Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 40

“We can’t take a taxi. They might think of that, they might even be listening in on a scanner. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess that a pickup down by the river, at this time of night, would be us.” Zeller led Dart along the river’s edge. Dart’s ankle felt almost normal.

“It was you up on Charter Oak Bridge,” he said to the man in front of him.

Speaking back as they walked, Zeller said, “Yeah. I had to know what you were up to. And then Ginny was involved, and that other woman-Lang-and I realized we had problems.”

“Alverez?”

“An out-of-towner. A guy hired to break my knees-yours too by now. Convince us to shut up.” He led through some shrubs that tore at Dart’s clothing, and then along the river’s edge again. “I’ve been avoiding him for months. But with you in the picture, I imagine they’ll bring in more help.” He said in a troubled voice, “I heard a rumor a shooter’s been hired.”

“That’s hardly breaking knees.”

“The difference between a spot fire and a range fire is getting an early jump.”

“Hired by whom? Proctor?” Dart asked.

“One thing I’ll say about you, Ivy-you do your homework.”

They walked in silence past the glaring lights of the power plant until they reached Charter Oak Bridge. They climbed the same steps where Dart had seen Zeller standing, and in minutes were up on the bridge.

“My car’s back in the south end,” Dart reminded wistfully.

“He’ll watch it after he realizes we lost him. Stay away. Same with your apartment. Same with Jennings Road. He’ll look for you there. In his eyes you’ve hooked up with me, Ivy. You’re fucked. They have a hell of a lot to protect. They’ve been trying for me for months. Even if you hadn’t stirred the nest by going to Roxin, you’d be on their list now anyway.”

“You know about my visit?” Dart asked, astonished.

“Ivy, I know fucking everything. How quickly we forget.”

“But they need me,” Dart protested. “They need me to bring you in for the murders. They should be helping me.”

“Don’t you get it, Ivy? Are you that fucking ignorant?”

“Maybe I am.”

Zeller stopped and turned around. Dart could barely make out the man’s face in the ambient light. As a car passed and Zeller was caught in the headlights, his eye sockets filled with black shadow. He said, “The Laterin doesn’t work.”

“Laterin?”

“The drug they’re testing,” he said condescendingly. “It doesn’t work.”

Dart ruminated on this. Zeller seemed to be making one last bid for innocence.

“Listen. How do you monitor whether or not a drug aimed at sex offenders works? This isn’t cancer-you don’t take an X ray,” he said condescendingly. “You keep the guy under surveillance-you monitor his every move.” Zeller spoke slowly. “Proctor Security had the contract to keep these creeps under surveillance. I was working for them. And what did I find out? A full half of these assholes repeatedly reoffend. They’re no better than they were.” His jaw seemed to move mechanically, inhumanly. Dart couldn’t catch his breath. “And Martinson, or someone over there, skewed the findings, and I, without meaning to, caught on. I got pissed off at Proctor one day and he made a boo-boo and hinted at something he shouldn’t have. I got a look at some files and turned up altered reports-Proctor was giving them the results they wanted. So what was my next step?” the teacher asked.

“Roxin’s files.”

“Exactly. Harder to break into at the time, but not impossible. Since then they’ve made the place into Fort Knox. I saw the fucking test results, Ivy-the real ones. The shit they’re testing-the Laterin-did nothing.”

“Oh, Christ,” Dart said.

“They caught me at it-nearly caught me, nearly physically had me-and I’ve been on the run ever since. Once I got started … you know … Alverez was brought in. The paperwork that I saw was shredded. Deleted. Whatever. Bet on it. I couldn’t produce a shard of evidence to support what I knew. So only the one choice,” he said, leaving it for Dart to draw his own conclusion. “What fucking choice was there?”

Dart felt in turmoil. He had deciphered the suicides as murders, concluded that the murders were the work of someone attempting to discredit Roxin-Walter Zeller. But what Zeller now told him turned all that on its head. Dart mumbled, thinking aloud. “If I had left them as suicides, if I had connected them to the clinical trial-”

“What the fuck do you think I’ve been trying to tell you with these phone calls-and risking seeing you in person! You were doing too good a job. You were pissing me off. All you had to do was connect the deaths to Roxin’s clinical trial.” He led Dart off Charter Oak, electing to leave a main thoroughfare. “The rest would have fallen into place.”

Zeller said, “She’s running out of money-Martinson. This Laterin thing has consumed her for ten years. She’s moved her resources around, thrown too much money at Laterin. She has probably cooked the books, but eventually that catches up to you. They’ve been in various stages of clinical trials on Laterin for years. She needs this to work. If it doesn’t, she’s shit-out-of-luck. This fails, she’s out of business. Everyone goes home-some of us happy.” Zeller checked over his shoulder. “Don’t look now,” he said.

Dart glanced back and saw a police patrol car approaching at a crawl.

Zeller told him, “The woods behind my old place. Two hours. Be there.” He cut down a side alley, leaving Dart alone, disappearing in a heartbeat. He had perfected the art of vanishing.

The patrol car pulled alongside, rolling at a walker’s speed. Dart, displaying his shield, walked over to the car. “What’s the problem here?”

“Your piece,” the uniformed driver said, adding, “sir,” and making a head motion in Dart’s direction. “Didn’t know who you was.”

Dart’s sweatshirt had ridden up over his holstered weapon, which was now in plain view.

“How about the other guy?”

“He’s with me,” Dart replied. He was, he thought.

“Couple of guys in clothes wet from the knees down, walking these particular streets on a cold night carrying hardware …,” the cop explained.

“I understand,” Dart said.

“You on duty, sir?” the cop asked, trying to impress now. “You want, I could give you a ride back to Jennings Road.”

“I could use a ride,” Dart said. “But not to Jennings Road.”