No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  “Harder than you think, lady. Pat Shawnesea is long dead. Lung cancer, and he never smoked a single cigarette in his life. Radon, I heard it was. Living atop a hot spot. Makes sense: The wife died of woman problems two years and change before Pat. Cut everything off her and outta her and she still up and died on him.”

  She thought that maybe Shawnesea’s death explained the change of date on the document, for it had been backdated eleven days, and that had been bothering her the whole way out here. Why backdate a document? Unless you need a window of time in which Pat Shawnesea was still working, so that the only person who could answer important questions was certain not to be available. She had a few nuggets of what she wanted, though the mother lode still avoided her. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said, slouching her shoulders forward involuntarily because of this man’s insistence on fixing his eyes on her chest. “Shawnesea took this case over from you eleven days before your initial investigation began. He decided the illnesses had been caused by salmonella, not staphylococcus, which was the finding of your investigation.”

  “Let me explain something-”

  “Please do,” she interrupted.

  “They wasn’t my findings, the way you say-they was Jefferson’s. He’s the one done the tests, okay? And as for Pat, I don’t remember exactly what he had to do with any of this.”

  “But it’s his name on this second document-the altered document.”

  “I understand that, lady, but it don’t necessarily mean it makes sense, now does it?”

  “But you knew Mark Meriweather.”

  “Sure I did.”

  “And Mr. Shawnesea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He knew Mr. Meriweather, too? He inspected Longview, too?”

  “Well, he must have, now mustn’t he?”

  “I thought you said Longview was part of your-”

  “We picked up each other’s slack.”

  “But did you investigate this New Leaf contamination or Mr. Shawnesea? I remind you that your signature is clearly visible on the original document.”

  “I did.” The man looked confused. “How many years that been? There one of them statues of elimination on this thing or what?”

  In another interview, Daphne might have cracked a smile, but Hammond disgusted her, and she immediately felt tempted to lie. What the general public failed to understand-to their loss, she thought-was that there existed no code of ethics or other formality instructing or limiting law enforcement officers to speak the truth, except while under oath. No place was this more evident than in the Box-the interrogation room, where police officers commonly invented any truth that helped their cause, and their cause was to put criminals away. The best liars were the best interrogators, and Daphne Matthews was considered close to the top. The only real difference she could see between an interrogation and an interview was the location of the discussion. What Hammond did not know was that she was out of her jurisdiction and had made no formal application to conduct this interview with King County police, meaning that everything either of them said was off the record from the moment she first opened her mouth to speak. Meaning also that she could tell as many lies as she wanted, and could act on anything Hammond told her, but could use none of the interview itself in a court of law. These thoughts circulated through her conscious mind before she answered untruthfully, “I believe the statute of limitations has expired on the Longview contamination. I don’t believe there’s any way we can prosecute anyone for what happened to this document. But to be honest, I don’t really care: It’s the truth I want, Mr. Hammond. A man may go to jail for a very, very long time if we can’t find the real truth about Longview.” There was a joke that lived on the fifth floor that she heard circulate year in and year out: What’s a Chinese court deputy say to those in the courtroom at the start of every trial? “All lies.”

  “That boy, Harry,” he said.

  “Yes, Harry,” she repeated, her heart backfiring.

  “A real troublemaker, Harry was. Got it in his head all wrong and wouldn’t have it any other way. Disappeared as fast as he arrived. Called me a liar to my face. Stood there looking me in the eye and called me a liar.”

  “What did you say his last name was?” she asked quickly, hoping to trick it out of him.

  “I didn’t say. I got no idea. Seeing people around a place and knowing them is two different things, lady. I regularly inspected seven dairies, five bird operations, a rabbit farm, a goat cheese outfit, and eleven food manufacturers. More, some years. People like Mark Meriweather, I had a business knowing. But his hired hands? Some drifter who thought he was God’s gift to chickens? Hang it up!”

  And yet by this very statement, Hammond revealed he knew more about Harry than he had first let on.

  “I understood that he was college educated,” she tested.

  “Was going to take over for Hank Russell when Hank stepped aside. Sure-that was the story anyway. Mark spent too much time and too much money on that boy, you ask me, treating him the way he did. Just a no-good drifter, and Mark goes treating him like a son. He mixed the boy up is what he done. Went to jail or something, I heard.”

  She carefully wrote down: Jail?

  “Mr. Russell was part-time, was he?”

  “Hank Russell? He ran that place, lady. Was foreman for half a dozen years. Damn fine operation, too.”

  She pretended to check some papers. “I don’t show any record of a Henry Russell.”

  “What kind of record? Taxes, I’ll bet.” He laughed and had to wipe his chin afterward. “Pay Uncle Sam? Not Hank Russell. My guess is that he worked it out with Meriweather, just like when he was over to Dover’s Butter-Breast before that. Roof over his head, some food, some cash under the table-that’s Hank for you. Part of the family.”

  “I’m confused about something.” She held up one document, then the other. “Was it a staph or salmonella outbreak?”

  Hammond’s eyes were glassy from the booze, of which he took another long swallow as he stewed on this. Boiled was more like it, she thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed as if food were going through the boa. His left hand gripped the arm of the chair in a choke hold. She felt him on the verge of opening up to her. When his throat cleared he said, “I got nothing to say to you, lady. Take it somewhere else, why don’t you?”

  “It’s just that-”

  He interrupted her with a bone-numbing delivery that drove his face scarlet and overfilled a blue vein in his long, pale forehead to where it jumped right off his face. “I said take it somewhere else! Get outta here. You get outta here now, ’fore I make you pay for that comment!” She was up and out of her chair, struggling with her briefcase.

  “I don’t want to talk no more,” he said. He turned his back on her, snatched his nearly empty drink from the side table, and headed back for the tall bottle that awaited him.

  She was out of there in a matter of seconds, in her car, and down the road. Exhausted, and still tense from the encounter, she drove until the phone cooperated and placed three calls-one of them downtown, one to the owner of Dover’s ButterBreast turkey farm, and the third to a tiny farm up the road toward Sammamish. After telling the farm’s owner that she worked for Publishers Clearing House, he claimed that Hank Russell was out in his trailer “watching the game, I think.”

  She disconnected the phone, placing it on the seat beside her, and drew in a deep breath. She shifted gears, took a curve suicidally fast, and whispered under her breath the punch line to that joke-“All lies”-a wry smile twisting up the edges of her lips, where her color had finally returned.

  “Where’s your jacket?”

  “Pardon me?”

  Hank Russell was short and solid. He looked like a fifty-five-year-old rodeo rider-jeans, dusty cowboy boots, and an azure blue work shirt with a western yoke and snap pockets. He had a silver belt buckle the size of a salad plate, and when he turned around to silence the television with a remote, she saw that on the back of his brow
n leather belt it read simply HANK, in big embossed letters. His twangy voice sounded like tires on gravel: “Them Publishing House Clearance folks got them blazers like I seen on the tube. You ain’t one of ’em, are you?”

  “No, sir.” She liked his smile immediately.

  “You lied to me, young lady.”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “You’re too damn pretty to be a tax lady, and it’s too damn late at night. Tell me you’re not a tax lady. God help me!”

  “I’m not a tax lady.”

  His relief was genuine. “Some unknown relative of mine died? You look more like an attorney than a tax lady.”

  “I’m not an attorney either,” she told him. “I’m a policewoman, Mr. Russell. I think Harry may be in trouble.”

  “Harry Caulfield? Again? Well, Jez-us!” he swung the screen door open wide. “Come in. Come in!” He zapped the TV this time killing the picture as well. She thought of cowboys and six-guns; and now they used remotes. “How about some lemon pie?” he asked with a twinkle in his green eyes. “Made it myself. It’s the best damn pie you’ve ever ate.”

  She and Boldt wandered his small backyard, side by side, the sergeant stopping every now and then to pick up one of the brightly colored plastic toys that were scattered about everywhere.

  “Last name of Caulfield,” she said. “Harry Caulfield. Wandered onto the farm at seventeen. Wouldn’t talk about his past. Not to anyone. Worked hard, learned fast. Everyone treated him like family. The owner, Meriweather, made him earn his high school equivalency if he wanted to stay on at Longview. Sent him on to college after that. Paid for everything for the boy.”

  “Here?” Boldt asked, briefly pausing in their slow stroll.

  She nodded. “That’s how the foreman remembers it. The university. Studied sciences, he said.”

  “Like microbiology?”

  “Could be,” she agreed. “It would help him with the poultry business-the diseases, the doctoring.”

  “It’s him.”

  “Worked back at the farm summers and on breaks. Evidently loved the work. Named a bunch of the hens. Really took to it.”

  “And came down hard.”

  “Russell says someone got paid. Said there was a break-in about a week before State Health shut them down, but that nothing was taken, and they blamed it on some kids and paid no attention. Never reported it.”

  “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 t
ime 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.