Chain of Evidence (33 page)

“I think we both understand each other,” she returned, her voice dry despite the wine.

“Unless these suicides become reclassified as homicides, your drug will be blamed. You said yourself that such a ruling would be devastating to your company. That reclassification is up to
me,
doctor.”

“No comment.” She lifted her chin and literally looked down her nose at him.

What was her game?
he wondered. “You need me,” he repeated. If murder, it would appear that someone had attempted to sabotage her research; if suicide, that the drug had fatal side effects.

“I
need
to get back to my work,” she said stubbornly.

“You need me to do this,” he said again.

“Need you?” She smirked, and said, “Let’s assume, hypothetically, that you’re right—that someone may be testing what you’ve called a Prozac for sex offenders. Do you see the importance of such a thing? Can you begin to understand the social and economic implications of such a treatment? The benefits to society? Even were this company to be
partly effective
in its goal—let’s say that we could reduce physical and sexual abuse by ten, or fifteen, or twenty percent with no adverse side effects—can you argue effectively against such a treatment? But there are those who would stop such a thing if they could. Oh, yes. Believe me, there are. They would say a crime committed is a crime to be paid for. They would do
anything
to see such a treatment fail—
anything
—this hypothetical company’s competitors, certain rights organizations—it’s a long list. You say you
may be able
to reclassify these suicides as homicides, Detective. Let’s say, hypothetically of course, that this company had over
ten years
in such an effort—where would you put your faith?” She drank some of the wine and caught eyes with Dart. “What I’m telling you, Detective, if you’re
listening,
is that I’m not convinced that these men, these suicides of yours, were ever part of
any
Roxin trial.” Dart felt the words like a blow to his chest. “You seem like a perfectly nice man; I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.” She spun the wineglass in her fingers. “You may be made to look foolish if you pursue this any further,” she cautioned.

Can she get the names off the list?
he suddenly wondered. He had no documentation from Martinson concerning the participation of Stapleton, Lawrence, and Payne in the trial, only a verbal comment made to him several days earlier.
She could deny it all.
If she could destroy the record of their participation then her only concern for their killer would be that he be taken care of—quickly and quietly, the less publicity the better. And that he, Dart, not make trouble.

“If someone has convinced you to go outside the law on this, Dr. Martinson, I strongly advise you to seek a second opinion—preferably a
legal
opinion. There’s no reason to further—”

“My impression,” she said sharply, interrupting him and coming to her feet, her chest heaving once again, “is that we are both wasting our time, Detective, and that we both have better things to do than to sit around speculating. I have, in fact, solicited just the legal opinion for which you seem to be strongly lobbying, and that has come back an unqualified ‘No comment.’
Unqualified,
” she repeated. “I’ll show you to the door now.”

“This is not the way to handle this,” Dart warned. “You’re making a big mistake.”

“And you, Detective, had better be careful, or you may need your own attorney, your own second opinion.” She paused by the front door. The threat came not from her words, but from her eyes. “Don’t meddle, Detective.” She turned the handle and opened the door. The cold air rushed in and stung Dart’s face.

“We can work together on this,” Dart offered one last time.

“I don’t think so. No thank you.” She opened the door. Dart stepped outside, suddenly chilled to the bone.

He was out on Farmington Avenue when his cellular rang, and the phone got hung up in his pocket trying to come out. He thought he had missed the call because it stopped ringing just before he answered. The line was in fact dead, but a moment later it rang again.

“Dartelli,” he answered.

“You’re finally thinking like a cop,” said Zeller’s voice. Dart immediately checked the rearview mirror and the cars in front of him, but it was a pitch black night,
and besides,
he thought,
Zeller would never make it that easy.

“I can help you, Sarge. But you—”

“Save it, Ivy. Just do your fucking job. That’s help enough. There’s a science editor at the
New York Times
might be interested in what you know. His name is Rosenburg. Good writer.”

The line went dead.

Dart jerked the wheel, skidded off the shoulder, and came to an abrupt stop at the top of a hill. He jumped out of the car and searched for a vehicle executing a U-turn or parked conspicuously. Below him was an intersection with a gas station and a bookstore on opposing corners. He looked for someone standing at a pay phone, or an idle car.

Nothing.

Besides
, he thought for a second time,
he would never make it that easy.

CHAPTER 37

With the surveillance of 11 Hamilton Court failing to produce any sign of Wallace Sparco, and with a Be On Lookout alert having failed to raise his vehicle, Dart felt his only chance of finding the man—of
saving
him, perhaps—lay within that building. But when during the Friday night shift he approached Haite to discuss the technical merits of the search-and-seizure warrant issued on the house, Haite forbade him to enter “or get anywhere near” 11 Hamilton Court. What began as a civilized discussion ended in a shouting match with all of CAPers staring at the two through the glass wall of Haite’s shared office. Dart stormed out and, feeling the brunt of everyone’s attention, continued into the hall looking for somewhere to calm down. He hurried down the hall and seeing Abby’s light on, knocked and entered. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a week, a fact that had escaped Dart until he found himself standing there looking at her.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“This is my office.”

“At night.”

“I make my own schedule. I’m a one-person division,” She hesitated and then explained, “I’m trying to get onto your schedule so we might see more of each other.” Another hesitation. “I’ve missed you.”

“The kids?”

“It’s actually better this way. They sleep at night. I’m with them in the mornings and afternoons. I should have tried this sooner.”

“When do you sleep?”

“I don’t,” she answered. “You look like you’re ready to break something. Not something I’ve done, I hope.”

“Haite. He’s bullheaded. I misjudged him. Brought him into my confidence when I probably shouldn’t have. Sent him off the deep end. He suddenly wants nothing to do with these suicides. He keeps assigning me domestics.”

“The night shift,” she reminded him. Domestic quarrels and assaults were almost entirely the domain of the night shift.

“Yeah, I know. But I’ve got bigger fish to fry and he knows it. It scares him, is the thing.”

“Which fish?”

“I told him—not directly, but I told him—about Zeller.”

“Oh, shit,” she gasped.

“Seems his loyalty outweighs his concern over—and these are his words—’a bunch of perverts’ getting killed.”

She nodded, as if she understood, or had encountered such resistance herself. She said, “I had a case involving a gym teacher. Junior high. Molesting his girl athletes, a peephole in the shower, stealing underwear from their lockers—the whole nine yards. He raped three of them. Got one pregnant, or maybe we’d have never known. The school board tried to pressure me not to press charges. Said it would hurt enrollment. Said that they’d fire him, and that that was enough. They got to someone upstairs—I don’t know how. And they fired him, and ran him out of town. And I pressed charges before he got out of town. But no press. No publicity.”

“I never heard about that.”

“No one did,” she said. “It damn near cost me my badge.” Looking at him coyly, she added, “But I kept my badge. In fact I got my own division.” She grinned. “I found out who they got to.”

Dart and others had wondered how she had managed to pull a Sex Crimes division out of CAPers, and now, years later, it was explained. He was struck with an idea.

“What is it?” she asked, seeing his change of expression.

“A thought,” he said, feeling more calm than when he’d entered. He placed a knee onto the room’s only other chair. “You are your own division,” he said, thinking aloud.

“True story.”

“You don’t go through Haite for warrants.”

“Thank God.”

“What?” he asked. “Directly to the PA?”

“Do not pass
GO
.”

“Do you operate under special probable cause requirements, or the same as the rest of us?” He clarified, “Does the prosecuting attorney hold you to a Sex Crimes—”

“Angle?” she filled in for him. “No,” she answered. She added sarcastically, “Surprisingly enough, they treat me like I’m a lieutenant.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t, but it sounded a little that way.”

“I need to extend the search warrant for Hamilton Court,” he stated. “I need inside.”

“
I
can get inside,” she said. “You can accompany me.” Checking her watch, she said, “It’ll be a phoner this time of night. Who’s the on-call judge?”

“Cryst.”

“Cynthia Cryst?” she said. “A
woman
, Joe. Piece of cake. Trust me on this.” She pushed her paperwork out of the way and pulled a blank pad in front of her. “This is a grounder.”

They entered 11 Hamilton Court an hour later, Abby carrying the signed warrant in her pocket. The automatic timer had the sitting room light switched on—it was 9:55
P.M.

Abby, via Dart, had listed three items on the warrant that had been left off of earlier warrants: grocery store shopping bags, the framed photographs on the piano, and “articles of clothing.”

With both of them wearing latex gloves, he collected the framed photographs into a white paper sack.

“The photos I can understand,” she said. “Even though you assume it’s Zeller who put them there to create this Wallace Sparco identity, you think there may be some significance to them, something he might tell you without intending to. But the shopping bags?” she asked.

“He thought to put food here,” Dart explained, having led her into the kitchen. “Again, as you said, to build the perception that Sparco lived here. Sparco didn’t live here. Neither did Zeller. He used this as a staging area—at least up until we discovered it; he must have used someplace else after that … He knew it was virtually impossible not to carry something of yourself into every crime scene, and to take something of the crime scene back to your house with you—it’s the nature of hairs-and-fibers—it’s what he drummed into me all those years. I was the one with the degree, but he was the one who understood fiber evidence handshakes and piggybacking.”

“So he came here, changed clothes—changed
identities,
” she corrected, “did the crime, came back, changed back….” She understood it then. “The chain of evidence would always lead back to here.”

“If we ever found anything at a crime scene—and he took extra precautions to see that we wouldn’t, like vacuuming and laying false evidence—we would only find his safe house, not the man himself.”

“But grocery bags?” she inquired skeptically.

“Maybe he was too smart for his own good,” Dart said, searching drawers. “He buys groceries to convince us Sparco lived here. Even eats some of it, to give the place a lived-in effect. But if he saved the grocery bags—” Dart thought aloud, sorting through the contents of another drawer.

Abby yanked open the cabinet below the sink, pulled out the trash can, and hoisted the trash bag—a plastic grocery bag. She completed for him, “Then he would use them as trash bags.”

“You’re brilliant,” he crowed.

“I know. It’s true, isn’t it? But not brilliant enough to know why you care about this,” she added.

He took it from her and turned it around for her to see the green writing on the side. “Shopway,” he said, reading the name.

“That’s up on Park,” she said, naming the worst street in town.

“How many groceries between here and Shop-way?” he quizzed.

“Two. Three, maybe. Catering to the college kids.”

“Catering to the whites,” he said. Shopway was an inner-city store.

“You’re trying to narrow down his neighborhood,” she said, impressed. “To identify someplace we might find him.” She added, “We put the Shopway under surveillance, assuming it’s closer to home.”

Dart grinned at her, dumping what little trash the bag held and collecting the grocery sack as evidence.

Then he opened the downstairs coat closet and searched through the three jackets hanging there.

Abby said, “He would have bought these at a secondhand store—a Salvation Army, something like that. You’re looking for tags, something to further narrow the neighborhood.”

“Nothing,” Dart mumbled, shutting the closet door and leading her upstairs.

Following closely, Abby said, “My guess is that he’s going to wish he hadn’t trained you so well.”

“Compliments,” Dart said, “will get you everywhere.” He entered the bedroom and headed for the closet.

Abby switched on the light. Dart turned quickly, shook his head, and said, “No!”

“This,” he said, checking through the clothes, “may have started out secondhand … and he would have bought it big, so that it fit him, but wasn’t his size … and some of it would have gotten thrown out: the Payne stuff for instance—too much blood. But he has a thing about clean clothes. Did you ever notice? Freshly ironed shirts, pressed pants. He and Lucky got in an argument once because she wanted to save money, but the Sarge insisted on sending out his shirts. It was almost a—”

“Fetish,” she completed for him, holding up the shirttail of one of the hanging shirts. “Is this what you’re looking for?” Next to her gloved right thumb was a blue commercial laundry tag, neatly pinned with a thread of plastic to the shirttail.