d spoken to Donner again en route to Cambridge and told him what was going on. Well, Donner had sighed, it’s not like we haven’t got enough to do here. True, Patrese had replied, but we are a federal organization, and these folks want me to help them out. OK, Donner had said at last. There was a Bureau field office in New Haven itself: he’d get them to give Patrese any help he needed.
Darrell Showalter, the corpse formerly known as John Doe, had taught at the Cambridge Abbey School, a few blocks up from Harvard Square. Patrese instantly clocked the school as the kind of place that turned out muscular Christians: young men who half a century ago would have traveled the world bringing gospel and gridiron to the natives. Organ music swelled from inside a chapel; students hurried through cloisters.
The principal introduced himself as Michael Furman and offered Patrese a seat, some coffee, a photograph of Showalter, and thanks for coming.
‘The school’s in shock, as you can imagine,’ Furman said. ‘Terrible business.’
‘What was it that Darrell did here?’
‘The school’s attached to the abbey, which is an institution in its own regard, of course. Most of our staff, like myself, are lay teachers, but some of the monks also teach: religious studies and spiritual guidance, mainly. It’s a tradition we value greatly. Darrell was one of those.’
‘So no family? No wife, no children?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Was he popular?’
‘Extremely. Both with the staff and with the boys. One doesn’t necessarily mean the other, as I’m sure you know.’ Furman looked around as though about to divulge an indiscretion, though only he and Patrese were in the room. ‘And the monks aren’t always that popular with the boys, either. Men who give their lives to God … sometimes they don’t understand children too well.’
Or sometimes, Patrese thought bitterly, they understand children all too well.
‘No enemies?’ Patrese asked. ‘No disputes? No one who wanted to do him harm?’
Furman shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’
‘Could I see his room?’
‘Sure.’
Furman led Patrese down corridors that smelled faintly of disinfectant.
‘Do you know when he was last seen?’ Patrese asked as they walked.
‘In the refectory on Saturday evening, around seven o’clock. He was on roster then, one of the staff due to eat with the boys. After that, no one knows. I guess he’d have gone back to his room if he had no other engagements, and no one would have thought anything strange about not seeing him again that night.’
‘Next morning? Sunday, in a religious establishment; someone must have noticed him missing?’
‘Of course. His absence was noted at first morning prayers, seven a.m., but people just thought he was ill; there’s a virus going round the school
, plenty of pupils and staff have got it. His room was checked to see if he was OK, but there was no sign of him.’
‘That didn’t cause alarm?’
‘At that stage, no. This is a big school; he could have been anywhere, doing anything. It didn’t seem sinister. But when he didn’t appear for the main chapel service at ten thirty or for lunch afterwards – that’s when we started to search for him in earnest.’
‘And when you couldn’t find him?’
‘We called the police.’
And Patrese knew what the police would have said: he’s an adult, adults go missing, we’ll take a note of his details and let you know if we find anything. Meanwhile, the search for John Doe would have been working its way slowly outwards from New Haven, and Cambridge was far enough away not to have shown up in the first sweep.
Not that it would have made any difference. Showalter had been dead several hours before anyone had even thought to look for him.
‘How easy is it to get into this place?’ Patrese asked.
Furman shrugged. ‘We have security guards, of course, and gates, but we’re a school of young men. They go on sports and cultural trips, we encourage them to help out in the local community, the abbey itself is open to the public at certain times. We don’t want to shut ourselves away from the world. We wouldn’t be much of a school if we did.’
‘But anyone acting suspiciously would be challenged?’
‘I’d like to think so.’
The problem, as Patrese knew, was that anyone who could kill a woman on New Haven Green and leave another body there was almost certainly pretty good at not acting suspiciously. If killers walked round rubbing their hands and cackling like pantomime villains, they’d be much easier to catch.
‘You have CCTV here?’
‘At the main entrance.’
‘Nowhere else?’
‘No.’
‘How many entrances are there?’
‘Four or five, depending on how you count.’
