White Death (13 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And you think they’re a smokescreen? A way of avoiding playing Tartu?’

‘That’s what a lot of people think. But I’m not so sure.’

‘Oh?’

‘Kwasi doesn’t think like other people. You ask me, he’s making these demands because he feels they’re necessary. Sure, to everyone else in the world they appear extravagant, absurd, but maybe not to him. He sees everything as a zero- sum game: one person wins, one person loses. He never compromises. Ever. I know that first-hand.’

‘From when you dated him?’

‘Right. In a lot of ways, he’s still a child. He doesn’t get the way the world works. Maybe that’s even part of his charm, part of his appeal. He’s this, like, man-child. Look at today, that clip you were showing. He went to help. Most people wouldn’t have done that. But he did. He didn’t think of all the reasons why not; he just thought of something and did it, like a child. And the conditions he’s demanded for the title match: I haven’t seen them all, but the ones I
have
seen are mainly about playing conditions. That tells you he might not like playing chess too much any more.’

‘He doesn’t
like
playing chess? But he
lives
for chess, no?’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

The interviewer laughed. ‘Whoa. Now you’re losing me.’

‘This might sound bizarre, but saying Kwasi doesn’t like playing chess isn’t the same as saying he doesn’t like chess. Quite the opposite. As you say, he loves chess. But I think that what he loves is the, er, I don’t know quite how to put this … is the … holy perfection of chess itself, as a game, as an intellectual exercise. Tournament chess is a very different thing. Your opponent’s a couple of feet away, the clock’s ticking down, people are shuffling and coughing …’

‘And more, in those time-scramble tie-breaks. They’re practically shouting then.’

‘Exactly. Everywhere he’s been since becoming world champion, Kwasi’s been photographed, filmed, followed, interviewed. He’s got a level of fame which I think he’s totally unsuited to, temperamentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if his true happiness – perhaps his only true happiness – is on his own, late at night, playing endless variations against … well, against himself. Against chess itself. Against God, maybe.’

‘Against God?’

‘There are more possible positions in chess than there are atoms in the universe.’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Not at all. That makes the game pretty much insoluble. It’s not checkers: there’s no perfect line. So man can struggle all he likes to penetrate chess’ inner secrets, but he’ll never get all the way there. Kwasi, though – he wants to get further than anyone.’

‘If you were a betting person, Miss Baikal, would you put money on Kwasi being at that table next week, when the match starts?’

‘No. No, I would not.’

Universities across the United States make demi-gods out of those who represent them at sports. Nowhere is this more true than in the Ivy League; nowhere in the Ivy League is this more true than at Harvard; and nowhere at Harvard is this more true than on the river.

Year on year, the Harvard men’s eight is one of the fastest crews in the country. The competition within the squad just to make the boat is so intense that sometimes the racing itself comes as a relief: it’s easier to beat another college than rise to the top of your own. The guys who
do
make it, therefore, are the kind of alpha males who end up earning millions on Wall Street or in the law: tall, muscular men with the confidence of those who believe that the sun in the sky has no purpose other than to shine directly on to them. They race each other up and down every step in the Harvard stadium. They drive themselves to collapse and beyond on the rowing machines. They argue and fight and never, ever admit that someone else might be better than them.

They’re not the kind of guys, therefore, who take kindly to their cox not showing up for an outing.

No cox means the boat can’t go out: eights are too big, heavy and fast to be left unsteered. No outing on the water means another session in the gym, which the rowers hate. Another session in the gym means the cox – half the size of everyone else in the boat to start with – runs the serious risk of having seven shades of shit kicked out of him when his oarsmen finally run him to ground.

Chase Evans was cox of the Harvard men’s eight, the one that had beaten Yale – again – in their annual match a few months ago, and he hadn’t showed up for training on the first Sunday in November. They’d called his cellphone: no answer. His voicemail had asked them to leave a message, and they’d done so. Several messages, in fact, each more abusive than the previous one. None of the messages had exhibited the slightest trace of concern, even though this no-show was totally out of character for Chase.

Chase was old-school Harvard. His father had been there, and his grandfather too, and probably a couple more generations of the dynasty fading back into the mists of sepia-photographed time. Chase loved the traditions and the ethos. If you’d pricked him, he’d probably have bled Harvard crimson rather than the plain red everyone else does. He was reliable, organized, solid. His crew trusted him absolutely. On the water, they just rowed: he did everything else, juggling steering, tactics, coaching and motivation with a deft calmness. Crews love coxes like that.

But still, there was no concern in their messages. The Harvard men’s eight don’t show concern. Concern is weakness. Weakness is for losers.

No one saw Chase all Sunday, either. Those oarsmen who gave it any thought in between half a dozen hectic stops on an average Harvard day might have figured that Chase was so embarrassed about missing the outing that he’d chosen to hide away rather than face them. He’d be there tomorrow morning, they were sure, and he’d stand on the concrete hard in front of the Newell boathouse, the most famous boathouse on all the Charles, and apologize with the same kind of concise elegance that he used to gee his crews up for one more push when it was fifty strokes to the line and they were dying.

Chase Evans was indeed at the boathouse on Monday morning. In fact, he was on the concrete hard itself. But he wasn’t going to be saying anything. Not without his head.

Patrese had spent more of his weekend than he would have liked dealing with the president of Columbia University, who had told him repeatedly that (a) Columbia would do anything they could to help find Dennis Barbero’s killer, (b) Columbia couldn’t allow this tragedy to affect their ongoing search for academic excellence – ‘academic excellence’, Patrese had thought, in this case being used under its lesser-known meaning of ‘snow-white public image and high levels of endowments’.

If that was Columbia’s attitude, Patrese thought, he could hardly wait to see what Harvard would say about this one. They’d probably demand a cover-up somewhere between the levels of Watergate and Roswell.

The detective on scene at the Newell boathouse was tall enough to carry his weight well, and his eyes were as gray and cold as the river. ‘Max Anderssen,’ he said. Patrese resisted the temptation to wince as they shook hands: the man had a grip like a mangle. Patrese glanced down at Chase’s body, looking for the tarot card he knew would be there. Another knight: the Knight of Pentacles, this time.

‘The crew found him when they arrived here at six,’ Anderssen said. The bane of rowers’ lives, Patrese thought: dawn starts to fit training around lectures and make use of the river before it got too busy. Anderssen nodded toward sprayed piles of vomit. ‘Bit of a shock for some of them, as you can see. The guys who barfed, they’re now the ones yelling loudest about how they want to find the guy who did this and rip
his
head off.’ He gave a little smile, acknowledgement of testosterone’s predictable pathways.

‘Media?’

‘Not yet, but that’s only because this ain’t a homicide town, so they’re not clued up to the police department the way they are in big cities.’

‘But when they
do
find out, it’ll be huge.’ Homicide in a safe town was always news: many times more so when it was part of a series, and many times more so again when it took place at perhaps the most famous university in the world.

‘It sure will. This is our first in a couple of years.’

Patrese was surprised. ‘You haven’t had a single homicide in two years?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I should move here.’

‘You’d be out of a job.’

‘I know. Sometimes I feel that wouldn’t be a bad thing.’

‘Longest clean run in fifty years. But even in normal times, we only ever get one or two a year. I’ve been here more than a decade: most I’ve ever had was five.’ That was impressive, Patrese thought. Cambridge had 100,000 residents, give or take: cities of that size averaged about ten murders per annum. ‘The usual stuff,’ Anderssen continued. ‘Husbands and wives, vagrants intoxicated on God knows what, young street punks too quick to pull a knife or a gun.’ He looked around him: at the yellow tape cordoning off the scene, at the river police boat blocking this section of the Charles. ‘Not this.’

‘Not this kind of killing, or not Harvard?’

‘Not this kind of killing. I’ve had Harvard before: my very first case, actually.’

Patrese thought for a second. ‘The roommates?’

‘You got a good memory.’

‘Remember reading about it. Big news at the time.’

‘Just that.’ Anderssen gave Patrese a précis of the case. It had involved two female students, both from overseas. Sinedu Tadesse had come to Harvard from Ethiopia, Trang Ho from Vietnam. They’d roomed together and gotten close: fellow students in their hall of residence had said they were inseparable, always going places in tandem. Co-dependent, some had even sniped. But it hadn’t been co-dependent, not really. It hadn’t been a relationship of equals.

Tadesse, struggling academically and with mental problems – she’d written to strangers picked from the phone book, describing her unhappiness and pleading with them to be her friend – had clung obsessively to Ho. Ho, more popular and balanced, had found the friendship increasingly suffocating.

At the end of their third year, Ho had told Tadesse she didn’t want to room with her anymore: she was going to room with someone different for their senior year. Tadesse had brooded, planned, made oblique hints to fellow students about her intentions, and finally stabbed Ho forty-five times with a hunting knife before hanging herself.

The fallout had been long and complex. Ho’s family had filed suit for wrongful death, emotional distress and negligence against Harvard, alleging that the university had had plenty of evidence of Tadesse’s mental state and fixation on violent vengeance, and could have prevented Ho’s death had they acted sooner. Harvard had set up a scholarship in Ho’s name, but not before a long debate over whether it should be in both girls’ names, as though this had been some lovers’ mutual suicide pact. And several other students had come forward to say how inadequate they had found Harvard’s mental health policies.

That might be the heart of it, Patrese thought. What it took to succeed here didn’t necessarily help build a healthy psyche. Attending Harvard wasn’t simply a matter of going to college: it was a sign that you’d been chosen, it was a talisman to put on your résumé. It was a guarantee that you could do pretty much what you wanted to in life, be it something interesting, something lucrative, or both.

Four victims now. One at Harvard, one at Columbia, the other two found near Yale. Patrese thought of Sinedu Tadesse, and wondered how many students there were at Ivy League colleges who harbored mental problems: how many with violent fantasies that might play out in the way he was looking at right now.

Oh, the universities themselves wouldn’t want to give out that kind of information, that was for sure. They’d cite patient confidentiality, which in this case meant the same as the Columbia president’s ‘academic excellence’. There were eight universities in the Ivy League – Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth. They’d spent many years building up their collective reputation. They weren’t about to roll over and let their names be trashed.

Patrese didn’t care.

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.