White Death (11 page)

‘What time is this?’

‘About eight thirty-five.’

They left the hall and headed across the quadrangle.

To their right, on the south side, was an enormous neo-classical library fronted by an arcade of Ionic columns. Above the columns ran a frieze of famous writers’ names, starting with Homer and Herodotus and ending with Voltaire and Goethe. To their left, a sculpture of the goddess Athena sitting on a throne, with a laurel crown on her head and the book of knowledge balanced on her lap. Her arms were raised as though welcoming the knowledge all around her.

Whatever accusations you could level at Ivy League colleges, Patrese thought, understatement wasn’t one of them.

‘From Lerner to Hartley, probably seven minutes, walking at normal pace,’ Dufresne said. ‘Well-lit, people around, usually a couple of campus police patrols too.’

‘You think he was followed?’

‘Maybe. Wouldn’t have dared jump him out here, though. No chance of getting away unseen. But maybe he wasn’t followed. Every Thursday, Dennis had the same routine: his radio show, walk across the quad, open up the Malcolm X Lounge, make sure everything was ready for the G-body meeting at nine. Didn’t need to follow him. You could set your watch by him. Hell, you could set the atomic clock by him.’

‘So Dennis unlocks the lounge, the killer slips in there with him—’

‘Or has gotten access to the room beforehand, and is lying in wait.’

‘—or that, and then he kills Dennis and hauls ass. Must have had a holdall or something, to carry the head and arm in. Anyone see anyone like that?’

‘Not that we know.’

Patrese shrugged. If the killer was smart – and they knew he was that, if nothing else – he’d have made sure that he attracted as little attention as possible. On a student campus, that meant dressing like a student, whether you were one or not. Sneakers, jeans, college sweatshirt; someone dressed in those would pass unnoticed, even with a holdall. Going to the gym, helping set up a party … plenty of reasons to carry a soft bag.

‘Security measures in Lerner and Hartley?’ Patrese said.

‘The time of night we’re talking, not much. Lerner’s a public building, so people come in and out the whole time. Hartley’s primarily residential, but it has a few communal rooms like the Malcolm X Lounge, which means the main door’s kept open till those meetings are over.’

‘CCTV?’

‘No. Students. Human rights.’

‘So we’re looking at, oh, several thousand possible suspects.’

Dufresne rubbed his chin. ‘In that neighborhood.’

Patrese thought for a moment. ‘Unless …’

‘Yes?’

‘Ivy League colleges: they stick together much?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They have a lot of meet-ups just for Ivy League places? Parties, conferences, tournaments, I don’t know. That kind of thing.’

‘No idea. Why?’

‘Two people killed within sight of Yale’s front entrance. Now one on Columbia’s campus itself. Columbia and Yale are both Ivy League colleges. It must be worth seeing whether anyone from Columbia was at Yale last weekend, or …’

Dufresne finished Patrese’s sentence for him. ‘Or whether anyone from Yale’s here at Columbia right now.’

Dufresne’s men and the campus police had been on the case most of the night. The campus block where Dennis had been killed had been locked down: no one allowed to leave till they’d spoken to police, no one allowed in without proof they lived there. Hartley apart, there were four other accommodation blocks: Wallach, Furnald, Carman and John Jay. Every resident had been interviewed, some at two or three in the morning. A lot of them had grumbled about this. Patrese couldn’t have given a damn.

He and Dufresne had kept themselves awake by mainlining black coffee the consistency and taste of peat sediment. When even that hadn’t been enough, Patrese had grabbed a couple of hours’ restless sleep on a cot bed in the precinct station house.

Now Dufresne took him to breakfast in a diner across the street, where they filled up on waffles and hash browns. Law enforcement officers, like soldiers, march on their stomachs: it might be many hours before they got to eat again.

They reviewed what they had so far.

No connections they could find between the first two victims and the third. Dennis Barbero had known neither Regina King nor Darrell Showalter. Patrese hadn’t set much store by any links between the two male victims – a radical black student and a white Benedictine monk were hardly natural bedfellows – but he
had
wondered whether Dennis and Regina had come across each other. Dennis had been president of Columbia’s Black Students’ Organization: Regina had been a member of the National Council of Black Women. Two black activists? It was hardly unheard of. But no, nothing doing. They’d never even attended the same conferences.

One small breakthrough: a connection between Columbia and Yale. The Columbia Lions football team had played Yale Bulldogs in New Haven the previous Saturday. Even that, however, seemed to lead nowhere. The Columbia team had stayed in New Haven the night before the game, on Friday, but had returned home after the game on Saturday. None of the team or its support staff had been in New Haven at the time of the murders.

Travelling supporters? Very few. The Lions’ home attendance was by far the worst of all Ivy League colleges; not surprising when you considered how hopeless the team were. The Lions found it hard to muster 1,500 people for an average home game, and less than 100 had made the trip to Yale last week. All but one of those had returned to Columbia the same night, and the exception had stayed up to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, a Yale sophomore.

Yes, they’d been together all weekend. The girl’s neighbors were adamant, their testimony shot through with equal parts annoyance and admiration at the prolonged sexual symphonies resonating through the walls. After all that, it was a wonder the guy had had enough energy to eat breakfast, let alone go out and murder someone.

But there’d been no events at Columbia last night involving anyone from Yale. So maybe the timings of the murders were sheer coincidence.

‘Coincidence’ isn’t a word that homicide investigators like to hear.

They’d also found out a little more about Dennis Barbero. Columbia was hoping to extend its campus into the largely Hispanic Manhattanville neighborhood to its north. Dennis hadn’t just joined the local Manhattanville protest campaign: he’d ended up running the damn thing. He’d addressed rallies, chained himself to railings, demanded audiences with congressmen and senators.

The expansion plans were incompatible with the need for affordable housing in Manhattanville, he’d said: they represented nothing but more forcible gentrification, more unthinking white property appropriation. Publicly, the university authorities had said they welcomed dialogue and debate, and valued Mr Barbero’s freedom of speech even – especially – when his opinions were opposed to their own.

What they’d thought privately might have been another matter entirely.

Breakfast done, Patrese and Dufresne went back to campus around nine. The campus was no longer locked down – only Hartley House itself – and the morning shifts of both precinct and campus officers had taken over, putting up notices and buttonholing students as they passed. Did you see anything? Do you know anything? All information confidential. Phone this number or talk to an officer.

There was a crowd around the entrance to Hartley House, as there had been last night, but Patrese could see instantly that the mood was very different. Where people had been shocked and tearful, now they were angry. Their bodies made angular lines of self-righteous defiance; their voices came in shouts, barks, growls. A couple of TV crews were filming them. Patrese spat out a curse. TV crews always made these things worse.

Dufresne walked over to the nearest uniform, exchanged a few words with him, and came back to Patrese.

‘What’s going on?’ Patrese asked.

‘People getting real pissed now. Say the police been hassling them.’

‘There’s been a murder. The fuck do they expect?’

Dufresne shrugged. ‘They’re students. Always think they know everything. Student who knows they don’t know everything is like a woman who don’t nag: a strictly mythical creature. You know how it is. We can’t do anything right. We ask questions, we’re hassling them. We don’t ask questions, we don’t care ’bout some dead black guy.’ He gestured to one corner of the protest. ‘Some fools over there, they’re stirring things up even more. Saying Dennis was killed ’cos he took it to the man.’

‘The Manhattanville protests?’

‘I guess. You ask me, they just want to make him a victim.’

Patrese thought for a moment: then he started towards the posse Dufresne had indicated. One of the TV cameramen came closer, lens tracking Patrese as he walked. A reporter shouted a question. Patrese ignored them both. He was tempted to tell them to butt out altogether, switch the camera off, but he knew that would cause more problems than it solved.

The students Dufresne had called stirrers were a mixed bunch: a handful of black guys dressed in the kind of low-slung pants that always made Patrese want to pull them up and tell the wearers to look smarter, but also some white and Asian kids with backpacks and earnest faces.

‘I’m Franco Patrese. I’m with the FBI. Is there anything I can help you with?’

You could try not sounding like a damn shop assistant, he thought to himself.

One of the guys with Rikers pants stepped forward. ‘You goin’ round aksin’ all the students if they killed Dennis, but why ain’t you investigatin’ the administration?’

‘We’re following several lines of enquiry.’

‘That’s what the police always say. The administration hated Dennis, man. Hated him. He was a pain in all their asses. You gotta talk to the president, the provost, the vice-presidents, all the trustees. I’m at law school here, and you know what they teach us?
Cui bono
? Who benefits?’

‘I know what
cui bono
means.’

‘Then go look, man. You keep on hasslin’ the students here, this thing’s gonna blow up. We ain’t afraid of protests at Columbia. We got a long tradition of that shit.’

The cameraman took a step toward them. Patrese kept his voice calm.

‘Sounds to me a little like a threat.’

‘Everyone got the right to protest, man.’

‘You know your rights, huh? What about your responsibilities? What about your responsibility to let us do our job? I didn’t just tumble out of high school and find myself in the Bureau. I worked hard, I got trained. I know what I’m doing. All the officers who stop and ask questions, they know what they’re doing too.’ Patrese clapped his hands, raised his voice. ‘Listen up. All of you.’

The crowd noise rose, subsided. Patrese spoke into its ebb.

‘I know you’re all upset about what happened last night. But please: let us do our job. You got any thoughts or information, ring the number on the noticeboards all around campus, where a trained officer will take your call. I ask you: disperse in an orderly fashion, and this whole thing will get solved quicker.’

For a moment, Patrese thought it had worked: and then the shouts went up, police trying to cover things up, just another nigger dead, and all that. This was the Ivy League in the twenty-first century, Patrese thought, not sixties-era Kent State: but this wasn’t all about race, he realized, this was students kicking against the system, and that was as old as education itself. He wanted to tell the protestors that in a decade’s time they’d be rich bankers or lawyers, and they’d sure as heck want the police to come quick enough when their condo got burgled: but he didn’t think that would do any good right this moment.

The crowd jostled and surged. It seemed to have grown bigger. A couple of campus police officers came hurrying over from outside the library, radioing for back-up as they did. If he wasn’t careful, Patrese thought, he’d have a full-scale riot on his hands.

Someone was leaning over the barriers, trying to attract his attention. A black guy with dreadlocks. Looked like Kwasi.

Not just looked like Kwasi, Patrese realized with a start. It
was
Kwasi.

‘Hey, Franco,’ Kwasi said, as though they were meeting in a coffee shop rather than on the fringes of incipient public disorder.

Patrese went over. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Saw it on the news. Same guy who killed my mom?’

‘Think so. I was going to call and tell you.’

‘OK.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘What question?’

‘What are you doing here? You wanted to talk to me, you could have rung me.’

‘Thought I could help.’

‘
Help?
’

‘Sure. Calm things down a little.’

Patrese almost laughed. Only Kwasi, with his weirdly direct logic – some form of mild autism, perhaps, maybe Asperger’s – only Kwasi could see a student protest and think he could help. Patrese opened his mouth to say, ‘Thanks, but no,’ and in that exact moment thought: Well, why not? It could hardly make things worse, could it?

He opened the barrier for Kwasi to squeeze through. Dufresne’s eyebrows practically attained escape velocity. ‘What the …?’ he mouthed.

‘Trust me,’ Patrese mouthed back, though in truth he wasn’t sure he trusted himself.

Kwasi walked to the building’s entrance, where the whole crowd could see him.

The transformation was amazing. Aggression drained from the chants as though a plug had been pulled. In its place came the happy shock of unexpectedly seeing a properly famous person up close.

The crowd whooped and hollered. ‘Hey! Kwasi!
Kwasi
!
Over here, man!’

Dufresne came over to Patrese. ‘Never seen nothing like this.’

Kwasi held up his hands. The crowd quietened. Give him a beard and a robe, Patrese thought, and he could have been Jesus.

‘My mom was killed last weekend.’ Kwasi spoke slowly and carefully, picking each word with care: not a natural orator, but perhaps the more effective for that. The protestors saw he was speaking from the heart. ‘Whoever killed her also killed Dennis, and another guy too. Agent Patrese, the Bureau guy who’s here behind me, he’s leading this case. He’s a good guy.’ Patrese felt the start of a blush. ‘He personally came to tell me about my mom, and he stayed with me that day, looked after me, when he had a ton of other things he needed to do.’