Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“Staying here, or visiting?” Dart inquired. “Did you get a feel for that?”

“Visiting, I think. He wasn’t very talkative. Not the same man by any means. But who can blame him? I don’t think any man could recover from losing his wife that way.” Sam’s face tightened, and Dart had the feeling that the loss of his own brother hung over him as well. “It’s not easy,” the man whispered, confirming Dart’s suspicions.

A feeling of dread swarmed through Dart, like the first hint of the flu. It seemed implausible that Zeller would have visited the city and not looked up a single friend-Dart had touched base with everyone he could think of.

Dart handed the shopkeeper his business card. “Call me right away, would you please?”

“I love a good surprise,” the man said.

“Yeah,” Dart answered. “This will be a hell of a surprise.”

Walter Zeller was not a rich man, having earned a policeman’s salary for twenty-two years, and so it had confused even his closest friends when he left the city and refused to sell his house-the house where his wife had been raped and murdered. He owned the house free and clear, and it represented his single biggest asset, and yet he had refused to sell, giving no explanation. For Dartelli, no explanation was needed. Perhaps he was the only one of Zeller’s friends to understand that part of the man, that specific quality, that would have made selling the house a further violation of his wife. Lucky Zeller had treasured the house-a rather common tract home in Vernon. The house was a brown ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision that hosted RVs, powerboats, and camper tops for pickup trucks. Dogwood Lane was oil stained from parked cars, its concrete gutters looking like chipped teeth. The limbs of the few mature trees, bare with winter’s approach, reached for a sky of gray cloud and cold wind.

Dart parked in Zeller’s driveway, wondering if he had quietly moved back from Seattle without telling anyone.

The building’s brown siding was stained gray where water from lawn sprinklers had soaked it. Dart felt a pang of nostalgia, troubled by the sight of the unattended gardens, and he knew in that instant that Zeller was not living here. The sergeant, renowned for his green thumb, for the endless hours he lavished on his plants and gardens, would never have allowed his beds to go unattended. A four-foot apron of bare earth, choked by clumps of dead weeds, surrounded the house. A few of the flower islands that had been cut into the small lawn by Zeller’s own hands had been covered over with gray gravel. Buried, as Lucky had been, Dart thought, knocking sharply on the front door. There was no answer, no sound of anyone inside. No surprise, he thought as he walked around the house and into the backyard, which flooded him with memories of barbecues, beer, and long discussions of the cases they had worked together.

He could recall Lucky’s cooking and the sound of her high voice. Despite the passage of time, the image of her bound and gagged corpse called up effortlessly and struck Dart with a pain in the center of his chest and a stinging in his eyes.

The three years that it had remained vacant had taken its toll. The deck needed painting, as did the trim around the windows. He climbed onto the deck and knocked on the back door, and peered through filthy windows at a kitchen that he had, at one time, considered almost his own.

Memories continued to plague him, mixing with images of the suicide victims. His police half battled with his friendship half, his suspicions contradicting his faith and trust in Walter Zeller. The similarities between the suicide jumps of the Ice Man and David Stapleton were impossible to overlook: the lack of a suicide note, the computer simulation confirming the bodies had been thrown from the windows. And for the better part of three years, Dart had believed, without knowing, that Walter Zeller was to blame for the Ice Man.

He tried several windows, all locked. He wasn’t about to break in. By the look of the place, Zeller had never returned. Dart knew that the inside had been left exactly as it had been on the night of Lucky’s murder. He had no great urge to visit that nightmare again.

He walked fully around the house and climbed into his Volvo, and sat parked in the drive for several long minutes contemplating Zeller’s possible involvement. A chill ran through him, head to toe and back to the center of his chest. He loved Walter Zeller like a brother, like a father, in a way that others wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know if he possessed the strength required to do what had to be done. The mere suggestion of Zeller’s culpability seemed itself a crime, certainly something that could not be raised with Sergeant Haite and the powers-that-be without a stack of evidence. Walter Zeller was the closest thing to a true hero that Jennings Road had ever produced. To arrest Walter Zeller on suspicion of murder would crush morale. The brass was certain to resist it without the smoking gun glued into Zeller’s hand and twenty-five nuns as witnesses.

Dart could think of a dozen reasons to drop this investigation, and very few to continue with it.

But he backed the Volvo out of the drive, focused on finding Zeller and connecting him to the crimes, his trust and faith converted to anger and resentment.

The following day Dart, Abby, and little Lewellan Page made the forty-five-minute drive to Sheffield through a cool but gorgeous afternoon. Mac the Knife patrolled the back of the Volvo, Lewellan offering her hand to lick. The spine of mountains bearing the northern stretch of the Appalachian trail were frosted with the first hints of winter. Lewellan, who had never been out of the Bellevue Square area of north Hartford, sat quietly in the backseat, eyes wide with awe, asking a nonstop stream of questions.

Tommy Templeton was well into his fifties. Since Dart had seen him last, his hair had gone completely gray. He was a big, solid man, shaped like a barrel with legs. He had rough, hard hands that looked more like a carpenter’s than an artist’s. He had a deep voice, kind eyes, and a small scar below his lip.

Greeting the three of them at the front door of his hilltop home, he shook hands with Abby and Lewellan and admonished Dart. “Six years I’ve been up here, and you’ve never visited. You’ve called, what, once?” Not allowing Dart the opportunity to respond, he welcomed them into his home, with its antique furnishings and spectacular sixty-mile view of the rolling hills of western Connecticut. The ceilings were low and the floors creaked under foot. The living room smelled of woodsmoke and pine needles. “Teddy has made it over to fish a couple times. Doc Ray, too.”

Dart had heard about those weekends. More drinking than fishing. “Maybe I could make the next one,” Dart lied.

“What about you, Lewellan?” Templeton asked. “Do you like to fish?”

“I like fish sticks,” she replied.

They all laughed. Abby put her arm around the girl and held her closely.

A people person, Tommy Templeton’s real gift as a police artist had been his ability to make friends quickly and to coax images from the unwilling minds of his witnesses. His was the craft of instant friendships. Since he had been divorced and left the force, six years earlier, Templeton had lived alone, creating commercial art for the tourist shops in southern Maine. He painted seagulls and fishing trawlers, and he drank too much and got out too little. There was no escaping the rumor mill of HPD.

Despite the view, Tommy Templeton worked in a studio with the shades drawn because sunlight compromised his computer screens. The computer gear-two flatbed scanners, a color laser printer, and a pair of Macintoshes, occupied the tops of three doors supported by rough-wood sawhorses and steel file cabinets. Cables and wires ran between them in a confusing tangle. He had pinned various pieces of computer art, both color and black-and-white, on his walls. There were nudes, landscapes, wildlife, and three self-portraits. The images, some of them vaguely familiar to Dart, were impressive. Like many artists, Templeton carried an aura of eccentricity. There was a duck decoy wearing a pair of reading glasses in the far corner that immediately grabbed Abby’s attention. But it was the full-frontal nude that captured Lewellan’s attention.