Читать книгу Soul Murder - Daniel Blake - Страница 19

You’ve seen homicide division rooms umpteen times on the silver screen, and it’s one of the few aspects of police work that TV gets right. There really are desks piled high with report forms and coffee cups, and the detectives sitting at those desks really do crick the phones into their necks while pecking two-fingered at their keyboards.

Amidst the barely controlled hubbub of a major homicide investigation, Patrese read the poster above Beradino’s head for the umpteenth time that day.

The Fifth Commandment, Book of Exodus, 20, of THE HOLY BIBLE.

Then: THE OATH OF PRACTICAL HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.

Beradino, who’d written the poster and had it typeset himself, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like.

Homicide investigation is a profound duty, and constitutes a heavy responsibility. Just as there is no crime worse than taking someone else’s life, so there is no task more important than bringing to justice the people who crossed that line. As such, let no person deter you from the truth and your own personal commitment to see that justice is done. Not only for the deceased, but for the surviving family as well.

And remember – ‘you’re working for God.’

No, Patrese thought angrily; he was working for the city of Pittsburgh. There were times when Beradino’s incessant God-squadding really got on his nerves, and this was one of them – not least because he was pissed anyway.

Every cop knows that the first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical. If they haven’t got a good lead in that time, the chances of solving the crime are halved as evidence disappears, suspects flee, and stories change.

More than forty-eight hours after Michael Redwine had been torched, Patrese and Beradino had nothing.

Sure, they had an autopsy report, but that just confirmed Beradino’s findings – that Redwine, alive when the fire started, had died from smoke inhalation.

And sure, Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi was provided by his mother, and her alone. But it was hard to see what they could do other than take it at face value. Yes, Sameera could have been lying – she’d said she’d do anything for him, after all – but to test that, they’d have to give her the full nine yards, on a hunch that was flimsy at best.

It didn’t take much imagination to see how carpeting a recent widow that way would look.

Because Patrese and Beradino had to accept Mustafa’s alibi, they had no probable cause to go search the house in Oakland for anything that might connect him to the fire. Even if they did get a warrant, and even if he had been involved, he was clearly a smart kid. He’d have ditched any clothing and other items that might have linked him to the blaze long before now.

That was how they consoled themselves, at any rate; because nothing and no one else in Redwine’s life seemed to point to any other suspects.

Every resident of The Pennsylvanian had been interviewed, as had all doormen, cleaners and maintenance workers; anyone with access to the building, in other words. No one had seen anything.

‘Either they’re on the level, or someone should win a damn Oscar,’ Patrese said.

It still didn’t answer what had started as the $64,000 question and was surely now into six figures – how had the killer got into The Pennsylvanian?

They retraced Redwine’s movements on the last day of his life. He’d been at Mercy in the morning, given a speech at a conference downtown after lunch, and been due to go to the opera – La Bohème – that evening. Nothing untoward.

They’d taken twelve officers from the regular police department and used them to turn Redwine’s life upside down. No friend, acquaintance or incident was deemed too insignificant or commonplace; everyone was followed up, checked out.

TIE, Beradino told the uniforms, TIE – trace, interview, eliminate as a suspect.

They found zilch. Redwine had been a regular attendee at church, done his part at charity fundraisers, and enjoyed hiking and fishing in his spare time. No embittered ex-girlfriends, no secret gay lovers, no outstanding sexual harassment cases. Even the professional jealousies were no more than the usual found among surgeons, which was to say at once endemic and excruciatingly professional.

All in all, no reason for anybody to have killed Redwine, let alone by such a horrific method as burning alive.

The fire had destroyed any physical evidence worth the name, so Patrese and Beradino could find no joy there either. Instant forensic breakthroughs were strictly the preserve of TV shows titled with snappy acronyms. Pittsburgh PD didn’t even have its own DNA lab. It had to use the FBI’s, which had a backlog running into the hundreds of thousands.

It couldn’t use private labs, as their results were inadmissible in court, due to concerns over accountability and maintenance of the chain of custody. Only government facilities were acceptable, though the technical standards at private labs were much higher; not surprisingly, perhaps, given that they were staffed by the best testers, many of whom had left the state sector because they wanted to be paid more, exacerbating staff shortages in public labs and increasing the backlog…

Franz Kafka was not dead, clearly. He was alive, well, and living in Pittsburgh.

Nothing of great value seemed to have been taken, ruling out burglary as a motive. Redwine was no serious collector of art, his TV set and computers were still in the apartment (though burnt to cinders, obviously), and everyone who knew him agreed that he never carried more than a hundred bucks or so in cash.

Every known arsonist within Allegheny County was interviewed, bar those already in prison. All of them had alibis for the night in question. Most said they’d pick easier targets than a portered apartment block, and that they certainly wouldn’t kill anyone in the process. Arson was a crime against property, not people.

Self-serving bullshit, Patrese thought, but anyway…

There was always the possibility that one of the uniforms had stumbled across the crucial bit of information without realizing it. Officers were human, not computers. Long days made them tired, repetitive interviews numbed and bored them. They could miss things and make mistakes, especially towards the end of a shift. But this was the same for every homicide investigation in history. Nothing you could do about it.

There are three nightmare scenarios for cops working homicide cases, and it looked very much as though Beradino and Patrese were facing one of them.

First, that they’d overlooked something so screamingly obvious that, if they ever did find it, they’d almost certainly be carpeted from here to Cincinnati and back again.

Second, that Redwine’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, and that in order to find the perpetrator, they’d need to discover first who he thought he’d killed.

Third, that the murder was the type of case that’s the absolute hardest to solve; a stranger homicide, where the connection between killer and victim is obvious only to one or both of them.

Killer spotting victim in the street; victim in the wrong place at the wrong time; victim who’d caught the attention of killer; and any or all of these happening for reasons unknown to the police, because they could simply have never imagined or reconstructed them, short of knowing each quotidian incident and occurrence in the lives of every single one of Pittsburgh’s citizens, and even the Soviet Union hadn’t managed such overwhelming control over its people.

Redwine’s ex-wife and sons had flown in from Tucson, their eyes rimmed red with tears and fatigue.

That was the worst part, Patrese felt; having to look these good people in the eye and say yes, we’re doing all we can to find the murderer, we’re following all lines of inquiry, we’re confident we’ll bring him to justice; when all the while he knew, and he knew they knew, that what he was really saying was this: we don’t have a damn clue.

Not a goddamn clue.