White Death (17 page)

‘Here.’

‘That’s what you said last time, when your mom was killed.’

‘I live alone. I don’t have friends. I don’t have convenient alibis every time you come round asking things. You believe me or you don’t. I was here, asleep, ’cos if Nursultan stops being a jerkoff in the next hour or so, I have to go and play a world championship match, and to do that I need all the rest I can get.’

‘I want to take you into protective custody.’

‘What?’

‘Your mom was killed. That might have been to unsettle you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t really know. But now Howard Lewis is dead too. It might be a coincidence, but cops don’t believe in coincidences too much.’

‘And Barbero? Showalter? Evans?’

‘You know their names.’

‘I know thousands of chess games, move by move. I knew the address and phone number of the place my mom was supposed to be staying the weekend she got killed. I remember things, Franco. So yes, I know their names. Wouldn’t you, if they’d all been killed by the same person who murdered your mom?’

Patrese held up his hands: fair point. ‘You have any connections to those guys?’

‘None. I never heard of any of them till they turned up dead.’

Kwasi’s cell rang. He picked up. Patrese could hear Nursultan’s tinny, agitated voice at the other end. Kwasi listened impassively. ‘You agree?’ he said at last. ‘No? Then I got nothing more to say.’ He ended the call and turned back to Patrese. ‘Man rings me every half-hour. Wants me to break first. Not gonna happen.’

Another ring tone. ‘Rings you every half-minute, more like,’ Patrese said.

‘That’s your cell, man. Not mine.’

Patrese reached in his pocket and brought out his phone. ‘So it is.’ He looked at the screen:
DUFRESNE
.

‘What’s up, Bobby?’

‘Where are you?’

‘With Kwasi.’

‘Go somewhere he can’t hear you.’

‘What?’

‘Go somewhere he can’t hear you. Just do it.’

‘Er … sure.’ Patrese gestured at Kwasi that he was going on to the roof terrace. Kwasi made a mime: sure.

Patrese stepped outside. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m on the terrace. What’s up?’

‘You gotta get out of there.’

‘What?’

‘You gotta get out of there. I just got a call from forensics. They found some DNA on Dennis Barbero’s body: strand of hair or something. Partial match with Regina King.’

‘So? We already know the same guy killed them both. Hairs and fibers get transferred from person to person the whole time.’

‘That’s what I told them. And they said that wasn’t what partial match meant, not in this context. It means they found DNA which partially matches Regina, but which partially doesn’t.’

‘As in a relative?’

‘As in a son.’

A dark shadow moving fast and furious in the corner of Patrese’s vision. With instinct faster than thought, he threw up his free arm, his left, to protect himself; which was why the marble chessboard Kwasi was wielding like a baseball bat only broke Patrese’s wrist rather than fracturing his skull.

Deep pain, such as that caused by a broken bone, often takes a few seconds to kick in. Patrese knew this, and he used it. He dropped his phone and went for his gun. Chessboard clattering on the floor, Kwasi darted back inside the apartment. Patrese followed.

Glimpse of a leg disappearing round a corner, and then a gust of wind. Open window. Fire escape. The first shockwave of pain rippled up Patrese’s arm, sharp enough to make him catch his breath. One second. Two. No more. Grit your teeth. Keep moving.

He ran to the window and looked down. Kwasi was a story below and moving fast, dreadlocks bouncing as he ran across the landing and on to the next level. Patrese climbed out of the window and began to follow. Wrought-iron staircase, beautifully crafted: a goddamn work of art for something so functional. Typical New York. Patrese couldn’t grip the banister with his left hand, needed his right free for the gun. Felt like he was about to fall the whole time. Couldn’t slow down without losing sight of Kwasi.

The fire escape ended up in a courtyard round the back of the condo block. Kwasi jumped the last six feet and headed towards an iron gate. Patrese was a flight above him. Lost his footing halfway down. Part jumped, part fell the same last six feet. Landed heavily, rolled hard to avoid smacking his broken wrist.

Pushed himself upright again, weight through that very wrist for a split second before he realized. A welter of agony. Kwasi through the gate and gone. Follow. Move. Should have listened to Dufresne first time round. Stupid Franco, thinking he knew best. He’d be more sensible next time.

The gate was still swinging where Kwasi had passed through. Patrese followed, looking left and right. A passageway that forked left and right. Big commercial dumpsters one side; the back of a restaurant. A bodyshop the other side, cars with their hoods up. A couple of mechanics looked at Patrese with surprise.

He thought fast. They wouldn’t have been surprised to see him if they’d just seen Kwasi run past, would they? So Kwasi must have gone the other way, past the dumpsters. Patrese headed that way. He felt lopsided, no real way of keeping balance with one arm hanging useless by his side and the other trying to keep a gun aimed halfway straight.

The passageway widened beyond the dumpsters: fifty yards straight, no doors Patrese could see on either side, and no sign of Kwasi, which meant either that a man who spent most of his life sitting down could run like a cheetah when he had to, or that …

… and the thought –
he’s behind the dumpsters
– hit Patrese at the same time as Kwasi did. A roundhouse in the solar plexus followed by a jab to the face. Patrese sank to his knees as though someone had cut his strings. A kick jarred his fingers, making him drop the gun; and before he could even start reaching for it, Kwasi had picked it up and was aiming it straight between Patrese’s eyes.

No one around. Dumbass mechanics must have gone back to their repairs. This was New York. People come running past looking wild-eyed the whole time. Nothing doing. Nothing to see. Move along now.

Patrese was aware that he was kneeling in front of Kwasi. He tried to stand up. Kwasi put a foot on his chest and pushed him back down on to his backside. Better for Patrese’s pride at least, if not for his immediate prospects of survival. The barrel never wavered. Shot by his own gun. Not exactly a heroic end. Not one for the Bureau’s wall of honor.

He wouldn’t beg. It wouldn’t do him any good anyway. He’d been wrong about everything. He’d fallen for Kwasi’s little-boy-lost act. He’d seen exactly what he’d wanted to see. He’d never thought, not for a minute, that someone who destroyed his opponents on a little board of sixty-four wooden squares would be every bit as merciless in real life. Killer instinct, that’s what they said about Kwasi: he had the killer instinct, the unerring ability to go for his opponent’s jugular given half a chance. Killer instinct.

At another time and in another place, Patrese might have laughed.

‘Who’s white?’ he said.

Kwasi looked at him with eyes of serene emptiness.

‘Who’s white?’ Patrese said again. ‘Who’s Ivory? Who’s in Boston? Who are you playing against?’

The pistol whip came so fast that Patrese hardly even saw it. Unlike his wrist, this one
did
hurt instantly. He toppled over. The ground was cold against his cheek. He pressed his good hand to the wound.

Kwasi squatted down beside him. Two cards in his hand, their backs facing Patrese.

‘This is what I am,’ Kwasi said, turning the first one round. ‘I’m the Magician. Watch me vanish.’

Another pistol whip, this time a backhand, the other way across Patrese’s face. As Patrese rolled on the concrete, trying to shake the pain out of himself, he heard the fading sound of running feet. By the time he was sitting up again, Kwasi had gone.

Kwasi had left the other tarot card face down on the ground. Patrese knew what it would be even before he turned it over.

Card zero. The Fool.

‘Play the middlegame like a magician.’

Rudolf Spielmann

It’s not hard to carve a human bone.

In this case, the humerus, the bone of the upper arm. The rest of the arm you can get rid of, though you’ve gotta be careful where you do this. Body parts got a nasty habit of turnin’ up and gettin’ in the hands of the cops if you don’t make damn sure of your disposal methods.

You cut away the skin, muscle and tissue till you got yourself just the bone. There’s still goin’ to be lots of blood and goo on it, of course, so you put it in a large cookin’ pot – same one you use to shrink the heads, if you like – and cover it in hot water. Very hot, very hot indeed, but not, repeat not, boilin’. Anyone say you gotta boil the bone, they’re a fool, ’cos that’s horseshit. Boilin’ bones makes ’em hard and brittle, and when they’re hard and brittle, that’s when they break. Never boil.

The hot water’ll help you get the blood and goo off. You also gotta scrape out all the marrow that’s inside the bone. Then you tip away the water and fill it back up again, this time with detergent and Nappy-San: three times the amount of each you’d use normally. Leave the bone in there for a coupla days, soakin’. Take it out after that, it’ll be clean as a whistle.

Now the cuttin’. Most of the humerus is pretty much a cylinder, straight up and down, but there are bits at the top and bottom, all with fancy medical names: greater tuberosity, lesser tuberosity, lateral epicondyle, medial epicondyle, trochlea, capitulum. Don’t matter what they’re called, you gotta get rid of them. All you want is the straight bit.

So you take a fretsaw, blade probably 18 tpi – that’s teeth per inch, you get to know these things after a while – and you saw right through the damn thing. You might want to wear a mask and goggles while doin’ this: it kicks up some bone dust, and that shit ain’t so good to breathe. When you’ve cut off both ends of the humerus, all the fancy-named knobbly bits, you should be left with something around a foot long.

You put the bone in a vice. You gotta be careful here, as the last thing you want is to damage it. So you put leather pads on the jaws of the vice, and you pack a leather bag filled with rice around the bone. Only now can you tighten the vice.

You take your files and your gravers. Only use the ones made by Vallorbe. They’re a Swiss company, and they’re expensive, but in this game you get what you pay for. You use cheap tools, your work will look cheap.

You file away all the rough edges and protuberances on the bone, and there are plenty of those. With the gravers – they’re like little chisels – you can make all the patterns you want in the bone. Nice and slowly does it. You don’t want to rush. You don’t need to rush. Like I told you before, no one’s going nowhere.

When you’ve finished your carvin’, you’re nearly done. Now you just gotta sandpaper it all down to get it as smooth as possible. Sandpaper comes in several grades, and you want to use four or five of them in turn, getting finer each time. Start with 240 grit, very fine, and then work your way through finer and finer ones: extra fine 400, super fine 600, and finally ultra fine 800. By the time you’ve gone through that lot, the bone will feel smooth as glass.

Like I said, not hard. Not hard at all.

If you’re going to run from the law, New York City must be one of the best places in which to do it. Hiding out in a heavily populated urban environment is far easier than doing so in an isolated rural area. People in cities don’t know their neighbors, don’t notice the unusual, don’t like to get involved in anyone’s business but their own. There are endless cheap hotels that take cash and ask no questions: homeless people have an underworld and subculture all their own, and don’t talk to the authorities in a month of Sundays. If you do want to leave the city, that’s the easiest thing in the world. Airports are easily monitored, and all flights require ID checks and passenger lists: but an endless traffic of cars and trains flows like blood through arterial bridges and venous tunnels.

All this was to Kwasi’s advantage, Patrese thought. Kwasi alone knew where he was going and how he intended to get there. Unlike most criminals, who can hardly find their own assholes without a mirror, Kwasi was super-smart, not
just to have killed three people the way he had, but to have had
Patrese in his apartment more than once and to have come to ‘help out’ at Columbia. He’d murdered his mother, the person to whom he’d been closest in the whole world, and had acted all shocked and surprised when Patrese had arrived to tell him of her death a few hours later. The man could pick daisies in a minefield and never miss a beat.

The cops who found Patrese wanted to take him to hospital straight away. No, he said, he had too much to do. Dufresne arrived, having hauled ass all the way from Morningside Heights, and told Patrese the same thing: go to hospital. You didn’t listen to me last time, Dufresne added, and look what happened.

The manhunt for Kwasi was already in motion: Dufresne had seen to that. An APB of Kwasi’s name and description had gone to every one of the NYPD’s seventy-six precincts, plus the local offices of the Bureau, the ATF, the DEA, the US Marshals, and so on. Bridges, tunnels, airports and railway stations were all being watched.

So there was no reason for Patrese to keep being ornery. A couple of hours in ER, some industrial-strength painkillers, and he would be back on the case. It was either that or him keeling over in half an hour’s time when the shock kicked in. Dufresne would see him back at Kwasi’s apartment. No ifs, no buts, no arguing.

Kwasi had spent a long time preparing for this moment. Life, like chess, was a matter of planning. He didn’t simply show up at the board and play whichever move came into his head; he had strategies, schemes. So too here. He wasn’t making this up as he went along. It had all been in place way beforehand.