Chain of Evidence (14 page)

Dart pulled the Volvo into the curving drive and parked alongside an HPD patrol car in front of the brick-and-stone two-story house. Abby yanked the rearview mirror toward her and ran a brush through her hair. They both hung their badges around their necks and entered by the front door.

“Tuna’s got the wife upstairs,” announced patrolman Benny Webster. Tanya Fische, an HPD patrol officer, referred to as Tuna, was clearly Webster’s patrol partner. “The wife popped a bunch of Valium and is in la-la land. No use to us until morning. We ain’t touched nothing in the study. But it’s a messy one,” he said, eyeing Abby Lang as if she might have trouble stomaching it. “Single shot up through the roof of the mouth. Nine millimeter.”

“Who’s on it?” Dart asked.

“Kowalski and—” he answered.

Dart and Abby met eyes, interrupting the uniformed man.

“Something wrong?” Webster asked, seeing this.

“Everything’s just ducky,” Abby answered.

Webster continued, “And their assistant chief.”

“West Hartford’s?” Dart clarified. “Nolan?” he said, adding the name.

“That’s him. Yeah. Only he ain’t here. Showed up, talked to the K,” he said, meaning Kowalski, “and took off. It being a suicide and all, he didn’t seem too bothered.”

“Wanted to brief his chief and prepare a statement,” came the voice of Roman Kowalski. He looked tired; the buttons on his shirt indicated he had dressed hastily. “What brings
you
here?” he asked Dart.

“Sergeant Haite.”

“And you?” he asked Abby.

She didn’t want to explain her having been with Dartelli. She said for Kowalski’s benefit, “‘And you,
Lieutenant
.’ Is that what you meant to say, Detective?”

Kowalski glared at her. “The wife was out with friends ’til about an hour ago. Comes home, finds the hubby spread all over the study. Calls nine-eleven.” Kowalski eyed Abby again, and Dart realized that maybe he was busy with his arithmetic.

The entrance foyer had a low ceiling with hand-hewn dark timbers and plaster that had pieces of yellow hay stuck into it. To Dart’s left, a gray-carpeted stairway ascended to the second floor. He passed a small stone column supporting a wicker basket filled with trick-or-treat candy and fresh fruit. He thought that on this of all nights, Halloween, there would have been, should have been, potential witnesses around and about.

“Did she find the house locked or open?” he asked Kowalski.

“If you want to sit in the fucking bleachers and watch, I got no problem,” Kowalski said. “But if you want to play Twenty Questions, fucking take it somewhere else.”

“You know what’s amazing about you,” Abby told Kowalski, stepping past him and moving toward the open study door, “is how delicately you handle the language.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but she cut him off, raising a finger at him, “And be careful what you say to your
superiors,
Detective.” With extra venom she added, “’Cause I’ll bust you down to traffic, given half the chance.”

Dart smiled at Kowalski and raised his eyebrows, taunting him.

Stepping up to Dartelli, Kowalski said earnestly, “I’m waiting on Buzz before I go in there. Don’t touch a fucking thing.” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket and stuck one in his mouth. “I’ll be outside.”

The study was the size of Dart’s studio kitchen and sitting area combined. Oriental rugs, dark antiques, a stone-and-brick fireplace with two gargoyles supporting the four-inch thick, burl walnut mantel. A substantial puddle of blood on the rug below the deceased. Splatter pattern on the ceiling consistent with the top of a human head coming off. An oil portrait of a man with a bulbous red nose, who lived back when the river trade kept Hartford prosperous, ruled from above the mantel. Leather-bound books crammed the shelves, looking both untouched and unread. Window dressing. Dart noticed a few spaces between the volumes, like missing teeth.

The body was a mess, draped over a walnut chair with a needlepoint cushion. What remained of the head was angled back away from the blast and discharge of the weapon. The top half of the man’s clothes was brown with drying blood—buckets of it.

“Harold C. Payne,” Abby Lang read, fingering a mailing label on a copy of
Arts and Antiques
left on a cherry side table in the hall. “I didn’t recognize him without his face.”

“You remember him?”

“Cyber-porn. Fuck shots and D-cup starlets over the Internet. Mail-order photo-CD-ROM. Digitized pornography. The Feds brought him down, but I was consulted. Yeah, I remember him.”

“Sounds like a real sweetheart,” Dart said.

“Piece of work, this one. Hired himself four attorneys and got himself acquitted on all but the mail-order charge, if I’m remembering right.”

Dart wasn’t about to question her memory.

She said, “The whole area of pornography over the Internet remains a little fuzzy—you’ll pardon the expression. It’s still being sorted out.”

“Is there a file on him in Sex Crimes?” Dart questioned.

She met eyes with him, understanding what he was asking. “No,” she answered simply but delivering the message that she did not appreciate the implications of his question. Her eyes said,
No one gets in my files without me knowing about it.

Attempting to change subjects, Dart pointed out the snifter of cognac on the partner’s desk, a spilled ashtray at the foot of the deceased’s chair, and the butt of a cigar on the rug. It appeared that Payne had poured himself a drink, had a smoke, and then ate a barrel.

A walnut armoire was wedged into the corner immediately to the left. The rest of that wall was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Four leaded windows occupied most of the wall behind the desk where a computer was set up on a custom-built return.

Before Bragg and the others arrived, while he still had a moment of peace, Dart studied the crime scene. A husband left alone while the wife went to a party, a glass of cognac, a cigar, and a bullet through the roof of his mouth.
The perfect suicide,
he thought, believing to his very core that Payne had been murdered. On the edge of the desk he spotted what appeared to be a gun-cleaning kit and what was clearly a box of shells. No suicide note that he could see, but the wife might have found one. The gun hung awkwardly from the dead man’s right thumb; Dart could predict that paraffin tests would confirm that the same hand had fired the weapon, and he wondered how that could have been accomplished.

Unlike the other suicides, he viewed this one as the audience views a magic show: looking for the tricks. He tried to reconstruct how a Zeller or a Kowalski could paint so clear a picture. A speed key or other lock-picking device could get a killer inside—no trick there. But then what? Overpower Payne—knock him unconscious, careful to tap him on that part of his head that would later shatter when the bullet entered.
You would have to know about the gun
, he thought. Some advance work would have to be done. But guns were registered, and most home weapons were kept in bedside drawers or on the top shelves of closets.

What ate at him was the absence of physical evidence. At the Stapleton jump, the trace evidence—crucial to any investigation—gave no indication of the presence of a mystery visitor. The Lawrence hanging evidence had come in the same way: Teddy Bragg’s report indicated finding some copper filings on the body—these from the lamp cord used for the hanging, the anticipated random cotton and synthetic fibers typical to any floor, and head and body hairs, but only from the victim. No evidence to suggest foul play. The scenario before him placed out the same way—it appeared a straight-ahead suicide. Having been trained in criminalistics, this is where Dart put his faith—the transference of evidence was virtually impossible to avoid; hairs and fibers were in a constant state of exchange: the person entering a room deposited such evidence; the person leaving a room carried such evidence with him. Every variety of organic matter from leaves to pollen, car-floor carpeting, clothing, food, seeds, hairs, dirt, and dust. It seemed inconceivable that the suicides had been staged without any such evidence being shed—and Dart knew that this was
exactly
what the prosecuting attorney would say: “No evidence, no case.”

Webster wandered over to check on them, and Abby asked him, “Did the wife enter the study?”

“Says she did, yeah. Said she felt for his pulse—his left hand.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine thinking that the
thing
in that chair might have a pulse. You talk about dreaming.”

“How long was she in the room?” Dart asked him.

“Don’t know. Didn’t say.”

Dart, his mind on fiber evidence, dropped to one knee and brought his head nearly to the floor, looking into the room. To Webster Dart said, “She was wearing slippers: blue fuzzy slippers. Is that right?” He glanced up at the patrolman, who appeared not to remember.

“I … ah …”

“Find out.”

“Yes, sir.” Webster took off a brisk pace, and Dart could hear him charging up the stairs.

“What?” Abby asked, kneeling.

“Get down low.” Dart demonstrated, nearly touching his ear to the floor.

Abby teased, “I love it when you talk dirty,” and then duplicated his actions.

“See them? The fibers?” he asked. “Play with your focus,” he instructed.

“Got ’em!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Blue fibers!”

“Yup. And do you see where they lead?”

“To the armoire. Not to the body.”

“Yup. And?”

She rocked her head, and they were nearly kissing, both of them with their ears to the hardwood floor. “There’s a dark swath cut down the rug between here and the deceased.”

“You’re good,” Dart told her. Her bottom was sticking high in the air, and for a moment he wasn’t thinking about fiber evidence.

“And there’s a lighter swath between the armoire and the desk.”

“The nap is worn down.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of trips to the armoire,” she pointed out.

“I agree.”

“And the darker swath?” she asked.

“The nap is
raised,
” he pointed out. “It’s going a different direction from the rest of the nap.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Exactly.” With the pieces coming together in his head, Dart wanted into the room, and was tired of waiting for Teddy Bragg. He told Abby, “Wait here. Don’t let anyone inside.”

“Joe?”

He hurried off. In the foyer, he ran into Webster just coming down the stairs. The patrolman confirmed, “Blue fuzzy slippers, Detective. She’s still wearing them.”

Kowalski was admiring the view, working on his second cigarette. As Dart passed him, Kowalski asked, “Are you fucking her, Dartelli?” Dart kept walking. “The reason I ask is she has that look, you know? All rosy around the chest and neck. A little more smiley than normal for her. And because on account of I’m only seeing your car out here, so I’m thinking the two of you rode together, and it’s kinda late for that,” Dart reached his car. “She any good, Dartelli? You know, if what they say about how a woman’s lips are the same in both places, I’d say you scored big.”

“Shut up, Kowalski,” Dart said, fishing two pairs of shoe covers and latex gloves out of the back of the Volvo where Dart kept a first-aid kit, a flak vest, and an evidence collection kit.

“Real nice mouth on her,” Kowalski said.

Dart shut the back of the wagon and heard a vehicle approaching.
Probably Teddy
, he realized, deciding to hurry. He passed Kowalski but then stopped. He said, “You know, I used to think that you’re as dumb as everyone says you are, as dumb as you act.” The big man’s head pivoted, and he looked into Dart’s eyes. Dart continued, “If you’ve fucked with these crime scenes in any way, I’m going to have your ass.” Smoke flowed out of Kowalski’s nose, and he squinted at Dart with such loathing that the detective thought he might take a swing at him. “Tell Teddy that I went in without him.”

“You can’t do that!” Kowalski protested.

Dart held up the paper shoe covers. “So stop me.” He turned and went inside.

At the study door, with Bragg’s step van just pulling up outside, Dart and Abby slipped the paper shoe covers over their shoes and donned latex gloves.

Dart told her, “I want you to guide me. Keep me away from the blue fibers wherever possible, and off that raised nap.”

Dart kept close to the near wall and reached the armoire without requiring any directions from Abby.

“Exactly what are you looking for?” she asked.

He opened the armoire, revealing a large television and an assortment of stereo equipment. He ran his gloved hand blindly along the interior of the piece of furniture.

“What’s up, Joe?” she asked.

Dart’s fingers bumped a stout piece of metal concealed beneath the first shelf. He hooked it, pushed it, pulled it.
Pop!
The edge of the armoire jumped away from the wall. Dart slid his fingers into the crack and pulled it open like a door.

“Jesus …,” she gasped.

“Stay close to the wall,” he advised.

Abby joined him. Dart pulled the armoire all the way open and found the interior light switch.

They heard the front door open and the voices of Kowalski and Teddy Bragg.

“Don’t touch anything,” Dart said as he led the way into the hidden room.

The room had no windows. The area closest to the hidden door was laid out like a computer/video laboratory, the remainder dedicated to library stacks crowded with books of every shape and size, cloth and leather-bound. On closer examination, the books appeared worn and quite old. One of the stacks held several long rows of video tapes.

“Ten to one,” Abby said, “this is the evidence that the Feds never found.”

The electronic equipment included two computers, a white table, several lights on tripods, two video cameras, a scanner, a color laser printer, and a multiline telephone.

“Nice gear,” Dart said.

“Major money,” she said.

A VCR and twenty-seven-inch television occupied a separate table.

Kowalski entered behind them. Dart looked first at his shoes, furious the man had not worn shoe covers—in theory, any hairs-and-fibers evidence was now contaminated. This kind of behavior was so typical of the man, that Dart realized mentioning it was useless. Kowalski was useless.