White Death (25 page)

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 seconds 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.

‘Thomas,’ Patrese continued, ‘we think you attacked Sergeant O’Kelly, and that if you attacked him you probably killed him, or at least tried to kill him. Unless you can disprove that, you’re in a whole heap of trouble. If you really don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’ve got to tell me where you were instead. Wherever it was, whatever you were doing, it can’t be as bad as killing a police officer.’

‘Down by the river.’ Unzicker’s voice was so quiet that Patrese had to lean in still further to hear: too close, with the smell. He fought the urge to wince: didn’t want to put Unzicker off his stride, not now he was beginning to open up.

‘What were you doing down by the river?’

More silence.

‘Thomas? You have to tell me. “Down by the river” isn’t enough. What were you doing there?’

Unzicker started to cry again. Patrese waited him out.

‘Girls,’ Unzicker said at last.

‘What about them?’

‘Watching them.’

‘It’s dark. It’s November. It’s cold. How can you be watching girls by the river?’

‘Boathouse. Ladies’ rowing. Training. Gym. Lycra.’

Chase Evans, the Harvard cox: his body had been left by the Harvard boathouse, Patrese remembered. And Unzicker had been in trouble with the authorities before, more at Harvard than at MIT: all the Mr Question Mark stuff, making girls feel uncomfortable.

‘The MIT boathouse?’ Unzicker nodded. ‘That far from where we found you?’ Unzicker shook his head. ‘You there all this time?’ Unzicker shook his head again. ‘Then what? What else were you doing?’

‘Walking.’

‘Walking?’

‘Walking. And thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘Misha.’

‘You been in contact with Kwasi recently?’

Another wide-eyed stare.

‘Thomas, you gotta tell me. You been in contact with him?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. No. No no no no no no no no no.’

Lying, Patrese thought; but how to be sure? How to prove it? Unzicker was like Kwasi: you couldn’t apply normal standards of behavior to weirdoes. All those telltale tics cops are trained to look for, the body language that says someone’s lying, they’re useless with some people. He feared Unzicker might be one of those.

He was still debating how best to play the next move when the door opened. It was one of the Cambridge cops.

‘They found Sergeant O’Kelly’s body.’

Glenn O’Kelly – more precisely, the headless and one-legged body of Glenn O’Kelly, plus a Chariot tarot card – had been dumped in the Navy Yard, towards the northern end of the Freedom Trail and one of the city’s premier tourist spots. The yard was busy by day but pretty much deserted at night, save for the handful of sailors assigned to the yard’s centerpiece, the eighteenth-century USS
Constitution
. It was one of these sailors who had found the body and alerted the police. O’Kelly’s car was discovered nearby.

The Navy Yard is in Charlestown, on a peninsula slightly north of downtown Boston. Cambridge is a little to the west. None of the distances involved were vast. In the time frame involved, therefore, Unzicker could easily have left Cambridge, gone downtown, abducted O’Kelly, killed him, dumped his body in Charlestown and headed back to Cambridge.

Whether he had done just that, of course, was another matter entirely.

They took his fingerprints and a DNA swab from inside his cheek. They removed his clothes – not one of Patrese’s most
treasured career moments, given the state of Unzicker’s trou
sers – and bagged them as evidence, to be cross-referenced against anything found on O’Kelly’s body or in his car. Unzicker said he’d never even heard of O’Kelly, let alone met him: so if there
was
a match, the only conceivable possibility would be that Unzicker had killed him.

The police doctor examined Unzicker and took samples of anything that might provide a link the other way; that was, anything of O’Kelly’s on Unzicker rather than vice versa. Samples from under his nails, stray hairs, that kind of thing. Only when this was done was Unzicker allowed to clean himself up and put on some new clothes: someone had found an old airline tracksuit that made him look like something out of a children’s program. They assigned him a cell, and told him he wasn’t going anywhere till the morning at least, and maybe the rest of his life.

It was a little past midnight, and Patrese was about to clock off, when Nursultan arrived, lawyer in tow. The lawyer was tall, silvering at the temples, and altogether better turned out than anybody had a right to be at this hour. He handed Patrese his card:
GREGORY Y. LEVENFISH
. Office on Fifth Avenue. Upper East Side accent, Upper East Side attitude. Demanding this, threatening that. Patrese bit back irritation and fatigue, and said they’d done everything by the book, they hadn’t been obliged to wait for a lawyer when they had reason to believe there’d been a public safety issue, and so on and so forth.

Levenfish spouted more rules and regulations. Patrese assured him that the district attorney would deal with all these points if the case came to court. Yes, Levenfish could see his client. No, Nursultan could not accompany him. Nursultan’s turn to rant and rave. Patrese was unmoved. If you’re neither a licensed attorney nor a family member, you can’t see the suspect. End of.

Your career, Nursultan replied: end of. Patrese laughed. Anyone with any money made that kind of threat to law enforcement agents sooner or later, he said. It might work where you come from, but not in the United States. More bluster: Nursultan accusing him of blackening the good name of Tatarstan. Patrese offered him some coffee. Regulation police-issue coffee could drop an otherwise healthy man in two sips.

Levenfish came back, demanding his client’s immediate release. No, Patrese replied. They were entitled to keep Unzicker here for forty-eight hours, and only then would he have to make a decision: charge or release. They were going to use that entitlement, and nothing the lawyer or Nursultan could say, or do, or offer, would change that.

Nursultan took Patrese aside. Arm round the shoulder, voice lowered: Let’s talk man to man, sort this out like adults. ‘Franco – I call you Franco, yes? – Misha project is important, you know that. Unzicker, he’s innocent, I know that. You let him go, I put up bail money, I guarantee – make personal guarantee – he come back for question any time you like.’

Not a bribe, Patrese noted: nothing improper in the suggestion.

‘I’ll let him go only if I’m satisfied he couldn’t have killed Glenn O’Kelly.’

But Patrese was thinking. Unzicker was still their best link to Kwasi. His arrest was now public knowledge. If he really was nothing to do with any of this, but Kwasi had nonetheless gotten spooked, then they might have lost their best chance.

Unless Patrese could find a way to work it to their advantage.

Under federal law – this was a federal case – suspects can be held for forty-eight hours without charge. At the end of that time, they must either be charged or released. Some people think forty-eight hours is a long time, some don’t. Perhaps it depends on the angle you’re looking from. Forty-eight hours isn’t that much time to build a watertight case against a tricky suspect, but then again that’s the job of the district attorney, who’ll have several months before the case comes to trial. But forty-eight hours might feel like an eternity if you’re the suspect, isolated and scared in custody.