(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  Dart nodded. He pushed past Zeller, for the first time offering him his back. He edged slowly toward the corner of this last dryer and sneaked his face out just far enough to see around the corner so that he could defend their position.

  Zeller’s breath was hot on Dart’s neck. The detective jumped, not expecting it. Zeller placed a hand firmly on Dart’s shoulder and spoke into his ear. “His name is Alverez. You met him at the fire. He was the one in the car. The reason we don’t kill the bastard is that they’ll only replace him. And we don’t want that. Got it?”

  Dart nodded.

  Zeller glanced around the corner of the roaring machine and gently eased himself away. He went back to hand signals—he had seen someone—and then hurried into the corner with the grate.

  His heart aching, Dart edged his left eye around the dryer. The man pursuing them was looking lost, standing motionless in the center of the aisle. He was carrying what looked like an Uzi.

  Zeller managed to open the grate without being heard over the rumbling of the dryers. He signaled Dart, and Dart limped over to him, pocketed his sidearm, and slipped quietly down the steel tube, using hand and foot grips welded into its wall, his ankle screaming. Zeller passed him the shotgun and followed, easing the grate down into place above him. Flashing sparks indicated that Alverez had seen them. A spray of bullets skimmed off the grate throwing fireworks overhead.

  Zeller winced and buckled on his way down the ladder, and though Dart did not see the man’s blood spilling from his shoulder, when Zeller reached out and accepted the shotgun, Dart knew that he’d been hit. Zeller switched on a small penlight as he came off the last rung and pointed down the storm sewer—a cement pipe perhaps four feet high. He signaled for Dart to defend their backside, then crouched and lead the way into the claustrophobic tunnel. The bottom of the pipe was dry. After only a few feet, when a spray of bullets echoed back at the base of entrance tube, Zeller switched off the light. Alverez had fired a volley down through the grate in defense.

  The grate banged on the cement floor, above and far behind them.

  Alverez was inside.

  Zeller allowed Dart to run fully into him, stopping him. He grabbed for the detective’s hand and pulled it down to a cold metal grip. Dart tested his toe forward and felt it slip out into nothingness. This pipe ended here. He crouched and began to descend, using the ladder of grips that Zeller had indicated. At the last rung, he stepped off into water so cold that it caught his breath. The sergeant flashed his penlight only once, aiming it down a large, arching stone ceiling that was dripping water and coated in a green slime. The water in which they stood was pitch black. Dart heard the distinct sound of scurrying rats but ignored it—he didn’t want to think about being in a storm sewer with a few hundred irritated rats at his feet. Zeller pulled on Dart, and led the way.

  From behind them came the unmistakable sound of shoes scraping on cement.

  With his left hand held out against the tunnel’s wall as a guide, Dart followed the sound of Zeller’s splashing. The sergeant had clearly practiced this escape, for he moved knowingly in the darkness. Dart’s ankle, chilled by the water, felt a little better.

  When they were a good twenty yards down this tunnel, Dart heard Alverez spit out the single word “Shit!” followed by the sound of a falling man landing hard—he had gone off the end of the pipe into the larger tunnel. The man fired off a stream of semiautomatic weapon fire in anger, made apparent to Dart only by a terrifying whistling in the air around him.

  Alverez was coming after them with a vengeance. Dart’s hope that he might be too injured to follow were dashed.

  Dart’s left hand went into space as the wall ran out.

  “Sssst!” Zeller said, to his immediate left.

  Dart blindly negotiated the turn into a similar tunnel, and they started off again. He realized that the intersection was yet another of Zeller’s ploys. Alverez would be forced to make a choice—hopefully the wrong one.

  He and Zeller stayed in this connecting tunnel for several minutes before taking a right; they were following the layout of the city blocks overhead. By all indications, they had lost Alverez—ten minutes later, Zeller stopped them, and they listened intently. There were no sounds from behind. Only rats. Dart’s feet were numb, and he could feel the chill spreading up his legs and into his bones. Zeller led on.

  They took one more right and walked through shallower water for another fifteen minutes, at which point Dart heard a small waterfall ahead of them. Zeller allowed the detective to bump into him once again. As he stopped, he heard a deeper sound beyond the small waterfall, and for the first time his eyes sensed a distant circle of gray at the center of the black in which he had lived for the past eternal forty minutes.

  They then reached the source of this gray. The water that held them spilled from the end of the storm sewer falling to a mass of ice below. The river spread out before them, etched with the bare branches of dormant trees, reaching into a canopy of low clouds that reflected back the dull amber glare of the sleeping city.

  CHAPTER 40

  “We can’t take a taxi. They might think of that, they might even be listening in on a scanner. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess that a pickup down by the river, at this time of night, would be us.” Zeller led Dart along the river’s edge. Dart’s ankle felt almost normal.

  “It was you up on Charter Oak Bridge,” he said to the man in front of him.

  Speaking back as they walked, Zeller said, “Yeah. I had to know what you were up to. And then Ginny was involved, and that other woman—Lang—and I realized we had problems.”

  “Alverez?”

  “An out-of-towner. A guy hired to break my knees—yours too by now. Convince us to shut up.” He led through some shrubs that tore at Dart’s clothing, and then along the river’s edge again. “I’ve been avoiding him for months. But with you in the picture, I imagine they’ll bring in more help.” He said in a troubled voice, “I heard a rumor a shooter’s been hired.”

  “That’s hardly breaking knees.”

  “The difference between a spot fire and a range fire is getting an early jump.”

  “Hired by whom? Proctor?” Dart asked.

  “One thing I’ll say about you, Ivy—you do your homework.”

  They walked in silence past the glaring lights of the power plant until they reached Charter Oak Bridge. They climbed the same steps where Dart had seen Zeller standing, and in minutes were up on the bridge.

  “My car’s back in the south end,” Dart reminded wistfully.

  “He’ll watch it after he realizes we lost him. Stay away. Same with your apartment. Same with Jennings Road. He’ll look for you there. In his eyes you’ve hooked up with me, Ivy. You’re fucked. They have a hell of a lot to protect. They’ve been trying for me for months. Even if you hadn’t stirred the nest by going to Roxin, you’d be on their list now anyway.”

  “You know about my visit?” Dart asked, astonished.

  “Ivy, I know fucking everything. How quickly we forget.”

  “But they need me,” Dart protested. “They need me to bring you in for the murders. They should be helping me.”

  “Don’t you get it, Ivy? Are you that fucking ignorant?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  Zeller stopped and turned around. Dart could barely make out the man’s face in the ambient light. As a car passed and Zeller was caught in the headlights, his eye sockets filled with black shadow. He said, “The Laterin doesn’t work.”

  “Laterin?”

  “The drug they’re testing,” he said condescendingly. “It doesn’t work.”

  Dart ruminated on this. Zeller seemed to be making one last bid for innocence.

  “Listen. How do you monitor whether or not a drug aimed at sex offenders works? This isn’t cancer—you don’t take an X ray,” he said condescendingly. “You keep the guy under surveillance—you monitor his every move.” Zeller spoke slowly. “Proctor Security had the contract to keep these c
reeps under surveillance. I was working for them. And what did I find out? A full half of these assholes repeatedly reoffend. They’re no better than they were.” His jaw seemed to move mechanically, inhumanly. Dart couldn’t catch his breath. “And Martinson, or someone over there, skewed the findings, and I, without meaning to, caught on. I got pissed off at Proctor one day and he made a boo-boo and hinted at something he shouldn’t have. I got a look at some files and turned up altered reports—Proctor was giving them the results they wanted. So what was my next step?” the teacher asked.

  “Roxin’s files.”

  “Exactly. Harder to break into at the time, but not impossible. Since then they’ve made the place into Fort Knox. I saw the fucking test results, Ivy—the real ones. The shit they’re testing—the Laterin—did nothing.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Dart said.

  “They caught me at it—nearly caught me, nearly physically had me—and I’ve been on the run ever since. Once I got started … you know … Alverez was brought in. The paperwork that I saw was shredded. Deleted. Whatever. Bet on it. I couldn’t produce a shard of evidence to support what I knew. So only the one choice,” he said, leaving it for Dart to draw his own conclusion. “What fucking choice was there?”

  Dart felt in turmoil. He had deciphered the suicides as murders, concluded that the murders were the work of someone attempting to discredit Roxin—Walter Zeller. But what Zeller now told him turned all that on its head. Dart mumbled, thinking aloud. “If I had left them as suicides, if I had connected them to the clinical trial—”

  “What the fuck do you think I’ve been trying to tell you with these phone calls—and risking seeing you in person! You were doing too good a job. You were pissing me off. All you had to do was connect the deaths to Roxin’s clinical trial.” He led Dart off Charter Oak, electing to leave a main thoroughfare. “The rest would have fallen into place.”

  Zeller said, “She’s running out of money—Martinson. This Laterin thing has consumed her for ten years. She’s moved her resources around, thrown too much money at Laterin. She has probably cooked the books, but eventually that catches up to you. They’ve been in various stages of clinical trials on Laterin for years. She needs this to work. If it doesn’t, she’s shit-out-of-luck. This fails, she’s out of business. Everyone goes home—some of us happy.” Zeller checked over his shoulder. “Don’t look now,” he said.

  Dart glanced back and saw a police patrol car approaching at a crawl.

  Zeller told him, “The woods behind my old place. Two hours. Be there.” He cut down a side alley, leaving Dart alone, disappearing in a heartbeat. He had perfected the art of vanishing.

  The patrol car pulled alongside, rolling at a walker’s speed. Dart, displaying his shield, walked over to the car. “What’s the problem here?”

  “Your piece,” the uniformed driver said, adding, “sir,” and making a head motion in Dart’s direction. “Didn’t know who you was.”

  Dart’s sweatshirt had ridden up over his holstered weapon, which was now in plain view.

  “How about the other guy?”

  “He’s with me,” Dart replied. He was, he thought.

  “Couple of guys in clothes wet from the knees down, walking these particular streets on a cold night carrying hardware …,” the cop explained.

  “I understand,” Dart said.

  “You on duty, sir?” the cop asked, trying to impress now. “You want, I could give you a ride back to Jennings Road.”

  “I could use a ride,” Dart said. “But not to Jennings Road.”

  CHAPTER 41

  They met in the dark alongside the droning hum of the electrical substation not far from Zeller’s former home; its mechanics were silhouetted against the sky like a giant schematic. It had snowed an inch, the first of the year, and the temperature had dropped into the twenties. Dart arrived first and was shivering by the time Zeller approached telegraphing the pain he was in without meaning to. Alverez had clearly wounded him back in the sewers.

  Dart was for moving out from under the loud hum of the overhead wires. He strained toward the wooded darkness. “This shit makes too much noise,” Dart complained, glancing overhead. Stepping closer to Zeller, he pointed into the dark.

  “You’re jumpy. Take it easy.” Zeller’s voice was tight. Dart worried for him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fucking peachy. Thanks.”

  “What now?”

  Zeller said, “It’s my job to sell you on leaving these as suicides. Let Martinson take the fall she deserves.” He paused. “I’d like to tell you that I’ll turn myself in, but I won’t. I’m not going to be locked up.”

  “It’s too late,” Dart explained. “I’ve already convinced Teddy Bragg and Haite that they were staged suicides. The good news is that Haite wants nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, there you go,” Zeller said. “Go along with him. Let them stand.”

  “It won’t bring down Roxin. Martinson has dropped the names of the suicides from their list of participants—covered her bases.”

  It was difficult to see in the dark, but Dart thought that he saw Zeller nod, as if he had expected something like this. His voice colored by pain and discouragement, Zeller said, “She pulls that off, and it’s all been for nothing.” He added, “Bitch.”

  “I think you’re wrong about the files—the records of the clinical trials,” Dart said, taking control of where they should head. He couldn’t remember contradicting Zeller so directly. “Being deleted,” he continued. “Shredded. Does that sound like Martinson? You say they’ve been in clinical trial for years. A person like her—a devoted scientist—is not going to destroy test data. Not for any reason.”

  “Bullshit. It’s gone.”

  “Hidden, maybe, but not gone.” He explained, “She needs that data. She created that data. It’s important to her. She won’t destroy it.”

  “I disagree.”

  “If I’m her, I destroy all physical evidence of those files, but only after I’ve hidden a copy away for my own use.”

  “And what? You’re going to subpoena it?”

  “We’ve got Ginny,” Dart reminded him.

  “The computer? You think Martinson has it in a computer?” Zeller asked, amused by the absurdity.

  “Where else? Password protected. Safe. Easy to get at—but impossible for anyone else to access.”

  “Doubtful, Ivy. It’s gone. She shredded it.” He reminded, “I was told that those files were shredded.”

  “Shredded, maybe, but not destroyed.”

  “You’re not making sense,” Zeller said angrily. “She’s not going to give you those files, Ivy, believe me. You make noise about them and she’ll destroy them, sure as shit.”

  “Maybe that’s what we want,” Dart said obliquely. “For her to erase them.”

  “Make some fucking sense, would you?” Zeller reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a mashed cigar. He tore open the crinkled cellophane and broke the cigar in half where it was torn, stuffed it into his mouth, and bit a piece off the end, spitting it out. Zeller located a match, cupped it, lit the cigar. “I fucked this up, Ivy. What I’m trying to tell you”—he puffed on the cigar and blew out the flame—” is that it’s over.”

  Dart saw a small red dot blink against the fence’s galvanized pipe. It seemed like nothing more than the lingering aftermath of Zeller’s lighting the match, but Dart’s sight remained fixed and the dot moved.

  It moved quickly toward Zeller’s head, and Dart identified it for what it was: an electronic sighting device used by marksmen. The red dot touched the fence behind Zeller’s shoulder and then quickly found his neck.

  Dart slapped out with his open hand, catching a stunned Zeller on the side of the face and knocking him to the side. Zeller stumbled, dropped the cigar, and fell.

  To Dart, the bullet sounded like a thin, fast wind at ear height. Zeller didn’t hear it. He misunderstood, shoving the detective away and prepared to fight. When
the red dot found Dart’s cheek, Zeller lurched forward and returned a life-saving shove. Dart went down into the wet snow as the second bullet splintered off a piece of a tree trunk behind them. The two immediately crawled toward the cover of the trees, their attention fixed on the other man, alert for the glowing red dot of the assassin. As the dot found Zeller’s back, Dart hissed, “Right!” and the sergeant rolled to his right. The ground, where he’d been crawling a fraction of a second before, exploded into mud and dirt. “Right,” Dart instructed again, and again the earth erupted under the power of the bullet. Zeller came to his knees and crawled fast, aware that the marksman was locked onto him, that all it required of the killer was to sweep the sight back and forth and await the signal. Dart moved left, intentionally widening the space between them, to give the marksman a larger dead space where the technology would fail to send a signal.

  But it was Zeller the red dot hunted, and Dart experienced an increasing sense of dread. “Left … right …” He called out commands, attempting to steer him clear, knowing well that the laser at the end of a weapon was faster, far more agile than its human target.

  A piece of Zeller’s leg exploded as a bullet hit from behind. Zeller splashed facedown in the muck.

  “Roll!” Dart coughed out, emotion choking him. The dot wandered onto Zeller’s ribs and then froze there.

  The sergeant rolled, but not before Dart heard the distinctive sound of another bullet taking a piece of him. Zeller groaned, came to his knees, and scrambled to his right in a zigzag pattern. The ground around him came alive with a series of small explosions. Dart raced ahead toward the trees, feeling helpless, looking on as Zeller’s efforts slowed.