LITMIR.BIZ

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never heard him mention the place once.’

      Patrese looked out of the window, toward the spire of the chapel and a concrete sports hall beyond. Something about the solidity of both buildings made him think of the Gothic gatehouse on one side of New Haven Green.

      ‘You’re not far from Harvard here, are you?’ he asked.

      ‘Not at all.’

      ‘You ever do anything with them? Meetings, programs, any of that?’

      Furman shook his head. ‘Not really. We take the boys in twelfth grade to look round the place – not just Harvard but MIT too, of course – in case any of them are thinking of applying there, but that’s about it.’

      ‘Did Darrell ever go on these trips?’

      ‘Not that I recall. Why?’

      ‘You’re near Harvard. His body was found near Yale. I was wondering whether there could be a connection.’

      ‘Not one that I’m aware of. Darrell certainly didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale as a student. Thought they were a little too elitist, if I remember rightly.’

      ‘And yet he taught in a private boys’ school.’

      ‘A third of our boys are on some sort of financial assistance. And religious instruction is a major part of the curriculum here. I think his conscience was satisfied that he was doing the right thing. Here—’ Furman pushed open a door and stood aside to let Patrese through. ‘This is – was – Darrell’s room.’

      It reminded Patrese a little of Kwasi’s room in Bleecker Street: a single bed, hundreds of books. None about chess, though, or at least none that Patrese could see at first glance. Shelves of religious texts, unsurprisingly. The obvious giants of the postwar American novel: Mailer, Updike, Roth, squashed close together like rush-hour rail commuters. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in translation, and not only the famous ones about war, peace, crime and punishment either: Patrese saw The Cossacks, The House of the Dead, Hadji Murat, The Idiot, Resurrection, Demons, all with broken spines and fraying corners.

      ‘Loved Russia,’ Furman said, following Patrese’s gaze. ‘One of the classes he liked to teach was about religious survival in times of persecution. In particular, how the Russian Orthodox Church kept going under the godless Soviet regime. Lessons for us all in how to keep the faith.’

      There was a laptop on a desk by the window. Patrese turned it on, waited for it to boot up, and tapped on the Outlook Express icon. Forensics could crawl over the machine later, but if Showalter had made any arrangements for Saturday night by e-mail, they’d probably still be on here.

      The program opened. No password demand: most people don’t bother when they have sole access to a machine. Patrese scanned through the inbox. All school-related business, by the look of it: circulars about staff meetings, refurbishment work, and so on. He glanced toward Furman. ‘Do you know whether he used a personal account too? Hotmail; that kind of thing?’

      ‘I very much doubt it.’

      ‘Why so?’

      Furman stepped forward and clicked on the ‘sent items’ folder. It came up empty.

      ‘Darrell didn’t use any e-mail unless he had to. He’d read the incoming stuff, because he knew that’s how people communicate nowadays, but if he wanted to reply, he’d ring you up.’

      ‘Why?’

      Furman shrugged. ‘Just the way he was. Not everyone likes to filter their lives through electronics.’

      When he’d finished with Furman, Patrese went over to the school security office by the main gate and asked to see the CCTV footage from Saturday evening. No sign of Darrell leaving at any time; though, as Furman had said, there were other ways in and out. Plenty of people entering and leaving, though it was hard to make out any more than the most rudimentary of features: this had all been filmed after dark, and the picture quality was as bad as it had been in Penn Station.

      It was like this in many investigations: questions way, way outnumbered answers. There was one thing Patrese knew for sure, however. Regina King had left New York alive and been killed in Connecticut; Darrell Showalter had left Massachusetts alive and been found dead in Connecticut. That meant interstate transportation, which in turn made it federal jurisdiction. The Bureau would take over from the New Haven PD.

      It was Patrese’s case now.

       11

      Since Patrese needed some cash, he pulled up at the nearest bank. The ATM in the wall was out of order, so he went inside, where there were three more machines: all working fine, but all with queues. That wasn’t surprising: it was the start of the lunch hour. Patrese scanned the queues, trying to work out from the kind of customers there which queue would move fastest. Businessmen in suits would be in a hurry; little old ladies would take their time.

      A bark of laughter came from the tellers’ counter. Patrese looked over. One of the tellers, a young guy with the kind of hair-and-moustache combo that hadn’t been in fashion since East Germany had ceased to exist, was holding up a piece of paper. A black man in a hooded sweatshirt stood in front of his position.

      ‘You demand money?’ the teller scoffed. ‘This is a practical joke, right?’

      No, Patrese thought. No, never say that. What the fuck was the teller playing at? The police tell every bank, and every bank tells its employees, not to stand up to bank robbers. Just give them the money and get them out of there. Hell, most banks use some kind of dye pack that makes the notes unusable, or they hand over bait money, whose serial numbers are recorded and the police alerted when the notes are back in circulation. But even if they don’t do either of those, it’s still only money. Better that someone gets away with a couple of grand than that someone gets shot because of some fool teller who thinks he’s Dirty Harry.

      All this went through Patrese’s head in a split second. In that same split second, Hoodie Man had pulled a gun from his waistband with his right hand and grabbed the nearest customer, a young Asian woman with red eyeglasses and a crimson Harvard top, with his left. He pressed the gun to the woman’s head. Her eyes and mouth made perfect circles of shock and fear.

      ‘Look like a practical joke to you now, motherfucker?’ yelled Hoodie Man.

      Shrieks and screams all around Patrese, people falling to the floor or backing away as far as they could. He had his own gun out now, though he wasn’t aware of having drawn it: that was Bureau training, where in times of danger you armed yourself without conscious thought.

      He drew a bead on Hoodie Man. ‘Let her go!’

      ‘You drop it, man! Drop it, or I smoke the bitch!’

      The man’s face was half hidden beneath his hood. He looked to have smooth skin and regular features, but beyond that Patrese couldn’t see enough to tell for sure whether he was serious about this threat or not, let alone whether he was juiced on crack or meth or whatever else junkies out there liked to hit on nowadays.

      Could take the shot anyway, Patrese thought, but Hoodie Man was moving around, pulling his hostage with him. Hs gun was pressed hard against her temple: the pressure was turning her skin white around the end of the barrel. Even if Patrese got off a clean shot, head or vital organs down the centerline of the trunk, Hoodie Man might still fire his own gun, as a reflex shot if nothing else.

      Patrese remembered Samantha Slinger, a crack addict whom he’d shot dead in some scuzzy Pittsburgh rowhouse because he’d thought she’d been going for a gun. She hadn’t. And her death had helped set in motion a series of murders that had reached five before he’d managed to finish it. That kind of thing stayed with you. It hadn’t stopped him taking shots in difficult situations since then – he’d put a bullet through the head of a wannabe suicide bomber during a Steelers match at Heinz Field, for a start –

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