No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  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 crime 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 amp; 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 letters 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?

  Two thoughts occupied her. She wanted a hard copy to show Boldt and others-perhaps even Owen Adler. She wanted a look at the archived copy to study its condition and, if possible, to run it by the second floor for lab tests. The New Leaf salmonella contamination gained weight in her mind as having some bearing on the present blackmailing of Adler Foods. Excitement surged through her. Right or wrong, she had to prove this to herself.

  With the document on the screen, she selected the PRINT icon, but a message returned to check the printer. She had not thought to switch it on. She did so, but the switch did nothing. The machine was not responding.

  She traced the printer’s power cord back to the wall socket, discovering a device unfamiliar to her. It appeared to be an AC power outlet that operated off a key: a metal box with a single keyhole that physically locked the printer’s plug inside the device and prevented any power reaching that plug without the right key. She tried the key Adler had given her, but it didn’t fit. Had he simply forgotten to give her this, or had he not wanted her gaining a hard copy without first asking?

  She snapped her head toward the door, left ajar, believing she heard something. On the far wall of the secretarial pool, a red light blinked twice. She squinted and studied the box from a distance: It was a security keypad identical to the one she had used upstairs, this one located next to one of the downstairs exit doors.

  She was familiar enough with security devices to know that this red blinking signal represented an entry by window or door somewhere in the building.

  Someone was inside. Someone with a key.

  A moment later the yellow blinking light turned green. This person had keyed in the proper code and reset the security.

  She returned her attention to the computer screen. Whoever it was, she didn’t want the person finding her and seeing the New Leaf lab report on the screen. With the printer message still on the screen she attempted to close the file, but the screen responded with a second overlapping message that she had requested to print the document and that the printer wasn’t responding: “Verify printer operation,” the dialogue box told her. She selected CANCEL, but this only removed the second dialogue box. It did not clear the printing error. The lab report remained on the screen staring back at her.

  How long did she have until she was discovered? As if to answer this, the tiny strip of light at the bottom of the door blinked, as whoever had entered the building had used the upstairs switch. Someone was headed downstairs.

  The screen-saver graphic patterns at work on the other terminal were designed to protect a monitor from “burning in” by keeping images moving on the screen, and were timed to take over the screen after a designated period of inactivity at the keyboard. Daphne had no way of knowing what amount of time had been selected for the screen-savers to take over, but she realized immed
iately that one possible way to mislead whoever was now heading downstairs was to allow the screen-saver to kick in. It would hide whatever document lay beneath it, and she could not close the lab report because of the printer error interrupt. She could keep trying to close it, but to do so would involve the keyboard and would further delay the screen-savers. Furthermore, she realized that even if the screen-saver kicked in, a single keystroke afterward would eliminate the screen-saver and return the lab report to the monitor, giving away her snooping. Worst of all, this screen-saver idea required her to do nothing-to sit back and be careful not to touch any key, awaiting a screensaver that might not appear in time.

  She took her hands off the keys and began softly encouraging the screen-saver to hide her efforts, while glancing repeatedly toward the door and the view of the secretarial pool. It occurred to her to lock the file room door in order to buy herself time, but she decided against it, believing this would require its own explanation and might raise the curiosity of whoever was approaching.

  The lab report lingered on her screen. The screen of the terminal nearest the door continued to splash shooting stars at her. She knew that the “time out” interval for screen-saver software could be one minute, five minutes, or even ten or twenty minutes. She had no way of knowing what it might be on these terminals. If the intruder was just a security guard, she decided she had nothing to worry about. It was doubtful a security guard would pay any attention to what was on the screen. If it was an employee, however, it presented her a far greater problem. Such a person could be counted on to see and identify the document that a stranger had called up from the files.

  The lab report continued to glare at her. No matter how strongly she willed it to vanish, it remained on the screen.“You piece of shit!” she hissed, tempted to put her foot through the monitor.

  But the psychologist took over. Hoping to buy time for the screen-saver to engage, she leapt up from her chair and swung open the door, crying out as she unexpectedly collided and tangled with a man. She broke loose, shoved away, and looked into the face of Kenny Fowler.