Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

They’ve ruined it! he thought, angry that Haite had authorized the raid, knowing as he did that this would jeopardize their evidence.

Not knowing where the strength or reserve came from, Dart lunged in the dark to block Proctor from reaching the computer, every muscle, every tendon screaming. He collided with the man and went down hard just as the first glow of the emergency lighting seeped into the room from the wall sconces. Proctor pushed away hard and struggled to his feet.

Dart raised the weapon and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.

The blond security man trained his weapon on Dart.

There was a loud pop that occurred just before Dart went blind with pain. His face seemed to explode at the same time as his ears failed him, and he wailed into the room along with the others. He screamed for Zeller, and lost friends; for his mother, and lost souls. Consumed by an overpowering white light, and deprived of his hearing, he folded into a ball and fell away from the world, as would a man thrown from a cliff. Weightless, and sublime.

A dusty image of Haite loomed above Dart wearing a look of concern, and Dart wondered why his first experience of death should be an image of his former sergeant, a man with whom he had never been particularly close. He would have preferred an image of Abby. A conversation with Zeller. A bronzed and naked body, perhaps. Anything but Haite.

He felt as if he were at sea, rocking in a light chop. He found the sensation comforting and pleasant.

“Can you hear me yet?” the sergeant asked loudly.

He remained cloudy, a vaporous apparition.

“Go away,” Dart said, wanting a dream, not a nightmare. “Leave me alone.”

“Stun bombs and phosphorus grenades,” the sergeant explained in an apologetic voice. “ERT toys,” he said.

The rocking, Dart realized, was the stretcher being carried up the stairs by a couple of paramedics with buzz cuts. He still couldn’t see very well.

“Your hearing will come back,” Haite said loudly.

And then the pain hit, a headache like a ton of bricks.

“Your head may hurt,” he heard a voice suggest from behind him.

“No shit,” said Joe Dart. He blinked away some of the pain and tried to identify which orb was the sergeant. He picked the one leaning over him. “Why? Why after all that did you abort? Jesus….” His thoughts trailed off with his voice. Rage surged through him, but without any physical energy to support it, it dried up, defeated. He felt on the verge of tears. Exhaustion. Self-pity.

“No, no,” Haite said.

“For me? You did it to save me? You’ve wrecked me,” Dart said. He wanted Haite to hurt for this; he wanted someone to pay. He wanted to be left alone to cry.

“Ginny solved it,” Haite said.

“She couldn’t download the file as long as it was in the buffer,” a techie’s young voice explained from behind him. It took Dart a moment to identify it as the voice of the command van technician. “When you cut the text, it was captured in RAM. You had to do this to keep the other person attempting access from deleting the files. There it was, this chunk of text, floating in the computer’s memory-but in a buffer, not on disk, not somewhere that Ginny could grab it.”

Haite said, “He should rest.”

The techie added excitedly, “The mainframe was set up to save all buffers to disk in the event of a power failure. Ginny realized this-realized the only thing to do at that point was to cut the power.”

They cleared the stairs, and Dart felt the legs of the stretcher released, and suddenly found himself being wheeled. The bumps hurt every inch of him.

“Later,” one of the paramedics complained to Haite. “Let him rest.”

Ignoring him, the technician continued. “The machine itself is protected by a backup power supply, so once we cut the juice, it dumped its buffers to disk, and Ginny, waiting for it, grabbed the file. It took her a couple of seconds is all.”

Seconds? Dart thought.

“After that,” Haite said, “it was all ERT. We’d lost you on the radio. We weren’t happy campers.”

“We got the file?”

“We got everything,” Haite confirmed. “Ginny’s a fucking genius.”

Arielle Martinson looked much smaller, much older in the CAPers interrogation room, even with her high-priced attorney sitting next to her. Dart was familiar with Bernie Wormser’s reputation, but had never faced him. Wormser had worked hard to arrange the interview elsewhere, but there they were, in a cramped, windowless room with a linoleum floor. Just the way Dart had wanted it.

Dart carried a tape recorder with him. His left arm was in a sling. He plugged the machine into a wall outlet, turned it on, and recorded the names of those present, the location, the date and time. Martinson appeared restless, Wormser, dead calm.

“As you know,” Dart addressed Martinson, “we’ve charged you with interfering in a criminal investigation, in so much as Terrance Proctor, and therefore Proctor Securities, acted as your agent. In this regard, there is also the charge of first-degree murder, for the shooting death of Walter Zeller, and attempted murder for the actions taken against myself. There are federal charges concerning the rigging of certain clinical trial results-”

“You don’t know anything,” Martinson said venomously. Wormser touched her arm lightly. She glared at her attorney, and as he attempted to speak, cut him off. “No, Bernie. I’ll dig my own grave, thank you just the same.”

“I really don’t think-” Wormser attempted.

“Quiet,” she said, silencing him, and burning his face scarlet. To Dart she said, “Have you ever dealt with a victim of sexual assault, Detective? Physical abuse? Do you have any clue what you’re dealing with here? Do you understand the trauma-the permanent damage done to a woman, and to boys as well-by such violation? Do you? Someone else’s body inside yours … the sense of helplessness … the pain … disease … Someone striking you … drooling onto you, slobbering onto you-”

“Arielle!” Wormser chastised.

“Oh, shut up!” she roared back at him.

Dart’s voice cracked as he explained, “He was shot five times, the last of which penetrated his skull just below the left eye and killed him.”

Ignoring him, she said, “What if you possessed the knowledge, the ability, to reduce sexual assault-rape-by ten percent? Spousal and child abuse by twenty percent? Sixty percent? What if you knew you had that within your grasp? And what if the government, in all its banality, had structured a set of rules so confining, so slow, so difficult to maneuver through that you came to understand it might be decades before you could bring this technology to market? What then? Do you sit back and wait? In this country, a woman is beaten every twelve seconds .” She glanced at her Rolex. “Since we’ve been sitting here, over ten women have had a fist raised to them. Would you wait decades, if you were in my shoes?”

Dart was flooded with a dozen images of Zeller. “Walter Zeller discovered your treatment of the documentation for the clinical trials. He uncovered Proctor’s tampering with the facts. Subsequent to that discovery he was pursued, his life was threatened, day and night, for over twelve months-”

Interrupting him, she said, “Who are you? Are you listening to what I’m telling you? Do you hear what I’m saying? So what if I altered some of the paperwork? That’s all it was-paperwork!”

“Arielle, I have to interrupt!” objected Wormser.

“Shut up, Bernie. You’re being paid either way.” Addressing Dart she continued, “Would I have put Laterin on the market despite less-than-perfect results? You bet I would.” Meeting eyes with him, she said, “I will if I get the chance. I’d rather stop fifteen, twenty, thirty percent of such beasts, than stand by and do nothing. Every twelve seconds, don’t forget. And would I have resorted to such means for the sake of greed? No. For the sake of science , Detective. For the sake of the victim. Every new generation of Laterin that we developed showed a five- to seventeen-percent improvement. But there’s no way to test it, given the rules. You can’t test Laterin on rats or monkeys! Who are you kidding? This is a human aberration-and in large part, a genetic defect. You know who should be in this room, should be here instead of me? The FDA.” She nodded. “You bet. That’s who should be in this chair. Not me. Am I guilty of trying to do something? You bet I am. And damn proud of it.”