Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“No,” Bragg answered. “He did not dive.”

Dartelli noticed that he had tuned out all else; he felt as if he were inside the computer screen.

“We have his weight programmed into it, his height. If he had an extraordinary build I might tweak things to make him appear stronger to the software. But he’s basically a normal build, and I’ll tell you something-he needs a hell of a lot more velocity,” the scientist explained. “So, let’s make him run for that window.” The software showed the mannequin attempt to run through the room for the window. The tight quarters required an awkward sidestepping. “You should have seen us trying to convince the thing to do that dance,” Bragg said. The mannequin struck the window, and fake pieces of glass went out with him. “We tried ten different times to get him out that opening with the speed necessary. He went through the glass every time. Turns out he would have had to start the dive back by the bed to make it out that opening with the necessary speed. That computes to traveling three feet, perfectly level through the air-Superman, maybe, not David Stapleton.”

Dartelli said, “And that leaves-”

Interrupted by Bragg. “A little help from my friends.”

A second mannequin appeared in the room, appropriately, dark gray, almost black. It picked up the Stapleton mannequin by the neck and waist, took two running steps toward the window and ejected the body. In the adjacent screen the body appeared and floated downward. It fell short of the cement tub, but drew much closer to the chalk outline than the other attempts.

“We got it right on the second try,” Bragg announced. “He would be a big guy, or one hell of a strong woman or smaller man, to accomplish this.”

The gray mannequin was noticeably larger this time. Two steps and the body was thrown from the room.

It came out the window parallel to the ground, arced, rolled, and the left shoulder impaled itself on the cement tub. The body lurched back, the head snapping sharply, and the mannequin smacked to the sidewalk in a crumpled heap.

Bragg worked the keyboard. The crime scene photograph reappeared, perfectly replacing the computer graphics. An exact match.

“Wow,” Dartelli said, rocking forward tentatively in the chair. A big guy , he was thinking. He had a couple of candidates in mind.

“My sentiments exactly.” Ignoring the screen and the photograph of Stapleton’s bloodied heap, Bragg faced him. “The unfortunate part is that it’s not proof, Joe. It can certainly be used to sway a jury or a judge-I’m not saying that it’s worthless-but we have no other evidence to support someone spear-chucked Stapleton from that room, and the evidence that we do have contradicts it fairly strongly, given that it would have taken an Amazon woman-an easy six feet, one-eighty, one-ninety. If she’s under six feet, then she’s built like Schwarzenegger.”

Dart’s attention remained on the screen. “So it suggests homicide but doesn’t confirm it.”

“Precisely.”

Dartelli wormed his hands together, and fidgeted in the chair. Its springs creaked under his weight. A dozen thoughts flooded him, but one quickly rose to the surface.

Bragg seemed stuck with his own thoughts. A heavy silence settled between them. The screen showed the photograph of Stapleton’s ungainly corpse, twisted and awkward-painful, even to look at.

It has started , Dart realized.

He felt a surge of panic as Bragg said, “I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I’m going to try the software out on the Nesbit jump-the Ice Man.”

Dart was thinking that both Zeller and Kowalski closely matched the physical requirements that Bragg had put forth. Zeller was right around six feet, barrel-chested, built like a pickup truck, not a sedan. He had lost a considerable amount of weight after Lucky’s murder- but not his strength, Dartelli thought.

“Why bother?” Dart asked, thinking: He knows!

“It would be an interesting test of the software, wouldn’t it?” Bragg asked rhetorically.

“I suppose,” Dartelli answered, trying to sound bored.

“That one never cleared,” Bragg reminded.

“True.” Dart was wishing the man would leave it alone, and yet he, too, wondered what the software would reveal. “I’d be interested in the results.”

The lab man typed instructions into the keyboard and the white mannequin representing David Stapleton once again came out of the window in a dive. He floated, twisted, and he fell, connecting sharply with the cement tub before being thrown to the sidewalk. Dartelli felt the collision in his bones. “The software is on trial with us. I need to test the modeling,” Bragg said. “This could work well for me.”

“I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it,” Dartelli cautioned the man. “Rankin would not exactly welcome pulling that particular case back out of the uncleareds.”

“Agreed,” Bragg said, knowing the political sensitivity of the case, and no doubt recalling the battering the department had taken from the press. “But it could be done quietly-strictly to test the software.”

Dartelli felt sick. What if the software suggested that the Ice Man had not jumped? he wondered.

“I’ll give it a try,” Bragg said.

Dartelli said carefully, “And for now, maybe we keep it our little secret.”

Teddy Bragg nodded, and as his fingers danced, the animated David Stapleton was thrown from the window once again, catapulted to his contorted death five stories below.

Abby Lang’s Sex Crimes office was as dismal as the rest of Jennings Road. It was hard to improve upon linoleum and acoustical tile, although she had given it her best. She had hung a few pieces of artwork on the cinder block walls, had a vase of dried flowers on her desk, and there was classical music playing softly from the boom box. An adagio for strings. She, like Dart, had a personal computer on her desk; there were only a few detectives who went to this expense.

“Sit,” she said as he entered. “And shut the door.”

Dart obeyed. It was in his Wood.

“Check that out,” she said, indicating the Gerald Lawrence file. Dart had worried that this might be about Lawrence; he had come armed with a number of arguments, but he suddenly forgot most of them. She said, “Page numbers of Kowalski’s log.” She added, “The thing is, he didn’t need to include his log, but he was trying to save himself the paperwork. You ask me: He put his foot in it. There are pages missing.”

Dart spotted what she was talking about. Kowalski had merely admitted photocopies of his field notes as some of his case material. On the actual report it read: See attached.

“But it’s typed up,” Dart pointed out to her, finding himself in the awkward position of defending Roman Kowalski. “What’s the point of typing up your field notes instead of just typing up the report?”

“It’s OCR-optical character recognition,” she reminded. “Everyone’s using it to cheat on their reports.”

Dart was familiar with the scanning software that could turn handwriting into printed text, but this was first that he heard of this particular application. “A shortcut,” he said.

“Exactly. It’s not why the department invested in OCR, but it’s probably the most popular use at the moment.”

It made a world of sense to Dart: keep legible field notes, scan them into the computer, edit them on the word processor, and submit them as your report-thus avoiding the tedious duplication that writing up a report typically required. It made him question his own practices.

Following her suggestion, Dart checked the page numbers of the typewritten field notes and discovered a gap between pages three and five. “Four is missing,” he observed. Abby said nothing, continuing to type on her terminal. Dart checked through the rest of the report in case page four had merely been placed out of chronological order. Page four did not exist.