“Lewellan’s mother has given her consent for the girl to participate in a lineup,” Abby announced proudly. “If we ever get a suspect.”
“And how did you pull that off?” Dart asked, thrilled that they might have a viable witness but still confused by the face that the girl and Tommy Templeton had created-not Zeller, not Kowalski. He was toying with the idea that Zeller had hired these hits-but kept his own distance in case something went wrong, which, when attempting to stage suicides, seemed inevitable.
“Magic.”
“I’d say so,” Dart replied.
A while later, with two paper coffee cups riding the dashboard, Dart said, “I have a confession to make.”
She rocked her head on the car seat and looked at him. “Okay,” she said.
“It’s not okay.” He hoped that she might pick up on what he meant, but she waited him out. “I’m getting used to this. Comfortable with it. You and me, I’m talking about.”
“I know what you’re talking about.”
“And yet, at the same time, I still think about Ginny.”
“I still think about my marriage.”
“I know you do,” he said.
She took a deep breath and said, “There are times when I’m madly in love with you, Joe. Others, when I’m not so sure.”
“I feel that.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I wish it were different. I really do.”
“I’d like to see more of the kids. They’re always going off somewhere just as I arrive.”
“I don’t want to hurt them,” she said. “They’re too young to understand all this.”
The seat cushion crackled as she adjusted herself. He could hear the drone of city life-traffic, mostly. A disturbing silence hung over them.
She added, “Charles and I have planned all along to get together for a week and see if we can’t put it back together. I told you about that,” she said defensively. “I … we … it’s for the kids’ sake.”
“I thought maybe that had changed, given the last month.”
“No,” she said, crushing him, “that hasn’t changed.”
“That’s not fair,” he complained.
She popped open her door and scrambled out of the car. She jumped across an icy puddle and up onto the sidewalk and started away from him at a brisk pace. She was risking both the surveillance and her own safety. He, too, broke the rules. He left the car and chased after her. She heard him coming and increased her stride.
“Abby,” he called after her.
“Don’t!” she objected.
“Come back to the car. It’s my mistake.”
She stopped and turned, and he bumped into her. She pushed him away forcibly and hollered loudly, “You’re damn right it’s your mistake. And a big one. These are my children we’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry,” Dart apologized. He approached her tentatively. She eyed him skeptically, and then the two of them wound together, arm in arm, and she whispered into his ear, “Asshole.”
“Jerk. Let’s drop it, okay?” he asked. “Whatever happens, happens.”
She nodded. Halfway back to the car, she took his hand. Joe Dart laced his fingers with hers and squeezed.
At eleven-thirty the downstairs light at 11 Hamilton Court went dark, followed several minutes later by an upstairs light going on. Dart explained, “An automatic timer.”
“Agreed. Either that or someone has been walking around in the dark for the last five minutes.”
Together, they watched the building until one in the morning, when the upstairs light went off. Dart repositioned the car on Park Terrace, where Abby could keep an eye on him as he crossed and once again knocked on the front door. No answer. He returned to the back of his car, moved a sleeping Mac out of the way, and got into his first-aid kit. Using a piece of white athletic tape, he bridged the hinged side of the house’s front door, placing it at ankle height. If the door were opened, the tape would tear loose from the hinge.
Around back, again with Abby watching, Dart wedged a thin stick into the crack of the only gate in the dilapidated green fence. If the gate door were opened, the stick would fall to the ground. Simple tricks-he and Zeller had used them dozens of times.
He dropped Abby back at her car, hoping she might invite him to her place, but she did not. On the way home, he worried about this, and again when he took Mac for a short walk.
He slept poorly until 3:00 A.M., having no idea what had awakened him-a nightmare? a sound? something out on the street? And then the thoughts cluttered his head like bats trapped in an attic.
He lay awake for hours, spinning, churning-driven by the possibilities that 11 Hamilton Court offered. Confused by Abby’s mixture of hot and cold.
If he was to get a look inside that house, he was going to have to convince Haite to involve the State Police. Haite, in turn, would need to involve Captain Rankin. A real mess.
In the morning, he returned to 11 Hamilton Court. Again, he knocked on the front door, and again no one answered. The piece of white tape remained in place. Disappointed not to find a sign of anyone, he moved around back, his heart busy in his chest, his palms damp and cold. He hated this neighborhood.
He found the stick that he had jammed into the gate’s crack lying in the dirt on the ground. Dart picked it up and held it. In the oozing mud outside the gate, he saw shoe prints coming and going. Shoe prints not his own.
Sometime during the night someone had been inside.
The rock salt and leaves that he had collected the night before were now in separate envelopes on the front seat of his car, marked and labeled. Evidence, he thought.
Perhaps just enough to convince Haite to authorize the raid.
CHAPTER 24
It had been a busy few hours.
Dart loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “I need an ERT for an evidence collection raid on a house in the south end,” Dart explained to Sergeant John Haite. The skin around the man’s eyes was an ink blue, reminding Dart of a raccoon mask. CAPers was run by two sergeants, John Haite or Dave Almedi, each with his own group of detectives and his own desk in a glassed room off the division’s floor. The two were rarely in at the same time because their units rotated in and out of twelve-hour tours. Dart took a metal chair across from Haite’s cluttered desk. The fluorescent lights made their skin glow an ugly yellow-green.
“A what?” Haite asked rhetorically.
The idea of using an Emergency Response Team to do a raid for the sole purpose of collecting evidence was an idea all Dart’s. It would require writs and warrants and probable cause. Dart explained, “I can place an unknown person inside Harold Payne’s study on the night he … committed suicide. Bragg will support me in that whoever this was may have attempted to conceal his or her presence by vacuuming the rug.”
Haite appeared skeptical.
Dart handed over Bragg’s report, completed only an hour earlier, that showed an identical chemical composition between the rock salt recovered at Payne’s and the salt Dart had collected at 11 Hamilton Court. “This links this suspect to both Payne’s and the house at Eleven Hamilton Court. I contacted the owner, who put me in touch with a property management firm-”
“Peter Sharpe,” Haite said. All the slum property was handled by Sharpe. He was hated by the police.
“Yeah. The place is rented to one Wallace Sparco, white male, fifty-two.” Dart passed Haite the photocopy of Sparco’s driver’s license. He went in for the kill by handing him next the computerized rendering Lewellan Page had witnessed at Gerald Lawrence’s. Although imperfect, the similarity was undeniable. “Wallace Sparco has been busy making suicides,” Dart said.
“Shit,” came Haite’s reply, comparing the two photographs. He looked over at Dart with basset hound eyes of irritation. He didn’t want things more complicated. “They are not suicides?”
“That’s what I need to prove or disprove.”