Chain of Evidence

cheeks said, “Ready, boss.” She set down the aardvark, a canister vacuum cleaner, specially-fitted with a removable filter for hairs-and-fibers collection.

Kowalski appeared down the hall with an attractive hotel manager at his side-he was a skirt chaser of the worst order. He caught up to Dartelli and reported, “No sheet on the guy. His name is Stapleton-David Stapleton.”

No criminal record: The news came as a welcome relief to the detective. It was one less thing to connect him to the Ice Man “suicide.”

The four of them entered the room together, Kowalski leading the way followed by Bragg and Dartelli, with Richardson taking up the rear, camera gear slung around her neck. The female manager stood outside the room, watching them.

Sam Richardson had marked with Day-Glo police tape the lanes where she had vacuumed for evidence; these were the areas in which the men were permitted to move about. She monitored their movement closely. The room was not large enough for all of them, the result somewhat comic.

“The bed is unmade and appears to have been slept in,” Bragg recorded impatiently into a handheld tape recorder.

“Fucked-in is more like it,” Kowalski contributed in his usual display of tact.

Bragg reported his findings, dictating as he went along. Studying the bedsheets, and the area immediately around the bed, he said, “Red pubic hairs. Empty condom wrapper-a vaginal condom wrapper. Strands of red hair on the pillow. Evidence of sexual discharge.”

Richardson took photographs of the bed and then stripped the bedding and bagged it and marked the bag.

Kowalski, glancing out the open window, said, “Is any of this really necessary for a fucking flier?”

“Your call,” Bragg informed him, obviously hoping to be sent home.

Kowalski met eyes with Dartelli, who had been openly critical of Kowalski’s lax attitude at crime scenes. “What the fuck?” Kowalski said. “We’ll give it the five-dollar tour.”

The woman shot pictures of the bathroom, following closely on Bragg’s heels as the man’s voice rang out. “We’ve got some additional red pubic hairs on the toilet rim and also in the shower stall.”

Dartelli moved to the bathroom door. Bragg, down on his hands and knees, continued, “Seat to the toilet is down. Flecks of cosmetics rim the sink-mascara, maybe some base.

“We’ve got a damp towel in a pile on the bathroom floor, and a damp bar of pink hotel soap in the higher of the shower stall’s two soap holders, indicating someone took a shower, not a bath.

“The shower cap has been used, now crumpled into a ball on the shower’s surround. So the person taking the shower goes firmly into the Jane Doe column.” Stabbing a wad of tissue in the plastic trash can, Bragg announced, “One discarded vaginal condom.” He prepared a plastic evidence bag and picked the condom out of the wad with his gloved hands and studied it by holding it up to the light. He dropped it into the bag and labeled it.

“Semen?” Dart asked.

“We’ll test for fluids.”

Kowalski stated, “So the guy hires a hooker, has a little trouble getting it up and does a Louganis out the window. What’s the big deal?”

“Hooker?” Richardson questioned indignantly. “Why, because she practices safe sex? Do only the hookers that you run with wear vaginal condoms, Detective?”

Kowalski, openly verbal against women detectives, was not loved by the females on the force. He stuttered but didn’t get out a full sentence.

Bragg offered his opinion of what the evidence told them. “They do the business. She showers, maybe with him, maybe alone, and she leaves. Then for his own reasons our boy does a swan dive out the window. Nothing here indicating a struggle. No sign of foul play.” All this, he recorded into the tape recorder for the sake of his report. Dartelli welcomed this explanation as much as anyone, but that voice inside of him was unrelenting. He argued internally that there was nothing here linking this in any way to the Ice Man. And yet … And yet … He couldn’t let go of his own guilt; just the similarity of the jumps troubled him.

He suggested, “I’d like to have a talk with his visitor.”

“Yeah,” Kowalski agreed, “but it will probably cost you just for the conversation. The trim is probably twenty and goes for fifty a night. Maybe the boys downstairs got a list of redheads,” he said, referring to the Vice/Narcotics Division.

Richardson exhaled audibly in disgust.

“Natural color or a dye job?” Dartelli asked Bragg.

“We can test for that,” Bragg conceded, taking it as a request, clearly unhappy with the direction the investigation was taking.

Dartelli had a thin line to walk: He needed to rule out any connection to the Ice Man, to discourage anyone pulling those files or that evidence for comparison, while at the same satisfying himself that there was no connection, for to make such a connection placed the blame for the death partially on him.

Bragg offered, “We can try to develop latent prints off the door hardware, the window and frame, armchairs, bathroom fixtures. We get something useful we run the prints through ALPS. Anything else?” He wanted out of here.

Richardson had gone on a photo safari in the main room. She called out, “Did any of you guys see that the doodad has been taken off the window?”

Kowalski, alone with the two men in the tiny bathroom made a face consisting of one part boredom, two parts disgust.

Dartelli joined her in the other room.

The dirty glass window was a slide frame, and opened left to right. The “doodad” she referred to was a preventer-a piece of aluminum that screwed into the frame to prevent the window from sliding open more than four inches. City code-a means to prevent children from practicing their Peter Pans. The room’s only other window had its preventer in place, and approaching it, Dartelli noticed that the screw head took a special tool, like the hardware in public toilets. He slid the open window shut and studied the screw hole where the preventer had been removed. The threads shined brightly. Recent, he thought.

Wearing plastic gloves in this kind of heat was oppressive. His fingers were waterlogged and the skin shriveled. Using his fingertip, he explored the hole. “Let’s shoot it,” he requested.

She fixed both cameras with macro adapters and fired off a round of closeups-two from the color- transparency Nikon and two from the Canon black-and-white. As she did so, Dartelli searched for the preventer and screw that had been removed. Richardson picked up on this, and without a word, joined him in his search. They checked under the beds, the bare drawers of the clothes chest, rimmed with black cigarette burns.

“Not here,” she announced.

“No,” Dartelli agreed, meeting eyes with her. “Roman,” he called out to Kowalski, who had gone back to flirting with the manager in the hallway and seemed bothered by the interruption.

Dartelli stated, “You checked the guy’s record.”

“So?”

“Off of ID found on the body, or his registered name?”

“Registered name,” the other detective replied.

Stupid shit, Dartelli thought. He inquired irritably, “You did or did not check the body for identification?”

“Coroner will do that when he inventories the personal effects. You want to go sponging around in that mess, be my guest.”

Dartelli headed straight out of the room, passing the detective and the manager.

Kowalski called out to him, his voice like that of a child who was missing the point. “What the fuck are you doing, Dart?”

Dartelli didn’t answer.

He enlisted the help of the two large men from the coroner’s body wagon to help him roll Stapleton. Samantha Richardson, showing a great deal of internal strength, photographed the grotesque body, including closeups, and then together the three men heaved the body over, two patrolmen shielding the body from the media