Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  “Hit you?” she asked, but in a way that sought to clarify, not accuse.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “I guess so.” He thought about starting to eat the risotto. He was feeling nervous, not comfortable at all. “Yeah, she hit me,” he admitted. How many times had he lied to the school nurse about this? How many years had he covered for her? And on this particular night he suddenly unloads. What the hell is going on? he wondered. “Hit me all the time. And you can only take so much of that-I could only take so much of that-before you learn to run. It kind of trains you to be a coward,” he said. This came the hardest for him-that he had run. All these years later, and it still felt cheap to run from her. As if he didn’t measure up. He had always wanted to hit her back. He had never lifted a hand. Her face all bloated, her eyes unfocused. Who could hit that? he wondered.

  “You don’t have to talk about this,” she repeated. A few minutes had passed. He realized he hadn’t touched his food. “But I want to hear, if you do want to talk about it.”

  “I ran,” he said. He felt the stinging in his eyes, and he wondered if he should leave the table. “I ran,” he said again. He swallowed. It felt as if a chicken bone were stuck in there. “And I learned to hide until she settled down. Passed out is more like it. Used to find her on the floor. Like a beached whale. Lying there. I couldn’t move her. Thought she was dead. Wishful thinking, I suppose.” He felt tears running, and powerless to do anything about it. Abby didn’t seem fazed. She was still staring at him intensely, but he felt no judgment coming from her. She’s trained for this shit, he thought, suddenly understanding why he had picked this particular woman to unload on. She’s the one who could handle it.

  He continued, “So I hid. The broom closet. The basement. There was a piece of furniture in the dining room that I could fit into. But she found me. Almost always. Until I discovered the dryer. The clothes dryer.”

  Her face remained impassive, revealing no opinion, no sympathy, no pity, and yet he knew that she had heard him. He wondered if she could be so objective, so internally calm, or was this some kind of act that she had learned as a professional?

  “She never thought to look in the clothes dryer,” he explained. “It became my first choice. And more than once I had been doing a load of laundry, and I would yank that laundry out of there as fast as I could and climb inside and pull the door closed.”

  “The heat,” she said. “Your lungs.”

  He nodded. His throat felt scratchy, but he didn’t want to cough in front of her, for it suddenly felt as if it would seem he had forced it. So he swallowed it away and said roughly, “Yeah. I figure I fried them hiding in there.”

  He drank. Something to do. Keep his hands busy. Stop them from shaking. Somewhere to avert his eyes. He thought that maybe five minutes passed in complete silence. It felt more like an hour.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He felt embarrassed all of a sudden. He had lowered his mask, and felt incredibly vulnerable.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No, but she lasted a long time. I was eighteen. And I was still living with her. Don’t ask me why.” He hesitated. “She had control. I suppose that’s why.”

  Abby came out of her chair and approached him. She bumped his chair and slipped a leg over him and sat down in his lap, facing him. She stroked his hair back at his temples and repeated, “Thank you.” She rubbed away the snail tracks left by his tears.

  He experienced a kind of giddy high, flooded by the relief of having told someone. The kiss that followed was gentle but by no means innocent. He kissed his way across her chin and down her neck, and as he did she whispered, “Harder,” and he sucked the soft skin of her neck into his lips, and she shuddered and purred, “Umm.”

  He leaned her back and kissed down into the loose neck of the sweater, as her hands slipped behind him and pulled his shirt free, and warm fingers scrambled over his back, sending flashes up his spine and gooseflesh head to toe.

  Abby knew his secret, and knew his pleasure as well. Her back was hot to touch, and the more he kissed her neck the more excited she grew until she muffled a knowing laugh of pleasure signaling that they had crossed a line. In an explosion of energy, she got out of the chair and led him down the hall and into the bedroom, undressing herself as she went.

  At that moment, the building’s hallway fire alarm sounded loudly. Dart smelled smoke. A curling fear ran down his spine. He had a great fear of fire, stemming from his drunken mother being a smoker.

  Perhaps it was the clothes dryer as a child, or the memory of a range fire he had witnessed out west as a teenager-great sheets of bright orange sweeping the plains and spewing a thick charcoal gray into the blue, boundless sky-or perhaps, he thought, it was simply an intuitive response to something that could kill so quickly, but Dart felt a surge of panic, and though he saw Abby’s horrified expression and her mouth moving, he heard no words. She pulled on her clothes. She searched the apartment door for heat, dropped to her knees, and sniffed between the carpet and door.

  “It’s okay,” he heard her say.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “We’re going,” she announced over the abrasive fire alarm. Far in the distance, the first wail of a siren was heard. “Ready?”

  He nodded, his attention riveted on all that he was leaving behind, on memories and artifacts of his time here with Ginny. She took hold of the doorknob.

  “Slowly,” he cautioned, stepping aside.

  She nodded and eased the door open. There was no flash of flame, no billow of smoke, only the increased volume of the alarm and the sounds of harried shouting and racing footsteps. Mac took off down the stairs. A general sense of chaos surrounded them as they hurried to the central stairs and began their descent. The smell of oil smoke was overpowering. It smelled of fear and old paint and dust, of all those, years Dart had used these stairs, forsaking the tired elevator. It smelled final.

  The smoke grew thicker as they descended, enveloping them like a fog. They checked for each other at each turn of the metal handrail. Her wide eyes glanced over at him. From below came sounds of panic. Two floors down, Dart caught sight of several familiar faces and wondered how he could live in the same place for so many years and know so few of his neighbors. They knew him, most knew he was a policeman, and though he knew some by name, not nearly enough.

  “Mrs. Amory,” he said to Abby as he stopped at the fire door to the ground floor. Eleanor Amory went about in a motorized wheelchair and had picked this apartment building because of its location on a city bus route. She was in her late seventies and fiercely independent. Abby apparently understood just by the way he spoke, and she stopped and helped him check the door for heat before they passed through and into the downstairs hallway. The smoke was heavier here, and Dart believed that it was coming from the parking garage, that a car was on fire, and this lessened his panic because fire could be contained well in the concrete garage. They ran down the long hallway, and only then was Dart aware that the only light came from the emergency lights, a fact that had escaped him. All the training, he thought, wondering how panic had so easily engulfed him, feeling it behind him now, and glad to have it gone.

  “Which apartment?” he heard Abby call from behind him.

  He kicked the door in, signaled her inside, and motioned for Abby to take the rooms to the left. Dart took those to the right.

  Eleanor Amory was not in the kitchen, or the small sitting room or in any of the three closets that Dart searched quickly.

  “Joe!” Abby called out.

  Eleanor Amory was in her bedroom coiled into a ball in the far corner, a nightgown bunched at her knees, a collapsible wheelchair propped against the wall alongside her. She was in shock, her dull blue eyes glassy and open wide in a fixed stare.

  Abby stooped, tried to communicate with the woman, but it was of no use. She tentatively eased her arms into the fold of the woman’s bent knees, and behind her head, and together with Dart, they hoisted her, and Dart
took her fully into his arms as Abby helped the woman to take hold around his neck.

  A moment later they were outside, in the alley behind the building, and Eleanor Amory was in the care of emergency personnel. Abby stood holding the woman’s hand. The alley was dark, awash in the scattering, fractured light of emergency vehicles, and from the building’s garage a thick coiling plume of black smoke rushed into the night sky. The area was crowded with onlookers as well as with residents of the building, in pajamas, raincoats, and whatever else they had grabbed. Several held pets tightly in their arms. One woman was crying as she stared up at her windows. Mac was sitting away from the chaos like an old person watching a parade.

  Dart felt the cold. He felt awkward and out of place, accustomed to being the one responding to an emergency rather than experiencing it firsthand. There were so many things he wished he’d taken. Photographs. Gifts. Letters. His first uniform as a patrolman. He ran down an inventory as he watched four fully clad firemen become swallowed by the smoke as they charged the garage. He hoped for a quick resolution. The night air was filled with the sound of communication radios spitting static, of children crying and adults sobbing, and an endless roar of orders being shouted about. To the lay person, the bystander, the efforts of the emergency crews seemed chaotic and disorganized. But Dart knew better.

  He crossed his arms tightly to fend off the cold.

  A harsh and unforgiving voice whispered, “Don’t turn around, Ivy. Nod if you can hear me.” Dart nodded. He smelled the stale aroma of cigar smoke despite the petroleum in the air, and he recognized the deep slow voice and the way that voice spoke his nickname. “I can’t afford the attention,” Walter Zeller said. Dart, stunned, could feel the man’s presence as he stepped closer and continued in a hushed whisper. “Your Volvo has had a slight problem, is all-an electrical short under the dash; if there had been less plastic in it, it might have never burned at all.”

  Dart had so many things to say that nothing came out, his thoughts bottle-necked somewhere near his tongue. What with the fire and the chaos, and the surprise that Zeller had orchestrated all of this to make contact with him.

  “You’ll figure this out. At least if you have any sense left in you, you will.” He added, “I can’t do your fucking work for you, kid. I told you that. Wish I could. But then you wouldn’t hold up on the stand, would you? You gotta do this yourself. You gotta get your mind off your pecker and back onto your desk.

  “What I want you to think about, Ivy, is-and I want you to remember this: You’re looking at what you know, what you’re familiar with, rather than digging in and finding what’s really the cause here.” He added, “That they’re all connected.”

  “The gene therapy,” Dart said.

  “Maybe you are listening.” He added, “Maybe I should have just called you again. You know how I like to do things in person.”

  “So you torched my car?” Dart said, exasperated. He made a move to turn around, but Zeller stopped him with a stern “Don’t!” He added, “It’s not safe for me.”

  “For you?”

  “They’re murders, Ivy, but it’s not what you think. I know what you think. Do your fucking homework. Do us both a favor.”

  An old beat-up car pulled into the far end of the alley. Not a police car, not fire. In the flashing lights Dart couldn’t make out the color or the face of the man who opened the car door and peered out quickly before climbing back in and driving off as a patrolman approached him to tell him to move.

  “You see that?” Zeller asked. “They’re after me, Ivy. Why? Because I know the truth-because I found out the truth! Find it, damn it all. Do your fucking homework.”

  Dart said softly, “The hormones.” He waited a second and turned his head slightly and said: “A treatment of some sort.”

  Zeller didn’t answer.

  Dart attempted to turn around for a second time, expecting his effort to be blocked, but instead faced the dark shadows immediately behind him broken only by the rhythmic, hypnotic pulse of vehicle emergency lights.

  Zeller was gone-vanished, though Dart could still hear the man’s whispers over his shoulder.

  His teacher. His mentor.

  Gone.

  His killer?

  For a fraction of a second Dart wondered if he had imagined this conversation. He scanned the area again, carefully probing every possible hiding place.

  Gone.

  They’re murders, Ivy, but it’s not what you think.

  Lies! Dart thought. Tricks! He’s toying with me.

  Find it, damn it all. Do your fucking homework.

  Dart felt sick to his stomach. The smoke curled into the night sky, and then it too was gone.

  CHAPTER 29

  Over the course of the transition between day and night tours, detectives worked poorly, sometimes falling asleep at their desks, in the middle of interrogations, or even during phone calls. Moods went sour, and tempers flared. Haite’s unit, including Dart and Kowalski, had just switched to the graveyard shift, and walking through CAPers was like entering an area laden with land mines. To make matters worse, the building was going to shit; a leak that no one seemed able to stop ran a slow but constant drip into a five-gallon white plastic container in the far corner by the coffee machine. The uninterrupted sound of it was a source of constant irritation, covered only by the drone of activity to which Dart and his colleagues had long since become accustomed.

  Dart cleared a domestic stabbing in the north end-a black woman had killed her drunken lover. He felt lucky because it was an early call, eight-thirty at night, and that took his name off the phone list. The rest of the night would be spent writing up an easy report, speaking with the on-call prosecuting attorney, and waiting for sunrise to free him.

  He was midway into his report when the familiar banter inside CAPers slowly trickled down to nothing and the room was silent. This took a moment to register, at which point Dart looked up and spun around to see Ginny Rice standing in the CAPers’ doorway. Everyone in the division had closely followed the drama of their split, and her unexpected appearance had quieted his colleagues.

  She wore a pair of Gap khakis and a white shirt under a green sweater. She had two earrings in her left ear and a small gold chain worn as a necklace.

  Dart stood and walked over to greet here, doing so in as quiet a voice as possible. “Hey there,” he said.

  “Hey, Dart. Somewhere where we can talk?”

  He lead Ginny to the crib and sat down with her at the scarred table, where a copy of Guns and Ammo lay open.

  “I may be in some trouble,” she said. Up close, she appeared dazed, or overtired. Worn at the edges.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “It may be nothing.”

  He reached over and took her hand, a mass of confusion. He wondered how, after the pain she had caused him, he could feel so instantly comfortable with her.

  She said, “The new policies. Remember? I accessed billing-” Twice Dart had covered for her, had helped her out of a legal knothole, only to have her caught hacking a third time. That had brought a federal conviction, something that Dart could not help with. Now he found himself feeling guilty about having asked her to do this.

  “It turns out, there are dozens of new accounts, all paid for by fund transfers from the same account. It’s a Union Bank corporate account.”

  “Dozens?”

  She nodded. “All males, and though I haven’t confirmed all of them, I know that at least three have wives who were kicked by the system as victims of abuse.”

  The tests, Dart thought. He said nothing.

  “I think what happened was that I tripped a security gate going into Union Trust.”

  “You broke into a bank.”

  “Electronically,” she said, adding defensively. “How else could I identify who paid for all this insurance?”

  “It was a perk,” he said, guessing that the insurance coverage had been used as an incentive to gain test subjects.

>   “What?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “I thought I had a hole in the firewall,” she explained. “I thought I had a clean entry. But maybe I stepped on something getting out. I’m not sure. All I know is that my software detected surveillance-”

  “They watched you?” he exclaimed.

  She nodded. “Chances are, they know what I went after.”

  “And did you come straight here?”

  Her face tightened. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”

  “You never know,” Dart said. “It’s doubtful they would have put you under physical surveillance. If it was federal-”

  “They would have busted me,” she answered. “You see?” She craned forward, “That’s one reason I came straight here. I’m hoping-hell, I’m praying-that maybe you, HPD, has some kind of white-collar crime thing in place. Because other-wise-”

  “It’s private,” he answered.

  “Yeah, private. And shit, they could sue the pants off me. I’d rather face you guys than a corporation any day.”

  “They can sue you either way.” He added, “They won’t, though.” Corporations rarely sued. That brought the case public, and exposed their system as vulnerable to electronic attack. They preferred keeping things as quiet as possible, often dropping all charges in exchange for a gag order against the hacker. On occasion the hacker got a job offer from that very same company. He reminded, “And you wouldn’t rather face us. You’re on probation. A second conviction-”

  “And I do time. I know.” She crossed her arms and shuddered. “I’m scared to death, Dartelli,” She said, “But hey, I got the name of the company for you. At least I didn’t come out empty-handed.”

  “The people buying these policies?”

  “Paid out of a corporate account under the name Roxin Incorporated.”

  Bud Gorman would be able to answer questions about Roxin. Dart wrote the name down.

  She said, “I thought you’d like that.”

  Dart looked up from his notebook, still angry with her. “Why, Gin? Why take the chance?”