White Death

by Daniel Blake

  ‘So why not have CCTV on them too?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have had it at all if it hadn’t been required by the insurance company. I want to bring these young men up properly, and you can’t do that if they think they’re being watched the whole time. I know most of them are good kids; but they’re also kids, and kids sometimes do what kids do. I come down like a ton of bricks on them when they screw up, but I want to let them make their own mistakes too. Within reason, of course.’

  Heck, Patrese thought. If he’d had a principal like Furman when he’d been at school, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up hating religion so much.

  ‘And you have no idea how Darrell could have ended up in New Haven?’

  ‘None whatsoever. As far as I know, he had no family there, no friends. I’ve been here eight years, and I never heard him mention the place once.’

  Patrese looked out of the window, toward the spire of the chapel and a concrete sports hall beyond. Something about the solidity of both buildings made him think of the Gothic gatehouse on one side of New Haven Green.

  ‘You’re not far from Harvard here, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You ever do anything with them? Meetings, programs, any of that?’

  Furman shook his head. ‘Not really. We take the boys in twelfth grade to look round the place – not just Harvard but MIT too, of course – in case any of them are thinking of applying there, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Did Darrell ever go on these trips?’

  ‘Not that I recall. Why?’

  ‘You’re near Harvard. His body was found near Yale. I was wondering whether there could be a connection.’

  ‘Not one that I’m aware of. Darrell certainly didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale as a student. Thought they were a little too elitist, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘And yet he taught in a private boys’ school.’

  ‘A third of our boys are on some sort of financial assistance. And religious instruction is a major part of the curriculum here. I think his conscience was satisfied that he was doing the right thing. Here—’ Furman pushed open a door and stood aside to let Patrese through. ‘This is – was – Darrell’s room.’

  It reminded Patrese a little of Kwasi’s room in Bleecker Street: a single bed, hundreds of books. None about chess, though, or at least none that Patrese could see at first glance. Shelves of religious texts, unsurprisingly. The obvious giants of the postwar American novel: Mailer, Updike, Roth, squashed close together like rush-hour rail commuters. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in translation, and not only the famous ones about war, peace, crime and punishment either: Patrese saw The Cossacks, The House of the Dead, Hadji Murat, The Idiot, Resurrection, Demons, all with broken spines and fraying corners.

  ‘Loved Russia,’ Furman said, following Patrese’s gaze. ‘One of the classes he liked to teach was about religious survival in times of persecution. In particular, how the Russian Orthodox Church kept going under the godless Soviet regime. Lessons for us all in how to keep the faith.’

  There was a laptop on a desk by the window. Patrese turned it on, waited for it to boot up, and tapped on the Outlook Express icon. Forensics could crawl over the machine later, but if Showalter had made any arrangements for Saturday night by e-mail, they’d probably still be on here.

  The program opened. No password demand: most people don’t bother when they have sole access to a machine. Patrese scanned through the inbox. All school-related business, by the look of it: circulars about staff meetings, refurbishment work, and so on. He glanced toward Furman. ‘Do you know whether he used a personal account too? Hotmail; that kind of thing?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Why so?’

  Furman stepped forward and clicked on the ‘sent items’ folder. It came up empty.

  ‘Darrell didn’t use any e-mail unless he had to. He’d read the incoming stuff, because he knew that’s how people communicate nowadays, but if he wanted to reply, he’d ring you up.’

  ‘Why?’

  Furman shrugged. ‘Just the way he was. Not everyone likes to filter their lives through electronics.’

  When he’d finished with Furman, Patrese went over to the school security office by the main gate and asked to see the CCTV footage from Saturday evening. No sign of Darrell leaving at any time; though, as Furman had said, there were other ways in and out. Plenty of people entering and leaving, though it was hard to make out any more than the most rudimentary of features: this had all been filmed after dark, and the picture quality was as bad as it had been in Penn Station.

  It was like this in many investigations: questions way, way outnumbered answers. There was one thing Patrese knew for sure, however. Regina King had left New York alive and been killed in Connecticut; Darrell Showalter had left Massachusetts alive and been found dead in Connecticut. That meant interstate transportation, which in turn made it federal jurisdiction. The Bureau would take over from the New Haven PD.

  It was Patrese’s case now.

  11

  Since Patrese needed some cash, he pulled up at the nearest bank. The ATM in the wall was out of order, so he went inside, where there were three more machines: all working fine, but all with queues. That wasn’t surprising: it was the start of the lunch hour. Patrese scanned the queues, trying to work out from the kind of customers there which queue would move fastest. Businessmen in suits would be in a hurry; little old ladies would take their time.

  A bark of laughter came from the tellers’ counter. Patrese looked over. One of the tellers, a young guy with the kind of hair-and-moustache combo that hadn’t been in fashion since East Germany had ceased to exist, was holding up a piece of paper. A black man in a hooded sweatshirt stood in front of his position.

  ‘You demand money?’ the teller scoffed. ‘This is a practical joke, right?’

  No, Patrese thought. No, never say that. What the fuck was the teller playing at? The police tell every bank, and every bank tells its employees, not to stand up to bank robbers. Just give them the money and get them out of there. Hell, most banks use some kind of dye pack that makes the notes unusable, or they hand over bait money, whose serial numbers are recorded and the police alerted when the notes are back in circulation. But even if they don’t do either of those, it’s still only money. Better that someone gets away with a couple of grand than that someone gets shot because of some fool teller who thinks he’s Dirty Harry.

  All this went through Patrese’s head in a split second. In that same split second, Hoodie Man had pulled a gun from his waistband with his right hand and grabbed the nearest customer, a young Asian woman with red eyeglasses and a crimson Harvard top, with his left. He pressed the gun to the woman’s head. Her eyes and mouth made perfect circles of shock and fear.

  ‘Look like a practical joke to you now, motherfucker?’ yelled Hoodie Man.

  Shrieks and screams all around Patrese, people falling to the floor or backing away as far as they could. He had his own gun out now, though he wasn’t aware of having drawn it: that was Bureau training, where in times of danger you armed yourself without conscious thought.

  He drew a bead on Hoodie Man. ‘Let her go!’

  ‘You drop it, man! Drop it, or I smoke the bitch!’

  The man’s face was half hidden beneath his hood. He looked to have smooth skin and regular features, but beyond that Patrese couldn’t see enough to tell for sure whether he was serious about this threat or not, let alone whether he was juiced on crack or meth or whatever else junkies out there liked to hit on nowadays.

  Could take the shot anyway, Patrese thought, but Hoodie Man was moving around, pulling his hostage with him. Hs gun was pressed hard against her temple: the pressure was turning her skin white around the end of the barrel. Even if Patrese got off a clean shot, head or vital organs down the centerline of the trunk, Hoodie Man might still fire his own gun, as a reflex shot if nothing else.

  Patrese remembered Samantha Slinger, a crack addict w
hom he’d shot dead in some scuzzy Pittsburgh rowhouse because he’d thought she’d been going for a gun. She hadn’t. And her death had helped set in motion a series of murders that had reached five before he’d managed to finish it. That kind of thing stayed with you. It hadn’t stopped him taking shots in difficult situations since then – he’d put a bullet through the head of a wannabe suicide bomber during a Steelers match at Heinz Field, for a start – but it had made him more cautious about weighing up risk and reward.

  And right now there was no contest between the two. Hoodie Man wants to steal some cash rather than work for it? Sure. Let him. Guys who hold up banks in broad daylight aren’t criminal masterminds. They get caught sooner rather than later. Give him the money, get him to let the girl go. That’s what Patrese thought. That’s what the teller should have thought too, before he started to get wiseass.

  ‘OK,’ Patrese said. ‘OK.’ He crouched down and put his gun on the floor.

  Hoodie Man swiveled his eyes toward the teller. ‘Money, now. In a bag, twenty seconds, or I smoke her.’

  Patrese could hear only two sounds: a quiet, breathless sobbing from somewhere behind him, and the panicky rustle of the teller frantically shoving shrink-wrapped packs of notes into a carrier bag.

  Hoodie Man glanced across at the teller again. ‘Enough!’ he said. ‘Give!’

  The teller reached out, bag juddering from the tremors in his arm. Hoodie Man tightened his left arm around Harvard Top’s neck and took the bag with the outstretched fingers of the same hand. The gun in his right hand never left her temple.

  ‘Fool,’ he spat at the teller.

  Patrese rather thought he had a point.

  Hoodie Man began to walk toward the door, still holding his hostage. She looked round in silent supplication. Do the right thing, Patrese thought. Get out of the door and let her go. You’ve got what you came for. You keep a hold of her, and within minutes it’ll be a situation with armed cops and all that, and those things tend to end the hard way.

  And that’s exactly what Hoodie Man did. He got out of the door, pushed Harvard Top away, and took off down the sidewalk like a scalded cat.

  Patrese grabbed his gun from the floor and went after him. No good. By the time he was out of the building, Hoodie Man was halfway down the block and moving fast toward the lunchtime crowds. Chasing him would only risk flaring the whole thing up again. He might take another hostage; even worse, he might start shooting. Letting him go wasn’t the macho thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

  It didn’t stop Patrese stamping the ground in frustration, though.

  12

  When the Cambridge police arrived at the bank a few minutes later, Patrese pulled rank and got himself interviewed first. It wasn’t just that he wanted to get to New Haven and didn’t have time to spare hanging around here: it was also that law enforcement officers are trained in observation and recall, which made his testimony more accurate and useful than that of a random member of the public. Most of the people in that bank, he knew, would hardly have remembered their own names when confronted by a man with a gun.

  Witness statement given, Patrese headed for the interstate. In the last day and a half, he realized, he’d driven from Foxborough to New Haven, New Haven to New York, New York to Cambridge, and now Cambridge back to New Haven. Heck; he should have been a trucker, not a Bureau agent. Probably get paid better, too.

  He drove straight to the New Haven police headquarters. They’d set up an incident room, done all the right things: two dozen officers manning the phone lines, one wall covered in photos of the cadavers and the crime scene, a buzz of industry and determination that told good things for the department’s standards.

  Kieseritsky showed Patrese into her office and told him what they’d got so far. It didn’t take long. She’d had little news for him yesterday, and she didn’t have a whole lot more for him today.

  No joy with the fingerprint they’d found on Showalter’s chest. There were millions of fingerprints on the Bureau’s database, most of them belonging to various shades of scumbag, but none of them matched this one.

  The Liberzon knife company had sent over a list of their US retailers. These were being checked to see if anyone connected with the victims had purchased the hunting knife in question: though if that person had used cash rather than a card, they’d be none the wiser.

  Still waiting on any other possible clues from forensics.

  Still no one who’d seen anything strange on the Green at that time of night.

  Still no idea how Regina had gotten to New Haven in the first place. They’d checked every hotel within a ten-mile radius of the Green, and she hadn’t stayed at any of them.

  Still no joy on the provenance of the tarot cards. They’d managed to establish that the cards were made by US Games Inc., who had copyright over the Rider-Waite design in the United States; but US Games Inc. sold hundreds of thousands of sets a year, all pretty much identical. The set the killer was using could have been bought in any state in the union, not to mention online. Where would they start?

  And, as far as could be ascertained, still absolutely no overlap whatsoever between the lives of Regina King and Darrell Showalter. A single mom from the projects and a monk teaching at a private school in one of Massachusetts’ most upscale areas: it wasn’t as though they’d have had much in common to start with.

  Showalter seemed to have lived a pretty blameless life; not even a speeding ticket or a parking fine. Regina, on the other hand, had been a bit of a firebrand. Remember how they’d got her fingerprints from the arrest docket at the Iraq War protest in 2003? Well, that hadn’t been the end of it.

  She’d sued the NYPD for bodily harm, alleging that the officer who’d arrested her, Howard Lewis, had used excessive force, which had damaged ligaments in her shoulder and neck. The case had dragged on a couple of years before being settled for an undisclosed sum; which was to say that the NYPD had worked out the minimum they’d have to pay her to make the problem go away, and had done precisely that.

  Settlement had been reached about six months before Kwasi had won his world title, which had made his fame and earnings go stratospheric. Patrese wondered whether Regina would still have accepted the NYPD’s offer had she known the financial windfall around the corner. Principles were good; eating was better.

  When Kieseritsky finished, Patrese told her kindly but firmly that this was now the Bureau’s case, and that the incident room must be transferred lock, stock and barrel to the Bureau field office a half-mile up State Street.

  Kieseritsky was disappointed but not surprised. She knew the rules of federal engagement as well as Patrese did; but any detective worth their salt doesn’t like giving up a case that has been theirs from the outset.

  ‘You know this is no reflection on you personally,’ Patrese said.

  Kieseritsky shrugged. ‘You sure? It’s not like we’re about to catch the murderer any minute now, is it?’

  ‘Some cases just don’t fall that way. As far as I can see, you’ve done everything exactly as you should have done. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Don’t be kind.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It makes it harder for me to hate the Bureau.’

  13

  If there was a prize for the most striking building in New Haven, Patrese thought, he was standing outside the runaway winner right now.

  It was a rectangular box without windows. In their place were panels of white, lightly veined marble framed with pale gray granite. It stood in the middle of a quadrangle on the edges of which glowered edifices in Gothic and Classical styles, as though this box was an alien spaceship that had dared to disturb the old-world tranquility around it. It was Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and a sign by the main door informed Patrese that this was the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books and manuscripts.

  Anna Levin, the curator, was waiting for him inside. Patrese was expecting some
tweedy old dame with reading spectacles dangling from her neck, and so he almost walked straight past her. Only when she put her hand on his arm did he realize who she was. She had the bright eyes and deep tan of someone who spent as much time as possible outdoors – no mean feat if you worked in this place, Patrese thought – and, like an athlete or a dancer, she walked on the balls of her feet. He’d never have put her as a librarian in a million years. She was this side of dotage, for a start.

  When they’d introduced themselves, Anna gestured around her, at the inside of the library. ‘Whadd’ya think? Quite something, huh?’

  Quite something indeed, Patrese thought. The marble panels, which from out in the quad had appeared solid, were now revealed to be translucent, almost like blank television screens. They let in a small amount of filtered light: presumably to allow rare books to be displayed without risk of damage.

  And in the middle of this enormous space, rising six stories like a monolith from Atlantis, was a glass tower full of books: a shrine to volumes bound in leather of olive green, Mikado yellow, burnt umber, carmine and a hundred other colors besides.

  ‘I think they’re the most beautiful things in the world,’ Anna said. ‘Books.’

  Her office was two stories below ground. She couldn’t offer him coffee or tea, she was afraid – no food or drink allowed, because they couldn’t risk damage to the books. That was fine, Patrese said. Too much caffeine gave him a weird St Vitus dance.

  ‘I’ve got a whole heap of things to do,’ he said, ‘so I can’t spend too long here. Nothing personal. You know why I’m here?’

  ‘Something about tarot cards being found at those dreadful murders yesterday.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, listen …’

  ‘I need hardly tell you that anything I say to you is confidential. We keep a tight lid on information from crime scenes: helps weed out the tons of crank callers you always get.’

  ‘Sure. Do you know which cards were found?’