Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“You’d catch it first,” he said.

“You bet we would,” she answered.

“So someone could hurt your company if they were to imply an association between your trial and these suicides?”

“This kind of sabotage could ruin us.” She appeared nervous then, irritable and anxious to be done with Dart. She said, “To be perfectly honest, Detective, the idea of this is frightening, and I’d like to get right on it. Again,” she said strongly, “I think if there were any such connection to be made, I most certainly would have heard about it, but if you’d excuse me-”

“I need to know what’s going on,” he said bluntly.

“I understand,” she said.

“I may be able to help you,” he offered.

“Yes.” She attempted a smile, but it failed. She was too shaken.

“One last question,” Dart said. He felt invasive with these questions. Here was Martinson, having been told that someone was trying to sabotage her company, and he, Dart, continued to pry into every dirty corner. “Is Proctor Securities-your security firm-ever involved in these trials in any way? Do they ever have access to these trials or to the trial results?”

“I should say not!” She flushed a bright crimson. “They police our parking lots for God’s sake. They help us with corporate espionage from at home and abroad.” Her eyes went wide and she snapped, “Where the hell are they when we need them?” He could see her making a mental note about this. She pulled herself together and said, “This is a highly competitive field, Detective, with tens- hundreds -of millions of dollars at stake. If one product fails, another may be in position to take its place. Terry Proctor is supposed to stay on top of that kind of thing. Protect our interests.” She tried another smile, this one more effective. “Can we continue this another time?”

Dart nodded. She spun her head around as she stood and Dart stole a look at her neck.

Definitely a scar. A knife wound. And by the look of it, a nasty one.

Dart didn’t want to return to 11 Hamilton Court because the house was being kept under surveillance on the hope that Wallace Sparco- Walter Zeller -might be apprehended. But it was Zeller’s own teachings that leaned Dart toward going back and reexamining its contents. That house remained the only physical link to the visitor at the Payne suicide. Always return to the crime scene , Zeller had taught him.

“Usually I hate being on call,” Samantha Richardson said, flirting with Dart as she unlocked the door to the photo lab. Bragg’s assistant and photographer wore blue jeans and a red flannel top that looked suspiciously like pajamas. At eleven-thirty at night, anything was possible-people showed up in the strangest clothes. Dart was hardly sleeping, between the night tour and day calls, like the one at Roxin Laboratories. He felt a wreck, and looked it too.

At night, the tiny basement forensics lab smelled no better than during the daytime, thanks to the photographic processor in the adjacent room. Richardson pulled a pair of chairs in front of the computer monitor, and Dart joined her.

“For initial viewing, we downsize the images for higher resolution,” she explained. The ERT team had shot digitized images, not photographs. Richardson prepared Dart for what he would see. “Shooting in relative darkness, as they did, the lighting, as you can imagine, is off. The camera sees things much as your night-vision goggles. One of the nice things, however, is that we can ask the computer to compensate and correct the lighting deficiencies. Fill in color. Enhance. And often the images get surprisingly close to a well-lighted, even daylight, look. That’s what we’ll do,” she told him. “We’ll start with the degraded image and enhance. We can always get back to the original.”

The first image, a shot of the sitting room with the recliner and television, appeared on the screen. At first, a difficult green and white, a black bar moved slowly down the screen, and as if lifting a shade, the room was suddenly in full color. The technology amazed Dart. “You’ll like this,” she said, typing furiously and then grabbing the computer’s mouse. The floor of the room suddenly tilted, and the image became fully three-dimensional, as if Dart were on a ladder looking down.

“What the hell?” Dart asked.

“The digital cameras are stereo-optic-another advantage. The computer uses algorithms to create the three-D effect.” She rotated the room, so that Dart was looking from a different direction, but the left of the screen was blank. She explained, “The computer cannot fill that which the camera never saw.” She pointed to the blank side of the frame and said, “This is where the photographer was standing while taking the shot.”

Dart gushed with enthusiasm over the technology, which Richardson clearly appreciated. She complained, “Only the Staties can afford the cameras, but maybe one of these days …”

Frame by frame, Richardson walked Dart through the house and through the evidence. The ability to manipulate the point of view afforded Dart the opportunity to see the rooms from many angles. He studied each carefully, occasionally requesting an enlargement of a particular area, something the computer could render in seconds. Room by room, he sought out any physical evidence that might provide insight into where to look for Walter Zeller, aka Wallace Sparco.

“ The killer is inside them. ” Zeller’s words continued to haunt him. As much as Dart believed Zeller was the killer, the only convincing physical evidence that he possessed connected the resident of 11 Hamilton Court to Payne’s suicide. Everything else remained circumstantial. And though he now believed that Zeller was Sparco, it didn’t necessarily mean that Sparco/Zeller had actually killed Payne. Perhaps, as Zeller wanted Dart to believe, it was the Roxin drug that connected all the suicides, and Martinson and her company were in fact the ones to blame. No matter, 11 Hamilton Court seemed to offer Dart the main hope of finding answers and its resident. If he could only locate Zeller….

For several days now he had cursed himself for not attempting to bring in Zeller at the fire. He wasn’t sure how he might have accomplished that. He had ended up outside, unarmed and in shock. But he blamed himself for falling under Zeller’s controlling spell, ever the student, the listener.

“Are you with me?” Richardson asked.

“Sure.”

She led him through a series of enhanced images that took them down the basement stairs and into the laundry room. Even under the effects of the computer’s improved colors, the room appeared dingy and dank. Dart recalled the moldy, suffocating smells.

“There,” he said, leaning forward and pointing out the workbench. “Can you enlarge that?”

Richardson rendered the image into 3-D, rotated it to face the workbench, and then stepped the computer through a series of enlargements, drawing the workbench progressively closer. “Fly-tying gear,” he said.

“Fly fishing,” she said.

“Yes.”

There was a small fly-tying vise that sat beneath an adjustable light, both mounted to the workbench and with a magnifying glass attached above the vise. The shelves were littered with feathers and plastic containers too grainy in enlargement to see well. If Dart had not known that Wallace Sparco was in fact Walter Zeller, he might have passed right by this as he had on the night of the raid. But suspecting this might be Zeller’s lair, the fly-tying kit stuck out. Walter Zeller hated fishing. The kit made sense only as an effort to create a fictional identity for Sparco. As such, its existence could be explained. But Dart the student, the man who knew Walter Zeller nearly as well as Zeller himself, read more into it. The ruse was too elaborate to be explained as an effort to mislead investigators. He could have left a tennis racket or a bag of golf clubs. It’s more important than that, Dart thought.