White Death (2 page)

The crime scene came with the sound-and-light show that all major incidents did: rotating blues and reds on top of patrol cars, men and women in sterile suits and shoe covers talking urgently to each other or into handsets, striped tape flapping in the breeze, and a crowd of onlookers both thrilled and appalled to be part of all this. A uniformed officer was subtly videoing the crowd: some killers like to hang around the crime scene.

Patrese parked up on a side street, opened his door, checked to see no one was looking, shoved a couple of fingers down his throat, and parked what was left of the contents of his stomach into the gutter. He hadn’t vomited at a crime scene for many years, but the way he was feeling right now, he couldn’t guarantee continuing that streak. It would do his image and authority no good if, the moment he saw the corpses, he started yakking his guts up like a teenager who’d had too much Coors. Hence the precautions: get it all out now.

When he was sure his stomach was well and truly empty, he popped some gum in his mouth, got out of the car and strode towards the Green. The Green was the kind of space which would have made the Founding Fathers purr: a large expanse of grass criss-crossed with paths and surrounded – protected – on all sides by buildings which reeked of civic pride. A neoclassical courthouse with columns out front; red-brick office blocks designed in Georgian Revival; and what looked like an enormous Gothic castle gatehouse.

A uniform checked Patrese’s badge and lifted the tape for him to duck under.

‘Detective Kieseritsky’s over there, sir.’ The uniform pointed to a small lady in a charcoal trouser suit. Patrese nodded his thanks and walked towards her.

‘You must be Agent Patrese,’ said Kieseritsky when he was still ten yards from her.

She was mid-thirties, all lines and angles: hair parted at the side and cut short at the back, cheekbones tilting above a pointed chin, arms forming triangles as she splayed her hands on her hips. If there was any warmth in her voice or bearing, Patrese couldn’t detect it: then again, he wouldn’t have been full of the milk of human kindness either if he’d spent the first part of his Sunday at a double homicide.

‘Looked you up while you were on your way,’ she added. ‘You ready?’

‘Sure.’

‘Any preference?’

‘Preference?’

‘Which one you want to see first.’

‘Whichever’s nearer.’

‘John, then.’

‘John?’

‘John Doe. That’s what they still are. John Doe and Jane Doe.’

There were three churches on the east side of the Green, arranged in a neat line: one at the north end, one at the south, and the third smack in between. Kieseritsky headed toward the middle one. Patrese fell into step alongside her.

He gestured all round them. ‘Big place,’ he said, and instantly cursed himself for being so facile.

Kieseritsky shot him a look which suggested she was thinking exactly the same thing, but her tone was polite. ‘Sure is. Designed by the Puritans to hold all those who’d be spared in the Second Coming.’

Patrese tried to remember the Book of Revelation. ‘A hundred forty-four thousand?’

‘You a religious man, Agent Patrese?’

‘Used to be. Not anymore.’

‘Then we’re gonna get along just fine.’

She led the way through a line of trees, and now Patrese could see the headless corpse on the church steps. The man was lying naked on his back, though curiously the pose didn’t look especially undignified, at least to Patrese’s eyes. Perhaps, he thought, it was because the cadaver hardly looked human anymore, not without its head.

‘Snappers have all been and gone,’ Kieseritsky said.

Patrese nodded. She was telling him that the crime scene had already been photographed from every conceivable angle and distance, so he could – within reason – poke around to his heart’s content.

Crisp fall morning or not, dead bodies stink. Patrese gagged slightly when the stench first reached him, but not so obviously that anyone would notice. Just as well he’d gone for the gutter option a few minutes before, he thought.

He crouched down beside the corpse.

No head, no right arm, and the skin gone in a large circle from sternum to waist. Hard to tell too much from any of that about whoever this poor soul had once been, but from the crinkly sagging of fat around the man’s waist, the faint wrinkles on his remaining hand and the gray hairs on the arm above it, Patrese guessed his age as mid-fifties.

No blood, either: no blood anywhere around the body, even though it had suffered two major amputations. John Doe had clearly been killed elsewhere and brought here.

Patrese peered closer at the points where the killer had performed those amputations. Clean cuts, both of them, even though taking off a head and arm involved slicing through tough layers of tissue, muscle, cartilage and bone. Must have used something very sharp, Patrese thought. Must have been skilled at using it, too. A surgeon? A butcher?

The man’s neck looked like an anatomy exhibit: hard white islands of trachea and esophagus surrounded by dark-red seas of jugulars and carotids. The stump of his shoulder was a sandwich in cross-relief: skin round the outside like bread, livid muscle and nerves the filling within. And where the skin on his chest had been was now a matrix of areolar tissue, thousands of tiny patches like spiders’ webs which Patrese could see individually up close but which blended into formless white from even a few feet away.

Patrese looked at the signet ring on the man’s pinkie. Kieseritsky had been right when she’d called it as the Benedictine medal: Patrese had grown up a good Catholic boy, and symbols such as these were now hardwired into his memory. There on the ring was Saint Benedict himself, cross in his right hand and rulebook in his left, and around the picture ran the words
Eius in obitu nostro praesentia muniamur.

‘May we be strengthened by his presence in the hour of our death,’ said Kieseritsky.

Patrese nodded, wondering whether John Doe had indeed felt the presence.

‘This isn’t a Benedictine church, though?’ he asked.

Kieseritsky shook her head. ‘United Church of Christ.’

‘And the other two?’

She shook her head again. ‘That one’ – pointing to the church at the north end of the green – ‘is also United Church. The other’s Episcopal.’

Patrese looked over the rest of the corpse. Indentations on the skin of both ankles: restraints, Patrese knew. That apart, nothing: no watch, no jewelry, no tattoos.

There
was
something next to John Doe’s hand. A playing card, by the look of it.

Kieseritsky handed Patrese a pair of tweezers. He picked the card up.

Not a playing card; well, not one of the standard fifty-two-card deck, at any rate.

The card pictured a man in red priestly robes sitting on a throne. On his head was a triple crown in gold, and in his left hand he carried a long staff topped with a triple cross. His right hand was making the sign of the blessing, with the index and middle fingers pointing up and the other two pointing down. At his feet were two crossed keys, and the back of two monks’ heads could be seen as they knelt before him.

Beneath the picture, in capital letters,
THE HIEROPHANT
.

Patrese knew exactly what it was. A tarot card.

There was a tarot card by the cadaver of Jane Doe, too. Hers was
THE EMPRESS
. The figure on this card was also sitting on a throne, though this one was in the middle of a wheat field with a waterfall nearby. She wore a robe patterned with what looked like pomegranates, and a crown of stars on her head. In her right hand she carried a scepter, and beneath her throne was a heart-shaped bolster marked with the symbol of Venus.

Like John Doe, Jane was also naked, and also missing her head, an arm (the left one, this time), and large patches of skin front and back.

The more Patrese looked, though, the more he saw that there were at least as many differences between the two corpses as there were similarities.

For a start, Jane was lying on the grass under a tree, a couple of hundred yards from the church where John had been left.

More pertinently, perhaps, she’d been killed where she lay.

Patrese saw the splatter marks of blood high and thick on the tree trunk: the carotid artery, he thought, spraying hard and fast as her neck was cut. The ground around and beneath her body squelched with all the blood which had run from the cut sites.

And whereas John had been killed with what looked like clinical precision – clean lines of severance at neck and
thigh, neat removal of the chest and back skin – Jane had been
attacked with a far greater, unfocused fury. The wound at her neck gaped open and jagged, as though the killer had sawn or twisted or yanked her head: possibly all three. Flaps of skin and muscle hung messily from the stump of her arm. The perimeters where the patches of skin had been taken were uneven and torn. No restraint marks on her remaining wrist or her ankles: the attacker must have set about her instantly.

Heads, arms, skin, all gone. Had the killer taken them with him, as proof of his skill and tools to help him relive the fantasy he’d just acted out?

‘Any thoughts?’ Kieseritsky asked.

‘Lots. Some of them might even be right.’ Patrese pushed himself to his feet. ‘John was killed elsewhere and brought here. Jane was killed here. Pretty risky, to decapitate someone in a public place. Lot of people round here at night?’

‘Up to midnight, sure. Most of ’em the kind of people who keep you and me in business, of course. Same for urban parks the country over. But we ain’t talkin’ murderers usually, let alone something like this. We’re talking pickpockets, drug dealers, muggers, those kind of guys. The guys who know the process system as well as I do, they come in and out of the station house so often.’

‘New Haven’s got a high murder rate, right?’

‘Where d’you hear that?’

‘Bureau report. I remember it ’cos after Katrina, when all the criminals had been shipped out of state during reconstruction, New Orleans dropped out of the top three for the first time in years. Big rejoicing in the Big Easy.’

‘Yeah, well. I seen that report too. We’re fourth highest in the US proportionate to population, it says. Only ones in front of us are Detroit, St Louis and some other hellhole, can’t remember where. But it’s bullshit, Agent Patrese.’

‘Yes?’

‘First off, our crime figures are
down
year-on-year, and that’s what matters to me, not how we rank against someplace else. Second, it all depends on where you draw the municipal boundaries. May I speak freely? New Haven ain’t no different to any other damn place in the States. The vast majority of crime is committed
by
poor black people,
on
poor black people,
in
areas full of poor black people. Don’t make it right, of course, but that’s the way it is. You must know that.’

Patrese nodded. He’d worked in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and it was the same in both those places. Kieseritsky continued:

‘But round here, downtown, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen.’ She gestured toward the Gothic gatehouse on the edge of the Green. ‘That’s the main entrance to Yale, you know. That’s the kind of place this is. Ivy League, old school, full of the kids who in twenty years’ time will be running the country.’

‘And screwing it up, same as generations before them have done.’

She raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘President Bush went to Yale.’

‘I rest my case.’

She laughed. ‘Anyway. Like I said, most law-abiding folks wouldn’t hang around on the Green late night, but those that do are only going to lose their wallets and cellphones. Not their lives.’

‘And the lowlife? They here all night?’

She shook her head. ‘Most of them have cleared out by two or three in the morning, even on weekends.’

‘And no one saw Jane Doe being killed, or John Doe being dumped?’

‘Not that we’ve found so far.’

A uniform hurried across the grass toward them, eyes bright with the importance of the news bearer.

‘We’ve got a match on Jane’s fingerprints, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Previous offense?’

‘Arrested in New York on the Iraq war demonstration, February 2003.’

Patrese remembered that day well: there’d been protests all over the world. He’d intended going, but he’d spent what had started as the night before and ended up as the whole weekend with a waitress he’d met on the Strip in Pittsburgh.

‘Regina King,’ the uniform continued.

He must have seen both Patrese’s and Kieseritsky’s eyes widen in surprise, because he nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. Sir.
That
Regina King. Kwasi King’s mom.’

Kwasi King was twenty-four years old, and he had been famous for exactly half his life. A month after his twelfth birthday, he became the youngest chess grandmaster in history. Before he reached fourteen, he won the US championship. Chess was pretty much a minority sport as far as the mainstream media were concerned, but one story was always guaranteed to get their attention – a child prodigy who might, just might, be the next Bobby Fischer.

Especially when that prodigy was a black kid raised by a single mom in America’s largest public housing project.

Regina King had been seventeen when she’d given birth to Kwasi. The name meant ‘born on a Sunday’, because he had been. If she knew who Kwasi’s father was, she never said so. She had no qualifications to speak of, but what she
did
have was a work ethic that was positively Stakhanovite and a tidal desire to give her son a better start than she’d had.

She took two jobs at once, sometimes three, just to keep them afloat; but the jobs were minimum wage and childcare cost money, so the only place she could afford was a small apartment high up in a Queensbridge tower block. Six thousand people lived in the Queensbridge complex, peering with hopeless longing across the water to Manhattan’s glass-and- steel canyons.