White Death (38 page)

Anyhows. First thing you do after drying the skin is wet it again. Contrary, I know, but that’s how it is. Just got to make it a little bit flexible once more. You boil up some water and put bran flakes in it. Let this sit for an hour, then strain the water through a colander. Keep the brown water, throw the soggy bran flakes away. Then boil up some more water, dissolve some salt in it and add this all to the brown water.

Next bit’s tricky. Be careful. Make sure you’re wearing gloves and a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe a cloth round your mouth and some safety goggles too if need be. Get some battery acid – every motor store from here to Detroit sells it – and pour it into the water. Don’t let it splash. You get any of that on you, you’ll sure know about it. Stir it all up, then put the skin in the solution, pressing it down and stirring with a long stick till it’s fully soaked. Leave it there for three-quarters of an hour, making sure you stir it every now and then so every part of the skin gets exposed to the solution just the same.

Take the skin out and put it very gently in some clear, warm water. Rinse it here for about five minutes. Add a box of baking soda to the rinse water to neutralize some of the acid in the skin. Then you take the skin out and hang it over a fence or somesuch to drain. When it’s damp – no longer soaking wet, but not yet bone dry either – take it off the fence and paint it with oil. Then lay it flat on a wood pallet to dry properly before you cut it.

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

It was the endgame now, cold and clinical. Just Patrese and Kwasi, one-on-one: the dizzying complications and legerdemain of the middlegame gone, distractions now down to a minimum. But the simplicity of the endgame is also its difficulty. It requires nerveless calculation, boundless patience, and the ability not to get spooked by the knowledge that your first mistake in the endgame is usually your last too.

The Bureau held a preliminary investigation into the death of Unzicker, as they always do when one of their agents kills a suspect in the line of duty. Agents deemed to have acted inappropriately are suspended on full pay pending further inquiries. There’d be a fuller hearing in due course, but at this stage there was no question of Agent Franco Patrese being suspended.

Quite the opposite, in fact: his behavior had been exemplary, entirely in keeping with the standards the Bureau demanded of its employees. There was no doubt that in killing Unzicker, Agent Patrese had saved Nursultan’s life, and no blame could be attached to him for failing to prevent Unzicker from killing the two bodyguards. Indeed, only Agent Patrese’s resourcefulness in getting himself to the balcony in the first place had prevented a catastrophe of even greater proportions.

Nursultan might have faced charges for inciting his bodyguards to beat Unzicker up, but it was his word against Patrese’s – the other three witnesses to the incident were dead – and Nursultan maintained (or rather, Levenfish maintained on his behalf) that he hadn’t intended his men to harm Unzicker, but had simply hoped that the threat of it would be enough to persuade Unzicker into dropping his absurd blackmail demand.

Truth was, Patrese didn’t fight too hard to have Nursultan charged. He knew Nursultan was as keen to find Kwasi as he was, since Kwasi had all the Misha material. Now Unzicker was dead, perhaps Patrese could use Nursultan to help flush Kwasi out. Exactly how he was going to manage this, he had no idea: but at this stage he wanted to keep as many of his options open as possible.

In any case, Nursultan wouldn’t be remanded in custody whatever the charge: he’d be granted bail, which would be chicken feed to someone like him, and all that Patrese would have done would be to have pissed someone off that he might yet need.

Patrese had lit a fire under the asses of the department responsible for issuing subpoenas, but their butts were clearly made out of heat-resistant material: they sent back a stock e-mail saying that his request was still being considered. The Bureau’s Los Angeles field office was trying to get hold of the company in Van Nuys that made the masks, and secure a copy of their mailing list. No subpoenas, Patrese had said. Break some limbs if you have to.

He went to the Cambridge police HQ and told them, hand on heart, that he would not rest until he’d found the man who’d murdered their colleague Max Anderssen. That was three cops Kwasi had killed already: three reasons why Kwasi better pray that Patrese rather than another cop found him, as cops don’t take too kindly to those who kill their own. Not, Patrese thought, that he could guarantee being much more sanguine about it than they were. He’d been a cop once, and in his heart he still felt more a Pittsburgh boy who liked beer and football than he did a shiny-shoed Hoover man.

When he’d finished with the Cambridge police, he rang Dufresne and reminded him to be alert. The next victim was bound to be in New York, right? That had always been Kwasi’s pattern, alternating moves. His MO had been a little off with Anderssen – he’d killed Anderssen on the spot, rather than taken him away as he’d done the other white victims – but that entire murder seemed to have been opportunistic. Kwasi had gone to the Stata Center to get the Misha stuff: he couldn’t have known for sure that Unzicker’s keycard would trigger an alert, let alone that Anderssen would be the one to respond to that alert.

Then he went round to Dudley House and knocked on Inessa’s door.

‘Who is it?’ she called out from inside.

‘It’s me. Patrese.’

‘Go away.’

‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Please. Just hear me out. Things have changed.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘With the case. With Kwasi. Listen – I can’t stand here like a lemon shouting through a door. Please let me in. Let me say my piece, and then I’ll go if you still want.’

Silence stretched behind the closed door: then Patrese heard footsteps, and Inessa opened the door. She was wearing a faded Harvard sweatshirt, and her hair was pulled back. She nodded to the room beyond: come in.

When she’d closed the door behind them, Patrese explained what had just happened. Inessa knew that Anderssen and Unzicker were dead, of course – it had been all over the news – but the public story was that Unzicker had been mentally disturbed. The networks knew nothing of Misha, and Patrese imagined that Nursultan for one would want it to stay that way for as long as possible. And of course Inessa knew nothing about what Tartu had discovered on the ICC.

‘Wow,’ she said when Patrese had finished. ‘Wow.’

‘So I’m sorry for asking you, er, what I did the other day, but …’

‘I understand.’

‘… I had to do it, you know? As a Bureau agent, I had to do it.’

‘I know. I was so mad at you for a while that I couldn’t even think past that. But then, when I began to calm down, I realized how hard it must have been for you, and I realized that you really didn’t have that much choice. So let’s forget about it.’

‘You mean that?’

‘Sure.’

‘Even though you didn’t seem that keen to see me just now, making me wait before you opened the door.’

Inessa laughed. ‘Gotta make a man sweat sometimes, no?’ She eased herself up on to tiptoes and kissed Patrese lightly on the mouth. ‘You staying here awhile, or you going back to New Haven?’

‘Going back.’

‘Want me to come?’

‘That’s kind, but you’ve done more than enough to help …’

‘I meant more to keep you company.’ She kissed him again. ‘I’ve missed you.’

Patrese smiled. ‘I’m not sure how much time I’m going to have.’

‘Heck, Franco, I don’t care. And I don’t throw myself like this at just anyone. Give me a few minutes to pack my stuff – I’ve got some work to take with me – and I’ll be with you.’

‘Sounds good. I’ve got something I want to run past you anyway.’

Here’s what Patrese had been thinking. Now they knew that Kwasi was both Ebony and Ivory, and that each victim represented a chess piece in some way, they could start ticking off the ones he’d already accounted for. Neither of the kings. One of two queens: Regina, the black queen. One of four bishops: Showalter, white. Three of four knights: Evans for white, Barbero and Mieses for black. Three of four rooks: O’Kelly and Anderssen for white, Lewis for black. And none of the pawns.

There were 32 pieces on a chessboard, and Kwasi had killed eight. But none of those eight had been pawns, though pawns made up exactly half of all pieces on the board. What were the odds of that? By the law of averages, you’d expect there to be as many pawns as pieces among the victims.

Perhaps he was killing pieces first, then pawns, Inessa suggested.

He’d already thought of that. That would make sense if he was killing in order, most valuable pieces through less valuable pieces through pawns, but he wasn’t. The kings were priceless, and yet none of his victims represented the king. He’d only killed one queen, his own mother. If there was an order to his killing, it wasn’t in terms of the value of the pieces. How about moves? Like he’s acting out the moves of a game? Queen moves, bishop moves, knight moves, that kind of thing.

Possible, Inessa replied, but again unlikely. The exact sequence of murders was bishop, queen, knight, knight, rook, rook, knight, rook. Yes, that was a plausible order of moves in the middle of a chess game, but not at the start of one. On the very first move, each side can only move ten of its sixteen pieces: all eight pawns, as they’re on the second row, and both knights, as they can jump over other pieces. Once the pawns move forward, they can clear the way for other pieces behind them: but they have to move first.

Patrese said he’d read somewhere that the pawns are known as the soul of chess. That’s right, Inessa said: the phrase had been coined by an eighteenth-century French player. But what of it?

Patrese paused before answering. He knew where his thoughts were taking him, and he knew it made sense, but the stubborn part of him didn’t want to know, as the truth of what it meant was unfathomably horrific.

They’d found no pawns among the victims. Kwasi must have killed some pawns.

There was only one way both those statements could be true: that Regina King and Darrell Showalter were the first victims the police had found, but not the first ones Kwasi had killed. He’d killed others. Up to sixteen others. And the police hadn’t found any of them.

Among the books found at Kwasi’s condo in Bleecker after he’d first gone on the run had been the medieval treatise
Game and Playe of the Chesse
, in which the author William Caxton had divided pawns into eight categories: laborers, clothmakers, apothecaries, dice players, those kind of things. Patrese doubted it was anything as literal as that; and besides, surely clothmakers and apothecaries couldn’t be killed without anyone knowing? They probably couldn’t even go missing without someone saying something.

Think like Kwasi. Pawns were expendable. Pawns were the lowest rank. Pawns could, if they were very lucky, get
to the other end of the board and promote into a piece,
but most of them went forward blindly, locked in the restrictions of their existence. They were the ones no one cared about. And they’d have to be the kind of people who, even if their bodies
were
found, would make no waves whatsoever.

At the start of this case, in the few hours before they’d gotten IDs for Regina King and Darrell Showalter, the cops had referred to the corpses as John Doe and Jane Doe. This was what Patrese would be looking for now, he realized: a whole bunch of John Does. People without identity, who’d died as they lived, without leaving a mark. The downtrodden. The invisible. The forgotten. The missing. The nameless.

The homeless.

In a world of social security numbers, store loyalty cards, cellphones, tax returns, benefit checks, Internet addresses and a hundred other things that leave digital breadcrumbs, being homeless is the best way, perhaps the only way, to fall off the grid completely. Few people spare the homeless so much as a glance, even when they drop a guilt-soaked dime in their begging cups.

To be without a home is to be without an identity: you’re not classified, you’re not quantified, you’re not a name on a system. You live in a disused train tunnel or a space beneath an underpass that isn’t even high enough to stand up in. You have no medication, no social worker, no one to look out for you except the odd Good Samaritan and your fellow homeless people, who are often bombed out of their heads and no one’s idea of a reliable safeguard.

If you have your own patch, your own makeshift fortress of discarded mattresses and cardboard boxes, then one day you’re not there anymore, people – always supposing they even notice – will assume you’ve moved on somewhere. You’re not traceable. That’s the point. You can go missing for months or years, and by the time your body’s found, it probably won’t even be recognizable as you.

As victims for a murderer, therefore, homeless people are pretty much perfect.

There was no point going round homeless areas in New York and Boston and asking if anyone had gone missing. Most of them were already missing; they were on the Missing Persons list, and they’d stayed that way because they hadn’t shown up on a database somewhere. Nor was there any point scouring the city for bodies which hadn’t been found. No; their best hope of finding whether this theory held any water was to ask every medical examiner’s office in the New York and Boston areas how many dismembered and unidentified John Does they’d had through in the past few months.

Unlike many public employees, medical examiners do work during the Thanksgiving holidays: people aren’t considerate enough to stop dying for four or five days just to give the ME a break. In fact, more people die during Thanksgiving than in any other four-day period throughout the year: too much food, too much alcohol, too many family tensions boiling over.