Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  “Meaning?” Gambelli questioned.

  “Ms. Payne,” Dart said, doing his best to ignore the attorney, “was your husband ever physically abusive toward you?”

  “Did he rough me up some? Sure he did,” she admitted. “He’s gone now. What’s it matter if I tell you. He was not an angel. So what? Show me a man who is.”

  “And you put up with this behavior of his,” Dart said. “You tolerated it. You endured it.”

  She shrugged. “We’ve got a nice place to live. I drive a Mercedes. Have you ever driven a Mercedes?” she asked, her eyes searching Dart, as if to say that this mattered a great deal. Dart shook his head no. She said, “It’s a nice car. A real nice car, a Mercedes. So what do you know?”

  “Isn’t it true,” Dart asked her, “that on at least six different occasions you admitted yourself to the emergency room for injuries sustained from conflicts with your late husband, that on two occasions you telephoned Nine-one-one and asked for help from the police?”

  She said defensively, “It was all a mistake.”

  “He’s dead,” Dart reminded. “You don’t need to fear him. You don’t need to lie to me.”

  She looked away. Her attorney advised her that she need not answer any question that she chose not to. Her eyes pooled with tears, she waved him off.

  Dart waited until she appeared more at ease. He needed to judge her reaction carefully to this, his most important question. He studied her and asked, “Were you ever approached by a man offering to help you with your husband?”

  Her expression disappointed him, for she didn’t appear to understand the implication that Dart was attempting, whereas her attorney certainly did.

  “I don’t want you to answer that,” the attorney snapped to his client.

  But Danielle Payne had already formed an answer in her head, and she spoke it. “They approached him, not me. It was his problem, not mine. Nothing I could do about it.”

  For the first time in this meeting, Dart and Gambelli met eyes, neither able to contain their astonishment at her answer. Dart’s eyes said sternly, Let me pursue this. Gambelli’s were a cauldron of concern.

  The attorney admonished. “Danielle, please!”

  But she had to protest, “He didn’t tell me any more than that-only that they could help him and he was going to try it.” To Dart she said, “Harry loved me loads. He didn’t want to be mean. Really. He didn’t want to hurt me.”

  “They?” Dart asked, knowing full well that the attorney would interrupt, which he did. But Danielle Payne seemed to be venting.

  “What’s he care what I say? He’s dead and gone. What’s it matter to him?”

  Seizing quickly on this, Dart asked, “Who offered to help your husband, Ms. Payne? What do you mean by that?” Dart had imagined just the opposite-that Walter Zeller had made himself available for hire to women who wanted their abusive spouses eliminated, that he had created a profession out of reversing his years of investigating homicides. An abused wife or lover, or the mother of an abused child, would have plenty of motivation to see the sex offender killed. A carefully manufactured suicide would be quickly cleared. Zeller could carry out his own passion and earn a living while convincing himself he was doing the world a favor. This fit Zeller’s controlling personality and his disenchantment with the legal system that he had abandoned. But Danielle Payne was throwing him off completely: The mention of a third party, and this third party approaching Payne himself, did not fit with any of Dart’s preconceived notions.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, and he trusted the confusion in her eyes. “Harry said he couldn’t tell me, but that things were going to get better, that he was going to be better, and that I just had to trust him and the doctors.”

  Gambelli released a chest full of air and said, “Enough!” attempting to silence his client. To Dart, he said, “I’d like to speak with her alone, Detective. If you intend to pursue this any further, I must speak with her first.”

  “Doctors?” Dart said to the woman.

  “Do not answer that, Danielle,” Gambelli warned, and this time his client obeyed. She nodded, and hung her head. She wore sky blue eye shadow on eyelids edged with pencil, her lashes gobbed with mascara.

  The woman murmured, “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t know any more than that.”

  Gambelli shook his head in disgust and slapped his legs with open palms.

  “Doctors,” Dart repeated, in the voice of a man thinking aloud.

  “I never met ’em,” she said. “But Harry was better toward me, nicer and all, and so I wasn’t complaining.”

  A thought occurred to Dart. “Did your husband ask that you leave the house that evening?”

  “No way,” she answered sharply.

  “It was Halloween,” Dart countered. “Didn’t he want you home to help give out the candy?”

  She hung her head again. “It isn’t a friendly neighborhood,” she said.

  At least not toward convicted pornographers, Dart thought, realizing that the Paynes would have been shunned following his arrest.

  “He didn’t have a meeting planned?”

  Gambelli allowed this question to pass.

  “No. Not so as he told me about.”

  Reading from his notes, he questioned her about the housecleaner, and she confirmed that the house had been cleaned that same morning. She also confirmed that there was no Dustbuster or similar small vacuum in the house. “And who had access to your garage? It operates via a remote, is that right?”

  “A clicker, yeah. Sure. Harry and me, we both had clickers in our cars.”

  “And you used yours upon your return?” Dart asked.

  She nodded.

  He said, “And the garage door was down at the time?”

  “Sure it was. What’s this with the garage door and all?”

  Dart believed that Bragg’s evidence-the pine needles, rock salt, and potting soil found in the garage and inside the study-pointed toward Payne’s killer having entered through the garage. Once inside the garage, the kitchen door was unlocked and would have allowed egress, undetected. Access to the garage was only through the automatic door openers, one of which Danielle Payne controlled. It was this combination of facts that had led him to consider that she had arranged for her husband’s staged suicide-providing her garage door opener to a killer she had hired.

  “And none of your husband’s business associates would have a garage door opener for your house.”

  “Of course not!”

  “Your housecleaner?”

  “No.”

  “And your security system that night. It would have been on or off?”

  “Harry liked to keep it on when we were home. He didn’t want no surprise visits.” She blushed and averted her eyes. It was the police he had hoped to avoid. “But Halloween it would have been off for sure. At least I think it would have been.”

  Dart dropped the biggest bombshell he had in his arsenal, hoping for a direct hit. It stemmed from a phone call he had placed earlier that day. “You weren’t with your friends, the Fallowfields, that evening, Ms. Payne, as you claim to have been in your sworn statement.” Dart glanced at Gambelli, knowing that the attorney, if not his client, would understand her vulnerability. “We checked with the Fallowfields. You saw them only for a drink that evening.”

  The woman glanced at her attorney.

  “I don’t want to file perjury charges,” he said, leaning heavily on the word and presenting it as a serious possibility. “And I wouldn’t want to drag you through the routine of being booked and charged with that or with more serious crimes. But I do need some answers, and so I turn it over to you-the two of you-as to where we go from here.”

  Her frightened eyes appealed to Gambelli. The attorney sought out and located the woman’s signed statement and read it over. He then said, “I would advise you to answer the detective’s questions, Danielle. Given the circumstances, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest.” He looked over at
Dart with a mixture of anger and respect and seemed to be fully involved for the first time.

  “Where were you that night, Ms. Payne?”

  For all her forty-odd years, she looked more like a child as she appealed again with her eyes. Gambelli simply glared back at her. She told the detective. “With a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “In bed, okay? I was in bed with a friend.”

  “You were having an affair,” he stated.

  “No shit,” she answered angrily. “We were fucking our brains out, okay? You want the details?”

  “I want his name. I want the exact times.”

  She asked her attorney, “Do I have to?”

  Gambelli nodded.

  She provided Dart the details of her assignation, and said, “You satisfied?” It would require a phone call to verify, but he suspected she was telling the truth.

  “The doctors,” Dart said. “I need everything and anything that you can tell me.”

  “I don’t know shit, I’m telling you! Only that Harry said that some doctors were going to help him get better-about hitting me, you know, about roughing me up-and that I wasn’t to tell no one.”

  “Did he meet with these doctors?” Dart asked.

  “I don’t know. He must have. Right?”

  “Did he take medication?”

  “Injections,” she said, touching her own arm. “I know that because I saw the Band-Aid on his arm one night, and he said how that was part of making him better.”

  “Injections,” Dart repeated, taking this down in his notepad. “Those were his words, ‘making him better,’” Dart checked.

  “Right.”

  “And you took that to mean?”

  “Better … you know … less hitting … less rough stuff. Not that I mind it a little rough, you know-the for-fun kind of rough, but Harry had a temper on him that wouldn’t quit sometimes. And it wasn’t me, you know-he used to tell me that. It wasn’t me. It was just me being a woman. It was like something chemical in him. Like a bad seed. Like that movie where the guy changes into the crazy doctor who kills people, you know? Like that.”

  “You never met these doctors.”

  “No.”

  “Never spoke to them on the phone.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And he received these injections …?”

  “Every two weeks, just about. Seems to me. He’d had maybe four or five.”

  “Your husband changed his medical insurance,” Dart stated. “Do you remember that?”

  “Don’t know anything about it. Swear.”

  “The dates of which appear to coincide with this treatment.”

  “He didn’t tell me jack shit about anything to do with money. That was his department. My department …” She hesitated and then said, “My department was the bedroom.” She locked eyes with Dart, hers a fire of fierce intensity and resentment. He had demeaned her, debased her with this questioning.

  “If these doctors should contact you-”

  “They won’t.”

  “But if they should.”

  “I should call you,” she stated. “Forget it. No way. Harry’s dead. Let him be. They were trying to help him. So maybe they’ll help someone else.”

  An alarm sounded in Dart’s head. Zeller had made a riddle out of it-people taking their own lives but not committing suicide. A drug gone bad, he thought. Guinea pigs. Test subjects.

  As Zeller had warned: The blood of the victims could be the key.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Joe, I’ve got another one,” Abby announced in a forced whisper, dragging a chair over to his desk. She smelled like lilacs in bloom; her cheeks were flushed and her blond hair needed combing.

  Dart’s attention was elsewhere. He had just hung up from speaking first with Teddy Bragg and then with pathologist Dr. Victor Ray, requesting the results of Harold Payne’s blood toxicology. The discussions had strayed into unfamiliar territory as Dart explored what could and could not be detected by such tests, finally persuading Dr. Ray to request a complete workup, since, typically, blood toxicology tested only for the more common narcotics and alcohol levels and tightwad Teddy Bragg had not wanted to release the funds necessary for such testing without “some damn good reasons,” which Dart found impossible to provide.

  Abby placed a computer printout on the desk in front of Dart, a single line highlighted in a bright yellow. Reading the name on the file, his body reacted as if he had taken a niacin tablet-every pore on fire. His blood pressure rose so quickly that he could hardly hear her whisper. “This is from our files,” she said, meaning Sex Crimes. “And this,” she emphasized, “is from CAPers.” Another highlighted line that shared the same name.

  He forced himself to inhale, a drowning man attempting to recover.

  “A suicide, Joe-and a suspected sex offender. As far as I can tell, the two have never been connected,” she said excitedly, “which I can explain. We do not reveal the identities of suspected offenders because of the libel suit lost in New Haven. Only arrests and convictions. This guy was never arrested-we didn’t have enough evidence.” She paused and said, “Do you recognize the name, Joe? Remember that case? Think what the papers would have done if we’d showed them this,” she said, tapping the Sex Crimes folder. “Can you believe it?” She waited, knowing he would recognize the name. And although he did, he said nothing. He wasn’t sure what to say, in part because he felt in a state of physical shock. She misunderstood his hesitation. “It’s the Ice Man, Joe! Come on! The Ice Man! And he flew out of a window just like Stapleton did. What’s that, coincidence? Stapleton was not the first.” A critical part of the job working a string of crimes was to identify the first in the series. Abby, believing as Dart did that they were on to a string, was ebullient with her discovery. “Get it?”

  “I was second on the Ice Man,” he informed her. A lump filled his throat, painfully choking him. He understood at that moment that there was no running away, only avoidance. Things believed dead and buried inevitably returned, either symbolically or literally, stepping out of the grave. He saw no way to tell her, no way to ask her to return the files and forget about it. The Ice Man had crawled back out of his grave. A part of Dart actually felt relief; the remainder of him was in a state of total panic.

  “Kowalski was the lead,” he explained. “I was the second.”

  “Talk about coincidence,” she said, lowering her voice. “Teddy is going to pull the evidence for us.”

  “What?” Dart asked, astonished.

  “Yeah, isn’t that great?” she said, mistaking his reaction for enthusiasm. “He agreed to review it with Rankin and Haite after lunch-to see if we can make any physical comparisons to Stapleton and the others.”

  The 3-D animated software had already made just such a connection-no wonder that Bragg felt prompted to delve into possible connections.

  Dart felt short of breath. He could feel his skin go alternately hot and cold. His head swam. Damage control, he warned himself.

  “What’s wrong, Joe?” she asked cautiously. “I thought you’d be thrilled. It’s an obvious connection.”

  Dart felt paralyzed by the numbness sweeping through him-he was in the midst of an anxiety attack. He heard her footsteps coming down the stairs and the whoosh of her dress. He looked up, only to see Abby.

  He weighed the options available to him.

  She placed her hand tenderly on his arm, and that did it. He snapped his head toward her, startling her, and said, “How would you like to take a walk?”

  Concern stealing the excitement from her face, she pushed her chair back and stood.

  A bitter cold had descended on the city in anticipation of winter, still more than a month away. They walked from headquarters toward a path that led down to the river. They passed a few smokers and then found themselves alone in the woods.

  He wasn’t sure how or where to start.

  “I was the second on the Ice Man,” he repeated. “Kowalski was the
primary, but he was worthless and everyone knew it. They wouldn’t assign Zeller because he had lost Lucky only a few months before and there wasn’t much left of him. But I consulted him nonetheless, because then, as now, there’s none better.”

  “Yes, I remember a lot of it,” she said sadly. “I was directly involved because it was the Asian Strangler, because of the Sex Crimes connection, although I was still with CAPers then.”

  “So,” he explained, “even though I was technically the second, it actually ended up my case in many ways.”

  “Nothing new for a Kowalski investigation.”

  They stopped; she leaned against a tree stump and Dart sat onto a rock embedded in the earth. But he didn’t feel connected to the earth; he felt almost as if he were floating. He continued. “The guy was found naked and frozen-as you’ll recall-his head bashed in from the jump, no identification. The pressure to clear it got pretty intense. Media slump. City Hall going ballistic. They came down on Kowalski like a ton of bricks. I was left pretty much unscathed. I continued to consult Zeller. He was drinking pretty heavily at the time and was starting to lose it. I loved him like a father,” Dart confessed, his throat tight. “It was hard for me to see him like that.”

  “I’m sure.” She studied him. “Hard on anybody, Joe.”

  “Kowalski ended up in the hot seat, but because of his connections he was pretty well protected. Spent most of his time defending an investigation that had basically gone nowhere.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Joe,” she said, still misunderstanding him, “I’m sure you did as good a job as could be done, given the circumstances.”

  “Me? No. It was Zeller who broke the case.”

  “Meaning?” She had that Abby look of concern that he had come to know-knitted brow, pursed lips, lowered chin. If she had read those files, then she knew that the case had never been “broken,” but simply cleared as a jumper.

  “It was Zeller who ID’d him. He had jumped from a window on the night of that terrible blizzard. Hit hard, and either landed or rolled into the street. Covered by the falling snow, he was struck by a city plow and pushed three blocks down the street, where he was deposited under a snowbank for three weeks. When it finally thawed, we had the Ice Man on our hands.” He stood and she followed, and they walked deeper into the woods. Gray and brown tree trunks; leaves mushy underfoot. He wasn’t sure how much to tell her, but he began to realize that it was all going to come out, that secrets were a thing of the past. If nothing else, he thought, this is a dress rehearsal for my discharge. “Zeller found the apartment first.” It should have sent up a red flag, he thought. “He didn’t want it to appear that he was working Kowalski’s turf, so he funneled the information through me-pointing me without actually telling me anything.” He’s doing the same thing again, he realized.