Daniel Blake - City of Sins

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.’

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.