White Death (24 page)

killerinstinct32
: U know someone who does. I’m relyin on u. Don’t let me down.

repino
: I’ll try.

killerinstinct32
: U gotta do more than that. Else I vamoose forever.

repino
: OK.

killerinstinct32
: Sure?

repino
: Yeah.

killerinstinct32
: OK. Gotta scoot. Hasta luego.

killerinstinct32
has logged out.

repino
has logged out.

The Beinecke Library opens at nine o’clock every morning, and Tartu was always to be found waiting outside a few minutes before. Rehearsals with the orchestra began at midday, he’d explained to Anna, so he wanted to get in as much time here as possible before he had to go off to the symphony hall.

Tartu was turning out to be something of a minor celebrity in the Beinecke. Many people recognized him, and though few were crass enough to ask for an autograph – not that they’d have gotten much joy, since pens were strictly forbidden in the Reading Room – some smiled at him, or murmured how sorry they were that he’d been caught up in such a dreadful thing. Tartu would smile with unfailing courtesy at each of them, even if they’d disturbed him in the midst of ferocious concentration on a rare manuscript.

He thanked Anna every time she brought up from the archives something new – which was to say, something very old, though new to him. She saw his excitement at a first edition of
Heart of Darkness
, an original Boswell journal, the
manuscripts of
Exiles
and
Far from the Madding Crowd
, the
Lhasa edition of the sacred Tibetan Kanjur. Tartu held them as though they were precious children, tracing a gloved finger across the pages in reverential silence. More than once, Anna thought she saw his eyes moisten. She’d found over the years that, while many people say they love books, few really do; not in the same way that people love art or music, let alone their families. But Tartu clearly did.

He asked her if she was free this Saturday, and if so, whether she’d like to come to the concert as his guest. He couldn’t sit with her, obviously, but he’d make sure she had the best seat in the house, and maybe afterwards he could take her out to dinner, to thank her for all the kindness she’d shown him.

She’d like that, she replied. She’d like that very much.

Late afternoon, barely even dark, and Ulysses Bar on Beacon Street had the gentle buzz of happiness that comes from the end of the day’s work and the start of the evening’s drinking. Ulysses was as Irish as its name suggested, and more authentically so than most of the city’s ‘Irish’ pubs. It was slightly off the Freedom Trail, so it attracted fewer tourists and more proper Bostonians. In particular, it was a favorite watering-hole for those who worked in the vast Suffolk County Courthouse just round the corner in Pemberton Square; and more often than not, that included cops who’d been required to testify in court that day.

Like most cops, Sergeant Glenn O’Kelly both loved and hated court appearances. Loved court appearances, because they were almost guaranteed sources of overtime. If you’d come off a 00:00–08:00 shift, or were scheduled for a 16:00–00:00 one, an appearance during normal court hours meant you had to do double time. Some of the more enterprising members of the department had been known to pull down six-figure salaries this way. Collars for dollars, they called it.

And hated court appearances, because a cop’s natural milieu was out on the streets, not in a witness stand with some smart-ass lawyer in a $3,000 suit trying to make him look stupid. O’Kelly had been a cop for long enough to know that the legal system had precious little to do with determining the innocence or guilt of those on trial. Every court case was a game in which the opposing sides tried to outsmart each other on technical points that made no real difference to the matter in hand.

If you were the defense attorney, part of that game was taking a man like O’Kelly – straightforward, decent, blunt – and making him look shifty and stupid by tripping him up on the kind of mistakes people made ten times a day. Nothing pissed off a cop more than a defendant who was guilty as sin but who walked anyway because he had a lawyer using more tricks than Penn and Teller. One day, O’Kelly always thought, one day a lawyer like that would have his house burgled or his wife raped by the kind of scum he’d just got acquitted, and you could guarantee that then he’d come running to the cops at top speed.

All this was going through O’Kelly’s head as he sipped his Guinness, because he’d spent the last couple hours testifying in a quadruple murder down in Mattapan, one of south Boston’s unlovelier areas. Lot of Haitians there. High crime rate. The do-gooding liberals would tell you the two weren’t connected, but O’Kelly knew what the crime rate was like back in Haiti itself, and … well, you do the math. That was O’Kelly. Blunt, told it like it was.

He and his fellow officers – five of them had been called to testify today – chewed the fat for a while, and they agreed that this case was as open and shut as any they’d ever come across. No way would the suspect get off. No way.

Buoyed by this – another bad guy off the streets for a long, long time – O’Kelly finished his beer and said he had to go. His wife was expecting their first child, and the in-laws were coming over for supper. Time to go play happy families. His colleagues sent him on his way with a couple of mother-in-law jokes. He’d heard them all before. Didn’t stop him laughing at them.

O’Kelly had parked in one of the multi-level parking lots on Beacon Street: as in most cities, parking space was at a premium. He went to the pay station, paid his ticket, and rang his wife as he headed for his car. Yes, he was on his way home. No, he hadn’t had too much to drink. He didn’t mind the nagging. It was white noise to him already, only a few years into their marriage. By the time they were senior citizens, he wouldn’t hear it at all. He blipped the fob to unlock his car, and told her he had to go: he was on his way.

A strange distortion, a darkening, in the window of his car door as he opened it. A figure behind him, arm raised and then coming hard down and round, something unyielding smacked on to his temple, and his final, surreal thought before it all went black was that he knew what his wife would say: Some people will do anything, ANYTHING, to get out of having dinner with the in-laws.

It was forty-five minutes or so before Ferris Bowe, one of the men who’d been drinking with Glenn O’Kelly in Ulysses, arrived at his own car in the same multi-level. He’d probably had a little too much to drink, truth be told: enough to be done for DUI, that was, though cops tended not to bust other cops unless they were several times over the limit. And Ferris Bowe certainly wasn’t that. He wasn’t drunk, merely feeling good.

Feeling good right up to the point he saw O’Kelly’s cell
phone on the ground.

He knew it was O’Kelly’s not only because he’d parked his own car pretty much next to O’Kelly’s this morning, but also because the phone had a green and white clip-on plastic cover adorned with a giant shamrock, and only O’Kelly was daft enough to have put some shit like that on his phone. Bowe picked up the handset and scrolled through the menu till he found the list of most recent calls. O’Kelly was always calling his wife: her number was bound to be on it sooner rather than later.

HOME,
it said. He clicked on it. A few seconds while the connection was made, and then a ringtone, slightly muffled: poor reception on account of being inside a large concrete building, probably.

She picked up. ‘I thought you said you were coming back right away.’ No ‘hello’, no preamble. Her voice was shrill. Hormones, Bowe thought, though his knowledge of pregnant women’s behavior was strictly theoretical.

‘Er … It’s not your husband, Mrs O’Kelly. It’s Ferris Bowe. I’m a colleague of his.’

‘Where the hell is he?’

‘I thought he was with you.’

‘No.’ Alarm behind the shrillness now.

‘Well, he left us, oh, almost an hour ago. Said he was going straight home. I found his cell in the parking lot. He must have dropped it.’

Cops don’t like to look foolish by over-reacting to something that turns out to be innocent: the Boston PD had been the butt of many jokes when they’d mistaken some battery-powered LED placards advertising a kids’ movie for improvised explosive devices. But still less do they like to do nothing in a situation that turns out to have been critical. Looking dumb is one thing. Having your ass handed to you by a disciplinary committee is worse. But screwing around when you could have saved someone’s life – especially the life of a fellow officer – well, that was the kind of thing
that sent cops to the bottle and a lonely end with a hosepipe and an exhaust tube.

Bowe got on to his radio.

‘10-56, officer in trouble. Repeat 10-56, officer in trouble.’

The great machinery of law enforcement spluttered and coughed into life. Officers were sent to Sergeant O’Kelly’s home in Roslindale Village, to look after his wife and be there in case this was all a misunderstanding and O’Kelly turned up safe, sound and sheepish. The department’s Special Operations Unit, which comprises traffic cops, traced O’Kelly’s likely route home, seeing if they could find any clues en route: anyone who’d seen something unusual, perhaps.

There was no CCTV in the parking garage, no attendant who’d seen anything: the barriers were automated, and raised when a paid ticket was inserted into the slot. The only time an attendant came down was when there was a problem. A description of O’Kelly’s car was circulated: it seemed that whoever had abducted him had either driven it away himself or got O’Kelly to do it at gunpoint.

Boston PD alerted Cambridge PD: that was standard procedure while these killings were going on. Sure, the Cambridge dispatcher said, we’ve got the main suspect under constant surveillance. Don’t think he’s been anywhere near central Boston today, but we’ll check anyway and get back to you.

The dispatcher checked with the surveillance unit. No, they said, it’s not our shift. The Bureau boys are on now. That was their deal: alternating shifts between Cambridge PD and the FBI’s Boston field office, eight hours on and eight hours off. Neither body had enough manpower to do the job round the clock.

The dispatcher called the Bureau. No, they said, it’s not our shift. The Cambridge police department are on now. We’re taking over at midnight.

A classic, solid-gold bureaucratic snafu. Absolutely textbook.

A brave soul dared tell Anderssen what had happened, and ducked for cover when the inevitable explosion came. No one had been watching Unzicker since four o’clock this afternoon. It was now almost eight. He could have been anywhere.

Find him, Anderssen yelled. Fucking find him,
now
, or heads were going to roll.

In the circumstances, Anderssen could probably have rephrased this to advantage, but no one was going to tell him while he was in that mood.

Patrese hit the sirens and hauled ass up the interstate. He felt he could do this route blindfold by now, New Haven to Boston.

Two frantic search teams in neighboring cities: Boston cops looking for O’Kelly, Cambridge cops looking for Unzicker. A macabre race, trying to find one of them before he killed the other one.

Patrese’s phone rang incessantly as he drove. First, Boston PD, wanting permission to go public with the search. Yes, Patrese said instantly: saving O’Kelly’s life was the priority, everything else be damned.

Next was Dufresne. Nursultan’s private jet had left Newark this morning, having filed a flight plan for Dulles in Washington, DC. It had returned to Newark from Dulles about a half hour ago. Nursultan had been at a Central Asian investment conference in the capital: a call to the venue had confirmed his presence there all day. Nursultan could not have been responsible for O’Kelly’s disappearance.

After Dufresne came Kieseritsky. Tartu had spent the morning in the library, the afternoon in the symphony hall, and the evening at his hotel, where he was right now. That ruled him out too.

And finally Anderssen, also wanting permission to go public – but this time about the search for Unzicker. Trickier one, this. They’d spent the past few days doing everything they could not to spook Unzicker, and there was still the possibility that he might have nothing to do with this. It wasn’t Unzicker who’d called the surveillance off, was it? He might be sitting in his lab in that crazy Lego building doing some impossibly complex calculations on his Misha project, and be totally oblivious to all this.

But no. If they found Unzicker –
when
they found him – they were going to take him in anyway and question him, so he was going to get freaked soon enough. And someone who hadn’t seen O’Kelly might still have seen Unzicker. Yes, Patrese said to Anderssen as well: make it public. Let’s throw the kitchen sink at it.

They did just that. News bulletins at nine and ten, police roadblocks and information boards, and everywhere the unmistakable sounds common to pretty much every police investigation since the dawn of time: the fading footsteps of a bolting horse, and the loud slamming of a stable door.

Unzicker lived with around four hundred other graduate students in the Tang Residence Hall, a twenty-four-story tower block hard up against the Charles River. There were armed police at all entrances, waiting for him to return. Shortly after ten o’clock, he did exactly that.

Well, not exactly that. He was about fifty yards away when another grad student walked past him, did a double-take, checked his stride and said: ‘Hey, man, it’s me, Marcus. You know the cops are looking for you?’

Unzicker looked blankly at him.

‘Jesus, freak: say something.’ Marcus went on. ‘The cops are looking for you. Looks like the damn SWAT team set up shop in Tang.’