White Death

by Daniel Blake

  23

  The press conference was held in the Bureau’s Boston field office. The field office was used to holding them, and the local reporters were used to going there.

  A lot of law enforcement officers don’t like the media, and make no secret of that. They dislike being second-guessed by reporters they consider uninformed at best and irresponsible at worst, and they hate the media’s tacit demands that the police work to news deadlines rather than at an investigation’s natural pace. Some detectives prefer simply to read out a statement, usually written in excruciatingly pedantic officialese, and flatly refuse to take any questions.

  Patrese took a more pragmatic approach. He figured the media were part and parcel of every major homicide investigation, so he might as well accept it. Better to have them inside the tent pissing out than vice versa. The more he could run them, the less they could run him. And there were also ways of using the media to put pressure on a killer, to bluff or double-bluff him, but you had to be pretty sure of your ground to do that, and Patrese wasn’t yet there on this one.

  He practiced his demeanor in the mirror before going on. He had to look confident but not cocky, serious but not depressed. Yes, these were tragedies, but he was in charge of solving the crimes, not leading the mourners. Others could weep and wail. What the public wanted to see was a flint-eyed, square-jawed G-Man who would run down the bad guy with implacable remorselessness. Think Jack Bauer meets Dirty Harry.

  Flashbulbs like a meteor shower as he walked in, and a copse of microphones on the table in front of him. He took his seat and shot his cuffs. What he was about to perform was a balancing act: give enough information to keep the media happy, but not enough to jeopardize the investigation.

  ‘Good morning. My name is Franco Patrese, and I’m the agent in charge of this case. A few hours ago, the body of a young man named Chase Evans was found outside Harvard University’s Newell boathouse. Mr Evans was a third-year student at Harvard, and he was the coxswain of the university’s rowing eight. I need hardly tell you that his murder has sent shockwaves through the university, just as the killing of Columbia student Dennis Barbero did at that university last week. We believe the same man is responsible for both killings, as well as the murders of Regina King and Darrell Showalter, whose bodies were found on New Haven Green in Connecticut eight days ago. In each case, the victims had been decapitated and had an arm removed.’

  No mention of the skin patches or the tarot cards. That information was being kept secret – well, as secret as something involving three separate police forces plus the Bureau itself could ever be – in order to weed out the crank callers, of which there were inevitably hundreds.

  ‘We are pursuing several lines of enquiry,’ Patrese continued, ‘which for operational reasons must remain confidential. But we’re confident that, with the public’s help, we’ll catch this man before too long. If anyone’s got any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.’ He indicated a blonde reporter in the front row. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sandra Olsen, WBZ-TV. Is there an Ivy League connection to the murders?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but of course it’s an avenue we’re exploring pretty closely. Two of the victims were Ivy League students; the other two were found more or less by Yale’s front door. I’ve already requested all eight Ivy League colleges, not just the three involved so far, to provide a list of students who’ve shown aggressive tendencies, been involved in violent incidents, or expressed any kind of murderous fantasies in classwork, therapist sessions, anything like that.’ Nod to a woman with frizzy hair. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bethany Bryan, Boston Globe. That sounds a lot like invasion of privacy. Aren’t therapy sessions confidential?’

  ‘Under normal circumstances, sure. Psychotherapy is a private process which often involves discussion of very sensitive issues, and I respect that. I’ve got no intention of rootling through the files of innocent folk who’ve got nothing to do with this. But in cases where the patient’s believed to pose a danger to himself or someone else, then confidentiality can be broken; that’s established case law. The protective privilege ends where the public peril begins.’

  This was all true, but it was also a tactical move on Patrese’s part. He guessed that at least some of the eight colleges, the Ancient Eight, would try to drag their heels: acceding to police demands for sensitive information didn’t sit well with lofty liberal academic ideals. By making his request a matter of such public record, Patrese hoped to shanghai any recalcitrant authorities into co-operating.

  ‘Doug Turner, WBZ news radio 1030. The victims have been both black and white, and male and female. Isn’t that a little unusual?’

  ‘You mean, serial killers don’t usually cross race or gender lines? Yes, it is. But it’s also unusual – and I’m not meaning to be flippant here – it’s also unusual to decapitate your victims and remove their arms. That it’s unusual doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’re clearly dealing here with someone who’s got a very rare and serious pathology. He’s not going to think and act like normal people. Unusual is the very least that he is.’

  ‘Barrie Golding, Christian Science Monitor. You’re coordinating investigations in three separate jurisdictions. Does that cause problems?’

  ‘That’s what the Bureau was set up for. Detectives Anderssen, Dufresne and Kieseritsky – they’re the ones in Cambridge, Manhattan and New Haven – they all understand that. They’ve been extremely helpful so far, and I’m sure they’ll continue to be. We all want the same thing: to catch the guy who’s doing this. I don’t care if it’s me that runs him to ground personally after a tri-state manhunt or if an old lady trips him up with her walking stick. I just want him caught. When that happens, then everyone can start arguing about who gets the credit.’

  Everyone in the room surely knew the phrase as well as Patrese did. Success has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.

  There was still a forest of hands showing. At this rate, Patrese thought, he could be here all day. He’d made his statement, he’d shown willing. Keen though he was to keep the media onside, he had a task force to run; and besides, it did no harm to have them always wanting a little bit more. He held up a hand.

  ‘I’d love to stay, but as you can appreciate, I have a thousand and one things to do. Before I go, though, let me say something.’ He looked down the lens of the nearest camera: a trick he’d learnt back in Pittsburgh, that a direct appeal could work wonders. ‘I’m asking you, the public, to help us on this one. We, the Bureau and the police, we can’t be everywhere. You can; you are. Be our eyes and ears. Please, if you’ve seen anything, heard anything, noticed anything unusual; please, ring in and tell us. Don’t worry if it seems too small or insignificant or irrelevant. Let us be the judge of that. You never know; your piece of information could be the one that makes the difference.’

  That kind of logic – it could be you – got people buying lottery tickets, so Patrese figured it was worth a try here. And the more publicity a case received, he felt, the greater the chance of it being solved. He didn’t know whether that was statistically the case, but logically it seemed that the more people who knew, the more likely they were to offer help. Too much information could, and often did, swamp homicide task forces, but better too much than too little. Sooner or later, the snippet they needed would bubble up through all the dead ends and red herrings. Given enough time, manpower and luck, you could always find the needle in the haystack.

  But if the needle wasn’t there to start with, you had no chance.

  24

  Patrese headed back to New Haven after lunch. Anderssen’s men were questioning people on the Harvard campus in the same way that Dufresne’s officers had done down in Columbia: sealing off the accommodation block where Evans had lived and working outwards from there. And, Patrese thought, Anderssen would face exactly the same problems Dufresne had: not in terms of protests – Harvard students didn’t protest unless their port was of insufficient vintage – but in th
e impossibility of keeping strangers off an open campus.

  Patrese rang Anna from the car. She too was on the road, en route back from Manhattan. She’d done the marathon in 3:47. She’d been hoping for 3:30, but was happy to have got round inside 4:00. Pretty good, Patrese said. If he ever ran it, he’d be lucky to finish before the maintenance crews arrived to take down the crowd barriers.

  He told her about Chase Evans at the boathouse.

  ‘The Knight of Pentacles?’ she said. ‘That’s a funny one. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. There are four knights in the deck, but Pentacles is the only one who’s reliable and steadfast. The others are daring but flighty. Pentacles is very thorough, very methodical. He’s pushy, bossy, a control freak. Loves being in charge, loves responsibility.’

  In other words, Patrese thought, a typical cox.

  But all this was getting him nowhere. That wasn’t Anna’s fault: she couldn’t have been more helpful. The problem was that, so far, the tarot cards showed Patrese only what had happened. Dennis Barbero had fitted the characteristics of the Knight of Swords, Chase Evans those of the Knight of Pentacles. But they were already dead: the cards had merely confirmed their personalities. Patrese needed to know in advance, and right now he could see no way of achieving that.

  Sure, he could try to extrapolate likely targets from the remaining seventy-four cards in a tarot deck, but the search fields were way too wide to be of any use. Even if Patrese got it spot on in working out what kind of victim corresponded to what card, that would still be no good – not unless he knew the very next intended victim. Not the one two or three down the line, but the next one, the one who was going to die in a matter of hours, days, weeks unless Patrese got to him before the killer did. Knowing your next victim might fit one of seventy-four different parameters gave you roughly the same odds of saving him – or her – as not knowing anything at all.

  In my next life, Patrese thought, I’m going to do a different job. Something simpler. Something easier. Something less frustrating. Astrophysics, perhaps. Or brain surgery.

  The figures that Patrese had requested from around the Ivy League, if not the specific cases behind those figures, were starting to come in by the time he got back to New Haven. There were 125,000 students between the eight universities, and almost one in six of them, 18,000, were on record as attending therapy. The one-in-six ratio was similar when staff were counted too: 8,000 therapy patients out of just under 50,000.

  Even by the standards of modern America, Patrese thought those staggering figures.

  But perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, not when he considered it some more. Parents, professors, peers all put these kids under insane pressure to succeed, to make the most of their opportunities. Perhaps the kind of person who got an Ivy League place was inherently more susceptible to mental trouble in the first place. Just as finely tuned athletes often get sick or injured, so too a brain overstressed by studying too hard or worrying about measuring up to high standards all around might start to malfunction.

  Then again, maybe he was making it all too sinister. Bipolar medication had allowed bright but mentally ill students to get to college in the first place, where beforehand they’d never have made it through high school. And therapy was no longer the stigma it used to be, especially amongst the educated classes. More people seeing therapists might not indicate more people needing therapy, simply more people prepared to seek it out.

  There was a similar phenomenon when it came to serial killers, Patrese knew. There had always been serial killers throughout history, but they hadn’t been recognized as such until crime detection methods had reached a point where crimes hitherto thought unrelated could be cross-referenced and correlated. Jack the Ripper wasn’t the first serial killer; just the first serial killer to be known as such.

  The majority of the therapists’ cases would be sexual identity issues, substance abuse, eating disorders, anxiety, apprehension about the future, and so on. Patrese wasn’t interested in those, not unless they came with violent undertones attached. If the killer was among the student body, and had been seeking therapy, it was almost inconceivable that he wouldn’t have shown some aggressive tendencies. The killings were too savage.

  Patrese stayed in the incident room for a couple of hours, finding out what they had (a ton of leads to follow up after his press conference earlier) and didn’t have (anything else). Still waiting on forensics, not just on this one but on Columbia too: it could take weeks sometimes, high-profile case or not. Nothing useful from eyewitness reports.

  The hell with Ivy League kids, Patrese thought. Much more of this, and he’d be needing a damn therapist.

  When he’d been at college, his first choice of therapy had always been exercise. Getting some air into his lungs, feeling the cleansing burn of lactic acid through his legs – that had been better for him than a dozen sessions on a shrink’s couch. If Anna could manage twenty-six miles, he could surely manage a few himself?

  ‘Where’s good to go running round here?’ he asked the room.

  Lighthouse Point Park, came the answer: a nice park on the city’s east shore. It was five miles dead from New Haven Green to the titular lighthouse, hence the name of the point it stood on: Five Mile Point.

  Patrese hadn’t been running for so long that five miles dead might leave him just that. And then it would be five miles back too. Well, that was what taxis were for, wasn’t it?

  The city center gave way to smaller residential streets, which gave way in turn to the industrial area round the city’s harbor. The park was the other side of the water from the city center, and two bridges spanned the bay: the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge, which didn’t permit pedestrians, and the Tomlinson Lift Bridge, which did. The slap of Patrese’s sneakers echoed off the girders as he crossed. His breathing came fast and ragged, the hard first few minutes of a run while his body adjusted itself to the effort.

  Feet wandering, mind wandering. The charioteer approaches things from the side, Anna had said. You can stare a solution straight in the face and not see it; but when you turn your head away and squint through the corner of your eye, it might become clear.

  In the press conference earlier, the guy from WBZ news radio had asked whether it was unusual for a killer to cross gender and race lines. Patrese’s reply – that ‘unusual’ was the very least this killer was – had sounded to him more flip than he’d meant it to be. Thing was, news radio man had a point. Lines of race and gender are heavily marked in the human psyche, and serial killers rarely cross them. Wayne Williams killed young black men and boys. Ted Bundy killed pretty white girls who looked like his ex-fiancée. Peter Sutcliffe, the English Yorkshire Ripper, killed prostitutes. Killers go for the same kind of victim over and again because the victim represents something specific to them.

  Patrese ran down off the bridge and past the seaport. Gas tanks huddled together in dirty white clusters. A rusting red crane lowered its boom towards the deck of a moored freighter like a bird pecking for food.

  MO, modus operandi, and signature. In the most basic terms, how and why a killer kills. MO comprises a crime’s functional components: the time of day, the means of access, the weapons used, and so on. Signature reflects the killer’s emotional and psychological drivers: specific patterns of mutilation, ways in which the body is posed, those kind of things. MOs can change over time as killers become more experienced or refine their techniques. Signatures never do.

  In all four killings so far, the signatures were identical: amputation of the head and one arm, removal of the skin patches, and the tarot cards. But the MOs were very different. Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans had been killed with clinical precision elsewhere and brought to the places their bodies had been found. Regina King and Dennis Barbero had suffered frenzied attacks at the spots where they’d died.

  WELCOME TO LIGHTHOUSE POINT PARK, said the sign. TAKE NOTHING BUT PICTURES, LEAVE NOTHING BUT FOOTPRINTS. Soccer pitches, Little League diamonds, jogging paths. Patrese swiped a s
leeve across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. He was breathing better now, slower and deeper.

  The Bureau likes to divide serial killers into two categories: organized and disorganized. The organized killer is intelligent and plans his crimes methodically. He’s socially adept and proficient at luring victims away from safe places, which means he can leave three crime scenes: where he meets his victim, where he kills them, and where he dumps the body. He has friends and lovers, sometimes even a wife and family. He follows his crimes in the media and takes pride in what he’s done. He might like to go back to the crime scene or play games with the police. He tends to have a nice car and travels a lot, often with his work. He’s the guy who helps his neighbors and runs the kids’ Little Leagues; when he’s caught, everyone’s shocked and says he’s the last person they suspected. But sometimes he’s not caught. Since he’s forever trying to improve his techniques, the longer he kills, the more difficult it is to find him.

  Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans appeared to be the victims of an organized killer.

  The disorganized serial killer is just the opposite. He’s of below average intelligence and doesn’t plan his crimes too much. He strikes on a whim, whenever the bloodlust takes him – hence the frenzy of his attacks and the carelessness to leave the murder weapon at the scene. He’s often unemployed, a loner with few friends and no spouse or family. He has poor hygiene, drug or alcohol problems, a history of mental illness. He doesn’t take much interest in the media coverage of his crimes. If he plays games, it’s with the victims’ families rather than the police; if he drives, it’s a battered old sedan or pick-up. He doesn’t go far from home. His inconsistency can make him hard to catch – How do you predict the movements of someone who doesn’t know himself when he’s next going to kill? – but when he is caught, people queue up to say they always knew he was a wrong ’un, and why the hell hadn’t the police gotten to him quicker?