(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  Dart answered him with a nod, attempting to keep any emotion off his face.

  Bragg said, “It looks like some guy comes in and taps someone. You have a body, I’m assuming?” Dart didn’t answer. Annoyed, Bragg said, “The blood splatter is telling me small weapons fire at close range. Drags the body, from yea to yea,” he said, pointing to the carpet marks that ran from the television to the window, “and, judging by the blood smear out there, tosses the stiff over the rail toward that Dumpster. The Dumpster is next, Ivy. I gotta get a look down there.” He smiled proudly. “You found the body in the Dumpster, am I right?”

  Dart said, “You’ve never been to my place, have you, Teddy?” He rounded the corner into the kitchen and retrieved a beer from the refrigerator. He handed it to the forensics man.

  “Your place? No. Why do you ask?” Bragg drank generously from the can.

  “Did I tell you that Ginny took most of the furniture when she split?” Dart looked out into the empty living room. Bragg’s eyes followed his closely.

  “Is that right?” Bragg asked uneasily. He shifted in the chair restlessly.

  Dart drank a long gulp of beer. “Yup.”

  “Left you three chairs, did she?” Bragg asked, counting the chair he was sitting in and two others by the breakfast table across the room.

  “Three. That’s right.”

  Bragg’s eyes filled with concern. “What the hell’s going on?” Agitated, he glanced at Dart sharply. “This is your place, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, shit. Listen, we all lose our cool eventually, Ivy. It happens. If you called me because you want help getting rid of the evidence … I can’t do that for you. I can walk away from here. I can never mention this. But I can’t help you.”

  Dart smiled. “It’s that convincing, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The evidence.”

  Bragg looked around. “What are you saying?”

  “I had to make sure it was convincing.”

  Bragg said, “You called me because we’re friends. I understand that—”

  Interrupting, Dart said, “I called you because you’re the last line of defense. You’re the final arbiter. You’re the one who signs off on this stuff. You’re the guy, Teddy.” Dart reached down and sorted through Bragg’s evidence bags, all neatly marked and labeled. He found three of those he was after and dropped them into Bragg’s lap.

  Bragg studied them. His forehead was shiny with perspiration. “I won’t destroy evidence for you, Ivy.”

  Dart laughed. He met eyes with the man and said, “Those fibers are from the basement of 11 Hamilton Court. A fly-tying setup in the basement. Everything in little containers.”

  “Fishing?”

  “It has nothing to do with fishing.”

  Bragg lifted one of the bags then and inspected its contents closely, confused and nervous.

  “Animal hairs, metal shavings, synthetics, feathers—all there on that fly-tying table.” Dart explained, “The crime scenes—the suicides—were works of fiction. The hairs and fibers were props, Teddy. Planted by a very clever individual. They told a story that we were comfortable reading.” He pointed to the living room. “It took me a little over two hours to set this up—but then I’m new at this.”

  Bragg’s eyes went wide as he began to comprehend. “You staged this?”

  “I had to see if it could be done. I had to see if I could fool the best. You are the best, Teddy. It couldn’t be Richardson. I scripted this crime scene, and I used the necessary props to be convincing.”

  “You woke me up for a staged crime scene?” Bragg checked his watch.

  “We’re predictable, Teddy. You, me—all of us.” He added, “If you know us well enough.”

  Bragg put down the beer and got out of the chair and walked a few feet to the edge of the living room and looked it over. “Staged?” he asked incredulously.

  Dart gave the man time to think it over, to see the various ramifications of someone planting trace evidence at a crime scene. He finally announced, “They were all homicides, Teddy. Every last one of them.”

  Bragg considered this for a long time. “Yeah? Think so? I tell ya—to be this good,” he declared strongly, “you gotta be better than smart. You gotta be one of us.”

  “That’s right.”

  Bragg paled. “You know who it is?”

  Dart nodded. “Yeah,” he answered. “I know.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Wallace Sparco was feeling out of form. He should have been feeling good; another worthless piece of shit was about to stop using up air. But Dart was getting too close; he was making a real pain in the ass out of himself.

  Beneath Sparco’s forest green safari jacket, Zeller wore a hooded sweatshirt and a tan fishing vest, its pouches and pockets loaded with goodies. The bulk of it added the look of weight to him, which made him feel better. He thought of himself as a big man; it was difficult for him to feel this thin, this slight, this insignificant.

  Zeller’s hands sweated lightly inside the black golf gloves that gripped the steering wheel. Dennis Greenwood lived just north of Colt Park, on Norwich Street in the south end, dictating that Zeller conduct himself with extreme self-confidence and work quickly. Norwich Street was immediately west of Dutch Point, an area so dangerous that city cabs stayed out. A white man—no matter how big—walking the streets in this area offered himself as a potential victim. To enter this area at night was so risky that Zeller—looking and behaving like Wallace Sparco—felt forced to make his move during dusk. He turned left onto Wyllys and parked, checked his sidearm, pulled the hood over his head, grabbed the small duffel bag, and made for the two-story tenement less than half a block away. Dennis Greenwood rented the upper floor, accessible only from the back. Sparco threaded his way over soggy litter, dog shit, and foul-smelling trash and found his way to the rickety wooden stairs, which he climbed in a hurry.

  One thing nice about this neighborhood was that the cops would get nothing from any witness. No cooperation whatsoever. Zeller could have killed the man out in the street, and Dart and company would not get so much as a description.

  Surveillance here had been difficult. Zeller had patrolled the area only three times and decided it was too tough a neighborhood to park his car and effect a stakeout. He did know that Greenwood had no phone, no credit cards, no current girlfriend. The black man had held a variety of jobs over the last six months, including a position at the Murphy Road Post Office. He had either quit or been fired, always because of drugs and alcohol. Four months earlier, his driver’s license had been reinstated after a six-week stint with a city-provided twelve-step rehabilitation program. There was no car registered in his name, although as of a week ago, he drove an eight-hour shift for Yellow Cab. The shift ended at four in the afternoon.

  It was five-fifteen.

  Sparco reached the scarred wooden door and knocked sharply. The drawn shade parted slightly and Sparco saw an eyeball peering back out at him.

  “I’m working with the clinical trial,” Zeller said in his best Wallace Sparco voice—a little lower than his own. “We have a change in your medication. Open the door please, Mr. Greenwood.”

  He waited through the metallic sound of four locks being disengaged, and the abrasive rubbing of the door on the jamb as it came open. His hands felt damp and uncomfortable inside the leather gloves, but he accepted their necessity.

  “How are you doing?” Zeller asked, stepping inside, tapping the toe of his right shoe in an absentminded nervous gesture. It all had to go perfectly to pull off Greenwood the way Zeller wanted it.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  The black man was in his early thirties, his skin more cream than charcoal. He had a wide, flat nose and thick lips that parted slightly to reveal a chipped front tooth. Mildly handsome, his face knew no smile, and the hard, distrustful eyes knew no friends.

  The studio apartment was dingy, dark, and smelled of cigarette smoke and bitter cof
fee. A worse-for-wear color television glowed blue from the corner—a cop show rerun. The countertop of the pullman kitchen held empty bags from fast-food chains. The furniture consisted of a ratty twin bed, a single straight-back chair, and a milk crate used as a footrest in front of a red vinyl overstuffed chair that had seen better days. Sparco saw no reading material whatsoever. A pelt of dirty clothes hung from a hook by the bathroom. The apartment’s only two windows had been boarded over with irregular sheets of dirty plywood recovered from construction sites, pieced together poorly with screws, nails, and duct tape. It was worse than any prison cell Zeller had ever seen. For Dennis Greenwood, this was home.

  Sparco, his shoulders slouching, set down the duffel bag, which occupied Greenwood’s attention and drove a look of suspicion into the man’s hard eyes. His brow furrowed and his jaw muscles flexed tight as chestnuts.

  “I need to ask you some questions about how things are going,” Sparco said. “Maybe take some blood.”

  “I just had my tests,” he complained.

  Sparco stepped closer to his victim and said in a warm, friendly voice, “Hey, I’m just following orders, you got to understand.” He met eyes with the man and then delivered the blow as a sharpened spear—a single devastating thrust of his right fist into the exact center of the man’s chest.

  Greenwood’s body seized. His knees gave out. He tried to breathe, but the blow to the solar plexus had been perfectly delivered and the effect was immediate—his nervous system stunned numb and useless.

  Sparco spun him around in an instant, sagged along with him, supporting him as they sank down to a kneeling position and then slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, locking his arms behind his back. He then forced the man’s flapping chin up, sealing his mouth closed, both covering the man’s lips and pinching his nose. With his right hand Sparco awkwardly fished out a small plastic bag filled with cocaine—annoyed by the need for the glove—and bringing the bag to his teeth, tore a corner off it.

  Greenwood’s breathing would return before the use of his limbs—the body’s first reaction was for survival. Wallace Sparco waited, his left hand muzzling the man’s air supply. The chest began to heave, straining for air; Sparco reinforced his grip. Greenwood blinked repeatedly, reminding Zeller of a bird. He choked him down hard, pinching his nose and denying him air. Greenwood’s body recovered quickly, and he began to struggle, rocking his head, pushing back with his legs, desperate to breathe.

  Sparco, still cupping the man’s mouth, raised the bag of coke to the man’s nose and inverted it at the same time that he released his finger pinch. In one enormous breath, Greenwood sucked in the contents—a gram of cocaine. As the white powder spilled over his upper lip he looked as if he had dipped his face in baking flour. His eyes went wild and wide as the coke froze his lungs and rushed to his head. He tried to scream but, still muzzled, managed only a whimper.

  Sparco hooked his elbow around his victim’s windpipe in a practiced choke hold, took his own right wrist in his left, and applied a constant steady pressure like a vise, being careful not to bruise. Three years earlier the Hartford police had been taught this defensive move, and then, a few months later, refused to use it after three suspects had died of crushed windpipes.

  “This is for Melanie,” Zeller, not Sparco, whispered hotly into the man’s ear. Melanie, eleven years old, fondled, raped, and sodomized over a seven-month period by this bastard. At Greenwood’s trial he had testified that he had gotten her high on coke before “doing” her. Melanie, for whom Greenwood had wept while on the stand, a performance that bought him thirty days in jail and a two-year probation from a judge with a known drinking problem. The system.

  Dennis Greenwood passed into the semiconscious state that Zeller intended—an oxygen-deprived narcosis, neither awake nor fully unconscious.

  Sparco moved smoothly; his actions had been choreographed and the routine rehearsed. He dragged the body over to and into the red, overstuffed chair facing the television, went over to the sink and poured a glass of water, and returned to the body. He opened his safari jacket and, without looking, removed the unlabeled brown prescription bottle with the tamper-proof cap. He primed the pump first, tilting the man’s head back and pouring a tiny amount of water down his throat. Greenwood coughed violently, spraying the water. Sparco tried again, this time massaging the man’s throat, and the water went down. He then emptied all twenty-seven of the ten-milligram Valiums into Greenwood’s mouth, and chased them with a mouthful of water. Greenwood swallowed repeatedly, the visible pulse beneath the skin of his neck revealing the effects of the cocaine on his heart.

  Zeller cleaned up the man’s chin with Wallace Sparco’s light blue handkerchief, as attentive as a mother with her newborn, and then studied the room carefully.

  He found a small plate by the sink. He set it down by the unconscious victim and tapped the coke bag until a dusting fell there. Then, in what he considered a brilliant touch, holding it by the edge, he used Greenwood’s laminated driver’s license to move this dusting of cocaine around on the plate and then left the license in plain sight sitting there.

  From his fishing vest he removed the short length of a plastic drinking straw that he had prepared in advance—it already had traces of cocaine up inside it. He pushed the body around, accessing the man’s handcuffed hands, and pinched the straw with Greenwood’s fingers so that it retained his latent prints, and then placed the straw on the plate.

  He put the man’s prints onto the prescription vial as well and dropped it into the chair alongside the victim’s leg, its plastic lid left by the plate.

  Walter Zeller had attended dozens of similar crime scenes. Wallace Sparco studied it carefully to make sure it added up. He liked it—it looked good.

  The duffel bag housed the cordless Dust-buster. Sparco ran the device over the floor where the cocaine had fallen as a snowy dust, lifting every last grain. He then vacuumed the entire area between the apartment’s door and the kitchen sink—the area in which he had walked. Putting the vacuum away he turned once again to his fishing vest, this time carefully examining its contents. He selected three vials, popping one lid at a time, and carefully sprinkling a tiny amount of household dust, then a pinch of cotton and synthetic fibers, and finally a trace of cigarette ash—a recipe for Teddy Bragg’s aardvark to find.

  Greenwood twitched awkwardly and unexpectedly, and Zeller wondered if the blood vessels in his head had exploded and killed him before the Valium was given a chance. He hoped not. Wallace Sparco paid it no mind. His work was completed: If he wasn’t dead already, Greenwood would suffer an irreversible coma within the hour, death within three.

  Sparco removed the handcuffs and checked to make sure there was no bruising from them. He walked gingerly to the door. The locks were the variety that offered a spring-loaded tongue meeting a steel housing screwed into the jamb. A knob could be twisted and a toggle thrown to set the lock open or allow it to close. Sparco threw the toggle on all three, releasing their metal tongues. The fourth lock was a deadbolt mounted inside the door. There was little Sparco could do about that. He pulled the door shut firmly, setting in place three of the four locks. When, in twenty to forty hours, the body’s decomposition announced itself to neighbors, the police would have to kick the door, splintering and destroying the jamb, perhaps covering up that the dead bolt had not been used.

  It was dark out, and bitterly cold, and Wallace Sparco felt the heart of Walter Zeller beating strongly in his chest, as if it were he who had been drugged. He felt none of the remorse that he understood any sane man would feel but stopped short of judging himself insane. Conversely, he took no vain pride in his work—it was something that had to be done, that was all; someone had to dispose of the trash. With no Davids in this world, he thought, the Goliaths would rule unchecked.

  Zeller pulled the sweatshirt hood up over Sparco’s baseball cap and gray hair, looking once again like an executioner or a Franciscan priest. He forced himself to walk slowly down the st
airs, not wanting to attract attention or to appear a man in a hurry.

  Image was everything. An act: one man playing another; one man living, one man dying. A murder turned into suicide.

  And Walter Zeller—the Creator—nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER 34

  Ted Bragg was kneeling by the door to the second-story apartment at 21 Norwich Street. The suicide had been called in at four in the afternoon, and Dart alerted shortly thereafter.

  Bragg informed the detective, “A woman in the apartment downstairs smelled him. I’m guessing he’s two days old.”

  “Who’s primary?”

  “I am,” answered Greg Thompson from behind. “Just interviewed the neighbor. Didn’t see or hear a thing. Just smelled the Jordon is all. Shit like this guy, stinks bad,” he added.

  Looking around the room, Bragg said to Thompson, “What we’re going to see, what we’re going to find, is a suicide—a drug overdose. What we’re looking at,” he corrected, “is a homicide.”

  Thompson appeared bothered. “Says who?”

  “Says the evidence,” Bragg answered. “I think I can show you, but it’s going to require several hours, and everyone coming and going wears shoe covers, hair nets, and gloves.”

  “It’ll never happen,” Thompson said.

  “That’s the way it’s going to be,” Bragg insisted.

  Dart pulled out the piece of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. Greenwood’s name was a third of the way down Ginny’s list of men whose medical insurance had been paid for by Roxin. He had written the letters NP alongside Greenwood’s name—No Phone.