Chain of Evidence (23 page)

“A what?” Haite asked rhetorically.

The idea of using an Emergency Response Team to do a raid for the sole purpose of collecting evidence was an idea all Dart’s. It would require writs and warrants and probable cause. Dart explained, “I can place an unknown person inside Harold Payne’s study on the night he … committed suicide. Bragg will support me in that whoever this was may have attempted to conceal his or her presence by vacuuming the rug.”

Haite appeared skeptical.

Dart handed over Bragg’s report, completed only an hour earlier, that showed an identical chemical composition between the rock salt recovered at Payne’s and the salt Dart had collected at 11 Hamilton Court. “This links this suspect to both Payne’s and the house at Eleven Hamilton Court. I contacted the owner, who put me in touch with a property management firm—”

“Peter Sharpe,” Haite said. All the slum property was handled by Sharpe. He was hated by the police.

“Yeah. The place is rented to one Wallace Sparco, white male, fifty-two.” Dart passed Haite the photocopy of Sparco’s driver’s license. He went in for the kill by handing him next the computerized rendering Lewellan Page had witnessed at Gerald Lawrence’s. Although imperfect, the similarity was undeniable. “Wallace Sparco has been busy making suicides,” Dart said.

“Shit,” came Haite’s reply, comparing the two photographs. He looked over at Dart with basset hound eyes of irritation. He didn’t want things more complicated. “They are
not
suicides?”

“That’s what I need to prove or disprove.”

“These are not your investigations. Where the hell is Kowalski on this?”

“It’s an end run, Sergeant,” Dart went ahead reluctantly. “I don’t feel good about it, but that’s the way it is.”

“An end run on Kowalski?”

“Each one of these suicides is his,” Dart pointed out.

“Oh, shit.” Haite tilted back in his chair. “Oh,
shit.
”

“I know,” said Dart. “I don’t like it either.”

“Fuck this,” Haite said, exasperated. “I don’t need this kind of trouble.”

Dart waited him out. He knew better than to push Haite.

“Someone tapped both Payne and Lawrence and set them up to look like suicides?” Haite muttered. “Why?”

“To keep us from catching on. To keep going. To clean house: They’re both sex offenders, Sergeant. Pornography. Wife beating. Stapleton too.”

“Stapleton is who?”

“The jumper at the Granada Inn. August.”

“Oh, shit.” He scratched his head. “Oh, fuck.”

“I know,” Dart repeated.

“And what the hell are you asking for?”

“An evidence raid with an Emergency Response Team in case it gets ugly. That’s a lousy area, Pope Park.”

“I know.”

“A way to get in and out without Sparco any the wiser.”

“Fuck that,” Haite said. “We just get the paper right and we kick it and search it. So what?”

“Sparco is one careful son of a bitch, Sergeant. We have less than zero to go on. If we don’t find some kind of evidence connecting him to these crime scenes, we don’t want to tip our hand that we’ve been there.”

“It’s illegal. Have you considered that? No matter what, we have to post the place that it was searched.”

“Those search notices have a habit of blowing off the door, Sergeant.”

“Oh, fuck. What’s happened to you, Dartelli? Blow off the door? You’re suggesting we
purposely
avoid posting notice?
That is illegal, Detective!
” He had raised his voice to shouting. Dart knew that by now the other guys would be looking this way, but with his back to the floor he couldn’t see.

“We post it, and if it blows off, it blows off.”

“This is not like you,” the sergeant condemned. He added, “This sounds much more like Kowalski or Drummond than you. What’s gotten into you?”

“Three murders made to look like suicides,” Dart answered. “We’ve got a jury of one running wild, Sergeant. If we don’t do
something
, the numbers are going to increase.”

Haite and Zeller had come up through the ranks at the same time. There was mutual respect between the men, but a healthy competition as well. If anyone felt as strongly about Zeller as Dart, it was this man sitting across from him. Were Dart to share the possibility of Zeller’s involvement with Haite, the detective risked being reassigned. Without ironclad proof, John Haite was not about to bring down Walter Zeller. So Dart avoided mentioning his former sergeant or the Ice Man investigation. But Haite had just reviewed the case a few days earlier.

“What about the Ice Man?” he asked. “He took a dive just like Stapleton.”

Dart met eyes strongly with his sergeant. “Yes, he did.” He offered nothing more. Telephones rang out on the floor. Haite and Dart maintained an unblinking eye contact.

“You’re saying the Ice Man was a sex offender? Do we
know
this? Can we
prove
this?”

Dart replied, “I didn’t say anything about the Ice Man, Sergeant. Do you have a specific question that you want to ask?”

Haite, still maintaining eye contact, bored a hole through Dart. He understood the meaning of Dart’s reserved tone of voice—he was trying to warn the sergeant off. Perhaps the only coincidence that Haite could pick upon—without Dart’s cooperation—was the date of Zeller’s retirement, which followed quickly after the Ice Man investigation.

“No questions,” Haite whispered dryly, fingering the photocopy of Wallace Sparco’s driver’s license, and Dart had to wonder what the man saw in the face. Did he, too, see the resemblance to Zeller?

Dart nodded. “Fine with me.” He hesitated and asked again, “And the ERT raid?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Haite now looked as pale as Teddy Bragg.

Two vans pulled onto Park Terrace at 1:00
A.M.
One was painted gray and carried a red diagonal stripe that read:
MANNY’S STEAM AND CLEAN.
It had been confiscated by the State Police in a drug bust two years earlier and was now outfitted with a personal computer and printer, communications hardware, and an elaborate video setup. The second van was a customized beige Dodge with what appeared to be darkly tinted windows but were in fact one-way glass. Behind the glass, six men and one woman sat on opposing steel mesh benches. Clad all in black, wearing combat boots that laced over the ankle, four were members of the State Police ERT unit. One of the outsiders was Joe Dartelli, who had suffered through an egregiously boring ninety-minute briefing that had been lectured by the commander of the State Police unit, Tom Schultz. The remaining two, a woman named Gritch and a man named Yates, were a team that someone at HPD had coined “Ted Bragg on amphetamines”: evidence technicians whose specialty was speed and efficiency.

They all wore communications devices in their ears, night-vision goggles perched on their foreheads, bullet-resistant vests, black handcuffs, black nine-millimeter semiautomatic handguns in their belt holster, and maglights Velcroed to their belts. Gritch and Yates carried bulging black canvas bags at their sides, the straps slung over their shoulders and necks. They all wore black farm hats that carried the single word
POLICE
in bright yellow stitching. The veterans called these “target caps” for obvious reasons. The ERT members wore the hats backward like black and Hispanic kids. The protective vests carried bold yellow print across the back:
STATE POLICE.
All but Dart also carried a stun grenade and a smoke grenade—both of which Dart had argued to leave behind. But ERT, the most militarylike unit of the State Police, did not, would not, vary from procedure.

One of the ERT members sitting directly across from Dart said, “A military unit could put a scope on those windows and tell us if we were facing any life-forms.”

“Life-forms, Brandon?” one of the others teased. “What are you expecting, Klingons?”

“Attack dogs, asshole. Animals
and
humans. The scopes work off infrared. You can scope right through
walls
with the newer ones.” Brandon held a bunch of electronic gear in his arms. Dart easily identified him as the techie.

“Hey, commander,” a third said to Schultz. “We ever gonna get anything like that?”

“On our budget? Who the fuck you kidding?” Schultz was the marine drill-sergeant type who had given the briefing. Every other word was a swearword or a denigrating, obscene comment involving some aspect of female anatomy. “Tit-sucker.” “Fist-fucker.” “Cunt breath.” A real charmer.

Gritch apparently tolerated Schultz, storing away enough harassment ammunition to retire comfortably if she ever chose to press a suit.

After the ninety-minute soliloquy, Schultz and Dart had entered into a brief but vehement discussion of chain of command, Dart emphasizing that it was his raid, Schultz insisting it was his team. They compromised whereby Schultz would handle the team logistics while Dart directed the actual reconnaissance—in this case, the physical inspection and the collection of evidence.

The search warrant had to specify what it was that Dart was looking for, if that item was to be removed for lab work. The trick—one of the oldest tricks—was for him to list everything and anything that he could think might be found in the search. It took a cooperating judge to go along with such practice, but there were plenty. On Dart’s list was everything from a portable vacuum cleaner to lamp cord, wool rugs, to latex gloves.

“Scope on,” Schultz directed Brandon, who carried what looked like a black metallic snake clipped at the calf and thigh to the outside of his right leg. He reached up to his head and flipped a small device into place that looked like a dentist’s mirror and came to rest two inches off his eye. His right hand worked a small box attached to his belt that Dart could not fully see. He reported, “Scope fully functional.” ERT members, Dart thought, apparently saw little use for verbs.

Schultz checked his watch. It had a black face and was on a black plastic band.
Probably wearing black shorts
, Dart thought. Schultz looked up at the van’s ceiling, which Dart now understood was this man’s reaction to radio communication, because as lead detective Dart was also able to hear the voice traffic from the operations van. “Two minutes,” Schultz told his troops.

Dart felt the prickle of heat in his scalp.

Exactly two minutes later, following a brief communication check between members of the unit, the van started up and turned into Hamilton Court.

Schultz rattled off orders. “Single file, people. We stay in shadow where possible. Brandon will scope the back gate; we move on my signals—we speak as little as possible. Any resistance, we withdraw to the park and our support transportation. Questions?”

“If we encounter weapons fire?” one of Schultz’s men asked.

“Dartelli leads the retreat to park. You, Brandon, and I take up defensive positions and follow ASAP. Anyone else?”

Dart felt his heartbeat strongly. He wanted to think of this as a drill, but his adrenaline told him differently. The van stopped and the doors flew open. The team moved quickly, quietly into the shadows. Dart, a part of them, could barely see the others.

“Okay,” Schultz said.

He followed at the back behind Gritch. The unit was well trained and moved as an entity. The van, having hesitated only long enough to disgorge the team, purred down the alley. Schultz held them in shadow for exactly one minute and then moved himself and his gadget man, Brandon, across to the green wooden gate. The two knelt and Brandon uncoupled the black snake from his leg and inserted it under the fence. The snake was, in fact, a fiber-optic camera, the small dentist mirror at his eye a viewing scope. Brandon inspected the back garden area and, with a hand signal, pronounced it clear. Schultz, using a speed key, unlocked the gate and then signaled the unit forward, his ERT man leading the way, followed by the evidence technicians and then Dart.

Within seconds, the unit was lined up in shadow alongside the house. Dart’s heart pounded heavily and he felt sweat trickling down his ribs. Brandon slipped the fiber-optic camera under the weather seal of the back door and used the video gear to inspect the inside. A moment later, Schultz had opened this door as well. Again, he waved them forward.

They were inside.

Dart had only used night-vision equipment once, in a seminar hosted by the New England Law Enforcement Association. The goggles were bulky, and the view from within them an eerie combination of green, black, and white. The unit moved ahead fluidly, but Dart felt awkward and disoriented, as if he had stepped into a video game. With his world reduced to glowing colors, he moved forward one unsure foot at a time.

Inside, the house was as it was outside—old and worn. In this first room there was a shoddy couch, a tilting standing lamp, a frayed recliner, and an old television set. Gritch and Yates fixed their attention onto Dart, who immediately pointed to the recliner; the two evidence technicians attacked the piece, working silently, efficiently, pulling cushions, sweeping, dusting for latent prints, digging at the crevices. Glassine and white paper bags, premarked with room locations, were used to capture the finds. In seconds the recliner was itself again. “No prints,” Gritch whispered into her microphone, playing in Dart’s right ear.

Dart scanned the room, experiencing tunnel vision, annoyed by the goggles.

Schultz and his commandos were gone, presumably conducting a preliminary search. Gritch tried dusting the television remote. She shook her head at Dart. Yates took a special solvent and cleaned the dust away, leaving no trace of their having been here.

Dart looked across at an upright piano missing several keys. There were a half dozen photographs in acrylic frames on top. He pointed these out to Gritch and Yates as well, and again they descended on their targets with an uncanny quickness and efficiency. Bags were opened—somehow silently—and Gritch produced a special camera. Yates removed what looked like a flashlight from his pouch, switched it on, and directed it at the photographs. Without the goggles, the special light would have appeared an extremely dull violet. Inside the night vision it appeared as if he had shined a halogen flashlight onto the subjects. Gritch fired off a series of shots, and to Dart’s surprise the camera worked in absolute silence. It would be explained later that the camera was digital, recording the images onto a computer disk. These images could be enlarged and manipulated electronically.