Chain of Evidence

dilapidated green fence. If the gate door were opened, the stick would fall to the ground. Simple tricks-he and Zeller had used them dozens of times.

He dropped Abby back at her car, hoping she might invite him to her place, but she did not. On the way home, he worried about this, and again when he took Mac for a short walk.

He slept poorly until 3:00 A.M., having no idea what had awakened him-a nightmare? a sound? something out on the street? And then the thoughts cluttered his head like bats trapped in an attic.

He lay awake for hours, spinning, churning-driven by the possibilities that 11 Hamilton Court offered. Confused by Abby’s mixture of hot and cold.

If he was to get a look inside that house, he was going to have to convince Haite to involve the State Police. Haite, in turn, would need to involve Captain Rankin. A real mess.

In the morning, he returned to 11 Hamilton Court. Again, he knocked on the front door, and again no one answered. The piece of white tape remained in place. Disappointed not to find a sign of anyone, he moved around back, his heart busy in his chest, his palms damp and cold. He hated this neighborhood.

He found the stick that he had jammed into the gate’s crack lying in the dirt on the ground. Dart picked it up and held it. In the oozing mud outside the gate, he saw shoe prints coming and going. Shoe prints not his own.

Sometime during the night someone had been inside.

The rock salt and leaves that he had collected the night before were now in separate envelopes on the front seat of his car, marked and labeled. Evidence, he thought.

Perhaps just enough to convince Haite to authorize the raid.

CHAPTER 24

It had been a busy few hours.

Dart loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “I need an ERT for an evidence collection raid on a house in the south end,” Dart explained to Sergeant John Haite. The skin around the man’s eyes was an ink blue, reminding Dart of a raccoon mask. CAPers was run by two sergeants, John Haite or Dave Almedi, each with his own group of detectives and his own desk in a glassed room off the division’s floor. The two were rarely in at the same time because their units rotated in and out of twelve-hour tours. Dart took a metal chair across from Haite’s cluttered desk. The fluorescent lights made their skin glow an ugly yellow-green.

“A what?” Haite asked rhetorically.

The idea of using an Emergency Response Team to do a raid for the sole purpose of collecting evidence was an idea all Dart’s. It would require writs and warrants and probable cause. Dart explained, “I can place an unknown person inside Harold Payne’s study on the night he … committed suicide. Bragg will support me in that whoever this was may have attempted to conceal his or her presence by vacuuming the rug.”

Haite appeared skeptical.

Dart handed over Bragg’s report, completed only an hour earlier, that showed an identical chemical composition between the rock salt recovered at Payne’s and the salt Dart had collected at 11 Hamilton Court. “This links this suspect to both Payne’s and the house at Eleven Hamilton Court. I contacted the owner, who put me in touch with a property management firm-”

“Peter Sharpe,” Haite said. All the slum property was handled by Sharpe. He was hated by the police.

“Yeah. The place is rented to one Wallace Sparco, white male, fifty-two.” Dart passed Haite the photocopy of Sparco’s driver’s license. He went in for the kill by handing him next the computerized rendering Lewellan Page had witnessed at Gerald Lawrence’s. Although imperfect, the similarity was undeniable. “Wallace Sparco has been busy making suicides,” Dart said.

“Shit,” came Haite’s reply, comparing the two photographs. He looked over at Dart with basset hound eyes of irritation. He didn’t want things more complicated. “They are not suicides?”

“That’s what I need to prove or disprove.”

“These are not your investigations. Where the hell is Kowalski on this?”

“It’s an end run, Sergeant,” Dart went ahead reluctantly. “I don’t feel good about it, but that’s the way it is.”

“An end run on Kowalski?”

“Each one of these suicides is his,” Dart pointed out.

“Oh, shit.” Haite tilted back in his chair. “Oh, shit.”

“I know,” said Dart. “I don’t like it either.”

“Fuck this,” Haite said, exasperated. “I don’t need this kind of trouble.”

Dart waited him out. He knew better than to push Haite.

“Someone tapped both Payne and Lawrence and set them up to look like suicides?” Haite muttered. “Why?”

“To keep us from catching on. To keep going. To clean house: They’re both sex offenders, Sergeant. Pornography. Wife beating. Stapleton too.”

“Stapleton is who?”

“The jumper at the Granada Inn. August.”

“Oh, shit.” He scratched his head. “Oh, fuck.”

“I know,” Dart repeated.

“And what the hell are you asking for?”

“An evidence raid with an Emergency Response Team in case it gets ugly. That’s a lousy area, Pope Park.”

“I know.”

“A way to get in and out without Sparco any the wiser.”

“Fuck that,” Haite said. “We just get the paper right and we kick it and search it. So what?”

“Sparco is one careful son of a bitch, Sergeant. We have less than zero to go on. If we don’t find some kind of evidence connecting him to these crime scenes, we don’t want to tip our hand that we’ve been there.”

“It’s illegal. Have you considered that? No matter what, we have to post the place that it was searched.”

“Those search notices have a habit of blowing off the door, Sergeant.”

“Oh, fuck. What’s happened to you, Dartelli? Blow off the door? You’re suggesting we purposely avoid posting notice? That is illegal, Detective!” He had raised his voice to shouting. Dart knew that by now the other guys would be looking this way, but with his back to the floor he couldn’t see.

“We post it, and if it blows off, it blows off.”

“This is not like you,” the sergeant condemned. He added, “This sounds much more like Kowalski or Drummond than you. What’s gotten into you?”

“Three murders made to look like suicides,” Dart answered. “We’ve got a jury of one running wild, Sergeant. If we don’t do something, the numbers are going to increase.”

Haite and Zeller had come up through the ranks at the same time. There was mutual respect between the men, but a healthy competition as well. If anyone felt as strongly about Zeller as Dart, it was this man sitting across from him. Were Dart to share the possibility of Zeller’s involvement with Haite, the detective risked being reassigned. Without ironclad proof, John Haite was not about to bring down Walter Zeller. So Dart avoided mentioning his former sergeant or the Ice Man investigation. But Haite had just reviewed the case a few days earlier.

“What about the Ice Man?” he asked. “He took a dive just like Stapleton.”

Dart met eyes strongly with his sergeant. “Yes, he did.” He offered nothing more. Telephones rang out on the floor. Haite and Dart maintained an unblinking eye contact.

“You’re saying the Ice Man was a sex offender? Do we know this? Can we prove this?”

Dart replied, “I didn’t say anything about the Ice Man, Sergeant. Do you have a specific question that you want to ask?”