Sparco hooked his elbow around his victim’s windpipe in a practiced choke hold, took his own right wrist in his left, and applied a constant steady pressure like a vise, being careful not to bruise. Three years earlier the Hartford police had been taught this defensive move, and then, a few months later, refused to use it after three suspects had died of crushed windpipes.
“This is for Melanie,” Zeller, not Sparco, whispered hotly into the man’s ear. Melanie, eleven years old, fondled, raped, and sodomized over a seven-month period by this bastard. At Greenwood’s trial he had testified that he had gotten her high on coke before “doing” her. Melanie, for whom Greenwood had wept while on the stand, a performance that bought him thirty days in jail and a two-year probation from a judge with a known drinking problem. The system.
Dennis Greenwood passed into the semiconscious state that Zeller intended-an oxygen-deprived narcosis, neither awake nor fully unconscious.
Sparco moved smoothly; his actions had been choreographed and the routine rehearsed. He dragged the body over to and into the red, overstuffed chair facing the television, went over to the sink and poured a glass of water, and returned to the body. He opened his safari jacket and, without looking, removed the unlabeled brown prescription bottle with the tamper-proof cap. He primed the pump first, tilting the man’s head back and pouring a tiny amount of water down his throat. Greenwood coughed violently, spraying the water. Sparco tried again, this time massaging the man’s throat, and the water went down. He then emptied all twenty-seven of the ten-milligram Valiums into Greenwood’s mouth, and chased them with a mouthful of water. Greenwood swallowed repeatedly, the visible pulse beneath the skin of his neck revealing the effects of the cocaine on his heart.
Zeller cleaned up the man’s chin with Wallace Sparco’s light blue handkerchief, as attentive as a mother with her newborn, and then studied the room carefully.
He found a small plate by the sink. He set it down by the unconscious victim and tapped the coke bag until a dusting fell there. Then, in what he considered a brilliant touch, holding it by the edge, he used Greenwood’s laminated driver’s license to move this dusting of cocaine around on the plate and then left the license in plain sight sitting there.
From his fishing vest he removed the short length of a plastic drinking straw that he had prepared in advance-it already had traces of cocaine up inside it. He pushed the body around, accessing the man’s handcuffed hands, and pinched the straw with Greenwood’s fingers so that it retained his latent prints, and then placed the straw on the plate.
He put the man’s prints onto the prescription vial as well and dropped it into the chair alongside the victim’s leg, its plastic lid left by the plate.
Walter Zeller had attended dozens of similar crime scenes. Wallace Sparco studied it carefully to make sure it added up. He liked it-it looked good.
The duffel bag housed the cordless Dust-buster. Sparco ran the device over the floor where the cocaine had fallen as a snowy dust, lifting every last grain. He then vacuumed the entire area between the apartment’s door and the kitchen sink-the area in which he had walked. Putting the vacuum away he turned once again to his fishing vest, this time carefully examining its contents. He selected three vials, popping one lid at a time, and carefully sprinkling a tiny amount of household dust, then a pinch of cotton and synthetic fibers, and finally a trace of cigarette ash-a recipe for Teddy Bragg’s aardvark to find.
Greenwood twitched awkwardly and unexpectedly, and Zeller wondered if the blood vessels in his head had exploded and killed him before the Valium was given a chance. He hoped not. Wallace Sparco paid it no mind. His work was completed: If he wasn’t dead already, Greenwood would suffer an irreversible coma within the hour, death within three.
Sparco removed the handcuffs and checked to make sure there was no bruising from them. He walked gingerly to the door. The locks were the variety that offered a spring-loaded tongue meeting a steel housing screwed into the jamb. A knob could be twisted and a toggle thrown to set the lock open or allow it to close. Sparco threw the toggle on all three, releasing their metal tongues. The fourth lock was a deadbolt mounted inside the door. There was little Sparco could do about that. He pulled the door shut firmly, setting in place three of the four locks. When, in twenty to forty hours, the body’s decomposition announced itself to neighbors, the police would have to kick the door, splintering and destroying the jamb, perhaps covering up that the dead bolt had not been used.
It was dark out, and bitterly cold, and Wallace Sparco felt the heart of Walter Zeller beating strongly in his chest, as if it were he who had been drugged. He felt none of the remorse that he understood any sane man would feel but stopped short of judging himself insane. Conversely, he took no vain pride in his work-it was something that had to be done, that was all; someone had to dispose of the trash. With no Davids in this world, he thought, the Goliaths would rule unchecked.
Zeller pulled the sweatshirt hood up over Sparco’s baseball cap and gray hair, looking once again like an executioner or a Franciscan priest. He forced himself to walk slowly down the stairs, not wanting to attract attention or to appear a man in a hurry.
Image was everything. An act: one man playing another; one man living, one man dying. A murder turned into suicide.
And Walter Zeller-the Creator-nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER 34
Ted Bragg was kneeling by the door to the second-story apartment at 21 Norwich Street. The suicide had been called in at four in the afternoon, and Dart alerted shortly thereafter.
Bragg informed the detective, “A woman in the apartment downstairs smelled him. I’m guessing he’s two days old.”
“Who’s primary?”
“I am,” answered Greg Thompson from behind. “Just interviewed the neighbor. Didn’t see or hear a thing. Just smelled the Jordon is all. Shit like this guy, stinks bad,” he added.
Looking around the room, Bragg said to Thompson, “What we’re going to see, what we’re going to find, is a suicide-a drug overdose. What we’re looking at,” he corrected, “is a homicide.”
Thompson appeared bothered. “Says who?”
“Says the evidence,” Bragg answered. “I think I can show you, but it’s going to require several hours, and everyone coming and going wears shoe covers, hair nets, and gloves.”
“It’ll never happen,” Thompson said.
“That’s the way it’s going to be,” Bragg insisted.
Dart pulled out the piece of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. Greenwood’s name was a third of the way down Ginny’s list of men whose medical insurance had been paid for by Roxin. He had written the letters NP alongside Greenwood’s name-No Phone.
For Dart, the room felt dark and cold, the burden of this man’s death weighing on him. For the past two days he had been using this list to try to anticipate Zeller’s next kill. He had interviewed or spoken to six of the list of twenty-four. Dennis Greenwood had no phone, and Dart, not liking the neighborhood, had not traveled out here-not during the night shift. Now Greenwood was dead-though exactly how Zeller might have accomplished this still mystified him.
“The guy had a sheet,” Thompson said to Dart.
“Sex crimes,” Dart said back, glancing over at the dead man’s gray face with its swollen eyes.
Greg Thompson’s jaw dropped. “Now just how in the hell did you know that?”
CHAPTER 35
Dart needed the support of the department if he was to convince Dr. Martinson to suspend her clinical trial, turn over all the names, and then for either Proctor or HPD to provide protection for these men until Zeller was apprehended. Greenwood’s murder confirmed for Dart that this was the only course of action.