Chain of Evidence

“I doubt it,” Dart admitted.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Me too. But it was a nice thought.”

They reentered the house. Tommy Templeton’s voice could be heard congratulating the girl. The two, still on their break, were looking at a coffee table book of wild animal photographs.

“Are you going to look?” Lewellan asked Dart.

“Is it done?” Dart asked.

“Not quite,” Templeton asked.

Abby sat down with the girl and the book, and Templeton came over to Dart and motioned Dart out onto the deck, which produced an immediate anxiety in the detective.

Tommy Templeton’s face, part shadow, part light, looked like a mask and offered Dart a disturbed expression. “We’re getting close,” he said, though it sounded more like a warning.

“What is it, Tommy?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The face?” Dart asked.

“Yes.”

“It looks familiar,” Dart stated.

Templeton nodded. “The eyes.”

“Who?”

Templeton shook his head.

“Who, Tommy?” Dart repeated.

“Doesn’t make any sense, and besides, the rest of the face doesn’t work at all.”

“Who?”

“I can’t make it out,” he said, “but it sure as hell seems familiar to me.”

Dart nodded. “I know. The eyes.”

“Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?” the man asked.

Dart didn’t answer. He asked, “Do we trust this?”

“I do. She’s good,” came the reply, “which is not exactly what you’re asking, is it? Is this the face she saw, or is it someone she has seen since and has convinced herself otherwise? We both know the score with eyewitnesses, Joe, don’t we? They’re about as reliable as the mail. But she has a face in her head-I guarantee you that. Whether it’s real or imagined, I can’t tell you.”

Half an hour later, Templeton called Abby and Dart into his studio.

His heart pounding strongly, Dart approached the computer screen, but Templeton directed him away. “The printer,” Templeton said, pointing. “We’ve enlarged it. It’s just coming out.”

The four of them stepped up to the laser printer, where a piece of paper was being slowly ejected, upside down so that only the white of the paper showed. Dart wanted to grab it and flip it over, but he waited for it to finish printing. Templeton picked it up and turned it over.

The image was that of a face. It looked so much like a photograph that Dart briefly forgot that it was not. Lifelike and human. Dart reached out and touched the sheet of paper, feeling an incredible sense of relief.

The face was jowly, the brow strong. The high cheekbones reminded him of an Irishman. Try as he did, he could no longer make the face into that of Walter Zeller. Even the eyes looked different. He felt giddy. He felt high, as if he’d been drinking.

“There’s your man,” Templeton said, handing Dart the image.

“That’s him,” Lewellan Page confirmed.

Dart felt both confusion and happiness. It was one time he felt thrilled to be wrong about the identification of a suspect.

But his stomach rolled and his bowels loosened when, at the door, saying good-bye, Tommy Templeton leaned in close to him and whispered, “I’d like to play with this image, Joe. I’ll fax you a copy if I get anything.”

“But I thought-” Dart complained. His euphoria popped like a balloon, his objection interrupted by Templeton.

“Inside every face, there’s another face,” Templeton cautioned in a sinister tone of voice. “Call it instinct, call it a hunch … This isn’t the face that I expected.”

Abby saw the two men whispering and caught eyes with Dart, her face a knot of concern. Lewellan Page ran out to the car and opened the back door and petted the dog.

“Let me work with it,” Templeton told the detective. “I’ll give you a call.”

Leave it alone, Dart wanted to say. But he nodded, wishing that secrets could stay hidden, and that a person’s face could never change.

CHAPTER 16

“There’s no question in my mind that the rug in Payne’s study was vacuumed sometime just before the suicide, but not being a detective,” Bragg said sarcastically, “I don’t see how that might bear upon the investigation.” Teddy Bragg looked better today, more color to his face, less to his eyes. He smelled like cigarettes. The file for the Halloween suicide, Harold Payne, lay open on his desk. The small office was cluttered with paperwork. A Lucite microscope, a forensic science award, sat in the corner gathering dust alongside a canning jar containing a pancreas suspended in a clear fluid. Dart had never asked about the pancreas, but he’d seen it there for years. Lights glowed on a small FM clock radio, indicating it was switched on, but the volume was evidently turned down.

“Before the suicide?” Dart asked curiously.

“Definitely prior to the shooting, yes. We’ve lifted blood splatter from the surface of the rug.”

“What’s the point?” Kowalski asked irritably.

Bragg answered, “The point, detective, is who vacuumed that rug, when, and why? We checked with the wife, who explained that the housecleaner had been there the same day; but for reasons that I’ll get into, that doesn’t cut it.”

“She was in there-the wife,” Dart reminded, “ahead of our arrival.”

“Yes, so she could be lying.”

Kowalski glanced over at Dart with a look that penetrated. Perhaps, Dart thought, he too understood that this might lead back to Zeller.

Bragg cautioned, “We know by the vacuum pattern-the width of the swath-that it wasn’t any of the machines in the house. Furthermore, we’ve checked the bags of the two machines and IDed wool fibers with the proper dye lot to match the study rug-and that tells us two things: one, the rug was vacuumed, possibly that same day; two, someone else using a different machine vacuumed the rug after the housecleaner but before the suicide.

“The upstairs canister vacuum,” he continued, “would appear to have resided upstairs and only worked the upstairs.” To Dart he said, “You know how I hate inconsistencies like this. It’s petty bullshit, I know. But it bugs the crap out of me.”

Kowalski complained, “It doesn’t matter.” He added, “Not to me. Does it affect your ruling in any way?”

“Roman, great minds think alike,” Bragg said. “I asked myself the same question: Does any of this matter? The kill is by his own hand, it’s clean-in a manner of speaking-and convincing. So what do we care?”

“Exactly.”

“But we do care,” Bragg contradicted. “All because of one tiny piece of evidence.”

Kowalski’s brow knitted. “What’s that?”