LITMIR.BIZ

       12

      When the Cambridge police arrived at the bank a few minutes later, Patrese pulled rank and got himself interviewed first. It wasn’t just that he wanted to get to New Haven and didn’t have time to spare hanging around here: it was also that law enforcement officers are trained in observation and recall, which made his testimony more accurate and useful than that of a random member of the public. Most of the people in that bank, he knew, would hardly have remembered their own names when confronted by a man with a gun.

      Witness statement given, Patrese headed for the interstate. In the last day and a half, he realized, he’d driven from Foxborough to New Haven, New Haven to New York, New York to Cambridge, and now Cambridge back to New Haven. Heck; he should have been a trucker, not a Bureau agent. Probably get paid better, too.

      He drove straight to the New Haven police headquarters. They’d set up an incident room, done all the right things: two dozen officers manning the phone lines, one wall covered in photos of the cadavers and the crime scene, a buzz of industry and determination that told good things for the department’s standards.

      Kieseritsky showed Patrese into her office and told him what they’d got so far. It didn’t take long. She’d had little news for him yesterday, and she didn’t have a whole lot more for him today.

      No joy with the fingerprint they’d found on Showalter’s chest. There were millions of fingerprints on the Bureau’s database, most of them belonging to various shades of scumbag, but none of them matched this one.

      The Liberzon knife company had sent over a list of their US retailers. These were being checked to see if anyone connected with the victims had purchased the hunting knife in question: though if that person had used cash rather than a card, they’d be none the wiser.

      Still waiting on any other possible clues from forensics.

      Still no one who’d seen anything strange on the Green at that time of night.

      Still no idea how Regina had gotten to New Haven in the first place. They’d checked every hotel within a ten-mile radius of the Green, and she hadn’t stayed at any of them.

      Still no joy on the provenance of the tarot cards. They’d managed to establish that the cards were made by US Games Inc., who had copyright over the Rider-Waite design in the United States; but US Games Inc. sold hundreds of thousands of sets a year, all pretty much identical. The set the killer was using could have been bought in any state in the union, not to mention online. Where would they start?

      And, as far as could be ascertained, still absolutely no overlap whatsoever between the lives of Regina King and Darrell Showalter. A single mom from the projects and a monk teaching at a private school in one of Massachusetts’ most upscale areas: it wasn’t as though they’d have had much in common to start with.

      Showalter seemed to have lived a pretty blameless life; not even a speeding ticket or a parking fine. Regina, on the other hand, had been a bit of a firebrand. Remember how they’d got her fingerprints from the arrest docket at the Iraq War protest in 2003? Well, that hadn’t been the end of it.

      She’d sued the NYPD for bodily harm, alleging that the officer who’d arrested her, Howard Lewis, had used excessive force, which had damaged ligaments in her shoulder and neck. The case had dragged on a couple of years before being settled for an undisclosed sum; which was to say that the NYPD had worked out the minimum they’d have to pay her to make the problem go away, and had done precisely that.

      Settlement had been reached about six months before Kwasi had won his world title, which had made his fame and earnings go stratospheric. Patrese wondered whether Regina would still have accepted the NYPD’s offer had she known the financial windfall around the corner. Principles were good; eating was better.

      When Kieseritsky finished, Patrese told her kindly but firmly that this was now the Bureau’s case, and that the incident room must be transferred lock, stock and barrel to the Bureau field office a half-mile up State Street.

      Kieseritsky was disappointed but not surprised. She knew the rules of federal engagement as well as Patrese did; but any detective worth their salt doesn’t like giving up a case that has been theirs from the outset.

      ‘You know this is no reflection on you personally,’ Patrese said.

      Kieseritsky shrugged. ‘You sure? It’s not like we’re about to catch the murderer any minute now, is it?’

      ‘Some cases just don’t fall that way. As far as I can see, you’ve done everything exactly as you should have done. I appreciate it.’

      ‘Don’t be kind.’

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘It makes it harder for me to hate the Bureau.’