No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  “A greatcoat, yeah. I didn’t see his face.”

  “A hat?” LaMoia asked. There had been a glimpse of this individual in the video, though it blurred in freeze-frame.

  “Yeah. Baseball cap, I think. Kinda like mine.”

  “How ’bout his shoes?” LaMoia tried.

  “Boots,” she spurted out. “Not shoes.”

  The way it flew out of her, Boldt trusted this. “Boots,” he repeated, making note of it.

  “Cowboy boots,” she said. “And blue jeans!” she announced proudly, somewhat surprised with herself.

  “Like mine?” LaMoia asked, showing off his Tony Lamas and his pressed blue jeans.

  “No. They were worn jeans,” she said. “Like frayed at the bottom, you know? And brown cowboy boots. Muddy maybe. I’m pretty sure they were brown. Maybe they were work boots. Hiking boots. I don’t remember.”

  Mud, Boldt thought, recalling how thick the mud was at Longview Farms. He caught Daphne looking at him, her eyes flashing with a heightened energy-she believed the witness; she thought they had a live one.

  LaMoia asked, “Jewelry? Tattoos? Scars? A limp? Anything distinguishing?”

  “The boots,” she repeated proudly. “I sort of remember the boots.”

  “Did he say anything to you? Did he speak to you?”

  “No way. But that look he gave me was heavy. Like he was going to kill me for running into his cart.”

  “Did you see him again, anytime after that?” Daphne asked.

  Holly MacNamara shook her head.

  “Take your time,” LaMoia encouraged.

  “In line, maybe,” she said to the detective. “The checkout line. He was buying something.” She said definitively, “You always buy something.”

  “Do you remember what he was buying?” Boldt asked.

  “I’m sure!” she said sarcastically. “I don’t even remember if I saw him in line,” she admitted. “I was in a hurry. I just wanted the hell out of there.”

  Boldt leaned to Daphne and whispered, “Get her started on the employee photos-Adler, Foodland, Shop-Alert. Then mug shots.” Data processing had compiled DMV photographs of the Foodland employees. The other companies had their own, for security reasons.

  The video, Boldt thought. Was one of the Shop-Alert security cameras aimed down the line of cash registers?

  What was that guy’s name? Don? Dave? Ron?

  Gus at Shop-Alert, the Redmond-based security company that handled Foodland, greeted Boldt as if he were an old friend. He escorted him quickly to the back room and the plethora of electronic equipment. “The minute I got your call, I started running the data looking for the guy you described. Been at it for the better part of an hour. He’s good, Lieutenant. Very good.” He triggered a key, and a screen-saving pattern left the monitor, replaced by the shadowy black-and-white flickering image of a tall man wearing a Mariners baseball cap and a greatcoat. “This is about all we have of him. And if you watch him closely,” he said, allowing the image to advance in a broken, mechanical movement, “you see he’s using the person at the register in front of him as a shield from the camera. See? He moves right along with this heavy woman-so the camera doesn’t catch much sight of him. He knows what he’s doing. Like I said: He’s very good.”

  Two aisles behind the suspect, Boldt caught sight of Holly MacNamara, though she too was screening herself from the camera.

  “What about his face?”

  “We never see it. I’ve tried some enhancement. I tried some of the other time sequences, but we hardly ever see him. He knows this system well. Too well.”

  “An employee?” Boldt let slip, his mind whirring.

  “Or a regular,” Gus hypothesized. “Or a guy who’s studied the hell out of it. Done his homework.”

  Boldt wrote down the exact time that was electronically stamped into the lower corner of the screen. “Register six,” he noticed.

  “Six, seven, and eight are Foodland’s express lanes,” Gus confirmed. “Shoplifters like express lanes.”

  Using this time stamp, Boldt hoped it might be possible to cross-check the register tapes and identify the exact items made during this particular purchase.

  When he returned to the Public Safety Building, he assigned Bobbie Gaynes the task, and two hours later she entered his office cubicle announcing that with the help of Lee Hyundai, she had found the cash register receipt in question. She handed him an enlarged photocopy grainy from the enlargement, the computerized lettering angular and spotty but still legible. It listed four items purchased at Foodland’s register 6.

  Of the four items, listed as CANDY and ICECRM, three were preceded by a four-letter producer code that Boldt had long since come to recognize: ADFD-Adler Foods.

  “Adler candy bars,” he whispered under his breath.

  “Maybe he intended to eat them, Sergeant,” Gaynes said optimistically. “We don’t know for certain what he has in mind for them.”

  “Yes, we do,” Boldt replied ominously. “I’m afraid we do.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  At five o’clock Thursday, July 12, Bernie Lofgrin poked his head into Daphne’s office waving a plastic bag containing the State Health document. “You win the Kewpie doll, Matthews. This report is one legal-size piece of bullshit.” He looked more closely at her, “What did you do to yourself?”

  “A box fell off my closet shelf and got me.”

  “That was a heavy box,” he said.

  She caught sight of a man just over Lofgrin’s shoulder and asked, “Can I help you, Chris?” She was asking Danielson, who seemed to be loitering within earshot.

  Danielson fumbled with his words, claiming to be reading the bulletin board just outside Daphne’s office, but to her the excuse fell short. She waved Lofgrin inside and asked him to shut the door.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the ecstatic Lofgrin said. “You come down to my office and I’ll show you my etchings.” He winked, which with his magnified eyeballs felt to her a little bit like a camera’s flash going off.

  A few minutes later, Lofgrin eased his office door shut. Through the large window the lab was mostly empty of workers at this hour. The office was its usual mess. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” he asked, as Daphne moved two stacks of papers in order to win a seat. “You mind?” He put on a jazz tape and set the volume low. “Helps me think,” he said, grinning widely. Lofgrin had a contagious enthusiasm when he was happy. And he was happy whenever the lab results gave him conclusive findings-which filled Daphne with optimism.

  “It has been altered?” she repeated.

  “A lousy job. A bunch of amateurs. They used Wite-Out and typed over it. At least someone was smart enough to use the same typewriter to make the changes-but the carriage alignment of those changes ran fractionally on an incline, just as you spotted.”

  Lofgrin explained, “The Wite-Out was old, and at one time it probably approximated the paper color quite well. It was an enamel and therefore bonded well to the document’s pulp and fiber content, rendering it virtually impossible to remove using solvents without risking the unintentional destruction of the primary surface, thereby losing indentations caused by prior impact-a typewriter keystroke, for instance.” His eyes moved like overinflated beach balls in a light wind. “Our interest, of course, was archaeological in nature: What lay beneath the Wite-Out that was so important to cover up? The cities of Troy, if you will.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Wite-Out is, of course, opaque. I’m afraid that our efforts to use illumination to develop a print-through were a failure.” He handed her one of the lab’s efforts: a heavy sheet of photographic paper. The bulk of the document text was fuzzy, for it had been photographed through the existing paper of the document by shooting strong light at it while negative film was placed underneath it. The spaces where the changes in the text had been made appeared as black strokes, revealing nothing of what words had once existed beneath the Wite-Out.

  “The way we got to i
t,” Lofgrin explained enthusiastically, “was by using a long-wave light technique commonly used in the detection of counterfeit currency. The enamel is porous, of course-opaque only in the light of certain frequencies. What we did was analogous to taking an X ray, where the enamel Wite-Out is the skin, and the words beneath it the bone, if you will. And we developed this,” he said, offering her yet another sheet from his file folder.

  She had rarely experienced one of Lofgrin’s detailed explanations in person-his “sermons,” as LaMoia called them. But she knew that such explanations were to be expected. The lab man never, never simply handed an officer the final results. He put on his jazz, leaned back in his chair, and he talked. He detailed each and every step of his arduous journey so that the peace officer would understand just what a superhuman job had been done.

  This latest document was a negative, indeed reminding her of an X ray, but in the spaces where earlier there had been just one word, now there were two, typed one on top of the other, creating in all but one space a mishmash of hieroglyphics impossible for her to decipher.

  “Not exactly readable,” Lofgrin admitted, “but the first, and perhaps most important, step to discovering what someone did not want read.” He leaned back in his chair, and it squeaked as he gently rocked himself, the rhythm conflicting with that of the sax music. “The typewriter used a ten-character-per-inch Courier typeface. A few years back we would have located a similar typewriter and typed over the top letters using a white ribbon in order to remove them. But computer graphics enhances and speeds up that process considerably. Amy Chu spent the better part of the afternoon drawing out the top layer of typed letters.” He handed her yet another sheet-this one computer-printed. “And this is what you get.” In each of the areas where changes had taken place, now only flecks of characters remained, looking a little like Chinese characters, or, in a few cases, worse: like paint splatters. “Not the easiest thing to read,” Lofgrin confessed. “And that’s because the letters often overlapped significantly, so when you took out the stem to the letter t, you might also erase the letter i beneath it. But if you think about it, there are only two characters-a number and a letter-that are interchangeable on the standard typewriter keyboard.” He allowed her to think about it only briefly before he answered for her. “Not even zero and O, capital or lowercase, duplicate one another.”

  Daphne answered like the good student: “The number one and the lowercase letter l.”

  “Gold star, Matthews!” he chirped. “Which means all other letters and numbers essentially leave their own fingerprint, if you will, whether a serif or a loop, a dot or a stem.” He stopped rocking. “Computer scanning technology gave us something called OCR-optical character recognition-software. The computer knows all these individual characteristics of each letter for each typeface, and using logarithms is able to predict within an error factor of only a few percent what letter is on the page. You scan a document, and it’s a graphic. You run OCR on that graphic and it’s converted into a text format that can then be manipulated. Bottom line,” he said, “we ran OCR on this jumble of flecks and spots and asked it to guess what it was we were looking at.” He held the final sheet in his hand, but he would not pass it to her. “It took Amy seventeen passes with the OCR, because even for the computer there just wasn’t enough there to work with, and its error rate was atrocious. But here you go: all the names, the date, the information they tried to hide.” He said proudly, “The truth they tried to hide.”

  The document was indeed restored to its original form.

  Lofgrin said, “You put me on the stand, and I’ll say the same thing to the jury or judge.”

  Heaven help us, Daphne thought.

  She ran her finger down the form, comparing the altered document to the one she now held, her curiosity driving a trickle of perspiration down her ribs. And there was the box she had most wanted to see.

  FIELD INSPECTOR: Walter Hammond

  Alongside was Hammond’s legible signature that for the past several years had been covered by Wite-Out. More shocking to her was the cause of the contamination, listed not as salmonella, as it had been on the altered document, but as staphylococcus. Knowing exactly where her eyes were on the page, Lofgrin said, “Staph is a contact infection, passed from human to human. An entirely different animal from salmonella.”

  It all but confirmed her suspicions: Longview Farms had been improperly accused of a contamination for which it was not responsible.

  Walter “Roy” Hammond lived in what Daphne’s friend Sharon called a “die-slow community.” Pontasset Point called itself a “progressive community” and consisted of double-wides with postage-stamp lawns that someone else mowed. There was a community center, a shuffleboard court, three tennis courts, and a pool-all next to the Hospice, a shabby-looking halfway house nursing home that probably struggled to meet the state minimums.

  Hammond wore ceramic teeth, a pair of pink Miracle Ears, and carried a lifetime of french fries and short-order cooking like a backup parachute at his belt line. Apparently if he dropped something he left it there, indicated by the existence on his nut-brown carpet of a wide variety of pens, candy wrappers, and two spoons that would have to wait until his “girl” came to clean. The TV, which was the size of a refrigerator and which fully blocked one of the room’s only two windows, ran loudly, even after Daphne asked that they turn it off.

  “You wouldn’t be carrying no tape recorder, would you?” The man had steely blue eyes the color of deep ice and big stubby hands with wrinkled, age-spotted skin, his fingernails chewed grotesquely short.

  “No tape recorder,” she answered.

  “Is this what you’d call ‘off the record?’”

  “It can be,” she allowed, her heart beating more quickly. Why did he want that?

  “I think that be best, lady,” he said.

  “Fine. Off the record, then.”

  “What exactly is it you want?”

  Daphne sized up her opponent and played him against himself. “What is it you think I want, Mr. Hammond?”

  “Call me Roy. Everyone else does.” He liked her looks-there was no missing that glint in his eyes, and it disgusted her. She wished she had worn a jacket. “No clue,” he answered.

  “None?”

  “You teasing me?”

  “Up until four years ago, you worked as a field inspector for the State Health Department.”

  “Matter of record.”

  “Does the name Longview Farms mean anything to you?”

  His swollen neck moved as he swallowed dryly, failing in his attempt to portray a man bored with her line of questioning. “Every place I inspected on a regular basis means something to me, lady. Part of my route, you understand. Part of what I did for a living. What exactly was it ’bout Longview you had a question ’bout?”

  “Exactly this.” She handed him two photocopies-before and after.

  Again the boa constrictor in his neck moved and he blinked repeatedly-both signs to her of an increasing anxiety. He switched off the television and adjusted both hearing aids, one of which screamed a high pitch while he toyed with it. His white, scaly tongue worked at his crusty lips, but his mouth remained bone-dry.

  “Is there a question to go along with this?” he asked.

  “Why the difference between the two?”

  He considered this for a moment, his eyes darting between Daphne and the two documents. “Don’t know where you got this one,” he said of the document as it had existed before the changes. “But this one here,” he said, shaking the salmonella document, “is dated later and therefore’s the one the department would go by. But honestly, lady, I don’t work there no more, and I think you’re asking the wrong guy.”

  “The original document,” she emphasized, “lists you as the field inspector.” She added, “In the later one, the name’s been changed.”

  “You know,” he said, his face reddening and his nostrils flaring, “I do remember this one.”

  “Terri
fic,” she said flatly, letting him sense her distrust.

  “Once upon a time we had a good department, lady. Then they started making us hire all the different colors-the United States government did-and things went straight downhill.”

  “And women,” Daphne pointed out.

  “Girls, too. Yeah, that’s right. Not that I got anything against girls.”

  “But you do when it comes to ‘different colors.’”

  “Ain’t none of them smart is the thing. I got no tolerance for people with their hand in Uncle Sam’s pocket. You know? They’re just plain stupid. Take Jake Jefferson, okay? You’re asking about the Longview, okay? Well it was that Jefferson who got things wrong in the first place, and made the rest of us have to work to fix it.”

  “A lab report?”

  “Got everything wrong he did, and then refused to admit it. Nothing worse than a nigger who thinks he’s right.”

  “I don’t care for your language, Mr. Hammond.”

  “Well pardon fucking me,” he said angrily. “It’s a free country, lady, in case you was off smoking pot while the rest of us was defending it. Just my luck to get the Flying Nun. You know there’s a Mariners game on the TV that I’d rather be watching, if we’re all through here.” He heaved himself out of his soft throne with great difficulty and shuffled over to pour himself a double Wild Turkey with two cubes of ice. The cushion where he had been sitting remained dished in a deep crater. He mumbled a steady stream of unintelligible dialogue with himself.

  Daphne looked toward the door to make sure it was close by, and she kept a very close eye on Roy Hammond as he opened and closed some kitchen drawers. “Why did your name get changed on that report?”

  “Why?” he asked, his back turned, and she could sense him vamping for time. He returned to his La-Z-Boy swivel recliner and drank an enormous amount of the liquor without batting an eye. He toyed with it, clinking the rapidly melting ice cubes against the glass.

  She added, “The man whose name replaced yours, a Mr. Patrick Shawnesea, does apparently not live in this state any longer. That makes it difficult for us to locate him for an interview.”