Chain of Evidence

and gawkers with a hotel bedsheet used as a curtain.

Dartelli found the searching of the man’s warm blood-soaked pockets both tedious and trying, though blood and guts no longer bothered him. He had become numb to such things. Richardson documented the entire process on film, including the contents of each pocket: a small black comb in the back jeans pocket; a thin wallet in the front left-confirming the man’s identity as David Stapleton; and in the front right pocket, some quarters and dimes, a stick of gum, a packaged condom, and the special screwdriver required to remove the window’s preventer.

Encouraged by discovery of the screwdriver, Dartelli searched each pocket three times, growing a little more disgusted and a good degree more frantic with each attempt. The missing preventer was just the kind of annoying detail that would haunt him and increase his suspicions, and thereby, his sense of guilt.

Richardson, changing rolls of film, suggested the dead man’s watch pocket.

The detective had not noticed this pocket, sewn below the belt line, but above the right pocket; he could hear the voice of Walter Zeller chiding him for the oversight. Zeller had a low tolerance for such mistakes.

Distant lightning flashed in the clouds, electrifying the sky. A moment later, thunder rumbled and rolled down the Connecticut River, sounding like rocks spilling down a hill, echoing in the caverns created by the downtown high-rises. It was a night that Dartelli would have liked to climb to the roof of his apartment building and drink a beer while awaiting the rain-enjoying the light show, or to drive a ways out of town and take his dog Mac for a walk in the woods. Instead, he had his hand in a dead man’s bloody pocket, and a chest knotted in fear.

He shoved his gloved index finger into the tiny pocket and withdrew the small tab of aluminum and the screw used to fix it to the window frame.

A few huge drops of rain slammed onto the sidewalk like small bombs.

Richardson glanced up into the sky. “I love the summer rains,” she said, shaking her short hair side to side.

Relief swept through Dartelli at having found this piece of evidence. Even so, the suicide continued to bother him, and though he willed it to go away the feeling persisted. He looked into the mashed face of the victim-he could just make out where the nose had been. An hour earlier this man had been alive, and the warmth of the body, the immediacy of the death, had an unusual and profound effect on the detective: He cared about the victim. Rookies cared. Family members cared. Eleven-year veterans could not afford such indulgence.

The rain fell harder and a light breeze picked up and moved some of the hot dry air, and the night opened like a curtain. The rain washed the red blood off his hand and the aluminum preventer and screw that he held there. Rivulets of blood dripped to the sidewalk, diluted and pink.

“It’s like God’s answer to the heat,” she said, her face still trained toward the heavens, her blouse wet and translucent.

“Yeah,” Dartelli said. “I know what you mean.” He wanted to talk to the redhead. He wanted to talk to Stapleton’s girlfriend-if she could be found-regardless of her hair color. He wanted this thing closed up tight, his secret protected, but he feared it wouldn’t be. The faceless head seemed to be looking up at him. “What?” he asked the face suddenly, sharply. Angry.

The rain fell more strongly. The coroners approached with the body bag. They wanted the body. Now. They wanted out of the rain.

“Joe,” Richardson said, her voice revealing her concern over his outburst, “let’s get out of the rain.”

Dartelli couldn’t take his eyes off the face. It wanted something from him.

“Joe …,” she said, stepping closer, noticeably upset.

Dartelli stood and walked past her, off into the rain toward the Volvo with its flashing lights. Another clap of thunder tumbled from the sky, shaking the windows of a nearby building as it landed. He didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Not even her.

He regretted his own past actions, and he wished to God that he had a second chance; he prayed to God that David Stapleton was a fluke coincidence. People do jump out of windows, his reasonable voice argued.

But in his heart, he knew better.

CHAPTER 2

Teddy Bragg looked like a candidate for bypass surgery. Dartelli worried about him. His skin was the color of watery cottage cheese and he lacked the nervous energy that had given him the longtime nickname Buzz. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath bad, and he had buttoned his shirt incorrectly, making him into an old man, but Dartelli didn’t have the heart to point out the buttoning error because Teddy Bragg took such things extremely personally, and when his mood went sour, everyone around him suffered.

“I got a total staff of two, don’t forget,” he said, apologizing first, which troubled Dart. “And I gotta run this by Kowalski-I’m perfectly aware of that-but you’re the one who asked about the apartment, so you’re the one I called.”

The lab ceiling was water-stained acoustic tile, the floor, paint-stained cement. Too much stuff had been taped and removed from the walls, leaving dark holes in the cream-colored paint. What remained of the evidentiary lab communicated by an open door with the pantry-size area in which a behemoth photo developer churned out crime scene photographs and mug shots, lending an inescapable toxic odor to both areas that gave Dartelli a quick headache, and Teddy Bragg his rheumy eyes.

“I can wait if I have to, Buzz, it’s only a suicide.” Lies. One begot the next.

“That wasn’t your attitude on Monday.”

“It’s Thursday. I have other fish to fry.” Dartelli tried this out on the man, despite the churning in his stomach and the tightness in his chest. For four days he had slept poorly, haunted by the image of Stapleton’s crushed face, and the suspicion that the past had surfaced like Ahab’s whale. He wanted whatever Bragg had, wanted it badly, but felt more like his alcoholic mother when she tried to hide her bottle. No one must know, he reminded himself.

“I gave it to Sam,” he said, meaning Samantha Richardson, the other half of Bragg’s department. Richardson handled all of the photography and most of the evidence collection, while Bragg dealt with the scientific analysis that wasn’t shipped out to the State Police, administration, and most of the court testimony. “I sent her with a uniform as an escort because I was hoping to get her back alive.”

“Stapleton’s apartment,” Dartelli clarified, itching for whatever information Bragg could supply and trying to appear nonchalant about it. The area north of the city where Stapleton had lived was not safe for a Caucasian out of uniform, even in the daytime.

“We didn’t lift any red pubic hairs or head hairs, for that matter. And though the neighbors knew there was a girlfriend involved-a lot of shouting, evidently-she, Sam, didn’t get a name from them.”

Dartelli had wanted to handle these interviews himself but had decided that on a north end suicide it might attract unnecessary attention within the department for him to express such interest. Leaving it to Bragg and Richardson had been difficult. Dart liked to maintain control, but he had complete faith in Bragg-at least when the man was healthy.

“No name?” Dartelli asked, frustrated by the thought he might have lost his chance to connect Stapleton to whoever had been in that room with him.

Lots of unanswered questions remained: Why had Stapleton traveled downtown to the De Nada, if his intention had been to commit suicide? And if his intention had not been to commit suicide, then why did he come prepared with the special screwdriver? And if his sole intention had been to have a whore on the night of his suicide, then why had Vice/Narcotics failed to produce the missing redhead? Given the two- hundred-dollar finder’s fee offered for information leading to the woman’s identity, it seemed inconceivable to Dartelli that they still had no solid leads. This was not a big town.

“I didn’t say that,” Bragg corrected, “just that the neighbors were worthless as usual.”

“You did get a name!” Dartelli said, seizing on the fact and belying his external calm. Give me the fucking name! he felt like shouting.

“Sheesh, think you won the lottery or something,” Bragg said suspiciously. Knowing he had the man, Bragg