Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“What they say about you and your research is true, isn’t it?”

“I can’t watch the hallway and go for the files at the same time.”

“No way.” She didn’t hesitate a nanosecond.

“It can’t be done?”

“No, it can’t,” she confirmed.

“Not without help,” he pressed.

“Message received. Now hear this: No way!”

“Your office has a clean view of the hallway. With the door left open, you could see down that hall, could warn me. Sometimes there’s a late bust. Predicting traffic flow in and out of that division is never a sure bet.”

“It would make me an accomplice.”

“We carry pagers. They can be set to vibrate instead of beep, did you know that? If you were to program your phone to dial my pager number, then it would take only seconds to warn me. It takes exactly nine seconds to walk down the hallway and reach Narcotics once you’ve rounded that corner.”

She shook her head, looking amazed that he had already timed it. “And whoever it was would recognize you.”

“I’m dressed as a housecleaner. I wear a ball cap, glasses, and a press-on ’stache. I keep my head down. No one ever looks at the wombats. Not at one in the morning. I push my cart out the door, and I’m gone. Besides,” he offered, “that’s my risk, not yours. If I’m caught, I acted alone. You’ve done nothing more than pull an all-nighter. How unusual is that?” He spoke sotto voce. His heart was beating fast, and he was sweating. The vanilla was melting in front of him, untouched.

She reached out, snagged the spoon, and guided it back between her lips. “I suppose you already know the order that housecleaning cleans in. Which offices are done first?”

“I can do this alone,” he reminded, “but I thought I’d ask you first. I’m pressuring you, Abby, and I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”

She removed the spoon and pursed her lips. She looked at him quizzically, skeptically, squinting in a way that felt as if she were measuring him. Testing him. “You’re right about IA. Putting the request through them would probably take several weeks. But break into Narco’s files based on the testimony of a victimized twelve-year-old girl? Does that strike you as odd?”

“Don’t look at me like that.” He toyed with the ice cream, but wasn’t hungry.

“You’re really pissing me off here, damn it.”

“Good.”

A tension had settled between them, uncomfortable and gnawing. “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she declared.

At 12:30 A.M., Dart, wearing a fake mustache, blue jeans, and a dark blue ball cap, entered the department’s basement housecleaning closet, where he located both a cart and a navy blue smock that the service people wore. There were four workers assigned to clean the two-story building. Dart, heading upstairs, estimated that he had a little over an hour for a job he thought would only take a few minutes.

He had rarely found use for the speed key given him by Walter Zeller some four years earlier. Zeller had claimed that no investigating officer could get by without one, despite their illegality. The speed key was shaped something like a small flat pistol. It magically picked most locks with the squeeze of a trigger and was the preferred tool of car thieves because of its simplicity-insert the tongue into the lock, squeeze and hold the trigger, rotate, and the lock was open. Dart hid it under a stack of green cotton rags on the cleaner’s cart.

The mustache itched. The glue had dried, shrinking his upper lip in the process. If he sneezed he might send the thing across the room.

He used his cellular phone to call Narcotics’ second-floor office. He allowed it to ring eight times, thrilled that no one answered.

He pushed the cart out into the hall, headed quickly to the building’s sole elevator, and rode up, his heart rate increasing with every yard. This exploit reminded him of trying to rob money from his mother’s wallet atop her dresser bureau-he would steal the money, not for himself but so that when she checked the wallet to send him out for a bottle, she would lack money.

The elevator doors slid open, and at a distance of thirty feet, down the long ugly tile corridor, he caught eyes with Abby Lang. He felt stunned. Elated. She sat behind a desk inside her Sex Crimes office, looking both tired and concerned. Instinctively, Dart felt down for his pager and switched the beeper off so that if it were called it would vibrate, not sound. She was clearly there to help him. Nothing else could explain her presence at this hour.

As he rolled the cart toward Narco, Abby picked up her phone and touched a single button. Less than five seconds later, the pager clipped to Dart’s belt began vibrating. He reached down and cleared it-like silencing an alarm clock. She did not look up at him but kept her head aimed down at her desk and the paperwork that seemed to absorb her.

Dart had a lookout-an accomplice. An angel on his shoulder.

The listing cart’s front right wheel chirped. Dart awkwardly navigated it to a position in front of Narco. He knocked, waited, and then knocked again. With no reply, he slipped his hand beneath the stack of green rags and removed the speed key. The fact that he was violating regulations distrubed him. If caught, he would have some tough explaining to do. He was the cop turned criminal, and for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to do this. But the hope that Kowalski, not Zeller, was responsible for the murder/suicide of Lawrence, and the possibility of connecting Lawrence to Stapleton drove him on-anything to quiet his guilt.

With the speed key the door opened effortlessly. It was illegal in all fifty states to own such a device, and Dart suddenly understood why.

As in hotels, the housecleaners at Jennings Road blocked open office doors as they worked. Dart did just that, though only partially screening the room inside so that the closet used as a vault to contain files remained obscured from the hallway.

He switched on the interior light, emptied a trash can into the hopper on his cart, and placed a beat-up feather duster on the desk top closest. His watch face read 1:03. The cleaners would be arriving any minute and would start on the first floor. He had plenty of time.

The file room closet was locked, but the speed key made quick work of it. The light switch was mounted on the wall outside. Dart studied his situation, planning, predicting every movement required should his pager alert him to a visitor. He had to keep all actions to a minimum, and so rather than venture inside the room, he stood there figuring how to avoid being caught. He relocked the file room door, so that once shut it would be locked and not require him to fiddle with it. He used a green rag to block it open, and tested that by kicking the rag free, the door would close on its own. Then, with the light on, he stepped inside and looked to judge the line of sight: If someone showed up unexpectedly, this person would quickly have a clear sight of the open file room.

The light switch on the wall was on the far side of the hinges, meaning that Dart would have to kick the rag out of the way, get himself around the door, helping it close as he went, and then hit the light switch. But this light going off would be picked up even sooner by someone entering because the office door to Narcotics had an institutional smoked-glass panel, and a change in background light would be noticeable. He reviewed the situation; deciding he had things in the right order, rehearsed them once while counting in his head. Four to five seconds , he guessed. When combined with the five or so seconds that Abby needed to alert him, it would be too long.

He grabbed the mop and headed directly to the hallway’s broom closet, filled the rolling bucket from the soapstone sink, wetted the mop and, carrying a yellow plastic sandwich board warning of a WET FLOOR, hurried to the end of the hall near the stairs and the elevator. He mopped the floor furiously, making it as wet as possible, then placed the sandwich board in the center of the hall. With all this water he hopefully had bought himself some extra time while also slowing down any approach.