Chain of Evidence

“That’s up on Park,” she said, naming the worst street in town.

“How many groceries between here and Shop-way?” he quizzed.

“Two. Three, maybe. Catering to the college kids.”

“Catering to the whites,” he said. Shopway was an inner-city store.

“You’re trying to narrow down his neighborhood,” she said, impressed. “To identify someplace we might find him.” She added, “We put the Shopway under surveillance, assuming it’s closer to home.”

Dart grinned at her, dumping what little trash the bag held and collecting the grocery sack as evidence.

Then he opened the downstairs coat closet and searched through the three jackets hanging there.

Abby said, “He would have bought these at a secondhand store-a Salvation Army, something like that. You’re looking for tags, something to further narrow the neighborhood.”

“Nothing,” Dart mumbled, shutting the closet door and leading her upstairs.

Following closely, Abby said, “My guess is that he’s going to wish he hadn’t trained you so well.”

“Compliments,” Dart said, “will get you everywhere.” He entered the bedroom and headed for the closet.

Abby switched on the light. Dart turned quickly, shook his head, and said, “No!”

“This,” he said, checking through the clothes, “may have started out secondhand … and he would have bought it big, so that it fit him, but wasn’t his size … and some of it would have gotten thrown out: the Payne stuff for instance-too much blood. But he has a thing about clean clothes. Did you ever notice? Freshly ironed shirts, pressed pants. He and Lucky got in an argument once because she wanted to save money, but the Sarge insisted on sending out his shirts. It was almost a-”

“Fetish,” she completed for him, holding up the shirttail of one of the hanging shirts. “Is this what you’re looking for?” Next to her gloved right thumb was a blue commercial laundry tag, neatly pinned with a thread of plastic to the shirttail.

Excitement stole into Dart: A grocery store was unlikely to have an address for a customer; but a commercial laundry just might.

As they climbed back into the Taurus, their body language expressing their urgency, Dart told her, “I would have found the laundry tag.” He started the car. “But I might have missed that grocery bag,” he confessed.

“You see?” she crowed. “You need me.”

The map on Abby’s office wall consisted of enlarged photocopies of a one-square-mile area surrounding the Park Street Shopway supermarket. Dart had made a pot of coffee, having worked through his shift, but stayed at Jennings Road. Abby had gone home for a few hours sleep, having returned a few minutes earlier, just before nine. Using the yellow pages, Dart had spent the wee hours narrowing down the location of the city’s nineteen commercial laundries. Six pushpins were now stuck into the improvised map.

At 9:02 Dart, yellow pages at his side, hung up the phone, stepped over to the map, and withdrew one of the pushpins. “White tags pinned to the collar using safety pins,” he said.

At 9:30, Abby complained, “White tags, green tags, pink tags-but no blue tags.”

“We’ll find it,” Dart said.

“Not near the Shopway,” she said, removing the last of the pins.

Dart stared at the map, thoughts buzzing in his head. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, feeling depressed. This was his sleep time, and a Saturday morning to boot. His body was experiencing jet lag. His head hurt. His back was sore from having fallen asleep in a chair. He envied her the few hours sleep.

Abby excused herself and left the room. Dart, who had been trying since Thursday to return a call left by Ginny, dialed her number. Her machine picked up. He cradled the phone, jealousy consuming him. Ginny was always home on a Saturday morning. This meant that she hadn’t slept there the night before. He’d wondered why he hadn’t heard from her. Typically they played phone tag until one reached the other.

Abby returned and said brightly, “So I guess we try every friggin’ laundry in the city until we find one that uses blue tags.” She plopped down into a chair by a phone and said, “Do you want to start with the A’s or the N’s?”

An hour later Abby hung up and reported, “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I finally found a company using blue tags,”-at which point Dart hung up in the middle of a call. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “They use blue tags, but their numbers aren’t close to this five-digit one that we have.”

His moment of elation past, Dart sank down in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Did they say anything about blue tags?”

“He gave me the name of the company that wholesales the tags,” she replied, and Dart realized that this was where he should have started all along. “Nutmeg Supplies out of Bridgeport. But it’s Saturday, and they won’t reopen until Monday. So if we can wait-”

“We can’t,” he reminded.

“No. I didn’t think so.”

“But we may not have to,” Dart said, recalling that Bud Gorman often worked weekends.

Gorman was an avid NASCAR fan, and liked to travel to NASCAR races all over the country. He managed this without chewing up too much vacation time by working six-day weeks and then trading in this extra time for a Friday or Saturday of his choice, buying himself three-day weekends whenever a race required an extra travel day. Dart reached him and was put on hold.

Gorman returned to the phone angrily. “You never return my calls.”

“I’ve hardly been home.”

“I have the Roxin information for you-who they are; what they’re about.”

“I have more urgent, local needs.”

“Dr. Arielle Martinson,” Gorman said, ignoring him. “Three venture capital firms and an industrialist from Sweden own seventy-three percent. Martinson’s been at the helm since the inception. She came out of the University of Michigan, where she chaired the genetics research program, which saw a hell of a lot of federal funding and where this industrialist, Cederberg, first met her. A real slow start to earnings, as with most biotechs- six years until it made a nickel. Has done very well with an arthritis treatment-”

“Artharest,” Dart interjected, forcibly interrupting the man. “Another time, Bud. Thanks. I’ve got an-”

“What you might be interested to know,” the man continued, undaunted, “is that Martinson-who pulls in eight hundred a year, plus stock options, incidentally-has nearly an entire year of her life missing. I mean, I’ve got basically nothing on her. I show some medical expenses, some attorney expenses, and that’s about it. ‘That’s all, folks.’ My guess is, she went off to what amounts to the funny farm in Switzerland. But it wasn’t no vacation-I don’t show that kind of spending pattern at all.”

Dart recalled the thick scar behind her ear and her nervous habit-her compulsion-of attempting to keep it hidden.

“My guess is, if I could get into her insurance records …,” Gorman said wishfully. Dart made a note to call Ginny and see what she could do. He felt himself sweating. Gorman had agitated him.

Dart charged in before Gorman could start again. “I need the name-and the phone number for that matter, if you’ve got it-for the owner of something called Nutmeg Supplies in Bridgeport.”

“Wait a second,” Gorman said, disgruntled. “Let me write this down.”

Dart repeated his request, and gave his extension in the conference room.

“Gimme a couple minutes.”

When the phone rang and Dart answered it, Gorman read off the information without saying hello. He ended with “No charge” and hung up.

Dart reached the owner of Nutmeg Supplies at home and heard football in the background on television. The television made him think of home, and that made him think of Mac, and even with the neighbor kid walking and feeding the dog during the days, he felt awful having to lock the dog up so much on night shift. The owner of Nutmeg Supplies, a man named Corwin, grew angry with Dart at first, believing the call was a phone solicitation. “I’m with the Hartford police,” Dart repeated for a third time.

“I thought it was a gimmick,” the man said apologetically. “That you was selling home security or one of them steering wheel locks or something.”

“I’m not selling anything,” Dart said.