White Death. Daniel Blake

to be. Not anymore.’

      ‘Then we’re gonna get along just fine.’

      She led the way through a line of trees, and now Patrese could see the headless corpse on the church steps. The man was lying naked on his back, though curiously the pose didn’t look especially undignified, at least to Patrese’s eyes. Perhaps, he thought, it was because the cadaver hardly looked human anymore, not without its head.

      ‘Snappers have all been and gone,’ Kieseritsky said.

      Patrese nodded. She was telling him that the crime scene had already been photographed from every conceivable angle and distance, so he could – within reason – poke around to his heart’s content.

      Crisp fall morning or not, dead bodies stink. Patrese gagged slightly when the stench first reached him, but not so obviously that anyone would notice. Just as well he’d gone for the gutter option a few minutes before, he thought.

      He crouched down beside the corpse.

      No head, no right arm, and the skin gone in a large circle from sternum to waist. Hard to tell too much from any of that about whoever this poor soul had once been, but from the crinkly sagging of fat around the man’s waist, the faint wrinkles on his remaining hand and the gray hairs on the arm above it, Patrese guessed his age as mid-fifties.

      No blood, either: no blood anywhere around the body, even though it had suffered two major amputations. John Doe had clearly been killed elsewhere and brought here.

      Patrese peered closer at the points where the killer had performed those amputations. Clean cuts, both of them, even though taking off a head and arm involved slicing through tough layers of tissue, muscle, cartilage and bone. Must have used something very sharp, Patrese thought. Must have been skilled at using it, too. A surgeon? A butcher?

      The man’s neck looked like an anatomy exhibit: hard white islands of trachea and esophagus surrounded by dark-red seas of jugulars and carotids. The stump of his shoulder was a sandwich in cross-relief: skin round the outside like bread, livid muscle and nerves the filling within. And where the skin on his chest had been was now a matrix of areolar tissue, thousands of tiny patches like spiders’ webs which Patrese could see individually up close but which blended into formless white from even a few feet away.

      Patrese looked at the signet ring on the man’s pinkie. Kieseritsky had been right when she’d called it as the Benedictine medal: Patrese had grown up a good Catholic boy, and symbols such as these were now hardwired into his memory. There on the ring was Saint Benedict himself, cross in his right hand and rulebook in his left, and around the picture ran the words Eius in obitu nostro praesentia muniamur.

      ‘May we be strengthened by his presence in the hour of our death,’ said Kieseritsky.

      Patrese nodded, wondering whether John Doe had indeed felt the presence.

      ‘This isn’t a Benedictine church, though?’ he asked.

      Kieseritsky shook her head. ‘United Church of Christ.’

      ‘And the other two?’

      She shook her head again. ‘That one’ – pointing to the church at the north end of the green – ‘is also United Church. The other’s Episcopal.’

      Patrese looked over the rest of the corpse. Indentations on the skin of both ankles: restraints, Patrese knew. That apart, nothing: no watch, no jewelry, no tattoos.

      There was something next to John Doe’s hand. A playing card, by the look of it.

      Kieseritsky handed Patrese a pair of tweezers. He picked the card up.

      Not a playing card; well, not one of the standard fifty-two-card deck, at any rate.

      The card pictured a man in red priestly robes sitting on a throne. On his head was a triple crown in gold, and in his left hand he carried a long staff topped with a triple cross. His right hand was making the sign of the blessing, with the index and middle fingers pointing up and the other two pointing down. At his feet were two crossed keys, and the back of two monks’ heads could be seen as they knelt before him.

      Beneath the picture, in capital letters, THE HIEROPHANT.

      Patrese knew exactly what it was. A tarot card.

       4

      There was a tarot card by the cadaver of Jane Doe, too. Hers was THE EMPRESS. The figure on this card was also sitting on a throne, though this one was in the middle of a wheat field with a waterfall nearby. She wore a robe patterned with what looked like pomegranates, and a crown of stars on her head. In her right hand she carried a scepter, and beneath her throne was a heart-shaped bolster marked with the symbol of Venus.

      Like John Doe, Jane was also naked, and also missing her head, an arm (the left one, this time), and large patches of skin front and back.

      The more Patrese looked, though, the more he saw that there were at least as many differences between the two corpses as there were similarities.

      For a start, Jane was lying on the grass under a tree, a couple of hundred yards from the church where John had been left.

      More pertinently, perhaps, she’d been killed where she lay.

      Patrese saw the splatter marks of blood high and thick on the tree trunk: the carotid artery, he thought, spraying hard and fast as her neck was cut. The ground around and beneath her body squelched with all the blood which had run from the cut sites.

      And whereas John had been killed with what looked like clinical precision – clean lines of severance at neck and thigh, neat removal of the chest and back skin – Jane had been attacked with a far greater, unfocused fury. The wound at her neck gaped open and jagged, as though the killer had sawn or twisted or yanked her head: possibly all three. Flaps of skin and muscle hung messily from the stump of her arm. The perimeters where the patches of skin had been taken were uneven and torn. No restraint marks on her remaining wrist or her ankles: the attacker must have set about her instantly.

      Heads, arms, skin, all gone. Had the killer taken them with him, as proof of his skill and tools to help him relive the fantasy he’d just acted out?

      ‘Any thoughts?’ Kieseritsky asked.

      ‘Lots. Some of them might even be right.’ Patrese pushed himself to his feet. ‘John was killed elsewhere and brought here. Jane was killed here. Pretty risky, to decapitate someone in a public place. Lot of people round here at night?’

      ‘Up to midnight, sure. Most of ’em the kind of people who keep you and me in business, of course. Same for urban parks the country over. But we ain’t talkin’ murderers usually, let alone something like this. We’re talking pickpockets, drug dealers, muggers, those kind of guys. The guys who know the process system as well as I do, they come in and out of the station house so often.’

      ‘New Haven’s got a high murder rate, right?’

      ‘Where d’you hear that?’

      ‘Bureau report. I remember it ’cos after Katrina, when all the criminals had been shipped out of state during reconstruction, New Orleans dropped out of the top three for the first time in years. Big rejoicing in the Big Easy.’

      ‘Yeah, well. I seen that report too. We’re fourth highest in the US proportionate to population, it says. Only ones in front of us are Detroit, St Louis and some other hellhole, can’t remember where. But it’s bullshit, Agent Patrese.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘First off, our crime figures are down year-on-year, and that’s what matters to me, not how we rank against someplace else. Second, it all depends on where you draw the municipal boundaries. May I speak freely? New Haven ain’t no different to any other damn place in the States. The vast majority of crime is committed by poor black people, on poor black people,