No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  “Right. Going after the Longview employees. That’s how you got Caulfield’s name. Right? And all thanks to yours truly. And Danielson, too, maybe-or was he just your go-boy on that?” He poked Boldt a little too hard with his metal claw. “You can thank me. I won’t complain.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Razor.” Boldt’s words barely left his mouth.

  “You don’t have to sound so overjoyed,” Striker stabbed sarcastically.

  “No. I appreciate it. Really,” Boldt said, sounding stronger, his attention focused across the lawn on Daniel-son’s profile. “The Longview tax records,” he repeated.

  “Damn straight. You ought to try going up against the tax boys sometimes. It ain’t all fun and games, believe me.”

  Boldt had LaMoia drive him downtown. He left the car before it came to a full stop and hurried to the door with the detective shouting loudly from behind him, “Wait up!”

  Boldt was not waiting. He took the stairs two at a time, descending into the basement. He had his key out for the Boneyard before reaching the door. Through the door, then the chain-link gate. He found the light switch without looking.

  Several long strides down the second aisle, around the corner to the shelf so familiar to him. C-A-U-

  And there it was: the arrest file for Harold Emerson Caulfield. Exactly where it belonged.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Armed with a variety of mug shots, including those of Harry Caulfield that had been given to her by Boldt, Daphne approached Holly MacNamara the following Friday morning before the young woman left for summer school.

  Holly was dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and black running shoes. The mother continually tried to push herself on them, and to prevent her from interfering, Daphne and the young woman sought privacy in Holly’s bedroom. The walls were covered with posters of grunge bands. The bed was on the floor, and the room smelled of incense.

  “You see what I live with?” she asked Daphne.

  “Mothers can be harsh,” Daphne agreed.

  “Yeah?”

  “My mother was a real jerk when I was in high school. She thought I was going to get pregnant and become a junkie.”

  “You?”

  “Me,” she answered. She placed the first series of mug shots in front of the girl, withholding Caulfield’s for the third or fourth group. She wanted to get her acquainted with the process before risking their prize. But more than that, she wanted to help this young woman if possible.

  Holly MacNamara studied them all carefully, picked one of them up, placed it down, and shook her head. “Not here,” she said.

  “The thing is,” Daphne told her, “the more time I spent at home, the worse it was, because it seemed like everything I did was wrong. My mother wanted me to be her cute little girl. She couldn’t handle that I had breasts and my period, and that I was curious to find out what drinking beer was like.” None of this reflected her high school years in the least, but she had studied the Holly MacNamaras and she thought she knew the general situation well enough to establish a rapport.

  “Talk to me.”

  “Same with you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Daphne laid out another set of four mug shots. “How about these?” she asked.

  Holly was not looking at the photographs, but at Daphne instead. “The thing is, she never lets up. And all I want is for her to chill and give me some space. You know? She doesn’t have a clue who I am.”

  “Maybe a clue,” Daphne said, “but not much of one.”

  “Exactly.”

  Daphne indicated the photos for a second time, and Holly studied them carefully-perhaps more carefully, Daphne hoped, than had they not had this conversation.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Holly said.

  “Make sure.”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  Daphne picked up these, but waited before placing down the next, for the photo of Harry Caulfield was among these. She said, “I volunteer at the Shelter-”

  “The place for runaways?”

  “Yes. A close friend of mine is the spokesperson, and I put in about eight hours a week there-evenings mostly. Have you ever considered volunteer work?”

  “Me?”

  “I know it’s not the same as hanging out at the mall, as hanging out with your friends. But the girls are about your age-closer to your age than mine, that’s for sure-and more than anything, they need contact with people, they need to find a base, to get themselves centered again. Volunteers do everything from serve meals to change beds to just sit around talking. What I was thinking-you’re kind of in a bad scene here. Your sentencing requires you to stay home, but this is where a lot of your problems seem to stem from. What if I could convince the judge to allow you to spend some time volunteering at the Shelter? Maybe the same hours I’m there-at least at first. Would you have any interest in that?”

  “I could try it.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  Holly studied Daphne’s face. “Yeah, that’s a yes.”

  “Good,” Daphne said, grinning.

  She laid out the next series of mug shots. First one, then the second, then Harry Caulfield, then a fourth. “What about these?” She watched the girl’s face carefully, as Holly’s eyes moved progressively down the row. When she reached Caulfield, her eyes widened and she bit her lip. Then, without saying anything, she looked at the fourth in the line.

  “Let me ask you something,” Holly MacNamara said. Daphne nodded. “If I did recognize this guy-not that I’m saying I do-then I become involved, right? I become a snitch.” Her voice changed, driven by anger. “You know how much trouble I’ve gotten in because someone ratted on me? Do you know what that feels like? And now you expect me to rat on some guy? Do you see anything wrong with this picture?”

  “I’m going to tell you something that I’m not allowed to tell you. I’m going to tell you because I trust you never to repeat it. If you were to repeat it, you could get me in some serious shit-maybe even cost me my job-it’s that secret. I don’t know you well, Holly, but I like you-and this is one time I had better be a good judge of character.” She hesitated, to allow this to sink in. “I know what you’re saying about snitching. I think I understand where you’re coming from. And I can see how it would be hard for you. Especially if you were turning in a shoplifter. Shoplifting is nothing to be proud of, Holly, but I can see how that would be difficult for you. But the person we’re after is not a shoplifter.” Caulfield stared back at her from the mug shot. He was clean-shaven, dark eyes, with an average face of average looks. He was Mr. Anybody. He might have been a waiter, or an attorney, or a cop. Dark hair, a firm jaw line, and strong eyes. He was a multiple murderer, and he seemed to be looking right at Daphne with an expression of smug contempt and hatred. I hate you all, his eyes said.

  Daphne continued, “The man we’re after is no shoplifter. He killed a boy young enough to be your little brother. He killed a family of four-two little girls and their parents. He’s put other people in the hospital. He has threatened much worse, and we take those threats very seriously. We believe time may be running out-and we need to know if we’re after the right person or not. We have a suspect, but no one that we know of has seen him but you. If you are able to identify him, then we know where to focus our investigation. We just may stop him in time.” She pointed back to the line of mug shots. “Do you see him, Holly? Is he any of these men?”

  Without any indecision, Holly MacNamara reached down and picked up the photograph of Harry Caulfield. “This is the man I saw at Foodland.”

  Bernie Lofgrin’s magnified eyeballs looked fake, like a pair of joke glasses won at the ringtoss at an amusement park. His office was crowded with stacks of reading material and reports vying for chair seats and rising like teetering skyscrapers from the office floor. A cup of steaming coffee sat by the phone and he waved a Bic pen in the air as if it were a baton.

  Boldt set the jazz tapes down on the man’s cluttered desk, moved a stack of printed
matter, and took a seat across from him.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Lofgrin said, holding the cassettes close to his face so he could read the titles that Boldt had written on them. “Uh-huh,” he muttered and repeated with each new discovery, quite pleased. “You’re a man of your word,” he said. Peering more closely, he added enthusiastically, “‘Jumping Off a Clef!’ Chet Baker! And Red Rodney, too! Terrific.” Lofgrin liked the trumpet.

  “An added bonus for my tardiness,” Boldt said.

  “You mind?” Lofgrin got up, shut the office door, and put the trumpet tape into a boom box and turned it on, setting the volume low. For Boldt the jazz improved his mood immediately, and he was glad it was as familiar to him as it was, because it did not distract him, stealing his attention the way unfamiliar music did.

  “We checked out all three ATMs last night. No latents. No evidence whatsoever.”

  While Boldt had been investigating the poisoning of the Mishnov family, three ATMs had been hit for another twenty-eight hundred dollars. Again, Boldt’s surveillance team had been nowhere near the ATM locations hit. Bernie Lofgrin’s forensic sciences squad had dusted for prints and inspected the sites for any other evidence.

  Lofgrin said, “One thing bothers me … We’ve seen four ATMs hit, right? And according to ATM security people, some fifty percent of the machines are equipped with optical surveillance-cameras. So is this extortionist of yours just lucky or what?”

  “It bothers me, too, Bernie.”

  “It gives you the feeling someone’s got a hand in your back pocket-know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean. I’ve got some ideas.”

  “I get the hint. We’ve got other things to discuss.”

  “The Longview Farms evidence,” Boldt reminded as Lofgrin sat back down.

  “We focused on that basement room, as you asked. Worked closely with the fire marshal, Peter Kramer, and also Fergus in their lab because a total burn is really its own science. And there is a lot of work yet to go, I’m afraid, some of which we’ve shipped off to Washington, thanks to your agreement with the Bureau boys. There just isn’t a hell of a lot left after a fire like that. Where we got lucky is that the workbench under which all these boxes were stored was topped with sheet metal. The weight of the collapsing building, combined with the limited protection of this layer of sheet metal, compressed the contents of some of the boxes, and there just wasn’t enough oxygen for it all to burn. So we have small clusters of flaky carbon, kind of like the layers of French pastry-extremely fragile, sensitive still to oxygen, and yet basically intact. We shipped a lot of this off to the Bureau because we want to get it right, and evidence this volatile only allows you one shot. Exposed to air, it literally turns to dust before you can work with it.”

  “How long?”

  “The Bureau is thorough. They can, and have, taken weeks to get back to us. I’d say two weeks is average. We’ve asked for a rush, but everyone does, so I doubt it means much. They do know about the case, though, and that helps. My guess is that it will get some kind of priority, which may mean a week or ten days if we’re lucky.”

  “We don’t have ten days.”

  “I understand,” Lofgrin said sympathetically. “I’m just being upfront with you. It’s out of my hands.”

  “So we wait?”

  “For the real detail work, we do. The specifics that may turn this thing on its ear. Oh, check this riff!” He leaned back. A pair of trumpets soared on an unpredictable harmony and fluttered to a gentle landing. Lofgrin sighed, as if he had just finished a good meal. “What we have for you is not the best news,” the lab man said, sitting forward again. “The boxes beneath that workbench contained varying sizes of thin sheets of paper. Printed matter. Color, probably.”

  “Labels,” the detective said.

  “Yeah, labels, I’m thinking. But who knows? Could be any printed matter-church programs, political flyers. We didn’t get a good look at any of them because of the decomposition during oxidation, and that’s what we’re hoping for by sending them out: some kind of positive identification for you to work with.”

  Boldt took notes despite the knowledge that Bernie Lofgrin would provide him with a copy of the preliminary report. Lab reports were overly technical and therefore difficult to interpret.

  “As far as you’re concerned, the most disturbing news was the detection of strychnine.”

  Boldt shouted involuntarily. “What?”

  “In a basement we expect the presence of rodent poisons-anticoagulants, mostly. But strychnine has no business being down there, especially in the proximity of the workbench, which is where we detected it. We picked up traces in some of the ash samples-parts per million, mind you; trace amounts is all-but there was definitely strychnine in and around that area.”

  “Cholera?”

  “If it was there, the bacteria were sterilized by the fire. We’re pretty damn sure that what remained of the electrical gear we found could have fit the parameters of a light box of the kind Dr. Mann described to you, and we’ve detected abundant amounts of melted polymers, plastics specific to the manufacture of petri dishes.”

  “So it was a home lab,” Boldt stated.

  Lofgrin nodded. “Sure could be.” His eyeballs seemed to be on springs.

  “Why strychnine?” Boldt asked himself quietly, though Lofgrin answered.

  “Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid jamboree,” Lofgrin reminded. “The Guyana massacre. The Sudafed case here. The Tylenol tamperings. Poison of choice for tampering.” He explained, “Tasteless, odorless, easily blended.”

  “A mass poisoning?” Boldt questioned, reminded of the faxed threats.

  “With cholera,” Lofgrin said, “if it’s identified and treated properly, the patient stands a good chance of recovery. Not so with strychnine. It’s extremely fast-a few minutes is all. There’s your primary difference.”

  “A few minutes,” Boldt repeated, reminded of Caulfield’s threat to kill hundreds.

  Lofgrin’s phone rang. He turned down the music, answered the phone, grunted, and placed it back in the receiver.

  “Matthews,” he informed Boldt. “She says she’s got some good news for you.”

  “It’s about time someone did.”

  “Do we dare release the mug shot to the press?” Boldt asked, buoyed by MacNamara’s positive identification.

  Daphne told him, “I think not. If he sees his own photo on the news, two things are going to happen: One, he’s going to go underground-we lose any chance of catching him at the ATMs; two, he’ll feel betrayed and may attempt to deliver on his larger threat. Let me run this by Clements. He’ll have an opinion for us.”

  Boldt mentioned the strychnine, and they discussed possible psychological motives for a more deadly poison, and again she deferred to Dr. Clements. Leaving her, Boldt made himself a copy of the face and left the original with one of the civilian office workers, asking that it be photocopied and made available to all patrol personnel. A Be On Lookout was issued-Caulfield would be detained and brought downtown if spotted.

  Boldt spent the afternoon distributing copies to the ATM surveillance team, moving between the various locations where his people were in position. They had a face now, and Boldt considered it their first decent break.

  Kenny Fowler lived in a deluxe apartment managed by Inn At The Market, with maid and room service. He seemed both proud and embarrassed by it as he showed Boldt inside. Located directly above Campagne Restaurant, the corner view looked out over the red neon sign-PUBLIC MARKET CENTER-and across Elliott Bay and the slowly moving lights of Seattle’s commercial shipping traffic. The first room encountered housed a wet bar, two couches, a pair of overstuffed chairs, a coffee table, and a small dining table. Off of this was a studio kitchen, a single bedroom with a water view, and a luxurious bath that Boldt knew Liz would kill for.

  Boldt needed a favor, and he did not enjoy coming to Kenny Fowler with his hand out. He did not feel he could trust Fowler fully, for al
though they both wanted to see an end to the tampering, Fowler wanted credit, no doubt motivated by a corporate hierarchy that encouraged competition. He was also likely to want something in return for Boldt’s request, and Boldt could not be sure he could, or would, grant any such request.

  Facing the picture window, Fowler said, “Must be something important to bring the mountain to Mohammed.” Then he continued his nervous orbit of the room, pouring himself a gin and tonic and joining Boldt in the sitting area.

  “I need your help,” Boldt announced, once Fowler’s back was to him. It caught the security man by surprise, and he left his glass at the bar and returned to his seat without it.

  “I’m listening.”

  “One of my people is exhibiting some peculiar behavior. I need a background check, maybe some surveillance, and I don’t want to involve Internal Affairs.”

  Fowler nodded. “Puts you in a bad position.”

  “He’s on my squad, Kenny. It’s Chris Danielson.”

  “Danielson? Are you saying you think he’s involved in this somehow? Have you spoken to him?”

  “Not yet. I want this background check first.”

  “What exactly has he done?”

  “I need your help, Kenny. Maybe we should leave it at that.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything you can get without it getting back to him that you’re interested.” The discussion made Boldt feel ugly and dirty at the same time. He knew this was not the way it was supposed to be done, and yet it seemed to him the most efficient use of manpower and time.

  “You think Chris Danielson is maybe drilling these soup cans?” Fowler became crimson, beside himself with confusion.

  “No, I don’t. But I’m a little short of explanations of how the extortionist is never near the ATMs we’re watching.”

  “Fucking A! Danielson’s giving out your surveillance information?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing, but I want his dirty laundry if he’s got any. It’s that simple.”