Chain of Evidence

minutes later.

The Oasis Diner was across town on Farmington Avenue, on the way to the Mark Twain house and West Hartford. The first triple-wide diner in the country, the Oasis retained its art deco interior, which included a total surround of stamped stainless steel and movie stills of Brando, Monroe, and James Dean. Dart had vanilla, Abby raspberry with chocolate sauce.

“So?” she asked. The drive over had been in complete silence.

Dart said, “Kowalski was Narco before Homicide. Doc Ray’s preliminary of Stapleton turned up some injection marks. They may be nothing, but it’s possible that Stapleton-maybe Stapleton and Lawrence-were dealers. The point is, we’ll never know because Narco records are shut away, and after what they’ve been through, if we go asking questions, we’re likely to open up a hornets’ nest and have Haite asking a lot of questions that neither of us wants to answer until we have some answers. Are you with me?”

“All the way,” she said, rolling her tongue over the chocolate sauce. She made no attempt to disguise her enjoyment and then licked her lips. “Lawrence was a cover-up?”

“It depends if we believe Lewellan Page or not,” he said.

“She wouldn’t survive on the witness stand, if that’s what you’re asking. No. She’d be torn apart by the psychologists, who would discover her abuse and create all sorts of reasons she would want to invent someone killing Gerry Law. That’s my professional opinion. Personally, I believe her, and I think that you do too, or we wouldn’t be sitting here, and you wouldn’t look so tired and bothered.”

“If we apply through Internal Affairs for Lawrence’s Narco file, it will take a ream of paperwork and six weeks. Plus countless interviews and reports, and at some point we’ll have to put everything out on the table.”

“In the meantime, we aren’t sleeping well,” she said, sampling the ice cream again. She drew it into her mouth on the end of a white plastic spoon and skimmed the surface softly with her lips stealing a little bit of the prize at a time, until what was on the spoon disappeared and she went after more. He sensed no intention on her part in making this overly sensual-it seemed more her way of eating her ice cream, but Dart had a difficult time with it. What would it feel like to be kissed by her?

“I’d like to get inside the Narco file room,” he confessed.

The spoon stopped inside her mouth. She returned it to the paper cup and put a napkin to her lips. “You what?”

“We need to know, one way or the other, if either Stapleton or Lawrence was ever investigated by Narcotics. It’s our only hope of connecting Kowalski to Lawrence.”

She set the spoon down, noticeably more pale. She looked around, as if he might have been overheard. “You must really trust me,” she said, staring at him. “Does the word suspension mean anything to you? Or how about the words, suspension without pay? How about an IA investigation with you as its target?” She pushed the ice cream away. “If you’re using me as a sounding board, Joe, then take this advice: Forget it. They’ll suspend you, maybe toss you. They’ll make an example of you-that’s how it works.” She cocked her head at him. “What is that look?”

“Narco is empty by one in the morning. They’re all out working the streets or eating doughnuts or killing time at strip joints. By three, they go home. CAPers is up and running, but it’s down the hall. Thursday through Sunday the cleaners start at midnight. The rest of the week, they go eight to eleven.”

“What they say about you and your research is true, isn’t it?”

“I can’t watch the hallway and go for the files at the same time.”

“No way.” She didn’t hesitate a nanosecond.

“It can’t be done?”

“No, it can’t,” she confirmed.

“Not without help,” he pressed.

“Message received. Now hear this: No way!”

“Your office has a clean view of the hallway. With the door left open, you could see down that hall, could warn me. Sometimes there’s a late bust. Predicting traffic flow in and out of that division is never a sure bet.”

“It would make me an accomplice.”

“We carry pagers. They can be set to vibrate instead of beep, did you know that? If you were to program your phone to dial my pager number, then it would take only seconds to warn me. It takes exactly nine seconds to walk down the hallway and reach Narcotics once you’ve rounded that corner.”

She shook her head, looking amazed that he had already timed it. “And whoever it was would recognize you.”

“I’m dressed as a housecleaner. I wear a ball cap, glasses, and a press-on ’stache. I keep my head down. No one ever looks at the wombats. Not at one in the morning. I push my cart out the door, and I’m gone. Besides,” he offered, “that’s my risk, not yours. If I’m caught, I acted alone. You’ve done nothing more than pull an all-nighter. How unusual is that?” He spoke sotto voce. His heart was beating fast, and he was sweating. The vanilla was melting in front of him, untouched.

She reached out, snagged the spoon, and guided it back between her lips. “I suppose you already know the order that housecleaning cleans in. Which offices are done first?”

“I can do this alone,” he reminded, “but I thought I’d ask you first. I’m pressuring you, Abby, and I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”

She removed the spoon and pursed her lips. She looked at him quizzically, skeptically, squinting in a way that felt as if she were measuring him. Testing him. “You’re right about IA. Putting the request through them would probably take several weeks. But break into Narco’s files based on the testimony of a victimized twelve-year-old girl? Does that strike you as odd?”

“Don’t look at me like that.” He toyed with the ice cream, but wasn’t hungry.

“You’re really pissing me off here, damn it.”

“Good.”

A tension had settled between them, uncomfortable and gnawing. “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she declared.

At 12:30 A.M., Dart, wearing a fake mustache, blue jeans, and a dark blue ball cap, entered the department’s basement housecleaning closet, where he located both a cart and a navy blue smock that the service people wore. There were four workers assigned to clean the two-story building. Dart, heading upstairs, estimated that he had a little over an hour for a job he thought would only take a few minutes.

He had rarely found use for the speed key given him by Walter Zeller some four years earlier. Zeller had claimed that no investigating officer could get by without one, despite their illegality. The speed key was shaped something like a small flat pistol. It magically picked most locks with the squeeze of a trigger and was the preferred tool of car thieves because of its simplicity-insert the tongue into the lock, squeeze and hold the trigger, rotate, and the lock was open. Dart hid it under a stack of green cotton rags on the cleaner’s cart.

The mustache itched. The glue had dried, shrinking his upper lip in the process. If he sneezed he might send the thing across the room.

He used his cellular phone to call Narcotics’ second-floor office. He allowed it to ring eight times, thrilled that no one answered.

He pushed the cart out into the hall, headed quickly to the building’s sole elevator, and rode up, his heart rate increasing with every yard. This exploit reminded him of trying to rob money from his mother’s wallet atop her dresser bureau-he would steal the money, not for himself but so that when she checked the wallet to send him out for a bottle, she would lack money.

The elevator doors slid open, and at a distance of thirty feet, down the long ugly tile corridor, he caught eyes with Abby Lang. He felt stunned. Elated. She sat behind a desk inside her Sex Crimes office, looking both tired and concerned. Instinctively, Dart felt down for his pager and switched the beeper off so that if it were called it would vibrate, not sound. She was clearly there to help him. Nothing else could explain her presence at this hour.

As he rolled the cart toward Narco, Abby picked up her phone and touched a single button. Less than five seconds later, the pager clipped to Dart’s belt began vibrating. He reached down and cleared it-like silencing an alarm clock. She did not look up at him but kept her head aimed down at her desk and the paperwork that seemed to absorb her.