White Death (21 page)

Unzicker had told his therapist all this. The mutism had begun to fade in adolescence, perhaps because his skill with computers had given him the confidence to believe he wasn’t a total loss at everything. Not that he could be described as entirely normal even now. During his time at Harvard, Unzicker had used his cellphone to take photos of female students’ legs under their desks, and had written poetry which was in various measures obscene, deranged, pathetic, violent, and almost totally lacking in literary merit.

He’d railed against rich kids and hedonists with their ‘Mercedes, golden necklaces, trust funds, vodka, cognac and debaucheries’. He’d written an ode to his girlfriend Jelly, who he said lived in outer space, traveled everywhere by spaceship, and called him Spanky. He’d signed these poems with a simple question mark, and had started referring to himself as Mr Question Mark or Mr Eroteme, another word for the punctuation mark.

The therapist had been sufficiently alarmed by Unzicker’s behavior to have arranged a duress code with her assistant: if she ever spoke the name of one of her former colleagues, now dead, the assistant was to call security at once. She’d never needed to use it, but in other fields Unzicker’s behavior had been reported to three separate bodies: the student affairs office, the dean’s office and the campus police. They’d each said the same thing: as long as Unzicker made no overt, direct threats against himself or other people, there was nothing they could do.

Why hadn’t Harvard disclosed any of this to MIT when Unzicker had applied for his postgraduate course there? Because federal law expressly forbade it. Only if Unzicker gave his consent could Harvard hand over the files; and he hadn’t done so. Patrese could get the information, but MIT couldn’t. Even if they could have, perhaps it would have made no difference. Unzicker was by all accounts a computer scientist of egregiously rare talent: no university, let alone the top technological institute in the world, was going to pass up a candidate like him. He was odd, he was a genius. They went together. Deal with it.

And now to the third point: Unzicker’s behavior at MIT itself. He was famous, or perhaps infamous, for his ‘hacks’ – MIT slang for practical jokes, usually with a technological element. During a keynote speech, he’d patched his own electronics into the audio hook-up and gradually made the
speaker’s voice sound higher and higher. He’d hacked into
the MIT website and changed the home page to an announce
ment that Disney was buying MIT. He’d altered elevator announcements so they said dumb things.

People who pulled these kinds of stunts at MIT were often seen as folk heroes, but Unzicker wasn’t going to be winning any popularity contests. People thought him arrogant, aloof, obnoxious. They rarely saw him with anyone who might constitute a friend. He ate every meal in the dining hall alone, and discouraged those who tried to be sociable and sit with him.

No one had officially complained about him at MIT, but that could be explained by two things: his immersion in Project Misha seemed to leave him little time for extra-curricular activities; and MIT liked to think of itself as less uptight and more freewheeling than Harvard. MIT girls might be more likely than Harvard princesses to laugh off a clumsy weirdo’s approach.

Whether that was the case or not, however, paled into insignificance against one thing: that the previous Thursday, less than twenty-four hours before Kwasi had gone on the run, Thomas Unzicker had attended MIThenge – which he’d mentioned in his e-mail to Kwasi – and had gone as a giant
tarot card. The presence of tarot cards at the murder scenes
was still not public knowledge, so Unzicker’s choice of costume was either incredibly coincidental, incredibly arrogant or incredibly stupid. And Patrese needed to remind no one what he thought about the prospects of coincidence.

Opinion in the room was split: not on whether Thomas Unzicker was a person of interest to the investigation, as he clearly was, but what their best course of action was. Anderssen wanted to bring Unzicker in, shake him down, smack him around if necessary. Dufresne wanted to bug Unzicker’s office and room, and see what they could get that way. Patrese agreed with neither of them.

There were two things here, he said. They had to find White, the person playing with Kwasi, but they also had to find Black, Kwasi himself. Assume Unzicker’s White. Bringing him in is only going to cause problems. We bring him in, arrest him, charge him, Kwasi breaks off contact. We bring him in and release him, that messes up his mental state still further, he freaks out, Kwasi realizes he’s no longer reliable, Kwasi breaks off contact. As for bugging Unzicker: the guy’s a tech whiz, he can probably spot a recording device or some software monitoring program at a hundred paces. He finds it, he freaks out, we’re back to square one again.

No. What they were going to do was this. Mount surveillance on Unzicker; not electronic watching, but proper human surveillance. Everywhere he went, everyone he met. If he was White, and he was the one who attacked Officer Larsen in Egleston Square on Saturday, then he’d want to try again soon. His bloodlust would be up, and Ebony and Ivory were killing in turn, so presumably Kwasi couldn’t kill again till Ivory had done so. Chess rules: one move each, strict rotation. They’d catch Ivory – Unzicker, perhaps – in the process of killing, and then try and use him as bait to lure Kwasi out.

But they had to catch Unzicker first. And, of course, there
was always the possibility that it wasn’t him at all. That he
was the most likely suspect didn’t mean he was the only suspect. If Kwasi was playing some form of warped chess with people’s lives, his ego was such that he’d only consider an opponent whom he deemed worthy. And there were two other people Patrese could think of who fit that bill: Tartu and Nursultan.

Tartu was now right here in New Haven, where the first two bodies had been found. Kieseritsky had put discreet surveillance on to him – he was staying at the same hotel as Patrese, which was either convenient or awkward, depending on your point of view – and so far he’d done nothing other than that what he claimed to be there for. If he wasn’t in the library, he was in the symphony hall. He’d been in New Haven all weekend, so he couldn’t have been the one who’d attacked Larsen. But he was still, if not an outright suspect, certainly a person of interest, if only for his refusal to help them. Were his reasons purely innocent, or more nefarious? Only time would tell.

Nursultan was a trickier case, not least because he had diplomatic immunity. When in the US, he spent most of his time in New York, with odd trips up to Cambridge to visit Unzicker – including one this weekend, which put him in the frame as at least a possibility for the attack on Larsen. If Nursultan did turn out to be involved, they’d have to tread very carefully or risk an international incident. But they’d cross that bridge when they came to it, and in the meantime there was nothing to stop them keeping tabs on him.

Unzicker, Tartu, Nursultan. Cambridge, New Haven, New York. Anderssen, Kieseritsky, Dufresne. Each individual surveillance operation would be the responsibility of the respective detective in charge. They’d all answer to Patrese, who’d oversee the whole thing, the entire tri-state operation.

And though waiting for one of them to slip up was all well and good, Patrese wanted to be more proactive. He
wanted to know how it felt to be playing such a game,
wanted to know the pressures, the strategies, the tactics. Since Tartu had refused to help, what Patrese needed was someone who was an excellent chess player, who knew Kwasi well, and who had no reason to want to protect him.

And if she looked like Inessa Baikal did, so much the better.

Inessa was a postgraduate student at Harvard, which Patrese hadn’t appreciated until he rang her. While they talked, he flicked quickly through the list of those students seeking therapy. Her name wasn’t among them.

Yes, she said, of course she’d help: not just because of the Kwasi connection, but because of the Harvard one too. She’d been wondering whether or not to volunteer her services anyway, but she’d been sure that the Bureau had been deluged with offers of help. Yes, he could come and see her at Harvard any time, but if he wanted to see her right now she could make it even easier for him. Right now, she wasn’t at Harvard at all.

She was in New Haven.

Business or pleasure? Patrese asked.

Both. She’d come to consult some texts for her doctorate, and she always got special treatment when she came to examine Yale’s rare books. Her sister was the librarian.

Anna Levin’s your
sister
? Patrese spluttered.

Sure, Inessa said. Different surname, because Anna had gotten married – briefly – but as sisterly as sisters could be. They’d been born in St Petersburg – Russia, not Florida – but after their mother had been killed by a vagrant seeking vodka, their father had brought them to the US and Brookline, a town encircled by, but fiercely resistant to, Boston. When its neighbor, West Roxbury, had become part of Boston in the late nineteenth century, Brookline had refused to follow suit, a position it had maintained ever since. The town was more than a third Jewish, many of them like Inessa and Anna of Russian heritage, and the inhabitants liked to think of themselves as both reflecting and reinforcing the town’s spirit of independence.

Anna came on the line herself. I tried to tell you, she said, the first time you came to ask me about the tarot cards. I tried to tell you twice, in fact, but you were in such a hurry that you’d talked over the top of me, and then I figured maybe you knew anyway, which is why you’d come to see me in the first place.

Patrese asked Anna if she’d come across Tartu. Of course, she said. He comes in every day. Very nice, very knowledgeable. The softening in her voice made Patrese wonder whether she had a soft spot for the Estonian.

It could all be harmless coincidence, of course: Inessa and Anna being sisters, Tartu coming to New Haven. In fact, Patrese couldn’t see how it could be anything else. He’d sought out both Anna and Inessa independently of each other, not knowing their relationship. Neither of them had come to him. And Tartu would still have been in New York playing for the world title had Kwasi not hightailed. If there was anything suspicious in any of this, therefore, Patrese couldn’t see it.

Inessa said she’d be round at the Bureau’s office in a half-hour.

She was smaller than Patrese had expected – five two, five three at most – but perhaps that was because he’d only ever seen her on TV. In the flesh, her eyes seemed larger, her hair darker. She came half a step too close when she introduced herself, held on to his hand a beat too long. Patrese wondered whether these were signals, or whether that was just the way she was with everybody; a flirt, a space invader, someone who – if the gawps of several task force members were anything to go by – enjoyed the effect she clearly had on men.

‘Ready to start?’ he asked her.

‘Listen, I’ve been stuck in front of a computer half the night – online poker tournaments, that’s how I make most of my money these days – and then in the library these last couple of hours, so what I’d really like to do is get outside and stretch my legs. I’ve brought my running kit. I was going to ask whether you want to come with me, but …’ She pointed to his plaster cast.

‘I don’t run on my hands.’

Her laughter tinkled round the room. ‘OK. Then let’s go.’

He drove her to his hotel. They changed in his room: her in the bedroom, he in the bathroom. The plaster cast made things slower and more difficult than usual, but he was getting better and quicker at it. When he was in his running gear, he knocked before going back in, to check he wouldn’t be surprising her half dressed.

He opened the door, and tried very, very hard not to look her up and down.

And failed.

She was wearing black lycra leggings and a lime green long-sleeved top. Her hair was tied back, and she fizzed with suppressed energy. How she managed to sit still long enough to play chess – or poker, for that matter – he had no idea.

They set off quicker than Patrese would have liked. It wasn’t his arm that was the problem; the cast was light, and it didn’t bother him too much. It was rather that he preferred to start slowly, ease himself into the exercise, let his body get used to the work. After a couple of minutes, he was breathing hard and half considered asking her to slow down, make some excuse about his broken wrist; but he knew that she’d only look at him and laugh, and shred his male pride to the four winds.

Be subtle, he thought. Give her an open-ended question, get her to do the talking. Maybe that would force her to slow down a bit.

‘Tell me about Kwasi,’ he said, timing it so he could talk between breaths.

‘God, where to start? Everything you see or hear about him is true, and yet it’s also untrue. Everything he does, he can do exactly the opposite. He’s so secretive about lots of things, and then sometimes he’ll say something so candid it takes your breath away. One minute he can be really generous, the next he wouldn’t give you a dime to save your life. I’ve seen him be kind and consoling to someone who’s just lost a game, and I’ve seen him take people apart not only at the board but in the postmortem afterwards.’

‘Postmortem?’ Three syllables was about Patrese’s limit as he puffed.

‘Oh!’ She clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Not your kind of postmortem. A chess postmortem. After the game, the players, and sometimes the spectators too, discuss where the game was won and lost, what different moves you could have played, and so on. If you’ve won, you’re supposed to be, you know, magnanimous. But I’ve seen Kwasi call his victims trash, fools, losers, all those things.’

‘We all have that.’

‘What?’

‘Contradictions.’ Puff, puff. ‘Paradoxes.’

‘Sure. But his are so extreme. He’s like two different
people. Sometimes he’s the biggest jerk in the world; arro
gant, rude, uncouth, spoilt, egocentric, greedy, vulgar. And sometimes he’s all sweetness and light.’