Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“That’s as good as we’re going to get it,” Samantha Richardson said.

Dart checked his watch. “No,” he said, “we can do better.”

Dart knocked on the car door and then slipped inside. The man behind the wheel had blond hair and a dark mustache. He looked younger than his thirty-eight years. Dart knew him as Jack. He had forgotten his last name.

“Anything?” Dart asked, glancing down the street at 11 Hamilton Court.

“Nothing.”

“Lights?”

“I said nothing, didn’t I?”

“I’m going inside,” Dart informed him.

“If you’re going inside, I’m going to take a leak.”

“If I’m going inside, I want you as backup.” He indicated his cellular phone. “If someone shows up, I want a warning.”

“Well,” the man protested, “I want to take a leak. You wait for me, I’ll be your backup.”

Dart wrote down his cellular number. “Don’t be long,” he requested.

“You want a doughnut or coffee?” Jack asked.

“No, thanks.”

Dart returned to his department-issue Taurus. With the Volvo out of commission, getting to work had meant hitching a ride with a friend or taking a city bus. He was tired of both, neither of which worked well for the night tour.

He sat behind the wheel for ten minutes. Then, pissed off, decided to wait no longer.

He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and entered through the back door, using the key that hung on the nail that Kowalski had claimed had been described to him in the “anonymous” phone call. The nail was there all right, and the key that hung on it. And the nail was rusted, not a recent addition. All of this would be part of Kowalski’s scheduled IA review.

The second time into a building always felt more familiar, though entering alone, and without backup, made Dart queasy. He was not afraid, but apprehensive. He moved quickly through the sitting room, where the room’s only lamp, on a security timer, was dark. At one o’clock, the bedroom light upstairs would be switched off automatically, also on a timer. Dart headed immediately to the basement, pulled the door shut behind him, and switched on the lights.

Step by step, he cautiously descended, feeling an increasing sensation of dread. He passed the washer/dryer; ducked under a clothesline, and approached the workbench and the fly-tying kit. As seen on the lab’s computer, the surface was littered with Baggies and small plastic vials. Dart studied these more closely. Some were filled with feathers, others animal fur, others contained bare metal fishhooks in varying sizes. Lead shot, metal filings, pipe cleaners, rolls of thin wire, thread. He leafed through the contents. And then again. It did not escape him that Kowalski liked to fly-fish, nor that Kowalski had been caught here. Nor that Kowalski, for his bungling of Lucky Zeller’s murder investigation, was a known enemy of Zeller’s.

Again, struck by the significance of the fly-tying kit, Dart inspected the contents of the workbench more carefully: elk hair, pheasant feathers, partridge, bobwhite, peacock. Synthetics of every color … A small plastic vial of thin aluminum shavings. Another, half-filled with copper shavings …

Dart paused, his hand on the prescription-size plastic vial containing the copper shavings. He experienced a flash of heat like a nausea that began in his stomach and rose into his throat like a bubble. He recalled Teddy Bragg’s review of the Gerald Lawrence evidence-the man’s hanging himself with a lamp cord. Dart fished out his notebook and flipped backward until he found Lawrence’s name written in caps at the top of a page. He skimmed down through his notes: copper filings on clothing and skin consistent with the lamp wire.

Copper filings … Dart shook the small vial. It contained a few coiled pieces of different-gauge copper wire. He held it up to the light. A small crescent of fine copper shavings filled the bottom.

His hand shaking, he set down the vial and drew up the stool beneath himself, his legs suddenly watery. He studied each of the vials more carefully, separating out the Baggies of swatches of brightly colored fabrics-pieces of carpeting and clothing-as he remembered Teddy Bragg detailing “the usual hairs and fibers” discovered at each of the crime scenes. The last small film canister that he opened offered all the convincing he needed. He tapped out its contents onto the table: human hairs. But it was the color that both intrigued and excited him: They were red!

And he understood.

“What the hell?” Ted Bragg’s shirt was buttoned lopsidedly and there was sleep dust stuck to the lid of his left eye. “Richardson is on call tonight. This morning ,” he corrected, checking his watch. It was 3:00 A.M. Dart had been at 11 Hamilton Court only a few hours earlier. It seemed like a lifetime to him now.

“I needed the best, Teddy. I needed you.”

“That’s bullshit, and we both know it. Richardson is good.” He sized up Dart. “You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit,” Dart said.

He checked his watch again.

“So what’s so fucking important?” He added, “I tell ya, this had better be good.”

“Do you have your stuff?”

“It’s in the car.”

“I’ll help you,” Dart offered.

Bragg shook his head in disgust. “May I remind you: I am not on call tonight.”

They removed two heavy bags from Bragg’s trunk. Dart was trying hard to reveal none of the turmoil and excitement he felt. Convinced that he finally understood each of the suicides, only Bragg was capable of confirming these, for him and for Bragg himself. But to be truly effective, he would have to trick the man.

“Where is everybody?” Bragg questioned.

“I haven’t called it in,” Dart answered, leading him up the flight of stairs.

“Smells like smoke in here,” Bragg said, moving up the stairs slowly. “Are you trying to tell me that you’ve called me to a crime scene that you haven’t called in?”

“That’s right.”

Bragg stepped inside the apartment door and set down the bags. “That’s not like you, Ivy.”

“No.”

“I tell ya, if you’re yanking my chain-”

“I’m not. I need an over-the-top is all,” Dart told him.

“Yeah, right-an over-the-top,” Bragg repeated caustically. “Since when do I do a half-ass job, Ivy? Answer me that.”

“You’re the best, Teddy.”

“Fuck you.” Bragg stooped toward the bags. “You’re playing assistant, I’ll tell you that much. This just became a two-man team.” He snapped on his gloves and went to work.

Dart heaved a sigh of relief.

Forty minutes later, Bragg sat down, clearly exhausted.

He had scrutinized every detail of the crime scene, collecting and bagging evidence at each step. He had been particularly intrigued with his discovery that the carpet below the broken window appeared to have been vacuumed. He had given Dart an all-knowing look that the detective had relished clear to his core.

Bragg packed up his gear, keeping the dozen or so evidence bags separate. He sat on a wicker chair. Dart leaned against the wall. “Well?” Dart asked.

“I tell ya, I see what it is about it that gave you the hard-on. I’ve got glass from the broken window-inside, on the carpet-that says the perpetrator most likely entered from the fire escape. Mud and some familiar organic matter-it looks like those same cypress needles to me-those from his shoe soles-good supporting evidence. All this in an area that appears to have been vacuumed-again, familiar. Maybe we find rock salt and potting soil when all is said and done-my guess is that we will. But I’ve got synthetics and what looks like cotton fibers on top of that area, meaning we’ve got timing problems-just like at Harold Payne’s suicide.”