White Death (7 page)

‘Look!’ Kwasi shouted suddenly. ‘Look!’

Two armies of chess pieces were coming past, one black and one white: adults as pieces, children as pawns. They threw candy to the crowd and posed happily for photos. Kwasi was rapt.

Patrese thought back to his childhood, when he and his buddies had daubed their faces with chalk, put on some of their moms’ lipstick and rung a few doorbells.

‘You ever go trick-or-treating as a kid, Kwasi?’

Kwasi watched the chess pieces disappear into the distance before answering.

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘Why not?’

Kwasi shrugged. ‘Just seemed silly.’

‘What about your friends? They must have asked you to go with them.’

‘You have a happy childhood, officer?’

‘Franco. Please, call me Franco.’

‘You have a happy childhood, Franco?’

Patrese thought for a second. ‘Most of the time.’

‘Good for you. Me? Never had one.’

‘Never had a happy one?’

‘Never had one, period. I’m the youngest world champion in history. I had to fight every day for it. I became a soldier too early. That’s the price. I had no childhood.’

For the second morning in succession, Patrese was woken in a hotel room by a phone call. This time, however, he didn’t have a hangover, and he knew who was calling:
KIESERITSKY
flashed up on his cellphone’s display screen.

It was half past six. She wouldn’t be calling to ask how he’d slept. He picked up.

‘Hey, Lauren. You found John Doe?’

‘Damn straight. Darrell Showalter. A monk who teaches school in Cambridge.’

‘As in Cambridge, Massachusetts?’

‘As in Cambridge, England.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really. Yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts.’

‘You sure it’s him?’

‘Pathologist found a small birthmark on the ankle: could have been livor mortis until you knew better.’ After death, with no heart to pump it round the body, blood settles toward the parts of the corpse nearer the ground, causing a purplish-red discoloration of the skin. ‘One of the other teachers came up in the middle of the night to give us an ID. You want to go and talk to the school, they’re waiting for you.’

Monday-morning traffic on the eastern seaboard meant it took Patrese four hours to get to Cambridge, and he knew it could have been worse than that.

He’d finally taken his leave of Kwasi at around ten the previous evening, and had found a hotel off Washington Square that had charged him – which was to say, had charged the Bureau – a couple of hundred bucks for a bed less comfortable than a landmine, a shower smaller than Gary Coleman, and Art Deco furniture less tasteful than Trump Tower. By that stage, however, Patrese had been beyond caring.

He’d spoken to Donner again en route to Cambridge and told him what was going on. Well, Donner had sighed, it’s not like we haven’t got enough to do here. True, Patrese had replied, but we
are
a federal organization, and these folks want me to help them out. OK, Donner had said at last. There was a Bureau field office in New Haven itself: he’d get them to give Patrese any help he needed.

Darrell Showalter, the corpse formerly known as John Doe, had taught at the Cambridge Abbey School, a few blocks up from Harvard Square. Patrese instantly clocked the school as the kind of place that turned out muscular Christians: young men who half a century ago would have traveled the world bringing gospel and gridiron to the natives. Organ music swelled from inside a chapel; students hurried through cloisters.

The principal introduced himself as Michael Furman and offered Patrese a seat, some coffee, a photograph of Showalter, and thanks for coming.

‘The school’s in shock, as you can imagine,’ Furman said. ‘Terrible business.’

‘What was it that Darrell did here?’

‘The school’s attached to the abbey, which is an institution in its own regard, of course. Most of our staff, like myself, are lay teachers, but some of the monks also teach: religious studies and spiritual guidance, mainly. It’s a tradition we value greatly. Darrell was one of those.’

‘So no family? No wife, no children?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Was he popular?’

‘Extremely. Both with the staff and with the boys. One doesn’t necessarily mean the other, as I’m sure you know.’ Furman looked around as though about to divulge an indiscretion, though only he and Patrese were in the room. ‘And the monks aren’t always that popular with the boys, either. Men who give their lives to God … sometimes they don’t understand children too well.’

Or sometimes, Patrese thought bitterly, they understand children all too well.

‘No enemies?’ Patrese asked. ‘No disputes? No one who wanted to do him harm?’

Furman shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’

‘Could I see his room?’

‘Sure.’

Furman led Patrese down corridors that smelled faintly of disinfectant.

‘Do you know when he was last seen?’ Patrese asked as they walked.

‘In the refectory on Saturday evening, around seven o’clock. He was on roster then, one of the staff due to eat with the boys. After that, no one knows. I guess he’d have gone back to his room if he had no other engagements, and no one would have thought anything strange about not seeing him again that night.’

‘Next morning? Sunday, in a religious establishment; someone must have noticed him missing?’

‘Of course. His absence was noted at first morning prayers, seven a.m., but people just thought he was ill; there’s a virus going round the school, plenty of pupils and staff have got it. His room was checked to see if he was OK, but there was no sign of him.’

‘That didn’t cause alarm?’

‘At that stage, no. This is a big school; he could have been anywhere, doing anything. It didn’t seem sinister. But when he didn’t appear for the main chapel service at ten thirty or for lunch afterwards – that’s when we started to search for him in earnest.’

‘And when you couldn’t find him?’

‘We called the police.’

And Patrese knew what the police would have said: he’s an adult, adults go missing, we’ll take a note of his details and let you know if we find anything. Meanwhile, the search for John Doe would have been working its way slowly outwards from New Haven, and Cambridge was far enough away not to have shown up in the first sweep.

Not that it would have made any difference. Showalter had been dead several hours before anyone had even thought to look for him.

‘How easy is it to get into this place?’ Patrese asked.

Furman shrugged. ‘We have security guards, of course, and gates, but we’re a school of young men. They go on sports and cultural trips, we encourage them to help out in the local community, the abbey itself is open to the public at certain times. We don’t want to shut ourselves away from the world. We wouldn’t be much of a school if we did.’

‘But anyone acting suspiciously would be challenged?’

‘I’d like to think so.’

The problem, as Patrese knew, was that anyone who could kill a woman on New Haven Green and leave another body there was almost certainly pretty good at
not
acting suspiciously. If killers walked round rubbing their hands and cackling like pantomime villains, they’d be much easier to catch.

‘You have CCTV here?’

‘At the main entrance.’

‘Nowhere else?’

‘No.’

‘How many entrances are there?’

‘Four or five, depending on how you count.’

‘So why not have CCTV on them too?’

‘I wouldn’t have had it at all if it hadn’t been required by the insurance company. I want to bring these young men up properly, and you can’t do that if they think they’re being watched the whole time. I know most of them are good kids; but they’re also kids, and kids sometimes do what kids do. I come down like a ton of bricks on them when they screw up, but I want to let them make their own mistakes too. Within reason, of course.’

Heck, Patrese thought. If he’d had a principal like Furman when he’d been at school, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up hating religion so much.

‘And you have no idea how Darrell could have ended up in New Haven?’

‘None whatsoever. As far as I know, he had no family there, no friends. I’ve been here eight years, and I never heard him mention the place once.’

Patrese looked out of the window, toward the spire of the chapel and a concrete sports hall beyond. Something about the solidity of both buildings made him think of the Gothic gatehouse on one side of New Haven Green.

‘You’re not far from Harvard here, are you?’ he asked.

‘Not at all.’

‘You ever do anything with them? Meetings, programs, any of that?’

Furman shook his head. ‘Not really. We take the boys in twelfth grade to look round the place – not just Harvard but MIT too, of course – in case any of them are thinking of applying there, but that’s about it.’

‘Did Darrell ever go on these trips?’

‘Not that I recall. Why?’

‘You’re near Harvard. His body was found near Yale. I was wondering whether there could be a connection.’

‘Not one that I’m aware of. Darrell certainly didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale as a student. Thought they were a little too elitist, if I remember rightly.’

‘And yet he taught in a private boys’ school.’

‘A third of our boys are on some sort of financial assistance. And religious instruction is a major part of the curriculum here. I think his conscience was satisfied that he was doing the right thing. Here—’ Furman pushed open a door and stood aside to let Patrese through. ‘This is – was – Darrell’s room.’

It reminded Patrese a little of Kwasi’s room in Bleecker Street: a single bed, hundreds of books. None about chess, though, or at least none that Patrese could see at first glance. Shelves of religious texts, unsurprisingly. The obvious giants of the postwar American novel: Mailer, Updike, Roth, squashed close together like rush-hour rail commuters. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in translation, and not only the famous ones about war, peace, crime and punishment either: Patrese saw
The Cossacks, The House of the Dead, Hadji Murat, The Idiot, Resurrection, Demons,
all with broken spines and fraying corners.

‘Loved Russia,’ Furman said, following Patrese’s gaze. ‘One of the classes he liked to teach was about religious survival in times of persecution. In particular, how the Russian Orthodox Church kept going under the godless Soviet regime. Lessons for us all in how to keep the faith.’

There was a laptop on a desk by the window. Patrese turned it on, waited for it to boot up, and tapped on the Outlook Express icon. Forensics could crawl over the machine later, but if Showalter had made any arrangements for Saturday night by e-mail, they’d probably still be on here.

The program opened. No password demand: most people don’t bother when they have sole access to a machine.
Patrese scanned through the inbox. All school-related busi
ness, by the look of it: circulars about staff meetings, refurbishment work, and so on. He glanced toward Furman. ‘Do you know whether he used a personal account too? Hotmail; that kind of thing?’

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘Why so?’

Furman stepped forward and clicked on the ‘sent items’ folder. It came up empty.

‘Darrell didn’t use
any
e-mail unless he had to. He’d read the incoming stuff, because he knew that’s how people communicate nowadays, but if he wanted to reply, he’d ring you up.’

‘Why?’

Furman shrugged. ‘Just the way he was. Not everyone likes to filter their lives through electronics.’

When he’d finished with Furman, Patrese went over to the school security office by the main gate and asked to see the CCTV footage from Saturday evening. No sign of Darrell leaving at any time; though, as Furman had said, there were other ways in and out. Plenty of people entering and leaving, though it was hard to make out any more than the most rudimentary of features: this had all been filmed after dark, and the picture quality was as bad as it had been in Penn Station.

It was like this in many investigations: questions way, way outnumbered answers. There was one thing Patrese knew for sure, however. Regina King had left New York alive and been killed in Connecticut; Darrell Showalter had left Massachusetts alive and been found dead in Connecticut. That meant interstate transportation, which in turn made it federal jurisdiction. The Bureau would take over from the New Haven PD.

It was Patrese’s case now.

Since Patrese needed some cash, he pulled up at the nearest bank. The ATM in the wall was out of order, so he went inside, where there were three more machines: all working fine, but all with queues. That wasn’t surprising: it was the start of the lunch hour. Patrese scanned the queues, trying to work out from the kind of customers there which queue would move fastest. Businessmen in suits would be in a hurry; little old ladies would take their time.

A bark of laughter came from the tellers’ counter. Patrese looked over. One of the tellers, a young guy with the kind of hair-and-moustache combo that hadn’t been in fashion since East Germany had ceased to exist, was holding up a piece of paper. A black man in a hooded sweatshirt stood in front of his position.

‘You demand money?’ the teller scoffed. ‘This is a practical joke, right?’

No, Patrese thought. No, never say that. What the fuck was the teller playing at? The police tell every bank, and every bank tells its employees, not to stand up to bank robbers. Just give them the money and get them out of there. Hell, most banks use some kind of dye pack that makes the notes unusable, or they hand over bait money, whose serial numbers are recorded and the police alerted when the notes are back in circulation. But even if they don’t do either of those, it’s still only money. Better that someone gets away with a couple of grand than that someone gets shot because of some fool teller who thinks he’s Dirty Harry.

All this went through Patrese’s head in a split second. In that same split second, Hoodie Man had pulled a gun from his waistband with his right hand and grabbed the nearest customer, a young Asian woman with red eyeglasses and a crimson Harvard top, with his left. He pressed the gun to the woman’s head. Her eyes and mouth made perfect circles of shock and fear.