White Death (39 page)

Patrese mobilized as many Bureau agents and cops as could be spared in New York and Boston, and set them to work. Dismembered bodies, that was what they were looking for. Perhaps only certain parts of them had been found, as Patrese couldn’t believe Kwasi would have made it too obvious by sticking so adamantly to the headless, legless and skin-patched template that had marked the eight victims they’d found so far. If he had done so, they’d have been on to him long before. No tarot cards either, presumably. Perhaps he’d had a different signature for the pawns than the pieces.

The answers started coming back within a few hours. MEs in both cities were routinely presented with body parts that they had no way of identifying. A leg here, a torso there, a couple of arms here, like some gruesomely warped shopping list. Many of these parts’ owners had been dead so long that they’d severely decomposed, making identification all the harder. Leave a torso in water for a few days, and when you take it out the skin will peel off like a glove.

Could Kwasi have killed eight black homeless men in New York and eight white homeless men in Boston? Sure he could. Hell, he could have killed eighty in each. These crimes aren’t routinely logged in crime databases. They should be, of course, but they’re not; because the vast majority of ME departments haven’t got the time, money or staff to go round trying to identify body parts that have literally no clue as to their origin.

One of the Boston MEs rang Patrese personally to impress on him the sheer scale of what they were dealing with. Have a guess how many sets of unidentified human remains are sitting in evidence rooms across the nation, he said.

No idea, Patrese replied.

Have a guess; go on.

I don’t know: ten thousand?

Higher.

Twenty thousand?

Higher still.

Patrese, doubling like the inventor of chess with his demands for grain: Forty thousand?

Spot on. Forty thousand sets of remains, all unidentified. And of those forty thousand, about one in seven ever make it on to a database. The rest are sent to a mass grave and covered in quicklime. What else is there to do?

What else indeed? Patrese thought.

Mom knew, of course. She knew all about the flotsam and jetsam. We used to joke about it: flotsam in New York, jetsam in Boston. I remember the first time it happened. I was down in Washington Square Park, where I used to hang out as a kid. There was this homeless guy there, Victor, one of the hustlers. Just him and me, playing late night, no one else around.

He was a good guy, least I thought he was. I’d known him since I was a kid. He didn’t treat me no different from no one else, and that was rare, you know, especially after I became champion. Victor would trash-talk you and whale on your ass just the same, didn’t matter whether you were some other hobo or the damn president himself.

Anyhows, we’re playing speed chess, and your blood’s up, you know? Slamming those pieces down, slamming the clock back and forth. Victor knows all the tricks, but he’s no match for me. I beat him every time out. He’s swigging from this bottle in a paper bag, and gradually he starts to get real aggressive. Trash-talk becomes nasty, personal. He starts telling me how my mom’s a ho and all that. No one says that kind of stuff to me. I tell Victor to cool it. He keeps on going. I stand up and tell him that’s it, he better shut the fuck up if he knows what’s good for him. He stands up too, and starts yelling ’bout how I done gone changed since I became champion and stuff, all these airs and graces I got now.

Shit, Victor, I say, I’m still here playing with you, just the two of us, just like we used to do back in the day. Victor’s having none of it. Maybe he’s high as well as drunk, I don’t know; but suddenly he takes his bottle out of the bag, smashes it on the table, and lunges at me with the jagged edge. I jump back and yell at him to cut it out. He lunges again. I knock the bottle from his hand and slam his head on the table once, hard, just to make it clear this shit stops here.

He stays like that, head on the table, for a few seconds.

I pull him up again to say OK, no hard feelings, but of course he’s dead, limp and heavy in my grasp, and there’s this smell of piss and shit like he’s soiled himself. A little hard to tell, given that Victor’s usual fragrance wasn’t exactly Alpine fresh to start with, but anyway. Motherfucker’s definitely dead. Now what?

No one saw us, ’cos it’s night and we’re alone. I could leave Victor here and let someone find him in the morning, but that doesn’t seem right: got to give the man some dignity, no? But equally, I can’t be found with him. You know what the media will do if they catch ahold of this? So I pull my hood up so nobody recognizes me, sling his arm over my shoulder so he’s draped across me, and start to walk with him, his feet dragging. My pick-up’s a block away. Long as we don’t come across a cop, we should be OK. Anyone who sees us will just think he’s dead drunk and I’m carrying him home.

Dead drunk. Funny.

We get to the pick-up, no major alarms. Can’t sling him in the back, in the loading bay: it’s got a cover which I’d have to open, and in any case it’s too obvious if someone sees us. So I shove him into the passenger seat, climb in myself and start driving. Can’t take him back to Bleecker Street, as there’s a doorman and stuff there. But I know where I can take him. The place I end up taking them all. The place you don’t know about.

And on the way, I talk to Victor. Sounds a little sentimental, maybe, but I honestly think he was my only friend, Mom apart. Like I said, he was always the same to you, no matter who you were. Ornery bastard, sure. Call him an equal opportunities asshole. But he wasn’t a phony and he wasn’t a hypocrite.

I start telling him all this stuff I’ve never told anyone before. About how my daddy had tried to come back into my life when I started getting famous, when I was a teenager. I didn’t want nothing to do with him. Mom had always said he’d walked out on us before I was even born, and I didn’t want nothing to do with anyone like that. We were a unit, Mom and me. We didn’t need no one else.

But he kept coming round, all full of how he’d seen me in the paper and on the TV and stuff, and I could tell that Mom was starting to kinda like the idea he might be around more often, ’cos he sure could be charming when he wanted to. I always remembered that about you, she said to him one night: you could charm the birds off the trees. Must have forgotten ’bout how feckless he was, too.

When he’d gone, I told her just that. We’d done fine without him all this time; why the hell would we need him now? You jealous? she asks. Jealous that you might not have my undivided attention for once? That ain’t nothing to do with it, I say, but of course it is. And she knows it as well as I do.

Listen, she says. Women got needs, just like men do. And I ain’t been with no man in a while. So when your daddy – and remember, I did love him once upon a time – when your daddy comes back and is acting all sweet and stuff, it makes a woman feel good, you know? Hell, you’re just a boy, you don’t know too much about these things, but trust me on this one.

No way, I say. No way. That man’s coming back in here over my dead body.

And then she smiles this weird little smile, like I’ve passed some kind of test or something, and says in this very soft, very calm voice that no other woman will ever love me like she does, and she knows no other man will ever love her like I do.

I tell Victor all this. When I get to the place, I take him out of the pick-up and upstairs – it’s the small hours and the place is deserted, so I ain’t worried about anyone seeing me – and then I talk to him some more. I know I can’t keep him here forever like this, but it’s a funny sort of thing we have going here, me just talking and him just listening, and soon I start thinking that I’d like to keep something to remember this by, this good old chat we’ve just had, something to immortalize Victor by so his death isn’t totally in vain.

And a few days later, I’m in Cambridge with Unzicker, studying a position for Misha to work on, when suddenly I feel this amazing rush, and it takes me a moment or two to work out what it is.

The power I felt when I smashed his head on the table – hell, I’d never felt anything like it. Sure, I was upset just after, but that was shock, and also a bit of human conditioning, I guess. You’re told that violence is bad and killing is worse. You’re supposed to be revolted by it, not exult in it. But you do: it’s savage, it’s primal.

And I realized something else, too. When you first kill, in fact, you kill two people; not just the victim, but yourself too. Your old self is gone, and in its place is a new persona. I’m no longer part of humanity, not really. I’m one of the bad guys, the others.

And I want to do it again.

People have noticed Victor’s gone, sure, but they all think he’s just drying out for the millionth time or something. Truth is, people like Victor don’t have lives the way most people have lives. You get beyond fifty on the streets, you’re doing good. So if I want to kill again, I have to find another homeless person. But the way I’ve chosen to give Victor a tribute, I need a white guy now. I tell Unzicker I’ve had enough and I’ll see him tomorrow, and then I drive around for a bit till I find some dude under a bridge, and I know he doesn’t recognize me because he probably wouldn’t recognize himself in a mirror, and I break his neck there and then, and just as before I pile him into the pick-up and take him back to the place, and we talk the whole way, like old friends.

I told Mom round about the third or the fourth one. Actually, I didn’t tell her: she came in and saw one of the skin patches hanging there, and the shrunken heads, and she freaked, but I caught her before she could run out the door and I told her listen, listen, I need this, this is what keeps me sane, the feeling of power I get, I can’t operate without it, and I know what she’s thinking, that she can’t do anything that might make me play even a little bit worse, she can’t endanger the golden calf in any way whatsoever. She’s tied herself to me so completely that she can’t jeopardize even the slightest part of it, as anything that threatens me threatens her too.

So she tolerates it. As long as it’s making me feel good, she tolerates it. But as the title match gets closer and closer, things start to go haywire. Ever since the blindfold simul fucked with my mind, I haven’t been right. People as pieces, pieces as people. The killings aren’t making it any better.

She starts to get worried, which just worries me in turn. She tells me not to be a jerk and just play the match. She doesn’t understand what’s in my head.

And the night of Hallowe’en, when I’m finished with the pawns and come back with the monk guy from Cambridge, the whole thing just snaps. I don’t want to play, I say. I don’t want to defend this damn title. You should have let me have therapy.

If you don’t play, she replies, if you fuck this all up, everything that we – we – have worked so hard for, I’ll never forgive you. I’ve done everything for you, and this is how you reward me? You don’t go through with it, I’ll tell the police what you’ve been doing.

You’d turn in your own son? I say.

You’d betray your own mother? she replies.

When they’d released Unzicker this time last week, Anderssen had said emphatically that they should stop hanging around, waiting for the other side to make mistakes: they should make them dance to the cops’ tune rather than vice versa. Now they knew the other side was only one man, Kwasi, that strategy seemed to be more rather than less imperative. They could just wait for Kwasi to choose his next victim; or they could try to influence who that victim would be, and catch him in the act.

Dufresne was first to offer himself. Next in line was a black New Yorker, he said, and he was that. Besides, Kwasi had already killed Anderssen, so wouldn’t he feel a certain symmetry by going for Dufresne too? What purer sign of his superiority than killing both detectives assigned to his respective cases?

Dufresne could call a press conference and really go to town on Kwasi, calling him a sexual inadequate, emotionally stunted, a weak person, all the things that would rile Kwasi and make him lose his cool. Easy to arrange for Dufresne to let it slip that he’d be in a given place at a given time, and try to tempt Kwasi to come after him there: offer himself as bait, as it were. There’d be protection, of course, but invisible to anyone who didn’t know – until it was too late.

Patrese was tempted. They batted the idea back and forth for a bit, but as they did so, Patrese found himself increasingly uneasy with it all. Not through fear for Dufresne’s safety – Dufresne was a professional, he knew what he was doing – but because he didn’t believe Kwasi would fall for it. It was too obvious a tactic, too one-dimensional. It was exactly the kind of thing Kwasi would be expecting, and it would reinforce all his sneering arrogance about the police being dimwits who couldn’t think outside the box if their careers depended on it.

But Patrese still liked the central idea behind it: take the battle to Kwasi, make him play on their turf rather than them on his. It was just that Dufresne was the wrong guy for the job. He had no emotional connection with Kwasi. Kwasi had only killed Anderssen through opportunism, and therefore he wouldn’t go out of his way to pull off a pre-meditated hit on Dufresne. If Kwasi was trying to get to anyone in this whole case, it was Patrese himself: Kwasi had sent his messages only to Patrese, not to anyone else. No: Dufresne definitely wasn’t the right choice. But if they could find a better candidate – someone more plausible to Kwasi, someone who had some kind of hold over him – then they’d be in business.

The answer came to both Patrese and Dufresne pretty much simultaneously.

‘No way,’ Inessa said. ‘No freaking way.’