White Death (41 page)

New Haven. Getting closer.

The admin guy called up the IP and ID information. Ah, he said, this client was using proxy servers and concealment software to try and hide his IP addresses. But that doesn’t work with us, because ICC isn’t played through a web browser such as Explorer or Firefox. To play ICC, you need to download a piece of their own software – Dasher – which connects directly to their server.

So it was easy to bypass these attempts at subterfuge, and … here we are.

Both coming out of the same location.

Patrese already knew that. But where?

New Haven, the tech guy said. Can’t be any more specific than that without checking against the server records, and that’ll take some time.

How long? Patrese asked.

Could be hours.

Patrese thought fast.

Sicilian Dragon, Inlaid Organics. If you were a rich man who’d registered companies offshore, and you’d used those companies to hide your identity while you were on the run, what would you do with them? You wouldn’t just buy a special effects mask and a couple of subscriptions to an online chess site, would you?

You’d use them to set up an entire alternate life. Car, house …

‘I need to use your computer,’ Patrese said.

The admin guy stood up and gestured to his chair. Patrese nodded his thanks as he sat.

Patrese called up the Connecticut Land Records and Deeds website, and entered ‘Sicilian Dragon’ in the search box.

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.’

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.

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.

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 of 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.

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.