“These are not your investigations. Where the hell is Kowalski on this?”
“It’s an end run, Sergeant,” Dart went ahead reluctantly. “I don’t feel good about it, but that’s the way it is.”
“An end run on Kowalski?”
“Each one of these suicides is his,” Dart pointed out.
“Oh, shit.” Haite tilted back in his chair. “Oh, shit.”
“I know,” said Dart. “I don’t like it either.”
“Fuck this,” Haite said, exasperated. “I don’t need this kind of trouble.”
Dart waited him out. He knew better than to push Haite.
“Someone tapped both Payne and Lawrence and set them up to look like suicides?” Haite muttered. “Why?”
“To keep us from catching on. To keep going. To clean house: They’re both sex offenders, Sergeant. Pornography. Wife beating. Stapleton too.”
“Stapleton is who?”
“The jumper at the Granada Inn. August.”
“Oh, shit.” He scratched his head. “Oh, fuck.”
“I know,” Dart repeated.
“And what the hell are you asking for?”
“An evidence raid with an Emergency Response Team in case it gets ugly. That’s a lousy area, Pope Park.”
“I know.”
“A way to get in and out without Sparco any the wiser.”
“Fuck that,” Haite said. “We just get the paper right and we kick it and search it. So what?”
“Sparco is one careful son of a bitch, Sergeant. We have less than zero to go on. If we don’t find some kind of evidence connecting him to these crime scenes, we don’t want to tip our hand that we’ve been there.”
“It’s illegal. Have you considered that? No matter what, we have to post the place that it was searched.”
“Those search notices have a habit of blowing off the door, Sergeant.”
“Oh, fuck. What’s happened to you, Dartelli? Blow off the door? You’re suggesting we purposely avoid posting notice? That is illegal, Detective!” He had raised his voice to shouting. Dart knew that by now the other guys would be looking this way, but with his back to the floor he couldn’t see.
“We post it, and if it blows off, it blows off.”
“This is not like you,” the sergeant condemned. He added, “This sounds much more like Kowalski or Drummond than you. What’s gotten into you?”
“Three murders made to look like suicides,” Dart answered. “We’ve got a jury of one running wild, Sergeant. If we don’t do something, the numbers are going to increase.”
Haite and Zeller had come up through the ranks at the same time. There was mutual respect between the men, but a healthy competition as well. If anyone felt as strongly about Zeller as Dart, it was this man sitting across from him. Were Dart to share the possibility of Zeller’s involvement with Haite, the detective risked being reassigned. Without ironclad proof, John Haite was not about to bring down Walter Zeller. So Dart avoided mentioning his former sergeant or the Ice Man investigation. But Haite had just reviewed the case a few days earlier.
“What about the Ice Man?” he asked. “He took a dive just like Stapleton.”
Dart met eyes strongly with his sergeant. “Yes, he did.” He offered nothing more. Telephones rang out on the floor. Haite and Dart maintained an unblinking eye contact.
“You’re saying the Ice Man was a sex offender? Do we know this? Can we prove this?”
Dart replied, “I didn’t say anything about the Ice Man, Sergeant. Do you have a specific question that you want to ask?”
Haite, still maintaining eye contact, bored a hole through Dart. He understood the meaning of Dart’s reserved tone of voice-he was trying to warn the sergeant off. Perhaps the only coincidence that Haite could pick upon-without Dart’s cooperation-was the date of Zeller’s retirement, which followed quickly after the Ice Man investigation.
“No questions,” Haite whispered dryly, fingering the photocopy of Wallace Sparco’s driver’s license, and Dart had to wonder what the man saw in the face. Did he, too, see the resemblance to Zeller?
Dart nodded. “Fine with me.” He hesitated and asked again, “And the ERT raid?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Haite now looked as pale as Teddy Bragg.
Two vans pulled onto Park Terrace at 1:00 A.M. One was painted gray and carried a red diagonal stripe that read: MANNY’S STEAM AND CLEAN. It had been confiscated by the State Police in a drug bust two years earlier and was now outfitted with a personal computer and printer, communications hardware, and an elaborate video setup. The second van was a customized beige Dodge with what appeared to be darkly tinted windows but were in fact one-way glass. Behind the glass, six men and one woman sat on opposing steel mesh benches. Clad all in black, wearing combat boots that laced over the ankle, four were members of the State Police ERT unit. One of the outsiders was Joe Dartelli, who had suffered through an egregiously boring ninety-minute briefing that had been lectured by the commander of the State Police unit, Tom Schultz. The remaining two, a woman named Gritch and a man named Yates, were a team that someone at HPD had coined “Ted Bragg on amphetamines”: evidence technicians whose specialty was speed and efficiency.
They all wore communications devices in their ears, night-vision goggles perched on their foreheads, bullet-resistant vests, black handcuffs, black nine-millimeter semiautomatic handguns in their belt holster, and maglights Velcroed to their belts. Gritch and Yates carried bulging black canvas bags at their sides, the straps slung over their shoulders and necks. They all wore black farm hats that carried the single word POLICE in bright yellow stitching. The veterans called these “target caps” for obvious reasons. The ERT members wore the hats backward like black and Hispanic kids. The protective vests carried bold yellow print across the back: STATE POLICE. All but Dart also carried a stun grenade and a smoke grenade-both of which Dart had argued to leave behind. But ERT, the most militarylike unit of the State Police, did not, would not, vary from procedure.
One of the ERT members sitting directly across from Dart said, “A military unit could put a scope on those windows and tell us if we were facing any life-forms.”
“Life-forms, Brandon?” one of the others teased. “What are you expecting, Klingons?”
“Attack dogs, asshole. Animals and humans. The scopes work off infrared. You can scope right through walls with the newer ones.” Brandon held a bunch of electronic gear in his arms. Dart easily identified him as the techie.
“Hey, commander,” a third said to Schultz. “We ever gonna get anything like that?”
“On our budget? Who the fuck you kidding?” Schultz was the marine drill-sergeant type who had given the briefing. Every other word was a swearword or a denigrating, obscene comment involving some aspect of female anatomy. “Tit-sucker.” “Fist-fucker.” “Cunt breath.” A real charmer.
Gritch apparently tolerated Schultz, storing away enough harassment ammunition to retire comfortably if she ever chose to press a suit.
After the ninety-minute soliloquy, Schultz and Dart had entered into a brief but vehement discussion of chain of command, Dart emphasizing that it was his raid, Schultz insisting it was his team. They compromised whereby Schultz would handle the team logistics while Dart directed the actual reconnaissance-in this case, the physical inspection and the collection of evidence.
The search warrant had to specify what it was that Dart was looking for, if that item was to be removed for lab work. The trick-one of the oldest tricks-was for him to list everything and anything that he could think might be found in the search. It took a cooperating judge to go along with such practice, but there were plenty. On Dart’s list was everything from a portable vacuum cleaner to lamp cord, wool rugs, to latex gloves.
“Scope on,” Schultz directed Brandon, who carried what looked like a black metallic snake clipped at the calf and thigh to the outside of his right leg. He reached up to his head and flipped a small device into place that looked like a dentist’s mirror and came to rest two inches off his eye. His right hand worked a small box attached to his belt that Dart could not fully see. He reported, “Scope fully functional.” ERT members, Dart thought, apparently saw little use for verbs.