Читать книгу White Death - Daniel Blake - Страница 10

There was a tarot card by the cadaver of Jane Doe, too. Hers was THE EMPRESS. The figure on this card was also sitting on a throne, though this one was in the middle of a wheat field with a waterfall nearby. She wore a robe patterned with what looked like pomegranates, and a crown of stars on her head. In her right hand she carried a scepter, and beneath her throne was a heart-shaped bolster marked with the symbol of Venus.

Like John Doe, Jane was also naked, and also missing her head, an arm (the left one, this time), and large patches of skin front and back.

The more Patrese looked, though, the more he saw that there were at least as many differences between the two corpses as there were similarities.

For a start, Jane was lying on the grass under a tree, a couple of hundred yards from the church where John had been left.

More pertinently, perhaps, she’d been killed where she lay.

Patrese saw the splatter marks of blood high and thick on the tree trunk: the carotid artery, he thought, spraying hard and fast as her neck was cut. The ground around and beneath her body squelched with all the blood which had run from the cut sites.

And whereas John had been killed with what looked like clinical precision – clean lines of severance at neck and thigh, neat removal of the chest and back skin – Jane had been attacked with a far greater, unfocused fury. The wound at her neck gaped open and jagged, as though the killer had sawn or twisted or yanked her head: possibly all three. Flaps of skin and muscle hung messily from the stump of her arm. The perimeters where the patches of skin had been taken were uneven and torn. No restraint marks on her remaining wrist or her ankles: the attacker must have set about her instantly.

Heads, arms, skin, all gone. Had the killer taken them with him, as proof of his skill and tools to help him relive the fantasy he’d just acted out?

‘Any thoughts?’ Kieseritsky asked.

‘Lots. Some of them might even be right.’ Patrese pushed himself to his feet. ‘John was killed elsewhere and brought here. Jane was killed here. Pretty risky, to decapitate someone in a public place. Lot of people round here at night?’

‘Up to midnight, sure. Most of ’em the kind of people who keep you and me in business, of course. Same for urban parks the country over. But we ain’t talkin’ murderers usually, let alone something like this. We’re talking pickpockets, drug dealers, muggers, those kind of guys. The guys who know the process system as well as I do, they come in and out of the station house so often.’

‘New Haven’s got a high murder rate, right?’

‘Where d’you hear that?’

‘Bureau report. I remember it ’cos after Katrina, when all the criminals had been shipped out of state during reconstruction, New Orleans dropped out of the top three for the first time in years. Big rejoicing in the Big Easy.’

‘Yeah, well. I seen that report too. We’re fourth highest in the US proportionate to population, it says. Only ones in front of us are Detroit, St Louis and some other hellhole, can’t remember where. But it’s bullshit, Agent Patrese.’

‘Yes?’

‘First off, our crime figures are down year-on-year, and that’s what matters to me, not how we rank against someplace else. Second, it all depends on where you draw the municipal boundaries. May I speak freely? New Haven ain’t no different to any other damn place in the States. The vast majority of crime is committed by poor black people, on poor black people, in areas full of poor black people. Don’t make it right, of course, but that’s the way it is. You must know that.’

Patrese nodded. He’d worked in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and it was the same in both those places. Kieseritsky continued:

‘But round here, downtown, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen.’ She gestured toward the Gothic gatehouse on the edge of the Green. ‘That’s the main entrance to Yale, you know. That’s the kind of place this is. Ivy League, old school, full of the kids who in twenty years’ time will be running the country.’

‘And screwing it up, same as generations before them have done.’

She raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘President Bush went to Yale.’

‘I rest my case.’

She laughed. ‘Anyway. Like I said, most law-abiding folks wouldn’t hang around on the Green late night, but those that do are only going to lose their wallets and cellphones. Not their lives.’

‘And the lowlife? They here all night?’

She shook her head. ‘Most of them have cleared out by two or three in the morning, even on weekends.’

‘And no one saw Jane Doe being killed, or John Doe being dumped?’

‘Not that we’ve found so far.’

A uniform hurried across the grass toward them, eyes bright with the importance of the news bearer.

‘We’ve got a match on Jane’s fingerprints, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Previous offense?’

‘Arrested in New York on the Iraq war demonstration, February 2003.’

Patrese remembered that day well: there’d been protests all over the world. He’d intended going, but he’d spent what had started as the night before and ended up as the whole weekend with a waitress he’d met on the Strip in Pittsburgh.

‘Regina King,’ the uniform continued.

He must have seen both Patrese’s and Kieseritsky’s eyes widen in surprise, because he nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. Sir. That Regina King. Kwasi King’s mom.’