Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  At night, the tiny basement forensics lab smelled no better than during the daytime, thanks to the photographic processor in the adjacent room. Richardson pulled a pair of chairs in front of the computer monitor, and Dart joined her.

  “For initial viewing, we downsize the images for higher resolution,” she explained. The ERT team had shot digitized images, not photographs. Richardson prepared Dart for what he would see. “Shooting in relative darkness, as they did, the lighting, as you can imagine, is off. The camera sees things much as your night-vision goggles. One of the nice things, however, is that we can ask the computer to compensate and correct the lighting deficiencies. Fill in color. Enhance. And often the images get surprisingly close to a well-lighted, even daylight, look. That’s what we’ll do,” she told him. “We’ll start with the degraded image and enhance. We can always get back to the original.”

  The first image, a shot of the sitting room with the recliner and television, appeared on the screen. At first, a difficult green and white, a black bar moved slowly down the screen, and as if lifting a shade, the room was suddenly in full color. The technology amazed Dart. “You’ll like this,” she said, typing furiously and then grabbing the computer’s mouse. The floor of the room suddenly tilted, and the image became fully three-dimensional, as if Dart were on a ladder looking down.

  “What the hell?” Dart asked.

  “The digital cameras are stereo-optic-another advantage. The computer uses algorithms to create the three-D effect.” She rotated the room, so that Dart was looking from a different direction, but the left of the screen was blank. She explained, “The computer cannot fill that which the camera never saw.” She pointed to the blank side of the frame and said, “This is where the photographer was standing while taking the shot.”

  Dart gushed with enthusiasm over the technology, which Richardson clearly appreciated. She complained, “Only the Staties can afford the cameras, but maybe one of these days …”

  Frame by frame, Richardson walked Dart through the house and through the evidence. The ability to manipulate the point of view afforded Dart the opportunity to see the rooms from many angles. He studied each carefully, occasionally requesting an enlargement of a particular area, something the computer could render in seconds. Room by room, he sought out any physical evidence that might provide insight into where to look for Walter Zeller, aka Wallace Sparco.

  “The killer is inside them.” Zeller’s words continued to haunt him. As much as Dart believed Zeller was the killer, the only convincing physical evidence that he possessed connected the resident of 11 Hamilton Court to Payne’s suicide. Everything else remained circumstantial. And though he now believed that Zeller was Sparco, it didn’t necessarily mean that Sparco/Zeller had actually killed Payne. Perhaps, as Zeller wanted Dart to believe, it was the Roxin drug that connected all the suicides, and Martinson and her company were in fact the ones to blame. No matter, 11 Hamilton Court seemed to offer Dart the main hope of finding answers and its resident. If he could only locate Zeller….

  For several days now he had cursed himself for not attempting to bring in Zeller at the fire. He wasn’t sure how he might have accomplished that. He had ended up outside, unarmed and in shock. But he blamed himself for falling under Zeller’s controlling spell, ever the student, the listener.

  “Are you with me?” Richardson asked.

  “Sure.”

  She led him through a series of enhanced images that took them down the basement stairs and into the laundry room. Even under the effects of the computer’s improved colors, the room appeared dingy and dank. Dart recalled the moldy, suffocating smells.

  “There,” he said, leaning forward and pointing out the workbench. “Can you enlarge that?”

  Richardson rendered the image into 3-D, rotated it to face the workbench, and then stepped the computer through a series of enlargements, drawing the workbench progressively closer. “Fly-tying gear,” he said.

  “Fly fishing,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  There was a small fly-tying vise that sat beneath an adjustable light, both mounted to the workbench and with a magnifying glass attached above the vise. The shelves were littered with feathers and plastic containers too grainy in enlargement to see well. If Dart had not known that Wallace Sparco was in fact Walter Zeller, he might have passed right by this as he had on the night of the raid. But suspecting this might be Zeller’s lair, the fly-tying kit stuck out. Walter Zeller hated fishing. The kit made sense only as an effort to create a fictional identity for Sparco. As such, its existence could be explained. But Dart the student, the man who knew Walter Zeller nearly as well as Zeller himself, read more into it. The ruse was too elaborate to be explained as an effort to mislead investigators. He could have left a tennis racket or a bag of golf clubs. It’s more important than that, Dart thought.

  “That’s as good as we’re going to get it,” Samantha Richardson said.

  Dart checked his watch. “No,” he said, “we can do better.”

  Dart knocked on the car door and then slipped inside. The man behind the wheel had blond hair and a dark mustache. He looked younger than his thirty-eight years. Dart knew him as Jack. He had forgotten his last name.

  “Anything?” Dart asked, glancing down the street at 11 Hamilton Court.

  “Nothing.”

  “Lights?”

  “I said nothing, didn’t I?”

  “I’m going inside,” Dart informed him.

  “If you’re going inside, I’m going to take a leak.”

  “If I’m going inside, I want you as backup.” He indicated his cellular phone. “If someone shows up, I want a warning.”

  “Well,” the man protested, “I want to take a leak. You wait for me, I’ll be your backup.”

  Dart wrote down his cellular number. “Don’t be long,” he requested.

  “You want a doughnut or coffee?” Jack asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  Dart returned to his department-issue Taurus. With the Volvo out of commission, getting to work had meant hitching a ride with a friend or taking a city bus. He was tired of both, neither of which worked well for the night tour.

  He sat behind the wheel for ten minutes. Then, pissed off, decided to wait no longer.

  He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and entered through the back door, using the key that hung on the nail that Kowalski had claimed had been described to him in the “anonymous” phone call. The nail was there all right, and the key that hung on it. And the nail was rusted, not a recent addition. All of this would be part of Kowalski’s scheduled IA review.

  The second time into a building always felt more familiar, though entering alone, and without backup, made Dart queasy. He was not afraid, but apprehensive. He moved quickly through the sitting room, where the room’s only lamp, on a security timer, was dark. At one o’clock, the bedroom light upstairs would be switched off automatically, also on a timer. Dart headed immediately to the basement, pulled the door shut behind him, and switched on the lights.

  Step by step, he cautiously descended, feeling an increasing sensation of dread. He passed the washer/dryer; ducked under a clothesline, and approached the workbench and the fly-tying kit. As seen on the lab’s computer, the surface was littered with Baggies and small plastic vials. Dart studied these more closely. Some were filled with feathers, others animal fur, others contained bare metal fishhooks in varying sizes. Lead shot, metal filings, pipe cleaners, rolls of thin wire, thread. He leafed through the contents. And then again. It did not escape him that Kowalski liked to fly-fish, nor that Kowalski had been caught here. Nor that Kowalski, for his bungling of Lucky Zeller’s murder investigation, was a known enemy of Zeller’s.

  Again, struck by the significance of the fly-tying kit, Dart inspected the contents of the workbench more carefully: elk hair, pheasant feathers, partridge, bobwhite, peacock. Synthetics of every color … A small plastic vial of thin aluminum shavings. Another, half-filled with copper shavings …


  Dart paused, his hand on the prescription-size plastic vial containing the copper shavings. He experienced a flash of heat like a nausea that began in his stomach and rose into his throat like a bubble. He recalled Teddy Bragg’s review of the Gerald Lawrence evidence-the man’s hanging himself with a lamp cord. Dart fished out his notebook and flipped backward until he found Lawrence’s name written in caps at the top of a page. He skimmed down through his notes: copper filings on clothing and skin consistent with the lamp wire.

  Copper filings … Dart shook the small vial. It contained a few coiled pieces of different-gauge copper wire. He held it up to the light. A small crescent of fine copper shavings filled the bottom.

  His hand shaking, he set down the vial and drew up the stool beneath himself, his legs suddenly watery. He studied each of the vials more carefully, separating out the Baggies of swatches of brightly colored fabrics-pieces of carpeting and clothing-as he remembered Teddy Bragg detailing “the usual hairs and fibers” discovered at each of the crime scenes. The last small film canister that he opened offered all the convincing he needed. He tapped out its contents onto the table: human hairs. But it was the color that both intrigued and excited him: They were red!

  And he understood.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What the hell?” Ted Bragg’s shirt was buttoned lopsidedly and there was sleep dust stuck to the lid of his left eye. “Richardson is on call tonight. This morning,” he corrected, checking his watch. It was 3:00 A.M. Dart had been at 11 Hamilton Court only a few hours earlier. It seemed like a lifetime to him now.

  “I needed the best, Teddy. I needed you.”

  “That’s bullshit, and we both know it. Richardson is good.” He sized up Dart. “You look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit,” Dart said.

  He checked his watch again.

  “So what’s so fucking important?” He added, “I tell ya, this had better be good.”

  “Do you have your stuff?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “I’ll help you,” Dart offered.

  Bragg shook his head in disgust. “May I remind you: I am not on call tonight.”

  They removed two heavy bags from Bragg’s trunk. Dart was trying hard to reveal none of the turmoil and excitement he felt. Convinced that he finally understood each of the suicides, only Bragg was capable of confirming these, for him and for Bragg himself. But to be truly effective, he would have to trick the man.

  “Where is everybody?” Bragg questioned.

  “I haven’t called it in,” Dart answered, leading him up the flight of stairs.

  “Smells like smoke in here,” Bragg said, moving up the stairs slowly. “Are you trying to tell me that you’ve called me to a crime scene that you haven’t called in?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bragg stepped inside the apartment door and set down the bags. “That’s not like you, Ivy.”

  “No.”

  “I tell ya, if you’re yanking my chain-”

  “I’m not. I need an over-the-top is all,” Dart told him.

  “Yeah, right-an over-the-top,” Bragg repeated caustically. “Since when do I do a half-ass job, Ivy? Answer me that.”

  “You’re the best, Teddy.”

  “Fuck you.” Bragg stooped toward the bags. “You’re playing assistant, I’ll tell you that much. This just became a two-man team.” He snapped on his gloves and went to work.

  Dart heaved a sigh of relief.

  Forty minutes later, Bragg sat down, clearly exhausted.

  He had scrutinized every detail of the crime scene, collecting and bagging evidence at each step. He had been particularly intrigued with his discovery that the carpet below the broken window appeared to have been vacuumed. He had given Dart an all-knowing look that the detective had relished clear to his core.

  Bragg packed up his gear, keeping the dozen or so evidence bags separate. He sat on a wicker chair. Dart leaned against the wall. “Well?” Dart asked.

  “I tell ya, I see what it is about it that gave you the hard-on. I’ve got glass from the broken window-inside, on the carpet-that says the perpetrator most likely entered from the fire escape. Mud and some familiar organic matter-it looks like those same cypress needles to me-those from his shoe soles-good supporting evidence. All this in an area that appears to have been vacuumed-again, familiar. Maybe we find rock salt and potting soil when all is said and done-my guess is that we will. But I’ve got synthetics and what looks like cotton fibers on top of that area, meaning we’ve got timing problems-just like at Harold Payne’s suicide.”

  Dart answered him with a nod, attempting to keep any emotion off his face.

  Bragg said, “It looks like some guy comes in and taps someone. You have a body, I’m assuming?” Dart didn’t answer. Annoyed, Bragg said, “The blood splatter is telling me small weapons fire at close range. Drags the body, from yea to yea,” he said, pointing to the carpet marks that ran from the television to the window, “and, judging by the blood smear out there, tosses the stiff over the rail toward that Dumpster. The Dumpster is next, Ivy. I gotta get a look down there.” He smiled proudly. “You found the body in the Dumpster, am I right?”

  Dart said, “You’ve never been to my place, have you, Teddy?” He rounded the corner into the kitchen and retrieved a beer from the refrigerator. He handed it to the forensics man.

  “Your place? No. Why do you ask?” Bragg drank generously from the can.

  “Did I tell you that Ginny took most of the furniture when she split?” Dart looked out into the empty living room. Bragg’s eyes followed his closely.

  “Is that right?” Bragg asked uneasily. He shifted in the chair restlessly.

  Dart drank a long gulp of beer. “Yup.”

  “Left you three chairs, did she?” Bragg asked, counting the chair he was sitting in and two others by the breakfast table across the room.

  “Three. That’s right.”

  Bragg’s eyes filled with concern. “What the hell’s going on?” Agitated, he glanced at Dart sharply. “This is your place, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, shit. Listen, we all lose our cool eventually, Ivy. It happens. If you called me because you want help getting rid of the evidence … I can’t do that for you. I can walk away from here. I can never mention this. But I can’t help you.”

  Dart smiled. “It’s that convincing, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The evidence.”

  Bragg looked around. “What are you saying?”

  “I had to make sure it was convincing.”

  Bragg said, “You called me because we’re friends. I understand that-”

  Interrupting, Dart said, “I called you because you’re the last line of defense. You’re the final arbiter. You’re the one who signs off on this stuff. You’re the guy, Teddy.” Dart reached down and sorted through Bragg’s evidence bags, all neatly marked and labeled. He found three of those he was after and dropped them into Bragg’s lap.

  Bragg studied them. His forehead was shiny with perspiration. “I won’t destroy evidence for you, Ivy.”

  Dart laughed. He met eyes with the man and said, “Those fibers are from the basement of 11 Hamilton Court. A fly-tying setup in the basement. Everything in little containers.”

  “Fishing?”

  “It has nothing to do with fishing.”

  Bragg lifted one of the bags then and inspected its contents closely, confused and nervous.

  “Animal hairs, metal shavings, synthetics, feathers-all there on that fly-tying table.” Dart explained, “The crime scenes-the suicides-were works of fiction. The hairs and fibers were props, Teddy. Planted by a very clever individual. They told a story that we were comfortable reading.” He pointed to the living room. “It took me a little over two hours to set this up-but then I’m new at this.”

  Bragg’s eyes went wide as he began to comprehend. “You staged this?”

  “I had to see if it c
ould be done. I had to see if I could fool the best. You are the best, Teddy. It couldn’t be Richardson. I scripted this crime scene, and I used the necessary props to be convincing.”

  “You woke me up for a staged crime scene?” Bragg checked his watch.

  “We’re predictable, Teddy. You, me-all of us.” He added, “If you know us well enough.”

  Bragg put down the beer and got out of the chair and walked a few feet to the edge of the living room and looked it over. “Staged?” he asked incredulously.

  Dart gave the man time to think it over, to see the various ramifications of someone planting trace evidence at a crime scene. He finally announced, “They were all homicides, Teddy. Every last one of them.”

  Bragg considered this for a long time. “Yeah? Think so? I tell ya-to be this good,” he declared strongly, “you gotta be better than smart. You gotta be one of us.”

  “That’s right.”

  Bragg paled. “You know who it is?”

  Dart nodded. “Yeah,” he answered. “I know.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Wallace Sparco was feeling out of form. He should have been feeling good; another worthless piece of shit was about to stop using up air. But Dart was getting too close; he was making a real pain in the ass out of himself.

  Beneath Sparco’s forest green safari jacket, Zeller wore a hooded sweatshirt and a tan fishing vest, its pouches and pockets loaded with goodies. The bulk of it added the look of weight to him, which made him feel better. He thought of himself as a big man; it was difficult for him to feel this thin, this slight, this insignificant.

  Zeller’s hands sweated lightly inside the black golf gloves that gripped the steering wheel. Dennis Greenwood lived just north of Colt Park, on Norwich Street in the south end, dictating that Zeller conduct himself with extreme self-confidence and work quickly. Norwich Street was immediately west of Dutch Point, an area so dangerous that city cabs stayed out. A white man-no matter how big-walking the streets in this area offered himself as a potential victim. To enter this area at night was so risky that Zeller-looking and behaving like Wallace Sparco-felt forced to make his move during dusk. He turned left onto Wyllys and parked, checked his sidearm, pulled the hood over his head, grabbed the small duffel bag, and made for the two-story tenement less than half a block away. Dennis Greenwood rented the upper floor, accessible only from the back. Sparco threaded his way over soggy litter, dog shit, and foul-smelling trash and found his way to the rickety wooden stairs, which he climbed in a hurry.