Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 1

Another one? he wondered, the sense of dread as great as anything he had ever experienced.

On his way back from his only trip to the beach all summer, Detective Joe Dartelli heard the call come over the radio and sat through the better part of a green light before someone had the good sense to honk and awaken him from his moment of dread.

The code was for a suicide-not that the codes did any good, the local press monitored these frequencies like sucker fish clinging to the belly of the shark, and they knew every code, could interpret even the slightest inflection-but it was the added word, “flier,” that caught Dartelli’s attention. A jumper.

Another one.

By the time he reached the front of the downtown Hartford Granada, the patrol personnel had already run the familiar tape around the crime scene, holding a few morbid curious at bay, and two impatient news crews. They were lucky: At eleven-thirty at night the downtown core was virtually deserted; the insurance executive set stayed out of the city at night unless there was a function. Better, the late news had already ended, making this tomorrow’s news. Dartelli spotted an unmarked Ford Taurus cruiser clumsily parked near the front, and a black step van that Dartelli recognized immediately as Teddy Bragg’s evidence collection van. Stenciled across its back doors were the words: HARTFORD POLICE DEPARTMENT FORENSIC SCIENCES DIVISION. Calling Bragg’s detail a division was a bit of a stretch, given that it consisted of only two people. But maybe that made the public feel better about their tax dollars.

Dartelli double-parked the eight-year-old red Volvo 245 wagon and left the emergency flashers going, and flipped around the visor with the paperwork that identified the car as one belonging to an HPD detective, so that it wouldn’t be cited or towed. He climbed out of the air-conditioned comfort into a soup of nearly unbearable heat and wicked humidity.

He wore a pair of blue madras Bermuda shorts, loafers with no socks and a white golf shirt from Scotty’s Landing, a fish and chips joint in Coconut Grove, Florida, the souvenir of a vacation long in the past. The patrolman at the door didn’t recognize him and tried to shoo him away before Dartelli’s police ID gained him passage.

“Good evening, sir,” the patrolman said, apologetically.

Joe Dartelli nodded, though there was nothing good about it at all. An African-American spread out on the sidewalk, the media closing in. He clipped his ID to the collar of the shirt.

“Who’s on it?” Dartelli asked.

“Kowalski,” the patrolman answered.

The detective nodded again. Figures, he thought. When shit went bad it rarely hesitated to go all the way.

“Fifth floor,” the patrolman informed him.

He heard an ambulance’s approaching siren climbing in the distance, rising in both volume and pitch, as if it might arrive in time to save the cooling remains that filled the cheap suit spread out bloodied and disfigured on the sidewalk. A body bag and the coroner’s wagon was more like it, and even then a shovel and hose were going to be needed.

August in New England: He had never seen any tourist brochures bragging about it.

He approached the elevator with a sour stomach that had nothing to do with the hot dog and mustard that he had called lunch. His stomach was instead the result of a toxic combination of fear and guilt: Another one. He felt an unyielding pressure at his temples delivering an unrelenting splinter of pain that felt as if it pierced the texture of his brain.

He recalled the last suicide that he had attended, three years ago, and the resulting investigation, and he felt dizzy enough that when the elevator car moved he reached out for the railing to steady himself.

I did my job, he reminded himself, recalling the death that the paper had quickly dubbed the Ice Man. It had been a disgusting winter of seventeen ice and snow storms, two blizzards, and a ten- day period when the mercury never crossed five above zero. In March, a melting snowbank revealed a frozen John Doe-the Ice Man.

I followed procedure, he told himself. But he knew the truth: For the sake of a friendship he had looked the other way. He had investigated, written-up and filed some potentially damaging evidence, the facts of which, when linked one to the next, seemingly related to the Ice Man case-though indirectly, and circumstantially-electing not to bring the evidence to the attention of the lead investigator, Detective Roman Kowalski. For the past two years he had internally debated that decision-now, he questioned it.

I did not break the law. This, ultimately, carried the most weight with Dartelli. He had stretched the law, perhaps to its limit, but remained within its bounds. To be found out might cost him a reassignment or transfer, but it was a job filled with difficult judgment calls, and he had made his, like it or not. The discovery of this second such suicide, however, added a burden to that earlier decision. Had he misread that evidence? Had his decision to ignore the evidence now allowed a second killing?

Despite the air-conditioning, he began to sweat again and he coughed dryly and his lungs hurt. He blamed the Granada Inn. It was a decent enough chain, but this particular hotel was a piece of shit. Its nickname was the De Nada-”of nothing,” in Spanish.

There were two uniformed patrolmen guarding the fifth floor, and Dartelli attributed his Bermuda shorts for his being stopped for a second time. Kowalski, who thought the world revolved around him, sized up Dartelli’s garb and said in his heavy Bronx accent, “The only known witness is a stoned Jordon across the street. You want to do something, you could take a statement.”

Detective Roman Kowalski had too much hair-bushy, black, curly hair escaping his shirtsleeves and collar; his eyebrows cantilevered out over his tight-set dark eyes like a pair of shelves. Kowalski had five o’clock shadow before noon. He was too vain for a beard, but it would have saved him a lot of time and effort.

Kowalski chewed on the end of his trademark wooden match. A pack of Camel non-filters showed through the breast pocket of his polyester shirt. He carried the bitter odor of a chain-smoker. The man reveled in the image of the renegade cop. Dart had no use for him. When he cleared a case it was only because he got lucky or beat up a snitch. He had a horrible clearance record. He bent every rule there was and got away with all of it, the darling of the upper brass.

“I’m off duty,” Dartelli announced.

“So fuck me,” Kowalski said irritably. “You want to nose around, take the statement. You want to be off duty, go home and be off duty. What the fuck do I care?”

“I saw Bragg’s van.”

“He’s working the scene now,” Kowalski said, indicating the motel room. “Listen, you don’t want to help out on your day off, I got no problem with that. But then make yourself scarce, okay? I got no mood this time of night for no show-and-tell.”

“Across the street?” Dartelli asked. He wanted a look inside that room, and a chat with Teddy Bragg. He had to know what they had so far. He headed back toward the elevators.

“Nice shorts, Dart,” Kowalski called out down the hall, using his nickname. “You look like you’re ready for recess.”

Joe Dartelli, his back to the man, lifted his right hand and flipped the man his middle finger. He heard Kowalski chuckling to himself.

It was good-they were getting along tonight.

The witness wore his New York Knicks hat backward, the plastic strap across his forehead. His dark green, absurdly oversized shorts came down to the middle of his black calves. Dart displayed his shield to the patrolman keeping the kid under wraps and the boy’s face screwed up into a knot, and he shifted uneasily from foot to foot like a member of a marching band. Rap music whined loudly from a pair of fuzzy black earpieces stuffed into his ears. The smell of marijuana intensified the closer Dart drew to the kid. Dart indicated for the kid to lose the tunes. He introduced himself formally as Detective Joseph Dartelli, Crimes Against Persons Division of the Hartford Police Department. He did so within earshot of the uniform, and he noted the uniform’s name in the spiral pad alongside the date and time. He took down the kid’s name and drew a line beneath all the information, annoyed by what the courts put a person through.