Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  Abby said, “This definitely goes into the books as the strangest first date.” She chuckled; Dart laughed, and then they shushed each other, which only served to make them laugh all the harder. Their chests bounced together with the nervous laughter and it fed on itself until it was uncontrollable. Trying to suppress it only made it worse.

  Rubbing herself against his erection, still laughing, she said, “Maybe someday we can make the most of that.”

  “I’ve got one for you,” she added, the both of them tight with laughter. “What if they give up the search?”

  Dart buried his face into her shoulder and muffled his laughter. “We could be here all night,” he said. He felt her nodding along with him.

  When she placed her open hand on his head and held him to her skin, their laughter stopped, running down like a windup clock. The mood changed in this instant. Dart felt his arousal even more substantial. She stroked his back.

  “Abby?” he said.

  “I know,” she answered in a whisper, while her hands kept petting him. “No harm in hugging, is there?”

  And so they hugged each other intimately, warmly, affectionately-the kind of hug that can take the place of breathing, he thought. It can take the place of food, and confuse time, and stop all thought.

  “Maybe they won’t come,” she said, kissing his cheek and moving toward his lips. All humor associated with that thought had passed.

  He kissed her, tentatively at first, and then with the passion that consumed him. She returned the kiss, parting her lips and opening her mouth to him.

  When the door opened a few minutes later, Dart failed to look up. He had planned to say Get the fuck out of here, because he enjoyed the irony of the statement. But he just kept kissing her instead, oblivious to the intrusion.

  The voice of the young cop said hastily, “Sorry, sir,” and the door bumped shut.

  Abby Lang began to laugh. She held Dart close and whispered, “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Joe Dart.

  CHAPTER 10

  Knowing what had to be done, and doing it, were two different things, especially given the consequences: death. Contemplating another man’s death was a power all its own. As much as this man wanted to believe otherwise, to ignore the palpable high coursing in his veins was nearly impossible. Tonight, his was the power of God, there was no denying it. He felt drawn toward intoxication, but he resisted this. He felt like humming, and so he did, though out of tune-he had never held a tune in his life.

  He stood on a Hefty garbage bag just inside the back door and stripped naked, revealing his uncomfortably thin body. Carefully stepping off the garbage bag, he turned it inside out, capturing the clothing, and slung the bag over his shoulder like Santa Claus, and carried it through the sitting room, up the narrow stairs and into the bedroom, where he set it down into the closet.

  He entered the bathroom still humming, his gaunt frame a stranger to him-he still thought of himself as the muscular beefmeister he had once been. Wearing the latex gloves that he had donned prior to entry, he opened the medicine cabinet. A small wire showed in the metal seam of the cabinet, and as he pulled on this the entire cabinet came free of the wall, and he set it aside, revealing a clear glass vial, a box of disposable syringes, and a box of needles. He removed the vial and a single syringe and a needle and returned the medicine cabinet to the wall so that he could see himself in the mirror.

  He hated this part: the needles, the pain.

  Standing before the mirror he studied his face, wiped the alcohol-soaked cotton ball across the sun-hardened, aged skin, lifted the syringe, and pricked the needle into his top lip, wincing with the puncture, and drawing a drop of blood. The injected fluid stung and itched at the same time-histamines-and the lip swelled and enlarged almost immediately, turning a bright red, as if an insect had bitten him. The lower lip was next, and again he winced. He worked his lips, as would someone standing too long in the cold, and attempted to speak. “Good evening,” he said to the mirror, working his puffy lips painfully until they formed the words more clearly. “Good evening, Mr. Payne.”

  Another injection, just below the mandible joints, produced swollen jowls and distorted his face magnificently. But it was the two shots, one below each eye, that altered him to the point of establishing a new identity. He was, at once, a squinty, puffy-faced bulldog with gray hair showing around the edge of the Yankees baseball cap-synthetic wig hair sewn to the edges of the cap, not his at all.

  The image in the mirror was no longer that of the man who stood before it, but instead one Wallace Sparco-the name on the bills, the apartment lease, and even on the credit cards that had bought the clothes hanging in the upstairs closet. An invented identity. The man did not feel himself as Sparco-he wouldn’t allow himself to go that far, to allow that dangerous switch to be thrown in his head. He knew damn well who he was and what was going on here-he was going to kill a man. A worthless piece of shit. He was going to fix things. He was more than willing to make the sacrifice necessary. Prepared. But he would not allow himself to enjoy it-despite the occasional rush-try as part of him did to do just that-and he would not allow any part of himself to fool any other part: It was wrong to kill, regardless of the justification; he knew this in his heart, his soul, in the quiet depths of his being. He was doing a job, that’s all. Charity work.

  He kept humming as he drew the cosmetic pencil through his thin eyebrows, darkening them. He envied Pavarotti that enormous talent, that gift. He thought of Mozart as a freak-some step beyond genius. Einstein belonged there with him. Michelangelo. Cuban cigars. Mexican beer. The stuff of life.

  And in this mirror, another man, a man of his invention-there were many ways to play God.

  You do what you have to, he reminded himself.

  The face that had started in this mirror before the charade of the injected histamines was one this man hardly recognized as his own: gaunt and drawn, pale, with jaundiced eyes. He thought of himself as handsome, but the face he saw there was not.

  He drove an old beat-up Mazda two-door, registered to Mr. Wallace Sparco, dressed in Mr. Sparco’s clothing, and wore Mr. Sparco’s old brown shoes, Timex watch, leather belt, and carried his nylon wallet. He slouched as the fictitious Mr. Sparco slouched and yet he hummed as only the driver hummed.

  He drove up the hill toward Trinity College, the view to his right a spectacular display of the sparkling lights of the valley, and slowed before turning left as the street became chaotic with costumed college-aged trick-or-treaters out for an evening of self-abuse. The costumes were products of educated imaginations, and the willowy, womanly legs, clad in black tights, were those of eighteen-year-old WASPs, wobbly from beer and steadied, no doubt, by concern and giddy anticipation. Mr. Wallace Sparco drove slowly through the teeming students, reminded of Mardi Gras. He beeped his horn lightly and turned left, not understanding exactly why he bothered to drive up the hill but deciding each life, even that of Wallace Sparco, was entitled to the occasional distraction. Back on course, he made his way to Farmington Avenue and headed for the affluence of West Hartford only a short ten-minute drive away, where the dismal poverty of the south end ghetto gave way to the manicured comfort of the Caucasian enclave, where black gave way to white, and project housing to suburbia. The AMEX cards were quiet tonight, the downtown deserted. Parents were home supervising another Halloween. A few minutes past the retail core, Wallace Sparco turned right and, a few minutes after that, on into the nestled canopy of darkness and the colonial-style homes that hid here from the fear of the inner city only a few short miles to the east.

  Wallace Sparco turned left onto Westmont and up the winding hill, then right onto Wendy Lane, driving to the very end of the cul-de-sac, where he pulled into and drove down the long driveway of the Tudor house marked with the Twentieth Century Real Estate sign, switched off his headlights, and parked. He waited five minutes in absolute silence. The area in front of the garage could be seen from only one
aspect of one other house, a neighbor a hundred yards away through thick woods. The Tudor was shown occasionally, and when it was, it was often at night to accommodate a working couple. But it wouldn’t be shown tonight because Wallace Sparco, introducing himself as Alfred Gluck, had booked a showing with the agent who carried the listing-the rendezvous planned at the agent’s office, six miles away and scheduled for an hour earlier. By this hour, a no-show. Now, all his.

  The back wall of 37 Orchard Street, covered in the gray, strangling veins of dormant ivy vines, could be seen through the two acres of barren autumn woods. Payne’s young and attractive wife was said to be at her regular Wednesday dinner with friends, where she would remain until dropped off at 10:00 P.M. She was, in fact, fucking wildly with the man who headed the local community theater group, a man ten years her junior who paid an uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman but possessing little talent. At least acting talent, he thought. She had never once, in the three weeks that he had kept her under surveillance, made it home before ten, leaving her husband, Harold, on this night, to become a victim. A statistic. A suicide.

  Reviewing his carefully orchestrated plan, Wallace Sparco checked his Timex watch and saw that he had a full fifty minutes to accomplish what had to be done.

  Plenty of time in which to play God.

  CHAPTER 11

  Colt Park occupied nearly twenty city blocks of open grounds, with copses of trees-maples, oaks, pines-a jungle gym and a parking lot. Like any of Hartford’s city parks, after sunset it was not a particularly safe place. Dart kept his eyes open for movement and his ears alert. He felt on edge.

  The occasional ghost or goblin appeared on the sidewalk, far in the distance, for this was the night of tricks or treats, a night any cop dreaded, a night as unpredictable as New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of July. By midnight, the gangs would be out in full force. By one o’clock in the morning a teenager would be dead of a bullet wound; on Halloween, that was virtually guaranteed.

  Dart waited for her in the early evening dusk that arrives in October like an unwanted cousin, waited beneath a yellow cone of an overhead street lamp, waited nervously for a woman he had loved too recently to forget but had loved too strongly to allow himself to fully remember, waited as a few early-fallen oak leaves tumbled across the grass sounding like spilled seashells, waited and felt hurt. The heat of Indian summer had surrendered to the insistent cool of autumn, the sky seemed a gloomier color, and the air had lost its fragrance. For the last two weeks, Dart had gone about his regular job of domestic assaults and gang-related homicides. But it was the string of suicides that occupied his mind. He had reviewed reports, studied photographs, and kept a keen eye on Roman Kowalski. He had not spoken to Abby Lang. Their night in the crib had not gone past kissing, and yet they passed each other in the halls with only a furtive glance, as if by sharing too much too soon, by breaking all kinds of rules together, personal and professional, they had erected a wall between them.

  Ginny wore a dark overcoat that covered her to her ankles. A scarf curled loosely around her neck. She had parked out on the street and crossed the corner of the park at a brisk pace, properly concerned about her choice of location for the rendezvous.

  Dart moved out from under the parking lot lamp, cloaked by the gray dusk, to where the two of them, observed from a distance, would appear as two indistinguishable forms in a quickly thickening mist.

  “Hi,” she said softly, unbuttoning her coat and removing an envelope that she then handed him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Priscilla Cole, as you asked. Her med insurance records.”

  He had lived with Ginny long enough to interpret her expressions. The eight months that they had been apart seemed only a matter of days at times like this. “What about them?”

  “One of the very seamy sides of the insurance world is the attempt on the part of the insurers to-as they put it: protect themselves from unforeseen losses. Unexpected losses. If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco they may deny or limit earthquake coverage. If you’re a known drunk they may refuse to insure your auto. The same practice carries over into medical coverage. Smokers may be restricted to certain qualified coverage, excluding or limiting what will be paid out for emphysema or asthma, lung cancer or other pulmonary disorders.”

  “I follow you.”

  “There is software in place in every major underwriter to flag possible ‘high-risk’ cases. It’s insidious, but there you are.”

  “And you’re involved.”

  “I police the software, right? I keep the code healthy and running. All kinds of software, including this screening variety. It locates and flags questionable accounts that are then reviewed in-house. If necessary, the coverage is reduced or even canceled. I’m part of it, Dart, just so you understand. Not proud of it, but part of it.”

  Dart felt restless and nervous, both a product of their surroundings and Ginny’s blatant anxiety. He wanted to hurry her along, but knew better. She went at her own speed-in everything.

  “David Stapleton’s claims were not flagged, but his girlfriend’s were-this Priscilla Cole.”

  “Flagged for what?” He’d hoped that Teddy Bragg’s 3-D software was indeed glitched, but Bragg had gotten back to him complaining that the company claimed the software was error-free. For his own sake, he hoped that she might report that Priscilla Cole had been diagnosed with HIV, and that Stapleton had taken his own life to avoid its horrors.

  “Battered-wife syndrome,” she replied, her eyes fixed onto him.

  This was not what Dart had expected. He had trouble forming his thoughts, much less thinking of something pertinent to say. His thoughts were stuck on the Ice Man and Gerald Lawrence-on sex offense. He’d been relieved that Stapleton had not had any such charges filed against him-only a Narco record, and that did not connect well with either of the other suicides. And now this, he thought.

  She explained, “Priscilla Cole was repeatedly admitted to emergency rooms with unexplained contusions and fractures, vaginal tearing, bite marks-you name it. The software is written to identify such injuries and flag the account. Victims of domestic violence are denied coverage by all major insurers but one. There are laws being proposed to change that, but at the moment that’s how it stands. She had two policies canceled, and was on the verge of losing all coverage because we’re in the process, right now, of linking all major health databases. Once that is complete, everyone will know everyone else’s secrets. There will be no switching companies in an effort to outrun your past.”

  “Or present,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Stapleton beat her,” he stated. He could hardly get the words out. Sex offense, he thought.

  “We don’t know it was Stapleton, no. There’s no mention of him.”

  “But the addresses! What about the addresses?”

  She nodded. “The second policy to be canceled had the Battles Street address that you gave me.”

  “Shit.” Of the three suicides, Stapleton, Lawrence, and the Ice Man, all were-in one way or another-guilty of violence against women. And if someone were targeting these violent men to become victims themselves, there were now two clear ways that Dart saw to spot them: men convicted of sex crimes and men involved with battered women. It was a connection that ran tension into his neck and made his fingers cold. Zeller? he wondered again. He asked Ginny, “Can you get me a list of other women?”

  “Abused women?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can try.”

  “I don’t want you getting yourself in trouble.”

  “It’s not legal, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I could subpoena it.”

  “If you have a few years, you could, yes. My guess is that they’d deny the existence of any such list-it amounts to a form of discrimination, after all. Their claim is that the woman has the choice of leaving the man who is doing this to her-that to stay is a voluntary act. It’s the old ‘she wants it’ argument. T
hey ignore the psychological factors, the existence of children and families-it’s barbaric, is what it is.”

  “If you could get it for me, then at least I’d have it while I go through the subpoena process. But I don’t want you taking any chances, Gin. It’s important to me that you understand that.” He knew this was the type of challenge she lived for-to raid a computer system and lift information, but she’d been arrested and convicted once already-a second offense would be far more serious.

  “I want to help, Dart. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know exactly. Maybe I feel guilty about the breakup. Maybe I’d like to see us back together. I don’t really want to think about all that. I just want to help.”

  “It feels awkward to me, your helping.”

  “You asked me to look into it for you.”

  Did he want to be in debt to her? It felt as if that were where they were heading, and it didn’t feel good.

  She said, “You’re worried about me. How sweet.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or straight with him, and he wondered when it was that he had lost track of such nuances. People get so close that they grow apart, he thought, wondering if every relationship was doomed before it began and feeling an ache deep within him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Joe Dart headed home to spend the rest of his Halloween alone. He channel-surfed, finding nothing but stupid sitcoms with everyone in costume, and black-and-white monster movies with sinister sound tracks.

  Two beers later, he conjured up the nerve to call Abby Lang. She answered on the third ring, and he asked if she was busy, and she said not terribly and asked what he had in mind. “Have you ever been a costume judge?” he asked her.

  Together, they drove in and around Trinity College searching out the best costume. Dart was the designated driver. Abby sampled from a thermos of scorpions, her mood becoming lighter with each passing mile. An hour into it, she slid over next to him so that they were like two teenagers cruising Main. When either of them spotted an award-winning costume, Abby would hop out of the car and snap a Polaroid, using Dart’s crime scene camera. She then stood the photos on the dash, lined up like mug shots, until she accidentally bumped the defrost switch and sent them flying.