Chain of Evidence

She didn’t want to explain her having been with Dartelli. She said for Kowalski’s benefit, “‘And you, Lieutenant.’ Is that what you meant to say, Detective?”

Kowalski glared at her. “The wife was out with friends ’til about an hour ago. Comes home, finds the hubby spread all over the study. Calls nine-eleven.” Kowalski eyed Abby again, and Dart realized that maybe he was busy with his arithmetic.

The entrance foyer had a low ceiling with hand-hewn dark timbers and plaster that had pieces of yellow hay stuck into it. To Dart’s left, a gray-carpeted stairway ascended to the second floor. He passed a small stone column supporting a wicker basket filled with trick-or-treat candy and fresh fruit. He thought that on this of all nights, Halloween, there would have been, should have been, potential witnesses around and about.

“Did she find the house locked or open?” he asked Kowalski.

“If you want to sit in the fucking bleachers and watch, I got no problem,” Kowalski said. “But if you want to play Twenty Questions, fucking take it somewhere else.”

“You know what’s amazing about you,” Abby told Kowalski, stepping past him and moving toward the open study door, “is how delicately you handle the language.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but she cut him off, raising a finger at him, “And be careful what you say to your superiors, Detective.” With extra venom she added, “’Cause I’ll bust you down to traffic, given half the chance.”

Dart smiled at Kowalski and raised his eyebrows, taunting him.

Stepping up to Dartelli, Kowalski said earnestly, “I’m waiting on Buzz before I go in there. Don’t touch a fucking thing.” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket and stuck one in his mouth. “I’ll be outside.”

The study was the size of Dart’s studio kitchen and sitting area combined. Oriental rugs, dark antiques, a stone-and-brick fireplace with two gargoyles supporting the four-inch thick, burl walnut mantel. A substantial puddle of blood on the rug below the deceased. Splatter pattern on the ceiling consistent with the top of a human head coming off. An oil portrait of a man with a bulbous red nose, who lived back when the river trade kept Hartford prosperous, ruled from above the mantel. Leather-bound books crammed the shelves, looking both untouched and unread. Window dressing. Dart noticed a few spaces between the volumes, like missing teeth.

The body was a mess, draped over a walnut chair with a needlepoint cushion. What remained of the head was angled back away from the blast and discharge of the weapon. The top half of the man’s clothes was brown with drying blood-buckets of it.

“Harold C. Payne,” Abby Lang read, fingering a mailing label on a copy of Arts and Antiques left on a cherry side table in the hall. “I didn’t recognize him without his face.”

“You remember him?”

“Cyber-porn. Fuck shots and D-cup starlets over the Internet. Mail-order photo-CD-ROM. Digitized pornography. The Feds brought him down, but I was consulted. Yeah, I remember him.”

“Sounds like a real sweetheart,” Dart said.

“Piece of work, this one. Hired himself four attorneys and got himself acquitted on all but the mail-order charge, if I’m remembering right.”

Dart wasn’t about to question her memory.

She said, “The whole area of pornography over the Internet remains a little fuzzy-you’ll pardon the expression. It’s still being sorted out.”

“Is there a file on him in Sex Crimes?” Dart questioned.

She met eyes with him, understanding what he was asking. “No,” she answered simply but delivering the message that she did not appreciate the implications of his question. Her eyes said, No one gets in my files without me knowing about it.

Attempting to change subjects, Dart pointed out the snifter of cognac on the partner’s desk, a spilled ashtray at the foot of the deceased’s chair, and the butt of a cigar on the rug. It appeared that Payne had poured himself a drink, had a smoke, and then ate a barrel.

A walnut armoire was wedged into the corner immediately to the left. The rest of that wall was floor-to- ceiling bookshelves. Four leaded windows occupied most of the wall behind the desk where a computer was set up on a custom-built return.

Before Bragg and the others arrived, while he still had a moment of peace, Dart studied the crime scene. A husband left alone while the wife went to a party, a glass of cognac, a cigar, and a bullet through the roof of his mouth. The perfect suicide, he thought, believing to his very core that Payne had been murdered. On the edge of the desk he spotted what appeared to be a gun-cleaning kit and what was clearly a box of shells. No suicide note that he could see, but the wife might have found one. The gun hung awkwardly from the dead man’s right thumb; Dart could predict that paraffin tests would confirm that the same hand had fired the weapon, and he wondered how that could have been accomplished.

Unlike the other suicides, he viewed this one as the audience views a magic show: looking for the tricks. He tried to reconstruct how a Zeller or a Kowalski could paint so clear a picture. A speed key or other lock-picking device could get a killer inside-no trick there. But then what? Overpower Payne-knock him unconscious, careful to tap him on that part of his head that would later shatter when the bullet entered. You would have to know about the gun, he thought. Some advance work would have to be done. But guns were registered, and most home weapons were kept in bedside drawers or on the top shelves of closets.

What ate at him was the absence of physical evidence. At the Stapleton jump, the trace evidence-crucial to any investigation-gave no indication of the presence of a mystery visitor. The Lawrence hanging evidence had come in the same way: Teddy Bragg’s report indicated finding some copper filings on the body-these from the lamp cord used for the hanging, the anticipated random cotton and synthetic fibers typical to any floor, and head and body hairs, but only from the victim. No evidence to suggest foul play. The scenario before him placed out the same way- it appeared a straight-ahead suicide. Having been trained in criminalistics, this is where Dart put his faith-the transference of evidence was virtually impossible to avoid; hairs and fibers were in a constant state of exchange: the person entering a room deposited such evidence; the person leaving a room carried such evidence with him. Every variety of organic matter from leaves to pollen, car-floor carpeting, clothing, food, seeds, hairs, dirt, and dust. It seemed inconceivable that the suicides had been staged without any such evidence being shed-and Dart knew that this was exactly what the prosecuting attorney would say: “No evidence, no case.”

Webster wandered over to check on them, and Abby asked him, “Did the wife enter the study?”

“Says she did, yeah. Said she felt for his pulse-his left hand.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine thinking that the thing in that chair might have a pulse. You talk about dreaming.”

“How long was she in the room?” Dart asked him.

“Don’t know. Didn’t say.”

Dart, his mind on fiber evidence, dropped to one knee and brought his head nearly to the floor, looking into the room. To Webster Dart said, “She was wearing slippers: blue fuzzy slippers. Is that right?” He glanced up at the patrolman, who appeared not to remember.

“I … ah …”

“Find out.”

“Yes, sir.” Webster took off a brisk pace, and Dart could hear him charging up the stairs.

“What?” Abby asked, kneeling.

“Get down low.” Dart demonstrated, nearly touching his ear to the floor.

Abby teased, “I love it when you talk dirty,” and then duplicated his actions.

“See them? The fibers?” he asked. “Play with your focus,” he instructed.

“Got ’em!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Blue fibers!”

“Yup. And do you see where they lead?”

“To the armoire. Not to the body.”

“Yup. And?”

She rocked her head, and they were nearly kissing, both of them with their ears to the hardwood floor. “There’s a dark swath cut down the rug between here and the deceased.”

“You’re good,” Dart told her. Her bottom was sticking high in the air, and for a moment he wasn’t thinking about fiber evidence.

“And there’s a lighter swath between the armoire and the desk.”