Chain of Evidence by Ridley Pearson Page B

said.
    Dartelli said carefully, “And for now, maybe we keep it our little secret.”
    Teddy Bragg nodded, and as his fingers danced, the animated David Stapleton was thrown from the window once again, catapulted to his contorted death five stories below.

CHAPTER 5
    Abby Lang’s Sex Crimes office was as dismal as the rest of Jennings Road. It was hard to improve upon linoleum and acoustical tile, although she had given it her best. She had hung a few pieces of artwork on the cinder block walls, had a vase of dried flowers on her desk, and there was classical music playing softly from the boom box. An adagio for strings. She, like Dart, had a personal computer on her desk; there were only a few detectives who went to this expense.
    â€œSit,” she said as he entered. “And shut the door.”
    Dart obeyed. It was in his Wood.
    â€œCheck that out,” she said, indicating the Gerald Lawrence file. Dart had worried that this might be about Lawrence; he had come armed with a number of arguments, but he suddenly forgot most of them. She said, “Page numbers of Kowalski’s log.” She added, “The thing is, he didn’t need to include his log, but he was trying to save himself the paperwork. You ask me: He put his foot in it. There are pages missing.”
    Dart spotted what she was talking about. Kowalski had merely admitted photocopies of his field notes as some of his case material. On the actual report it read: See attached.
    â€œBut it’s typed up,” Dart pointed out to her, finding himself in the awkward position of defending Roman Kowalski. “What’s the point of typing up your field notes instead of just typing up the report?”
    â€œIt’s OCR—optical character recognition,” she reminded. “Everyone’s using it to cheat on their reports.”
    Dart was familiar with the scanning software that could turn handwriting into printed text, but this was first that he heard of this particular application. “A shortcut,” he said.
    â€œExactly. It’s not why the department invested in OCR, but it’s probably the most popular use at the moment.”
    It made a world of sense to Dart: keep legible field notes, scan them into the computer, edit them on the word processor, and submit them as your report—thus avoiding the tedious duplication that writing up a report typically required. It made him question his own practices.
    Following her suggestion, Dart checked the page numbers of the typewritten field notes and discovered a gap between pages three and five. “Four is missing,” he observed. Abby said nothing, continuing to type on her terminal. Dart checked through the rest of the report in case page four had merely been placed out of chronological order. Page four did not exist.
    Dart said, “So he didn’t have any use for whatever was on page four. That’s hardly significant.” Dart rarely used even a third of his own notes.
    â€œOh, yeah? Take a look at this,” she suggested, scooting her chair back from the screen. “To use the OCR software, you have to scan the material first, right? And the only scanner we have is in Records—and that’s a PC, it’s not one of the networked terminals.”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œThe scanner takes the handwritten notes and turns them into a graphic. The graphic is read by the OCR software and turned into text that can be read by a word processor.” Dart didn’t need an education on OCR. Abby clearly sensed this. She said, “It creates the files in its own directory. What Kowalski does is go down there, create the file, and print it up. He doesn’t move the file; he doesn’t erase it.”
    â€œYou’re saying that you lifted his original file?” Dart inquired, impressed.
    â€œ Voilà! ” she said, pointing to the screen. “Kowalski’s scanned Gerald Lawrence notes.”
    She had copied