Bark of Night

by David Rosenfelt

  The purpose of the fingerprinting is to provide proof that Adams really stayed here. If we find any other prints that can help us, that will be a bonus, but we’re not expecting to.

  Once that is accomplished, Laurie and I will go through everything, under the watchful eye of Jamieson. If we come up with anything interesting, then we’ll photograph it. All originals will stay with Jamieson, who will place the materials in evidence bags and store them in a safe, secure area.

  Sam’s role is to document everything, all the evidence collection and the entire search, on video. He begins the process by recording Halitzky saying on camera that we have his full permission to enter, since the tenant is behind on his rent. The terms of the rental agreement permit the entering and even the seizure of possessions.

  I don’t believe that anything we find needs to be shared with the prosecution, at least for now. They have refused to acknowledge that Adams is even tangentially involved with the Haley murder, mocking the connection through Truman.

  But if we get lucky and come up with something, we will want to share it and then introduce it at trial. If that happens, we will have had to do everything by the book, which is why Jamieson and Flory are here. Their credibility, plus the care with which all of this is handled, will make it difficult to challenge.

  We all go into Adams’s apartment and introduce ourselves to Sam’s video. I explain in detail exactly what is about to happen, and how the evidence will be handled.

  And now we begin.

  The first thing we notice is that Adams clearly intended to come back here. All his clothes are here, as is his suitcase. There is also some food in the refrigerator and in the small cupboard. Most of it is snack-type food … chips, pretzels, chocolate-covered raisins, soda … Adams was not a healthy eater. There are no peas to be found.

  Unfortunately, there isn’t much of anything to be found. There’s not a signed confession or any apparent hint why he was there. Nor is there any obvious connection to Haley, or any weapons.

  There is a briefcase, but all that is in it is a blank pad of paper and two pens. It has a lock on it, but is open.

  Flory reports that he has found at least a dozen different fingerprints, all of which he is carefully documenting. That in itself is not significant; this apartment is a short-term rental and most of those fingerprints could be previous tenants. Flory will run them all through the database; he has friends in the department who will give him access without broadcasting it to their bosses.

  I point to the hardwood floor. “That looks like dog hair. Let’s get some, and we can compare it to Truman’s.”

  “You’re going to compare dog hair?” Flory asks, clearly doubting the significance.

  “Absolutely. We can even run DNA on it. I’ve done it before.” We might as well do it, though it’s really overkill. We have plenty of evidence tying Adams to Truman.

  Flory gathers it in, and I ask him to go down to the Tara Foundation when we’re done to take a sample of Truman’s hair. I don’t think he considers this the highlight of his forensic career. I’ll call Willie and tell him to expect Flory’s arrival.

  We go through the clothes in the dresser drawers, and under Adams’s socks there is a cell phone. It appears to have been hidden there, though I don’t know why Adams would have worried that his room would be searched. Halitzky said that they provide weekly maid service, so maybe Adams was making sure the maid didn’t take it.

  After Flory dusts the phone for prints, I examine it. Unfortunately, it is locked and requires a fingerprint to open it. “I can’t see what’s on here,” I say to Laurie.

  Sam overhears my saying this. “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t open this,” I say. “It requires a fingerprint of the owner. I’m assuming that is Adams.”

  “Let me see it,” he says, and when I give it to him, he adds, “It’s an iPhone 6.”

  “So?”

  “So there are ways.” He asks Flory, “Can you get me a copy of Adams’s thumbprint?”

  “Assuming there is one here, of course,” Flory says.

  I tell Sam that I’ve read somewhere that you can’t just use a copy of a print, that it requires the actual finger. He says something about a high-resolution copy and a dental mold. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I trust Sam in all matters like this.

  I tell Sam to work with Jamieson on making sure that whatever he does preserves the integrity of the evidence. But certainly it is crucial that we get into this cell phone; there could be a wealth of information in it.

  At the very least it should tell us who Adams talked to and will help us track his movements through the GPS, although it is obvious on its face that he didn’t carry this phone at all times. When he left this apartment on the day he died, the phone was in his sock drawer.

  When we leave, Laurie and I stop off at Halitzky’s office. I thank him for his help and ask, “How much rent was Adams paying?”

  “Four hundred a week.”

  I nod. “Okay, I’ll pay his back rent and take the apartment for another four weeks from now. But I want it to stay locked, and I don’t want maid service.”

  “No problem. You can have it as long as you like.”

  I give him a check for the full amount, and Laurie and I leave. All we can do now is wait for the fingerprint, dog hair, and, most important, Sam’s cracking the iPhone that we found. Unfortunately, he says that it could take a while.

  I’m not a big fan of waiting.

  “They didn’t take any film,” Hike says.

  I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I’m assuming it’s bad news because Hike is the one saying it. Hike could make “you won the lottery” sound ominous and foreboding.

  “Who? What film?”

  “We got more discovery on James Haley’s possessions. We had thought that they might have taken the film that he had been shooting, because the camera was empty. But they didn’t; it wasn’t there.”

  “Do they know where it is? Could he have sent it somewhere?”

  He shakes his head. “No. And it’s not actually film; he shot in digital. But it’s all missing. I don’t know if he shipped it somewhere, but I doubt it. There were no shipping receipts in his possessions.”

  “He still could have,” I say. “Maybe he has an editor somewhere.”

  Hike nods. “He does; it was included in the information that Sam found on Haley. His name is Cal Kimes; he lives in Cleveland.”

  “Can we get him in here? Tell him we’ll pay for his flight, put him up in Manhattan, and get him tickets to a show.”

  Hike shakes his head. “Nothing but junk on Broadway now. All one hundred percent crap.”

  “When was the last time you saw a Broadway show?”

  “Maybe ten years ago. The one where the guy in the mask hangs out in an opera house bothering people. Put me to sleep.”

  “So you haven’t gone in ten years, but you know all the new stuff is one hundred percent crap?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that’s why I don’t go. I remember when Broadway was Broadway.”

  My only goal in conversations with Hike is to reach the end, and so far I’m not making much progress. “Hike, let’s try and get Kimes here, but leave out the part about the shows being crap and Broadway not being Broadway. If he won’t come, you’re going to have to go out there.”

  “Then I’ll make sure he comes,” Hike says, and heads to his office to make some calls.

  Like everything else, the missing film, or digital thing, or whatever, could be significant or could be meaningless. Maybe we’ll find out when we talk to Kimes, but in the meantime, it changes my perspective.

  Until now I haven’t given too much thought to motive. I have not yet made any connection between Adams and Haley except for Truman, but that is after the fact. I don’t know why Adams would have wanted Haley dead.

  I’ve thought that maybe Haley was shooting some film that presented a danger to someone, and since he was shooting in down
town Paterson, I assumed that “someone” might have been Chico Simmons. But there is also no connection that I am aware of between Adams and Chico, or anyone else in Paterson.

  Chico is a gang leader and killer. If he wanted someone in Paterson dead, he wouldn’t call Fat Tony Longo in Philadelphia and ask him to send a hit man. He would grab Haley, paint an “X” on his forehead, and put a bullet in it.

  I believe that Adams came here from Philadelphia to kill Haley. He did so simultaneously with Haley starting to shoot footage in Paterson, so his motive must have been set before that. Maybe Haley had a Philadelphia connection; that is something we are going to have to find out.

  But how did Joey Gamble get stuck in the middle of this? How would Adams have known that he was a candidate to set up? That’s where Chico, or someone like him, would come in. But I just don’t see how. It’s not like Adams advertised for a framing candidate on Craigslist and Chico answered the ad.

  Added to all this confusion is the murder of Denise Adams. As the wife of a mobster, it’s fairly safe to assume that her murder was rooted in his world. It also seems likely, though not certain, that her murder was somehow connected to her husband being out of town. Of course, that doesn’t mean it was tied to Haley. Maybe she was having an affair with another dangerous guy, and Adams being away gave them an opportunity to be together. And then they had a falling out, and …

  But Haley, as near as we can tell, was not a part of that world. He was a documentary filmmaker, and not even a major player in that field. To attract someone like Adams, in effect to be worthy of being killed, must have meant he was a danger to someone: Adams, or maybe Fat Tony Longo.

  Which means that, at some point, Little Andy Carpenter and Fat Tony Longo might have to get together.

  That will give me something to look forward to.

  Cal Kimes clearly does not share Hike’s opinion of the Broadway landscape.

  He was on a plane hours after Hike called, and Hike met him at Newark Airport. Hike’s bringing him to my office, which means that Kimes will have to spend at least forty-five minutes alone in a car with Hike. With that kind of torture, he might jump out of the moving car onto Route 80, or confess to the murder himself.

  We’ve got him staying at the Michelangelo Hotel on Fifty-first Street, which is convenient to his theater tickets. Unfortunately, he wanted to see Hamilton, and for the price of the ticket, I could have bought something with bucket seats.

  Kimes seems to look around the office with some surprise when Hike brings him in. I think he felt this was going to be a glamorous trip, but my office says the opposite. Hike also walked him through the fruit stand downstairs, which is not exactly the red carpet treatment.

  I introduce myself and thank him for coming. “Hey, no problem,” he says. “I was really upset to hear about Jimmy.”

  It’s the first time I’ve heard Haley referred to as anything other than James. It somehow humanizes him, which shouldn’t have been necessary. I’m annoyed at myself for thinking of a murder victim as a piece in a puzzle.

  “You knew him well?” I ask.

  “Pretty well. I mean, we weren’t buddies or anything like that, but we worked together. I edited his films, all except for the first one, I think. Maybe the first two.”

  “He was a talented filmmaker?”

  He shrugs. “I guess. I mean, it’s a struggle, you know? Everything is low budget. So he did what he could. If he’d had more money to work with, then we would have learned more about how good he was. But here’s the thing about Jimmy. He thought of himself as a journalist; he wanted to tell real stories, and he wanted good to come out of it. We could use more people like him … and now we have one less.”

  “How did it work? Did he send you the film as he shot it?”

  “He worked in digital,” he said. “Has for at least five, six years.”

  “Right, digital. Did he send you the, what do you call it, the digital stuff? Did he send it to you as he shot it?”

  “Sometimes he’d send me a hard drive, but not always, and not lately. There was no rush on most of these things, so there was no reason to send me dailies. When the project was done, he’d send me everything. Or usually bring it to me, so we could talk about it, you know, spend some time before we started the editing process.”

  “Did he send you anything in the days leading up to his death?” I ask.

  “No, maybe a year ago, maybe ten months, he changed the way we operated. He did all of the shooting, and then he’d get it to me and we were going to work on it together.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Some kind of diving thing. He was down in Florida.”

  “Did he mention anything about shooting in the inner city?”

  “No. But that doesn’t really mean anything; he didn’t have to check in with me. And he knew I worked with other filmmakers as well, so I was fine with waiting on him. I figured he’d come to me when he was ready.”

  “So there was nothing unusual about him lately that you were aware of?”

  He thinks for a moment. “Just that he must have thought one of his films was going to hit big. Last time we talked, he made some comment about how we were going to have the money to do the kind of films we want to make. Money’s always an issue in the documentary world.”

  “Did he say how he would get the money?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I didn’t believe him. I mean, a movie about diving? Or the one before that, about a drought? One’s got water, one has no water. Who cares? And who’s going to pay to see it?”

  So far I haven’t gotten anything worth the cost of the Hamilton ticket, but I take another shot. “Help me out on this,” I say. “When he shot the footage, where did it go … into, like, a digital cassette in the camera?” I’m a dinosaur about stuff like this, but there’s no sense in trying to conceal that fact from him.

  He half nods. “It’s a memory card, maybe this big.” He holds his fingers slightly apart to show how small it is. “Then he downloads it into his computer.”

  “Can he reuse that card?”

  “Yes. He just erases it through the computer or in the camera itself. That’s called formatting.”

  I nod. “Okay. So now the footage is on his computer. How does he protect it from a computer crash, or fire, or if he loses it?”

  “Backs it up on his external hard drive.”

  “So all of the footage Haley had just over the past months, where would it be?”

  “On his computer and the external hard drive.”

  “And where would those things be?”

  He laughs. “Wherever he is. He would literally never let them out of his sight. I would assume his will said that his computer should be buried with him.”

  This is very interesting to me. There was no computer or hard drive found in his house after the murder; neither shows up anywhere in the discovery. “Last question,” I say. “He shot footage the day he was killed, but no trace of it was found in his house. Nor were his computer or hard drive found.”

  “Whoa,” Kimes says, taken aback. “Only one thing could have happened. Someone stole it.” Then, “You think that’s why he was killed?”

  “Do you?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. What could have been in that footage worth killing someone for?”

  “Damn good question,” I say. “Enjoy Hamilton.”

  The missing digital footage is something we need to follow up on.

  It’s not that we have any evidence that it contained something dangerous to someone; it’s more that we have no other idea as to why James Haley might have been a target. So we have to investigate whether George Adams, or whoever hired him, was worried about what Haley had on film, or tape, or digital, or whatever.

  If we go to trial on this, I’m going to have to learn about this tech stuff. Back in the day, when film was film and Broadway was Broadway, these things used to be easier.

 
Since we don’t have access to the missing video, the best we can do now is try to retrace Haley’s steps, to learn where he filmed and when he filmed there.

  There are two possible ways for us to do this. One is to put Sam Willis on the case, by supplying Sam with Haley’s cell phone number. As he has done a number of times in the past, Sam could use his hacking skills to get into the phone company computer, which allows him to trace the GPS records of the phone. That way we can tell where Haley’s phone was at all times. It doesn’t mean that Haley was carrying his phone at those times, but it’s a good bet that he was.

  The other, easier approach to this is fortunately also available to us in this case. The police have already traced Haley’s movement in the days after he arrived in Paterson, and the details are properly included in the discovery.

  So we’ll follow the road map that the police have laid out for us. I’ll also put Sam on the case, just in case the police reports have left things out. But I doubt that they did, since their goal would have been to place Haley and Gamble in the same location.

  They have been at least partially successful at that, getting some witness statements from people who claim they saw Haley and Gamble in the same place and, in a couple of cases, conversing. It’s nothing terribly damaging to us, since we are not claiming they had no contact. For instance, we are clearly admitting to the fact that Gamble’s fingerprints were in Haley’s house.

  Laurie and I are going to retrace the steps Haley took together. I want to do it because the more I can do that is hands-on, the better feel I have for what took place. Laurie will come along not only because she is a professional investigator, but also because we will be going to areas where people might not be so glad to see us.

  Laurie sees herself as my protector, which means she sees me as in need of protection. I see her as correct, but I would never admit it to her. I’ve only recently been willing to admit it to myself.

  So off we go into downtown Paterson. Our first stop is Eastside High School, which happens to be where I went to school. Eastside is on Market Street and is generally considered a “tough” school with a history. The movie Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman, chronicled the controversial efforts of school principal Joe Clark to instill discipline in the place, and the film was actually shot here.