Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“Okay, I guess.”

The black man was in his early thirties, his skin more cream than charcoal. He had a wide, flat nose and thick lips that parted slightly to reveal a chipped front tooth. Mildly handsome, his face knew no smile, and the hard, distrustful eyes knew no friends.

The studio apartment was dingy, dark, and smelled of cigarette smoke and bitter coffee. A worse-for-wear color television glowed blue from the corner-a cop show rerun. The countertop of the pullman kitchen held empty bags from fast-food chains. The furniture consisted of a ratty twin bed, a single straight-back chair, and a milk crate used as a footrest in front of a red vinyl overstuffed chair that had seen better days. Sparco saw no reading material whatsoever. A pelt of dirty clothes hung from a hook by the bathroom. The apartment’s only two windows had been boarded over with irregular sheets of dirty plywood recovered from construction sites, pieced together poorly with screws, nails, and duct tape. It was worse than any prison cell Zeller had ever seen. For Dennis Greenwood, this was home.

Sparco, his shoulders slouching, set down the duffel bag, which occupied Greenwood’s attention and drove a look of suspicion into the man’s hard eyes. His brow furrowed and his jaw muscles flexed tight as chestnuts.

“I need to ask you some questions about how things are going,” Sparco said. “Maybe take some blood.”

“I just had my tests,” he complained.

Sparco stepped closer to his victim and said in a warm, friendly voice, “Hey, I’m just following orders, you got to understand.” He met eyes with the man and then delivered the blow as a sharpened spear-a single devastating thrust of his right fist into the exact center of the man’s chest.

Greenwood’s body seized. His knees gave out. He tried to breathe, but the blow to the solar plexus had been perfectly delivered and the effect was immediate-his nervous system stunned numb and useless.

Sparco spun him around in an instant, sagged along with him, supporting him as they sank down to a kneeling position and then slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, locking his arms behind his back. He then forced the man’s flapping chin up, sealing his mouth closed, both covering the man’s lips and pinching his nose. With his right hand Sparco awkwardly fished out a small plastic bag filled with cocaine-annoyed by the need for the glove-and bringing the bag to his teeth, tore a corner off it.

Greenwood’s breathing would return before the use of his limbs-the body’s first reaction was for survival. Wallace Sparco waited, his left hand muzzling the man’s air supply. The chest began to heave, straining for air; Sparco reinforced his grip. Greenwood blinked repeatedly, reminding Zeller of a bird. He choked him down hard, pinching his nose and denying him air. Greenwood’s body recovered quickly, and he began to struggle, rocking his head, pushing back with his legs, desperate to breathe.

Sparco, still cupping the man’s mouth, raised the bag of coke to the man’s nose and inverted it at the same time that he released his finger pinch. In one enormous breath, Greenwood sucked in the contents-a gram of cocaine. As the white powder spilled over his upper lip he looked as if he had dipped his face in baking flour. His eyes went wild and wide as the coke froze his lungs and rushed to his head. He tried to scream but, still muzzled, managed only a whimper.

Sparco hooked his elbow around his victim’s windpipe in a practiced choke hold, took his own right wrist in his left, and applied a constant steady pressure like a vise, being careful not to bruise. Three years earlier the Hartford police had been taught this defensive move, and then, a few months later, refused to use it after three suspects had died of crushed windpipes.

“This is for Melanie,” Zeller, not Sparco, whispered hotly into the man’s ear. Melanie, eleven years old, fondled, raped, and sodomized over a seven-month period by this bastard. At Greenwood’s trial he had testified that he had gotten her high on coke before “doing” her. Melanie, for whom Greenwood had wept while on the stand, a performance that bought him thirty days in jail and a two-year probation from a judge with a known drinking problem. The system.

Dennis Greenwood passed into the semiconscious state that Zeller intended-an oxygen-deprived narcosis, neither awake nor fully unconscious.

Sparco moved smoothly; his actions had been choreographed and the routine rehearsed. He dragged the body over to and into the red, overstuffed chair facing the television, went over to the sink and poured a glass of water, and returned to the body. He opened his safari jacket and, without looking, removed the unlabeled brown prescription bottle with the tamper-proof cap. He primed the pump first, tilting the man’s head back and pouring a tiny amount of water down his throat. Greenwood coughed violently, spraying the water. Sparco tried again, this time massaging the man’s throat, and the water went down. He then emptied all twenty-seven of the ten-milligram Valiums into Greenwood’s mouth, and chased them with a mouthful of water. Greenwood swallowed repeatedly, the visible pulse beneath the skin of his neck revealing the effects of the cocaine on his heart.

Zeller cleaned up the man’s chin with Wallace Sparco’s light blue handkerchief, as attentive as a mother with her newborn, and then studied the room carefully.

He found a small plate by the sink. He set it down by the unconscious victim and tapped the coke bag until a dusting fell there. Then, in what he considered a brilliant touch, holding it by the edge, he used Greenwood’s laminated driver’s license to move this dusting of cocaine around on the plate and then left the license in plain sight sitting there.

From his fishing vest he removed the short length of a plastic drinking straw that he had prepared in advance-it already had traces of cocaine up inside it. He pushed the body around, accessing the man’s handcuffed hands, and pinched the straw with Greenwood’s fingers so that it retained his latent prints, and then placed the straw on the plate.

He put the man’s prints onto the prescription vial as well and dropped it into the chair alongside the victim’s leg, its plastic lid left by the plate.

Walter Zeller had attended dozens of similar crime scenes. Wallace Sparco studied it carefully to make sure it added up. He liked it-it looked good.

The duffel bag housed the cordless Dust-buster. Sparco ran the device over the floor where the cocaine had fallen as a snowy dust, lifting every last grain. He then vacuumed the entire area between the apartment’s door and the kitchen sink-the area in which he had walked. Putting the vacuum away he turned once again to his fishing vest, this time carefully examining its contents. He selected three vials, popping one lid at a time, and carefully sprinkling a tiny amount of household dust, then a pinch of cotton and synthetic fibers, and finally a trace of cigarette ash-a recipe for Teddy Bragg’s aardvark to find.

Greenwood twitched awkwardly and unexpectedly, and Zeller wondered if the blood vessels in his head had exploded and killed him before the Valium was given a chance. He hoped not. Wallace Sparco paid it no mind. His work was completed: If he wasn’t dead already, Greenwood would suffer an irreversible coma within the hour, death within three.

Sparco removed the handcuffs and checked to make sure there was no bruising from them. He walked gingerly to the door. The locks were the variety that offered a spring-loaded tongue meeting a steel housing screwed into the jamb. A knob could be twisted and a toggle thrown to set the lock open or allow it to close. Sparco threw the toggle on all three, releasing their metal tongues. The fourth lock was a deadbolt mounted inside the door. There was little Sparco could do about that. He pulled the door shut firmly, setting in place three of the four locks. When, in twenty to forty hours, the body’s decomposition announced itself to neighbors, the police would have to kick the door, splintering and destroying the jamb, perhaps covering up that the dead bolt had not been used.