“True story.”
“You don’t go through Haite for warrants.”
“Thank God.”
“What?” he asked. “Directly to the PA?”
“Do not pass GO.”
“Do you operate under special probable cause requirements, or the same as the rest of us?” He clarified, “Does the prosecuting attorney hold you to a Sex Crimes-”
“Angle?” she filled in for him. “No,” she answered. She added sarcastically, “Surprisingly enough, they treat me like I’m a lieutenant.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“I know you didn’t, but it sounded a little that way.”
“I need to extend the search warrant for Hamilton Court,” he stated. “I need inside.”
“I can get inside,” she said. “You can accompany me.” Checking her watch, she said, “It’ll be a phoner this time of night. Who’s the on-call judge?”
“Cryst.”
“Cynthia Cryst?” she said. “A woman, Joe. Piece of cake. Trust me on this.” She pushed her paperwork out of the way and pulled a blank pad in front of her. “This is a grounder.”
They entered 11 Hamilton Court an hour later, Abby carrying the signed warrant in her pocket. The automatic timer had the sitting room light switched on-it was 9:55 P.M.
Abby, via Dart, had listed three items on the warrant that had been left off of earlier warrants: grocery store shopping bags, the framed photographs on the piano, and “articles of clothing.”
With both of them wearing latex gloves, he collected the framed photographs into a white paper sack.
“The photos I can understand,” she said. “Even though you assume it’s Zeller who put them there to create this Wallace Sparco identity, you think there may be some significance to them, something he might tell you without intending to. But the shopping bags?” she asked.
“He thought to put food here,” Dart explained, having led her into the kitchen. “Again, as you said, to build the perception that Sparco lived here. Sparco didn’t live here. Neither did Zeller. He used this as a staging area-at least up until we discovered it; he must have used someplace else after that … He knew it was virtually impossible not to carry something of yourself into every crime scene, and to take something of the crime scene back to your house with you-it’s the nature of hairs-and-fibers-it’s what he drummed into me all those years. I was the one with the degree, but he was the one who understood fiber evidence handshakes and piggybacking.”
“So he came here, changed clothes-changed identities,” she corrected, “did the crime, came back, changed back….” She understood it then. “The chain of evidence would always lead back to here.”
“If we ever found anything at a crime scene-and he took extra precautions to see that we wouldn’t, like vacuuming and laying false evidence-we would only find his safe house, not the man himself.”
“But grocery bags?” she inquired skeptically.
“Maybe he was too smart for his own good,” Dart said, searching drawers. “He buys groceries to convince us Sparco lived here. Even eats some of it, to give the place a lived-in effect. But if he saved the grocery bags-” Dart thought aloud, sorting through the contents of another drawer.
Abby yanked open the cabinet below the sink, pulled out the trash can, and hoisted the trash bag-a plastic grocery bag. She completed for him, “Then he would use them as trash bags.”
“You’re brilliant,” he crowed.
“I know. It’s true, isn’t it? But not brilliant enough to know why you care about this,” she added.
He took it from her and turned it around for her to see the green writing on the side. “Shopway,” he said, reading the name.
“That’s up on Park,” she said, naming the worst street in town.
“How many groceries between here and Shop-way?” he quizzed.
“Two. Three, maybe. Catering to the college kids.”
“Catering to the whites,” he said. Shopway was an inner-city store.
“You’re trying to narrow down his neighborhood,” she said, impressed. “To identify someplace we might find him.” She added, “We put the Shopway under surveillance, assuming it’s closer to home.”
Dart grinned at her, dumping what little trash the bag held and collecting the grocery sack as evidence.
Then he opened the downstairs coat closet and searched through the three jackets hanging there.
Abby said, “He would have bought these at a secondhand store-a Salvation Army, something like that. You’re looking for tags, something to further narrow the neighborhood.”
“Nothing,” Dart mumbled, shutting the closet door and leading her upstairs.
Following closely, Abby said, “My guess is that he’s going to wish he hadn’t trained you so well.”
“Compliments,” Dart said, “will get you everywhere.” He entered the bedroom and headed for the closet.
Abby switched on the light. Dart turned quickly, shook his head, and said, “No!”
“This,” he said, checking through the clothes, “may have started out secondhand … and he would have bought it big, so that it fit him, but wasn’t his size … and some of it would have gotten thrown out: the Payne stuff for instance-too much blood. But he has a thing about clean clothes. Did you ever notice? Freshly ironed shirts, pressed pants. He and Lucky got in an argument once because she wanted to save money, but the Sarge insisted on sending out his shirts. It was almost a-”
“Fetish,” she completed for him, holding up the shirttail of one of the hanging shirts. “Is this what you’re looking for?” Next to her gloved right thumb was a blue commercial laundry tag, neatly pinned with a thread of plastic to the shirttail.
Excitement stole into Dart: A grocery store was unlikely to have an address for a customer; but a commercial laundry just might.
As they climbed back into the Taurus, their body language expressing their urgency, Dart told her, “I would have found the laundry tag.” He started the car. “But I might have missed that grocery bag,” he confessed.
“You see?” she crowed. “You need me.”
The map on Abby’s office wall consisted of enlarged photocopies of a one-square-mile area surrounding the Park Street Shopway supermarket. Dart had made a pot of coffee, having worked through his shift, but stayed at Jennings Road. Abby had gone home for a few hours sleep, having returned a few minutes earlier, just before nine. Using the yellow pages, Dart had spent the wee hours narrowing down the location of the city’s nineteen commercial laundries. Six pushpins were now stuck into the improvised map.
At 9:02 Dart, yellow pages at his side, hung up the phone, stepped over to the map, and withdrew one of the pushpins. “White tags pinned to the collar using safety pins,” he said.
At 9:30, Abby complained, “White tags, green tags, pink tags-but no blue tags.”
“We’ll find it,” Dart said.
“Not near the Shopway,” she said, removing the last of the pins.
Dart stared at the map, thoughts buzzing in his head. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, feeling depressed. This was his sleep time, and a Saturday morning to boot. His body was experiencing jet lag. His head hurt. His back was sore from having fallen asleep in a chair. He envied her the few hours sleep.
Abby excused herself and left the room. Dart, who had been trying since Thursday to return a call left by Ginny, dialed her number. Her machine picked up. He cradled the phone, jealousy consuming him. Ginny was always home on a Saturday morning. This meant that she hadn’t slept there the night before. He’d wondered why he hadn’t heard from her. Typically they played phone tag until one reached the other.
Abby returned and said brightly, “So I guess we try every friggin’ laundry in the city until we find one that uses blue tags.” She plopped down into a chair by a phone and said, “Do you want to start with the A’s or the N’s?”