Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  “So what exactly are you saying?” Kowalski asked rhetorically, answering, “What you’re saying is that some Joe entered the house through a locked garage and did a little housecleaning before he left, after which, our friend Harry Payne blows his hat off with a nine millimeter. Am I missing something here?” He addressed Dart, “This sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me-no offense, Teddy. What do you think?” he asked Dart in a leading tone.

  Dart hesitated.

  Kowalski said, “Fuck the pine needles and the goddamned potting soil. There’s always crap at any crime scene that you can’t explain. Am I right, or am I right?”

  “You’re probably right,” Dart confessed. “Where do we go with this?” he asked Bragg.

  “Where you go with it is your business,” Bragg reminded, clearly upset. “I’m just telling you what I found.”

  “Where would you go with it?” Dart restated.

  Kowalski rocked uncomfortably onto his heels.

  Bragg pondered the question, he searched Kowalski’s eyes and then Dart’s. “A botanist, probably. Identify the organic matter. That may or may not tell us something. And I think I would run a crew out to the Payne house once more to do some detail work between the garage entrance to the kitchen and the door to the study.”

  “But the garage was locked,” Kowalski protested.

  “I can’t argue that,” Bragg agreed, “but Ivy asked me what I’d do, and that’s what I’d do.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kowalski complained, “I say forget about it. This is not a fly ball, boys. It’s a grounder. The guy ate a nine-millimeter-case and casket closed. You want to beat it stupid, that’s your business. Me? I got other shit to do.” Kowalski flicked his thick black hair off his forehead with his meaty hand and said, “Later.”

  Dart saw him reaching for a smoke before he was out of the lab.

  Bragg said, “Something like this comes up, you know who I wish were still around?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dart acknowledged, his stomach burning. I know, he thought privately. And just maybe he’s closer to this than you think.

  CHAPTER 17

  The small, two-acre patch of grass along the west bank of the Connecticut River was technically part of Riverside Park, though not directly connected to it. This particular section was beneath the Charter Oak Bridge, a relatively new structure linking Hartford and East Hartford. The river’s brown surface reflected the gray of the sky and the delicate etching of the dormant trees that lined its banks. A pair of ducks raced down the very center of the waterway, their wings singing. A brisk November chill raised Ginny’s collar and had brought out a winter wool sweater. She wore her green oil slicker, partially open, green rubber half-boots with leather laces, and a pair of small pink gloves. The winter river was quieter than that of spring or summer, void of sound, as if sleeping while awaiting its blanket of ice, which had already begun to creep in from the edges.

  Dart took a deep breath. “You look worried. What’s wrong?” He felt he knew her well enough to ask this, although it implied an intimacy that she was clearly not comfortable with on that day.

  “Nothing.”

  “If it’s personal-”

  “It’s not,” she snapped.

  He felt too much a part of her to separate himself from her tension; it attached to him and slowly choked a ring around his upper throat, restricting his air and increasing his heart rate.

  “The name of this woman that you gave me, Danielle Payne,” she said, referring to the late Harold Payne’s wife, “is in the system as a victim a domestic abuse.”

  For Dart, this confirmed that at least one verifiable way existed for the killer to identify his victims-this could not be explained by coincidence. The second part of the victim list seemed to be associated with convicted offenders. He said, “You could have told me that over the phone.”

  “It’s bigger than that. Bigger than we thought. More confusing,”

  She didn’t appreciate nagging, and so he waited her out, but the anxiety swelled in his chest.

  She said, “Your friends Stapleton and Lawrence had both recently purchased extensive health care policies. Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deductible. The kind of policies you would associate with the affluent. Both within three months prior to their suicides. These are both men with no prior coverage. What did me in was your friend Harold Payne-”

  Stop calling them my friends, he wanted to complain.

  “He had a policy in place, but it was one thousand deductible. Exactly three months ago, he reapplied and obtained a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deductible.”

  Dart wasn’t sure what to make of this information. Thinking aloud, he muttered, “All three suicides had new or recently altered insurance policies.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which connects them all, one to the other.”

  “Absolutely,” she agreed.

  It seemed to Dart yet another way that a killer might have identified his victims, and this, in turn, worried him because Ginny had been exploring the same database. “Why?” he asked, still puzzled.

  “I don’t have any idea. But it would seem that someone is buying these policies for them, and if that’s the case, I may be able to find out who that is by accessing billing.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “This is computers, Dart. You can do anything.”

  “Safely?”

  “More lectures?”

  The comment infuriated him, and for a moment he felt tempted to give her a piece of his mind but restrained himself by chewing on his lower lip. “Maybe one of the companies had some kind of marketing campaign in place.”

  “Offering policies for wife beaters and convicted sex offenders?”

  “The demographics are similar,” he said, realizing immediately that Payne’s affluent lifestyle distanced him from both Stapleton and Lawrence. “I don’t know,” Dart conceded. “That’s not right.”

  She handed him a large manila envelope and said, “Victims of domestic violence, as identified by the insurers-Hartford, East Hartford, West Hartford. It’s a big list, Dart, and probably quite incomplete. You might want to try your Sex Crimes files.”

  Guilt in the form of a searing heat flashed up his spine-does she know about Abby? he wondered. Hartford was a small town and rumors circulated freely. Is she trying to tell me something?

  “Right,” he said, attempting to interpret her expression while at the same time avoiding contact with her eyes. She could read him far too well.

  But his eyes did stray to hers, and he saw that she was looking over his shoulder, not directly at him, and her expression was one of concern, causing him to glance back quickly.

  In the distance, a ramped footbridge climbed up from ground level to a landing where it turned and rose by a series of formed-concrete steps to the pedestrian way on Charter Oak Bridge. Silhouetted on the landing stood the figure of a tall man.

  Dart looked quickly away, his pulse pounding with this sight, returning his attention to Ginny and saying softly, “Is he still there?”

  “He’s heading up the stairs.”

  Dart ventured another glance and asked, “How long was he there?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, her voice reflecting her fear.

  “Did he approach from the bottom or the bridge?”

  “I don’t know!” she repeated harshly.

  Dart’s first temptation was to turn and go after the man, despite the fact that it could have been any pedestrian simply pausing to enjoy the river view. But he felt uneasy about leaving Ginny alone in an isolated location, especially given her discovery of a possible conspiracy involving the three suicides.

  “Listen-” he said.

  “Go,” she prompted.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go! I’m fine.”

  Dart took off at a run. The entrance to the pedestrian ramp was a hundred yards ahead, the ramp itself climbing in his direction. He crossed several islands of weeds and a pair of paved roads
that saw little, if any, traffic at that time of year. Reaching the ramp, he pushed hard, climbing it quickly while glancing down at where he and Ginny had been talking. Ginny, her head tilted back, her chin raised, watched him intently.

  Dart flew up the concrete steps and up onto the bridge itself, and looked in both directions: first left, up the inclined arch of the bridge; then right, toward the city, and then down at ground level. He panted, out of breath, blood pounding in both ears. A car in the midst of a right-hand turn was visible to him only briefly. He blinked his eyes closed in an act of concentration, attempting to burn the image into his memory. But like the car, the image escaped, an undefinable blur, leaving only a color imprinted on the underside of his eyelids: blue-gray.

  Dart recovered his breath and turned back to the steps to rejoin Ginny, but she and her car were gone, leaving Dart with that color imprinted into his vision, lingering like the afterglow of a flash camera: blue-gray.

  He blocked out all else but this color, allowing it to swim within his head, and a voice quickly filled the void. It was the voice of a twelve-year-old black girl that interrupted him, the voice of Lewellan Page, resonating within her mother’s kitchen as she offered to Lieutenant Abby Lang a description of the car that she had witnessed parked behind Gerald Lawrence’s Battles Street apartment on the night of his “suicide.” Blue, maybe. Gray … he recalled her saying.

  The killer? Dart wondered, furious that he had not seen enough of the vehicle to register a make, a model, or a year.

  CHAPTER 18

  Standing inside the roadside phone booth, dialing the number, Walter Zeller experienced a parent’s anger. Stupidity, he thought, is an art form in the proper hands. He had never been a parent, but he understood a parent’s frustration well enough.

  He collected his strength, preparing himself for the confrontation, annoyed by its necessity, alarmed by the degree of emotional resolve that this required, like dredging up the black muck of the river bottom to clear the way for further passage.

  Traffic blew by him on the commercialized strip that could have been Anywhere, USA. Oversized plastic signs declaring DRIVE THRU WINDOW and AMERICA’S FAVORITE; cheap marketing gimmicks like giant anchors perched out front, or a lobster claw reaching for the sky like a church steeple. He felt quite above such fanfare, sick of it, disgusted by the greed, the blatant disregard of aesthetics, and the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for neon, repetitive architecture, and Low Everyday Prices! Sick to death.

  Throughout his years of public service, he believed that he had concealed well his sentimentality. Only Lucky had ever seen that side of the otherwise iron-willed sergeant. Yet dialing this number and anticipating the voice on the other end flooded him with such emotions, alarming him with a vulnerability that both relieved and ashamed him. Relieved, because it reminded him of his own humanity. Ashamed, because Walter Zeller was above sniveling about the past. His blunt fingertip hesitated alongside the final digit. An eighteen-wheeler roared past, carrying behind it a train of raised dust and the stench of diesel and burning rubber. Zeller stabbed the button. Fuck it, he thought.

  “Dartelli,” the voice answered.

  Walter Zeller hesitated, a knot in his throat.

  “Hello? I can’t hear you.”

  Without introduction, Zeller asked, “Why do it the easy way when there’s a hard way?”

  “Sarge?”

  Zeller registered the astonishment in Dart’s voice, the fear and concern, his decades of skilled interrogation techniques not lost. “Are they suicides, Ivy?”

  Silence as even the kid’s breathing stopped.

  “Answer me!” Maintain the upper hand at all times.

  “No.”

  “Of course not. Good. Very good.”

  “I’ve been trying to-”

  “Don’t try-do!” he said, purposely interrupting to prevent the kid the completion of even a single thought, keeping him off balance and out of sorts. Maintain control. “They took their own lives, but they’re not suicides, Ivy. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t get sidetracked with insurance records, for Christ’s sake. What the hell can that accomplish?”

  “It was you on the bridge?”

  Disappointed that he’d allowed the man a complete sentence, Zeller strung together a series of thoughts and voiced them as a single spoken stream. “I’m your fucking guardian angel, Ivy. I’m watching over you so that you don’t go astray, and believe me, it’s a fucking full-time job with you. What’s happened to you? Making a huge tangle out of something so simple. Over-thinking,” he said, raising a complaint that he had voiced dozens of times. “Making problems instead of solving them. Losing track of the basics. Didn’t you retain anything? For any conviction to stick, the detective needs to be able to connect all the dots himself. That is, unless the snitch is willing to take the witness stand, and I can tell you right fucking now that that is not the direction we’re going-you and me. The basics, damn it all. Didn’t you retain anything? Shit! If the suicides aren’t suicides, and if, on the other hand, these guys all killed themselves, then what the fuck is going on here? Make sense of it, Ivy. Don’t make a mountain of confusion. What about their blood, Ivy? The basics! Sometimes the enemy is within.” He slammed the phone into the cradle, his hand still shaking, though not from the cold.

  Things never went as planned, and people were as unpredictable as the weather. Walter Zeller felt the need to take the kid by the shoulders and shake some sense into him-set him straight. He stood in the phone booth looking down at his trembling hands, wondering what was happening to him. How could he let the kid get to him this way? How had he become involved in the first place? Kowalski was the one he had targeted-as dumb as stone, and yet smart enough to let a sleeping dog lie. The truth would out soon enough, all by itself.

  Joe Dartelli, the pride and joy of his police career, was another thing entirely. Dartelli, with his college degree and his barnyard sense of where the rat was hiding, was proving nothing but trouble.

  I’ll put him in the hospital if I have to, Zeller thought, just like they’re trying to do to me.

  He glanced down the street nervously, alert for the familiar Toyota, for the cracked and bent face behind the wheel-the hired knee-breaker he had been outrunning all this time. Outsmarting. Out-thinking.

  Looking down once again, he felt relieved to see that his hands had stopped shaking. He was under control again, and for Zeller, control was everything.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dart was part theatre critic, part acting coach. It was his job to make this woman tell him what she didn’t want to. Any interrogation amounted to the same thing: a con game of give-and-take, of tricks, the challenge of making someone say something that he or she had no intention of saying. Any investigator worth his salt knew that everyone held secrets. The skill was finding a way to pry it out.

  The CAPers interrogation rooms were a pair of small unattractive cubicles, each containing a cheap table and two metal chairs. Dart dragged a third chair inside and shut the door, well aware of the effects of such an austere environment. Interrogation offered only a single door. That door lead either to jail or to freedom, depending on how the critics rated a performance.

  Danielle Payne, the wife of the Halloween suicide, had an artificial look of surprise around her eyes that could be attributed only to a face lift. Her skin was flawlessly smooth, her lips a sensual red, and the rest of her could have been the model for Tommy Templeton’s Venus, a pinup of epic proportions with a pair of breasts that would have made her surgeon proud, displayed in a tight turtleneck top that accentuated the lack of any visible means of support, defying all rules of gravity and age. That she had been married to a known pornographer could be easily determined by her lousy taste in clothing, her platinum hair, the gum that she chewed between her front teeth, and a heightened sense of sexual readiness, communicated by repetitively placing her hand into her crotch and withdrawing it slowly, and a tendenc
y to shift her upper body around restlessly, jiggling her breasts and twisting her narrow waist as if she needed an itch scratched. Scratched hard, by the look of her.

  The attorney to her right, Dart’s left, was a silver-tongued, six-hundred-grand-a-year asshole by the name of Gambelli. His mere presence warned Dart not to expect much.

  After formal introductions for the sake of a tape recorder, he asked the woman to recount her activities on the night of her husband’s suicide-a suicide that Dart considered a murder but lacked the evidence to investigate as such. Throughout her narration, Dart sensed in her an underlying nervousness that he associated with lying. There were two different kinds of anxiety that surfaced in an interrogation-the person uncomfortable and unfamiliar with being in the company of a cop; and the person who had something to hide. Danielle Payne fell firmly into the second category.

  “How would you describe your relationship with your husband, Ms. Payne?”

  “My relationship?” she asked, checking with the attorney, who offered a barely visible nod.

  “Warm and fuzzy?” Dart offered. “Turbulent … Nurturing?”

  “We got on okay, I guess.”

  “Okay?” Dart asked. “Affectionate? Romantic? Distant? Cold?”

  “We liked each other fine. Harry, you know, had his work, his stuff, and I had my stuff too. Okay, I guess.”

  “He was never rough with you,” Dart stated, clearly making her uncomfortable.

  “Rough?” she gasped, blushing.

  “Physically abusive,” Dart clarified.

  Gambelli tugged at his French cuff and said, “Where are you going with this, Dartelli?”

  Danielle Payne squirmed in her chair, all sexuality lost. Her face puckered up into a knot of worry.

  “Abusive situations are difficult on the victim of that abuse.” I ought to know, he thought, thinking of his alcoholic mother and hiding inside the dryer.