White Death (26 page)

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 imminent, 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 leni
ency, 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’ve 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.

They went back and forth like this for a while: Patrese probing and Levenfish defending, Patrese putting up flares and Levenfish shooting them back down again. An hour went by, two, and Patrese was getting nowhere. A more loquacious – hell, a more
normal
– man than Unzicker might have started talking by now, but it was lunchtime, fourteen hours or so since the arrest, and they were pretty much where they’d been to start with. Not so much back to square one as never having left square one in the first place.

Patrese paused the interview and stepped outside with Anderssen.

‘This is not going well,’ Patrese said.

‘You said it. I hoped he’d be a plumber and we could get to him that way, but no.’ A plumber was cop slang for someone who often needed to take a piss. You could usually threaten such people by refusing to let them go to the toilet until they’d co-operated.

‘It’s like interviewing Marcel Marceau.’

‘At least Marcel Marceau makes you laugh.’

‘He’s still at the dead point of absolute denial. We have to get him away from that. We’re not going to be in business till we do. We need to change our strategy around.’

‘How?’

‘If I knew that, we wouldn’t be out here in the first place.’

Levenfish emerged from the interview room. ‘Can you get us two coffees, please?’

‘Do I look like a fucking busboy?’ Anderssen snapped. ‘Machine’s down the end of the corridor. Get it your damn self.’

The arch of Levenfish’s eyebrow was superciliousness itself. ‘I see the Bureau have got better manners than the Cambridge police.’ He strode off towards the coffee machine.

‘The fuck does he think he is?’

Patrese held up a hand: wait. Anderssen furrowed his brow in puzzlement. Patrese waited till Levenfish was out of sight before he spoke.

‘That’s it.’

‘That’s what?’

‘That’s what we have to do.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Patrese mimicked Levenfish’s voice. ‘
I see the Bureau have got better manners than the Cambridge police
. Divide and rule, oldest play in the book: set the snobby Bureau against the salt-of-the-earth police.’

‘So?’

‘So that’s what we have to do back to them. Drive a wedge between Levenfish and Unzicker. Get them arguing. Get Unzicker to distrust his own lawyer.’

‘Sounds like a plan. But how are we going to do that?’

‘Find out what we can about Levenfish. Must be something we can use.’

Ten minutes on Google provided exactly that something. Mixing his metaphors with abandon, Patrese thought that you didn’t get to be lawyer to a man like Nursultan without being near the top of the tree, but sometimes you didn’t climb that tree without sailing close to the wind.

And so it proved with Levenfish. Levenfish had pulled off some spectacular results in the past, but there had also been what might charitably be described as setbacks. Patrese printed out the links, gave thanks to Brin–Page, Supreme God of the Search Engine, and went back into the interview room.

‘You know, Thomas, you don’t have to take the first attorney you’re given,’ he said.

Levenfish clicked his tongue. ‘What is this, Agent Patrese? Amateur hour?’

‘Thomas, you don’t have to say anything in reply to what I’m about to tell you. You don’t have to worry about incriminating yourself or anything like that. I just want to tell you a few things about Mr Levenfish here.’