Soul Murder. Daniel Blake

couldn’t use private labs, as their results were inadmissible in court, due to concerns over accountability and maintenance of the chain of custody. Only government facilities were acceptable, though the technical standards at private labs were much higher; not surprisingly, perhaps, given that they were staffed by the best testers, many of whom had left the state sector because they wanted to be paid more, exacerbating staff shortages in public labs and increasing the backlog…

      Franz Kafka was not dead, clearly. He was alive, well, and living in Pittsburgh.

      Nothing of great value seemed to have been taken, ruling out burglary as a motive. Redwine was no serious collector of art, his TV set and computers were still in the apartment (though burnt to cinders, obviously), and everyone who knew him agreed that he never carried more than a hundred bucks or so in cash.

      Every known arsonist within Allegheny County was interviewed, bar those already in prison. All of them had alibis for the night in question. Most said they’d pick easier targets than a portered apartment block, and that they certainly wouldn’t kill anyone in the process. Arson was a crime against property, not people.

      Self-serving bullshit, Patrese thought, but anyway…

      There was always the possibility that one of the uniforms had stumbled across the crucial bit of information without realizing it. Officers were human, not computers. Long days made them tired, repetitive interviews numbed and bored them. They could miss things and make mistakes, especially towards the end of a shift. But this was the same for every homicide investigation in history. Nothing you could do about it.

      There are three nightmare scenarios for cops working homicide cases, and it looked very much as though Beradino and Patrese were facing one of them.

      First, that they’d overlooked something so screamingly obvious that, if they ever did find it, they’d almost certainly be carpeted from here to Cincinnati and back again.

      Second, that Redwine’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, and that in order to find the perpetrator, they’d need to discover first who he thought he’d killed.

      Third, that the murder was the type of case that’s the absolute hardest to solve; a stranger homicide, where the connection between killer and victim is obvious only to one or both of them.

      Killer spotting victim in the street; victim in the wrong place at the wrong time; victim who’d caught the attention of killer; and any or all of these happening for reasons unknown to the police, because they could simply have never imagined or reconstructed them, short of knowing each quotidian incident and occurrence in the lives of every single one of Pittsburgh’s citizens, and even the Soviet Union hadn’t managed such overwhelming control over its people.

      Redwine’s ex-wife and sons had flown in from Tucson, their eyes rimmed red with tears and fatigue.

      That was the worst part, Patrese felt; having to look these good people in the eye and say yes, we’re doing all we can to find the murderer, we’re following all lines of inquiry, we’re confident we’ll bring him to justice; when all the while he knew, and he knew they knew, that what he was really saying was this: we don’t have a damn clue.

      Not a goddamn clue.

       Thursday, October 28th. 3:51 p.m.

      Flames leapt high and jagged around the burgers on the grill.

      Crammed into a sweltering kitchen, wearing a ridiculous polyester uniform with her hair in a net as though she’d just been caught by a trawler, Jesslyn’s anger mashed in tight oblongs.

      The interview had been bad enough. Kevin the manager had proved as snotty as he was spotty, sneering at her throughout it all with a contempt he didn’t even bother to disguise. Why did she want this job? Why had she left her previous employment? Did she have references? Had she ever worked in the fast-food industry before?

      And on, and on, and on, when they both knew this was a minimum-wage job that almost literally a monkey could do, and here was Kevin treating it as though he were personally responsible for choosing the next UN Secretary-General.

      She even had to work some Sundays, her religious convictions be damned. Not because Kevin had forced her to – she could have claimed her constitutional right to freedom of religion and threatened him with a lawsuit if he’d even tried – but because she’d done Sunday shifts at Muncy so she could preach in the chapel there. Her suddenly spending every Sunday at home would arouse suspicion in a moron, and Mark was certainly not that.

      But even if she did find a way to tell him about Mara, she thought, he wouldn’t understand, not really. Prison was one of those things you could never explain. If you knew what it was like, you didn’t need to be told. If you didn’t know, mere words weren’t enough.

      Prison was a pressure cooker, a place of white heat where life had a suffocating intensity. Friendships, still less love affairs, weren’t casual, to be picked up and put down whenever one felt like it; they were life-rafts of survival in a place that tried to crush the soul, raging torrents of defiance and pride in being human.

      Within prison walls, the rules changed. What went on inside stayed inside. That was why Jesslyn was so careful to keep her two worlds apart. Mark had some of his colleagues over to dinner or Sunday lunch at their condo from time to time; she never did. Mark brought documents home, discussed work problems with her, gave her tidbits of department gossip; she never did any of that either. If he thought it weird, he’d long since accepted it as just the way she was.

      And with Mara, who’d been such a bright shining Technicolor light in the pallors of endless institutional gray…well, Jesslyn had been honored, frankly, that Mara, beautiful, radiant, poised, fragrant Mara who somehow kept her poise and fragrance in those conditions, had chosen her when she could have had pretty much anyone.

      And then she’d gone. Gone in stages, each of them more painful than the last.

      First, Mara had called time on their relationship.

      One day, just like that, out of the blue, Mara had said she didn’t want to go on with it. Jesslyn had been standing six feet away, yet she’d honestly thought Mara had hit her, such was the physical shock. She’d rushed to the restroom and brought up her breakfast. Food poisoning, she’d said, before going home. They wouldn’t see her cry on the prison floor; not then, not ever. Crying was weakness, and weakness was death.

      In the weeks that followed, Jesslyn had begged, pleaded, reasoned, shouted and threatened, all to no avail. Sometimes she sought Mara out; sometimes she tried to avoid her. Each time she saw her, it felt as though someone had opened up a wound and started scraping salt into it.

      Second, Mara had been released; back into the outworld.

      If seeing her had been a torment, Jesslyn quickly realized that not seeing her was a hundred times worse. Even after their split, Mara had been the center of Jesslyn’s universe, the point around which she orientated herself and her days.

      Now all Jesslyn had was the whisper of Mara’s name in corridor gossip, and the few of Mara’s keepsakes she’d managed to hold on to, inhaling their scent as though it were the breath of life.

      Third, Mara had officially complained about Jesslyn’s conduct.

      Briefly, surgingly, Jesslyn had hoped Mara had brought the complaints as some warped way of trying to keep Jesslyn in her life. But she could only fool herself for so long and, as the process had ground forwards, Jesslyn had let her feelings curdle towards hatred, if only in hope that it would harden into a carapace around her heart.

      She’d always thought of Mara as the innocent victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice. Now, she’d forced herself to damn her as the devil incarnate, vile and evil murderess, fit only for an eternity in hell.

      And finally, obviously, when Muncy had given Jesslyn her marching orders.

      Jesslyn stared into the flames.