Читать книгу White Death - Daniel Blake - Страница 21

Patrese had settled in to New Haven for the long haul, whether he liked it or not. The Bureau had booked him a room – special rates for government employees, naturally – in the downtown New Haven Hotel, conservatively named and conservatively decorated in various tones of corporate taupe.

He’d had the New Orleans field office FedEx him up a bunch of his suits, dress shirts and black leather Oxfords so he’d actually look like a Bureau agent. All he’d had packed when Kieseritsky had first called on Sunday morning was casual clothes for a weekend at the football.

He’d spent the past couple of days following up leads that had started without promise and had become even more hopeless. In the process, he’d gotten himself acquainted with the city’s geography and neighborhoods. Westville, East Rock and the East Shore were the ‘best’ – for which, read ‘richest’ – places to live. Fair Haven, the Hill and Dwight-Kensington were at the other end of the scale. As was so often the case, Patrese thought, the prettier the name, the bigger the shithole.

The first forty-eight hours after the murders had come and gone, and with them the hope that this thing might get solved quick and clean. The task force had followed up any known cases of criminal pairings, be they siblings, couples, friends, colleagues or any other imaginable permutation. Nothing doing.

And meantime, pressure was mounting from several directions at once. The press were clamoring for more information, which meant an arrest or another victim. Kwasi King wanted his mother’s body back so he could give her a proper burial, but the medical examiner wanted to keep hold of it a while longer, perhaps even till the crime was solved. Patrese had rung Kwasi to tell him. Kwasi had delivered himself of an unflattering opinion of medical examiners in general and the New Haven one in particular. Kwasi was well into the anger phase of grief, Patrese had thought.

Anna’s tarot reading had freaked Patrese more than he wanted to admit. The Fool had annoyed him; the Moon had unsettled him; and as for the Tower, men diving to earth while the building burned behind them … it reminded him of the pictures from New York on the day seared into America’s collective memory, when some of those trapped above the firelines in the Twin Towers had been pushed or jumped to their lonely, brutal deaths. An uncanny harbinger of that tragedy, no? If the Tarot was right about that, what else might it be right about?

Now Patrese was in the hotel bar, about to order dinner before turning in for the night. He couldn’t be bothered to go out, but equally he thought it defeatist to order room service. Hence the bar.

The waitress informed him that tonight’s special was apizza, a white clam pie pizza with a thin crust and no mozzarella. Apizza was New Haven’s main contribution to world cuisine, and boy did you know it when you were here. If one more person in this town asked Patrese whether he’d tried it, he might start committing murders himself rather than trying to solve them.

His cellphone rang. He held a finger up to the waitress: let me get this.

The display showed a 212 number. Manhattan code. Kwasi?

‘Patrese.’

‘Agent Patrese?’ A man’s voice, deep and rough: not Kwasi’s. ‘My name is Bobby Dufresne. I’m a detective with the NYPD, Twenty-Sixth Precinct.’

He didn’t need to tell Patrese why he was calling.