White Death

by Daniel Blake

  Your search has returned 1 result(s).

  He clicked again.

  1 result(s) found in New Haven County.

  Some registries charge you for each record you call up. Connecticut is free. No screwing around with credit cards and online verification. Patrese added the guys who’d built this website to his list of those whom he was going to buy a beer (current incumbents: the maintenance department of the Veritas Hotel).

  He clicked a third time.

  1 property registered to Sicilian Dragon. Five Mile Point Lighthouse, Lighthouse Point Park, 2 Lighthouse Road, New Haven, CT 06512.

  Five Mile Point Lighthouse.

  Patrese had to look twice, he was so shocked.

  Five Mile Point Lighthouse. That was where he ran: to the lighthouse and back.

  He remembered what Kwasi had written. I lived in a house shaped like a rook, with parapets and spiral staircases.

  A house shaped like a rook. A lighthouse. Patrese had run to it. He’d touched it. And Kwasi had been right there, under his nose, the whole time.

  Patrese had run to the lighthouse.

  He’d run there with Inessa.

  Jesus Christ.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Inessa. It went straight to voicemail. ‘Hi, it’s Inessa. Leave a message.’

  He hung up. There was a landline in the apartment they were using to try and lure Kwasi out. He rang that. One of the New Haven cops picked up.

  ‘It’s Patrese. He’s in the lighthouse.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Where’s Inessa?’

  ‘Gone for a run, sir.’

  ‘A run? You let her out there?’

  ‘There are two guys with her, sir. She’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘How long have they been gone?’

  ‘About a half-hour, a little more. Said they were going to the lighthouse and back.’

  New Haven, CT

  Inessa sprinted the last hundred yards to the lighthouse, ignoring the shouts of the Bureau men behind her. If they had enough breath left to shout, she reckoned, they had enough breath left to keep up with her.

  She reached the wall of the lighthouse and leaned against it, sweat running into her eyes as the burn spread up her legs. Damn, but that had felt good. She could just about cope with being holed up in that apartment if she was allowed to do this every day.

  The Bureau men arrived, sucking in great gulps of air.

  ‘Miss Baikal,’ one said, ‘please don’t do that again.’

  Adjusting her hairpin to keep the hair out of her face, she looked at them. ‘Sorry.’

  A man was jogging past in the other direction, muffled against the cold. Inessa noticed that the door of the lighthouse was ajar.

  The jogger’s gait was familiar, she thought: and she remembered exactly whose gait it was just as he stopped, pulled a gun from his hoodie, shot the two Bureau men before they could react, and dragged her inside the lighthouse.

  One of the Bureau men was dead. The other managed to call in and report what had happened. Within minutes, the park had been sealed off, and a bunch of police cruisers and ambulances were haring towards the scene. The fourteen-man New Haven SWAT team was deployed with orders to storm the lighthouse if need be.

  And where law enforcement goes, the media does surely follow. There were five helicopters in the sky above the lighthouse: one Bureau, one New Haven PD, and one for each of the main networks. Normal programming was interrupted to go live to the lighthouse where Kwasi King was holding his former girlfriend captive. It was a hostage situation, and the cops wanted to keep it that way. The more they could talk to him, the longer they could spin it out, the more chance they had of getting Inessa back safely.

  Unless, of course, she was dead already.

  Pittsburgh, PA

  Patrese’s driver got him back to the airport in double-quick time. He was running for the turboprop when his cellphone rang.

  ‘You, and no one else,’ Kwasi said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’ll talk to you and no one else. Tell those motherfuckers outside: if they so much as knock on my door, I’m going to cut her head off.’

  ‘I’m in Pittsburgh. I won’t be able to get to you for a couple of hours.’

  ‘I got all day. All night too, if need be.’

  ‘Listen, Kwasi: I’ll get there as soon as I can. But I might not be in contact the whole time between then and now, you get? I’m gonna be in the air.’

  ‘The moment you get here, you let me know. And like I say: it’s a damn circus outside. One false move from any of them, and it’s over. You get?’

  ‘I get.’

  Kieseritsky was officer in charge on scene, the designated commander. She’d been the detective who’d called Patrese the morning Regina King and Darrell Showalter had been found: it seemed sort of fitting that she was involved at the end.

  And it was the end, everyone knew that. One way or another, it was the end; but exactly how things would play out, that was something no one knew.

  Patrese spoke with Kieseritsky before he took off, and relayed what Kwasi had said. No negotiation, Patrese emphasized, not before I get there. Kieseritsky demurred. There are rules about this kind of thing, established and honed through years of hostage situations. Commander and negotiator are to be different people: the commander takes overall charge of the situation, the negotiator speaks directly to the perpetrator. Big picture, little picture. The negotiator stalls for time, saying he has to go higher up the chain of command to have decisions or concessions approved. These tactics work, and have been proved time and again to work.

  No, Patrese said. Stand all that on its head. Trust me. Kwasi said he’ll talk to no one but me, that means he’ll talk to no one but me. Sure, he understood Kieseritsky’s position: she couldn’t afford to be seen to be simply sitting on her hands for a couple of hours waiting for Patrese to arrive. If Kwasi was bluffing, and just went ahead and killed Inessa anyway during that time, Kieseritsky’s career would never recover. Better to do something and fail than do nothing and fail; better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t.

  But this wasn’t a normal hostage situation. There was only one hostage, so they couldn’t convince Kwasi to release some of his captives in return for food or concessions; and that meant they wouldn’t be able to get an idea of the layout inside the lighthouse from someone who’d just come out of there. Kwasi probably wouldn’t have any demands. And the conventional wisdom about trying to make the hostage-taker see his victims as human beings, which would in turn make him more reluctant to harm them: well, Kwasi already knew his victim perfectly well. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t see her as a human being: he didn’t see anyone as a human being.

  If Patrese was wrong, he said, he’d take the heat for it. Kieseritsky could have that in writing if she wanted: he’d send her an e-mail right now spelling it out. He asked her again: Please. You trusted me enough to get me involved in this case from the get-go. Trust me to finish it now.

  OK, she said. Against my better judgment, OK.

  A ride in the Bureau director’s private jet would have allowed Patrese to watch TV the whole way and keep abreast of the situation on the ground. His turboprop had no such luxuries. He peered out of the window as the Appalachians unfurled beneath, willing the little plane to go faster. In New Orleans, he’d taken down a serial killer obsessed with the Mayan storm god of Huracan, who’d given his name to the hurricane. Patrese wondered if Huracan did tailwinds too. He’d happily convert to Mayanism if it would blow the turboprop into New Haven a little quicker.

  Clarksburg, WV

  The FBI operates the largest biometric database in the world. It is called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), and it holds the fingerprints of more than a hundred million people – two-thirds of them criminals or terrorists, whether actual or suspected, and one-third civilians, mainly public sector workers, whose prints are taken in the course o
f their employment.

  IAFIS’ vast central processors run many thousands of searches every second, and are always finding matches between prints already stored and those found at crime scenes. Not just fresh crime scenes, either. If IAFIS is unable to match incoming prints with those in its files, it can be programmed to repeat the search at a given interval – a day, a week, a month, a year – to see if any new prints submitted since the last search match up.

  And so it was that, a month and a day after Darrell Showalter’s body had been found, IAFIS finally coughed up a match with the fingerprint found on his chest.

  New Haven, CT

  It’s only a couple of miles from New Haven airport to the lighthouse. Three minutes after touching down, Patrese was making his way through the police perimeter.

  If homicide scenes were a circus, hostage scenes were something out of Barnum & Bailey’s wildest dreams. There must have been a couple of hundred people on scene: cops crouching by car doors with their guns trained on the lighthouse, SWAT team members bulked out with Kevlar vests and big pockets, paramedics with stretchers and drips ready to go.

  He found Kieseritsky, standing alone and reading through a checklist.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Since you called, nothing.’ She gestured toward a row of TV reporters talking urgently to their respective cameras. ‘Not that they care. A hundred ways to make something out of nothing, and …’

  ‘… they get paid a whole lot more than we do.’

  ‘You’re damn right, Franco. So, tell me: you’re the negotiator now?’

  ‘If I’m the only one he’ll talk to, I guess we got no choice.’

  ‘You ever negotiated before?’

  ‘I haggled a carpet-seller in a Moroccan souk once. Paid a third of what he’d asked.’

  ‘And he still ripped you off, I bet. You want to swap jobs? I got a five-year-old. Once you’ve negotiated bedtime with a five-year-old, you can negotiate anything with anybody. Trust me.’

  Patrese pulled his cellphone out. ‘Let me talk to him. See what he wants.’

  He dialed. Kwasi picked up on the second ring. Well, what else was he going to be doing? Actually, Patrese thought, best not to answer that question.

  ‘It’s me,’ Patrese said. ‘I’m outside.’

  ‘Come on in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come in here.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘You’re not in here in two minutes, I kill her.’

  ‘Prove to me she’s still alive.’

  ‘Here.’ A brief pause, and then Inessa’s voice. ‘Franco?’ Kwasi’s voice again. ‘There’s your proof.’

  ‘That’s not proof.’

  ‘What the fuck is it, then?’

  ‘You could have recorded her voice. Let me ask her a question.’

  ‘Hey! You’re not the ones making the demands round here.’

  ‘Let me ask her a question. I need to know she’s alive.’

  ‘And when you’re satisfied, you’ll come in.’ No inflection at the end: not a question.

  Patrese looked at Kieseritsky. She was shaking her head. He shrugged. She mouthed something at him. He didn’t catch it, and furrowed his eyebrows. She mouthed it again: ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘Probably,’ he mouthed back, and then spoke into the phone. ‘Yes. When I’m satisfied, I’ll come in.’

  ‘OK.’ Another pause, and again Inessa’s voice. ‘Franco?’

  ‘Inessa, tell me this.’ He thought frantically of something suitably offbeat, to remove any doubt she was still alive; and he got it. He made a clicking sound to imitate applause and sung: ‘We are!’

  She got it instantly. ‘Penn State!’

  ‘OK, good. Let me talk to Kwasi again.’

  ‘Here already, man,’ Kwasi said. ‘In you come. And don’t be an asshole. I’m going to search you the moment you get in here. You got a piece, you wearing a wire, your narrow white ass is grass. You got that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Two minutes. Knock twice on the door.’

  He ended the call. Patrese looked at Kieseritsky.

  ‘What the fuck have you done?’ Kieseritsky said.

  ‘Kept her alive.’

  ‘What are you going to do when you get in there?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Two minutes is not a long time, not when you have to get rid of your weapons, make your way through a crowd of heavily armed men, and try to make a coherent plan with the on-site commander. Strategy and tactics, considered and discarded in seconds.

  Could the SWAT team take up position around the door as Patrese approached, and then storm the place the moment Kwasi opened the door? No: too big a risk. They didn’t know if he’d be holding Inessa, a gun to her temple perhaps, or have something wired up to kill her if he didn’t return in a given time to deactivate it. The latter was unlikely, sure, but unlikely wasn’t enough in these circumstances. The lighthouse had no windows, which meant the cops had been unable to get any kind of visual as to where or how Inessa was being held.

  They couldn’t therefore take chances. Hostage negotiation was all about time. In any hostage situation, there are two moments of maximum danger to the victim: at the start, at the moment of being snatched, and at the end, during a rescue attempt. The hallmarks of these moments are adrenalin, speed and confusion, three things a negotiator hates. The longer, the slower, the less emotional, the better.

  Could Patrese take in some kind of transmission device? Again, no. Kwasi would search him for one, he’d said as much. In any case, the lighthouse walls would be several feet thick. There was no way they could guarantee a line of transmission through that.

  To all intents and purposes, therefore, Patrese would be on his own once he was in there. He’d have to talk Kwasi into a position of compromise, and try and establish some lines of communication with the outside world.

  And if he couldn’t? Well, there’d be three people in there: and if things didn’t work out, at least one of them would be dead.

  This is how the situation will end, Anna Levin had told him. Card XVI. The Tower. The card Anna feared the most, the one that comes right after the Devil card, the bad omen, the one they leave out when they play tarot games in Europe. The Tower is bad. Chaos. Impact. Downfall. Failure. Ruin. Catastrophe. You want to know how bad it is? she’d asked. It’s the only card that’s better inverted. That way, you land on your feet.

  It was about fifty yards from Kieseritsky’s makeshift command post to the front door of the lighthouse, and it felt like the longest walk of Patrese’s life. The cops moved aside to let him past, giving him a wider berth than he felt was strictly necessary. Perhaps they were afraid that his madness was contagious. For those about to die, and all that.

  He knew there were TV cameras on him too, and through them half the nation would be watching: but he forced himself not to think about that. In fact, the only way to deal with the enormity, the bravery, the stupidity of what he was doing was to dissociate, to pretend it was happening to someone else. He didn’t have to try too hard: there were moments in that short, endless walk where he really did feel the old cliché, that he was outside his own body looking in. When he reached out to knock on the door, his arm seemed incredibly long: a hallucination; a bad trip.

  Kwasi’s voice came through the thick wood. ‘I’m going to open it just enough to let you in. I’m armed, of course. Just get inside. Don’t try anything dumb. You got?’

  ‘I got.’

  Patrese’s cellphone rang, sudden and loud enough to make him jump. He checked the screen. Unknown number: not Kwasi. He pressed the red button and let it go straight through to voicemail.

  There was a metallic clacking as Kwasi unlocked the door. A brief chink of light on the lintel, a foul smell that Patrese may have imagined. There was no one else within ten yards of him. He felt like Armstrong or Aldrin at Tranquility Base, about to cross over into an alien world from which they knew they
might never come back.

  He stepped inside.

  ‘This is a message for Agent Franco Patrese. My name is Wilson Pessoa, and I’m with the Criminal Justice Information Services division of the Bureau. The fingerprint on the cadaver of Darrell Showalter? We got a match for you, one of the prints that just came in the system the past couple of days. That print belongs to a lady named Inessa Baikal.’

  Kwasi slammed the door shut behind Patrese, locked it, threw him up against the wall and frisked him with quick hands, all over, balls and ass included: no cultural sensibilities or airport protocol here. When he was happy, he spun Patrese round and pushed him towards the stairs.

  ‘Up.’

  Patrese climbed. The stairs led past a kitchen – ‘Keep going’ – and into an open-plan living area, circular like the building. Inessa was sitting in front of a large table. Kwasi pushed Patrese down opposite her, pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and cuffed Patrese’s good wrist – the one that didn’t have a plaster cast on it, the one that Kwasi hadn’t broken – to one of the table legs.

  Inessa gestured slightly with her head toward the table, wanting him to see what was on it. He hadn’t really looked at it yet, as his first focus had been on her.

  There were a couple of dozen objects there, two or three feet tall. Patrese’s first thought was that they were candles or some sort of ornaments, but when he looked closer he saw their shape: tall, thin stems with something bulbous on top. The surface of the table itself was neither flat nor uniform: it alternated between dark and light squares, their texture slightly uneven.

  The squares were the patches of skin that Kwasi had taken from his victims; that was clear enough. It took Patrese a little longer to work out what the stems of the objects on the squares were: bones, he saw, so thick that they could only have been bones from the severed arms. And the bulbous things on top of the stems: well, they were so horrendous that Patrese had to clamp his teeth against the rising bile.

  Heads. Miniature, shrunken heads.