Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

In the morning, he returned to 11 Hamilton Court. Again, he knocked on the front door, and again no one answered. The piece of white tape remained in place. Disappointed not to find a sign of anyone, he moved around back, his heart busy in his chest, his palms damp and cold. He hated this neighborhood.

He found the stick that he had jammed into the gate’s crack lying in the dirt on the ground. Dart picked it up and held it. In the oozing mud outside the gate, he saw shoe prints coming and going. Shoe prints not his own.

Sometime during the night someone had been inside.

The rock salt and leaves that he had collected the night before were now in separate envelopes on the front seat of his car, marked and labeled. Evidence, he thought.

Perhaps just enough to convince Haite to authorize the raid.

It had been a busy few hours.

Dart loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “I need an ERT for an evidence collection raid on a house in the south end,” Dart explained to Sergeant John Haite. The skin around the man’s eyes was an ink blue, reminding Dart of a raccoon mask. CAPers was run by two sergeants, John Haite or Dave Almedi, each with his own group of detectives and his own desk in a glassed room off the division’s floor. The two were rarely in at the same time because their units rotated in and out of twelve-hour tours. Dart took a metal chair across from Haite’s cluttered desk. The fluorescent lights made their skin glow an ugly yellow-green.

“A what?” Haite asked rhetorically.

The idea of using an Emergency Response Team to do a raid for the sole purpose of collecting evidence was an idea all Dart’s. It would require writs and warrants and probable cause. Dart explained, “I can place an unknown person inside Harold Payne’s study on the night he … committed suicide. Bragg will support me in that whoever this was may have attempted to conceal his or her presence by vacuuming the rug.”

Haite appeared skeptical.

Dart handed over Bragg’s report, completed only an hour earlier, that showed an identical chemical composition between the rock salt recovered at Payne’s and the salt Dart had collected at 11 Hamilton Court. “This links this suspect to both Payne’s and the house at Eleven Hamilton Court. I contacted the owner, who put me in touch with a property management firm-”

“Peter Sharpe,” Haite said. All the slum property was handled by Sharpe. He was hated by the police.

“Yeah. The place is rented to one Wallace Sparco, white male, fifty-two.” Dart passed Haite the photocopy of Sparco’s driver’s license. He went in for the kill by handing him next the computerized rendering Lewellan Page had witnessed at Gerald Lawrence’s. Although imperfect, the similarity was undeniable. “Wallace Sparco has been busy making suicides,” Dart said.

“Shit,” came Haite’s reply, comparing the two photographs. He looked over at Dart with basset hound eyes of irritation. He didn’t want things more complicated. “They are not suicides?”

“That’s what I need to prove or disprove.”

“These are not your investigations. Where the hell is Kowalski on this?”

“It’s an end run, Sergeant,” Dart went ahead reluctantly. “I don’t feel good about it, but that’s the way it is.”

“An end run on Kowalski?”

“Each one of these suicides is his,” Dart pointed out.

“Oh, shit.” Haite tilted back in his chair. “Oh, shit. ”

“I know,” said Dart. “I don’t like it either.”

“Fuck this,” Haite said, exasperated. “I don’t need this kind of trouble.”

Dart waited him out. He knew better than to push Haite.

“Someone tapped both Payne and Lawrence and set them up to look like suicides?” Haite muttered. “Why?”

“To keep us from catching on. To keep going. To clean house: They’re both sex offenders, Sergeant. Pornography. Wife beating. Stapleton too.”

“Stapleton is who?”

“The jumper at the Granada Inn. August.”

“Oh, shit.” He scratched his head. “Oh, fuck.”

“I know,” Dart repeated.

“And what the hell are you asking for?”

“An evidence raid with an Emergency Response Team in case it gets ugly. That’s a lousy area, Pope Park.”

“I know.”

“A way to get in and out without Sparco any the wiser.”

“Fuck that,” Haite said. “We just get the paper right and we kick it and search it. So what?”

“Sparco is one careful son of a bitch, Sergeant. We have less than zero to go on. If we don’t find some kind of evidence connecting him to these crime scenes, we don’t want to tip our hand that we’ve been there.”

“It’s illegal. Have you considered that? No matter what, we have to post the place that it was searched.”

“Those search notices have a habit of blowing off the door, Sergeant.”

“Oh, fuck. What’s happened to you, Dartelli? Blow off the door? You’re suggesting we purposely avoid posting notice? That is illegal, Detective! ” He had raised his voice to shouting. Dart knew that by now the other guys would be looking this way, but with his back to the floor he couldn’t see.

“We post it, and if it blows off, it blows off.”

“This is not like you,” the sergeant condemned. He added, “This sounds much more like Kowalski or Drummond than you. What’s gotten into you?”

“Three murders made to look like suicides,” Dart answered. “We’ve got a jury of one running wild, Sergeant. If we don’t do something , the numbers are going to increase.”

Haite and Zeller had come up through the ranks at the same time. There was mutual respect between the men, but a healthy competition as well. If anyone felt as strongly about Zeller as Dart, it was this man sitting across from him. Were Dart to share the possibility of Zeller’s involvement with Haite, the detective risked being reassigned. Without ironclad proof, John Haite was not about to bring down Walter Zeller. So Dart avoided mentioning his former sergeant or the Ice Man investigation. But Haite had just reviewed the case a few days earlier.

“What about the Ice Man?” he asked. “He took a dive just like Stapleton.”

Dart met eyes strongly with his sergeant. “Yes, he did.” He offered nothing more. Telephones rang out on the floor. Haite and Dart maintained an unblinking eye contact.

“You’re saying the Ice Man was a sex offender? Do we know this? Can we prove this?”

Dart replied, “I didn’t say anything about the Ice Man, Sergeant. Do you have a specific question that you want to ask?”

Haite, still maintaining eye contact, bored a hole through Dart. He understood the meaning of Dart’s reserved tone of voice-he was trying to warn the sergeant off. Perhaps the only coincidence that Haite could pick upon-without Dart’s cooperation-was the date of Zeller’s retirement, which followed quickly after the Ice Man investigation.

“No questions,” Haite whispered dryly, fingering the photocopy of Wallace Sparco’s driver’s license, and Dart had to wonder what the man saw in the face. Did he, too, see the resemblance to Zeller?

Dart nodded. “Fine with me.” He hesitated and asked again, “And the ERT raid?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Haite now looked as pale as Teddy Bragg.

Two vans pulled onto Park Terrace at 1:00 A.M. One was painted gray and carried a red diagonal stripe that read: MANNY’S STEAM AND CLEAN. It had been confiscated by the State Police in a drug bust two years earlier and was now outfitted with a personal computer and printer, communications hardware, and an elaborate video setup. The second van was a customized beige Dodge with what appeared to be darkly tinted windows but were in fact one-way glass. Behind the glass, six men and one woman sat on opposing steel mesh benches. Clad all in black, wearing combat boots that laced over the ankle, four were members of the State Police ERT unit. One of the outsiders was Joe Dartelli, who had suffered through an egregiously boring ninety-minute briefing that had been lectured by the commander of the State Police unit, Tom Schultz. The remaining two, a woman named Gritch and a man named Yates, were a team that someone at HPD had coined “Ted Bragg on amphetamines”: evidence technicians whose specialty was speed and efficiency.