City of Sins. Daniel Blake

and call it years of experience, call it having been on the other end of this plenty of times before, call it whatever, but in that moment, Patrese knew what the woman’s next words were going to be, and that having to say them was one of the worst things in the world.

      ‘Are you family?’ she asked.

      Bee-striped tape, rotating blues and reds, radio chatter, stern-faced cops, neighbors crowded wide-eyed and soft-voiced; the tropes of a homicide scene, unvaried from Anchorage to Key West. Patrese felt at home; he knew his way round such places.

      He flashed his Bureau badge, ducked under the tape, and went inside. The building was a nineteenth-century town-house subdivided into condos. Cindy’s was on the top floor, and Patrese was sweating by the time he reached her apartment door.

      Not just from the heat, either. No matter how many times a man inhales the rank sweetness of death, he never becomes used to it, not really, not properly. Especially not in the sauna of a Louisiana summer.

      Selma appeared in the doorway. She was half a head shorter than Patrese, and her eyes blazed with an anger that he instinctively thought of as righteous.

      ‘Who the heck are you?’ she snapped.

      He showed his badge again. ‘Franco Patrese, from the …’

      ‘I can see where you’re from. The Federal Bureau of Interference.’

      ‘Hey, there’s no need for that.’

      ‘No? How about Freaking Bunch of Imbeciles? You like that one better?’

      ‘Listen, I’m here because …’

      ‘Yes. Why are you here? Picked it up on the scanner and had nothing better to do? Let me tell you something, Agent Patrese. We, the NOPD, are perfectly capable of solving homicides all by ourselves, you know? It’s not like we don’t get enough practice. So don’t call us, yes? We’ll call you.’

      Patrese recognized Selma from coverage of the Marie Laveau trial, which meant he knew why she was pissed at the Bureau. Marie had managed to cast doubt on the legality of the Bureau’s surveillance procedures: technicalities, sure, but things the Bureau should have made certain of to start with. And that doubt had played well with the jury. It might not have made the difference, but it had certainly made a difference.

      So Patrese didn’t blame Selma. In any case, he’d been the other side of the fence himself, and he knew that, even without high-profile trial fuck-ups, pretty much every police force in the land resented and envied the Bureau in equal measures. It was a turf war, simple as that, as atavistic and ineradicable as all conflict. The turf caused the war, and there would always be turf; therefore there would always be war.

      ‘I was supposed to meet her tonight,’ he said.

      The woman cocked her head. ‘You the one who rang just now?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You a friend?’ She said it in a tone which suggested disbelief that Bureau agents would ever have friends.

      ‘Business. She, er, she said she had something to tell me.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘I don’t know. She never showed. Now I know why.’

      ‘This something – you think it was important?’

      ‘I’m certain it was.’

      ‘I mean, was she the kind of person who’d know something important?’

      ‘You don’t know who she was?’

      ‘Sure I do. Cindy. Cindy Rojciewicz.’

      ‘That name doesn’t mean anything to you?’

      ‘We’ve only been here a half-hour or so.’ The police car and ambulance he’d seen, Patrese thought. ‘We’re still getting things straight. You want to stop messing around and tell me?’

      ‘She was St John Varden’s PA. And her dad’s a bigshot congressman.’

      The woman puffed her cheeks and blew through pursed lips. ‘Sheesh.’ She stuck out a hand. ‘Selma Fawcett. Homicide.’

      ‘I used to work the same beat.’

      ‘Not round here. I ain’t never seen you.’

      ‘Back in Pittsburgh.’

      Selma narrowed her eyes. ‘Patrese, you said? Mara Slinger? That the one?’

      Mara Slinger. The case which had wrecked him. ‘That’s the one.’

      She thought for a second. ‘OK, Agent Patrese, here’s the deal. You go in there, you take a look around, tell me if you see anything that might … I don’t know. Anything. Anything that might help you, anything that might help me. But you don’t touch, you don’t take pictures, and most of all, you don’t forget, not for a second, that this is my scene and you’re here on my say-so. You understand?’

      ‘I do. Thanks.’

      ‘Good. And I’m sure I needn’t tell you this, but … it’s not pretty in there.’

      ‘It never is.’

      ‘No. But this one really, really isn’t.’

      Selma wasn’t wrong.

      The one saving grace was that it hardly looked like Cindy any more. Her vibrant beauty had drained away with the blood that was everywhere; spread out in oily slicks on the floor, dripping from tables, and splashed in patterns of arterial fury across the walls. It seemed impossible that anybody should have had so much blood in them.

      Cindy was lying on her back in the living room, naked. Her left leg was gone entirely; cut clean through, high on the thigh. Much of the blood must have come from here, Patrese thought, where the killer had sliced through the femoral artery.

      Something had been left in place of Cindy’s leg. With all the blood, Patrese had to peer closer to see what it was. When he did, he made an involuntary start backward.

      A snake.

      A rattlesnake, to be more precise; and clearly as dead as Cindy was.

      As far as he could make out, her other leg and torso were untouched.

      Not so her face. A mirror had been smashed into her forehead with an axhead.

      Patrese liked to think he’d seen his fair share of the unusual, the warped and the downright depraved, but this was right up there – rather, right down there – with anything else in his experience. No psyche he’d ever come across, even the most damaged, could have done something like this.

      Cindy’s right arm lay crooked across her chest. Patrese looked for injuries.

      Nothing.

      In particular, no defense wounds, where she’d tried to fight off her attacker.

      But the spatter patterns on the wall indicated she’d been alive when her leg had been severed. Arteries didn’t pump out huge pressurized waves of blood when their owner was dead.

      Alive and passive meant unconscious, with or without sedation.

      Patrese walked through the condo, dodging the crime-scene officers in their hazmat suits. It was small, two rooms masquerading as four; a kitchenette with an outside door off the living room, a bathroom off the bedroom.

      The living room apart, there was no blood. Cindy had been killed where she lay.

      Patrese went into the bedroom. It was where he always headed at a crime scene. People tend to keep the truly revealing things about themselves in the bedroom, as it’s where they’re most vulnerable. Sleeping or making love, that’s when defenses are lowest; that’s when people are exposed, flayed, softened.

      In the top drawer of Cindy’s bedside table, Patrese found, in order, a pack of rubbers, a folded square of paper which he knew would