No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  There is no such thing as The Perfect Crime, thought Boldt.

  Hyundai educated him about the process of food distribution, from the moment a shipment arrived in the store to the closing of the automatic doors. Soup arrived from a wholesale distributor in sealed cardboard boxes. Case lots-no partial cases. Hyundai made it a policy not to accept opened or damaged cases because it usually meant a dented can or two, and he couldn’t sell dented cans. “People are weird about even the slightest ding in something. I’m telling you, if it is not perfect, it stays on the shelf. Cereal, soup. I don’t care what it is.”

  “Are the cases stored somewhere-temporarily-in a back room, perhaps?”

  “Sure.”

  “Show me?”

  “Sure.”

  He led Boldt through the store into a loading dock area that served as a staging zone. Meats and produce and dairy went to giant walk-ins, some of which were built directly behind the shelved product-beer and soda mostly. A conveyor system and dumbwaiter transported the nonperishables to an enormous basement. Boldt looked around, stunned by the quantity he saw-row after row, stacks of cases of every conceivable product. “I hate carrying this much inventory,” Hyundai said. “Cheaper in these quantities, though.”

  “Some of these cases are open,” Boldt pointed out. “Quite a few, in fact.”

  “Sure. We’re constantly restocking.”

  Boldt would ask for an employee list before he left. Not now, but later, when he would claim it was “routine.” The list would be checked against Adler employees past and present and against the Criminal Identification Bureau’s computerized database of state felons. Maybe the FBI would get a copy as well. Alone, down here in this basement, placing a tainted can would be effortless. Boldt assumed the employee list would draw a blank-blackmail was rarely so simply solved.

  “How bad is your shoplifting?” he asked, steering the man away from any thought of open cases.

  “We’ve hired a new security company. All the latest stuff.”

  If the blackmailer worked for a security company, he would know the store’s surveillance weaknesses better than anyone.

  Where is he, right now? Boldt wondered.

  He questioned Hyundai about his soup distributor, wondering privately how hard it could be to open a case, substitute a can, and reglue it. That kind of deceit was certain to go unnoticed. He was told it was the same wholesale distributor he had worked with for years, but that the distributor had switched truckers a couple of months ago. Boldt scribbled notes, his thoughts and suspicions branching continually. He tried to keep each thought separate, to give each full consideration, and yet never to lose that thread that might lead to another, more promising possibility. These mental gymnastics continued, as did his questions. He felt exhausted and must have looked it. Hyundai interrupted, offering an espresso. Espresso in the grocery store! Boldt thought. He said no, he didn’t drink the stuff.

  “Tears a hole in my stomach.”

  “Too bad,” Hyundai said.

  “It’s simpler,” Boldt replied.

  Hyundai steered them toward the deli and ordered himself “a tall double with shavings.” There ought to be a handbook, Boldt was thinking. The man signed the receipt and handed it back to the attendant.

  “If I knew the nature of your investigation, perhaps I’d be able to help more,” Hyundai suggested.

  Boldt flashed a false smile that said, Answer the questions, don’t ask them. Hyundai received the message, returning to a description of the surveillance system.

  “The name of the new company?” Boldt asked.

  “Shop-Alert.”

  Boldt flipped another page in his notebook.

  There was always a time in any investigation when he sensed the enormity of the case. The limitless possibilities. It was the first, brief glimpse of the black hole opening up to swallow him.

  Hyundai knew his facts and figures: average number of customers, daily and weekly; average purchase amount: $42.50; the demographics of his customers; figures skewed by this particular neighborhood, for it leaned toward the college crowd. Scribble, scribble, Boldt caught it all, useful or not. He could, and would, throw most of it out later, but not until he had taken the time to review it.

  The veins of the leaf were many: Each required one or more detectives to chase down leads. Boldt would be awake a good part of the night writing it up. Up early to start it over. Somewhere in this city, as Boldt stood questioning Hyundai, the Tin Man could be twisting his drill into the seam of yet another can of soup. Somewhere, a Slater Lowry was dying to eat it.

  Confused, Boldt asked the man about the numbers printed on the lid of the can and whether or not anyone in Hyundai’s employ would catch it if a can suddenly showed up with a different number. He was told they would not. As long as the UPC bar code remained the same-and it would from one product run to the next-there would be nothing to alert them. “Even a label change would be likely to carry the same UPC code,” Hyundai concluded.

  A bell rang in Boldt’s head, a way to ensure that no more cans of tainted chicken soup reached the public. Tossed out insignificantly by Hyundai, it went into Boldt’s notebook in thick bold letters: A Label Change.

  He was still writing this down when the bell tolled again, causing a surge of excitement in his chest.

  “What’s that? Repeat that,” Boldt stuttered.

  Hyundai stiffened; he didn’t appreciate repeating himself. “I was talking about the automated checking system,” he said. “The registers itemize every sale. I can tell you which brands sell on which days. Mondays, for instance, are big on dairy products; Wednesdays, we do a lot of cigarettes-don’t ask me why; and Fridays we can’t keep beer or fish in the store.”

  “You said ‘each sale,’” Boldt reminded. “Let me get this straight: I come in here and buy a shopping cart full of groceries and you track every item?”

  “Sure.”

  “I come back three days later and you can tell me what I bought?” He was thinking: right down to a can of soup!

  “Sure. No problem. Computers. Register tapes. We got it.”

  “And if I paid by check, would you know it?”

  “Sure. Cash. Check. Credit card. We keep records of all forms of payment. Sure.”

  Boldt needed to know when Betty Lowry had purchased her can of Mom’s Chicken Soup. This would provide him a way to work backward with the distributor, and even possibly the security company’s surveillance videos. Timing was everything. Tracking bank checks and payment by credit card would also give him a chance to identify other customers who might have witnessed the blackmailer in the act. This, he realized, was the trail to follow. A crime scene.

  Boldt received a page and placed a call downtown. Dixie had come through: State Health had identified the particular strain of cholera and had traced it to the Infectious Diseases lab at King County Hospital. Excited by this news, Boldt reached out and shook the man’s hand vigorously, anxious to be going.

  A stunned Lee Hyundai was left standing there with a drained espresso in hand, shouting after the detective, “What did I say? What did I say?”

  SIX

  Dr. Brian Mann had an energetic handshake, eyes glassy with exhaustion, brown curly hair, and a disheveled look to which Boldt could relate. He led the detective through the Infectious Diseases lab at King County Hospital and into a small corner office littered with reading material. A computer terminal hummed in the far corner. Boldt was overly sensitive to such noise. There was also a phone, its receiver discolored from activity.

  “Neither of us has much time, Sergeant, so I’ll get right to it. You and everybody else would like to know where this strain of cholera originated, and I can answer that now.” Mann had pulled a twenty-hour shift, and he looked it. He pointed into his lab. “We’re the only ones in the city-in the state, for that matter-with that strain, cholera-395.”

  This was what Dixon had told Boldt: a single source for the offending bacteria. Another possible crime scene.r />
  “We believe these contaminations were intentional,” Boldt said. “You understand the need for confidentiality.”

  “Exactly what the hell are you saying?”

  “Product tampering-food product tampering. It was a can of soup. Chicken soup.”

  “Protein base,” Mann mumbled, nodding. And then to explain himself, “The cholera needs a protein base to survive. Soup would provide that.” He rubbed his eyes. “What’s this world coming to?”

  Boldt was thinking that this man could be the bastard behind it all. His lab. His cholera. Why not? Except that Dixie swore by Mann, and that was good enough for Boldt.

  “How many have access to the cholera? To the lab?” he questioned.

  “Too many,” Mann said. “Coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Anything?”

  “Tea would be nice.”

  “Give me a minute, will you? I pulled some stuff for you to read.” He stood. Boldt called out, “No cream. No sugar.”

  “Be right back.”

  A lot of what Boldt read was over his head, but some was not. He was distracted, in part by the fact that this was a children’s research hospital. In the last forty-eight hours, he had seen precious little of his boy. Liz, too, for that matter. When he was away from Miles for too long, he missed him in a way that until the boy’s birth he had never experienced, and would never have expected. It was a chemical longing, like an addict after his fix.

  “Make any sense of that?” Mann asked, setting down Boldt’s tea in a Styrofoam cup. Liz would not drink out of Styrofoam cups anymore.

  The tea tasted terrible, but Boldt choked it down for the caffeine. “If I’m the person doing this, why do I choose cholera?”

  Dr. Mann considered this a long time. When he finally spoke, it was cautiously, a man unfamiliar and uncomfortable with being inside the mind of a stranger. “It depends on what you hope to accomplish. I would guess he considered three choices-a poison, a viral contaminate, a bacterial contaminate. The toxins, the poisons-strychnine, or something like what we saw in the Sudafed product tampering-can and will be immediately detected in the blood of the victim. If you’re just looking to kill a few people, then that’s the poison of choice, I would think. Most of your other choices, if you’re talking food products, will give themselves away, either by producing a gas you can smell or a taste that warns you immediately what you’re into. Also, all of the more common of these would be immediately detected in the state lab. If it was me, I too would choose cholera if available. What’s interesting about cholera is that labs around here once tested for it, but many don’t any longer. This gets political, I’m afraid; this enters into health care and insurance costs, and believe me, you don’t want to get me started. But the point is, this is the exact area where reduced health care costs are felt. The lab has to cut something and they cut right here. We see virtually no cholera up here. Dropping that test is justifiable at every level of bureaucracy. Don’t tell that to these two kids, mind you.”

  “You’d miss the cholera. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It would take longer to type-which is what happened. If I wanted to make a few people real sick, if I wanted to use something that would take awhile to detect, confuse the authorities, then I’d look to something like this strain of cholera.”

  “A scare technique?” Boldt took out his notebook and pen.

  “Could be.” Mann tasted his coffee. He grimaced, but drank it. “Is it?”

  Boldt did not answer.

  “Make this company look bad?” Mann glanced up. Again, Boldt did not answer. “Which company? Or can’t you say?”

  “Adler Foods,” Boldt answered. He wrote the product-run number on a page of his notepad, tore it out, and handed it to Mann. “They’re clearing the shelves of this product-run number as we speak. The number will be announced on the news tonight, and in the papers for the next couple of days. At this point the public won’t be told exactly why there’s a recall.”

  “Why not tell them?”

  “The individual has warned against police involvement. And there’s also a concern about copycats. It’s the biggest risk with product tampering. We want to keep the actual tampering, the connection to these kids, out of the press just as long as possible. A lot more people are at risk if we don’t. We know that. In a British food-tampering case, after word of the contamination hit the press, police faced fourteen hundred reports of similar tamperings.”

  Mann winced. “Fourteen hundred?”

  The two men shared an uncomfortable silence. “You won’t hear it from me,” Mann said. Boldt looked out the window at the crowded sea of houses. How many cans of contaminated soup might they miss? How many were sitting in a kitchen pantry ready to go off like time bombs?

  “I’ll need the names of everyone who has access to the lab,” Boldt informed him.

  “One of my people?” Mann asked defensively. “That strain is marked clear as day.”

  “But a person can’t just walk in and take it,” Boldt suggested.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re kidding, I hope.”

  “Not a bit. This is a university lab. Dozens of people pass through every day, many of them complete strangers to one another. Students. Grad students. Researchers. We get visitors from all over the world. Every walk of life. Every look you can imagine. It’s a teaching hospital. Men, women, young, old, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, you name it. Every week of the year. Sometimes there are a half-dozen techs working in that lab, sometimes one or even none.”

  “Just walk in and take it?” Boldt asked, astonished.

  “If you know what you’re looking for.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Try it.”

  “What?”

  “Go ahead and try it.” Mann pushed back his chair and came to his feet. He eyed Boldt as would a haberdasher. “Not bad. That’s the look you need: the run-down professor thing. I’m telling you, just go ahead and try it.” The doctor clearly said this as his chance to remove his lab workers from suspicion.

  He grabbed his lab coat from a hook on the back of the door and offered it to Boldt, and Boldt put it on. It was a little snug. Mann said, “If you look like you know what you’re doing, you’re in. Confidence is everything. It’s in a half-size refrigerator on the right. If I’m your man, I go in at lunchtime, because the place is deserted at lunch. It’s a little late for that-but that’s all the better for your test. Straight to the fridge. You’re looking for a petri dish.” He scrambled and found an empty dish by the computer that was filled with paper clips. “Like this, but containing a tan gelatin with florid spots. You’re looking for one marked cholera or V. cholerae, INABA strain, and a number.

  “Anyone asks you a question, you say you’re working the third floor. You’re looking for some vibrio cholera. You watch: They’ll hand it to you if you’re polite.”

  “I gotta see this,” Boldt said.

  “Out through this lab, down the hall, first door on your right.”

  By the time Boldt was in the hall, he could once again feel himself as the would-be thief. With each step he felt a little more nervous. There were three people perched on metal stools working at the lab counter. Wearing goggles and plastic gloves, they appeared focused on their work. The place was littered with hundreds of glass flasks, plastic petri dishes, test tubes, and other lab equipment. A mess. He headed directly to the small refrigerator, stooped, and pulled open the door. No one said a word. He caught himself expecting it, but it never happened. The refrigerator shelves were crammed with petri dishes. He picked one up, inspected it, and dropped it as it came apart.

  The woman nearest him glanced over at him. An attractive Asian woman in her midtwenties. She smiled at him and returned to her work. He returned the fallen dish and sorted through the others. Way in the back he found it, marked with a black grease pen: V cholerae-395. He took it, shut the refrigerator door, and walked out.
/>   Just like that.

  His heartbeat was back to normal by the time he reached Dr. Mann.

  “Well?”

  “You’re right: If I hadn’t done that myself, I never would have believed it.” He handed Mann the petri dish.

  Mann studied the dish, spinning it in his hand.

  “And once he has it?” Boldt asked, removing the uncomfortable lab coat, taking notes again.

  “Not much to it. He probably has some microbiology under his belt-early college level. Some agar-a petri dish containing a protein base; some broth-the book would have a recipe; an incubator-but could build something-a light box might work. Doesn’t need much, I’m afraid. It’s all pretty easy. It looks real complex and the language is fairly complex, but the actual mechanics of growing a culture are relatively simple. It’s covered in both high school and college chemistry.”

  “Anything else I should know?” Boldt tried. “Limited shelf life?”

  “Not terribly. Cholera’s a pretty good choice. Salmonella would have been obvious to whoever opened the can because of gases-bacterial odor. But cholera? No odor or gases to speak of. And if it isn’t someone at the university, someone who knows specifically about cholera-395-and there couldn’t be more than a handful who do-then this guy probably didn’t know what a powerful punch it packed. Three ninety-five is a resistant strain. Probably didn’t know what he was getting. And unless and until you do put this in the press, he may not even be aware he may kill people with it.”

  Boldt felt the wind knocked out of him. “Kill?”

  “It’s a research strain, 395. It doesn’t react to the more common antibiotics. That’s why these kids became so ill. It’s in the material,” he said, indicating Boldt’s pile of literature. “Their youth may help them-we’re lucky there.”

  “It’s lethal, and it’s just sitting in there in a refrigerator?”

  “I know. I know. But it’s true of much of what’s in there: This is Infectious Diseases. We’re working to cure people here.”