Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

“Roxin’s files.”

“Exactly. Harder to break into at the time, but not impossible. Since then they’ve made the place into Fort Knox. I saw the fucking test results, Ivy-the real ones. The shit they’re testing-the Laterin-did nothing.”

“Oh, Christ,” Dart said.

“They caught me at it- nearly caught me, nearly physically had me-and I’ve been on the run ever since. Once I got started … you know … Alverez was brought in. The paperwork that I saw was shredded. Deleted. Whatever. Bet on it. I couldn’t produce a shard of evidence to support what I knew. So only the one choice,” he said, leaving it for Dart to draw his own conclusion. “What fucking choice was there?”

Dart felt in turmoil. He had deciphered the suicides as murders, concluded that the murders were the work of someone attempting to discredit Roxin-Walter Zeller. But what Zeller now told him turned all that on its head. Dart mumbled, thinking aloud. “If I had left them as suicides, if I had connected them to the clinical trial-”

“What the fuck do you think I’ve been trying to tell you with these phone calls-and risking seeing you in person! You were doing too good a job. You were pissing me off. All you had to do was connect the deaths to Roxin’s clinical trial.” He led Dart off Charter Oak, electing to leave a main thoroughfare. “The rest would have fallen into place.”

Zeller said, “She’s running out of money-Martinson. This Laterin thing has consumed her for ten years. She’s moved her resources around, thrown too much money at Laterin. She has probably cooked the books, but eventually that catches up to you. They’ve been in various stages of clinical trials on Laterin for years. She needs this to work. If it doesn’t, she’s shit-out-of-luck. This fails, she’s out of business. Everyone goes home-some of us happy.” Zeller checked over his shoulder. “Don’t look now,” he said.

Dart glanced back and saw a police patrol car approaching at a crawl.

Zeller told him, “The woods behind my old place. Two hours. Be there.” He cut down a side alley, leaving Dart alone, disappearing in a heartbeat. He had perfected the art of vanishing.

The patrol car pulled alongside, rolling at a walker’s speed. Dart, displaying his shield, walked over to the car. “What’s the problem here?”

“Your piece,” the uniformed driver said, adding, “sir,” and making a head motion in Dart’s direction. “Didn’t know who you was.”

Dart’s sweatshirt had ridden up over his holstered weapon, which was now in plain view.

“How about the other guy?”

“He’s with me,” Dart replied. He was , he thought.

“Couple of guys in clothes wet from the knees down, walking these particular streets on a cold night carrying hardware …,” the cop explained.

“I understand,” Dart said.

“You on duty, sir?” the cop asked, trying to impress now. “You want, I could give you a ride back to Jennings Road.”

“I could use a ride,” Dart said. “But not to Jennings Road.”

They met in the dark alongside the droning hum of the electrical substation not far from Zeller’s former home; its mechanics were silhouetted against the sky like a giant schematic. It had snowed an inch, the first of the year, and the temperature had dropped into the twenties. Dart arrived first and was shivering by the time Zeller approached telegraphing the pain he was in without meaning to. Alverez had clearly wounded him back in the sewers.

Dart was for moving out from under the loud hum of the overhead wires. He strained toward the wooded darkness. “This shit makes too much noise,” Dart complained, glancing overhead. Stepping closer to Zeller, he pointed into the dark.

“You’re jumpy. Take it easy.” Zeller’s voice was tight. Dart worried for him.

“Are you all right?”

“Fucking peachy. Thanks.”

“What now?”

Zeller said, “It’s my job to sell you on leaving these as suicides. Let Martinson take the fall she deserves.” He paused. “I’d like to tell you that I’ll turn myself in, but I won’t. I’m not going to be locked up.”

“It’s too late,” Dart explained. “I’ve already convinced Teddy Bragg and Haite that they were staged suicides. The good news is that Haite wants nothing to do with it.”

“Well, there you go,” Zeller said. “Go along with him. Let them stand.”

“It won’t bring down Roxin. Martinson has dropped the names of the suicides from their list of participants-covered her bases.”

It was difficult to see in the dark, but Dart thought that he saw Zeller nod, as if he had expected something like this. His voice colored by pain and discouragement, Zeller said, “She pulls that off, and it’s all been for nothing.” He added, “Bitch.”

“I think you’re wrong about the files-the records of the clinical trials,” Dart said, taking control of where they should head. He couldn’t remember contradicting Zeller so directly. “Being deleted,” he continued. “Shredded. Does that sound like Martinson? You say they’ve been in clinical trial for years. A person like her-a devoted scientist-is not going to destroy test data. Not for any reason.”

“Bullshit. It’s gone.”

“Hidden, maybe, but not gone.” He explained, “She needs that data. She created that data. It’s important to her. She won’t destroy it.”

“I disagree.”

“If I’m her, I destroy all physical evidence of those files, but only after I’ve hidden a copy away for my own use.”

“And what? You’re going to subpoena it?”

“We’ve got Ginny,” Dart reminded him.

“The computer? You think Martinson has it in a computer?” Zeller asked, amused by the absurdity.

“Where else? Password protected. Safe. Easy to get at-but impossible for anyone else to access.”

“Doubtful, Ivy. It’s gone. She shredded it.” He reminded, “I was told that those files were shredded.”

“Shredded, maybe, but not destroyed.”

“You’re not making sense,” Zeller said angrily. “She’s not going to give you those files, Ivy, believe me. You make noise about them and she’ll destroy them, sure as shit.”

“Maybe that’s what we want,” Dart said obliquely. “For her to erase them.”

“Make some fucking sense, would you?” Zeller reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a mashed cigar. He tore open the crinkled cellophane and broke the cigar in half where it was torn, stuffed it into his mouth, and bit a piece off the end, spitting it out. Zeller located a match, cupped it, lit the cigar. “I fucked this up, Ivy. What I’m trying to tell you”-he puffed on the cigar and blew out the flame-” is that it’s over.”

Dart saw a small red dot blink against the fence’s galvanized pipe. It seemed like nothing more than the lingering aftermath of Zeller’s lighting the match, but Dart’s sight remained fixed and the dot moved.

It moved quickly toward Zeller’s head, and Dart identified it for what it was: an electronic sighting device used by marksmen. The red dot touched the fence behind Zeller’s shoulder and then quickly found his neck.

Dart slapped out with his open hand, catching a stunned Zeller on the side of the face and knocking him to the side. Zeller stumbled, dropped the cigar, and fell.

To Dart, the bullet sounded like a thin, fast wind at ear height. Zeller didn’t hear it. He misunderstood, shoving the detective away and prepared to fight. When the red dot found Dart’s cheek, Zeller lurched forward and returned a life-saving shove. Dart went down into the wet snow as the second bullet splintered off a piece of a tree trunk behind them. The two immediately crawled toward the cover of the trees, their attention fixed on the other man, alert for the glowing red dot of the assassin. As the dot found Zeller’s back, Dart hissed, “Right!” and the sergeant rolled to his right. The ground, where he’d been crawling a fraction of a second before, exploded into mud and dirt. “Right,” Dart instructed again, and again the earth erupted under the power of the bullet. Zeller came to his knees and crawled fast, aware that the marksman was locked onto him, that all it required of the killer was to sweep the sight back and forth and await the signal. Dart moved left, intentionally widening the space between them, to give the marksman a larger dead space where the technology would fail to send a signal.