“We can’t be sure this newspaper story is his doing,” Boldt told her. “He may have just seized upon a convenient headline.”
“Maybe.” She clearly believed otherwise, and Boldt trusted Daphne’s instincts. Heart and mind; he was reminded of his lecture.
“What’s Fowler doing about it?” Boldt asked.
“He doesn’t know about this meeting. Not yet. He, like Taplin, advised against involving us. He’s looking to identify a disgruntled employee—but he’s been on it a month now. He’s had a few suspects, but none of them has panned out. His loyalty is to the company. Howard Taplin writes his paychecks, not Owen—if you follow me.”
Boldt’s irritation surfaced. “If this news story is his doing, I’d say we’re a little late.”
“I’m to blame. Owen asked me for my professional opinion. I classified the threats as low-risk. I thought whoever it was was blowing smoke. Proper use of the language. The faxes are sent by portable computer from pay phones. Fowler traced the last two to pay phones on Pill Hill. That’s a decent enough neighborhood. What that tells us is that in all probability we’re dealing with an educated, affluent, white male between the ages of twenty-five and forty. The demands seemed so unrealistic that I assumed this person was venting some anger—nothing more. Owen went along with that. He put Kenny on it and tried to forget it. I screwed this up, Lou.” She crossed her arms tightly again and her breasts rode high in the cradle. Again she quoted, “‘It can, and will, get much worse than this.’”
Her voice echoed slightly in the cavernous enclosure, circling inside his thoughts like horses on a carousel.
A black hole. His now.
“You want me to look into it, I’ll look into it,” he offered reluctantly.
“Unofficially.”
“You know I can’t do that, Daffy.”
“Please.”
“I’m not a rent-a-cop. Neither are you. We’re fifth-floor. You know the way it works.”
“Please!”
“I can’t do that for very long,” he qualified.
“Thank you.”
“If either of these kids dies, Daffy—” He left it dangling there, like one of the many broken cobwebs suspended from the cement ceiling.
“I know.” She avoided his gaze.
“You’ll share everything with me. No stonewalling.”
“Agreed.”
“Well … maybe not everything,” he corrected.
It won a genuine smile from her, and he was glad for that—though it deserted her as quickly as it had come. His frantic footfalls on the formed stairs sounded like the beating of bats’ wings as he descended at a run.
The newspaper article had listed one of the hospitals. For Lou Boldt, the victim was where every investigation began.
TWO
Boldt stood at the foot of the bed in the Harborview Medical Clinic’s ICU ward. Slater Lowry lay unconscious, the repository of a half-dozen tubes, the source for the weakened signals charted on a variety of green video monitors. KIRO’s morning news had picked up the story of a “mysterious infection.” There had been no mention of Owen Adler or the threatening faxes.
The boy was a towhead with a short, turned-up nose and monkey ears he would hopefully grow into. The hospital gown fit him awkwardly, riding up tightly against his neck; Boldt glanced toward the door, then to the large viewing window, and found himself alone with the boy. He reached out and tugged the white seam to a moonlike crescent at the boy’s collarbone. Better now. Despite the child’s beauty, he did not sleep peacefully. His was a tormented unconsciousness. This room was too bright, too clinical for a child: more an operating theater with a bed in it. Too many machines, too much tile and stainless steel—a place to die rather than to recover. No window to the outside, nothing human about it whatsoever. It had been created to be sterile, and had greatly succeeded.
“Hold on,” Boldt whispered encouragingly, willing him stronger, unable to fight off the thought that this might be his own son just as easily. That this condition had been inflicted on him by a complete stranger so repulsed Boldt that he, too, felt briefly nauseated and sought a chair where there was none to be found.
Miles. His two-year-old. All the clichés held true: the sun rose and set on the boy; the light of his life. And what if? What then? How does a parent stand idly by at a hospital bedside and watch a child shrink from this earth? Who deserves that? A sickening energy invaded him. He shuddered and pulled at the gauze mask that suffocated him.
There was no consideration of ducking this one, black hole or not. It qualified as “crimes against persons,” and as such, was to be handled by Homicide. It was his; he owned it. He wanted this case now—eager, like a boxer climbing into the ring.
Pressed into the wall, concentrating on the boy—the victim—a greenish haze clouded the room. Boldt had heard all the stories of cops who could place themselves into the head of the killer. Not him: He was no mind reader, but an observer. An evidence hound. His strength was not so much intuition as an uncanny ability to listen to the victim. Empathy. In this regard, he had what the others did not.
But for the moment he was stumped. The victim typically brought along a crime scene, a foundation of physical evidence from which Boldt built a case. Slater Lowry offered him nothing. Or did he? the detective wondered, stepping closer to the bed again. True, the crime scene was now well separated from the victim. But there was, in fact, an intended weapon: this bacteria or virus. Boldt called down to the basement of this same building and after a long hold connected with Dr. Ronald Dixon—“Dixie”—pathologist and chief medical examiner for all of King County. A man recruited by San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York at twice the salary, twice the vacation; a man who stayed at half the salary and half the vacation and ten times the friends. Boldt asked Dixie to join him, and without any questions Dixie agreed. There was, quite possibly, a crime scene somewhere. Somehow the food eaten by Slater Lowry had been contaminated, intentional or not.
Waiting, Boldt fell victim to his own active imagination. He pictured a man’s hands injecting a piece of fruit with a syringe; he saw a fast-food chef worker squeezing several drops of fluid onto a roll. He saw a cannery, a thousand cans an hour whirling down roller chutes and a single square inch of a stainless steel cutter somewhere in the maze holding a green fuzzy mold that the swing-shift cleaners had failed to notice. It was this last thought that caught him. What if Adler Foods was responsible? What if these faxes were merely a ruse to cover up a massive blunder, a contaminated product—their own product? What if Daphne had been used—manipulated. What if she were the real victim?
Suspicion. He lived with it, always casting as wide a net as possible, encompassing every possibility, distasteful or not. He worked systematically, methodically following up each thought, each suspicion. He processed, considered, weighed, tested, and then compared with whatever evidence was available.
“It’s a strain of cholera.” It was Dixie’s voice. He was reading the boy’s chart. A youthful face for a fifty-year-old. Somewhat oriental eyes. Dixie was a big man like Boldt. Thinning brown hair juxtaposed by bushy eyebrows. He wore a gold wedding ring and a black rubber watch. Wide shoulders that hunched forward from years of leaning over a stainless steel slab.
“I’ve gotten a couple of calls about this,” he informed Boldt. They had worked maybe two hundred crime scenes together. “The girl, Lori Chin, is much improved. She’s going to pull through.”
“Who’s on this?”
“State Health investigates infectious diseases. CDC, if it’s a real bastard.”
“It’s a real bastard,” Boldt said, staring at the boy. “It’s unofficial.”
“No, it’s cholera. Cholera is quite official.”
“How did he get it?” Boldt asked.
Dixie referenced the boy’s chart. “They have names, you know? Numbers really: the strains. They can be followed that way—tracked.” Boldt felt his eye twitch. Dixie continued: “It’s a particularly virulent s
train, this one, whatever it is. Normally, cholera responds to rehydration. Antibiotics can speed the recovery but this strain is resistant to the usual antibiotics. Theoretically,” he said, sounding suddenly detached, “antibiotics are not necessary for recovery. This boy is dying from shock, Lou. His dehydration progressed too far, and when rehydrated he showed a temporary recovery and then went into severe shock that has resulted in organ failure. Acute tubular necrosis of the kidneys, which will result in renal failure and fluid overload. And something called ARDS—adult respiratory distress syndrome, which can occur in children—also the result of rehydration shock. ARDS causes pulmonary failure.”
“He’s going to pull through,” Boldt stated emphatically.
Dixie shifted uneasily, returning the chart to a plastic file holder on the wall. “No,” Dixie corrected. “He’s not going to pull out of this, Lou.”
Boldt heard the words, but would not allow them to register. His eyes flashed darkly at his friend. “How’d he get it?” Boldt repeated, teeth clenched.
“Listen, there are bacterial outbreaks like this all the time. Maybe not cholera, but plenty just the same. You don’t hear about most of them, only the sensational ones. Typically, it doesn’t take State Health very long to identify the source: a restaurant, a fish stand. It goes down pretty quickly. But this one’s a bastard. An uncommon strain of an uncommon bacteria. They’re unlikely to track down the source before IDing the strain.”
“What if I knew the source?” Boldt asked. “What if I think I knew the source?” Boldt modified.
Dixie bore down on him intensely. “Then we’ve got to move on this, Lou.”
“I’ll need some techs. I’ll need a cover—something to fool the neighbors.”
“I can help with that.” Dixie pointed urgently to the door. He said, “After you.”
Boldt glanced back at Slater Lowry. The nausea had grown into a knot.
THREE
Less than ninety minutes later, at 11:30 A.M., a RID-ALL Pest Control van turned left past a pair of green recycling bins into the driveway of 1821 Cascadia. Dixie had arranged it; State Health used the van for low-profile inquiries exactly like this.
Boldt parked his Chevy on the street. He wore a RID-ALL windbreaker and carried a brushed aluminum clipboard clasped in his big fist. The neighbors were certain to have heard of Slater Lowry’s illness. This small effort to disguise police involvement—an involvement that remained unofficial and went strictly against the blackmailer’s demands—seemed well worth the short delay it had caused. Inside the van four State Health field technicians, outfitted in what amounted to environmental space suits, awaited a go-ahead from Boldt.
He introduced himself to a strikingly handsome woman and displayed his police identification. Pointing to the logo silk-screened onto the jacket he explained, “Just a precaution against curious neighbors.”
“A precaution against what?” she asked, immediately suspicious.
“If you have a minute?”
She apologized and showed him inside.
She gave her name as Betty, closing the door behind him. Germanic ancestry, in her late thirties, she had boyish blond hair, bright blue eyes, and wore fashion jeans and a T-shirt bearing Van Gogh’s Irises. She had small, high breasts, square shoulders, and a straight spine. A brave intensity flashed in her eyes. She wasn’t one to be pushed around, he noted. She showed him into a baby boomer’s living room: hardwood floor, cream canvas couches, a brick fireplace, surround-sound speakers.
She offered him tea and he accepted. He wanted her comfortable. He wanted her calm.
A few minutes later she returned with the tea and explained, “A man from the State Health Department called me late yesterday. He asked a lot of questions. Which restaurants we frequented, markets. That sort of thing. I can understand State Health. But what’s the interest of the police?”
“The van in the drive,” he said, “it’s State Health.”
“But you are not,” she fired back. She looked up as she poured. “You visited Slater this morning.” He nodded. “I keep track. I don’t want the press bothering him.”
“I have a two-year-old,” he said, though it sounded stupid once he heard it.
“Why?” she asked sternly. “Why the visit? What are you doing here?”
“It’s unofficial, my interest—” he explained. This wasn’t easy for him. He wanted to break it to her gently, but she was all business. Her boy was critical. A cop was sitting on her couch. How would Liz have reacted? Her jaw muscles tightened and the teapot danced slightly under her direction. He was relieved to see this. The exterior was hard, but the inside was human.
“What department are you with, Sergeant?”
There it was, he thought. She’d gone and done it. He could dodge it—answer a question with a question—he knew the tricks. Most of them. But he owed her.
“Homicide.” It came out more like a confession.
She blinked furiously, placed the tea down, and excused herself. After several excruciating minutes she returned with reddened eyes. “Okay, what’s going on?” she asked heatedly. Angry. Her eyes a hard blue ice.
“We don’t know.”
“Bullshit! He’s my boy. You tell me, damn it! You tell me everything.” She hesitated. “Homicide?” she asked.
“We investigate all crimes against persons. That may—only may—be what we have here.”
She crossed her arms tightly. “Meaning?”
“We can’t confirm any of this.”
“Any of what?” she fumed.
He explained it in general terms: A company had received threats; those threats included a reference to Slater’s illness; there may or may not be a connection; State Health field technicians were on call in the van outside hoping for her permission to look for any such connection.
“It’s entirely up to you, but I’ll tell you honestly: We need your cooperation and we need your candor. We don’t want anyone else joining Slater in the hospital.”
“May I call my husband?”
“You may call your husband. You may throw me out.” She rose and headed toward the kitchen door. He hurried, “Or you can give me a go-ahead.”
It stopped her. She looked exhausted all of a sudden. “You don’t want me to call him.”
“I want to control this, to keep it controlled. If he’s upset, if he has to leave the office, he’ll say something. You see? That’s out of my control. That worries me.”
“What’s his name?” she asked. “Your boy?” She moved back toward the couch. She was distant. Dazed.
“Miles,” he answered. “I love jazz. My wife and I like jazz.”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they? Children.” She looked up and they met eyes. Hers were pooled. “It’s a beautiful name: Miles.”
The search was its own kind of terror. The van disgorged the four technicians—two women and two men—wearing green jumpsuits, Plexiglass goggles, and elbow-length orange rubber gloves with a space-age silver material covering the palms and fingers to protect against sharpies. They wore high rubber boots. Paper filters covered their mouths. Technomonsters.
Lou Boldt and Betty Lowry looked on as these aliens methodically searched and stripped the kitchen from the deep freeze to the dustpan. The contents of every food cabinet, the pantry, and the home’s two refrigerators were removed, examined, sorted, inventoried, or returned. The occasional item was confiscated to a thick, glassine bag that was then sealed, labeled, and placed inside a bright red plastic bag that read Contaminated Waste in a winding chain of bold, black lettering. The crew’s leader kept a careful inventory. At a future date the great state of Washington would replace or return these items. What Betty Lowry was to do in the interim was not discussed. A narrow bottle of horseradish. A can of chocolate syrup. Two yogurts long past their sale date.
Every toilet bowl in the house was wiped down with paper tissues bearing stenciled numbers. Each was bagged separately.
Betty L
owry cradled herself in tightly crossed arms as she watched the desecration of her home. The crew worked silently and efficiently, the effect disarming. Boldt experienced her sense of violation and wondered which side he was on. The technicians spoke to each other using a clipped, highly specialized verbiage that further isolated them.
The last kitchen item to be bagged and labeled was the electric can opener. As they moved outside to work the trash, they left behind a kitchen stripped of its character. The teapot was gone from the stove. The entire disposal unit had been removed from the sink, along with a part of the faucet nozzle, leaving the immediate need of a plumber—something not discussed. The salt and pepper shakers were gone. The coffee grinder had been labeled and bagged—removed—as if Slater Lowry had been drinking a cup of home brew on the day he took ill. It suddenly looked like a real estate model home. A distraught but brave Betty Lowry glared up at Boldt, blaming him. He offered a look of concern, but made no apology.
She stood away from him as they listened uncomfortably to the crew’s rummaging through the trash like a bunch of rats. At one point she mumbled, “It was picked up a couple days ago. They won’t find anything.” Boldt nodded, but he didn’t stop them. They had been cued to pay particular attention for any Adler Foods products. So far, not one had been found.
Forty-five minutes after it had arrived, the van drove away, having cut a swath through Betty Lowry’s home and her life, taking off like a thief with oversize red bags of discarded garbage, and leaving her with only a multipage yellow receipt bearing some scribbles and the familiarity of her own signature.
The last room to be searched was Slater’s bedroom. Boldt and Betty Lowry watched the van depart from this window. There were sports posters and a well-traveled basketball, a Macintosh computer and a Webster’s dictionary. In the closet was a shoe box filled with army men and another filled with trading cards. Three pairs of sneakers and a pair of soccer shoes. A model of the Space Shuttle, incomplete.
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