Daniel Blake
City of Sins

Dedication

To Jenie and Jeremy Wyatt,

top drawer parents-in-law

Contents

Title page

Dedication

Prologue

Khao Lak, Thailand

New Orleans, LA

Interlude

Part One July

Friday, July 1st

Monday, July 4th

Tuesday, July 5th

Wednesday, July 6th

Thursday, July 7th

Friday, July 8th

Saturday, July 9th

Sunday, July 10th

Monday, July 11th

Tuesday, July 12th

Wednesday, July 13th

Thursday, July 14th

Friday, July 15th

Saturday, July 16th

Sunday, July 17th

Monday, July 18th

Tuesday, July 19th

Wednesday, July 20th

Thursday, July 21st

Friday, July 22nd

Saturday, July 23rd

Sunday, July 24th

Monday, July 25th

Interlude

Part Two August

Friday, August 19th

Saturday, August 20th

Sunday, August 21st

Monday, August 22nd

Tuesday, August 23rd

Wednesday, August 24th

Thursday, August 25th

Friday, August 26th

Saturday, August 27th

Sunday, August 28th

Monday, August 29th

Tuesday, August 30th

Epilogue

Thursday, November 24th

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other books by Daniel Blake

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

December 26th

Khao Lak, Thailand

The sea ran back down the beach.

Franco Patrese felt the warm sand between his toes and smiled. There might be better places to be in the world right now, but none sprang to mind. It was sunny and hot, he’d spent the last six nights with an English girl who had the dirtiest laugh and nicest smell of anyone he’d ever met, and the most strenuous task he faced today was sorting out the precise sequence of swimming, sunbathing, lunch, beer and sex.

Exactly two weeks ago, Patrese had sat in a Pittsburgh hospital room and listened to a murderer’s confession. It had been the culmination of a case which had consumed him for months and taken with it much of his faith in human nature. Exhausted and traumatized, he’d searched online for last-minute holidays, and ended up among the palm trees here in Khao Lak.

The first week had been an open-water diving course – a refresher course, in Patrese’s case, as he’d done a lot of diving in his youth but hadn’t been for a few years now. It was there that he’d met Katie, the English girl currently asleep in his beachfront hotel room. They’d dived to reefs and wrecks, swum with Technicolor rainbows of marine life: cube boxfish dotted in yellow and black, nudibranches of solar orange, shrimp banded in Old Glory red and white.

Now Patrese had another week in which to do the square root of nothing. For the first time in months, perhaps longer, he felt – well, not exactly happy, given everything which had happened back in Pittsburgh, but certainly carefree. Tension was leaching like toxins from his body with every day that passed.

He kept walking toward the sea, waiting for the next wave to roll up the sand and lap round his ankles like the licking of an eager puppy.

The water continued to retreat, almost as though it were playing a game with him. Through one wave cycle, then another, and still it receded.

Patrese’s brain was so firmly in neutral that it took him a few moments to realize how unusual this was.

In the shallows, swimmers laughed in amazement as the water drained around them. Tourist canoes were left stranded on ropes suddenly slack; beach vendors picked up fish writhing on the sand. Patrese heard questioning voices, saw shoulders shrugged. No one had ever seen such a thing, it seemed.

He had.

A Discovery Channel program, he thought, or maybe National Geographic. They’d reconstructed a historic earthquake – Lisbon, that was it, sometime in the eighteenth century – with CGI effects, talking heads, and a narrator whose voice had been set firmly to ‘doom’. The program had shown many of Lisbon’s residents fleeing to the waterfront to escape fires and falling debris in the city center. From the docks, they’d seen the sea recede so far and fast that it had exposed all the cargo lost and wrecks forgotten over the centuries.

And after that …

‘Tsunami!’ Patrese shouted. ‘Tsunami!’

A couple of people looked curiously at him. Perhaps they thought he was calling for a lost dog. A lobster-colored Englishman in a black-and-white soccer shirt clapped and began to sing, ‘Toon Army! Toon Army!’

A posse of Germans were twenty yards away. Patrese ran over to them.

‘Move! You’ve got to move!’

‘Hey!’ One of the Germans clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Chill out, man.’

‘There’s a tsunami coming!’

‘Tsunami?’

‘Tidal wave.’

The Germans looked out at the ocean. The water was a carpet of azure as far as they could see.

‘I don’t see no tidal wave,’ said the shoulder clapper.

They all looked at Patrese with a sort of benevolent wariness, clearly bracketing him as slightly demented but probably harmless.

‘It’s coming, I tell you,’ Patrese insisted.

‘Whatever you’re on, man, can you give me some?’

‘Please leave us alone now,’ said one of the German women.

Patrese opened his mouth to say something else, but the Germans were already turning away from him. He kept moving, telling everyone he could find: leave the beach, go inland, get somewhere high. Some people packed up their stuff without a word and did what he said. Some ignored him or feigned incomprehension. Some, the smart ones, took off to other parts of the beach and began to spread the word.

A white crescent on the horizon now, awesome in its grace and beauty. For a moment even Patrese stood spellbound, watching as the crescent began to grow.

Then he ran.

Behind him, the tsunami reared up, an angry cobra of seawater. It flipped a fishing boat over and swallowed it whole. Urgent voices round Patrese, a dozen different languages and all saying the same thing: Move, run, keep going.

Katie was standing at the entrance to the hotel, wearing one of Patrese’s T-shirts over her bikini. Her hair was tousled, and her eyes were still bleary with sleep.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said.

Patrese grabbed her without breaking stride. ‘Move. Come with me.’

‘Franco, what the fuck …?’

‘Just do it!’ He had to shout to be heard above the roaring.

The tsunami smashed through the swimmers who hadn’t managed to get ashore in time and raced up the beach with murderous intent. It was every monster from every nightmare bundled together and made real; surging into the hotel, devouring whole rooms in seconds, tearing husbands from wives and children from parents.

Water all around Patrese and in him, holding him up and dragging him down. Water does not strive. It flows in the places men reject. Chest and spine pressed vice tight and harder still, a balloon expanding from within. Bubbles around his head and ringing beyond heart thumps in his ears; air, life itself, scurrying away into mocking oblivion. The camera’s aperture of consciousness closing in, light shrinking from the edges, dim through flashes of jagged crystals. Thoughts slowing, panic receding, resignation, acceptance, dulled contentment, blue gray flowing around, sounds gone, and this is how it ends, this is it, just let go and slide away, like falling about in a green field in early summer.

Then suddenly the water went out and the air came in; coughing, spluttering, frenzied inhaling, man’s reflex to survive. Patrese opened his eyes and saw that the tsunami was gone, pulling itself back out of the hotel and down the beach. Bodies span like sticks in the surge. Patrese felt a wall at each shoulder, and realized he’d been pinned in a corner, facing away from the beach. Blind chance. Anywhere else in the room, he’d have been swept straight back out to sea.

From the dining room upstairs came voices, giddy and shrill with relief. Patrese climbed slime-slippery steps and looked around the room. Two dozen people, he reckoned: the quick ones, the lucky ones.

Katie wasn’t among them.

New Orleans, LA

It could have been very romantic. Private room in one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, hard on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Just the two of them: him handsome in a swarthy, weathered way, not quite yet ruined by the years; she with skin the color of barely milked coffee under an orange-and-black madras headdress. They wouldn’t have been young lovers, that was for sure, but it was anyone’s guess as to exactly how old they were: they weren’t the kind of people to keep their original birth certificates. The best estimates put her somewhere in her late fifties and him half a decade older. Whatever the truth, they weren’t saying.

It could have been very romantic, were it not for the four men who stood outside the private room – two of them hers, two his, all of them armed – and were it not also for the FBI surveillance van which sat at the far end of the parking lot, listening in through the microphone attached to the underside of the wine bucket. The Bureau had guessed the room would be swept for listening devices before the diners arrived, but not after that. They’d guessed right. Now all the listeners needed was something incriminating; something they could hear and, even better, something they could record. These were two big fish, and the Bureau desperately wanted to net them.

The male fish was Balthazar Ortiz, a senior member of Mexico’s Los Zetas drug syndicate. Los Zetas were somewhere between a faction of the Gulf Cartel and a private army of their own. The organization was full of former Mexican special forces soldiers like Ortiz, and they were ruthlessly good at what they did. Los Zetas had sprung two dozen of their comrades from jail somewhere in Mexico a couple of months back; they’d killed the new police chief of Nuevo Laredo six hours after he’d taken office.

And she was Marie Laveau, one of the kingpins – queen-pins? – of the New Orleans underworld. In particular, she was Queen of the Lower Ninth, a hardscrabble district perched at the corner where the Mississippi met the Industrial Canal. The Lower Ninth, uneasy by day and terrifying by night, reeked of poverty and drugs. It was overwhelmingly black, of course; that went without saying, that was just the way it was in this city.

The original Marie Laveau had lived in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, and had styled herself the Voodoo Queen. A hairdresser by trade, she’d also claimed to be an oracle, an exorcist, a priestess, and much more. For every known fact about her life, there were a hundred myths. So too with this one, the current Marie Laveau. She claimed to be not just a descendant of the original but the very reincarnation of her. She also styled herself the Voodoo Queen, but with the proviso that the spirit of the Voodoo Queen was immortal; she was only the temporary guardian of it.

Marie gestured across the shimmering darkness of the water. In the distance, headlights slid along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the twin-span interstate bridge which connected the city to the north side of the lake.

‘The second Marie Laveau – daughter of the original – she was conducting a ceremony on the lake when a storm came up. Swept her out into the middle of the lake. She stayed in the water five days. When they found her, she didn’t even have exposure.’

Ortiz nodded. ‘Shall we get to business?’

Marie sighed, as if his lack of interest in small talk was somehow discourteous. ‘If you like.’

‘Now, I don’t know how you did it before, with my, er, predecessor …’

‘Just like we’re doing it now.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘Round about this time, every year. See how the arrangement’s gone the past twelve months, see how we want it to go for the next twelve.’

‘OK. And the arrangement; how is it for you?’

‘The arrangement’s not the problem.’

‘Then what is the problem?’

‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘You. You’re the problem.’

The folds of Marie’s green kaftan seemed to shift and rearrange themselves, and suddenly she was holding a Magnum Baby Eagle pistol with an extended barrel to accommodate the suppressor on its end.

Ortiz just about had time to look astonished before Marie shot him straight through the heart.

Interlude

Patrese stayed in Khao Lak for three weeks after the tsunami. Every day of those three weeks, from before dawn to after dark, he worked with a frenzy born of knowing one sure thing: that once he stopped, he’d never start again.

He helped carry corpses – one of them Katie’s – to warehouses stacked to the ceiling with coffins, body bags and cadavers. He helped dig through rubble with his bare hands, dragging bodies out into the open and off for whatever dignified burial their families could give them. He helped pin photographs of the lost and missing on walls; he listened to the impotent bewilderments of each newly arrived wave of relatives. He helped pile debris into trucks, and helped drive those trucks to landfill sites. He helped aid workers hand out food, helped doctors distribute medicines, helped hammer up walls and roofs for makeshift shelters.

He helped everyone but himself, knowing that he could wait.

And at the end of those three weeks, he suddenly knew it was time to go. There were more people helping with the reconstruction than were strictly needed, and they were beginning to get in each other’s way. Hardened professional aid workers were scorning fresh-faced Western volunteers as ‘disaster tourists’; locals were chafing at soldiers who ordered them around.

The night before Patrese left, he was taken to see Panupong Wattana. Wattana was five foot two on a good day, always immaculately turned out in what seemed an endless rota of lightweight suits, and he’d been around Khao Lak pretty much every day since the tsunami: giving interviews to the world’s media, glad-handing those unfortunate souls who’d lost everything, and generally strutting around like some latter-day Napoleon. As far as Patrese could make out, Wattana was a hybrid of politician and businessman. Clearly, the two roles were seen as complementary, even indivisible. Equally clearly, the concept of a conflict of interest was a very remote one round these parts.

‘The great Stakhanovite!’ Wattana exclaimed, clasping Patrese’s hand in both of his own. ‘I have heard much about you; the American who works like a Soviet!’

Patrese mumbled something noncommittal about just doing his bit.

‘Come, come, Mr Patrese. You are too modest, and we all know it. I just want to thank you on behalf of the people of Khao Lak, of Takua Pa district, of Phang Nga province, of Thailand itself …’

Patrese half-wondered whether Wattana was going to keep on, rather as Patrese himself had addressed envelopes when a child: name, street, city, country, earth, galaxy, universe.

‘…and to tell you that if you ever need anything in America, three of my sons are there, and I’ve instructed them specifically to do anything you ask.’

‘Where are they based?’ Patrese asked, more out of politeness than a genuine desire to know.

‘Johnny’s in Baltimore. Tony, New Orleans. Mikey, San Diego.’

Johnny, Tony, Mikey – damn, Patrese thought, they sound more Italian than I do.

‘Well, I’m in Pittsburgh, but if I ever go visit any of those places, I’ll be sure to look them up.’

The Bureau might not have caught Marie discussing anything concrete about her drugs business – the ‘arrangement’ she’d spoken about could have meant anything – but they’d got something better: audio evidence of a murder. The cough of the suppressed pistol hadn’t been loud enough to carry outside the room, so neither Marie’s bodyguards nor Ortiz’ had heard; but it was clearly audible on the surveillance tape.

Back-up had been there inside three minutes; barreling through astonished diners into the back of the restaurant, shouting at the bodyguards not even to fucking think about it, and into the private room, where Marie was sitting calmly across the table from a very dead Ortiz.

The surveillance might have been a Bureau operation, but the murder squarely and clearly belonged to the New Orleans Police Department. Homicide detective Selma Fawcett took charge of the investigation. Selma – named after the Alabama city of civil rights movement fame – was black, which didn’t make her a minority in the NOPD, and female, which did.

Short of actually catching Marie with a smoking gun, this seemed to Selma pretty much as clear-cut as cases went. Marie was so guilty, she made OJ look innocent.

Under Louisiana law, murder in the first was reserved for killings with aggravated circumstances. Since none of those circumstances applied here – there’d been no kidnap, rape, burglary, robbery, and the victim hadn’t been a member of law enforcement – Marie could only be charged with second-degree murder, which in turn meant the maximum sentence she could receive was life rather than death.

That suited Selma fine. She’d seen firsthand what Marie’s kind of drugs did to people, and if the last, best option was putting Marie inside to the end of her days, then that would have to do. Selma was less keen on the fact that the second-degree charge allowed Marie to be released on bail – $500,000 bail, to be precise – but since there was little Selma could do about that, she tried not to let it bother her too much.

The world and his wife grandstanded on this one. The Bureau trumpeted the success of their surveillance operation. The police department pointed to the speed of their officers’ response and the efficiency of their investigators. The assistant district attorney took personal charge of the prosecution. Even the state governor himself went on television to restate Louisiana’s commitment to drug-free streets. Impressively, he even managed to get all that out with a straight face.

Marie said she wanted a quick trial, as was her right. She also said she wanted to defend herself. This, too, was her right. She started to keep a tally of everyone who quoted to her the maxim about a man who is his own lawyer having a fool for a client.

Trial date was set for late June; and pretty much everyone who came across Marie said that, for a woman facing the prospect of life imprisonment, she seemed about as concerned as someone putting the cat out for the night.

It was ten below freezing when Patrese arrived back in Pittsburgh, and the welcome he got at police headquarters wasn’t a whole lot warmer. He’d worked there almost a decade, he’d always thought of himself as fairly popular, yet pretty much not a single person asked how he was, said it was good to have him back, suggested they go for a beer. They must have known about the tsunami: even the most inward-looking of America’s TV networks couldn’t have ignored it. They just didn’t seem to care.

Patrese knew why, of course. The case which had so consumed him had done for his partner, Mark Beradino. Beradino had lost his career and more because of it, and since Beradino had been a legend in the department, and since the department didn’t like to see a legend brought low, they’d looked around for someone to blame. Patrese was clearly that someone. That this was unfair – Beradino had brought all the bad luck and trouble on himself – was irrelevant. A scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb, had been sought, and Patrese was its name.

There’d been a time, perhaps as recently as a month ago, when Patrese would have said ‘screw the lot of you’ and put up with it until people came to their senses. But as he walked through the endless institutional corridors, catching snatches of discussion about the Steelers’ upcoming championship game in Foxborough, he realized that he simply couldn’t be bothered. He’d just spent three weeks among people who really had lost everything. The static he was getting now seemed so petty in comparison.

He found an empty meeting room and dialed his old college buddy Caleb Boone, now in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office.

‘Franco! Man, am I glad to hear from you! Been trying you for weeks.’

‘Caleb, you want to grab a beer?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. I want to grab many beers.’

Patrese laughed, relieved. ‘I believe that’s the recognized international signal for a serious FatHeads session.’

‘I believe it is. Seven?’

‘Sounds good. And listen; we can talk about this more when we’re there, but I was wondering … I was wondering if the Bureau has any vacancies. For a cop.’

‘Vacancies? In the Pittsburgh field office?’

‘No. In any field office apart from Pittsburgh.’

The FatHeads session indeed turned out to be serious; seriously liquid and seriously long. Patrese stumbled to bed sometime nearer dawn than midnight, and trod gingerly through the next day as a result. He was just about feeling human again by the time he went round to his sister Bianca’s for dinner, and for a few hours lost himself in the uncomplicated and riotous warmth of her own family’s love for him; her briskly efficient doctoral clucking, her husband Sandro’s watchful concern, and the endless energy and noise of their three kids.

‘Here,’ Bianca said suddenly, as they were clearing away. ‘Meant to give you this.’

She reached up to the highest shelf and pulled down a small jar. There was some kind of fabric inside, Patrese saw. It looked old and frayed.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘It’s your caul. I found it while packing up Mum and Dad’s stuff.’ Their parents had been killed in a car crash a few months before.

‘Funny thing to keep around the place.’

‘Mom, what’s a caul?’ said Gennaro, Bianca’s youngest.

‘Some babies are born with a membrane covering their face and head.’

‘Yeeuch!’

‘Not “yeeuch”, honey. It’s perfectly natural; it’s just part of the, er, the bag which holds babies inside their moms’ tummies. Uncle Franco was one of those babies. And having a caul is special.’

‘Why’s it special?’

‘Lots of reasons. If you have a caul, it can mean you’re psychic …’

‘I wish,’ Patrese muttered.

‘…or you can heal people, or you’ll travel all your life and never tire, or –’

Bianca stopped suddenly and clapped her hand to her mouth.

‘What?’ Patrese said.

She spoke through her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Tell me.’

She took her hand away, put it on his shoulder, and looked him squarely in the eye.

‘It means you’ll never drown.’

Boone rang as Patrese was driving back home.

‘This a good time to talk, buddy?’

‘Er … sure.’

‘You OK? You sound a little, er, distracted.’

Patrese glanced at the caul jar on the passenger seat. ‘No. Just driving.’

‘OK. You asked about the Bureau? Got a name for you: Wyndham Phelps.’

Patrese laughed. ‘Sounds like someone from Gone with the Wind.’

‘Good Southern name. I told him all about you, and he wants to meet with you.’

‘Where’s he at?’

‘He heads the field office in New Orleans.’

PART ONE

Friday, July 1st

The jury were coming back in today; Marie was certain of it. And that meant she could leave nothing to chance.

She took six white candles, stood them in a tray of holy water, and lit them. Then she took twelve sage leaves, wrote the name of one of the apostles (with Paul standing in for Judas) on each leaf, and slipped six into one shoe and six into the other. This was so the jury would decide in her favor.

She dabbed court lotion on her neck and wrists, just as she’d done every day during the trial. She’d made the lotion herself, by mixing together oils of cinnamon, calendula, frankincense and carnation, and adding a piece of devil’s shoestring and a slice of galangal root all mixed together. This was to influence the judge and jury.

Finally, she took a white bowl piled with dirt. The dirt she’d gathered herself, with her right hand, from the graves of nine children in the St Louis Number One cemetery. She placed the bowl on her altar, facing east, between three white candles. Then she added three teaspoons of sugar and three of sulfur, recited the 35th psalm, asked the spirits to come with all their power to help her, and smeared the dust on the inside of her kaftan. This was so the court would do as she wished.

She was ready.

The sidewalk outside the courthouse was packed: crowds four or five deep, pressing against hastily erected barriers and watched by police officers who shifted uneasily from foot to foot in the oppressive heat. The gathering felt more like a street party than a demonstration. People passed food to each other, creased their faces in laughter. Marie wasn’t the only one convinced she’d be acquitted, clearly.

The trial had lasted only a week. Marie’s defense had been simple: Ortiz had killed himself. The ‘problem’ she’d referred to on the surveillance tape was his carrying a gun: she’d seen it on his waistband as he’d shifted position. Then he’d brought the gun out and, before she’d even been able to react, he’d shot himself. As to why he’d done so, she had no idea: but then the burden of that proof wasn’t on her, was it?

She’d brought in witnesses who testified that she funded many amenities in the Lower Ninth. Folks got in trouble with their finances, she helped them out. Folks got beaten up by the police, she helped them out. She pointed out that she’d never been convicted of anything in her life, not so much as a traffic offense, and yet the Bureau were bugging her like she was bin Laden or John Gotti or someone.

She was representing herself, she said, so the jury – most of them people of color like herself, just trying to make their way in a world stacked against them – could see what she was really like. No smart-ass lawyer twisting her words for her. The other side could do that all they liked, but not her, not Marie Laveau, no sir.

It had been pure theater. And now it was time for the curtain call.

The courtroom itself was so full it seemed almost to bulge. People fanned their faces and tried to stay as still as possible: the ageing municipal aircon system was nowhere near up to coping with a couple of hundred excited metabolisms.

An expectant murmur fluttered off the walls as the jury took their seats.

Judge Amos Katash, who looked like the older brother of Michelangelo’s Sistine God and was clearly relishing every moment of this performance, shuffled some papers and cleared his throat. ‘Would the foreman please stand.’

A gray-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain round her neck got to her feet, glancing at Marie as she did so.

In the gallery, Selma closed her eyes. Like every cop, she knew the old adage about the foreman never looking at the defendant if they’re guilty – and as Selma had maintained right from the start, Marie was as guilty as anyone she’d ever come across.

‘Have you reached a decision?’ Katash asked the foreman.

‘Yes.’

‘And is the decision the decision of you all?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Marie Laveau, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Balthazar Ortiz?’

‘Not guilty.’

Pandemonium in the courtroom; a dissonant vortex of triumphant whoops, frantic applause, tears and outraged shouts. Marie smiled and waved daintily, as though she were on the red carpet at the Kodak Theater. Selma pinched her nose between thumb and middle finger as she shook her head in disbelief.

Monday, July 4th

Fourth of July, and New Orleans was hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.

Patrese took a sip of daiquiri and pinched at his shirtfront, trying to peel it away from his skin.

‘Hell, Franco,’ laughed Phelps, ‘you look like a water cannon’s been using you for target practice. Know what it is? Thick blood. All those steeltown winters have given you sludge in your veins. A couple of years down here, the stuff’ll be running through you like water, and one hundred degrees won’t even make you sweat. Till then, my friend, make like us locals. Laissez les bons temps rouler.’ He clinked his glass against Patrese’s and gestured round the party. ‘Quite something, huh?’

It sure was, thought Patrese. White-suited waiters glided between the guests, proffering champagne here, stuffed lobster claws there. Three barmen shook and mixed every cocktail Patrese had ever heard of and plenty he hadn’t. A string quartet floated Haydn under the hubbub of conversation and laughter. Exotic fish glided endlessly round ornamental ponds.

New Orleans held fast to the old ideals of high society. Anybody who was anybody spent their Fourth of July here, at the Brown House, a steep-gabled, Syrian-arched monument to Romanesque Revivalism. No matter if you wanted to go to your beach house or visit with family, when you were invited to the Brown House, you went. It was the largest house in all New Orleans, and it was owned by the city’s richest man.

Who was, as usual, nowhere to be seen.

St John Varden’s Gatsby-like absence from his own parties may have been because he preferred to work, because he found other people tedious company, because he wanted to enhance his mystique, or all of the above. Only he knew for certain, and he wasn’t telling.

Patrese had been in New Orleans only a few months, but that was plenty enough to realize Varden was everywhere and nowhere. The logo of his eponymous company sprouted across the city like mushrooms after rain; his name bubbled up in quotidian conversations, an eternal presence in the ether. But he appeared in public only once a year, at the company’s AGM, and if you wanted a photo of him, it was the corporate brochure or nothing.

In contrast, his son – St John Varden Jnr, universally known as Junior – was working the guests with practiced ease. In another era, he could have been a matinee idol, all brooding hazel eyes, jet-black hair and olive skin. As it was, he’d been a proper war hero. Purple Heart in Desert Storm, Silver Star in Bosnia, and finally the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan; the first living recipient of the award since Vietnam. He’d left the army and announced his intention to go into politics. Eighteen months ago, he’d become Governor of Louisiana at his first attempt. Massachusetts had the Kennedys, Texas the Bushes: Louisiana had the Vardens.

‘Here,’ Phelps said, ‘let me introduce you to a few people.’

Phelps’ wife had filed for divorce earlier in the year and gone to live with her new lover in Mobile, so Patrese was his plus one today. There were plenty of other people Phelps could have brought – hell, half of Patrese’s new colleagues at the FBI’s New Orleans field office would have killed for the chance – but Phelps, lord of that office, had chosen to ask Patrese, the outsider.

There’d been protests; whispered and civilized, perhaps, but protests nonetheless. Patrese wasn’t a southerner. Worse, he hadn’t even been a Bureau man until a few months ago.

All the more reason to show him how we do things down here, Phelps had said; and that had been that.

Patrese shook hands and repeated people’s names back to them when they were introduced, the better to remember who was who. He already recognized Marc Alper, the assistant DA who’d prosecuted Marie Laveau and was now putting a brave face on the verdict: ‘You can never predict juries.’ Here was a chief justice, here someone high up in City Hall, here a golfing store magnate, all full of backslapping bonhomie, safe and smug in the knowledge that, if you were in here, you counted for something.

All men, Patrese noticed, and all white. The absolute top jobs – mayor, DA, police chief, pretty much everyone bar Phelps himself – might have had black incumbents, but to Patrese the dark crust seemed very thin, like a pint of Guinness in negative.

‘And this,’ said Phelps, his voice rising slightly as though in anticipation of a drum roll, ‘is Cindy Rojciewicz.’

Patrese knew she’d be a knockout even before she turned, just from the reactions of everyone around them. It was like something from the Discovery Channel: the males puffing their chests out, the females bristling and snarling with affront.

‘Hiii,’ said Cindy, in a voice which suggested she’d spent more time than was healthy smoking filterless cigarettes and watching Marlene Dietrich films. ‘Wyndham’s told me a whole heap about you.’ She winked. ‘All good, of course.’

Such an obvious lie, Patrese thought. Why then was he so flattered?

Raven hair, cobalt eyes and a dress which straddled demonstrative and slutty might have had something to do with it, he conceded.

With every wife in a five-yard radius practically dragging their husbands away by the hair, and Phelps excusing himself with a pat on Patrese’s shoulder – he could hardly have made it more obvious if he’d winked and given a thumbs-up – Patrese suddenly found himself alone with Cindy.

She nodded toward his shirt. ‘Spill something?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You wanna come inside and freshen up?’

‘Come inside? You live here?’

She laughed. ‘I wish. I’m Mr Varden’s PA. I know my way around.’

‘And he won’t mind?’

‘Jeez, Franco; it’s a house, not a darn museum.’ Houshe, musheum; she was drunk, Patrese realized.

Drunk, sexy as hell, and inviting him inside. A good Catholic boy might have made his excuses. A lapsed Catholic, never.

‘Then let’s go,’ he said.

She walked a pace in front of him. He kept his eyes above her waist for at least a second. A triumph of willpower, in the circumstances.

They dodged a couple of waiters and went in through a pair of French doors. It was much darker now they were out of the sun, and Patrese blinked twice as his eyes adjusted. Cooler, too. He gave a little shiver as the sweat began to dry.

Cindy was holding a door open. ‘Over here.’

He caught a tendril of her scent as he walked past. It was a library, air heavy with leather and walls paneled with wood the color of toast.

She closed the door behind her.

‘You can freshen up in a second, Franco. But first, I want to …’

He was already moving for the kiss as he turned back to her.

‘…say there’s something terrible going on,’ she blurted.

Their lips had almost touched before he realized what she’d said. He pulled back and looked at her, almost too startled to be embarrassed.

‘I need to tell someone about it,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you.’

‘But you’ve never even met me.’

‘Exactly. Exactly. Everyone here knows everyone. Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot. Might as well take out a personal in the Times-Picayune, you know? But not you. You don’t know anyone here, not properly. Not yet. You’re not –’ she grabbed for the word, missed, found it with a snap – ‘tainted.’

Cindy was talking fast but coherently; the strange lucidity of the drunk whose brain can only focus on one thing at a time, but does so with the precision of a laser.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Then tell me. What is it?’

‘Too big to tell you now. Too complicated.’

‘Just give me an idea.’

‘Oh, God … Sacrifice.’

‘Sacrifice?’

‘Sacrificing people.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got documents. Evidence. I need you alone, not with’ – she waved an arm vaguely toward the window – ‘all that boo-yah going on out there. And I need to trust you. Maybe I won’t, next time. Maybe I’ll have got you all wrong.’

‘But you’ve just told me …’

‘I’ve told you nothing. Not yet.’

A shadow fell across the strip of light at the bottom of the door. Patrese and Cindy watched it pause a moment, then disappear.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you interested?’

‘I told you already. Yes.’

‘Good. Can’t meet tomorrow – we’re out of town all day.’

‘We?’

‘Mr Varden and me. Wherever he goes, I go. You free Wednesday? After work?’

‘Sure.’

‘You know Checkpoint Charlie’s?’

‘Esplanade and Decatur, right?’

‘A man who knows his bars. Always a good sign. Eight o’clock? Don’t get out of work much earlier, I’m afraid.’

‘Eight’s fine.’

‘Good. See you then.’

She opened the door, and they stepped out into the corridor.

She studied Patrese’s face. He wondered if she was going to kiss him after all.

‘Noah,’ she said. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Patrese. Noah.

She walked back out into the light.

Tuesday, July 5th

The office had a weekend feel to it. Half the staff had taken an extra day or two round about the holiday itself, and so Patrese found himself with a morning uninterrupted by the usual round of meetings and briefings.

If he was going to go through with this, he wanted to get it right. In the few months he’d been with the Bureau, he’d been struck most of all by the scale on which things were done. Resources were ten times what he’d been used to in the Pittsburgh PD. Cases were larger and more intricate, focusing on serious criminals rather than the lowlife who formed the staple of every Homicide cop’s beat. Hell, even the agents’ suits were better, their shoes shinier.

He pulled from the shelf the Bureau’s Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines – MIOG, as it referred to itself, with the usual inability of any bureaucracy to resist an acronym – and found section 137, ‘The Criminal Informant (CI) Program’.

Worse than having no human sources, the text began, is being seduced by a source who is telling lies.

Typical Bureau, Patrese thought; assume the worst, right from the get-go. But he took the point. He didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, and until he did, his default would have to be that she was yanking his chain unless specifically proven otherwise.

Failure to control informants has undermined costly long-term investigations, destroyed the careers of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, and caused death and serious injuries to innocent citizens and police.

This, too, Patrese knew full well. He’d run informants in his days on the Pittsburgh Homicide beat, usually gangbangers in between prison sentences who’d have sold their grandma for a hit of crack and lied as easily as they breathed. Smart lawyers picked government cases apart on technicalities, the perps walked free, and heads rolled; sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.

Cindy was, potentially at least, a different kettle of fish altogether. Whether that would make her easier or harder to control, Patrese had no idea.

Informants must be classified according to one of the following 12 categories: Organized Crime (OC); General Criminal (C); Domestic Terrorism (DT); White-Collar Crime (WC); Drugs (D); International Terrorism (IT); Civil Rights (CR); National Infrastructure Protection/Computer Intrusion Program (NI); Cyber Crime (CC); Major Theft (MT); Violent Gangs (VG); Confidential Sources (CS).

White-collar crime, Patrese presumed, given Cindy’s position, though he couldn’t help but feel the categories were pretty arbitrary. Where did violent gangs end and drugs begin? Couldn’t major theft also be organized crime?

The FBI considers the following factors in determining an individual’s suitability to be an informant:

1. Whether the person appears to be in a position to provide information concerning violations of law that are within the scope of authorized FBI investigative activity.

He had to presume that Cindy was in such a position, else she wouldn’t have come to him in the first place. As Varden’s PA, she must be privy to vast swathes of information, much of it private and sensitive. Tick that.

2. Whether the individual is willing to voluntarily furnish information to the FBI.

She’d approached him, hadn’t she? Not the other way round. Another tick.

3. Whether the individual appears to be directed by others to obtain information from the FBI.

Unlikely. If Varden wanted to find out something from the FBI, all he had to do was ask Phelps. In any case, Patrese had been a cop, if not an agent, long enough to recognize the moment in an investigation when a suspect, snitch, witness, whoever, started asking questions rather than answering them.

4. Whether there is anything in the individual’s background that would make him/her unfit for use as an informant.

Patrese didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, of course; not even her surname. Something Polish, it had sounded like when Phelps had introduced them, but he couldn’t have repeated it, let alone spelled it.

He Googled ‘Varden’, found the company website, and dialed the main switchboard. Best not to announce his interest too clearly, he thought.

‘Good morning, Varden Industries.’

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m calling from FedEx. We have a package for someone in Mr Varden’s office, but I’m afraid the surname’s illegible. It’s a Cindy someone.’

‘That’ll be Mr Varden’s PA, sir. Cindy Rojciewicz.’

‘Spell that for me, please.’

‘Certainly, sir. R-O-J-C-I-E-W-I-C-Z.’

‘Thank you. The courier will be round later.’

Patrese hung up, logged into the National Instant Criminal Background Check database, and entered Cindy’s name.

No matches.

Then he Googled her.

Turned out her father was a congressman. Roger Rojciewicz, Republican, and therefore known in Washington as 3R. He represented Louisiana’s first congressional district, which comprised land both north and south of Lake Pontchartrain, including most of New Orleans’ western suburbs and a small portion of the city proper. And he seemed quite the bigshot: chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and a member both of the Homeland Security Subcommittee and the Committee of Appropriations too.

No surprise how Cindy had got her job with Varden, then.

About her personally, Patrese found much less. She was pictured on a high school reunion website, and she’d written condolences on a tribute board to a teenager who’d committed suicide. Every other appearance she made on the web was Varden-related, and pretty anodyne at that: job applications, media inquiries.

He wondered if he’d have been so keen to find out more about her without an official excuse, and realized that he already knew the answer.

5. Whether the nature of the matter under investigation and the importance of the information being furnished to the FBI outweigh the seriousness of any past or contemporaneous criminal activity of which the informant may be suspected.

See above, Patrese guessed.

6. Whether the motives of the informant in volunteering to assist the FBI appear to be reasonable and proper.

This was key. Informants tend to be motivated by one or more of MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego. Cindy’s behavior the previous day had suggested ideology more than anything else. She’d used the words ‘terrible’ and ‘tainted’, as though whatever she wanted to tell him was some great moral wrong which needed righting.

But there could be – in Patrese’s experience, there usually was – more to it than that. Informants never had just one reason for snitching, and the reasons they did have were rarely static, waxing and waning in importance as an investigation progressed.

Points seven through ten were all things Patrese would find out only once the investigation had begun: whether they could get the information in a better way; whether the informant was reliable and trustworthy; whether the informant was willing to conform to FBI guidelines; and whether the FBI would be able to adequately monitor the informant’s activities.

Point eleven concerned legalities of privileged communications, lawful association and freedom of speech. One for the lawyers to argue over. All billable, of course.

12. Whether the use of the informant could compromise an investigation or subsequent prosecution that may require the government to move for a dismissal of the case.

Patrese thought for a moment. He wasn’t aware of any current investigation which this could compromise, but that meant nothing. He was still the new kid here, and if he knew anything, it was that what he didn’t know far outweighed what he did.

Perhaps he should ask Phelps about this.

Perhaps he should talk to Phelps anyway.

Cindy had told Patrese not to tell anyone, hadn’t she?

Actually, he remembered, she hadn’t. She’d said: ‘Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot,’ but that wasn’t the same thing, not at all.

And she must have known that, if she involved Patrese, she’d be involving Phelps too, sooner or later. She’d hardly expect Patrese to run something like this without the knowledge of his own boss; and if she did, she was clearly deranged, and therefore by definition not worth bothering with.

Patrese dialed Phelps’ extension.

‘Hi, Franco.’

‘Hey, Sondra.’ Sondra, Phelps’ secretary, was the longest-serving employee in the entire New Orleans field office. Phelps was the tenth Special Agent-in-Charge for whom she’d worked. She liked to joke that she was the Crescent City’s own version of the Queen of England; her prime ministers might come and go, but she was always there, though admittedly a little older and grayer each time around.

‘Is the gran queso there?’ Patrese asked.

‘Franco, I keep telling you, you’re in a French city now. Grande fromage. And no, he’s not around. He’s out of town today.’

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow he’s here, in the city, but not here, in the office. Conference down at the Convention Center. You wanna call him, you want me to put you in the diary for Thursday, or is it anything I can help with?’

Patrese toyed for a moment with the idea of telling her about Cindy. Sondra might not have been an agent, but she’d probably give better advice than the rest of them put together.

But Cindy was Varden’s PA, and when it came to Varden, Patrese already knew, treading carefully was the order of the day. He didn’t want to involve Sondra with something that wasn’t her problem; nor did he want to ring Phelps and get a snatched few minutes on the phone. He wanted to ask Phelps his advice face-to-face, talk through the options with him one by one.

But he couldn’t do that before he’d seen Cindy.

The hell with it, Patrese thought. He’d keep the rendezvous, commit himself to nothing, and brief Phelps when it was done. If Phelps chewed him out, so be it.

‘Thursday morning’s fine,’ Patrese said.

‘Great. He’s got fifteen minutes at ten. That do?’

‘That does nicely. Thanks.’

Patrese hung up and stared out of the window. The view was hardly National Geographic: the parking lot out the front of the building, and the traffic rumbling along Leon C. Simon. He needed another couple of pay grades to get one of the higher floors looking out the back over Lake Pontchartrain.

He turned his attention back to the manual.

The single biggest mistake an agent can make in his relationship with the confidential informant is to become romantically involved.

Spoilsports.

Wednesday, July 6th

Patrese was there quarter of an hour early. The moment he walked in, he was glad he’d changed between leaving work and coming here. Collar shirt and flannel pants would have marked him out a mile off as a stiff trying to unwind, but with a faded Pitt T-shirt and battered jeans, he blended right in.

Checkpoint Charlie’s is located pretty much right on the spot where the French Quarter fades into Faubourg-Marigny; which was to say, right on the spot where most tourists turn on their heels, because their guidebooks mark the edge of the Quarter as the edge of the known world, with bohemian Faubourg one of those uncharted territories on medieval maps emblazoned with the warning Here Be Monsters.

Patrese ordered an Abita and looked round. It was somewhere between a biker bar and a college hangout; pretty empty at the moment, but doubtless hopping in the small hours, even hotter and sweatier than it was already, if that were possible.

A blackboard announced live bands later that night. Somewhere to his left, pool balls clacked against each other. A ceiling fan moved lazily overhead.

He’d tried to work out a hundred times how to play this, and still had no clear answer. But sitting here, listening to other people’s laughter, Patrese decided just to go with the flow; trust his instincts, take it from there. Cindy had called the meeting. Let her make the running.

Eight o’clock came and went.

He wasn’t especially bothered. New Orleanian attitudes to time are pretty loose; not surprising, perhaps, when half the city’s bars are open round the clock.

Maybe Cindy had been held up at work. Maybe she was plucking up courage, which round here usually involved a couple of daiquiris. Maybe she was playing hard to get; make him wait, establish her terms.

There was a fire station right across the road, and a bunch of firemen were sitting out front, admiring the girls who walked past. Most of the girls seemed happy to admire them right back.

Eight thirty.

Patrese would have rung, but he didn’t have Cindy’s number. She hadn’t given him her cell. If she was still at work, Varden would be there too, so she wouldn’t be able to talk. He could see if she was in the phone book, but that might appear too creepy, finding out where she lived and ringing up.

He was hungry. The menu said that Checkpoint Charlie’s burger and chips were famous as far as Berlin – Berlin, Germany, not Berlin, Connecticut – which made him laugh, so he ordered that, medium rare.

A dark-haired girl came in. For a moment, Patrese thought it was Cindy, but she was too tall, and not nearly as attractive. She had a bag of laundry slung over her shoulder, and he watched with mild surprise as she walked straight through the bar and into a laundromat out back.

What a great idea. Separating lights and darks would be much more fun with a few tequilas inside you. Why had no one else ever thought of that?

Unlike some people, Patrese didn’t mind sitting in a bar on his own, but only if he’d gone there alone to start with. Waiting was something else entirely. He dropped his shoulders, told himself to relax.

‘Here you go, baby,’ said the waitress, setting his burger and another Abita down on the table.

The menu was right; the burger was well worth its international fame.

Nine o’clock.

She wasn’t coming; he was sure of that now. An hour late meant no-show, even in New Orleans. The disappointment surged in his throat. He’d really wanted to know what she’d found so terrible.

And to see her again too, of course.

Sirens out front, the endless two-tone urban soundtrack. A cop car streaked by, an ambulance hard on its tail, pushing through behind before the traffic could reform.

The moment the clock ticked nine thirty, he paid the check and got up to leave.

‘Do you have a phone book here?’ he asked, so suddenly it surprised him.

‘Surely.’ The bartender nodded toward a payphone in the corner. ‘Should be one right there. Probably covered in graffiti by now. Everyone’s a comedian, you know?

The directory was indeed there, and it was indeed covered in graffiti.

Patrese flicked through to the ‘R’s.

Rojciewicz, C. Only one of them. An address on Spain Street, five minutes’ walk from the bar. Presumably why she’d chosen it as a meeting-point in the first place.

Patrese entered the number into his cell and walked outside while it dialed.

It rang eight, nine, ten times. No one home.

He was about to hang up when a woman’s voice answered. ‘Hello?’

‘Cindy?’

A slight pause – 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 contain cocaine even before he opened it, and an envelope of what turned out to be nude photos of her. Amateur shots, probably taken by a lover and printed off of a computer. They weren’t exactly hardcore, but nor were they the kind of snapshots you took to pharmacy developers.

When he looked up, Selma was standing in the doorway.

‘What do you reckon?’ she asked.

He rubbed his eyes. ‘Where do you want me to start?’

She gave a wan smile, the first he’d seen. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

He showed her what he’d found.

‘Quite the party girl,’ she said. Her voice was flat, unimpressed. ‘Pathologist reckons she’s been dead twelve hours, give or take. Hard to tell, it’s so hot in here.’

Pathologists estimate time of death according the cadaver’s temperature, working on the principle that the body loses a degree or two every hour postmortem; but a room as warm as this one would skew the readings. Body temperature is ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. New Orleans summer, no aircon, and windows closed, presumably to keep the smell from escaping; the room certainly felt about that hot.

‘Twelve hours dead means she wouldn’t have gone into work today.’

‘Yup.’

‘She was PA to the richest man in the city. She didn’t turn up without explanation, he’d have wanted to know why.’

Selma nodded. ‘Last call made from the apartment phone was eight thirty this morning. We dialed the number. An office extension, now on voicemail.’

‘Calling in sick?’

‘Could be. The voicemail message is an electronic one, no name given, so we won’t know who it belongs to till tomorrow morning.’

‘But if she called in sick herself, she was either being forced to, or she must have known her attacker and had no idea he’d come to kill her. If her attacker called in pretending to be her …’

‘…her attacker must have been a she.’

‘Yes. But even then … You work with someone, you know their voice. You can’t just ring up and pretend you’re someone else. So she let her attacker in. There’s no forced entry, is there? And he made her call her office …’

‘…or it was a lover, and they were going to have some fun together.’

‘The neighbors see any men come round?’

‘One last night, around ten o’clock. But he left a few minutes later.’

‘Description?’

‘Vague. Black. Six foot, hundred and eight pounds.’

‘Could be half the guys in this city.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And no one this morning?’

‘Not that no one saw.’

Patrese thought for a moment. ‘The kitchenette has an outside door. Where does it go to?’

‘I haven’t checked.’

They went back through the living room, where the crime-scene officers were bagging Cindy’s cell phone for evidence, and into the kitchenette.

Patrese pushed down on the handle of the outside door with his knuckles, so as not to confuse the fingerprint testers.

The door swung gently open. Unlocked.

Patrese looked out. Fire escape, running down into the rear courtyard. He turned back to Selma.

‘Fifty bucks says that’s how he got in.’

‘I don’t gamble.’

He looked at her. She was serious. He held up his hands. ‘I didn’t mean to offend.’

‘Accepted. Now, tell me. The snake. Why?’

‘Is this a test?’

‘I’m asking your opinion. That’s all.’

‘OK. The snake – well, evil springs to mind, doesn’t it? The serpent in Eden. Forbidden fruit. Temptation. That kind of thing.’

‘Pretty much my thoughts too. The leg?’

‘Well, if we’re still looking for the obvious imagery – if thy hand offends thee, cut it off. That’s somewhere in the Bible, no?’

‘It is indeed.’

‘A hand, I could understand. But a leg … why would you cut off a leg?’

Selma shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The mirror? The axhead?’

‘Those, I have no idea.’

‘Again, me neither. So I’m not even going to theorize, you understand? I’m going to wait for what Forensics say, and turn every corner of Cindy’s life upside down, and see what comes of that. The data never lies.’

‘Do you disapprove?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of her. Of Cindy. Photos. Drugs. Sex.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You didn’t look too thrilled when I showed you the photos. You don’t gamble. I’m guessing you’re a – you’re a woman of faith.’

‘She’s dead, Agent Patrese. What she did when she was alive doesn’t matter.’

‘That’s what Homicide cops always say.’

‘Maybe. But I happen to believe it’s true. Everyone’s equal above the ground, and everyone’s sure as heck equal beneath it. I’ve handled cases of murdered whores and murdered nuns, and I’ve given as much to one as to the other. I’ve given it everything I’ve got. You don’t believe me, you walk out of that door now and never come back.’

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