Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 31

Dart didn’t want to return to 11 Hamilton Court because the house was being kept under surveillance on the hope that Wallace Sparco-Walter Zeller-might be apprehended. But it was Zeller’s own teachings that leaned Dart toward going back and reexamining its contents. That house remained the only physical link to the visitor at the Payne suicide. Always return to the crime scene, Zeller had taught him.

“Usually I hate being on call,” Samantha Richardson said, flirting with Dart as she unlocked the door to the photo lab. Bragg’s assistant and photographer wore blue jeans and a red flannel top that looked suspiciously like pajamas. At eleven-thirty at night, anything was possible-people showed up in the strangest clothes. Dart was hardly sleeping, between the night tour and day calls, like the one at Roxin Laboratories. He felt a wreck, and looked it too.

At night, the tiny basement forensics lab smelled no better than during the daytime, thanks to the photographic processor in the adjacent room. Richardson pulled a pair of chairs in front of the computer monitor, and Dart joined her.

“For initial viewing, we downsize the images for higher resolution,” she explained. The ERT team had shot digitized images, not photographs. Richardson prepared Dart for what he would see. “Shooting in relative darkness, as they did, the lighting, as you can imagine, is off. The camera sees things much as your night-vision goggles. One of the nice things, however, is that we can ask the computer to compensate and correct the lighting deficiencies. Fill in color. Enhance. And often the images get surprisingly close to a well-lighted, even daylight, look. That’s what we’ll do,” she told him. “We’ll start with the degraded image and enhance. We can always get back to the original.”

The first image, a shot of the sitting room with the recliner and television, appeared on the screen. At first, a difficult green and white, a black bar moved slowly down the screen, and as if lifting a shade, the room was suddenly in full color. The technology amazed Dart. “You’ll like this,” she said, typing furiously and then grabbing the computer’s mouse. The floor of the room suddenly tilted, and the image became fully three-dimensional, as if Dart were on a ladder looking down.

“What the hell?” Dart asked.

“The digital cameras are stereo-optic-another advantage. The computer uses algorithms to create the three-D effect.” She rotated the room, so that Dart was looking from a different direction, but the left of the screen was blank. She explained, “The computer cannot fill that which the camera never saw.” She pointed to the blank side of the frame and said, “This is where the photographer was standing while taking the shot.”

Dart gushed with enthusiasm over the technology, which Richardson clearly appreciated. She complained, “Only the Staties can afford the cameras, but maybe one of these days …”

Frame by frame, Richardson walked Dart through the house and through the evidence. The ability to manipulate the point of view afforded Dart the opportunity to see the rooms from many angles. He studied each carefully, occasionally requesting an enlargement of a particular area, something the computer could render in seconds. Room by room, he sought out any physical evidence that might provide insight into where to look for Walter Zeller, aka Wallace Sparco.

“The killer is inside them.” Zeller’s words continued to haunt him. As much as Dart believed Zeller was the killer, the only convincing physical evidence that he possessed connected the resident of 11 Hamilton Court to Payne’s suicide. Everything else remained circumstantial. And though he now believed that Zeller was Sparco, it didn’t necessarily mean that Sparco/Zeller had actually killed Payne. Perhaps, as Zeller wanted Dart to believe, it was the Roxin drug that connected all the suicides, and Martinson and her company were in fact the ones to blame. No matter, 11 Hamilton Court seemed to offer Dart the main hope of finding answers and its resident. If he could only locate Zeller….

For several days now he had cursed himself for not attempting to bring in Zeller at the fire. He wasn’t sure how he might have accomplished that. He had ended up outside, unarmed and in shock. But he blamed himself for falling under Zeller’s controlling spell, ever the student, the listener.

“Are you with me?” Richardson asked.

“Sure.”

She led him through a series of enhanced images that took them down the basement stairs and into the laundry room. Even under the effects of the computer’s improved colors, the room appeared dingy and dank. Dart recalled the moldy, suffocating smells.

“There,” he said, leaning forward and pointing out the workbench. “Can you enlarge that?”

Richardson rendered the image into 3-D, rotated it to face the workbench, and then stepped the computer through a series of enlargements, drawing the workbench progressively closer. “Fly-tying gear,” he said.

“Fly fishing,” she said.

“Yes.”

There was a small fly-tying vise that sat beneath an adjustable light, both mounted to the workbench and with a magnifying glass attached above the vise. The shelves were littered with feathers and plastic containers too grainy in enlargement to see well. If Dart had not known that Wallace Sparco was in fact Walter Zeller, he might have passed right by this as he had on the night of the raid. But suspecting this might be Zeller’s lair, the fly-tying kit stuck out. Walter Zeller hated fishing. The kit made sense only as an effort to create a fictional identity for Sparco. As such, its existence could be explained. But Dart the student, the man who knew Walter Zeller nearly as well as Zeller himself, read more into it. The ruse was too elaborate to be explained as an effort to mislead investigators. He could have left a tennis racket or a bag of golf clubs. It’s more important than that, Dart thought.

“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.