Boldt 03 - No Witnesses (2 page)

She handed him a fax—the first of what appeared to be several that she removed from a briefcase.

S
OUP IS MOTHER’S CHOICE
.N
OT ALWAYS
.

She told him, “That was the first threat he received.”

“Adler,” Boldt said, filling in the blank.

She nodded, her hair trailing her movements. Daphne Matthews had grace, even when frightened. “It’s an ad slogan they use.”

“Innocuous enough,” he said.

She handed him the next saying, “Yes, but not for long.”

S
UICIDE OR MURDER. TAKE YOUR PICK.
N
O COPS
. N
O PRESS
. N
O TRICKS,
OR YOU WILL CARRY WITH YOU
THE LIVES OF THE INNOCENT
.

“It could be nothing,” Boldt said, though his voice belied this.

“That’s exactly what
he
said,” she replied angrily, lumping them together.

Boldt did not want to be lumped in with Owen Adler. “I’ll give you one thing: When you say
black hole
, you mean
black hole
.” Faxed threats? he thought. In the top left of the page of thermal paper, he read a date and time in tiny typeface. To the right: “Page 1 of 1.” Good luck tracing this, he thought.

She handed him a third. He did not want it.

“Quite a collection,” he said. Boldt’s nerves unraveled from time to time, and when it happened, he defaulted to stupid one-liners that seldom won a laugh.

I
F
A
DLER
F
OODS IS OUT OF
BUSINESS WITHIN 30
DAYS, AND
ALL
OF THE
MONEY IS GONE, AND YOU ARE DEAD AND
BURIED, THERE WILL BE NO SENSELESS KILLING
.
T
HE CHOICE IS YOURS
.

“How many days has it been?” It was the first question that popped into his head, though it was answered by the date in the corner. He counted the weeks in his head. The thirty days had expired.

“You see the way he worded it?” Looking down at her feet, she spoke softly, dreamy and terrified. Her lover was the target of these threats, and despite her training, she clearly was not prepared for how to handle it. “The more common threat would be: ‘If Adler Foods is
not
out of business within thirty days …’ You see the difference?”

Her bailiwick, not his, he felt tempted to remind her. “Is that significant?” He played along because she had
FRAGILE
written all over her.

“To me it’s significant. So is the attempt in each fax to place the blame firmly with Owen: It’s his decision; his choice.” When she looked up at him, he saw that she held back tears.

“Daffy—” he offered, stepping closer.

“Owen and I are not going to see each other—socially—for a while. Me being police and all.” She wanted it to sound casual, but failed. “We have to take him seriously now.”

Boldt felt a chill. “Do we?”

She handed him another.

I
AM WAITING
. I
SUGGEST YOU DO NOT
.
Y
OU WILL HAVE TO LIVE WITH YOUR CHOICE
.
O
THERS WILL NOT BE SO LUCKY
.

“It’s the first time he’s mentioned himself,” Boldt noted.

She handed him the last of the group. “That one was sent four days ago. This one arrived this morning.”

Y
OUR INDECISION IS COSTLY
.
IT CAN, AND
WILL, GET
MUCH WORSE
THAN THIS
.

Below this on the fax was a copy of a newspaper article.

“
Today’s
paper,” she explained.

The headline read:
INFECTIONS BAFFLE DOCTORS
—
Two Children Hospitalized
.

He read the short article quickly.

“The girl is improving. The boy is
not
,” she told him. “‘It can, and will, get
much worse
than this,’” she quoted.

He looked up. “This is his offer of proof? Is that what you’re thinking?”

“He means to be taken seriously.”

“I don’t get it,” he complained, frustrated. “Why didn’t you bring this in sooner?”

“Owen didn’t want to believe it.” She took back the faxes possessively. Her hand trembled. “The second one warns against involving us.”

She meant cops. She meant that the reason for them meeting here, and not in the fifth-floor offices, was that she still was not sure how to handle this.

“An Adler employee,” Boldt said. “Past or present, an employee is the most likely.”

“Owen has Fowler working on it.”

She meant Kenny Fowler, formerly of Major Crimes, now Adler’s chief of security. Boldt liked Kenny Fowler, and said so. Better yet, he was good police—or had been at one time. She nodded and toyed with a silver ring fashioned into a porpoise that she wore on her right hand.

“I misjudged him,” she said so quietly that Boldt leaned in to hear as she repeated herself. Daphne was not one to mumble.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure,” she lied.

A
black hole
. Absorbing energy. Admitting no light—pure darkness. He realized that he had already accepted it, and he wanted to blame her for knowing him so well.

“Talk to me,” he said, nervous and irritated.

“You’re right about it being an employee. That’s the highest percentage bet. But typically it involves extortion, not suicide demands. Howard Taplin, Owen’s counsel, wants it handled internally, where there’s no chance of press leakage, no police involvement, nothing to violate the demands.” This sounded a little too much like the party line, and it bothered him. It was not like her to voice the opinions of others as her own, and he had to wonder what kind of man Howard Taplin was that he seemed to carry so much influence with her. “That’s why I have to be so careful in dealing with you. Taplin wants Fowler to handle this internally. Owen overruled this morning. He suggested this meeting—opening a dialogue. But it was
not
an easy decision.”

“We can’t be sure this newspaper story is his doing,” Boldt told her. “He may have just seized upon a convenient headline.”

“Maybe.” She clearly believed otherwise, and Boldt trusted Daphne’s instincts. Heart and mind; he was reminded of his lecture.

“What’s Fowler doing about it?” Boldt asked.

“He doesn’t know about this meeting. Not yet. He, like Taplin, advised against involving us. He’s looking to identify a disgruntled employee—but he’s been on it a month now. He’s had a few suspects, but none of them has panned out. His loyalty is to the company. Howard Taplin writes his paychecks, not Owen—if you follow me.”

Boldt’s irritation surfaced. “If this news story
is
his doing, I’d say we’re a little late.”

“I’m to blame. Owen asked me for my professional opinion. I classified the threats as low-risk. I thought whoever it was was blowing smoke. Proper use of the language. The faxes are sent by portable computer from pay phones. Fowler traced the last two to pay phones on Pill Hill. That’s a decent enough neighborhood. What that tells us is that in all probability we’re dealing with an
educated, affluent, white male
between the ages of
twenty-five
and
forty
. The demands seemed so unrealistic that I assumed this person was venting some anger—nothing more. Owen went along with that. He put Kenny on it and tried to forget it. I screwed this up, Lou.” She crossed her arms tightly again and her breasts rode high in the cradle. Again she quoted, “‘It can, and will, get
much worse
than this.’”

Her voice echoed slightly in the cavernous enclosure, circling inside his thoughts like horses on a carousel.

A
black hole
. His now.

“You want me to look into it, I’ll look into it,” he offered reluctantly.

“Unofficially.”

“You know I can’t do that, Daffy.”

“Please.”

“I’m not a rent-a-cop. Neither are you. We’re fifth-floor. You know the way it works.”

“Please!”

“I can’t do that
for very long
,” he qualified.

“Thank you.”

“If either of these kids dies, Daffy—” He left it dangling there, like one of the many broken cobwebs suspended from the cement ceiling.

“I know.” She avoided his gaze.

“You’ll share
everything
with me. No stonewalling.”

“Agreed.”

“Well … maybe not
everything
,” he corrected.

It won a genuine smile from her, and he was glad for that—though it deserted her as quickly as it had come. His frantic footfalls on the formed stairs sounded like the beating of bats’ wings as he descended at a run.

The newspaper article had listed one of the hospitals. For Lou Boldt, the victim was where every investigation began.

TWO

Boldt stood at the foot of the bed in the Harborview Medical Clinic’s ICU ward. Slater Lowry lay unconscious, the repository of a half-dozen tubes, the source for the weakened signals charted on a variety of green video monitors. KIRO’s morning news had picked up the story of a “mysterious infection.” There had been no mention of Owen Adler or the threatening faxes.

The boy was a towhead with a short, turned-up nose and monkey ears he would hopefully grow into. The hospital gown fit him awkwardly, riding up tightly against his neck; Boldt glanced toward the door, then to the large viewing window, and found himself alone with the boy. He reached out and tugged the white seam to a moonlike crescent at the boy’s collarbone. Better now. Despite the child’s beauty, he did not sleep peacefully. His was a tormented unconsciousness. This room was too bright, too clinical for a child: more an operating theater with a bed in it. Too many machines, too much tile and stainless steel—a place to die rather than to recover. No window to the outside, nothing human about it whatsoever. It had been created to be sterile, and had greatly succeeded.

“Hold on,” Boldt whispered encouragingly, willing him stronger, unable to fight off the thought that this might be his own son just as easily. That this condition had been
inflicted
on him by a complete stranger so repulsed Boldt that he, too, felt briefly nauseated and sought a chair where there was none to be found.

Miles. His two-year-old. All the clichés held true: the sun rose and set on the boy; the light of his life. And what if? What then? How does a parent stand idly by at a hospital bedside and watch a child shrink from this earth? Who deserves that? A sickening energy invaded him. He shuddered and pulled at the gauze mask that suffocated him.

There was no consideration of ducking this one,
black hole
or not. It qualified as “crimes against persons,” and as such, was to be handled by Homicide. It was his; he owned it. He
wanted
this case now—eager, like a boxer climbing into the ring.

Pressed into the wall, concentrating on the boy—
the victim
—a greenish haze clouded the room. Boldt had heard all the stories of cops who could place themselves into the head of the killer. Not him: He was no mind reader, but an observer. An evidence hound. His strength was not so much intuition as an uncanny ability to listen to the
victim
. Empathy. In this regard, he had what the others did not.

But for the moment he was stumped. The victim typically brought along a crime scene, a foundation of physical evidence from which Boldt built a case. Slater Lowry offered him nothing. Or did he? the detective wondered, stepping closer to the bed again. True, the crime scene was now well separated from the victim. But there was, in fact, an intended weapon: this bacteria or virus. Boldt called down to the basement of this same building and after a long hold connected with Dr. Ronald Dixon—“Dixie”—pathologist and chief medical examiner for all of King County. A man recruited by San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York at twice the salary, twice the vacation; a man who stayed at half the salary and half the vacation and ten times the friends. Boldt asked Dixie to join him, and without any questions Dixie agreed. There was, quite possibly, a crime scene somewhere. Somehow the food eaten by Slater Lowry had been contaminated, intentional or not.

Waiting, Boldt fell victim to his own active imagination. He pictured a man’s hands injecting a piece of fruit with a syringe; he saw a fast-food chef worker squeezing several drops of fluid onto a roll. He saw a cannery, a thousand cans an hour whirling down roller chutes and a single square inch of a stainless steel cutter somewhere in the maze holding a green fuzzy mold that the swing-shift cleaners had failed to notice. It was this last thought that caught him. What if Adler Foods
was
responsible? What if these faxes were merely a ruse to cover up a massive blunder, a contaminated product—
their own product
? What if Daphne had been used—manipulated. What if she were the real victim?

Suspicion. He lived with it, always casting as wide a net as possible, encompassing every possibility, distasteful or not. He worked systematically, methodically following up each thought, each suspicion. He processed, considered, weighed, tested, and then compared with whatever evidence was available.

“It’s a strain of cholera.” It was Dixie’s voice. He was reading the boy’s chart. A youthful face for a fifty-year-old. Somewhat oriental eyes. Dixie was a big man like Boldt. Thinning brown hair juxtaposed by bushy eyebrows. He wore a gold wedding ring and a black rubber watch. Wide shoulders that hunched forward from years of leaning over a stainless steel slab.

“I’ve gotten a couple of calls about this,” he informed Boldt. They had worked maybe two hundred crime scenes together. “The girl, Lori Chin, is much improved. She’s going to pull through.”

“Who’s on this?”

“State Health investigates infectious diseases. CDC, if it’s a real bastard.”

“It’s a real bastard,” Boldt said, staring at the boy. “It’s unofficial.”

“No, it’s cholera. Cholera is quite official.”

“How did he get it?” Boldt asked.