White Death

by Daniel Blake

  ‘Thomas,’ Patrese continued, ‘we think you attacked Sergeant O’Kelly, and that if you attacked him you probably killed him, or at least tried to kill him. Unless you can disprove that, you’re in a whole heap of trouble. If you really don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’ve got to tell me where you were instead. Wherever it was, whatever you were doing, it can’t be as bad as killing a police officer.’

  ‘Down by the river.’ Unzicker’s voice was so quiet that Patrese had to lean in still further to hear: too close, with the smell. He fought the urge to wince: didn’t want to put Unzicker off his stride, not now he was beginning to open up.

  ‘What were you doing down by the river?’

  More silence.

  ‘Thomas? You have to tell me. “Down by the river” isn’t enough. What were you doing there?’

  Unzicker started to cry again. Patrese waited him out.

  ‘Girls,’ Unzicker said at last.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Watching them.’

  ‘It’s dark. It’s November. It’s cold. How can you be watching girls by the river?’

  ‘Boathouse. Ladies’ rowing. Training. Gym. Lycra.’

  Chase Evans, the Harvard cox: his body had been left by the Harvard boathouse, Patrese remembered. And Unzicker had been in trouble with the authorities before, more at Harvard than at MIT: all the Mr Question Mark stuff, making girls feel uncomfortable.

  ‘The MIT boathouse?’ Unzicker nodded. ‘That far from where we found you?’ Unzicker shook his head. ‘You there all this time?’ Unzicker shook his head again. ‘Then what? What else were you doing?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘Walking?’

  ‘Walking. And thinking.’

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘Misha.’

  ‘You been in contact with Kwasi recently?’

  Another wide-eyed stare.

  ‘Thomas, you gotta tell me. You been in contact with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. No. No no no no no no no no no.’

  Lying, Patrese thought; but how to be sure? How to prove it? Unzicker was like Kwasi: you couldn’t apply normal standards of behavior to weirdoes. All those telltale tics cops are trained to look for, the body language that says someone’s lying, they’re useless with some people. He feared Unzicker might be one of those.

  He was still debating how best to play the next move when the door opened. It was one of the Cambridge cops.

  ‘They found Sergeant O’Kelly’s body.’

  45

  Glenn O’Kelly – more precisely, the headless and one-legged body of Glenn O’Kelly, plus a Chariot tarot card – had been dumped in the Navy Yard, towards the northern end of the Freedom Trail and one of the city’s premier tourist spots. The yard was busy by day but pretty much deserted at night, save for the handful of sailors assigned to the yard’s centerpiece, the eighteenth-century USS Constitution. It was one of these sailors who had found the body and alerted the police. O’Kelly’s car was discovered nearby.

  The Navy Yard is in Charlestown, on a peninsula slightly north of downtown Boston. Cambridge is a little to the west. None of the distances involved were vast. In the time frame involved, therefore, Unzicker could easily have left Cambridge, gone downtown, abducted O’Kelly, killed him, dumped his body in Charlestown and headed back to Cambridge.

  Whether he had done just that, of course, was another matter entirely.

  They took his fingerprints and a DNA swab from inside his cheek. They removed his clothes – not one of Patrese’s most treasured career moments, given the state of Unzicker’s trousers – and bagged them as evidence, to be cross-referenced against anything found on O’Kelly’s body or in his car. Unzicker said he’d never even heard of O’Kelly, let alone met him: so if there was a match, the only conceivable possibility would be that Unzicker had killed him.

  The police doctor examined Unzicker and took samples of anything that might provide a link the other way; that was, anything of O’Kelly’s on Unzicker rather than vice versa. Samples from under his nails, stray hairs, that kind of thing. Only when this was done was Unzicker allowed to clean himself up and put on some new clothes: someone had found an old airline tracksuit that made him look like something out of a children’s program. They assigned him a cell, and told him he wasn’t going anywhere till the morning at least, and maybe the rest of his life.

  It was a little past midnight, and Patrese was about to clock off, when Nursultan arrived, lawyer in tow. The lawyer was tall, silvering at the temples, and altogether better turned out than anybody had a right to be at this hour. He handed Patrese his card: GREGORY Y. LEVENFISH. Office on Fifth Avenue. Upper East Side accent, Upper East Side attitude. Demanding this, threatening that. Patrese bit back irritation and fatigue, and said they’d done everything by the book, they hadn’t been obliged to wait for a lawyer when they had reason to believe there’d been a public safety issue, and so on and so forth.

  Levenfish spouted more rules and regulations. Patrese assured him that the district attorney would deal with all these points if the case came to court. Yes, Levenfish could see his client. No, Nursultan could not accompany him. Nursultan’s turn to rant and rave. Patrese was unmoved. If you’re neither a licensed attorney nor a family member, you can’t see the suspect. End of.

  Your career, Nursultan replied: end of. Patrese laughed. Anyone with any money made that kind of threat to law enforcement agents sooner or later, he said. It might work where you come from, but not in the United States. More bluster: Nursultan accusing him of blackening the good name of Tatarstan. Patrese offered him some coffee. Regulation police-issue coffee could drop an otherwise healthy man in two sips.

  Levenfish came back, demanding his client’s immediate release. No, Patrese replied. They were entitled to keep Unzicker here for forty-eight hours, and only then would he have to make a decision: charge or release. They were going to use that entitlement, and nothing the lawyer or Nursultan could say, or do, or offer, would change that.

  Nursultan took Patrese aside. Arm round the shoulder, voice lowered: Let’s talk man to man, sort this out like adults. ‘Franco – I call you Franco, yes? – Misha project is important, you know that. Unzicker, he’s innocent, I know that. You let him go, I put up bail money, I guarantee – make personal guarantee – he come back for question any time you like.’

  Not a bribe, Patrese noted: nothing improper in the suggestion.

  ‘I’ll let him go only if I’m satisfied he couldn’t have killed Glenn O’Kelly.’

  But Patrese was thinking. Unzicker was still their best link to Kwasi. His arrest was now public knowledge. If he really was nothing to do with any of this, but Kwasi had nonetheless gotten spooked, then they might have lost their best chance.

  Unless Patrese could find a way to work it to their advantage.

  46

  Thursday, November 18th

  Under federal law – this was a federal case – suspects can be held for forty-eight hours without charge. At the end of that time, they must either be charged or released. Some people think forty-eight hours is a long time, some don’t. Perhaps it depends on the angle you’re looking from. Forty-eight hours isn’t that much time to build a watertight case against a tricky suspect, but then again that’s the job of the district attorney, who’ll have several months before the case comes to trial. But forty-eight hours might feel like an eternity if you’re the suspect, isolated and scared in custody.

  Unzicker seemed to be the latter, at least from the look of him when Patrese opened up his cell the next morning. The bags under his eyes could have carried the weekly grocery shop; his skin was blotched crimson and white.

  ‘Sleep well?’ Patrese asked.

  Unzicker shook his head.

  ‘We’re going to question you later. Your attorney will be present.’

  He shut the door before Unzicker could respond; not that any reply would have been immin
ent, given Unzicker’s track record so far. Another few hours of isolation, to make Unzicker sweat some more, give him a little information, then nothing. Repeat. It was as simple a tactic as it was effective. Most humans, even solitary computer nerds like Unzicker, need company and reassurance. Denying them all this makes them panic; they feel anxious, restless, full of self-doubt. They believe they’re being ignored or forgotten, and are happy when their questioner returns. But in extreme cases, denying them company only hardens them. Hence the drip-drip of Patrese’s solicitousness.

  Cambridge PD and Bureau agents had spent the night tearing Unzicker’s room apart. They’d found lots. Photographs of women, many of them with the blur of a surreptitious shot. A play about a bullied student in Prague who creates a golem and destroys his tormentors. Books and websites about the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Porn, obviously – there were two types of men, Patrese knew: those who look at porn online, and those who are dead – but nothing especially deviant. No BDSM, no children. Quite arty, in fact, some of it: black-and-white shots full of shadows and close-ups.

  But in all this, nothing that looked to have a direct link to the case. The conceit that killers have walls plastered with newspaper clippings of their crimes is strictly Hollywood, but nowhere on Unzicker’s laptop – nowhere obvious, at any rate – was there any evidence that he’d spent time searching for information about the killings.

  Yes, he’d read one story from the Harvard Crimson website about the murder of Chase Evans, but that was hardly surprising – Harvard was just down the road. In any case, he’d visited four other news pages on the same website in quick succession, all nothing to do with the murder: two about the upcoming Harvard–Yale football match, one about a production of Tosca, and an opinion piece about Barack Obama. Hardly bin Laden’s browser history.

  They’d been to Unzicker’s office in the Stata Center too, to check out his computers there, but had found nothing. Not ‘nothing’ as in ‘nothing of relevance’; ‘nothing’, as in no computers at all. Patrese had been in that office the previous week, and he remembered three computers there, two enormous iMacs and a laptop. They’d all gone.

  Nursultan, Patrese thought. Paranoid about Project Misha, he must have gone in and removed them the previous night, en route to or from the police station when he and Levenfish had come to see Unzicker. Patrese rang him.

  ‘You’ve got the computers from the Stata Center, haven’t you?’

  ‘Those computers: my property. Property of Kazan Group. Not Unzicker.’

  ‘Those computers are germane to my investigation.’

  ‘You say someone take them?’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me. You’ve got them.’

  ‘You have search warrant? Then I make co-operate. But nothing for me to do, if I don’t have machines.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Other end of phone to you.’

  Patrese ended the call with a curse, rang through to the task force HQ in New Haven, and told them to get a search warrant for Nursultan’s computers. Yes, he understood that it would be hard if they didn’t belong to Unzicker personally. No, he didn’t want to hear excuses. Just do it.

  Good news: nothing so far that would conclusively rule out Unzicker having killed Glenn O’Kelly. No one had seen him yesterday evening during the time of his disappearance, at least not definitively enough to swear to it: it had been dark and cold, the kind of weather in which people muffled up and hurried on their way. Footprints had been found down by the MIT boathouse that matched the shoes Unzicker had been wearing at the time of his arrest, but there was no way of telling whether he’d made those prints when he said he’d been there, the previous afternoon, or some unspecified time before. He hadn’t even taken any photos of the girls he said he’d been watching – it had been too dark for a decent shot, presumably – but that had ruled out another possible alibi. Not only do digital cameras have time and date stamps, but the subjects in the pictures could have confirmed whether they’d been there at that time.

  Bad news: nothing so far to conclusively prove that Unzicker had killed Glenn O’Kelly, either. No matches yet from forensics between Unzicker and O’Kelly, or between Unzicker’s room and O’Kelly’s car. No sightings of Unzicker anywhere near the Ulysses Bar or in the Beacon Street parking lot. And no definitive evidence meant one thing: to get a charge, they’d probably need a confession.

  For Patrese, a confession was the end to which he always worked. You could always tell what kind of cop you were dealing with, he thought, by the word they used to describe the process of questioning a suspect. A man like Anderssen would call it an interrogation, which bespoke a workman’s directness: you hammer away at a suspect, you chisel down his defenses, you prise the truth from him as though with pliers. These past few years, interrogation had taken on other overtones too: orange jumpsuits, waterboarding, Jack Bauer and falling skyscrapers. And it doesn’t work on hardened professional gangsters, who are more likely to run through a selection of Broadway hits than ever admit to wrongdoing. But most people will say anything if they’re pushed far enough. Patrese had worked with plenty of cops who thought that if an admission contradicted the facts, then the facts were wrong; and if the facts were wrong, then they should be changed.

  So Patrese preferred to think of the process more as an interview. You gain trust, you exchange confidences, you wheedle and nurdle away, taking your time, being subtle, being patient, so when the magic words ‘I confess’ finally come, they do so not in the shriek of a man who can take no more pain, but from the heart, slipping out with the same casual inevitability that a man will tell his woman that he loves her. Perhaps this kind of interview was in its own way a seduction, though inevitably the promises made – of leniency, of good treatment – tend not to last much longer than it takes to type up the statement and get the suspect to sign it. Patrese didn’t just want a confession; he wanted to find out why. He wanted Unzicker to hand him his soul.

  Mid-morning, they assembled in the interview room: Patrese, Anderssen, Unzicker and Levenfish. Patrese made the necessary introductions for the tape – time, date, those present – and he began.

  ‘Thomas, will you tell us again your movements between four p.m. and the time you were arrested last night?’

  ‘My client has nothing to add to his statement yesterday,’ Levenfish said.

  ‘Your client is perfectly capable of answering for himself.’

  ‘The Fifth Amendment gives him the right to remain silent.’

  ‘Yes, it does. And you know as well as I do that, whatever the Constitution says, whatever the judge says, when a jury sees a defendant who took the Fifth, they think one thing and one thing only: that person’s got something to hide.’

  ‘Really? The juries I get tend to agree with me.’

  Anderssen twitched; wanting to smash Levenfish’s face in, no doubt. Patrese kept talking, smoothing things over. ‘We’re only interested in finding the truth.’ He leaned towards Unzicker. ‘Listen to me, Thomas. Kwasi King is out there, and he’s doing terrible things. We need you to help us find him. If you want to tell us about Sergeant O’Kelly, then we’ll listen. Does he have a hold on you? Kwasi, that is. You don’t look like the kind of person who’d do this normally. Some people have that power over others. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if it happens to you.’

  Levenfish leaned in towards Unzicker too, forcing Patrese to move back a fraction, asserting his primacy over his client. ‘Don’t answer that, Thomas. Classic police tactics. The first technique of neutralization: denial of responsibility, allowing the subject to blame someone else for the offense.’

  ‘Or perhaps a Bureau agent trying to do his job.’

  ‘And a lawyer trying to do his. Rather more successfully, I might add.’

  Much more of this, Patrese thought, and he might be investigating Anderssen on a case of bodily harm. Mitigating circumstances: victim was a smart-ass lawyer.

  ‘Tell us what happened, Thomas. I’v
e got to be honest with you: I spoke to the DA this morning, and he’s out for blood on this one. You seen the papers? You know what the TV news is saying? You killed a cop, Thomas—’

  ‘My client did no such thing.’

  ‘—you killed a cop, and it doesn’t get worse than that, not so far as the police are concerned. My colleague here, Detective Anderssen; you killed a man just like him. A good man, dedicated to ensuring law and order. I let a bunch of Boston cops in here right now – I let the guys O’Kelly was drinking with yesterday in the Ulysses Bar, before you killed him – and Mr Levenfish and I left, what do you think they’d do to you, given free rein? What do you think? It wouldn’t be pretty.’

  ‘That’s threatening my client.’

  ‘It’s nothing of the sort. It’s outlining a hypothetical situation to get across to him the gravity of his offense.’

  ‘Alleged offense.’

  ‘We’re not in court now, Mr Levenfish. You don’t have to pick me up on endless little details. What I’m trying to tell you, Thomas, is this. The DA’s out for blood. He’s got public opinion on his side: no one likes to be seen as soft on crime. The only chance you have of making this easier for yourself is to confess. You confess, and he’ll be more lenient. So will the judge.’

  Levenfish slammed his fist down on the table. ‘Bullshit! Total bullshit! A confession does precisely the opposite, and you know that as well as I do. A DA without a confession can’t make half as strong a case. You got any compelling forensics here, Agent Patrese? Let’s see them if you do. But if you don’t – and you don’t – the DA hasn’t got a leg to stand on. The very least, he’ll have to make a plea bargain. A confession makes his job a whole lot easier. A confession gets before a jury, I’ll tell you the prospects of acquittal. Nil. So don’t you go lying to my client here. You’re not … don’t you go lying.’

  Patrese could guess what Levenfish had been about to say: You’re not allowed to lie. But that wasn’t true. There’s no law against outright lies or other deceptions on the part of law enforcement during questioning. Nothing they promise is binding on them, let alone the DA.