Читать книгу White Death - Daniel Blake - Страница 8

There are several types of hangover. There’s Hangover Lite, a mild but insistent ache in the temples; there’s Hangover Medium, where you ride greasy swells of nausea which rear and ebb without warning; and there’s Hangover Max, when a team of roadworkers are jackhammering behind your eyes, your heart is doing a one-man Indy 500, and the thought that you might die is eclipsed only by the fear that you won’t.

And then there’s the kind of hangover Franco Patrese had at the precise moment his cellphone jolted him from sleep with a brutality that was borderline sociopathic.

But Patrese was a pro. In the time it took for the phone to ring once, neither the shock of the rude awakening nor the monumental combination of toxins gleefully racing round his body could prevent him from assembling a few salient points.

First, it was still dark outside.

Second, he was in a hotel room, which he remembered as being on the outskirts of Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Third, there was another bed in the room, and in that bed was a man named Jeff whose snoring had the rhythm and persistence of waves breaking on a shore. Jeff was one of Patrese’s college buddies. A whole bunch of them had hooked up to come see their beloved Pittsburgh Steelers play the New England Patriots in Foxborough this coming afternoon, and, as Patrese hadn’t seen much of his old friends since moving down to New Orleans, they’d decided to make a weekend of it, all boys together. For someone like Patrese, a single guy who lived in party central, this was just another weekend of good times. For those of his buddies who were married with kids, and whose usual weekends were therefore kids’ soccer practice, home-improvement jobs and putting up with the in-laws, this was pretty much their only free time all year, and by hell they’d made the most of it.

Fourth, Patrese had been first a cop and then an FBI agent for more than a decade, so he knew that no one rang that early on a Sunday morning unless there was a good reason for it. And nine times out of ten, a good reason means something bad has happened.

He answered on the second ring. ‘Patrese.’

Well, ‘Patrese’ was what he’d wanted to say. ‘Ngfrujghr’ was how it had actually come out.

‘Hello?’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘I’m looking for Franco Patrese?’

Bile rose fast and hard in Patrese’s throat. He took a deep breath and forced it back down. This time when he opened his mouth to speak, his tongue felt like a desiccated slug.

‘Hello?’ said the woman again. ‘Hello?’

There was a glass of water by the bed. Patrese reached for it. Felt sick again. Hangover motion sickness, he thought: you move, you feel sick. No matter. He grabbed the glass and drank it down in one.

‘This is Patrese.’ His voice still sounded like Darth Vader with flu, but at least he was now speaking recognizable English.

‘Agent Patrese, my name is Lauren Kieseritsky. I’m with the police department in New Haven, Connecticut.’

No apology for waking him so early. Patrese didn’t expect one. Law enforcement personnel don’t apologize to each other for doing their jobs. In any case, Patrese was already trying to think. New Haven, Connecticut? He’d never been there in his life. Never been, didn’t know anyone there, probably couldn’t even point to it on a map.

‘I got your number through ViCAP,’ Kieseritsky continued.

Patrese sat straight up, nausea be damned. ViCAP is the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a Bureau database which collates information on violent crime, especially murder. ViCAP is linked to police and sheriff departments across the country. Local officers can enter details of crimes committed on their patch and see if these details match anything already in the system. ViCAP is particularly useful in catching serial killers, who often murder in different jurisdictions and over many years: crimes which beforehand had simply been written off as unrelated and insoluble.

ViCAP definitely meant something bad had happened.

‘What you got?’ Patrese asked.

‘Two bodies found an hour ago on the Green.’

‘The Green?’

‘Sorry. New Haven Green. Grass square, center of the city.’

‘OK.’

‘White man, black woman. No IDs on either yet, though we’ve taken fingerprints and are running them through the system. Both been decapitated. No sign of the heads. Both missing an arm. Both with skin taken from their chests and backs.’

‘The arms – that’s why you called me? Limb removal?’ Patrese’s first case as an agent in New Orleans had been a serial killer who, amongst other things, had amputated his victims’ left legs.

‘Yes, sir. Well, not just that.’

‘Then what?’

‘The dead man. We found him on the steps of a church, and he’s wearing a signet ring with a cross emblem on it. We think it’s the Benedictine medal. We think he’s a monk, a priest, something like that.’

Before Patrese had been a Bureau agent, he’d been a Pittsburgh cop. He’d taken down a killer nicknamed the Human Torch, whose victims had included a bishop – a bishop who, as a young priest, had befriended Patrese’s family and done the kind of things to a teenage Franco that no human being should ever inflict on another.

Patrese ran to the bathroom and threw up.