No Witnesses Page 8

  “It may be a woman!” Boldt stated. “I’ll give you that,” although this shattered his image of the Tin Man, whom he had assumed to be male. “I need to follow her every movement.”

  The technician showed him all the images in which the female suspect was captured by the cameras. At no point did she reveal her face. “Here’s where we vote her All-Pro,” Gus said. “There are only a few shoplifters as good. Note her position to the camera. She’s in aisle four: soup and vegetables. Positioned this way, she fully blocks any chance we might have of seeing her specific actions. She checks her watch—see that?” He replayed the moment. “And now she’s gone from our view for over seven seconds. By the time we pick her up again, she has moved quickly down the aisle. She bumps into that man with the cart, there—see that?—and by the time we pick her up again, she is paying cash, head still down, for a candy bar, and she’s gone. The thing is, checking her watch: She had the cameras timed.”

  “A woman?” Boldt asked uneasily. The Tin Man? he wondered.

  “Now check this out. This is beautiful!” the technician said enthusiastically. The screen blanked to a deep blue. When an image reappeared again, it showed aisle 4. The technician blocked a segment using a white box, tripped a key, and leaned back. The area zoomed and enlarged several times, the shelves moving increasingly closer, the products—soup cans—more easily identified: Adler soup cans. “This is where the woman was standing,” he explained. He split the screen into two similar images and said: “Before and after. See the difference? She’s not a lifter after all; we’ve got nothing on her!”

  The right-hand screen showed five soup cans that were not present in the earlier image.

  “Five?” Boldt asked in a panic.

  “Something wrong?” the young man queried. “She’s not a lifter at all,” he repeated.

  “Is it possible?” Boldt muttered.

  “Five cans of soup?” the young man asked, misunderstanding the question. “You should see some of the clothing that’s been used, the amount of stuff they can hide. We offer a seminar on clothing used in shoplifting—you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff!”

  Boldt could only account for two, possibly three, cans: the Chin girl and Slater Lowry. So where were the other three cans?

  “Listen up,” Boldt announced to his squad: LaMoia, Gaynes, Danielson, and Frank Herbert.

  Herbert, fifty, stood five feet five with a pot belly that made him equally wide. His balding head was spot-shined. Lieutenant Shoswitz stood by the door.

  Homicide’s situation room contained a half-dozen Formica desks, a retractable projection screen, and a large Wipe-It board that at the moment contained several profanities and a graphic cartoon.

  Boldt briefed them on the case, taking them through his visit to Shop-Alert and the discovery of several unaccounted-for soup cans. He had been on the phone the entire afternoon; his voice was hoarse. Or maybe that was nerves.

  “We’re missing two to three cans: Lori Chin’s mother doesn’t have any on her shelf, so I’m guessing there are still three at large. The surveillance video has given us a window of time during which the suspect was inside the store, making the drop,” Boldt continued. “Thanks to a computerized cash register system, we can identify any bank check or credit card purchases and then trace them back to whoever made that purchase. We’ve identified thirty-four people who we know were shopping inside this Foodland supermarket at the exact same time as our suspect. We have also identified eleven customers who purchased the Adler chicken soup within the twenty-four hours that followed the contaminated cans’ being placed on the shelves.

  “Here’s the drill: First, I’ve attempted to contact these eleven individuals, but I only reached three. Your job is to do a follow-up. You proceed to their homes, collect any cans—treated as evidence, don’t forget—and conduct a thorough interview to make sure no cans were given away or placed somewhere that’s been forgotten about.”

  Boldt said, “If we get lucky—if we locate these extra cans—then, beginning tomorrow morning, I want each of you to contact and interview these thirty-four others who were present at Foodland during the time of the drop.” He added as a footnote: “Obviously, this case gets our priority, although technically you’re not detailed to it, so you’ll have to stay current on the Book as well. It’s a lot of work, I know.” He continued, “These shoppers—and anyone they were with—are all potential witnesses and should be dealt with as such. We contact them first by phone, and with the hot ones, we conduct follow-ups. Interviews are tape-recorded, where we can get permission. I want you keeping good notes.” He glanced at Shoswitz.

  “Okay? Questions?” Shoswitz said, “Let’s go.”

  ELEVEN

  At seven-fifteen that Monday evening, beneath a heavy blanket of cloud that accelerated the early summer dusk, Daphne let herself into the Adler Mansion using Owen’s master key. She closed and locked the door behind her. If she were to go undetected in her efforts, then she knew she must key in the security code within the next thirty seconds to prevent a silent alarm from sounding.

  The Mansion, corporate headquarters for Adler’s global business, occupied a large corner lot in the old part of town. Adler Incorporated owned the rest of the buildings on this block as well, all nestled under towering trees, but the Mansion was special for its Victorian grandeur and charm. Three full stories and a converted basement, four chimneys, eight fireplaces, mustard-colored siding with white shutters and white trim, ornately carved fascia, a glorious series of roofs aimed to the heavens and topped with lightning rods like exclamation points.

  She had decided to break the law.

  In her mind the choice was quite clear. Warrants need more than suspicions in order to be issued, and suspicion and curiosity were all she had. Children were dying; there was no time for lengthy debate with judges and prosecutors.

  Added to this was a nagging doubt that Howard Taplin intended to cooperate fully and provide her with all the files concerning the New Leaf contamination. Intuition? A psychologist’s instincts? During the meeting on Adler’s boat, she had witnessed his cool resistance to the topic of New Leaf. It was clearly not something that he wanted discussed or investigated. Why? she wondered. The meeting had taken place late Friday afternoon. The Monday business day had now passed without any mention, any offer of the files to the police. She believed that to officially request the files—for a second time—was likely to get them shredded. Regardless of Adler’s permission to be here, she felt that if she were caught in the act, if Taplin knew how serious she was about investigating New Leaf, that any and all files pertaining to the previous contamination would start disappearing quickly. And quite possibly, forever.

  More important, the threats. Under no circumstances could she allow herself to be discovered, her identity revealed—the involvement of the police found out. The possibility of a disgruntled employee remained at the top of their suspect list. Word would travel fast within the company: The police raided our files last night. The faxed threats made it abundantly clear that police interference came at the price of more lives. If she made a mess of this, there would be more killing.

  She searched for the security device on the wall of the pantry, through the swinging door now to her right—where Adler had told her to look. She pushed through but found it too dark to see well, and with activity in a few of the other nearby Adler buildings, she decided against turning on a light. The warnings against police involvement kept her anonymity of foremost importance.

  Nonetheless, she took that risk. She wanted a look at the files alone, by herself, without the editorial screen of Howard Taplin’s watchful eye. The fact that Adler Foods had been involved in a contamination incident several years before offered Daphne Matthews, forensic psychologist, the possibility of a real and potent motivation. And whereas a large percentage of crimes against persons were seemingly committed without an identifiable motivation, judging by the use of language in the blackmail threats, she believed this crim
e different.

  Fifteen thousand … sixteen thousand … she counted off as she waved her hand in large arcs on the wall desperately searching for the security device while her eyes continued to adjust slowly to the darkness. There! Behind the door, a mahogany valance enclosing it. She pulled the cover open. A red light at the bottom flashed ominously. Her middle finger sought out the raised bump on the number 5 key, she entered the code, and the red light stopped blinking, replaced by green. She entered the security number a second time, rearming the device as Adler had advised her, ensuring both her privacy and that the building would not be broken into while she was downstairs in the files.

  She had only been here a few times, always in the day, always when the building bustled with activity. She found the near-total silence, the slight hum of ventilation, somewhat haunting. It was a big place, and the old wooden floors complained underfoot and a big grandfather clock in reception tolled out the seconds sounding like someone chipping ice. Living alone for as long as she had, she felt accustomed to solitude, but the unfamiliarity of her surroundings coupled with the clandestine nature of her mission here instilled in her a sense of foreboding, as if someone might be hiding around the next corner.

  “Hello?” she called out tentatively, in case she was wrong about being alone. Judging that she was in fact all by herself in this museum of a place—every piece of trim, every piece of furniture restored or reproduced to match the original era—she returned into the back hall and stood at the top of the curving back staircase that led down into the converted basement. She hesitated only briefly before taking the plunge and descending step by cautious step into an increasing darkness. Adler had described the layout of this sublevel secretarial pool to her, and the location of the file room, but it did not make voyaging down into the darkness, the unknown, any easier.

  She wanted those files. But more than anything, she wished now that she had not come alone.

  The drumming in her chest increased with each stair step, her breathing quickened to sharp gasps. She nervously fingered the two keys like worry beads and twisted the starched ribbon that bound them.

  In the faint red glow of a pair of lighted exit signs, Daphne saw that the secretarial pool housed five computer workstations isolated from each other by office baffles. There was a string of clocks high on the wall displaying the proper time in Rome, London, New York, Denver, Seattle, and Tokyo. A pair of erasable-pen board calendars hung on the same wall, cluttered with lines, arrows, and notations. The file room, marked Private, was to Daphne’s right. The second key opened this door.

  She had prepared herself for a vast room containing row after row of gunmetal-gray filing cabinets. Instead, it was a simply appointed, small office space containing a pair of large-screen computer workstations, constantly running, that occupied a narrow counter space; two copiers; a color laser printer, and a pair of color scanners. On the left wall hung a shelving system that housed a dozen in-boxes, all labeled. The wall to her right held more shelving and two large green plastic garbage cans labeled B + W Recycle and Color Recycle. Below the computers were several drawers containing optical disks in plastic jewel boxes. They resembled small CDs and were numbered 1 through 131, with plenty of empty slots yet to be filled.

  The room was windowless. Daphne switched on the overhead lights, pushed the door partly shut, and sat down at the right-hand terminal. The two computer terminals appeared to be identical. Both the keyboards and monitors bore the boldly printed name EDIFIS—Electronic Digital Filing System. Adler had cautioned that many of the more confidential categories were security protected, and had provided her with a credit card-size plastic pass bearing a magnetic strip that, once read, gained her the highest level of access. She pushed the proper function key for security clearance and ran the card through a slot on the right of the keyboard.

  She was inside.

  She quickly navigated through a series of menus to an alphabetized index that was organized into four separate databases: (C)ategory, (S)ubject, (D)ate, and (A)uthor. The indexing system felt familiar, like one used by the public library downtown. She moved deeper into the increasingly specific indexes. EDIFIS was a paperless filing system that called up the images of the scanned documents. The index, whether by general category or specific title, referenced one of the numbered optical disks; an (a), in parentheses indicated that an archived hard copy existed off-site.

  “Insurance” listed seventeen subheadings. She scrolled through them slowly. Several listings caught her eye, among them Executive Protection Package and another, Catastrophic, with additional subcategories branched beneath it.

  Catastrophic

  Act of God

  Criminal

  Environmental Disaster

  Health

  The word Criminal caught her eye. She selected this, was prompted to insert the proper optical disk, and having done so was faced with yet another menu. Several case histories were listed, including one called Policy & Coverage with an (a) indicating an archived copy. She selected this option and was subsequently presented with a scanned image of the actual policy: “Page 1 of 17,” it read in the bottom corner. She selected a computer icon that resembled a magnifying glass, and the document enlarged, becoming more readable. The opening pages dedicated great verbiage to defining criminal activity both within and without Adler Foods—what legally constituted it and what did not. She was no attorney, and this was an attorney’s world to be sure, but extortion and blackmail, if certified by law enforcement (whatever “certified” meant) appeared to be fully covered—up to and including a ransom sum of five million dollars.

  The number swam around lazily in her head: five million dollars.

  Third paragraph, page 4: Consumer Product Tampering. She swallowed dryly and glanced around the room to make sure she was still alone. Gooseflesh ran up her left side and across her chest and down into her stomach, which fluttered nervously.

  A long definition, followed by more legalese. It seemed to say that all costs of advertising, development, distribution, promotion, production, and publicity to reintroduce any discontinued product line that was pulled as a direct result of internal or external criminal activity—“see above”—were to be paid in full up to and including the sum of eighty million dollars.

  She gasped aloud and reread this number: eighty million dollars. Under Criminal Attack, Adler Foods was to be compensated in order to return its goods to the marketplace. It occurred to her how it might be possible to misuse this reimbursement in order to redesign, repackage, and reintroduce a product or an entire line, with the insurance company footing the bill. It would require convincing the police a crime had taken place, and it would require paperwork from police files supporting this. Such paperwork existed already, no doubt, thanks to her enlisting the help of Lou Boldt, and the company had already issued one recall of Mom’s Chicken Soup, which Taplin had claimed would cost the company a quarter-million dollars. But according to this document, it would not cost the company at all. So why had Taplin lied about the cost to the company?

  A hollow, sinking feeling stole into her. Her mouth went dry; her palms grew sticky. She loosened her scarf. It did not help.

  She backed up in the indexes. She touched N, in the general index and found an entry for New Leaf Foods, the original company name that Adler had operated under until his reorganization several years before. She found the appropriate disk and inserted it into the machine, hit the ENTER key, and was faced now with yet another index. She browsed a variety of categories, astounded by the wealth of information and how easily available and accessed it was.

  She browsed New Leaf’s legal documents and used a hypertext SEARCH function to locate all documents containing the word contamination. She took another ten minutes to narrow the result of this search down to several business letters and memos sent between New Leaf and the Washington State Health Department. All of these documents were shown in the index to have archived hard copies.

  The first of these lette
rs documented a phone call from the State Health Department alerting New Leaf to a possible contamination of their soup products. This and all subsequent correspondence was handled by Howard Taplin who, judging by the tone, had been cooperative but denied any wrongdoing on the part of Adler Foods. A product recall had been issued.

  The dates of the correspondence were filed chronologically. In the middle of the electronic stack, Daphne discovered a copy of a State Health lab report that showed a technical analysis of New Leaf’s Free Range Chicken Soup. The details of Slater Lowry’s death did not escape Daphne’s attention. The psychologist in her suddenly had not only a possible motivation, but a convincing similarity between the two crimes.

  She anxiously hurried forward in the correspondence searching for further explanations. Memo after memo blurred past. Too many to read thoroughly, but she scanned them all. She resorted to the FIND function, searching first for “chicken” and, faced with dozens of documents, changed the search string to “poultry,” which produced only six hits. She viewed the documents individually, reading each one carefully. On the third document she read the name: Longview Farms.

  A rural route address was listed in Sasquaw, Washington. She wrote this down, including the phone number, and continued to speed-read the rest of the documents. Lawsuits and countersuits had been filed. State Heath had charged Longview Farms with the contamination, clearing New Leaf.

  Her eye caught the slight uphill angle of a typed word, salmonella. She zoomed in on the image.

  Daphne would realize later that had the lab report not been scanned into the computer, had the image not been placed on a large screen that allowed her to zoom in with the magnifying glass icon, she might have missed this and the other changes that appeared to have been made. One of these changes was the date—September 15—which appeared slightly askew, imperceptibly misregistered on the line with the rest of the typewritten data. Over the next fifteen minutes she scrutinized this document, studying all the vital information and discovering what appeared to be five separate changes. Six or seven, possibly. At last she leaned back in the chair studying the screen and released a huge sigh that she had unknowingly been containing. It seemed possible that this lab report had been altered. Why? And by whom? And what did it mean?