Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 5

Abby Lang’s Sex Crimes office was as dismal as the rest of Jennings Road. It was hard to improve upon linoleum and acoustical tile, although she had given it her best. She had hung a few pieces of artwork on the cinder block walls, had a vase of dried flowers on her desk, and there was classical music playing softly from the boom box. An adagio for strings. She, like Dart, had a personal computer on her desk; there were only a few detectives who went to this expense.

“Sit,” she said as he entered. “And shut the door.”

Dart obeyed. It was in his Wood.

“Check that out,” she said, indicating the Gerald Lawrence file. Dart had worried that this might be about Lawrence; he had come armed with a number of arguments, but he suddenly forgot most of them. She said, “Page numbers of Kowalski’s log.” She added, “The thing is, he didn’t need to include his log, but he was trying to save himself the paperwork. You ask me: He put his foot in it. There are pages missing.”

Dart spotted what she was talking about. Kowalski had merely admitted photocopies of his field notes as some of his case material. On the actual report it read: See attached.

“But it’s typed up,” Dart pointed out to her, finding himself in the awkward position of defending Roman Kowalski. “What’s the point of typing up your field notes instead of just typing up the report?”

“It’s OCR-optical character recognition,” she reminded. “Everyone’s using it to cheat on their reports.”

Dart was familiar with the scanning software that could turn handwriting into printed text, but this was first that he heard of this particular application. “A shortcut,” he said.

“Exactly. It’s not why the department invested in OCR, but it’s probably the most popular use at the moment.”

It made a world of sense to Dart: keep legible field notes, scan them into the computer, edit them on the word processor, and submit them as your report-thus avoiding the tedious duplication that writing up a report typically required. It made him question his own practices.

Following her suggestion, Dart checked the page numbers of the typewritten field notes and discovered a gap between pages three and five. “Four is missing,” he observed. Abby said nothing, continuing to type on her terminal. Dart checked through the rest of the report in case page four had merely been placed out of chronological order. Page four did not exist.

Dart said, “So he didn’t have any use for whatever was on page four. That’s hardly significant.” Dart rarely used even a third of his own notes.

“Oh, yeah? Take a look at this,” she suggested, scooting her chair back from the screen. “To use the OCR software, you have to scan the material first, right? And the only scanner we have is in Records-and that’s a PC, it’s not one of the networked terminals.”

“Meaning?”

“The scanner takes the handwritten notes and turns them into a graphic. The graphic is read by the OCR software and turned into text that can be read by a word processor.” Dart didn’t need an education on OCR. Abby clearly sensed this. She said, “It creates the files in its own directory. What Kowalski does is go down there, create the file, and print it up. He doesn’t move the file; he doesn’t erase it.”

“You’re saying that you lifted his original file?” Dart inquired, impressed.

“Voila!” she said, pointing to the screen. “Kowalski’s scanned Gerald Lawrence notes.”

She had copied the file to disk and had moved it to her own PC. Industrious of her, he thought, realizing he would have to watch out for her.

Dart read the screen. Recognizing the kind of notes that had been taken, he realized immediately that Kowalski had interviewed a witness to the Gerald Lawrence suicide. Quotation marks peppered the page.

Dart’s first instinct was to believe the witness had proven a washout, as so many did. It would explain perfectly why Kowalski had not bothered to include the text of the questioning. Dart snagged the file-Kowalski’s official investigative report-from Abby’s desk. Procedure required the investigating officer to list the name, or names, of each and every witness to the crime, including those deemed useless. Dart could find no reference to any witness.

“Her name is Lewellan Page,” Abby announced.

Dart read quickly down the screen. He didn’t like being behind Abby on this. Reading, he protested, “She’s twelve years old, Abby!” greatly relieved. “No wonder he didn’t bother listing her.”

“But he interviewed her, Joe,” she reminded. “He’s required to list her.” She hesitated and asked, “So why did he leave her out? What did she see?”

“Abby,” he cautioned, “it’s speculation.” But for the second time the hopeful thought nagged at him: Is Kowalski involved in this?

She advanced the screen to the bottom of the page. Her finger pointed out a sentence. Dart read:

“I seen a white man. A big white man. He gone on upstairs and …”

“The next page is missing,” she informed him.

Dart reread the material several times. Ohmy-god, he thought. A white man.

“I want to talk to her, Joe. I want to know what it is-who it is-that she saw.”

“Can you find her?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But if I do, I want you there.”