White Death (6 page)

There were no bullet holes in the bodies, and no stab wounds to the vital organs. A full toxicological analysis was still pending, but the most basic tests had showed up no evidence of poisons, sedatives or intoxicants. Blood splatter and flow patterns – particularly the difference between pre-mortem and post-mortem bleeding – suggested that the victims’ arms and skin patches had all been removed post-mortem. It was therefore most likely that the act of decapitation itself had killed both Regina King and John Doe.

Wouldn’t they have screamed? Not if the killer had put a rag in their mouths. Certainly not once he’d severed their larynxes.

No sexual interference in either case. That was interesting. Dismemberment is usually sexual and often connected with picquerism, where the killer is aroused by stabbing, pricking or slicing the body; all obvious substitutes for penile penetration, of course. The slicing was here –
both in terms of the missing arms and heads, and the patches of skin removed – but there was no sexual interference and no stabbing.

Criminology theory holds that there are five forms of dismemberment: the practical, the narcotic, the sadistic, the lustful and the psychotic.

Practical usually involves cutting up bodies to make them easier to transport or store, which didn’t seem to be the case here. Regina had been alive when she’d come to the Green; it was hard to see how removing John Doe’s head and arm would have made him materially easier to move.

Narcotic, as in the perpetrator being off his head on drugs; well, that was a possibility in Regina’s case, given the frenzy with which she had been attacked, but not for John Doe, whose killing had been a work of clinical precision.

Sadistic; unlikely, even given the gruesome method of death. Those things which would inflict unimaginable pain on a person, such as amputating their arm and removing their skin, had been done post-mortem.

Lustful: no, for the absence of sexual interference.

Which left psychotic. The killer was doing all this for his own reasons, and those reasons would be buried somewhere unfathomably deep within his psyche. It might turn out that they would find the reasons only by finding the killer, through traditional police work and evidence-gathering. Taking wild guesses at what was driving him might simply distract them from genuine leads.

But as for such evidence-gathering: well, so far there was no forensic evidence worth the name, as was often the case when bodies had been left outside. The police lab was doing its best, though no one was holding their breath for a breakthrough: not because the lab wasn’t good – it was as good as could be expected of any short-staffed, underfunded public body – but because this was real life, and in real life
cases don’t get solved in fifty-eight minutes minus commer
cial breaks.

The tarot cards were part of a standard Rider-Waite deck, the most common tarot deck in the United States and Europe. They were trying to trace the manufacturer, but that was easier said than done, especially on a Sunday. Manufacturers tend to put their details on the packaging box, but not on individual cards themselves.

As for the symbolism of the cards, they’d managed to find some basic information on the Internet: the mighty Google, helping cops and porn fiends since 1998. ‘Hierophant’ was more or less a fancy ancient word for a priest: ‘Regina’ was Latin for ‘queen’, which would tie in with ‘empress’.

The curator at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was one of the country’s foremost experts on the history and symbolism of tarot – the Beinecke had one of the oldest decks in the world, dating back to 1466 – but she was returning from vacation and wouldn’t be at her desk until tomorrow morning.

Kieseritsky had scheduled a press conference for an hour’s time. Patrese said he’d look after Kwasi, keep the press away from the world champion, and at the same time do some digging to try to find out what had happened to Regina King.

He hung up and dialed the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore, number helpfully supplied by Kwasi’s incredible memory. No, the receptionist said, we didn’t have a Regina King staying last night. Yes, sir, she was absolutely sure. Not in the general register, and not under the National Council’s discount rate block booking.

Could she have registered under a false name? Patrese asked.

Yes, the receptionist said, but only if she had a fake ID too: each guest had been obliged to present some form of photocard. The receptionist had a copy of the National Council’s own attendee list, and there was no Regina King on that either.

Patrese thanked her and hung up.

Regina had told Kwasi she was going to Baltimore. He’d dropped her off at Penn Station. She hadn’t gone to Baltimore. She’d gone to New Haven. Trains from Penn Station ran to New Haven too.

Time to go to Penn Station.

Patrese stepped back inside the apartment. Kwasi was sitting at a computer. Patrese noted without surprise that there was a chessboard on the screen.

He explained what he’d found out from the Hyatt receptionist, and said he was going to Penn Station to try to find out where Regina had gone from there. ‘I’ll give you my cell number. You got a pen?’

‘Tell me. I’ll remember it.’

Patrese did, and he had no doubt that Kwasi would.

‘Will you come back when you’ve finished?’ Kwasi said. He sounded so like a little boy lost that Patrese instinctively put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Sure, Kwasi. Sure I will.’

Penn Station was no one’s idea of a grand railway terminus, the kind of place movie crews would dress up in period detail and have steam trains come hissing to a halt beside men in thick tweed suits. It was a catacomb, mostly underground and as bland as it was dark. Armed police stood with their feet wide apart and tried to look as though they weren’t dying of boredom. The government had warned of terrorist attacks on transport hubs a few weeks back, so everyone
was going through the motions of pretending to do some
thing about it.

A bomb in this place might actually improve it, Patrese thought.

He found his way to the control center after a couple of wrong turns and a station worker who’d been less impressed by a Bureau badge than Patrese would have liked. The control center was half movie theater, half trading floor: rows of workstations, many of them empty, and an enormous wall covered in intricate maps of the railway system. Trains inbound and outbound were marked by little symbols in various colors. It looked pretty busy even now, midway through a Sunday afternoon. God alone knew what it must be like during a Monday-morning rush hour.

The train to Baltimore that Regina had said she’d catch had left at ten o’clock. The train to New Haven had left at exactly the same time: ten o’clock, on the dot. Patrese asked for CCTV footage of both platforms from the moment the gates had been opened until the moment the trains had departed. The angles weren’t great and the picture resolution left much to be desired, but after going over the footage in fine detail, often asking to rewind a frame two or three times, Patrese had to accept a simple fact. Regina had been on neither of those trains.

He looked at other services that had departed at round about the same time: the Adirondack line up to Montreal, the Empire service to Buffalo and Niagara, the Vermonter to, well, Vermont, and a plethora of smaller commuter trains. No joy on any of those either, nor on the next two trains to New Haven and Baltimore respectively, nor anywhere on the station concourse between 9.45 and 10.00.

Kwasi had dropped his mother off at Penn Station at 9.45 yesterday morning. She’d gone inside, vanished into thin air, and rematerialized without her head in New Haven almost eighteen hours later.

There was a crowd of perhaps twenty people outside the main door of Kwasi’s apartment block by the time Patrese returned there, and they weren’t part of the Hallowe’en parade. As Patrese got out of his car and walked toward the building, large lenses swiveled to follow him for a moment before being lowered. The photographers clearly deemed him of little interest. Fine with him.

The toothpaste-ad doorman was standing just inside the door, eyeballing the posse of reporters with a sailor’s determination to repel boarders. Patrese didn’t want to have to flash his badge in case the reporters saw and clocked who he was, but Toothpaste Man recognized him from earlier
and unlocked. Patrese slipped inside, checking out the nameplate on the man’s lapel:
BEN SHERWOOD
.

‘Thanks, Ben,’ he said. ‘I’m Franco Patrese, FBI. You know why they’re here?’

‘Saw it on the news. Damn shame.’ Sherwood gestured toward the reporters. ‘Freakin’ vultures.’

‘They’re only doing their job.’

‘Flockin’ round when someone’s dead, waiting to get fed. Like I said. Vultures.’

‘Any of them tried to get in?’

‘Not yet. They can try all they want. I know all the residents by sight, and if I don’t know you, you ain’t comin’ in.’

‘Good man. I’m going back up. You have any problems, give me a shout.’ Sherwood had a pad on his desk; Patrese jotted down his cell number.

‘Will do. I’ll ring up to Mr King, let him know you’re on your way.’

Kwasi was waiting at the door of his apartment. Behind him, a phone was ringing.

‘Been like that the last twenty minutes,’ he said.

‘You answered any of them?’

‘First couple of times. People jabbering about my mom. I hung up.’

‘Good. Let me deal with this.’ Patrese walked over to the phone, crouched down and pulled the jack from the wall. The phone stopped ringing.

On Kwasi’s fifty-inch plasma TV, Fox News’ Chris Wallace was interviewing a young woman with limpid eyes and a cascade of black hair. A caption appeared as she spoke:
INESSA BAIKAL, US WOMEN’S CHESS CHAMPION
.

‘What it means for his title defense, no one can yet know,’ she said. ‘For a world championship match, you need to be at your absolute peak, total concentration. Even for someone like Kwasi, who’s so good at shutting things out, you have to ask: Will he be in the right frame of mind? Could anyone be in the right frame of mind after something like this? He’s so strong, mentally, but this is so … so awful.’

‘You know him better than most,’ Wallace said. ‘You used to date him, is that right?’

‘That’s not right,’ Kwasi said from beside Patrese.

‘You want to switch over?’

Kwasi shook his head. ‘Everyone got an opinion about me. I’m used to it.’

On the TV, Inessa said: ‘Date him? A couple of times, sure, but nothing too serious.’

‘How will he be dealing with this?’

‘Badly, I think. They were so close, Kwasi and his mom. They were inseparable. I— I can’t imagine what he must be going through right now.’

Kwasi had had enough. He picked up the remote and muted the sound. Inessa talked silently on.

‘No, bitch, you can’t imagine,’ Kwasi said to her image. ‘You know shit about me, you know shit about chess. So shut the fuck up.’

Patrese pointed at the caption. ‘Says she’s the national women’s chess champion.’

‘So?’

‘So she must know something about chess.’

‘She knows nothing about chess. She’s a woman.’ There was real anger in Kwasi’s voice now. ‘National women’s champion means fuck all. You know her ranking? She’s the 812th best player in the world. She knows nothing about what it takes to be world champion. And she knows nothing about me.’

‘You don’t think women are good at chess?’

‘I
know
they’re not good at chess.’

‘Why?’

‘Too emotional. Chess is rough and hard. You have to be a man to win. Control your feelings, be a machine. You let feelings and emotions in, you’re fucked. The only women who can ever play well are those who change their character, suppress their natural instincts, take on a man’s qualities. And
she
’ – he flicked his hand dismissively toward the screen – ‘she’s too busy lying round on the beach in her underwear, doing photoshoots for fashion magazines and pretending she’s a model.’

Wow, Patrese thought: it was like listening to some bitter
old misogynist of a bachelor uncle rather than a black kid with dreadlocks. He wondered how many of Kwasi’s sponsors would drop him in a heartbeat if they heard him talk this way. And he wondered, too, what exactly had happened between Kwasi and Inessa.

Probably not the best moment to ask.

Kwasi and Regina had been inseparable, and now she was dead. In the circumstances, a little spleen was no bad thing.

Kwasi stared at Inessa, who was giving a coquettish smile as Wallace ended the interview.

‘Bitch,’ he spat.

Thinking that it might prove a welcome distraction, Patrese took Kwasi up on to the roof to watch the parade. Hallowe’en on Sixth Avenue wasn’t a bunch of schoolkids dressed up as zombies and trick-or-treating: it was a three-hour extravaganza like nothing else on earth, apart perhaps from Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

In fact, Patrese remembered, the 2005 parade had been a gathering point for those New Orleans residents living in airport hotels near JFK after Hurricane Katrina, having been displaced from their homes two months before by that iconic catastrophe through which Patrese had hunted
another serial killer. The parade organizers that year had put
on a mock-up jazz funeral with a second-line band and dancers, and all those folks whose houses had been washed away and who weren’t used to fall temperatures south of the eighties, all those folks knew that George W. Bush might not have cared about them, but New York sure did.

Now the crowds on Sixth Avenue were ten deep, and they cheered the parade as though every passing costume
was the winning play in the Super Bowl. The dancing skel
etons came first, as they always did, a reminder that tonight death danced only to celebrate life. After them came giant illuminated caterpillars; a Statue of Liberty stabbed in the chest; a group of bulldogs on leashes all dressed as Batman. Giant Scrabble tiles rearranged themselves time and again to spell different words. Decks of playing cards – not tarot ones, Patrese saw – shuffled up the avenue.