Soul Murder. Daniel Blake

      ‘Looking for a motive for whoever killed Kohler, that’s why. Happily married guy with kids ain’t gonna wake up one morning and decide to off the bishop, is he?’

      ‘I guess not. Far as I know, they’re a pretty standard cross-section. Check the files, if you want. They’re in the system.’

      Patrese logged on, and soon found that Beradino was right; they were a pretty standard cross-section.

      More than half were married, about a fifth were divorced, some of them shockingly young. A few gays, a handful with drug problems, or at least problems bad enough to have shown up on their records. There’d be a lot more beneath the surface, Patrese was sure of that; a lot of things that those people wouldn’t or couldn’t tell the cops. And why should they? Cops were cops, not social workers.

      Patrese recognized more names than he’d thought he would. It was like some sort of surreal, virtual school reunion; people whom he’d frozen in his mind at some stage in their teens suddenly reincarnated on the screen in front of him as adults with jobs, and lives, and problems, years and heartbreaks and triumphs and catastrophes away from how he’d remembered them.

      ‘How you’ve grown!’ he recalled friends of his parents saying when he’d been a kid; and of course he’d grown, he’d always thought. It would have been a whole heap weirder if he hadn’t. So too with these people. Of course they’d changed.

      Later that afternoon, Patrese went back in front of the media, and tossed them tasty but fundamentally unfilling morsels.

      Yes, they were following up multiple leads. Yes, they were aware the first forty-eight hours had elapsed. Yes, they understood the city’s shock and outrage.

      No, he wouldn’t give operational details. No, he wouldn’t commit himself to any predictions. No, he didn’t want to send a message directly to the killer.

      He didn’t say what he really thought: that, two murders in – and if Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi held when they finally managed to interview him – what they needed more than anything else was a third.

      A third would give them more evidence. A third might persuade Chance to call in the Bureau. A third was what they feared and wanted in equal measures.

       Thursday, November 4th. 9:20 a.m.

      Of all Pittsburgh’s buildings, the Allegheny County Courthouse was Patrese’s favorite. It boasted the quintessential architecture of crime and punishment. Massive slabs of Massachusetts granite ran down long sides punctuated with brooding arches and flanked by half-towers, as though the edifice had been lifted wholesale from city gates in ancient Rome.

      Richardson, the architect, regarded this building as his greatest work. He’d plundered from across Europe for it: detailing from Salamanca Cathedral for the front tower, still majestically authoritative despite the upstart skyscrapers which now dwarfed it on all sides; Notre-Dame’s cornice; the hollow rectangle massing from Rome’s Palazzo Farnese; and from Venice the rear campanile and the Bridge of Sighs, through which prisoners had been transported from jail to court and back again.