Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  “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.

  Excitement stole into Dart: A grocery store was unlikely to have an address for a customer; but a commercial laundry just might.

  As they climbed back into the Taurus, their body language expressing their urgency, Dart told her, “I would have found the laundry tag.” He started the car. “But I might have missed that grocery bag,” he confessed.

  “You see?” she crowed. “You need me.”

  The map on Abby’s office wall consisted of enlarged photocopies of a one-square-mile area surrounding the Park Street Shopway supermarket. Dart had made a pot of coffee, having worked through his shift, but stayed at Jennings Road. Abby had gone home for a few hours sleep, having returned a few minutes earlier, just before nine. Using the yellow pages, Dart had spent the wee hours narrowing down the location of the city’s nineteen commercial laundries. Six pushpins were now stuck into the improvised map.

  At 9:02 Dart, yellow pages at his side, hung up the phone, stepped over to the map, and withdrew one of the pushpins. “White tags pinned to the collar using safety pins,” he said.

  At 9:30, Abby complained, “White tags, green tags, pink tags-but no blue tags.”

  “We’ll find it,” Dart said.

  “Not near the Shopway,” she said, removing the last of the pins.

  Dart stared at the map, thoughts buzzing in his head. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, feeling depressed. This was his sleep time, and a Saturday morning to boot. His body was experiencing jet lag. His head hurt. His back was sore from having fallen asleep in a chair. He envied her the few hours sleep.

  Abby excused herself and left the room. Dart, who had been trying since Thursday to return a call left by Ginny, dialed her number. Her machine picked up. He cradled the phone, jealousy consuming him. Ginny was always home on a Saturday morning. This meant that she hadn’t slept there the night before. He’d wondered why he hadn’t heard from her. Typically they played phone tag until one reached the other.

  Abby returned and said brightly, “So I guess we try every friggin’ laundry in the city until we find one that uses blue tags.” She plopped down into a chair by a phone
and said, “Do you want to start with the A’s or the N’s?”

  An hour later Abby hung up and reported, “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I finally found a company using blue tags,”-at which point Dart hung up in the middle of a call. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “They use blue tags, but their numbers aren’t close to this five-digit one that we have.”

  His moment of elation past, Dart sank down in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Did they say anything about blue tags?”

  “He gave me the name of the company that wholesales the tags,” she replied, and Dart realized that this was where he should have started all along. “Nutmeg Supplies out of Bridgeport. But it’s Saturday, and they won’t reopen until Monday. So if we can wait-”

  “We can’t,” he reminded.

  “No. I didn’t think so.”

  “But we may not have to,” Dart said, recalling that Bud Gorman often worked weekends.

  Gorman was an avid NASCAR fan, and liked to travel to NASCAR races all over the country. He managed this without chewing up too much vacation time by working six-day weeks and then trading in this extra time for a Friday or Saturday of his choice, buying himself three-day weekends whenever a race required an extra travel day. Dart reached him and was put on hold.

  Gorman returned to the phone angrily. “You never return my calls.”

  “I’ve hardly been home.”

  “I have the Roxin information for you-who they are; what they’re about.”

  “I have more urgent, local needs.”

  “Dr. Arielle Martinson,” Gorman said, ignoring him. “Three venture capital firms and an industrialist from Sweden own seventy-three percent. Martinson’s been at the helm since the inception. She came out of the University of Michigan, where she chaired the genetics research program, which saw a hell of a lot of federal funding and where this industrialist, Cederberg, first met her. A real slow start to earnings, as with most biotechs-six years until it made a nickel. Has done very well with an arthritis treatment-”

  “Artharest,” Dart interjected, forcibly interrupting the man. “Another time, Bud. Thanks. I’ve got an-”

  “What you might be interested to know,” the man continued, undaunted, “is that Martinson-who pulls in eight hundred a year, plus stock options, incidentally-has nearly an entire year of her life missing. I mean, I’ve got basically nothing on her. I show some medical expenses, some attorney expenses, and that’s about it. ‘That’s all, folks.’ My guess is, she went off to what amounts to the funny farm in Switzerland. But it wasn’t no vacation-I don’t show that kind of spending pattern at all.”

  Dart recalled the thick scar behind her ear and her nervous habit-her compulsion-of attempting to keep it hidden.

  “My guess is, if I could get into her insurance records …,” Gorman said wishfully. Dart made a note to call Ginny and see what she could do. He felt himself sweating. Gorman had agitated him.

  Dart charged in before Gorman could start again. “I need the name-and the phone number for that matter, if you’ve got it-for the owner of something called Nutmeg Supplies in Bridgeport.”

  “Wait a second,” Gorman said, disgruntled. “Let me write this down.”

  Dart repeated his request, and gave his extension in the conference room.

  “Gimme a couple minutes.”

  When the phone rang and Dart answered it, Gorman read off the information without saying hello. He ended with “No charge” and hung up.

  Dart reached the owner of Nutmeg Supplies at home and heard football in the background on television. The television made him think of home, and that made him think of Mac, and even with the neighbor kid walking and feeding the dog during the days, he felt awful having to lock the dog up so much on night shift. The owner of Nutmeg Supplies, a man named Corwin, grew angry with Dart at first, believing the call was a phone solicitation. “I’m with the Hartford police,” Dart repeated for a third time.

  “I thought it was a gimmick,” the man said apologetically. “That you was selling home security or one of them steering wheel locks or something.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” Dart said.

  “I understand that.” He apologized again.

  Dart stressed the urgency of his case, building up Corwin’s importance and underscoring that the information was vital to an active homicide investigation. The man rallied to the call, an unusual but welcome response. “I’ll need to go down to the office. Blue tags, you said? Only blues?”

  “Blue; Five digits, starting with nine-eight.”

  “If we sold them,” Corwin said confidently, “I’ll know who to.” He paused. “You did say murder, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Corwin called back. “I got two retail and one commercial with blue tags. The ninety-eight thousand series went to Abe’s over on Seymour.”

  “Seymour?” Dart shouted into the phone without meaning to.

  “Yeah, Seymour Street. Abe’s Commercial Laundry.”

  Dart checked the open yellow pages for an address. “Abe’s is not listed in the Yellow Pages,” he complained.

  “They’re commercial, not retail. They do institutional work-nursing homes, that sort of thing. I doubt they would advertise.”

  “No retail?” Dart asked.

  “Some, probably. There’s a storefront of sorts, as I recall-mind you, I haven’t done a delivery in ten years. It’s not a big part of their business-retail. That’s a bad part of town.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Even ten years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Commercial work, mostly. They’re a good customer for us. Big volume.”

  Dart thanked the man and was already turning through the white pages, his finger running down columns. A manicured nail entered his vision-Abby had found the listing. Corwin clarified, “You said a murder investigation, right?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “And I helped?”

  “Very much.”

  “That’s okay … I like that…. Hey, Detective?” he said, holding an impatient Dart on the phone. “Nail the bastard.”

  Dart thanked him again and hung up. He told Abby, “He said to nail the bastard.”

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I thanked him.”

  She was over checking the map, pinned to the wall. “It’s Seymour Street, just south of Park Street.” “We can’t go in there alone, Joe,” she chided. “Not without a cruiser. Not without backup.”

  He didn’t want to get into this with her. Haite would resist giving him any help, would never grant him backup. What made this worse, much worse, for Dart was that just the sound of the words Seymour Street was familiar to him, but he couldn’t remember why, could not place the voice speaking those words, Corwin’s voice too fresh, too present, in his mind.

  But then that voice came to him. After seven years of hearing a voice daily it did not stay blurred for long. Walter Zeller had been raised in his parents’ house on Seymour Street, back when Park Street had been a good neighborhood, not a demilitarized zone. He had spoken of that house, that time, often, affectionately, nostalgically, referring to it simply as Seymour Street.

  Dart could not remember what had happened to the house. Zeller had inherited it upon his mother’s death four years ago. That much he remembered well, because Zeller had paid some inheritance tax rather than sell the place, despite its almost worthless value. He wasn’t sure what had become of the place after that.

  Perhaps, Dart thought, Wallace Sparco lives there now.

  CHAPTER 38

  This was it-Dart knew before he set foot out the door.

  He stole four hours sleep at home after walking Mac around the block and fixing himself a tuna sandwich. By five-thirty it was dark outside, and it occurred to him that the earlier the better because the worst gang violence came after ten at night, by the time the drugs and the alc
ohol and the restless anger had taken hold. He dressed in black jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt so that he could walk with hood up and buy himself some disguise.

  He made the trip alone, believing that he would find Zeller at the house on Seymour Street, that the man had chosen the perfect safe house-no one from outside, not even a cop, would enter the heart of Park Street at this time of night without good reason and plenty of backup. Maybe Zeller had cut himself a protection deal with one of the gangs-establishing himself on an inner-city warning system consisting of cellular phones and CB radios. The cops always arrived five minutes too late.

  As he drove past the courthouse and a string of gentrified houses used as law offices, he was struck by the irony of their closeness to Park Street only a few short blocks to the south. Law and lawlessness, coexisting side by side. Two blocks from these law offices fourteen-year-old girls hustled themselves on street corners and crack dealers sold their goods from the sidewalk. Dart drove with his sweatshirt’s hood pulled up, and he drove fast, running stop signs and disobeying traffic lights.

  On the seat beside him lay a loaded shotgun. Under the sweatshirt, he wore a flak jacket, in the pocket a speed key. His sidearm had a round loaded into the chamber. In his left pocket he carried two ammunition magazines taped together into a “speed clip.” The car doors were locked. The closer he drew to Park Street, the slower the traffic and the busier the activities. This was the south end’s Sin Street-the night was alive with possibility.

  Despite the November cold, the dark street corners were crowded with Puerto Ricans and a sprinkling of Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese, all under twenty-five. Le Soledos and the Latin Kings ruled this turf. The wrong color socks could cost a kid his life. To show a weapon was to start a fight. They had teethed on Stallone and Lee and Schwarzenegger and Snipes and considered themselves equal to the task. It felt to Dart as if anyone older than thirty had been exiled. The place was ruled by restless youth.

  Forty-thousand-dollar BMWs and Mercedes Benzes cruised Park Street at ten miles an hour, driven by teenage kids doing business over cellular phones-and proud of it. To honk at a car for driving too slowly was to invite a stream of bullets.