(1995) Chain of Evidence Page 5

  He worked the keyboard again, returning Dartelli and the screen to the outside, this time from the sidewalk perspective where a crime-scene photograph showed a bloodied Stapleton folded on the sidewalk. He once again manipulated the system into performing a metamorphism between the photographic image and one that was the result of computerization. Stapleton transformed into that same white mannequin.

  “We work backward.” He controlled the software so that the mannequin slowly unfolded itself, lifted off the sidewalk, connected with the rim of the enormous cement pot, and then floated up into the air, feet first, head pointed down toward earth. Dartelli recalled the black kid’s description of Stapleton diving out the window, the kid whistling as he waved his large hand in the air indicating the dive.

  Bragg said, “The specific trajectory allows us to compute velocity necessary to launch Stapleton out the window in order for him to travel the distance he actually traveled. Any other velocity, and he lands in a different spot, connects with that pot differently, or misses it altogether.

  “Then,” Bragg added, “we look at three different scenarios: stepping off the windowsill, running at the window and diving, or … being thrown.”

  Dart’s breath caught and heat spiked up his spine. The chair wavered and nearly went over backward; he caught his balance at the last possible second.

  “We ask for new chairs,” Bragg said, “but we never get them.” He worked the keyboard. “Check this out.” The screen split into two halves: on the left, a side perspective of the interior of the room; to the right, a frontal image of the hotel and a graphical chalk mark where Stapleton had hit. The computerized colors were unnatural, the image eerie.

  The mannequin walked to the window, climbed to the sill and awkwardly squeezed through the small opening and disappeared. On the adjacent screen the computerized body appeared and fell through space. It landed feet first near the building’s brick wall, far from the chalk mark.

  “He didn’t simply jump,” Bragg said. “So did he dive?”

  The mannequin reappeared inside the hotel room. Feet on the floor, the head exited the open window and the body disappeared. In the communicating window, the body fell slowly and struck, headfirst, well away from the cement tub and the chalk mark.

  “No,” Bragg answered. “He did not dive.”

  Dartelli noticed that he had tuned out all else; he felt as if he were inside the computer screen.

  “We have his weight programmed into it, his height. If he had an extraordinary build I might tweak things to make him appear stronger to the software. But he’s basically a normal build, and I’ll tell you something—he needs a hell of a lot more velocity,” the scientist explained. “So, let’s make him run for that window.” The software showed the mannequin attempt to run through the room for the window. The tight quarters required an awkward sidestepping. “You should have seen us trying to convince the thing to do that dance,” Bragg said. The mannequin struck the window, and fake pieces of glass went out with him. “We tried ten different times to get him out that opening with the speed necessary. He went through the glass every time. Turns out he would have had to start the dive back by the bed to make it out that opening with the necessary speed. That computes to traveling three feet, perfectly level through the air—Superman, maybe, not David Stapleton.”

  Dartelli said, “And that leaves—”

  Interrupted by Bragg. “A little help from my friends.”

  A second mannequin appeared in the room, appropriately, dark gray, almost black. It picked up the Stapleton mannequin by the neck and waist, took two running steps toward the window and ejected the body. In the adjacent screen the body appeared and floated downward. It fell short of the cement tub, but drew much closer to the chalk outline than the other attempts.

  “We got it right on the second try,” Bragg announced. “He would be a big guy, or one hell of a strong woman or smaller man, to accomplish this.”

  The gray mannequin was noticeably larger this time. Two steps and the body was thrown from the room.

  It came out the window parallel to the ground, arced, rolled, and the left shoulder impaled itself on the cement tub. The body lurched back, the head snapping sharply, and the mannequin smacked to the sidewalk in a crumpled heap.

  Bragg worked the keyboard. The crime scene photograph reappeared, perfectly replacing the computer graphics. An exact match.

  “Wow,” Dartelli said, rocking forward tentatively in the chair. A big guy, he was thinking. He had a couple of candidates in mind.

  “My sentiments exactly.” Ignoring the screen and the photograph of Stapleton’s bloodied heap, Bragg faced him. “The unfortunate part is that it’s not proof, Joe. It can certainly be used to sway a jury or a judge—I’m not saying that it’s worthless—but we have no other evidence to support someone spear-chucked Stapleton from that room, and the evidence that we do have contradicts it fairly strongly, given that it would have taken an Amazon woman—an easy six feet, one-eighty, one-ninety. If she’s under six feet, then she’s built like Schwarzenegger.”

  Dart’s attention remained on the screen. “So it suggests homicide but doesn’t confirm it.”

  “Precisely.”

  Dartelli wormed his hands together, and fidgeted in the chair. Its springs creaked under his weight. A dozen thoughts flooded him, but one quickly rose to the surface.

  Bragg seemed stuck with his own thoughts. A heavy silence settled between them. The screen showed the photograph of Stapleton’s ungainly corpse, twisted and awkward—painful, even to look at.

  It has started, Dart realized.

  He felt a surge of panic as Bragg said, “I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I’m going to try the software out on the Nesbit jump—the Ice Man.”

  Dart was thinking that both Zeller and Kowalski closely matched the physical requirements that Bragg had put forth. Zeller was right around six feet, barrel-chested, built like a pickup truck, not a sedan. He had lost a considerable amount of weight after Lucky’s murder—but not his strength, Dartelli thought.

  “Why bother?” Dart asked, thinking: He knows!

  “It would be an interesting test of the software, wouldn’t it?” Bragg asked rhetorically.

  “I suppose,” Dartelli answered, trying to sound bored.

  “That one never cleared,” Bragg reminded.

  “True.” Dart was wishing the man would leave it alone, and yet he, too, wondered what the software would reveal. “I’d be interested in the results.”

  The lab man typed instructions into the keyboard and the white mannequin representing David Stapleton once again came out of the window in a dive. He floated, twisted, and he fell, connecting sharply with the cement tub before being thrown to the sidewalk. Dartelli felt the collision in his bones. “The software is on trial with us. I need to test the modeling,” Bragg said. “This could work well for me.”

  “I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it,” Dartelli cautioned the man. “Rankin would not exactly welcome pulling that particular case back out of the uncleareds.”

  “Agreed,” Bragg said, knowing the political sensitivity of the case, and no doubt recalling the battering the department had taken from the press. “But it could be done quietly—strictly to test the software.”

  Dartelli felt sick. What if the software suggested that the Ice Man had not jumped? he wondered.

  “I’ll give it a try,” Bragg said.

  Dartelli said carefully, “And for now, maybe we keep it our little secret.”

  Teddy Bragg nodded, and as his fingers danced, the animated David Stapleton was thrown from the window once again, catapulted to his contorted death five stories below.

  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 mus
ic 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.

  “Voilà!” 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.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Jackson Browne’s music played in the background. He sounded lonely. So was Dart. Ginny wouldn’t agree to meet him at his apartment, and he had no desire to chance an encounter with some boyfriend of hers. So it was to be neutral ground—Smitty’s Bar, a place neither of them haunted, not that Dart haunted any bar. He was more a library man, though loath to admit it.

  It was a yuppie bar, with dark wood furniture, white linen, and an island bar that dominated the entrance. It catered to an insurance clientele, white men and women in their thirties wearing dark suits, drinking light beer, and making conversation in the most animated voices they could muster.

  Aside from the core downtown, with its gleaming skyscrapers, the only place a bar like this could exist was West Hartford and the valley. Whites, a minority in this city, had to pick their watering holes carefully.

  Jackson Browne sang that he would do anything, from flying airplanes to walking on the wings. Dart had felt like that once with her. And maybe, just maybe, she had felt that way with him. But it had failed. Dissolved like a figure walking into a thick fog. He had watched it recede, had reached for it, called out to it, and cried when it had vanished, for such things can never come back—at least that was what she had said.

  Ginny Rice turned a couple of heads when she entered, not so much for her looks as her presence—she commanded attention. He thought of her affectionately, though he hoped she wouldn’t sense this, and he feared that she might because for her he was an easy read. She wore blue jeans, a brown bomber jacket zipped halfway to counter the air-conditioning, a teal blue stone-washed silk shirt and the diamond and gold heart necklace that he had given her on an insignificant anniversary. This outfit alone set her apart from the nearly uniform crowd, just as Dartelli’s khakis and blue blazer had differentiated him. She had cut her dark brown hair short, well off her shoulders. She had a perfect nose, small lips and eyes the color of the shirt. A matching pair of gold studs occupied her left ear—nothing in her right. That was Ginny: always something just a tad different. Tomboy. Fantastic athlete. Yet dignified and graceful when she wanted to be. She was somebody else’s now—he had heard the rumors. He swallowed dryly, attempting to clear his voice, wondering once again why he had allowed it to happen.

  “Hey, Dart,” she said, pulling the chair out for herself. If he had stood, if he had helped her with the chair she would have been angry at him, so he fought the urge and just sat there. Use of his abbreviated last name was not a formality; she had always called him this. He thought of himself as Joe Dart most of the time, thanks to her. She unzipped the bomber jacket. A couple of the guys were still looking—Ginny knew this, but she was accustomed to it and accepted it as flattery. She wiggled a smile onto her face, like an actor practicing in a mirror. His heart banged in his chest. Let go, he told himself.

  He had been told that time heals all wounds, but if that were the case, then time was moving awfully slowly and the wounds still felt raw. And seeing her—the freshness, t
he comfort with which she carried herself, her apparent happiness—was salt in those wounds. Dart was still back on the time line somewhere. He felt adrift. He had lost Zeller and Ginny in the same two-month period. He had not yet recovered.

  Jackson Browne was plaintive—he had messed up a relationship. You and me both, pal, Dart thought.

  “You look good,” she lied. She ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks with a twist from a woman who had looked good to Dart a few minutes earlier.

  He thanked her and returned the compliment, and she managed that same fake smile again, and his heart stung. She didn’t want to be here; she had better things to do. He could have died at that moment.

  Shut up, Jackson, Dart thought. He didn’t want to hear about someone else’s pain, he had enough of his own. Bad idea, coming here, he realized. He looked around and his eye found the door.

  “I saw you on television,” she said. “I thought you’d regained some of the weight, but I guess it’s true what they say about the camera adding ten pounds.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, but they both knew.

  “Good.” The Dewars arrived and she insisted on paying. She had to stretch to reach into her front pocket and Dart realized her every little movement thrilled him, and he hated himself all the more.

  “How’s Mac?” she asked.

  “Great.” Together they had recovered the Labrador from the animal shelter the weekend before they had broken up. He and Ginny used to visit the pound every Saturday morning. One of the rituals of the relationship. Twelve years old, arthritic, mostly deaf, the dog had been found hiding under a porch, stabbed eighteen times with a knife. No longer had a voice box—when he tried to bark he sounded either like a balloon losing air, or gears grinding, depending on his message. He owned a serious limp, very few teeth, and the sweetest disposition on God’s green earth. The attendant at the pound had named him Mac the Knife, and it seemed appropriate enough, and Dart had kept the name and the dog. Ginny loved Mac too, though she tried not to show it; she was private with her pain. Private with her pleasure too. Dart called out and ordered a vodka—he needed something stronger than the beer that was now empty in front of him.