“Woh!” he said, adjusting his suit jacket. “You?” he inquired, glancing furtively toward the file room door. “We got an alert that someone had entered-”
“Owen gave me his key. He didn’t want to attract attention.”
“His key?” Fowler asked. “The files? I thought Howard-”
“I didn’t want to bother Mr. Taplin.”
He nodded, but he did not appear convinced. Again, he craned his neck toward the file room door. “You weren’t on this evening’s log,” he explained. “No one was authorized for the Mansion. With all this trouble … We’ve cracked down on authorization. Your entry raised the curiosity of my guards.”
She cast him an intentionally suspicious look. It sounded to her as if he were making this up. She didn’t know what to believe.
“I was in the area,” he clarified for her, knowing what she must be thinking. “I took the call.” He tugged on his shirt cuff. He was nervous, she decided.
“You headed straight downstairs,” she pointed out, remembering she had not turned on any lights, had not given any indication of her whereabouts.
“The security system is a good one,” he said.
She took that to mean that he had known someone had penetrated the file room. Was he protecting the building or protecting access to the files?
“You need help with the file system?” he asked, attempting to ease his way around her in order to get a better look at the file room.
“I can manage.” Kenny Fowler would report whatever he saw to Howard Taplin. She was certain of that. The two seemed to work in concert. “Anything on any of the employees?” she asked, knowing that by agreement with Owen Adler, Boldt had assigned the in-house side of the investigation to Fowler. This eliminated any police presence at Adler Foods or their suppliers and the chance they might alert the blackmailer to the bigger picture.
“We’re working on it,” he replied, taking yet another step forward. “So, he’s giving you keys now?” He sounded almost jealous.
They looked at each other suspiciously. She felt both combative and defensive. If the lab report were still on the screen, then he was going to see it, because she fully understood now that Fowler was going into the file room with or without her blessing. Maybe because he felt it was part of his job. Maybe because he was curious. Maybe because Howard Taplin had told him to. He had known someone was in the file room even before he had got here. It made sense for security to be protective of the company files, and she knew Fowler to be a thorough man. Maybe that was all it was.
She did not want to believe that Howard Taplin would invent a crime in order to obtain insurance money that might allow the redesign of the entire Adler product line. Why go to such lengths? It made no sense unless the underlying economic strength of the company was a mirage. Were they in financial trouble? Had Owen hidden this from her? But no matter what, she felt she could not dismiss it without further investigation. The form she had seen on that screen implied tampering with evidence in an earlier contamination. She wanted answers. And for the time being she wanted them kept all to herself.
Fowler stepped past her and pushed through the door. She glanced in time to see that both screens showed the shooting stars of screen-saver software. For now, she was safe.
Fowler slid into the seat in front of the first screen-the terminal she had not been using-touched the keyboard, and the screen cleared, showing the opening menu. “You haven’t gotten very far,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t think so.” Her attention remained riveted on the keyboard to his right. If he touched one of those keys, if he bumped the mouse, the screen-saver would vanish, replaced by the altered New Leaf lab report.
“What was it you wanted?” he asked, blazing through a series of menus. “Security has its own files terminal,” he said, answering her astonished look at how fluent he seemed to be.
“Some privacy,” she answered, annoying him. “Thanks, but no thanks, Kenny.”
“What? What is it? What do you mean ‘privacy’? We’re on the same team here, remember. What-I’m not one of you because I left the force for better pay? What-that’s a crime?”
“Just some privacy is all.”
“I know what you people think of me.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Is it?” he asked. “You think I copped out-no pun intended. Took the bucks instead of the responsibility. Well fuck you.”
“Kenny, I don’t think that. I’ve got no grudge against your decision.”
“The others do. You know I’m right.”
“All I want is a look at some of these files.”
“I’ll help you. That’s what I’m saying: I’ll help. I know the system.”
As distracted as she was by the proximity of the adjacent keyboard, and Fowler’s tendency to animate, she found it hard to concentrate. At last she gave in, hoping to be rid of him, requesting a look at the employee records of all college-educated males with access to the Mom’s Chicken Soup production facility. It seemed like a legitimate request to her, though a second too late she realized it crossed over into Fowler’s domain-the very area of his half of the investigation. But he did not protest the request. He typed furiously, and quite competently, and within a minute or so called up the respective files.
“Can I get a hard copy of those?” she asked, hoping to trick him into turning on the printer for her.
Tapping the locking device, Fowler answered immediately, “Not with this box, you can’t.” He felt under the lip of the counter, searching out a key. She had not thought to do this, and felt angry at herself and frustrated that she actually might need Fowler after all. “If I know Suzie …,” he said, abandoning his search and heading into the secretarial pool. She heard, but did not see him open a drawer in the other room. He called out to her, “The trouble with corporate security is that it’s only as smart as your employees.”
As he appeared in the doorway, his pager sounded. The key to the printer dangled from a small key chain, held out like a carrot in front of her. She wanted to snatch it away from him. “I gotta answer a page,” he said, catching her eye. He glanced at the key, then back to Daphne.
He tossed her the key.
The key flew through the air toward her on a flight path headed straight for the keyboard to the second terminal. If she missed it, it would hit the keys and reveal the lab report hidden behind the screen-saver. She took quick measure and swiped the air, attempting the catch, and miraculously snagged the key just inches above the keyboard. But her elbow thumped against the computer mouse poised alongside the keyboard and the screen came to life, the altered lab report glaring back at her.
The sound of Fowler’s voice electrified her: She was caught. Then she realized he was not talking to her, but was on the phone in other room.
Glancing between Fowler’s back and the computer screen, she shoved the key into the printer’s security box and twisted it. The printer’s amber power light flashed, the machine hummed, and the computer screen blinked.
A new message appeared. Daphne did not read the message. All she saw were the words:
CANCEL THIS PRINT JOB
YES NO
?
She zipped the mouse into place and clicked “Yes.” The printer error message vanished from the screen. She pulled down the file menu.
Fowler said, “Okay,” and hung up the phone.
Her heart in her throat, Fowler now approaching, Daphne clicked the mouse through a series of steps: File … Close … Menu … Main … her full attention on the screen, and the task before her.
The lab report left the screen, replaced by the main menu.
Kenny Fowler stepped through the door.
“Pretty easy, once you get the hang of it,” she said. Her face felt burning hot. Her fingers were trembling. Would he notice? “Thanks,” she said, trying to get rid of him.
“You okay here?” he asked. “I gotta look into something.”
“Fine.”
“Key goes in the center drawer, second desk over.” He added, “I’m going to have to do something about that.”
“No problem,” she said, but her voice broke, and he looked at her strangely. He glanced over at the two screens, and she thought that he must have wondered why she was not sitting at the first terminal. But he did not say anything.
Kenny Fowler instructed her. “Use the same security code when you leave.” He turned and headed up the stairs.
A few minutes later, with the file room door locked tightly, enclosing her, the first pages of the State Health Department lab report for New Leaf Foods slid out onto the printer’s plastic tray.
Daphne wasted no time in folding them and slipping them into her purse.
TWELVE
At seven o’clock Tuesday morning, Daphne faxed Owen Adler at his home with the words, “The eighteenth step; eight o’clock,” knowing he would recognize the shadowed heart that she drew on all her notes. One of the benefits of intimacy, she thought, is that shared experiences need only reference, not explanation. They had visited the locks on their first date.
At eight o’clock, beneath a canopy of steel-wool clouds and chilled by a temperature too cool to possibly be June, Daphne parked her Honda on the north side of the locks. Here, where the darkened waters of Lake Union spilled into the estuary of Puget Sound, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built a set of locks to account for and correct the difference in elevations between the two bodies of water, overcoming what previously had been a minor set of waterfalls.
Daphne hurried through the verdant park, barely taking notice of the sweep of green lawn and the colorful beds of annuals, the dogs out on their morning constitutional with owners in tow, continuing past the refurbished administration buildings that offered postcards and maps in the lobby.
Inside the lock, a thirty-foot ketch by the name of Heather was being eased lower as the water beneath it was evacuated at the far gates. Line was fed down as overhead the lock attendants kept the craft secure, while a handsome young couple monitored the bumpers and tracked the descent. Daphne crossed, at a brisk gait, the narrow footbridge with its chain handrails, not noticing that she turned the heads of several of the male attendants who then eyed one another with lustful expressions. She continued past the fixed floodgates, following signs to the fish ladder. Below, to her right, silver streaks sliced through the turbulent green water like knife blades in bright light, followed by an explosion of white foam as the salmon leapt and tumbled three feet out of the water, a cascade of brilliance before crashing back to the surface and disappearing.
She descended the stairs past various platforms of the fish ladder, turned and entered the bunkerlike cement viewing station where a prerecorded female voice said through thin speakers, “This is the eighteenth step.”
Owen Adler, dressed in a dark blue business suit and wearing a pink shirt with French cuffs, stood alone before the viewing glass, where an enormous salmon slowly waved its tail and maintained a stationary hold in the strong current. The narrator’s voice droned on overhead, but Daphne tuned it out. She approached him and they kissed, not as lovers, but as acquaintances. This bothered her.
“Not followed?” she asked.
“No. Not that I could tell. You?”
“No.”
“So,” he said. “It’s good to see you. How did it go last night? Did you get in all right?”
“Fowler found me out.” She explained her interruption in the file room. “I have to ask you a few things,” she said, “that are not easy to ask, but they need answering. They need honest answering. And if the answers aren’t what I hope they will be, then I want you to know that I would sooner leave the case, even leave the department than betray your confidence. I don’t know how you find it, but it’s hard for me, Owen, to be divided between work and you this way.”
“Divided? Aren’t we working together? Perhaps you should ask those questions,” he said, revealing his concern.
She nodded, glancing briefly at the lumbering salmon, nearly three feet long, whose journey had carried it from the ocean to this fish ladder and soon beyond into the waters of Lake Union-a long, arduous journey.
She said, “The company is insured to the tune of eighty million dollars in the event of product tampering. How stable is the company financially? Is there any chance that anyone around you might have created this incident in order to win enough insurance money to redesign or remarket your product line?”
To her relief, the shock and astonishment that froze his features confirmed to her that he had never heard of, had never considered such a possibility. He finally managed to say, “Is it that much? Eighty?”
“Is that your answer?”
“Financial stability? We’re an international corporation now, Daphne. We have assets and liabilities that are managed and juggled and manipulated to please those who issue us our credit. It’s unprofitable to make too much profit, so you leverage your profits for more credit to expand your business and you go deeper in debt. It’s a huge wheel. My job is to keep the wheel moving, for it’s movement that sustains growth and therefore an ever-increasing asset base. At any one time we’re seriously in debt, if that’s what you’re asking. But the product line is both well designed and marketed, and I, for one, can’t see any reason to change that. And to go to such lengths to change it is absurd.”
“If you wanted to redesign the line, could you afford to?”
“Right now? Is that what you’re asking? We’re moving into Europe. At this very moment our resources would be a little slim.”
“Has anyone made such a suggestion?”
“Within the company? We’re always getting those kinds of suggestions! Listen, we invented a market niche: the low-fat, organic ingredient-wholesome soups, frozen dinners, desserts. For a while we existed there in a vacuum; we owned that niche. Not so anymore; we’re under attack from every major out there. There’s always someone within our ranks who thinks we’ve got the wrong look or that we’re missing a major play that could be accomplished by a few subtle changes. I encourage that kind of independent thinking. There are some who want a more unified labeling to our products, others who understand the success of our diversity. Inventing a new look for our cans. You name it, I have heard about it.” He studied her. “You’re suggesting that, meeting my resistance, someone may have gone to this kind of extreme to see their ideas through to fruition. I don’t believe that for a second. Absolutely not. We’ve lost market share, sure we have; this push into Europe has strained our pocketbooks, no question; but resort to something like this? Forget it!”
Another large salmon entered at the left of the window and swam forward, crowding out the one that was resting and sending it out of view, off to the nineteenth step. They watched it, the narrator’s voice going on about breeding grounds.
“Tell me about Longview Farms,” she said, facing the Plexiglas viewing window, but alert for any other early-morning visitors. The tourists wouldn’t get here until mid-morning, and if it rained, maybe not at all.
“That’s going back,” he said. “Did you dig up that name in the files?”
She did not answer. She saw how scarred and beat-up this latest fish seemed to be, and thought that the sea was a much more hostile environment than she had envisioned it. The jaws of the big fish opened rhythmically, followed by a fanning of the gills.
“A supplier back in our New Leaf days. A family venture. Poultry farm. Good people to work with. Good product.”
“Tainted product.”
He nodded. “You’re speaking of the salmonella contamination,” he stated. “So you were able to find that, were you? That’s what you wanted, right?” he asked reproachfully. “Honestly, that surprised me at the time. Mark Meriweather produced good birds, ran a solid operation. That’s why I used him in the first place.”
“That was also chicken soup, Owen. And that’s the kind of coincidence that cannot be ignored. A company put out of business-bankrupted-by a
series of lawsuits directly connected to your former company.
“Owen, I need an absolute point-blank answer …” She waited and then asked, “Are you aware that the State Health lab report that blamed the Longview Farms poultry for the salmonella contamination may have been altered?”
“Come again?”
“Altered. Forged. Changed.”
The blank expression on Adler’s face was all the convincing she needed. She felt the knot that had formed in the center of her chest loosen as a drip of perspiration skidded coolly down her ribs, sending a chill down her side. She told herself that he did not know anything about this. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
“I don’t have proof,” she said. “Not yet.” She stepped closer to him. “But if someone at State Health altered that report in order to frame Longview Farms, then we have some serious motivation that may help to explain or even identify your blackmailer.” She added, “Even if there was only the perception that Longview Farms was unjustly accused, it could be enough to set someone off.”
“That was four, maybe five years ago.”
“Part of the thrill of revenge is in the plotting, the planning. Strangely enough, the execution of the plan is often a letdown. It’s one of the reasons the individual will stretch it out, given half a chance. Revenge-motivated crimes are unpredictable that way.”
A young couple entered, hand in hand. Daphne studied the transparencies of the varieties of fish that might be seen in the viewing window. The woman said to her, “Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Daphne mugged a smile and waited the full five minutes until the couple left. Alone again, she approached Adler.
She said, “I need access to the New Leaf archives-the hard copies of what I saw on the computers at the Mansion. I need the original of that lab report.”
“What about getting it from State Health?”
“If someone at State Health altered the file, I’d rather know that before paying them a visit. We may get some arrests out of this, and if we do, we may get some answers.”
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