Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 34

Ted Bragg was kneeling by the door to the second-story apartment at 21 Norwich Street. The suicide had been called in at four in the afternoon, and Dart alerted shortly thereafter.

Bragg informed the detective, “A woman in the apartment downstairs smelled him. I’m guessing he’s two days old.”

“Who’s primary?”

“I am,” answered Greg Thompson from behind. “Just interviewed the neighbor. Didn’t see or hear a thing. Just smelled the Jordon is all. Shit like this guy, stinks bad,” he added.

Looking around the room, Bragg said to Thompson, “What we’re going to see, what we’re going to find, is a suicide-a drug overdose. What we’re looking at,” he corrected, “is a homicide.”

Thompson appeared bothered. “Says who?”

“Says the evidence,” Bragg answered. “I think I can show you, but it’s going to require several hours, and everyone coming and going wears shoe covers, hair nets, and gloves.”

“It’ll never happen,” Thompson said.

“That’s the way it’s going to be,” Bragg insisted.

Dart pulled out the piece of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. Greenwood’s name was a third of the way down Ginny’s list of men whose medical insurance had been paid for by Roxin. He had written the letters NP alongside Greenwood’s name-No Phone.

For Dart, the room felt dark and cold, the burden of this man’s death weighing on him. For the past two days he had been using this list to try to anticipate Zeller’s next kill. He had interviewed or spoken to six of the list of twenty-four. Dennis Greenwood had no phone, and Dart, not liking the neighborhood, had not traveled out here-not during the night shift. Now Greenwood was dead-though exactly how Zeller might have accomplished this still mystified him.

“The guy had a sheet,” Thompson said to Dart.

“Sex crimes,” Dart said back, glancing over at the dead man’s gray face with its swollen eyes.

Greg Thompson’s jaw dropped. “Now just how in the hell did you know that?”