No Witnesses

by Ridley Pearson

  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 immediately 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.

  “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 ke
pt 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 over
head, 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.”