Guilt in the form of a searing heat flashed up his spine-does she know about Abby? he wondered. Hartford was a small town and rumors circulated freely. Is she trying to tell me something?
“Right,” he said, attempting to interpret her expression while at the same time avoiding contact with her eyes. She could read him far too well.
But his eyes did stray to hers, and he saw that she was looking over his shoulder, not directly at him, and her expression was one of concern, causing him to glance back quickly.
In the distance, a ramped footbridge climbed up from ground level to a landing where it turned and rose by a series of formed-concrete steps to the pedestrian way on Charter Oak Bridge. Silhouetted on the landing stood the figure of a tall man.
Dart looked quickly away, his pulse pounding with this sight, returning his attention to Ginny and saying softly, “Is he still there?”
“He’s heading up the stairs.”
Dart ventured another glance and asked, “How long was he there?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, her voice reflecting her fear.
“Did he approach from the bottom or the bridge?”
“I don’t know!” she repeated harshly.
Dart’s first temptation was to turn and go after the man, despite the fact that it could have been any pedestrian simply pausing to enjoy the river view. But he felt uneasy about leaving Ginny alone in an isolated location, especially given her discovery of a possible conspiracy involving the three suicides.
“Listen-” he said.
“Go,” she prompted.
“Are you sure?”
“Go! I’m fine.”
Dart took off at a run. The entrance to the pedestrian ramp was a hundred yards ahead, the ramp itself climbing in his direction. He crossed several islands of weeds and a pair of paved roads that saw little, if any, traffic at that time of year. Reaching the ramp, he pushed hard, climbing it quickly while glancing down at where he and Ginny had been talking. Ginny, her head tilted back, her chin raised, watched him intently.
Dart flew up the concrete steps and up onto the bridge itself, and looked in both directions: first left, up the inclined arch of the bridge; then right, toward the city, and then down at ground level. He panted, out of breath, blood pounding in both ears. A car in the midst of a right-hand turn was visible to him only briefly. He blinked his eyes closed in an act of concentration, attempting to burn the image into his memory. But like the car, the image escaped, an undefinable blur, leaving only a color imprinted on the underside of his eyelids: blue-gray.
Dart recovered his breath and turned back to the steps to rejoin Ginny, but she and her car were gone, leaving Dart with that color imprinted into his vision, lingering like the afterglow of a flash camera: blue-gray.
He blocked out all else but this color, allowing it to swim within his head, and a voice quickly filled the void. It was the voice of a twelve-year-old black girl that interrupted him, the voice of Lewellan Page, resonating within her mother’s kitchen as she offered to Lieutenant Abby Lang a description of the car that she had witnessed parked behind Gerald Lawrence’s Battles Street apartment on the night of his “suicide.” Blue, maybe. Gray … he recalled her saying.
The killer? Dart wondered, furious that he had not seen enough of the vehicle to register a make, a model, or a year.
CHAPTER 18
Standing inside the roadside phone booth, dialing the number, Walter Zeller experienced a parent’s anger. Stupidity, he thought, is an art form in the proper hands. He had never been a parent, but he understood a parent’s frustration well enough.
He collected his strength, preparing himself for the confrontation, annoyed by its necessity, alarmed by the degree of emotional resolve that this required, like dredging up the black muck of the river bottom to clear the way for further passage.
Traffic blew by him on the commercialized strip that could have been Anywhere, USA. Oversized plastic signs declaring DRIVE THRU WINDOW and AMERICA’S FAVORITE; cheap marketing gimmicks like giant anchors perched out front, or a lobster claw reaching for the sky like a church steeple. He felt quite above such fanfare, sick of it, disgusted by the greed, the blatant disregard of aesthetics, and the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for neon, repetitive architecture, and Low Everyday Prices! Sick to death.
Throughout his years of public service, he believed that he had concealed well his sentimentality. Only Lucky had ever seen that side of the otherwise iron-willed sergeant. Yet dialing this number and anticipating the voice on the other end flooded him with such emotions, alarming him with a vulnerability that both relieved and ashamed him. Relieved, because it reminded him of his own humanity. Ashamed, because Walter Zeller was above sniveling about the past. His blunt fingertip hesitated alongside the final digit. An eighteen-wheeler roared past, carrying behind it a train of raised dust and the stench of diesel and burning rubber. Zeller stabbed the button. Fuck it, he thought.
“Dartelli,” the voice answered.
Walter Zeller hesitated, a knot in his throat.
“Hello? I can’t hear you.”
Without introduction, Zeller asked, “Why do it the easy way when there’s a hard way?”
“Sarge?”
Zeller registered the astonishment in Dart’s voice, the fear and concern, his decades of skilled interrogation techniques not lost. “Are they suicides, Ivy?”
Silence as even the kid’s breathing stopped.
“Answer me!” Maintain the upper hand at all times.
“No.”
“Of course not. Good. Very good.”
“I’ve been trying to-”
“Don’t try-do!” he said, purposely interrupting to prevent the kid the completion of even a single thought, keeping him off balance and out of sorts. Maintain control. “They took their own lives, but they’re not suicides, Ivy. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“Don’t get sidetracked with insurance records, for Christ’s sake. What the hell can that accomplish?”
“It was you on the bridge?”
Disappointed that he’d allowed the man a complete sentence, Zeller strung together a series of thoughts and voiced them as a single spoken stream. “I’m your fucking guardian angel, Ivy. I’m watching over you so that you don’t go astray, and believe me, it’s a fucking full-time job with you. What’s happened to you? Making a huge tangle out of something so simple. Over-thinking,” he said, raising a complaint that he had voiced dozens of times. “Making problems instead of solving them. Losing track of the basics. Didn’t you retain anything? For any conviction to stick, the detective needs to be able to connect all the dots himself. That is, unless the snitch is willing to take the witness stand, and I can tell you right fucking now that that is not the direction we’re going-you and me. The basics, damn it all. Didn’t you retain anything? Shit! If the suicides aren’t suicides, and if, on the other hand, these guys all killed themselves, then what the fuck is going on here? Make sense of it, Ivy. Don’t make a mountain of confusion. What about their blood, Ivy? The basics! Sometimes the enemy is within.” He slammed the phone into the cradle, his hand still shaking, though not from the cold.
Things never went as planned, and people were as unpredictable as the weather. Walter Zeller felt the need to take the kid by the shoulders and shake some sense into him-set him straight. He stood in the phone booth looking down at his trembling hands, wondering what was happening to him. How could he let the kid get to him this way? How had he become involved in the first place? Kowalski was the one he had targeted-as dumb as stone, and yet smart enough to let a sleeping dog lie. The truth would out soon enough, all by itself.