by Daniel Blake
Like most cops, Sergeant Glenn O’Kelly both loved and hated court appearances. Loved court appearances, because they were almost guaranteed sources of overtime. If you’d come off a 00:00–08:00 shift, or were scheduled for a 16:00–00:00 one, an appearance during normal court hours meant you had to do double time. Some of the more enterprising members of the department had been known to pull down six-figure salaries this way. Collars for dollars, they called it.
And hated court appearances, because a cop’s natural milieu was out on the streets, not in a witness stand with some smart-ass lawyer in a $3,000 suit trying to make him look stupid. O’Kelly had been a cop for long enough to know that the legal system had precious little to do with determining the innocence or guilt of those on trial. Every court case was a game in which the opposing sides tried to outsmart each other on technical points that made no real difference to the matter in hand.
If you were the defense attorney, part of that game was taking a man like O’Kelly – straightforward, decent, blunt – and making him look shifty and stupid by tripping him up on the kind of mistakes people made ten times a day. Nothing pissed off a cop more than a defendant who was guilty as sin but who walked anyway because he had a lawyer using more tricks than Penn and Teller. One day, O’Kelly always thought, one day a lawyer like that would have his house burgled or his wife raped by the kind of scum he’d just got acquitted, and you could guarantee that then he’d come running to the cops at top speed.
All this was going through O’Kelly’s head as he sipped his Guinness, because he’d spent the last couple hours testifying in a quadruple murder down in Mattapan, one of south Boston’s unlovelier areas. Lot of Haitians there. High crime rate. The do-gooding liberals would tell you the two weren’t connected, but O’Kelly knew what the crime rate was like back in Haiti itself, and … well, you do the math. That was O’Kelly. Blunt, told it like it was.
He and his fellow officers – five of them had been called to testify today – chewed the fat for a while, and they agreed that this case was as open and shut as any they’d ever come across. No way would the suspect get off. No way.
Buoyed by this – another bad guy off the streets for a long, long time – O’Kelly finished his beer and said he had to go. His wife was expecting their first child, and the in-laws were coming over for supper. Time to go play happy families. His colleagues sent him on his way with a couple of mother-in-law jokes. He’d heard them all before. Didn’t stop him laughing at them.
O’Kelly had parked in one of the multi-level parking lots on Beacon Street: as in most cities, parking space was at a premium. He went to the pay station, paid his ticket, and rang his wife as he headed for his car. Yes, he was on his way home. No, he hadn’t had too much to drink. He didn’t mind the nagging. It was white noise to him already, only a few years into their marriage. By the time they were senior citizens, he wouldn’t hear it at all. He blipped the fob to unlock his car, and told her he had to go: he was on his way.
A strange distortion, a darkening, in the window of his car door as he opened it. A figure behind him, arm raised and then coming hard down and round, something unyielding smacked on to his temple, and his final, surreal thought before it all went black was that he knew what his wife would say: Some people will do anything, ANYTHING, to get out of having dinner with the in-laws.
43
It was forty-five minutes or so before Ferris Bowe, one of the men who’d been drinking with Glenn O’Kelly in Ulysses, arrived at his own car in the same multi-level. He’d probably had a little too much to drink, truth be told: enough to be done for DUI, that was, though cops tended not to bust other cops unless they were several times over the limit. And Ferris Bowe certainly wasn’t that. He wasn’t drunk, merely feeling good.
Feeling good right up to the point he saw O’Kelly’s cellphone on the ground.
He knew it was O’Kelly’s not only because he’d parked his own car pretty much next to O’Kelly’s this morning, but also because the phone had a green and white clip-on plastic cover adorned with a giant shamrock, and only O’Kelly was daft enough to have put some shit like that on his phone. Bowe picked up the handset and scrolled through the menu till he found the list of most recent calls. O’Kelly was always calling his wife: her number was bound to be on it sooner rather than later.
HOME, it said. He clicked on it. A few seconds while the connection was made, and then a ringtone, slightly muffled: poor reception on account of being inside a large concrete building, probably.
She picked up. ‘I thought you said you were coming back right away.’ No ‘hello’, no preamble. Her voice was shrill. Hormones, Bowe thought, though his knowledge of pregnant women’s behavior was strictly theoretical.
‘Er … It’s not your husband, Mrs O’Kelly. It’s Ferris Bowe. I’m a colleague of his.’
‘Where the hell is he?’
‘I thought he was with you.’
‘No.’ Alarm behind the shrillness now.
‘Well, he left us, oh, almost an hour ago. Said he was going straight home. I found his cell in the parking lot. He must have dropped it.’
Cops don’t like to look foolish by over-reacting to something that turns out to be innocent: the Boston PD had been the butt of many jokes when they’d mistaken some battery-powered LED placards advertising a kids’ movie for improvised explosive devices. But still less do they like to do nothing in a situation that turns out to have been critical. Looking dumb is one thing. Having your ass handed to you by a disciplinary committee is worse. But screwing around when you could have saved someone’s life – especially the life of a fellow officer – well, that was the kind of thing that sent cops to the bottle and a lonely end with a hosepipe and an exhaust tube.
Bowe got on to his radio.
‘10-56, officer in trouble. Repeat 10-56, officer in trouble.’
The great machinery of law enforcement spluttered and coughed into life. Officers were sent to Sergeant O’Kelly’s home in Roslindale Village, to look after his wife and be there in case this was all a misunderstanding and O’Kelly turned up safe, sound and sheepish. The department’s Special Operations Unit, which comprises traffic cops, traced O’Kelly’s likely route home, seeing if they could find any clues en route: anyone who’d seen something unusual, perhaps.
There was no CCTV in the parking garage, no attendant who’d seen anything: the barriers were automated, and raised when a paid ticket was inserted into the slot. The only time an attendant came down was when there was a problem. A description of O’Kelly’s car was circulated: it seemed that whoever had abducted him had either driven it away himself or got O’Kelly to do it at gunpoint.
Boston PD alerted Cambridge PD: that was standard procedure while these killings were going on. Sure, the Cambridge dispatcher said, we’ve got the main suspect under constant surveillance. Don’t think he’s been anywhere near central Boston today, but we’ll check anyway and get back to you.
The dispatcher checked with the surveillance unit. No, they said, it’s not our shift. The Bureau boys are on now. That was their deal: alternating shifts between Cambridge PD and the FBI’s Boston field office, eight hours on and eight hours off. Neither body had enough manpower to do the job round the clock.
The dispatcher called the Bureau. No, they said, it’s not our shift. The Cambridge police department are on now. We’re taking over at midnight.
A classic, solid-gold bureaucratic snafu. Absolutely textbook.
A brave soul dared tell Anderssen what had happened, and ducked for cover when the inevitable explosion came. No one had been watching Unzicker since four o’clock this afternoon. It was now almost eight. He could have been anywhere.
Find him, Anderssen yelled. Fucking find him, now, or heads were going to roll.
In the circumstances, Anderssen could probably have rephrased this to advantage, but no one was going to tell him while he was in that mood.
Patrese hit the sirens and hauled ass up the interstate. He fel
t he could do this route blindfold by now, New Haven to Boston.
Two frantic search teams in neighboring cities: Boston cops looking for O’Kelly, Cambridge cops looking for Unzicker. A macabre race, trying to find one of them before he killed the other one.
Patrese’s phone rang incessantly as he drove. First, Boston PD, wanting permission to go public with the search. Yes, Patrese said instantly: saving O’Kelly’s life was the priority, everything else be damned.
Next was Dufresne. Nursultan’s private jet had left Newark this morning, having filed a flight plan for Dulles in Washington, DC. It had returned to Newark from Dulles about a half hour ago. Nursultan had been at a Central Asian investment conference in the capital: a call to the venue had confirmed his presence there all day. Nursultan could not have been responsible for O’Kelly’s disappearance.
After Dufresne came Kieseritsky. Tartu had spent the morning in the library, the afternoon in the symphony hall, and the evening at his hotel, where he was right now. That ruled him out too.
And finally Anderssen, also wanting permission to go public – but this time about the search for Unzicker. Trickier one, this. They’d spent the past few days doing everything they could not to spook Unzicker, and there was still the possibility that he might have nothing to do with this. It wasn’t Unzicker who’d called the surveillance off, was it? He might be sitting in his lab in that crazy Lego building doing some impossibly complex calculations on his Misha project, and be totally oblivious to all this.
But no. If they found Unzicker – when they found him – they were going to take him in anyway and question him, so he was going to get freaked soon enough. And someone who hadn’t seen O’Kelly might still have seen Unzicker. Yes, Patrese said to Anderssen as well: make it public. Let’s throw the kitchen sink at it.
They did just that. News bulletins at nine and ten, police roadblocks and information boards, and everywhere the unmistakable sounds common to pretty much every police investigation since the dawn of time: the fading footsteps of a bolting horse, and the loud slamming of a stable door.
44
Unzicker lived with around four hundred other graduate students in the Tang Residence Hall, a twenty-four-story tower block hard up against the Charles River. There were armed police at all entrances, waiting for him to return. Shortly after ten o’clock, he did exactly that.
Well, not exactly that. He was about fifty yards away when another grad student walked past him, did a double-take, checked his stride and said: ‘Hey, man, it’s me, Marcus. You know the cops are looking for you?’
Unzicker looked blankly at him.
‘Jesus, freak: say something.’ Marcus went on. ‘The cops are looking for you. Looks like the damn SWAT team set up shop in Tang.’
Unzicker peered towards the main door of the apartment block. Two cops in stab vests and cradling sub-machine guns. He turned and started to walk away again.
‘Listen, man,’ said Marcus, ‘if I wanted to live in a police state, I’d have moved to one. Now you go see what they want, and they can leave us all alone.’
Unzicker’s eyes were glassy, as though he was having trouble focusing. He quickened his step. Marcus turned back toward the Tang building and hollered. ‘Officers! Here! Got him!’
Now Unzicker was sprinting, and there were cops coming from everywhere: bursting from the Tang building as though spat out from the inside, sudden explosions of light and noise as cruisers appeared, tracking Unzicker in their headlamps. He ran one way, stopped, went another: vanishing into darkness for a second before the lights caught him again, as though in those brief moments he’d ceased to exist altogether. A raucous cacophony of sirens and shouts, telling him to get down on his knees with his hands up, and not even to think about going for his pockets, not for a second, else they’d blow him from here to kingdom come. Twenty officers, thirty, forty, all here, all round him, multiplying like cells, training guns and hatred and flashlights on him, a state’s crushing power over an individual. Unzicker’s eyes were so wide, they seemed to take up half his face. He looked like he might die of fright. Down, down, they kept shouting, down on your fucking knees.
Patrese raised a hand and stepped into the circle of light. Unzicker shielded his eyes with one hand, trying to see beyond the halogen glare. Patrese fancied he could hear trigger fingers taking up that little bit more pressure. It made sense: they thought he was a killer, and he had one of their own, either alive or dead. But Patrese knew that sudden movements screwed up situations like this no end. He’d been both sides of that coin, and they both sucked. They had Unzicker where they wanted. One itchy cop trying to be a hero, and they’d lose their main contact with Kwasi.
‘I’ve got this,’ Patrese said, loud enough to be heard but in a tone that he hoped was calm enough to suggest reassurance. ‘Thomas, we need to ask you some questions. Do you understand that?’
No answer. Unzicker didn’t speak, Patrese remembered, not normally, and certainly not in situations like this.
‘Nod if you understand,’ Patrese said.
Unzicker was still for a few moments, and then he nodded.
‘OK,’ Patrese continued. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to come forward and cuff you. I don’t want to do that, but I have to. If you resist, these men will hurt you. Do as I tell you and we’ll sort all this out. Nod again if you understand.’
Unzicker nodded.
Patrese went closer, trying as before to get the balance right: fast enough to be purposeful, slow enough not to spook Unzicker into doing something dumb. Twenty yards became ten, ten became five, five became two; and all the time Patrese watched Unzicker’s hands and had his own, good, hand resting on the butt of his gun, because if Unzicker was shamming and wanted to take Patrese with him in some inglorious suicide-by-cop, Patrese would just about have time to feel stupid before he felt dead.
‘I’m going to go round behind you and cuff you,’ he said.
He went round to Unzicker’s back, squatted down alongside him and snapped on the cuffs, first one hand and then the other. Unzicker squealed in pain.
‘Too tight?’ Patrese asked. Unzicker nodded. ‘That’s ’cos I’m doing it one-handed. Your good buddy Kwasi busted my other wrist. You tell me where O’Kelly is, and I’ll loosen them.’
Unzicker looked blankly at him and said nothing.
‘You have the right to remain silent,’ Patrese said. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?’
Unzicker continued to look blankly at him, and continued to say nothing.
They took Unzicker to the Cambridge PD headquarters. Normally, they’d have let him sweat for a couple of hours before starting the interview, but time was very much of the essence here. Glenn O’Kelly was possibly, probably, almost certainly dead; but while there was still a chance, and while Unzicker might have the key to unlocking that chance, they had to try everything they could. They’d take their chances with the not-having-an-attorney-present part: when law enforcement has good reason to believe that a suspect’s information might be time-sensitive, other considerations take second place, and the courts usually recognize this.
Good cop, bad cop is a cliché, and like most clichés, it’s one because it’s true and it works. Anderssen was larger, older, more irascible than Patrese. He’d be bad cop.
He went in guns blazing: face up close to Unzicker, letting him smell the coffee and fast food on his breath, shouting at him that there was a special place in hell for cop killers, they knew all about Unzicker’s mental history, they were going to bang him up for the rest of eternity unless he told them right now where O’Kelly was, dead or alive, and if he did they might consider leniency, but that offer was one-time, right now, and if he didn’t take it in the next ten second
s so help him God.
There was a loud squelching sound and a sudden farmyard smell. Anderssen recoiled in disgust. ‘You dirty fucker. You dare shit yourself in my station? Jesus Christ. Last time I pooped my pants, I was three years old. You’re a grown man. The fuck is wrong with you? Lemme tell you this: you can sit in that pile of shit till you fucking tell me what I want to hear.’
He took a step back, and another. Patrese saw the stain on Unzicker’s trousers. Unzicker was sobbing silently, shaking in huge, mute convulsions. The man who’d killed Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans had been ruthless and methodical. He wasn’t the kind of guy who shat himself in an interview room the moment a cop yelled at him.
Then Patrese remembered how wrong he’d been about Kwasi. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
He leaned in as close as he could, stifling the gag reflex at the back of his throat. ‘Tell us where he is,’ he said quietly. ‘Tell us where he is, and we’ll get you cleaned up.’
Unzicker stared at him. You have the right to remain silent, Patrese thought.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Unzicker said suddenly.
‘Glenn O’Kelly. Cop who went missing in Boston tonight. Been all over the news.’
‘Haven’t seen the news.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘Out.’
‘Out doing what?’
Long pause. ‘Can’t tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just can’t.’
‘Something to do with Misha?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
Silence. Anderssen spat out a curse. Patrese made a damping motion with one hand behind his back, so Unzicker couldn’t see: leave this to me.
