White Death

by Daniel Blake

  And then there were days like today: an endlessly depressing litany of all the shit that the city’s detritus could scoop up and fling in his direction. Stolen cars, convenience-store robberies, and now the inevitable domestic violence call-out. What really got Larsen was the paucity of ambition in these crimes. These weren’t daring or exotic master criminals taking on the police in a battle of wits; they were nasty, brutish, squalid.

  Squalid was the word of the day, he decided. The city’s Egleston Square district, sandwiched between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, was squalid. The apartment complex outside which he was pulling up was damn sure squalid. It might have been OK when new, but now it looked like a trailer park without wheels. The perimeter fence sagged where it had fallen away from its supports, and the cars parked up against it all had dents in their hoods: sure signs that people climbed the fence and used the cars to break their fall, Larsen thought. Beer cans lay toppled on the ground like felled trees. Dogs barked, couples shouted at each other. Just another day in paradise.

  Other units were en route, Larsen knew. The sensible thing would be to wait for them. All cops in the Greater Boston area had been briefed about Howard Lewis’ murder, and warned that they might be targeted in a similar fashion. The advice sheet circulated had contained the usual mix of health’n’safety overcaution and the bleeding obvious: be vigilant, vary your routes home, try to avoid being alone when out on the streets. Sinclair Larsen, along with at least 99.9 per cent of his fellow officers, reckoned that a cop who couldn’t be trusted to look after himself didn’t really have the right to call himself a cop at all.

  Alone on the streets? He was a first responder, that was his job. If he got there before everyone else, so be it. The 911 call had described a screaming match and furniture crashing in apartment 24. The kind of low-lives who lived here weren’t above using fists on their women, and where fists came, knives and guns often followed. Larsen didn’t know whether he had time to spare. He didn’t want to find out too late that he hadn’t.

  He came out of the car fast, gun drawn. No one in the communal gardens. The apartments were built on two levels. A quick check of the numbering showed him that 1–20 was first floor, 20–40 was second. There was a stairwell away to his left. He ran for it.

  It stank of piss. Of course it did. There wasn’t a public staircase anywhere in the world that didn’t. He took the stairs two at a time, turned back on himself at the landing, and felt a blow to his face so sharp and savage that for a second he thought he must have run full tilt into the wall without realizing.

  Sinking to his knees, hands coming to his face, gun clattering to the ground. A man above him, punching him for a second time, this time hard in the solar plexus, and the breath whistling out of him like a freight train. As he pitched forward, reflexively trying to get some air – any air – back into his lungs – Larsen caught a quick glimpse of his assailant. Hoodie. Smooth features. White skin. Gloves.

  No sirens. Other units weren’t yet here. Have to get to apartment 24, Larsen thought, have to get to the domestic violence … and through the fog of pain, he realized dimly that there was no domestic violence in number 24. This was the call-out, right here; an ambush, an attack, first unwary copper gets it.

  A couple of kicks to his ribs. He’d have screamed if he hadn’t been so busy sucking in breaths. Not that it would have made a difference. Places like this, no one came to investigate a fight, not unless they wanted to be next.

  Hands turning him over, under his armpits, grabbing and dragging him up the stairs. The concrete slammed into Larsen’s back. He winced and twisted, grabbing upwards at the man’s chest. Couldn’t reach all the way to the man’s face, but Larsen’s fingers brushed against something. A chain, a medallion, something like that. He reached again, shirt and jacket riding up on his chest as he fastened his hand round the chain …

  … and suddenly, just like that, the man with the hoodie dropped him and took off. By the time Larsen had struggled to his feet and half run, half tumbled back down the stairs to retrieve his gun, his attacker had run across the complex’ front yard, through the gates and was gone, weaving down the lines of dented cars till he disappeared from sight.

  Patrese had asked that any attacks on Boston police officers be reported to him. A Columbia student had been murdered shortly before a Harvard student; by the same logic, the murder of a New York cop should presage something similar in the Boston area.

  That Sinclair Larsen was white was unsurprising; apart from him fitting the tarot/chess pattern, four in every five Boston police officers were white. That he’d survived was surprising. That his attacker had voluntarily let him go seemed inexplicable.

  Patrese didn’t like inexplicable. He got Larsen to tell him what had happened, blow by blow, no detail too small, no recounting too exhaustive.

  Larsen went through the whole thing. When he finished, Patrese was still mystified. The $64,000 question: Why had Larsen’s attacker suddenly dropped him? No other cops had arrived, no curious resident had poked their head out of another apartment. Yes, Larsen had gotten hold of the chain round the man’s neck, but it had only come away in his hand once the man had dropped him; it hadn’t been the action of Larsen yanking the chain that had caused the man to drop him.

  It didn’t make sense.

  So Patrese made Larsen tell him again, even slower and more painstakingly than before. This time, Patrese played the part of the attacker: mimicking the ambush, pretending to drag Larsen along the ground, seeing how Larsen reached for the chain, shirt and jacket riding up …

  There.

  Larsen had a tattoo on his stomach. A Red Sox logo, perhaps nine inches in diameter.

  Right on the place where the patches of skin had been removed on the other victims.

  The killer had seen the tattoo, and that had spared Larsen’s life. Whatever he and Kwasi wanted with the patches of skin, a big tattoo didn’t seem part of it. If the skin wasn’t clean, they weren’t interested. None of the other victims had had tattoos.

  ‘You want to see the chain?’ Larsen said.

  Patrese was still thinking about the tattoos. ‘The chain?’

  ‘The one I grabbed from his neck.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Sure.’

  Larsen passed over a transparent evidence bag. ‘We’ve got people checking it out. Mainly sold at the gift shop, I think.’

  Patrese took the chain from the bag. It was silver, and had a circular charm bearing a seal. There were two men pictured: one with a hammer and anvil, the other engrossed in a book. They were leaning against a plinth marked ‘1861’, and below them was the legend Mens Et Manus. Mind and hands.

  Words ran round the perimeter of the seal, but Patrese didn’t need to read them. He knew what they’d say, as he’d already seen this seal; two days ago, in fact.

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  36

  Monday, November 15th

  New Haven, CT

  Patrese called a sitrep meeting first thing Monday morning. Anderssen and Dufresne had come up the night before, and they’d been drinking with Patrese in his hotel bar till the small hours. Patrese had put it all on his room tab. God alone knew how he was going to get that one past the Bureau bean-counters. Perhaps he could call it a ‘liaison meeting with multi-jurisdictional law enforcement personnel’. Or maybe food was chargeable as a legitimate expense. Trouble was, every item on the tab was strictly liquid. Ah well.

  Now he stood in front of the task force and outlined where they stood. Officer Larsen had been attacked by someone with an MIT pendant. Forensics were seeing what, if anything, they could get off that pendant by way of evidence. So far, all they’d managed to ascertain was that the pendant had been purchased from the MIT shop, where they sold hundreds each year, and that the only fingerprints were those of Sinclair Larsen where he’d grabbed at it during the attack.

  Kwasi King was working with Thomas Unzicker of MIT on Project Misha. There was no way of knowing for sure whether Un
zicker had been the guy who’d attacked Officer Larsen, or if Unzicker had called in the fake 911 call himself. Analysis of the tape revealed that the caller had used some sort of electronic voice modifier. But at the very least, they’d needed to investigate Unzicker further, which was exactly what they’d done. The task force had spent most of the weekend digging up whatever they could find on him, and boy was there a lot of it.

  First, the Ivy League connection.

  Not only was MIT just down the road from Harvard, with well-documented friction between the two, but Unzicker had been at Harvard beforehand: he’d done his undergraduate degree there. Patrese had asked for any Harvard therapy reports on Unzicker – the initial request to Ivy League colleges had been for current students only, so Unzicker hadn’t been included in that – and Harvard had come back with plenty.

  That led Patrese on to the second point: Unzicker’s mental problems. In childhood, Unzicker had suffered from a condition called selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that manifests itself in the sufferer speaking very quietly and infrequently – and often not at all – in situations most people would find entirely normal and unthreatening. The mutism had, with sad predictability, been exacerbated by the reactions of other children. They’d teased him, offered their lunch money just to hear him talk, called him Trombone Boy for his habit of walking to school alone carrying his trombone, stuffed him in garbage cans and made him eat trash. When a teacher had threatened to fail him for not participating, he’d begun talking in a strange, deep voice which had sounded as though he’d been possessed by an alien or had something stuck in his mouth.

  Unzicker had told his therapist all this. The mutism had begun to fade in adolescence, perhaps because his skill with computers had given him the confidence to believe he wasn’t a total loss at everything. Not that he could be described as entirely normal even now. During his time at Harvard, Unzicker had used his cellphone to take photos of female students’ legs under their desks, and had written poetry which was in various measures obscene, deranged, pathetic, violent, and almost totally lacking in literary merit.

  He’d railed against rich kids and hedonists with their ‘Mercedes, golden necklaces, trust funds, vodka, cognac and debaucheries’. He’d written an ode to his girlfriend Jelly, who he said lived in outer space, traveled everywhere by spaceship, and called him Spanky. He’d signed these poems with a simple question mark, and had started referring to himself as Mr Question Mark or Mr Eroteme, another word for the punctuation mark.

  The therapist had been sufficiently alarmed by Unzicker’s behavior to have arranged a duress code with her assistant: if she ever spoke the name of one of her former colleagues, now dead, the assistant was to call security at once. She’d never needed to use it, but in other fields Unzicker’s behavior had been reported to three separate bodies: the student affairs office, the dean’s office and the campus police. They’d each said the same thing: as long as Unzicker made no overt, direct threats against himself or other people, there was nothing they could do.

  Why hadn’t Harvard disclosed any of this to MIT when Unzicker had applied for his postgraduate course there? Because federal law expressly forbade it. Only if Unzicker gave his consent could Harvard hand over the files; and he hadn’t done so. Patrese could get the information, but MIT couldn’t. Even if they could have, perhaps it would have made no difference. Unzicker was by all accounts a computer scientist of egregiously rare talent: no university, let alone the top technological institute in the world, was going to pass up a candidate like him. He was odd, he was a genius. They went together. Deal with it.

  And now to the third point: Unzicker’s behavior at MIT itself. He was famous, or perhaps infamous, for his ‘hacks’ – MIT slang for practical jokes, usually with a technological element. During a keynote speech, he’d patched his own electronics into the audio hook-up and gradually made the speaker’s voice sound higher and higher. He’d hacked into the MIT website and changed the home page to an announcement that Disney was buying MIT. He’d altered elevator announcements so they said dumb things.

  People who pulled these kinds of stunts at MIT were often seen as folk heroes, but Unzicker wasn’t going to be winning any popularity contests. People thought him arrogant, aloof, obnoxious. They rarely saw him with anyone who might constitute a friend. He ate every meal in the dining hall alone, and discouraged those who tried to be sociable and sit with him.

  No one had officially complained about him at MIT, but that could be explained by two things: his immersion in Project Misha seemed to leave him little time for extra-curricular activities; and MIT liked to think of itself as less uptight and more freewheeling than Harvard. MIT girls might be more likely than Harvard princesses to laugh off a clumsy weirdo’s approach.

  Whether that was the case or not, however, paled into insignificance against one thing: that the previous Thursday, less than twenty-four hours before Kwasi had gone on the run, Thomas Unzicker had attended MIThenge – which he’d mentioned in his e-mail to Kwasi – and had gone as a giant tarot card. The presence of tarot cards at the murder scenes was still not public knowledge, so Unzicker’s choice of costume was either incredibly coincidental, incredibly arrogant or incredibly stupid. And Patrese needed to remind no one what he thought about the prospects of coincidence.

  Opinion in the room was split: not on whether Thomas Unzicker was a person of interest to the investigation, as he clearly was, but what their best course of action was. Anderssen wanted to bring Unzicker in, shake him down, smack him around if necessary. Dufresne wanted to bug Unzicker’s office and room, and see what they could get that way. Patrese agreed with neither of them.

  There were two things here, he said. They had to find White, the person playing with Kwasi, but they also had to find Black, Kwasi himself. Assume Unzicker’s White. Bringing him in is only going to cause problems. We bring him in, arrest him, charge him, Kwasi breaks off contact. We bring him in and release him, that messes up his mental state still further, he freaks out, Kwasi realizes he’s no longer reliable, Kwasi breaks off contact. As for bugging Unzicker: the guy’s a tech whiz, he can probably spot a recording device or some software monitoring program at a hundred paces. He finds it, he freaks out, we’re back to square one again.

  No. What they were going to do was this. Mount surveillance on Unzicker; not electronic watching, but proper human surveillance. Everywhere he went, everyone he met. If he was White, and he was the one who attacked Officer Larsen in Egleston Square on Saturday, then he’d want to try again soon. His bloodlust would be up, and Ebony and Ivory were killing in turn, so presumably Kwasi couldn’t kill again till Ivory had done so. Chess rules: one move each, strict rotation. They’d catch Ivory – Unzicker, perhaps – in the process of killing, and then try and use him as bait to lure Kwasi out.

  But they had to catch Unzicker first. And, of course, there was always the possibility that it wasn’t him at all. That he was the most likely suspect didn’t mean he was the only suspect. If Kwasi was playing some form of warped chess with people’s lives, his ego was such that he’d only consider an opponent whom he deemed worthy. And there were two other people Patrese could think of who fit that bill: Tartu and Nursultan.

  Tartu was now right here in New Haven, where the first two bodies had been found. Kieseritsky had put discreet surveillance on to him – he was staying at the same hotel as Patrese, which was either convenient or awkward, depending on your point of view – and so far he’d done nothing other than that what he claimed to be there for. If he wasn’t in the library, he was in the symphony hall. He’d been in New Haven all weekend, so he couldn’t have been the one who’d attacked Larsen. But he was still, if not an outright suspect, certainly a person of interest, if only for his refusal to help them. Were his reasons purely innocent, or more nefarious? Only time would tell.

  Nursultan was a trickier case, not least because he had diplomatic immunity. When in the US, he spent most of his time in New York, with odd trips up to Cambri
dge to visit Unzicker – including one this weekend, which put him in the frame as at least a possibility for the attack on Larsen. If Nursultan did turn out to be involved, they’d have to tread very carefully or risk an international incident. But they’d cross that bridge when they came to it, and in the meantime there was nothing to stop them keeping tabs on him.

  Unzicker, Tartu, Nursultan. Cambridge, New Haven, New York. Anderssen, Kieseritsky, Dufresne. Each individual surveillance operation would be the responsibility of the respective detective in charge. They’d all answer to Patrese, who’d oversee the whole thing, the entire tri-state operation.

  And though waiting for one of them to slip up was all well and good, Patrese wanted to be more proactive. He wanted to know how it felt to be playing such a game, wanted to know the pressures, the strategies, the tactics. Since Tartu had refused to help, what Patrese needed was someone who was an excellent chess player, who knew Kwasi well, and who had no reason to want to protect him.

  And if she looked like Inessa Baikal did, so much the better.

  37

  New Haven, CT

  Inessa was a postgraduate student at Harvard, which Patrese hadn’t appreciated until he rang her. While they talked, he flicked quickly through the list of those students seeking therapy. Her name wasn’t among them.

  Yes, she said, of course she’d help: not just because of the Kwasi connection, but because of the Harvard one too. She’d been wondering whether or not to volunteer her services anyway, but she’d been sure that the Bureau had been deluged with offers of help. Yes, he could come and see her at Harvard any time, but if he wanted to see her right now she could make it even easier for him. Right now, she wasn’t at Harvard at all.