White Death (31 page)

Let’s take control
, Anderssen had said.
Let’s make these fuckers dance to our tune for a change.
Anderssen had been angry, and he’d been right. In every case apart from the easiest ones, there comes a time when you have to take stock and be prepared to push off in an entirely new direction if need be. Following Unzicker round hadn’t brought them great joy so far: nor the surveillance on Tartu and Nursultan, come to think of it.

Neither Tartu nor Nursultan could have killed Glenn O’Kelly. Unzicker could have done, but denied doing so. How were the three of them connected? Unzicker and Tartu didn’t know each other, at least not that Patrese was aware of, but Nursultan knew them both. And Nursultan’s lust for power would certainly fit with the profile of the organized killer, of Ivory.

He couldn’t have killed O’Kelly himself: but he could have gotten someone else to do it for him. Maybe they were taking it in turn. Tartu had talked about playing a few simultaneous exhibitions up in New Haven, taking on multiple opponents. Was something like that going on here? Was Kwasi deemed so good that he needed more than one
opponent to make it a fair contest? Maybe Unzicker killed one, then Kwasi, then Nursultan, then Kwasi, then Tartu …

No. That sounded ludicrous. The chances of finding four people rather than two with similar pathologies were exponentially vast. And each of Ivory’s victims had been killed in exactly the same way. Patrese was experienced enough to be able to tell if Glenn O’Kelly and Chase Evans had been killed by different people, and he was absolutely sure that they hadn’t. Ebony and Ivory were different people. Ivory and Ivory weren’t.

Ivory was one person. Most likely, one of Unzicker, Tartu or Nursultan.

Most likely, Patrese realized, but not definitely. Ivory could be someone else entirely. Someone who also knew Kwasi, who was also good at chess …

In other words, he realized, someone like Inessa.

Kwasi had told Patrese how much he disliked Inessa.
Told
Patrese, that was. Didn’t necessarily make it true. Inessa seemed to bear less of a grudge, but that didn’t necessarily make that true either.

OK, Patrese thought. Reverse it. Why
couldn’t
Inessa be Ivory?

Inessa couldn’t be Ivory because it couldn’t be a woman doing the killings.

Inessa was small, but she was fit and toned. More importantly, she was sufficiently plausible and attractive to get men to help her, to do what she wanted. Patrese could imagine several scenarios, beyond the strictly obvious, in which Inessa could have caught Chase Evans or Glenn O’Kelly off guard, and thus allowed her to incapacitate them before setting to work on chopping them up.

Strike one as an objection.

Inessa couldn’t be Ivory because she had no motive.

Well, that wasn’t necessarily true either. She had no motive that Patrese yet knew about, but she’d been the only woman other than Regina in Kwasi’s life, and it had been Regina’s murder that had started this whole thing. Again, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario in which Regina and Inessa had somehow fought for primacy over Kwasi.

Strike two as an objection.

It couldn’t be Inessa because she had an alibi.

Well, did she? Not any that Patrese knew, for the simple reason that he’d never asked her. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t. She certainly hadn’t been with him the afternoon O’Kelly was murdered. And she was at the same university as Chase Evans.

Strike three as an objection.

Motive, means, opportunity; and it seemed like Inessa might have all of them.

Next question: what should Patrese do about it?

In the first instance, he had only two options; don’t ask her, or ask her.

If he didn’t ask her, there were two possibilities.

First, that it wasn’t her, and that in years to come, when the killer had been caught, tried, convicted and banged up for life, he’d breathe a sigh of relief that he hadn’t gone around shooting his mouth off.

Second, that it
was
her, and that presumably she’d killed again before they’d caught her, because Patrese hadn’t had the balls to do what was his duty as a Bureau agent. He’d have at least one death on his conscience, maybe more.

That didn’t bear much thinking about, so he tried to put it from his mind.

If he
did
ask her, there were also two possibilities.

First, that she’d understand his logic and reasoning. She’d feel for him having to ask such an awful thing; she’d calmly provide alibis and reasons why she couldn’t have done it; and she’d tell Patrese how he was a wonderful law enforcement officer and an even better man, and reward him for these attributes by fucking him till the break of dawn.

Second, that she’d go apeshit.
Apeshit
. She’d be livid that he could even ask such a question, incandescent that he clearly had so little faith in her; and if that was the way he felt, which it clearly was, then she never wanted to see him again, and that would be the end of their dalliance and his testicles pretty much simultaneously.

Four possible scenarios.

Two good, two bad.

What was the worst of the four?

Clearly that he didn’t ask, and that she turned out to be the killer.

So he had to do the opposite. He had to ask.

Not to do so would be a breach of professional duty egregious enough to have him dismissed on the spot, and he was probably running pretty close to that edge as it was.

He had to ask.

He picked up his cellphone and dialed. She answered on the second ring.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You OK?’

‘Yeah. Just need to talk to you.’

‘You still in Cambridge?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then come round.’

‘You’re back here?’

‘Man runs out on you first thing in the morning, you don’t stay around all day waiting for him to come back.’ Her tone was teasing. ‘Dudley House, just off of Harvard Square.’

Patrese rehearsed what he was going to say all the way to her accommodation block. His gut churned, and it took him a few moments to recognize this particular variety of nerves. It was the same way he’d felt as a student when about to break up with a girlfriend: the dread of hurting someone against the need to go through with it, the determination not to resort to the old clichés about still being friends and it being him rather than them.

Inessa opened the door and kissed him. ‘Looks like you need a drink,’ she said. ‘You want to go for a coffee in the block café? Best coffee in Harvard Square. Something stronger? I got some beer somewhere. Baltika. Russian beer. Not chilled horse piss like Bud or Coors.’

‘That would be great.’

‘Kitchen’s across the hallway. Back in a sec.’

She slipped out of the door. Patrese looked round the living room. A few trophies on the sideboard, though not as many as he’d expected. A poster-size photo of her from the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition: she’d been wearing a black-and-white bikini, of course. A magazine cover shout proclaiming her the Jessica Alba of chess. A couple of pictures of her teaching chess in schools, with teenage boys hunched lovelorn over the board, more interested in chess for that hour than they’d ever been before or would be again. And a monochrome portrait of a woman with her head shaved, staring brooding and challenging down the lens of the camera. It took Patrese a few moments to realize that this, too, was Inessa.

She came back with the bottle of Baltika. ‘Here.’ She handed him the beer and followed his gaze. ‘Yeah, I shaved it all off once. Not my best look.’

‘Then why do you keep it there?’

‘To remind me it wasn’t my best look.’

‘And why did you do it?’

‘Shave it off? To be taken seriously. I’d had enough of all the bullshit. You’re always aware of how you look, how you’re always being looked at, so you can’t totally lose yourself in the game like you should. You get Neanderthals who think you must be having your period when you’re playing badly. Tell them the queen’s the most powerful piece on the board, and the whole game’s a feminist inversion of the male patriarchy, and they suddenly shut the hell up.’

‘Am I going to have to apologize for the manifold shortcomings of my gender?’

‘You’d never have enough time. But truth is, it wasn’t only the male players doing it. It was all the other women too, with their catty remarks and sniping behind my back about what good photographers I had, what amazing lighting, anyone could look like that if they had all that time and money spent on them, yadda yadda yadda, you know the kind of thing. I had a sort of breakdown, to be honest. Lost my shit for a little bit.’

‘Like Kwasi. Chess and madness.’

‘You got it. And then you wonder why there aren’t more women chess players.’

‘Or maybe women are just too reasonable to spend all their time on chess.’

‘There is that.’

Patrese had got it all word perfect in his head, and now it fled from him like morning mist before the sun. ‘Inessa-I-have-to-ask-you-did-you-kill-those-people?’

Reactions flitted across her face like seasons: bewilderment, as she tried to make sense of what he’d said; amusement, as she took it for some kind of joke; disbelief, that Patrese clearly meant what he’d asked; and anger, as the implications of the question sunk in.

‘Did I
what
?’

She wasn’t screaming or shouting yet, which almost made it worse. He could see the anger rising in her cheeks.

He took a deep breath and said it again; slower this time, better.

‘Did you kill those people? Darrell Showalter. Chase Evans. Glenn O’Kelly.’

She stared at him, and loaded her gaze with all those things women could call on so much better than men: scorn, disdain, contempt.

She didn’t ask him whether he was joking, or why he thought she might have done it, because she knew the answers, and Patrese could tell she hoped – correction, she
had
hoped – that he’d have been smart enough to know them too.

Without speaking, she got up, went over to her desk and picked up her diary.

‘You tell me the dates they were killed, and I’ll tell you what I was doing at those times. OK?’

‘OK.’ He knew the dates off the top of his head, and he suspected she did too, after all the time she’d spent studying the case; but maybe she was making him sweat, and he wouldn’t blame her for that, not really. He wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. ‘Saturday, October thirtieth.’

Inessa flicked to the relevant page in her diary. ‘Faculty drinks party. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies. But I didn’t go. I had the flu, I was feeling lousy.’

‘And yet the next day you were on TV talking about Kwasi’s title defense.’

‘The next day I’d had a good night’s sleep and had dosed myself up with medicine. I can tell you which pharmacist I went to, if you want to check their records, see what I bought when.’

‘So you were here all alone that night?’

‘No, I had an orgy to try and shake the flu. Yes, of course I was alone. Don’t you tend to be, when you’re ill?’

‘Following weekend. Sixth–seventh November.’

Flick.

‘Down in New York with my sister, all weekend.’

Patrese thought for a moment. ‘She was running the marathon, right?’

‘Right. I went to watch, give her support, all that.’

‘Where d’you stay?’

‘Old family friend’s place in Tribeca. I can give you all the details.’

‘Wednesday the seventeenth.’

Flick.

‘I was down in New Haven all that week. That’s when I first started helping you. That particular day: I looked at a few of the case files in the morning, then I went to the library all afternoon. You can ask my sister.’

‘Your sister seems to be your only alibi.’

‘Yeah. Her and the thousands of others who ran the New York marathon; her and everyone else in the library that afternoon.’ Her eyes brimmed, the anger suddenly spilling over into grief. ‘I can’t believe you, Franco. I can’t believe you’d even … I really liked you, you know? I really did.’

Liked. Did.
Past tense.

One of the scenarios he’d mapped out was that Inessa would be livid that he could even ask such a question, and that she’d never want to see him again.

Ah, well. At least he was getting better at understanding women.

Rainer Tartu lay in bed and ran his thumb along the edge of his X-Acto knife; back and forth, back and forth, testing the blade against his skin. Scalpel sharp, as he knew it would be; as he
needed
it to be. Good.

The concert had been a triumph, with three encores and a standing ovation that had lasted minutes. The conductor had made a touching little speech in which he’d thanked Tartu for stepping in at such short notice and had said he couldn’t imagine anyone having done it better. In the front row, Anna had glowed.

Tartu had taken her out to dinner afterwards as promised: the Ibiza, a Spanish place which was one of New Haven’s better – and most expensive – restaurants. Over
bacalao, solomillo, caldo gallego
and
ensalada de pulpo
, they’d talked about James Joyce, Bobby Fischer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Anna’s divorce.

He’d walked her home, but hadn’t tried to kiss her. He wanted to be absolutely sure that she trusted him, and he knew that playing the gentleman was the best way to ensure that. Unless she trusted him absolutely, he wouldn’t be able to do what he intended: he wouldn’t be able to do what had, in fact, been his main motivation for coming to New Haven in the first place.

The concert had been a happy coincidence, not to mention the most perfect of cover stories. But Tartu had something else in mind. It was something that he’d got away with in more countries than he cared to remember, and something that as far as he knew no one had ever suspected had even happened, let alone managed to link with him.

He ran his thumb over the X-Acto’s blade again.