White Death (15 page)

In all four killings so far, the signatures were identical: amputation of the head and one arm, removal of the skin patches, and the tarot cards. But the MOs were very different. Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans had been killed with clinical precision elsewhere and brought to the places their bodies had been found. Regina King and Dennis Barbero had suffered frenzied attacks at the spots where they’d died.

WELCOME TO LIGHTHOUSE POINT PARK,
said the sign.
TAKE NOTHING BUT PICTURES, LEAVE NOTHING BUT FOOTPRINTS
. Soccer pitches, Little League diamonds, jogging paths. Patrese swiped a sleeve across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. He was breathing better now, slower and deeper.

The Bureau likes to divide serial killers into two categories: organized and disorganized. The organized killer is intelligent and plans his crimes methodically. He’s socially adept and proficient at luring victims away from safe places, which
means he can leave three crime scenes: where he meets his
victim, where he kills them, and where he dumps the body. He has friends and lovers, sometimes even a wife and
family.
He follows his crimes in the media and takes pride
in what he’s done. He might like to go back to the crime scene or play games with the police. He tends to have a nice car and travels a lot, often with his work. He’s the guy who helps his neighbors and runs the kids’ Little Leagues; when he’s caught, everyone’s shocked and says he’s the last person they suspected. But sometimes he’s not caught. Since he’s forever trying to improve his techniques, the longer he kills, the more difficult it is to find him.

Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans appeared to be the victims of an organized killer.

The disorganized serial killer is just the opposite. He’s of below average intelligence and doesn’t plan his crimes too much. He strikes on a whim, whenever the bloodlust takes him – hence the frenzy of his attacks and the carelessness to leave the murder weapon at the scene. He’s often unemployed, a loner with few friends and no spouse or family. He has poor hygiene, drug or alcohol problems, a history of mental illness. He doesn’t take much interest in the media coverage of his crimes. If he plays games, it’s with the victims’ families rather than the police; if he drives, it’s a battered old sedan or pick-up. He doesn’t go far from home. His inconsistency can make him hard to catch – How do you predict the movements of someone who doesn’t know himself when he’s next going to kill? – but when he
is
caught, people queue up to say they always knew he was a wrong ’un, and why the hell hadn’t the police gotten to him quicker?

Regina King and Dennis Barbero appeared to be the victims of a disorganized killer.

Up ahead, Patrese could see the lighthouse that marked five miles. It was octagonal and made from whitened sandstone. No light at the top, even though the sun was setting. Must have been decommissioned. Most of them were nowadays.

Organized killer for Showalter and Evans. Disorganized killer for Regina and Barbero. Showalter and Evans had been white, and had come from the Cambridge area in Greater Boston. Regina and Barbero had been black New Yorkers. It could almost have been two separate investigations: Anderssen in Boston, Dufresne in New York.

Anderssen was white, like ‘his’ victim. Dufresne black, like his.

If Regina and Showalter had been killed in their hometowns, Patrese would never have had to come here, to New Haven.

New Haven was pretty much halfway between New York and Boston. Halfway. A midpoint. A meeting point. A rendezvous.

You need two people for a rendezvous. You also – solitaire aside – need two people to play cards.

Patrese sprinted the last few yards to the lighthouse and sagged against it, spent. A runner going past the other way smiled sympathetically.

No, Patrese thought as he sucked in air and felt the endor
phin flush on his face. I’ve got it all wrong. I’m not dealing with a serial killer.
A
serial killer. One.

I’m dealing with two.

Patrese didn’t need the taxi to get back to town: he ran all the way without stopping, adrenalin outstripping the fatigue. When he got back to the hotel, he called Anderssen and
Dufresne and asked them – told them – to get here within
the
next two hours. Then he called Kieseritsky and told
her
the
same. Eight o’clock meet in the incident room, and
all
the apizza they could eat. Finally, he called Anna and
asked
her a few questions.

When Patrese arrived in the incident room at five to eight, the three detectives were already there. They’d introduced themselves and were swapping stories in the way detectives do the world over. Common theme – the stupidity of criminals. Cops liked nothing more than, say, robbers who left their wallets at the scene of the crime: the double whammy of an easy arrest and a good story in the bar after work.

This might be a good story, Patrese thought, but it sure as hell wasn’t an easy catch.

He told them his theory. Two killers: a white one in the Boston area, a black one in New York. The white one was organized, the black one disorganized. They’d met in New Haven last weekend for the first kill. Maybe they’d never met before that, though they must have been in touch with each other to start with. How they’d gotten to know each other, let alone how they’d decided to start killing, Patrese had no idea.

If they were of different races, it was unlikely they were related. But they could have been friends, colleagues, lovers; something pretty close, in any event. In the rare cases Patrese knew of where killers were operating in tandem, their signatures tended to vary more than their MOs: signatures being behavior innate to the perpetrator’s psyche, MOs being learned and malleable. But in this case, it seemed the other way round. It was as though the killers shared a psychosis, but not a way of executing it. And you don’t divulge your deepest neuroses to another person without knowing and trusting them.

Whatever the killers’ relationship, they seemed to be murdering in turn. The presence of the tarot cards no longer suggested merely symbolism or divination: it looked very much like a game of some sort too. Anna had told Patrese that most tarot games use the full 78-card pack, with the Fool card acting like a Joker. Although games are usually for four players, there is a version of French tarot that is for two players only. Whether or not the killers were following established game rules was another thing entirely, of course.

Either way, they surely had some means of communicating with each other. Back in the day, criminals had used the classified sections of newspapers to plant coded messages. Such a method nowadays seemed as remote and antiquated as the telegraph. There were plenty of ways two people could communicate without ever needing to leave a trace of their real names: e-mail accounts, Internet forums, pay-as-you-go mobiles. Losing yourself in the endless chatterings of the electronic ether was as hard as falling off a log.

Yes, the authorities have ways to punch through that chatter. The FBI can mount surveillance operations and intercept communications, but only if they know who to watch. The NSA – the National Security Agency, for a long time so secretive that it had been nicknamed ‘No Such Agency’ – has supercomputers that can analyze improbably large amounts of data in improbably short fractions of time. Set some trigger words – ‘tarot’, perhaps, or ‘behead’ – and its banks of processors can race through billions of phone calls, e-mails and texts, plucking out any containing those words.

But there are two problems with this. First, the NSA isn’t allowed to spy on US citizens while they’re on US soil. This isn’t in itself insurmountable. The US, along with the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is part of a network called Echelon, which eavesdrops on those same billions of phone calls, e-mails and texts across the world. When the NSA wants to spy on people it’s not allowed to, it simply asks one of the other four signatories to Echelon to do it and pass the information over.

And that’s where the second problem comes in. These are government operations, and as such are always overstretched. They’ll pull out all the stops if you’re a terrorist plotting on taking down an airliner out of JFK. But if you’re a common-or-garden serial killer, forget it. Only four victims? You’d get that many in a road smash on the turnpike. Not a reasonable use of our time or resources. Sorry.

Here’s what I suggest, Patrese said to Anderssen and Dufresne. You each treat your own investigation as an entity unto itself. Anderssen was looking for a serial killer who’d killed two people; Dufresne was also looking for a serial killer who’d killed two people. They just happened to be different serial killers. Every piece of information either detective got was to be duplicated to Patrese in New Haven. Patrese would pull it all together, look at the big picture, try to connect the dots, and any other management-speak bullshit bingo you could think of.

They all thought that was a good plan.

We need names, Anderssen said. Names? Nicknames for the killers, till we find them. Cops are like soldiers: they need to personalize the enemy. The Viet Cong had been ‘Charlie’, the First World War Germans ‘Jerry’. This was no different.

Dufresne started humming a track and miming a piano. They all laughed, getting the reference instantly, and the nicknames were decided there and then.

Ebony and Ivory.

‘Only you do I let in here,’ Kwasi said. ‘Only you.’

Unzicker looked around in what appeared to be distaste. A Bleecker loft apartment, the kind of place that featured in trendy urban magazines, and right now it looked like a crack den: Babel towers of washing-up teetering in the sink, archipelagos of half-empty pizza boxes sprawling across the floor. Whatever state the apartment was in, however, was mild compared to that of its owner. Kwasi’s hair was matted, his eyes looked like a shattered ketchup bottle, and his BO would have taken down a buffalo at ten paces.

Kwasi’s defense of his title was due to start in two days’ time, and there was still no guarantee that he’d play. The press attention would have been intense even in normal circumstances: but with the will-he-won’t-he? saga going
on, and with the clock ticking down, it was through the roof.
There were similar media encampments outside the Waldorf-Astoria, where Nursultan was staying, and Madison Square Garden, where the match was due to take place.

Kwasi had been to see Nursultan on Saturday. His original list had detailed 180 demands. Nursultan had agreed to 179 of them. The only standout was what percentage of gate receipts Kwasi should get. But as Tartu had said, there weren’t 180 demands: there was one demand in 180 parts. Take it or leave it. And if Nursultan wouldn’t take it, Kwasi would leave. He wouldn’t play, and he didn’t care if he was portrayed as the bad guy: the one who walked away from the match of the century for nothing more than a bit of cash. Don’t agree, won’t play. Like a child: shan’t, won’t, hate you.

‘Clean up,’ Unzicker said softly. He picked up a couple of pizza boxes and, looking to clear some space to put them on, began to slide Kwasi’s Red Sox and Yankees chess set along a table.

‘Don’t touch my set!’ Kwasi barked.

Unzicker jumped back as though he feared Kwasi would bite him.

‘I want this place cleaned, man, I’ll do it myself,’ Kwasi said. ‘Now: if Nursultan didn’t send you here, why did you come?’

Unzicker unzipped his computer bag, brought out a laptop and turned it on.

‘You hear about the Harvard kid?’ Kwasi said.

‘No direct programming since last time,’ Unzicker replied. ‘Just played around with the hardware.’ He clicked on one of the screen icons. A stylized graphic of a chess king with eyeglasses appeared. Below it was the word MISHA.

‘White or black?’ Unzicker asked.

‘Don’t care.’

Unzicker got Misha to select colors. It chose to play black.

Kwasi looked out of the window at the photographers below and called out his first move. Unzicker played it on screen. When Misha responded, he called that move back to Kwasi. They continued like this: Unzicker inputting and relaying, Kwasi playing without looking at the screen.

The first time Unzicker had seen Kwasi do this, he’d been
speechless with admiration, as though Kwasi was some kind
of sorcerer. Now, he didn’t even notice. When you played chess like Kwasi did, the board itself was strictly for ornamental purposes. Kwasi carried thousands of games in his head; this was just one of many.

On move twenty, Kwasi turned round. ‘You can stop it there,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Unzicker looked at the position on the screen. ‘Looks pretty even to me.’

‘Misha and I played these exact moves on twenty-first February this year. I won that game. This is the point where I won it, when Misha played his bishop to c5 rather than b4. Now it’s played the same move again, c5. Twenty moves’ time, I’ll have this game won.’

‘You sure?’

Kwasi didn’t even bother to answer.

‘OK,’ Unzicker said. ‘Try something else. You play black this time …’

‘No. I’m tired. Tommy, you gotta go now.’

‘But …’

‘But nothing.’

Unzicker slapped the back of his hand against the screen, a flash of annoyance that seemed at once out of place and deeply characteristic. ‘We are
so
close. We get this right, we’re going to be like Watson and Crick, Page and Brin, you know? We’re going to be immortal. We’re going to make history.’

‘Tommy.’ There was no smile in Kwasi’s eyes. ‘I already am. I already have.’

Twice a year, in November and January, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experiences a striking phenomenon. When the path of the setting sun crosses the axis of MIT’s
Infinite Corridor, which runs more than quarter of a kilometer
from the institute’s main entrance and links five different buildings, the sun fills the windows and blazes light down the corridor’s entire length. Inevitably, and with a nod to one of the world’s most famous solar shrines, this phenomenon is known as MIThenge.