Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 3

By five o’clock on a hot August day, the Jennings Street booking room held an air of confusion: voices shouting; detainees complaining; attorneys arguing; parents protesting; police officers of every rank, dress, and both sexes attempting to manage the chaos. The special task force on gang violence had brought in twenty-three Hispanic teens for booking and questioning. Dartelli and others had been enlisted for the raid.

The air-conditioning had failed two hours earlier. The air hung heavy with the tangy odor of perspiration and the deafening roar of constant cursing and swearing. The room, like the building, combined cream-colored cinder block walls with vinyl tiled floors in a urine white. The acoustic ceiling tiles were stained from the leaks that had been ongoing throughout the building for the past three years. The place reminded Dartelli of a cross between a post office and a prison. At the moment, it felt more like a high school principal’s office.

Dartelli was consulting with a fellow detective on how to book one of the kids found in possession of a nine-inch switchblade. The two were speaking in normal voices despite the cacophony. He glanced up as a red file folder squirted between a pair of bodies, and he registered that this folder was directed at him. It shook, inviting him to take hold. And then he saw attached to the folder a graceful, feminine hand, and attached to this hand, an elegantly muscled and tan forearm covered in fine, sun-bleached hairs. Before he saw her face, he identified the voice of Abby Lang.

“Joe? This is for you,” spoke that voice. The folder shook again. “We should talk.”

He had never really looked at her arms before; he didn’t spend a lot of time looking at a person’s arms. But she had a nice pair.

Lieutenant Abigail Lang worked the Sex Crimes detail alone. Two years earlier she had managed to sheer the detail off of Crimes Against Persons-CAPers, as the dicks referred to it-but not without resentment, both of her rank and the power her separated detail afforded her. Dart had admired the move, one that had required a great deal of political savvy to accomplish, but he’d never had any interaction with Lang. Until the moment this file was shoved at him.

She wore her straight blond hair turned in at the shoulder, and had the kind of Nordic looks that might have stopped traffic ten years earlier. In her mid-forties, she was a handsome woman with bright, interested eyes, a coy smile, and a small, slightly upturned nose. On television, she might have played an attorney or a nurse.

Dartelli accepted the folder and felt obliged to thank her, but she was squeezed by two sides of a competing verbal exchange, and all but her perfume disappeared, leaving Dartelli drinking in a deep inhale.

“Nice,” the other dick said, looking in her direction.

“Agreed,” answered Dartelli, who didn’t have time to think about Abby Lang, although he furtively searched for a second glimpse of her. If he had taken a moment, he might have realized that he had sat alone in his apartment for too many months since his break up with Ginny, had awakened to a television screen filled with electronic lint far too many times, trapped in the darkness and solitude of a beer-induced coma. Had retreated too far into himself.

Control was his issue. His mother; Zeller; the women in his life-he always granted control to others, surrendering himself to their whims, desires, and emotions. During his worst depressions, he allowed himself to believe that he had been a puppet for most of his adult life, never navigating his own way, but dancing along with the strings that dictated his actions from high overhead. This feeling of being at the will of others could nearly paralyze him at times. Secretly he wanted to believe that he stood behind the wheel of his own ship.

As he glanced at the folder, it was not the name GERALD OBRIGHT LAWRENCE that caught his attention but instead, the two letters that preceded the booking number, SC-Sex Crimes. Had Dart not ignored the evidence gleaned late in the Ice Man investigation, evidence that confirmed the Ice Man was in fact the serial rapist dubbed the Asian Strangler by the media-for his Asian victims-then that file too would begin with these same two letters.

But he had chosen to ignore the evidence for the sake of a precious friendship. Sergeant Walter Zeller’s wife had been viciously raped and murdered by the elusive Asian Strangler, and the evidence discovered by Dart irrefutably identified the Ice Man as the Asian Strangler. With the very real possibility that Zeller had cleverly avenged his wife’s brutal killing, but with absolutely no concrete evidence supporting this, his partner and protege had chosen to let the evidence slide, electing not to put Zeller through an ordeal that ultimately could not be proven anyway.

And now, like the great white whale resurfacing, this folder brought the Ice Man back.

Dartelli, file in hand, navigated his way out of booking and down the hall to CAPers. He examined the opening pages of the report.

Gerald Lawrence had been detained seven times on suspicion of sexual molestation of minors; he had been arrested and convicted only once, late the previous year. Having served five months of a four-year sentence, he had been released and paroled on probation eleven weeks earlier.

Lawrence had hanged himself four weeks later.

Dartelli stared at the file. A suicide. A sex offender. His best ideas rarely came to him in flashes of brilliance, instead seeping into him as a trickle, a faint voice that suddenly, for reasons unknown, gained in both volume and clarity. As he sat before this file, he asked himself, Coincidence? His chest tightening, he sensed someone behind him and spun around in his chair.

Abby Lang stood about five foot seven. She had square shoulders, a delicate neck, soft eyes and full, high breasts. She wore ordinary clothing, but it didn’t look ordinary on her. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, stealing a peek over his shoulder.

He told her no, she was not interrupting.

She handed him a second file, this one from CAPers, his own division. It too was marked with Lawrence’s name. “It was Kowalski’s case,” she informed him. “Lawrence’s suicide. But I keep the Sex Crimes files locked up, and I thought you might want to see it.”

“Why?” he asked, the guilt seeping into him. Did she know about the Ice Man? he wondered. Had she connected the Ice Man to the Asian Strangler investigation?

“That jumper last week. Everyone’s talking about how hot and bothered you were by it.”

“Everyone?”

“Sam Richardson. She said you took it pretty hard.”

Dartelli knew the truth. Roman Kowalski, the hairy-chest-and-gold-chain detective who drove a red Miata and bench-pressed two-ten, was loathed by nearly every woman on the force. Abby Lang was leaving it for Dart to see the connection between the two suicides: the investigating officer.

Turning back to the file, he offered for her to pull up a chair, which she did.

Lang saved him the trouble of reading. “Gerald Lawrence was known in his neighborhood as Gerry Law. He hanged himself from a ceiling light fixture using a length of lamp cord. He left a note that read quite simply, ‘I can’t live with my crimes. Forgive me.’ There was no booze found in his blood workup, and though half an ounce of pot was discovered in the apartment, there was no THC in his blood at the time of death, and no indication of foul play. Place was locked from the inside, Kowalski closed the case with little more than writing up the necessary reports, although it took him a couple of days to do so.” She sounded a little annoyed by this.

Dartelli allowed as how any CAPers detective would have acted in pretty much the same way; suicides cleared quickly.

“Listen,” she confessed openly, “this is the kind of thing I celebrate. A known piece of shit takes himself out. Saves me time and energy. Five months on a five-year sentence? That’s justice?” she asked angrily. “But it was a suicide, and it was investigated by Kowalski.”

“Meaning?” If she had evidence to support that Kowalski had somehow mishandled the investigation, then it was a case for Internal Affairs, not CAPers, not him.

She didn’t answer his question directly. “Gerry Law worked the young girls in the neighborhood. Befriended them. Got them to trust him. Obtained a promise of secrecy. And then the horrors began. He took his time with them to make sure he could count on their secrecy-broke them in slowly. Kept some of them for several years. Took photos and videos. Sold some of them, used the photographs to blackmail the older ones: ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to see this.’ Pure slime. Discarded those over fourteen. We had some mothers who suspected someone in the neighborhood, but couldn’t find a witness. He had them all too well trained.”

“You knew but couldn’t do anything?” Dartelli asked incredulously.

“Suspected,” she corrected. “This kind of abuse is often first noticed in the bathtub at home or at the doctor’s office. It’s insidious because it’s not always that obvious, depending on the act. A doctor has to know what to look for. Parents-mothers in particular-are often the worst: They don’t want to believe what they see. Happens all the time.”

“But you busted him,” Dartelli recalled. He leafed through the CAPers file, studying the photographs of the hanging. Lawrence’s body hung by the neck from a length of wire fixed to a ceiling light fixture that was itself pulled out of the Sheetrock.

“Sure. We got lucky, but only once. Seven arrests, one conviction-you know the drill.”

Dartelli also knew the frustrations that went along with such work.

As he reached Bragg’s forensics report, she asked him, “Why use a strand of lamp wire? Does that sound right?” He flipped forward to the detailed report of the apartment’s contents.

“What are you saying?” he asked. But he understood the question perfectly well: She doubted the suicide.

She said, “If you’re Lawrence and you’re planning to do something like this, why not get a piece of rope?”

Dartelli hurried through Bragg’s crime scene report. It lacked detail, indicating a hasty job typical of both a suicide investigation and Kowalski’s lax approach-the usual cotton and synthetic fibers expected in any home, some copper filings from the lamp cord found on the floor under the body, nothing special.

“How did you finally get him?” Dart asked, trying to keep her away from questioning the suicide.

She answered, “An eighteen-year-old girl came forward. She had seen some Oprah program that dealt with sexual abuse, and realized what had been done to her and how she had blocked it out. We put her on the stand and she identified him, but she fell apart on cross and that cost us. He gets five years, commuted to one-out in six months; five, as it turned out, because of prison overcrowding. I mean, here’s a piece of shit that had done over a dozen young girls by some counts, and he gets virtually nothing.”

Dartelli pulled out the medical examiner’s report.

Abby reached over his shoulder and flipped past to a photocopy of Lawrence’s suicide note. “Let me ask you this,” she said. “You’re Gerry Law, slime ball pervert, and here is your last comment to the world. Two sentences, the grammar correct, the message simple. ‘I can’t live with my crimes. Forgive me.’”

Dart studied the photocopy. The lettering was jerky, indicating stress-understandable, he thought, given that the man was about to kill himself. Nonetheless, the wording was curious, though he was loath to admit it. What is she after?

“The choice of words is what intrigues me,” she said. “The word crimes for instance. Is that how a guy like this thinks? Crimes? I’ve interviewed dozens of these men, Joe. It doesn’t ring right with me.” He could see in her doubting expression that he faced trouble. “Does that sound right to you? Some down-and-out slime ball living on the edge of Bellevue Square?” She answered herself, “It sounds more like a prosecuting attorney than Gerry Law.”

Or a detective, he kept to himself, thinking of Walter Zeller.

“What if Gerry Law was into drugs?” she asked. “What if he has a Narco record as well?”

Roman Kowalski had worked Narcotics before coming over to CAPers; Dartelli finally saw what she was after-she suspected Kowalski. Not Zeller.

She had nearly flawless skin, belying her age. She nibbled at her lower lip as she concentrated and said, “The Narco files are kept separate, same as mine. Without access to those files, we’d never know if there was a connection between an investigator and these suicides or not.”

“Listen,” Dartelli said, feeling heat spike up his spine, “this is interesting, Abby, but I doubt there’s any great cover-up going on here.” There had been a shake-up in the department a year earlier. Two Narco detectives had been sent packing. She was still sniffing these same bushes.

“You’re CAPers, Joe. You could take another look at the Lawrence case-maybe it’s connected to Stapleton.”

Maybe it is, but not in the way you think. It occurred to him how convenient it would be for him if it could be connected to Kowalski. Realizing that she had handed him the Lawrence file not for his sake, but because of her own curiosity, Dartelli wondered how to shake her interest. “What is it you want from me, Lieutenant?”

“It’s Abby, Joe. Please! And you know how it is with me and CAPers. How far would I get with any of this?”

It was true, her rank and privilege were coveted and the source of much envy and resentment in CAPers. Sexism was rarely discussed, but it existed. “Any of what, Abby?”

She offered him a look of annoyance and disappointment that reminded him of his mother. He felt a pang of guilt and he wanted to shout: Leave me alone!

She reminded, “Two suicides, both investigated by the same detective-one, with a questionably worded note. You were at the Stapleton scene, Joe. All I’m wondering … what I’m asking … was there anything there to suggest any kind of-”

“No,” he cut her off. “Nothing.” Leave it alone, he mentally encouraged. Drop it.

The interruption infuriated her. “You, Joe? You’re not one of them.” She meant the clique at CAPers, the old boys’ club. No, he wasn’t one of them; he was Ivy, the outcast with the education-only Zeller had included him. “Don’t tell me that. I don’t believe that for a minute. We’re not so different, you and me. And don’t tell me to go running to Internal Affairs, because you know damn well that would be the beginning and end of it. Kowalski is far too well connected.”

Roman Kowalski was loved by all. Perhaps the worst cop on the force, the biggest fuck-off, and the detective with the best connections to the top, the most friends and allies. “You want me to stir up trouble? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Just forget it,” she said, standing up, glaring down at him, and then storming off.

He wanted to call out to her-to stop her and tell her that yes, he too was curious. But he sat in his chair watching her go, hurting, knowing somehow that things were different now, and that with Abby’s involvement he would have to beat her to the truth.

He looked at the open file in his lap. She was good; she was thinking; she was trouble.

Damn her, he thought.