Boldt 03 - No Witnesses

by Ridley Pearson

  Holly MacNamara sat quietly with Daphne on the other side of the cigarette-scarred table in interrogation room A. Boldt and LaMoia faced them, and everyone sat in uncomfortable straight-back metal chairs. The large plastic bags containing the hat and the dark coat with the hidden pockets sewn into its hem were in full view, like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Boldt switched on the tape recorder, named those present, and stated the time and date.

  Striker joined them a few minutes late, his prosthesis clicking nervously, and Boldt added his name to the tape, too.

  Holly MacNamara met Boldt with a steely-eyed determination that he hoped Miles would never adopt. Too hard for her young age, too brooding, too suspicious, and far too self-confident given her present situation. She had dark eyebrows, high cheekbones, and long, dark hair. She had some acne that she hid with cosmetics, and her bottom teeth held a retainer. A child in a grown-up’s game. She wore silver studs in her ears, and was quite confused when Boldt opened the discussion by asking her to remove them.

  It didn’t help Boldt to connect her to the woman in the video, but it served to disarm her and set her slightly off-balance, which was extremely important to the interviews.

  Boldt said, “On the twenty-first of June, during your house detention, in-store security cameras captured you at the Foodland supermarket over on Broadway. You were dressed in clothes similar to these,” he said pointing to the bags, “and your behavior suggested you were trying to avoid these same security cameras.”

  “So?” Holly MacNamara asked.

  Daphne, who would play the role of friend for this interrogation, advised her, “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, but it’s best just to go ahead and answer the easy stuff.”

  “Maybe you were shopping with your mother,” LaMoia suggested, giving her a way around the implication of criminal activity. “You were in the soup aisle, do you remember that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Try to remember, Holly,” Daphne encouraged.

  “Soup?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Boldt nodded to LaMoia, who turned on the Sony Trinitron and ran the video that Shop-Alert had dubbed for them. They watched it together: Holly watching the screen, the police watching Holly. When it was just at the point where she crashed into a cart being pushed by a man or a woman—it remained impossible to tell—LaMoia stopped the tape.

  “Holly?” Boldt asked.

  Maintaining her suspicions of all of them, she glanced toward Daphne, who nodded gently.

  Boldt clarified: “We don’t want a made-up story from you, we want and need the truth.”

  Striker’s hand ticked several times as he told her, “If you cooperate, there will be no charges against you stemming from this discussion. It’s like immunity. You know what that is; I don’t have to explain immunity to you. Whatever you tell us is off the record, and just between us. But Sergeant Boldt is right: We need the truth. You should also know that we’re prepared to play tough if that’s the way you want it.”

  Boldt said, “You saw something just now that made you remember.”

  “The thing of it was,” she began in a flurry of words. “Like maybe I’d taken some Better-Veggie—the drink, you know? Like maybe I was thinking about buying some of that.”

  Boldt conveyed his doubts with a single penetrating look.

  “So maybe I wasn’t going to buy it,” she admitted. “I wasn’t. I’d lifted three cans. And I’d lifted some fruit salad, and something else—I don’t remember. Like there I am, pretty loaded up, and I’m thinking about some V-8, which is the same aisle as the soup, but it’s a hard grab because of that overhead eye, and then there’s this guy—” She caught herself and stopped.

  Boldt felt the hairs on the back of his neck go erect. Go on! he wanted to scream. What guy?!

  As if hearing him, she met eyes with him and said, “This guy came out of nowhere. I hit his cart—really hit it, you know? And this look he gave me—right through me, you know? Like he knew everything, and I’m in his way. Like he’s a lifter, too, or else a security guy. And I’m thinking I’m busted, but all he wants is me out of the way. And like I’m gone. But I look back, you know, and what’s he do? He drops a couple cans out of his coat into his cart, walks a few feet, and puts them on the shelf! So like I’m thinking, Oh, shit, there is a security guy nearby. He’s dumping his stash. And if he’s dumping his stash then I’m sure as hell dumping mine.” She winced, taking them all in, clearly fearing she had gone too far.

  “It’s all right, Holly,” Boldt assuaged her. “You’re doing fine.”

  “Doing real well,” Striker echoed.

  Daphne asked, “Do you remember anything at all about this man?” Start general; work specific. It had been several weeks—how much could they expect?

  “You mean like what he looked like?” she asked nervously. “No way.”

  “His clothes,” LaMoia suggested. “You say he dumped his stash out of a coat?” The streetwise LaMoia used her language, making it sound as if it were his own.

  “A raincoat. It’s summer,” she reminded them. “You only lift when it’s raining, ’cause like where are you going to stash it when it’s hot out?”

  LaMoia said, “A raincoat.”

  She nodded. Boldt wrote it down. It’s a start.

  “What kind of raincoat? Hip? Conservative? Khaki? Black?” the detective asked.

  “Green maybe. Long. Like those guys in westerns. You know?”

  Young kids made some of the best witnesses. The girls recalled clothing down to the buttons—male and female. The boys remembered a girl’s face and her body shape.

  “A green greatcoat,” LaMoia repeated.

  “A greatcoat, yeah. I didn’t see his face.”

  “A hat?” LaMoia asked. There had been a glimpse of this individual in the video, though it blurred in freeze-frame.

  “Yeah. Baseball cap, I think. Kinda like mine.”

  “How ’bout his shoes?” LaMoia tried.

  “Boots,” she spurted out. “Not shoes.”

  The way it flew out of her, Boldt trusted this. “Boots,” he repeated, making note of it.

  “Cowboy boots,” she said. “And blue jeans!” she announced proudly, somewhat surprised with herself.

  “Like mine?” LaMoia asked, showing off his Tony Lamas and his pressed blue jeans.

  “No. They were worn jeans,” she said. “Like frayed at the bottom, you know? And brown cowboy boots. Muddy maybe. I’m pretty sure they were brown. Maybe they were work boots. Hiking boots. I don’t remember.”

  Mud, Boldt thought, recalling how thick the mud was at Longview Farms. He caught Daphne looking at him, her eyes flashing with a heightened energy—she believed the witness; she thought they had a live one.

  LaMoia asked, “Jewelry? Tattoos? Scars? A limp? Anything distinguishing?”

  “The boots,” she repeated proudly. “I sort of remember the boots.”

  “Did he say anything to you? Did he speak to you?”

  “No way. But that look he gave me was heavy. Like he was going to kill me for running into his cart.”

  “Did you see him again, anytime after that?” Daphne asked.

  Holly MacNamara shook her head.

  “Take your time,” LaMoia encouraged.

  “In line, maybe,” she said to the detective. “The checkout line. He was buying something.” She said definitively, “You always buy something.”

  “Do you remember what he was buying?” Boldt asked.

  “I’m sure!” she said sarcastically. “I don’t even remember if I saw him in line,” she admitted. “I was in a hurry. I just wanted the hell out of there.”

  Boldt leaned to Daphne and whispered, “Get her started on the employee photos—Adler, Foodland, Shop-Alert. Then mug shots.” Data processing had compiled DMV photographs of the Foodland employees. The other companies had their own, for security reasons.

  The video, Boldt thought. Was one of
the Shop-Alert security cameras aimed down the line of cash registers?

  What was that guy’s name? Don? Dave? Ron?

  Gus at Shop-Alert, the Redmond-based security company that handled Foodland, greeted Boldt as if he were an old friend. He escorted him quickly to the back room and the plethora of electronic equipment. “The minute I got your call, I started running the data looking for the guy you described. Been at it for the better part of an hour. He’s good, Lieutenant. Very good.” He triggered a key, and a screen-saving pattern left the monitor, replaced by the shadowy black-and-white flickering image of a tall man wearing a Mariners baseball cap and a greatcoat. “This is about all we have of him. And if you watch him closely,” he said, allowing the image to advance in a broken, mechanical movement, “you see he’s using the person at the register in front of him as a shield from the camera. See? He moves right along with this heavy woman—so the camera doesn’t catch much sight of him. He knows what he’s doing. Like I said: He’s very good.”

  Two aisles behind the suspect, Boldt caught sight of Holly MacNamara, though she too was screening herself from the camera.

  “What about his face?”

  “We never see it. I’ve tried some enhancement. I tried some of the other time sequences, but we hardly ever see him. He knows this system well. Too well.”

  “An employee?” Boldt let slip, his mind whirring.

  “Or a regular,” Gus hypothesized. “Or a guy who’s studied the hell out of it. Done his homework.”

  Boldt wrote down the exact time that was electronically stamped into the lower corner of the screen. “Register six,” he noticed.

  “Six, seven, and eight are Foodland’s express lanes,” Gus confirmed. “Shoplifters like express lanes.”

  Using this time stamp, Boldt hoped it might be possible to cross-check the register tapes and identify the exact items made during this particular purchase.

  When he returned to the Public Safety Building, he assigned Bobbie Gaynes the task, and two hours later she entered his office cubicle announcing that with the help of Lee Hyundai, she had found the cash register receipt in question. She handed him an enlarged photocopy grainy from the enlargement, the computerized lettering angular and spotty but still legible. It listed four items purchased at Foodland’s register 6.

  Of the four items, listed as CANDY and ICECRM, three were preceded by a four-letter producer code that Boldt had long since come to recognize: ADFD—Adler Foods.

  “Adler candy bars,” he whispered under his breath.

  “Maybe he intended to eat them, Sergeant,” Gaynes said optimistically. “We don’t know for certain what he has in mind for them.”

  “Yes, we do,” Boldt replied ominously. “I’m afraid we do.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  At five o’clock Thursday, July 12, Bernie Lofgrin poked his head into Daphne’s office waving a plastic bag containing the State Health document. “You win the Kewpie doll, Matthews. This report is one legal-size piece of bullshit.” He looked more closely at her, “What did you do to yourself?”

  “A box fell off my closet shelf and got me.”

  “That was a heavy box,” he said.

  She caught sight of a man just over Lofgrin’s shoulder and asked, “Can I help you, Chris?” She was asking Danielson, who seemed to be loitering within earshot.

  Danielson fumbled with his words, claiming to be reading the bulletin board just outside Daphne’s office, but to her the excuse fell short. She waved Lofgrin inside and asked him to shut the door.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the ecstatic Lofgrin said. “You come down to my office and I’ll show you my etchings.” He winked, which with his magnified eyeballs felt to her a little bit like a camera’s flash going off.

  A few minutes later, Lofgrin eased his office door shut. Through the large window the lab was mostly empty of workers at this hour. The office was its usual mess. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” he asked, as Daphne moved two stacks of papers in order to win a seat. “You mind?” He put on a jazz tape and set the volume low. “Helps me think,” he said, grinning widely. Lofgrin had a contagious enthusiasm when he was happy. And he was happy whenever the lab results gave him conclusive findings—which filled Daphne with optimism.

  “It has been altered?” she repeated.

  “A lousy job. A bunch of amateurs. They used Wite-Out and typed over it. At least someone was smart enough to use the same typewriter to make the changes—but the carriage alignment of those changes ran fractionally on an incline, just as you spotted.”

  Lofgrin explained, “The Wite-Out was old, and at one time it probably approximated the paper color quite well. It was an enamel and therefore bonded well to the document’s pulp and fiber content, rendering it virtually impossible to remove using solvents without risking the unintentional destruction of the primary surface, thereby losing indentations caused by prior impact—a typewriter keystroke, for instance.” His eyes moved like overinflated beach balls in a light wind. “Our interest, of course, was archaeological in nature: What lay beneath the Wite-Out that was so important to cover up? The cities of Troy, if you will.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Wite-Out is, of course, opaque. I’m afraid that our efforts to use illumination to develop a print-through were a failure.” He handed her one of the lab’s efforts: a heavy sheet of photographic paper. The bulk of the document text was fuzzy, for it had been photographed through the existing paper of the document by shooting strong light at it while negative film was placed underneath it. The spaces where the changes in the text had been made appeared as black strokes, revealing nothing of what words had once existed beneath the Wite-Out.

  “The way we got to it,” Lofgrin explained enthusiastically, “was by using a long-wave light technique commonly used in the detection of counterfeit currency. The enamel is porous, of course—opaque only in the light of certain frequencies. What we did was analogous to taking an X ray, where the enamel Wite-Out is the skin, and the words beneath it the bone, if you will. And we developed this,” he said, offering her yet another sheet from his file folder.

  She had rarely experienced one of Lofgrin’s detailed explanations in person—his “sermons,” as LaMoia called them. But she knew that such explanations were to be expected. The lab man never, never simply handed an officer the final results. He put on his jazz, leaned back in his chair, and he talked. He detailed each and every step of his arduous journey so that the peace officer would understand just what a superhuman job had been done.

  This latest document was a negative, indeed reminding her of an X ray, but in the spaces where earlier there had been just one word, now there were two, typed one on top of the other, creating in all but one space a mishmash of hieroglyphics impossible for her to decipher.

  “Not exactly readable,” Lofgrin admitted, “but the first, and perhaps most important, step to discovering what someone did not want read.” He leaned back in his chair, and it squeaked as he gently rocked himself, the rhythm conflicting with that of the sax music. “The typewriter used a ten-character-per-inch Courier typeface. A few years back we would have located a similar typewriter and typed over the top letters using a white ribbon in order to remove them. But computer graphics enhances and speeds up that process considerably. Amy Chu spent the better part of the afternoon drawing out the top layer of typed letters.” He handed her yet another sheet—this one computer-printed. “And this is what you get.” In each of the areas where changes had taken place, now only flecks of characters remained, looking a little like Chinese characters, or, in a few cases, worse: like paint splatters. “Not the easiest thing to read,” Lofgrin confessed. “And that’s because the letters often overlapped significantly, so when you took out the stem to the letter t, you might also erase the letter i beneath it. But if you think about it, there are only two characters—a number and a letter—that are interchangeable on the standard typewriter keyboard.” He allowed her to think about it only briefly
before he answered for her. “Not even zero and O, capital or lowercase, duplicate one another.”

  Daphne answered like the good student: “The number one and the lowercase letter l.”

  “Gold star, Matthews!” he chirped. “Which means all other letters and numbers essentially leave their own fingerprint, if you will, whether a serif or a loop, a dot or a stem.” He stopped rocking. “Computer scanning technology gave us something called OCR—optical character recognition—software. The computer knows all these individual characteristics of each letter for each typeface, and using logarithms is able to predict within an error factor of only a few percent what letter is on the page. You scan a document, and it’s a graphic. You run OCR on that graphic and it’s converted into a text format that can then be manipulated. Bottom line,” he said, “we ran OCR on this jumble of flecks and spots and asked it to guess what it was we were looking at.” He held the final sheet in his hand, but he would not pass it to her. “It took Amy seventeen passes with the OCR, because even for the computer there just wasn’t enough there to work with, and its error rate was atrocious. But here you go: all the names, the date, the information they tried to hide.” He said proudly, “The truth they tried to hide.”

  The document was indeed restored to its original form.

  Lofgrin said, “You put me on the stand, and I’ll say the same thing to the jury or judge.”

  Heaven help us, Daphne thought.

  She ran her finger down the form, comparing the altered document to the one she now held, her curiosity driving a trickle of perspiration down her ribs. And there was the box she had most wanted to see.

  FIELD INSPECTOR: Walter Hammond

  Alongside was Hammond’s legible signature that for the past several years had been covered by Wite-Out. More shocking to her was the cause of the contamination, listed not as salmonella, as it had been on the altered document, but as staphylococcus. Knowing exactly where her eyes were on the page, Lofgrin said, “Staph is a contact infection, passed from human to human. An entirely different animal from salmonella.”