The look of surprise that swept over the man’s face convinced Dart that they had no idea who he was; his only hope now was to separate Proctor from his own employees.
“Bullshit,” the guard snapped, checking furtively over his shoulder. “Drop the fucking piece!”
Rent-a-cops were notorious for shooting widows, and dogs, and children. They had no excuse to carry loaded weapons with so little training. Dart didn’t like that barrel being aimed at him.
One minute, he estimated. He needed to stall for several more. He felt only a swelling pain in his right hand.
“You shoot a cop and you’re dead. The building is surrounded.”
“What a fucking windbag,” the blond man said. He looked about twenty-one. He, too, held a weapon on Dart. “I say we tap him right here.”
“No,” came a recognizable voice from behind. “You’re in a bad situation here, Officer Dartelli,” Proctor said, confirming to his subordinates that Dart was in fact a cop. It struck Dart as a curious move. “Don’t do anything stupid. Anything we’ll all regret.”
Proctor showed himself then, stepping past his uniformed guards, his hands in the air. “I’m unarmed and defenseless,” He took another tentative step forward. “Are you going to shoot me?” His eyes wandered over Dart’s shoulder, and he gave away that he had spotted the green button. He knew more about the computer system than Dart would have given him credit for.
“Back!” Dart challenged, waving the barrel of the weapon slightly.
Two minutes, he thought.
“Are you really going to shoot me?” Proctor asked, hands still out away from his body. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his suit pitted below the arms.
Dart felt a dizzying drain to his system as he paled and felt cold. His shoulder was losing blood badly.
“I’m not armed,” the man reminded. He smiled, as if to calm Dart. He kept walking, sliding one foot tentatively ahead of the other. He wasn’t interested in reaching Dart, he wanted the mainframe.
Dart’s dulled mind could barely think. The man took another step forward and Dart said overly loudly, “Yes, I copy,” into the room.
The words startled Proctor, who stopped in his tracks. His eyes swept over Dart, looking but not finding the microphone.
“Video and audio,” Dart lied, unsure if either was working any longer. He watched as the color drained from the man’s face. “Anything that you’d like to say to the command van?”
“If that were true,” Proctor said, taking another step forward, “they would have long since come to your help. Nice try.”
Dart couldn’t tell him why they couldn’t come, so instead he said, “I haven’t given them the signal.”
“I don’t think so,” Proctor said, taking yet another step.
“Don’t,” Dart warned.
“Put the gun down,” the unsteady guard cautioned. His arms were tiring from holding the weapon, Dart noted. His aim would be off because of this.
Three minutes … How much longer?
All the lights failed at once, leaving only the computer’s tiny lights ablaze.
Dart saw a white flash as the guard fired and missed. Through ringing ears he heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking and metal ripping as the ERT team set off explosive charges at five entrances.
They’ve ruined it! he thought, angry that Haite had authorized the raid, knowing as he did that this would jeopardize their evidence.
Not knowing where the strength or reserve came from, Dart lunged in the dark to block Proctor from reaching the computer, every muscle, every tendon screaming. He collided with the man and went down hard just as the first glow of the emergency lighting seeped into the room from the wall sconces. Proctor pushed away hard and struggled to his feet.
Dart raised the weapon and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.
The blond security man trained his weapon on Dart.
There was a loud pop that occurred just before Dart went blind with pain. His face seemed to explode at the same time as his ears failed him, and he wailed into the room along with the others. He screamed for Zeller, and lost friends; for his mother, and lost souls. Consumed by an overpowering white light, and deprived of his hearing, he folded into a ball and fell away from the world, as would a man thrown from a cliff. Weightless, and sublime.
CHAPTER 45
A dusty image of Haite loomed above Dart wearing a look of concern, and Dart wondered why his first experience of death should be an image of his former sergeant, a man with whom he had never been particularly close. He would have preferred an image of Abby. A conversation with Zeller. A bronzed and naked body, perhaps. Anything but Haite.
He felt as if he were at sea, rocking in a light chop. He found the sensation comforting and pleasant.
“Can you hear me yet?” the sergeant asked loudly.
He remained cloudy, a vaporous apparition.
“Go away,” Dart said, wanting a dream, not a nightmare. “Leave me alone.”
“Stun bombs and phosphorus grenades,” the sergeant explained in an apologetic voice. “ERT toys,” he said.
The rocking, Dart realized, was the stretcher being carried up the stairs by a couple of paramedics with buzz cuts. He still couldn’t see very well.
“Your hearing will come back,” Haite said loudly.
And then the pain hit, a headache like a ton of bricks.
“Your head may hurt,” he heard a voice suggest from behind him.
“No shit,” said Joe Dart. He blinked away some of the pain and tried to identify which orb was the sergeant. He picked the one leaning over him. “Why? Why after all that did you abort? Jesus….” His thoughts trailed off with his voice. Rage surged through him, but without any physical energy to support it, it dried up, defeated. He felt on the verge of tears. Exhaustion. Self-pity.
“No, no,” Haite said.
“For me? You did it to save me? You’ve wrecked me,” Dart said. He wanted Haite to hurt for this; he wanted someone to pay. He wanted to be left alone to cry.
“Ginny solved it,” Haite said.
“She couldn’t download the file as long as it was in the buffer,” a techie’s young voice explained from behind him. It took Dart a moment to identify it as the voice of the command van technician. “When you cut the text, it was captured in RAM. You had to do this to keep the other person attempting access from deleting the files. There it was, this chunk of text, floating in the computer’s memory—but in a buffer, not on disk, not somewhere that Ginny could grab it.”
Haite said, “He should rest.”
The techie added excitedly, “The mainframe was set up to save all buffers to disk in the event of a power failure. Ginny realized this—realized the only thing to do at that point was to cut the power.”
They cleared the stairs, and Dart felt the legs of the stretcher released, and suddenly found himself being wheeled. The bumps hurt every inch of him.
“Later,” one of the paramedics complained to Haite. “Let him rest.”
Ignoring him, the technician continued. “The machine itself is protected by a backup power supply, so once we cut the juice, it dumped its buffers to disk, and Ginny, waiting for it, grabbed the file. It took her a couple of seconds is all.”
Seconds? Dart thought.
“After that,” Haite said, “it was all ERT. We’d lost you on the radio. We weren’t happy campers.”
“We got the file?”
“We got everything,” Haite confirmed. “Ginny’s a fucking genius.”
CHAPTER 46
Arielle Martinson looked much smaller, much older in the CAPers interrogation room, even with her high-priced attorney sitting next to her. Dart was familiar with Bernie Wormser’s reputation, but had never faced him. Wormser had worked hard to arrange the interview elsewhere, but there they were, in a cramped, windowless room with a linoleum floor. Just the way Dart had wanted it.
Dart carried a tape recorder with him. His left arm was in a sling. He
plugged the machine into a wall outlet, turned it on, and recorded the names of those present, the location, the date and time. Martinson appeared restless, Wormser, dead calm.
“As you know,” Dart addressed Martinson, “we’ve charged you with interfering in a criminal investigation, in so much as Terrance Proctor, and therefore Proctor Securities, acted as your agent. In this regard, there is also the charge of first-degree murder, for the shooting death of Walter Zeller, and attempted murder for the actions taken against myself. There are federal charges concerning the rigging of certain clinical trial results—”
“You don’t know anything,” Martinson said venomously. Wormser touched her arm lightly. She glared at her attorney, and as he attempted to speak, cut him off. “No, Bernie. I’ll dig my own grave, thank you just the same.”
“I really don’t think—” Wormser attempted.
“Quiet,” she said, silencing him, and burning his face scarlet. To Dart she said, “Have you ever dealt with a victim of sexual assault, Detective? Physical abuse? Do you have any clue what you’re dealing with here? Do you understand the trauma—the permanent damage done to a woman, and to boys as well—by such violation? Do you? Someone else’s body inside yours … the sense of helplessness … the pain … disease … Someone striking you … drooling onto you, slobbering onto you—”
“Arielle!” Wormser chastised.
“Oh, shut up!” she roared back at him.
Dart’s voice cracked as he explained, “He was shot five times, the last of which penetrated his skull just below the left eye and killed him.”
Ignoring him, she said, “What if you possessed the knowledge, the ability, to reduce sexual assault—rape—by ten percent? Spousal and child abuse by twenty percent? Sixty percent? What if you knew you had that within your grasp? And what if the government, in all its banality, had structured a set of rules so confining, so slow, so difficult to maneuver through that you came to understand it might be decades before you could bring this technology to market? What then? Do you sit back and wait? In this country, a woman is beaten every twelve seconds.” She glanced at her Rolex. “Since we’ve been sitting here, over ten women have had a fist raised to them. Would you wait decades, if you were in my shoes?”
Dart was flooded with a dozen images of Zeller. “Walter Zeller discovered your treatment of the documentation for the clinical trials. He uncovered Proctor’s tampering with the facts. Subsequent to that discovery he was pursued, his life was threatened, day and night, for over twelve months—”
Interrupting him, she said, “Who are you? Are you listening to what I’m telling you? Do you hear what I’m saying? So what if I altered some of the paperwork? That’s all it was—paperwork!”
“Arielle, I have to interrupt!” objected Wormser.
“Shut up, Bernie. You’re being paid either way.” Addressing Dart she continued, “Would I have put Laterin on the market despite less-than-perfect results? You bet I would.” Meeting eyes with him, she said, “I will if I get the chance. I’d rather stop fifteen, twenty, thirty percent of such beasts, than stand by and do nothing. Every twelve seconds, don’t forget. And would I have resorted to such means for the sake of greed? No. For the sake of science, Detective. For the sake of the victim. Every new generation of Laterin that we developed showed a five- to seventeen-percent improvement. But there’s no way to test it, given the rules. You can’t test Laterin on rats or monkeys! Who are you kidding? This is a human aberration—and in large part, a genetic defect. You know who should be in this room, should be here instead of me? The FDA.” She nodded. “You bet. That’s who should be in this chair. Not me. Am I guilty of trying to do something? You bet I am. And damn proud of it.”
“You’ll go to jail for your actions,” Dart told her. “But by cooperating now—as Mr. Wormser will tell you—special consideration will be given your case.”
“I don’t want your special consideration. How many dead women—beaten wives, raped children—equal one Walter Zeller? You tell me how to fit that into an equation. Zeller broke the law repeatedly. In the end, he committed acts of murder—”
“You are the murderer!” Dart shouted, regretting immediately the outburst. He collected himself, met eyes with her, and said, “You rigged the data, the results of the trials, and then tried to, and eventually did, kill the man who uncovered your deceit. You, not Proctor, not his shooter, you.”
Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Finally she whined, “This is important work.”
A silence settled over them. Martinson’s chest heaved from the stress. Dart knew he’d broken out in a sweat.
Dart said, “You can’t balance one against the other. It doesn’t work that way.” He felt himself softening. Twenty-percent fewer sex offenders? Was it possible?
She said, “You do what you have to, Detective. We all do what we feel we have to. I’ll take my chances.” She paused, glanced at the annoyed Wormser and then back to Dart. “You want to know something? Don’t forget that juries are made up of men and women. There’s not a jury in this country that would convict me for what I’ve done. It was Zeller that committed murder, not me. A desperate man driven by the loss of his wife. I was trying to help the men he killed. They wanted that help—that much is documented—which is why they participated in the trials.” She looked over at Wormser again. Martinson had spent her life in control. She edged to the front of her seat.
Dart informed the attorney, “Terry Proctor is going to testify against your client. You might want to keep that in mind.”
“Stay where you are, Arielle,” Wormser advised.
She stood up, though feebly. She ran a hand down her smooth navy blue suit and, meeting eyes with Dart, said weakly, “I was trying to help solve a serious social problem. Condemn me if you will.” She walked past him and continued out the door.
Dart did nothing to stop her.
CHAPTER 47
“They called you a genius,” Dart told her. Ginny’s favorite walk was a section of the Appalachian Trail.
“Well, it shows that at least sometimes cops are right,” she teased.
It was awkward for Dart walking with his arm in a sling—he hadn’t realized how much walking depended on swinging his arms. His ankle was good enough for this hike, though it occasionally glowed with a twinge of pain. She had asked to see him, and he was in no mood to deny her.
Once on the trail, she found an overlook where an outcropping of rock faced north, and they perched there, wrapped in their winter coats, their breath fogging, Dart’s heart pounding. The afternoon sun was muted by clouds.
She said, “That was fun, what we did.” He thought that she was referring to the raid at Roxin, but he wasn’t sure.
“Yeah.”
He could tell when she was nervous by the way she chewed her lip. “Where do you stand with Abby?” she asked, not surprising him one bit. He had known what this talk would be about.
“Why?”
“I need to know.”
He wanted to ask why for a second time but thought better of it. He said, “Where do I stand, or where do we stand?”
“Is there a we?”
“Very much so.”
“That’s part of what I need to know,” she said.
“She’s not going back with her husband, if that’s what you’re asking. Ultimately, it was for the kids that she ever considered it—and I think she’s pretty clear that if she sacrifices herself for her kids and ends up unhappy, then that’s maybe harder on the kids than the way it is now.”
“And you?”
“This isn’t easy, you know.”
“I can make it easier,” she told him. “Michael—I’m sure you’ve heard about Michael—has asked me to move to New Hampshire with him. I’m tempted, because it offers a chance to start over. You know…. And I can do my computer work from just about anywhere—I don’t need to be in an office. It works for me. But there’s this part of me that is still holding on to us—is still thinking that we mig
ht try again—and I need to put that part away if I’m going to do this. I owe that to Michael. I can’t be leading one life and hoping for another.”
“No, that’s no good,” he said.
The wind blew across them, whistling in Dart’s ears and singing in the shrubs and treetops. The view was a vast sea of gray. Dart felt gray.
“So?” she asked.
“I don’t want to lose touch,” he answered. It was difficult for him to say, and his body ached with it.
“No.” She looked into the wind, and when she looked back at him her eyes were shiny with tears and she gave him a smile that made his heart tight and a lump form in his throat. “It’s okay,” she said, one tear escaping down her cheek.
“So much has happened,” he said.
“Yes, it has,” she agreed, looking away again.
She was a strong person, and he admired her. He wanted to reach over and touch her, to show her the compassion he felt, but he did not. He would not confuse things. It was difficult enough as it was.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the wind.
“Me too.”
They walked a little while longer, and somewhere high above a town that he didn’t recognize, she took his gloved hand in hers and did not let go. She held hands with him for the remainder of the walk, right until they reached their cars, at which point they finally released each other’s grip. She looked into his eyes and said, “We were good together.”
He nodded. He could feel the tears coming from deep within him, and he fought to hold them off.
“A good fit,” she said.
He nodded again.
She kissed him once lightly on the lips, climbed into her car, and was gone.
CHAPTER 48
It seemed strange to Dart that he should know so many people in a graveyard. Patrolman Bernie Denton was buried on the west side in a family site, the victim of a gang shooting and recipient of a funeral covered on national news a few years earlier.
(1995) Chain of Evidence Page 34
