“Someone doctored their birds,” Boldt speculated.
She nodded. “Set them up. They never saw it coming. About the time the infection spread, the State Health inspector, Hammond, shows up and shuts them down that very day. It happened real fast. Too fast for Hank Russell; that’s how he claims he knew it was rigged. The farm was ordered to destroy the birds, and the boy was there, back from college. Meriweather wasn’t himself. His wife got into the booze. The people who got sick threatened lawsuits. He was going to lose it all, and worse: He and the boy both knew it. Russell says Meriweather wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t think clearly. He refused to poison the birds, so instead they butchered them—all of them. All in one day. Over a thousand birds. By hand. The boy, too—Harry. Russell says he’s never had a day like that in his life. Ankle-deep in blood, covered in it. ‘A mountain of headless birds,’ he said. And another pile of just the heads. And Mark Meriweather and Harry Caulfield crying the whole time, crying for sixteen hours while they slaughtered those birds and put an end to the farm.” The psychologist in her said, “They should have never involved the boy.”
Boldt stopped and rocked his head back toward the moon, and his voice cracked as he tried to say something to her but stopped himself. When he did manage to speak, he said, “I don’t know that I can go on being a parent.” He picked up another piece of plastic—it looked like a bridge—and stacked it with the others. Maybe they combined to make a fort or a house, she could not tell which.
“The lawsuits did come, and on an icy fall night Mer-iweather drove himself off Snoqualmie Pass for the insurance money. The wife ended up committed; the way Russell described it, it sounded like wet brain. Ownership of the farm was never worked out. Meriweather owned it outright, and the wife was still living. So it just rotted away, according to Russell.”
“And our friend Harry?”
“Wouldn’t speak after Meriweather died. Nearly starved himself to death by not eating. Russell said he was hospitalized for a while, and that when he got out, he came to Russell with a plan to prove they had been framed.”
Boldt sat down into one of the midget swing-set seats and stretched his legs out. The swing set was bright blue in the moonlight, with a yellow wrapping like wide ribbon. Daphne took the swing next to him, but was afraid their combined weight might break the set, so she stood up and held the chains, feeling awkward.
“But Russell didn’t want any of that,” Boldt guessed.
“Hank Russell is what you might call the original honest outlaw. He’s simply not in the system. Doesn’t drive. Doesn’t pay taxes, I don’t think. But he knows livestock, and he seems to have been around every kind there is, if you believe him.”
“And you do.”
“I do.”
“So Harry launches his own crusade against Owen Adler.”
“No,” she corrected. “This is several years ago when Harry gets this idea.”
“I don’t get it,” Boldt said, looking over at her.
“Russell’s story stops there. He heard the boy had gotten into some trouble, but never knew what it was.”
“Jail?”
“Hammond mentioned jail. I didn’t call in a request because I wasn’t sure about using the radio.”
“You did exactly right.” This pulled Boldt out of the swing and to his feet. “So we check Corrections.”
“The kid’s a mess, Lou.”
“The kid is killing people, Daffy. You want me to feel sorry for him?”
She did not answer.
“Maybe I can see it,” he said. “Maybe someday even come to understand it on some level. But I’ll never condone it. I’ll never forgive him for Slater Lowry.”
“It’s not him doing this.”
“Don’t start with me.”
“It’s not, Lou.”
“Yes it is, Daffy. He is the one doing this. Don’t kid yourself. You found him, Daffy: You identified him. You did it! You should feel proud about that.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, following him toward their cars.
Boldt, too, elected not to use the radios, to take no chance whatsoever that the name Harry Caulfield might be overheard by an eavesdropping reporter. Instead, he and Daphne returned separately to the fifth floor and immediately sought the man’s prior convictions and outstanding warrants through Boldt’s computer terminal. The search for H. Caulfield produced a single hit.
“Harold Emerson Caulfield,” Boldt read to her from the screen. “Twenty-eight years old. A narco bust. Arrested and convicted four years ago for possession of two kilos of cocaine. Paroled four months ago. Home address—get this!—Sasquaw, Washington.” He looked up at her excitedly and confirmed, “That’s our guy.” He took her by the arm, pulled her down to him, and kissed her quickly on the lips. Their faces just inches apart, hers alive with excitement, there was a brief moment in which he felt confused, but he let go of her arm in time to allow the sensation to pass. She smiled and laughed somewhat nervously. “Well!” she said, letting out a huge sigh.
“Come on!” he encouraged, tugging on her hand. “Let’s pull the file.”
They hurried across the floor in brisk elongated strides that neared an all-out run—which, at that early hour of the morning, caught the attention of the few members of Pasquini’s squad who were at their desks. “Where’s the fire?” one of the men called out. Another answered, “In their pants!” And laughter erupted all around. Boldt knew it probably looked that way—running off together to find an empty room—and this once, he did not care. The discovery of Caulfield made him feel drunk.
There was only one elevator in use this time of night, and it was a long time coming, so Daphne suggested the stairs. They raced each other down, in the middle of which she called out to him: “I want to run this by Clements if it’s all right with you.”
“Is he here?”
“Arrived this afternoon. There’s a meeting called for tomorrow. Any objections?”
“None at all.”
“It will help with his profile.”
“No objections,” he repeated, winded already.
They reached the basement floor and started first at a walk, and then broke into a run simultaneously. All police of the rank detective or higher possessed keys to the three file rooms, and Boldt used his to open first the door, and then the interior chain-link gate. This basement room was nicknamed “the Boneyard,” and contained the files for all cleared cases three to seven years in the past. Twice a year the oldest of these files were removed to a permanent graveyard for police files in a warehouse off Marginal Way.
There were thousands of files contained in row after row of gray-metal racks, all color-coded with the same system used by doctors and dentists. The lighting was dreary, the files thumbworn, and the organization miserable. But the colored stickers, marked by alphabetical reference, made it easy to find C-A-U-.
Boldt had to pry one file from the next, they were crammed in so tightly. Daphne lent a hand, opening a space between files so that Boldt could read the case number and name.
He made one pass, then another. He glanced down at her—she was standing on her toes to reach this shelf—and said, “I don’t see it.”
“You hold,” she instructed, and they switched jobs. She became somewhat frantic on the fourth pass. “It has to be here.”
“It isn’t.”
“Misspelled maybe.”
Boldt checked the tattered ledger by the door, leafing through the scrawled listings of what files had been signed out, and by whom. It was an archaic system where half the entries were illegible. “Not here,” he called out.
At Daphne’s frustrated insistence, together they spent another ten minutes leafing through all the files beginning with the letters Ca and found no file for Harry Caulfield, at the end of which Daphne was out of breath. She blew on her bangs to move them off her forehead, but the hair was stuck there and she brushed it out of the way.
They stood in an uncomfortable silence staring at the tow
ering wall of smudged and ragged files, both of them seething with anger. The room seemed the size of a football field to Boldt, and the records on Caulfield could have been misfiled.
“Someone took it,” Boldt finally said, voicing what he knew she too was thinking.
She looked up at him, so frustrated that her eyes were brimmed with tears, and she said in a tense and raspy voice, “What do you want to bet that whatever went on with Longview Farms reached further than State Health?”
“I’m not a betting man,” replied Lou Boldt.
TWENTY-TWO
“It’s no secret that some of you consider this voodoo,” the renowned forensic psychiatrist and FBI special agent Dr. Richard Clements said in a deep-throated voice that filled Homicide’s situation room. Thirty minutes into the evening shift, LaMoia and Gaynes were already on ATM watch, as were a total of eight other police officers.
Boldt, Shoswitz, Rankin, and Daphne Matthews were all in attendance for SPD. They were joined by two plain-clothes detectives from the King County police, a homicide lieutenant and two detectives from the Portland Police Department, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle field office, and two FBI public information officers.
Dr. Clements looked a little green under the artificial lights. He wore a plain gray suit, white shirt with a loud, abstract tie, and black wing tips. He had long gray hair, wild over the ears, and steely dark eyes, and looked like someone who ran a museum for a private foundation. He never blinked. Wearing half-glasses, he read from a dogeared folder, and made notes with a black mechanical pencil as he went.
Prior to the start of this meeting, he had complained to Boldt that he would rather be back in Virginia mowing his lawn and drinking a sloe gin fizz. This, Boldt assumed, was his attempt to give a romantic impression of himself. Boldt knew all about Dr. Richard Clements.
Dr. Clements had interviewed the most vicious mass murderers and serial murderers in confinement in the United States as well as several overseas countries, including the former Soviet Union, and had compiled a psychological overview of these killers that later led to the now commonplace practice of criminal profiling. For four of the Reagan years, he had been adviser to the Secret Service, analyzing both real and perceived threats to the president’s life. According to rumor, on three occasions he had accurately predicted where to find the would-be assassins just days before the attempts.
He had come to work with Daphne Matthews as an adviser while serving as a special agent on the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit during the Seattle Police Department’s attempt to apprehend the Cross Killer. An eccentric, he was the stuff of legend in law enforcement—the Einstein of the criminal mind. He lectured at Yale and Johns Hopkins regularly, and had authored several books including a textbook in use in nearly every criminology course in the country. It was said that extensive scars, barely visible above his shirt collar but more obvious at the cuff of his left sleeve, covered most of his upper torso and had been given to him by Mad Dog, a Swedish inmate who had nearly devoured the man before guards saved him. There were other stories about Dr. Clements—some even about these same scars—that Boldt had heard over the years, some of them flattering, some not. Until today, he had not believed them. Now, looking at this creature, he was not so quick to rule anything out. In appearance, Dr. Clements had been around mass murderers for too long: He was wide-eyed and given to explosive bursts of animation followed by eerie stretches of silence and contemplation that one dare not interrupt.
“Perhaps this science is part voodoo. Sometimes the profiles help, sometimes not. What I am going to tell you about this man—oh yes, a man—is intended merely as a reference point, a fallback that hopefully, may help guide you toward a better understanding of this individual, or even possibly predict his future behavior.” He addressed Captain Rankin, a big burly man of Irish coloring. “My job is part science, part invention. But like you, I take it seriously, and I ask only that you give me serious consideration and your undivided attention.
“First, a point of business: At my suggestion, Sergeant Boldt has instructed Adler Foods to begin a quiet recall and subsequent destruction of all its candy bars. As you may know, an individual believed to be our suspect has been identified as having purchased several such candy bars, and it is my contention that he intends to poison them. This is a substitution recall only—that is, all such products currently on the shelf will be replaced with fresh product, and random testing will be conducted on recalled product. In this way we do not violate the demands, but we serve the public interest. Now, as to the larger issue.
“The individual in question goes by the name of Harry Caulfield. He is single, twenty-eight years old. Despite a possible residence at Longview Farms, I believe he has recently lived within a two-mile radius of the Broadway Foodland supermarket. He may be cohabitating, though I doubt it—a loner is more likely. He is or was recently employed in a blue-collar job or jobs that involve manual labor. This employment may have temporarily included Adler Foods or association with Adler Foods, though it is my contention he was never on the payroll.
“I can see, Captain Rankin, that you are skeptical of my assessment.” Rankin shifted uneasily in his chair. “I can explain some of this. The first two faxes that Mr. Owen Adler received some months ago were pasteups, not computer faxes like the more recent threats. Your lab identified the source publications for these pasteups as including typography from both Playboy and Penthouse as well as a local shopping giveaway. The two skin magazines help us define his demography; the giveaway helps narrow his current or former place of residence, because the publication does not enjoy wide circulation. He also clipped both Sports Illustrated and a national blue-collar rag called Heartland—these identified by our Hoover lab—which further narrows his demographics and suggests the likelihood of manual labor. We don’t dream this stuff up.” He smirked.
“But who is he?” he continued. “He is a loner. A possible insomniac. The actions he is taking are his—that is, he is not some hired gun, but instead his own man. He may or may not have a background in”—he held up his fingers—“microbiology, animal husbandry, electronics, or food production. He believes his cause righteous, and as far as we are concerned, that makes him extremely dangerous and he is to be taken at his word. He believes he is doing what he has to: punishing Adler Foods, or Owen Adler himself, for some grievous wrong committed in the past.
“Technically, clinically,” he went on, “he is assumed to be a paranoid schizophrenic. He is really two people, if you will—the evil person committing these crimes and the voice he hears both encouraging him and warning him of the severity of his actions. There is a voice of reason within him, hence his ability to organize and seemingly remain one step ahead. Although schizophrenic, he’s not crazy in the way you think of him,” he addressed to Rankin. “Not organically. He’s disturbed certainly, but there is a vast difference. No drooler, this man. He is to be taken seriously. He is to be feared. If he says two weeks, then two weeks it is. If he says he’ll kill a hundred, then it shall be no less.”
Clements scanned the room and continued. “He does not believe he can be caught. You snicker, Captain, but it is the truth. He believes himself smarter than all of you—all of us combined. I promise you that he monitors the media closely for signs of his success or failure. Your ability so far to disguise his acts is to be commended. As I understand it, you were concerned about the proliferation of copycat crimes—a legitimate concern. But worse, this is a man who will try to outdo his own headlines.”
Rankin, still not convinced, asked, “Where does the extortion fit in? The extortion demands?”
“It’s a complex issue,” Clements answered. “It appears he has a grand scheme, a grand design in mind, perhaps from the beginning. Three phases: a warning phase, an attack phase, a final phase, if you will. I believe we have moved into the attack phase. He has not seen the results he had hoped for, but he was prepared for this all along. He has shifted from the larger demands that ev
en to him must have seemed unlikely for him to win, to the more specific monetary gains of these extortion demands.”
“And the final phase?” one of the Portland cops asked reluctantly.
“Phase three is to deliver on his promise to kill hundreds, I would assume. Do not doubt it. It is not inconceivable that he has devised a plan in advance to accomplish this in the event of his arrest.” As an aside he said, “With an individual as seemingly capable as this, nothing is inconceivable.” He allowed another wry smile, and his glassy, unflinching eyes sparkled in the harsh light. Dr. Richard Clements was enjoying himself.
TWENTY-THREE
That same Thursday night, LaMoia pulled up in front of Boldt’s house knowing the sergeant was expecting him. Still tucking in his shirt, Boldt came out the door with his coat slung over his arm. A cloud of moths fluttered overhead, surrounding the porch light. Another group enveloped a street lamp above the car.
LaMoia met him on the porch and handed Boldt a scrawled note containing an address that was surprisingly close. Over by Greenlake on Seventy-fourth, it was a neighborhood Boldt remembered well from another case, and one he would have just as soon forgotten.
“Dixie?”
“On his way. His people will meet him there.”
“Razor?”
“Left your cellular number with him.” LaMoia handed Boldt his cell phone and Boldt absentmindedly slipped it into his coat pocket. He patted his side; his gun was there. “It’s a tough break, Sarge.”
Boldt double-checked the front door. The two men hurried to the waiting car. “Who called it in?” Boldt asked.
“Who else would land this kind of black hole? Hollywood, Sarge,” he said, answering Boldt’s blank expression. “Danielson.” A second later from inside the car, LaMoia shouted, “You coming?”
Boldt stood frozen with his hand on the door. Daphne had mentioned Danielson’s eavesdropping. Boldt did not like it.
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