Boldt And Matthews: No Witnesses Part 30

"Lisa wanted it over with. She's lucky there weren't no kids."

Boldt waited several steps and asked, "Was Mac on patrol that night or was he following Matthews?"

Fowler missed a step, though he covered it well by pretending he had stepped in something. "A person goes asking a question like that, you'd think it's you running into posts in the dark, not Matthews."

"Is that your answer?"

"The way I see my job in all of this, my primary responsibility-'kay?-is looking out for number one, which in this case is Adler. We watch him pretty much round the clock, Lou. He don't like it, so we don't tell him. Mac had the woods that night. Bad draw."

"He was in the woods. On patrol," Boldt clarified.

"You got it."

"And Danielson's clean?" Boldt repeated skeptically.

"I can hear it in your voice, you don't believe me. 'Kay. So why'd you ask me to do this for you if you're not going to believe me anyway? You're p.i.s.sing me off here, Lou. What? I'm not busy enough without your laundry? Trouble with you, Lou?" he asked rhetorically. "You want everything nice and clean. Square pegs in the square holes. But it ain't like that, pal." He was building a head of steam. A vein rose in his forehead. "Order out of chaos, all that s.h.i.+t. I remember you." They dodged around a street musician. Boldt threw a quarter in the guitar case. Seeing this, Fowler put a dollar in and took out fifty cents in change. "You want Danielson dirty because it fits some preconceived notion of yours. You want Taplin, too, judging from our last conversation. For all the looks you give her, maybe you want your face in Matthews's p.u.s.s.y." Boldt stopped cold. "How the h.e.l.l do I know? But it ain't that way, Lou. The square peg never fits. Danielson's not dirty. And it's Adler riding Matthews, not you. There's no f.u.c.king order to it, Lou. It's random-it has always been random. No f.u.c.king way to make things fit. That is your problem."

"You've got a foul mouth, Kenny."

"And a dirty mind," Fowler added. "But Danielson is still clean."

"No he's not, pal. You just don't like being wrong. And you knew your guys screwed this up somewhere." Boldt turned and walked away. Fowler had drilled too close to the nerve. He counted to ten, and then he counted to ten again. He wanted a drink. He wanted some food. He wanted to go back and pop Fowler in the face. Or maybe he wanted Fowler to pop him. He wanted some order where none existed. He walked for three hours before returning to his car.

And he had blisters in the morning.

THIRTY-ONE.

Friday morning Dr. Richard Clements left voice mail for Boldt informing him that the Seattle field office of the FBI had been in touch with the Hoover Building and that the Bureau was sending Boldt seventy-five Special Agents and providing a digital tracking and communications package. A man named Meisner wanted to speak via a conference call with Boldt and Shoswitz about logistics.

Slater Lowry had been dead three weeks.

Boldt jotted down some notes to himself while riding the elevator to the second floor. His feet hurt too much to take the stairs. Another piece of voice mail had been from Bernie Lofgrin.

He entered the lab and signaled its director from across the room. Lofgrin carefully removed a pair of goggles and caught up with the sergeant in his office. The goggles left a dark red line in the shape of a kidney bean encircling his eyes and bridging his nose. His thinning gray hair was a mess, much of it sticking straight up. He patted it down, but it jumped right up again, charged with static electricity. He looked like a c.o.c.katoo.

The office had been tidied, though it could not be considered neat. Boldt took a chair.

"Clements must have leaned on the Bureau," Lofgrin said as he closed the door for privacy. "At seven o'clock this morning our fax machine started humming. When the Feds issue reports, they don't mess around. With all this paperwork," he said, indicating an impressive stack of faxes on the desk, "it's no wonder it takes them a month of Sundays to get back to us."

Lofgrin settled into his seat and switched on the tape of Scott Hamilton at Radio City that Boldt had copied for him. The sergeant felt impatient, knowing full well that all indications pointed to a Bernie Lofgrin lecture.

Lofgrin cleaned his c.o.ke-bottle eyegla.s.ses, carefully rubbing them with a special soft cloth, and returned them to his face. He leaned forward. "Do you know what we call the volatilizing chamber on our gas chromatography?" The process of gas chromatography involved burning-volatilizing-a sample and a.n.a.lyzing the gases emitted in order to determine the organic and chemical compounds that comprised it.

Boldt shook his head. Lofgrin's jokes were famous for falling flat.

"The ash-hole."

Lofgrin loved it; he bubbled with pleasure. Boldt felt obliged to twist a smile onto his lips, but found it impossible to maintain it. Foremost on his mind was Caulfield's threat-as yet, that dreaded call had still not come in.

"The ash-hole uses helium injection and weighs in at nearly twice the temp of your standard arson," Lofgrin explained. Boldt had heard most of this before. He did not care about method; he wanted results. "Thirty-five hun and up. We reburn elements in the ash that weren't torched the first time around, and the gases allow us to identify all but the inert compounds."

Seeing Boldt's lack of interest, Lofgrin said, "Okay-I'm lecturing again. Sue me. Caulfield had several boxes under his workbench. We've identified them as cardboard. You and I discussed that we had some supportive evidence that three of these boxes may have contained paper products-labels, leaflets, who knows? The cardboard in those boxes is apparently from the same manufacturer-a set, if you will. Produced by Everest Forest Products up to Anacortes. Everest has clients all over the state-but I have a list," he said, digging into the pile and handing Boldt a fax. It was several pages long and listed over two hundred clients. "About seventy of those clients have their company logo printed on the boxes before final s.h.i.+pment. Seventeen of those seventy have zip codes here in the city." He grinned and teased, "And I bet you thought you were the only one who loves detective work."

Boldt asked anxiously, "And do we know if the boxes at Longview Farms were printed or not?"

"We do not know anything conclusively. We're talking about the examination of ash, Lou. Our tests suggest that these boxes were the unprinted, generic variety. And that means they could have been supplied to any one of the other one hundred and thirty Everest clients."

Boldt's hopes waffled.

"The FBI techs have turned up a mixed bag. In all three boxes we show pulp fiber inconsistent with the production of the cardboard, meaning there is a high probability that all three contained paper products." Reading another of the Bureau's faxes, Lofgrin said, "In one of the boxes we find the presence of bleach and heavy metals consistent with some commercial inks-commercial printing techniques. In the other two, we show trace quant.i.ties of organics that suggest, but do not confirm, what we usually see in herbal inks-"

"Adler uses herbal inks," Boldt reminded.

"Yes. That had occurred to me." Lofgrin did not like being interrupted.

"Sorry," Boldt apologized.

When Lofgrin's enlarged eyes blinked, Boldt felt as if the man were waving at him. Lofgrin said, "Knowing that Adler uses herbal inks on his labels, we asked for a comparison, and you'll be pleased to know that the ink found in these two boxes at Longview is consistent with that used on Adler labels. We cannot differentiate between say a chicken soup label and a hash label, but we can say with some degree of certainty that the labels in those two boxes could have been Adler Foods labels.

"What is of interest to us," he continued, "is that the contents of this other box-the one with the heavy metal content-have nothing whatsoever to do with the labels of Adler Foods products. Did I mention that because of a nice stratification, the Bureau lab was able to approximate paper size?"

"No."

"Well, I told you how when we exposed the contents of these boxes to oxygen, they basically disintegrated. The Bureau boys have a vacuum chamber large enough for something like this, and they were able to pull accurate measurements for us. And those measurements also support the a.s.sumption that two of the boxes were Adler labels, and one not. So, basically, of the three boxes with paper products, two conform to what we see in Adler products and one does not."

"A different company," Boldt suggested.

Lofgrin nodded. "Right. And by the size and shape, they could very well be labels from another company's product. Whether or not it is food, we can't say."

"It's food," Boldt said.

"One other element of interest to you," he said, spinning to face his computer. "And this was sent via the proverbial new information superhighway-which we just happen to have been using for the past eight years, I might add ... and there's a hard copy to follow by express courier ..." He clicked through some files, explaining, "The Bureau people got a beauty of a photograph of a sample in what I'm calling the heavy metal box. While inside the vacuum chamber, no less? I wish to h.e.l.l we had this kind of gear ..." The screen went completely blank, and lines slowly drew across the screen until what looked like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle appeared. Lofgrin stepped the computer through several moves, and the piece enlarged. He said, "This is a piece of what we believe to be one of the labels in the heavy metal box. It's tiny, only a few centimeters square-a flake is all-but notice the colors."

With the next enlargement, the colors became apparent: red, yellow, and blue. Strong, primary colors.

Boldt, leaning over Lofgrin's shoulder, asked for the crime scene photographs from Longview Farms.

"Color or black-and-white?"

"Color."

It took Lofgrin a few minutes to locate the photos. When he returned to the office, he rewound the Scott Hamilton tape to his favorite ballad.

While Boldt leafed through the dozens of eight-by-tens, he grabbed the phone and telephoned upstairs to LaMoia. "Find someone at Adler Foods who can tell us who does their label printing. Fowler was handling that for us, but I don't want to involve him."

"Don't want to involve him, or don't want him to know?" LaMoia asked.

"Both," Boldt answered. He told him he could be reached in Lofgrin's office, and hung up.

While it was on his mind, and while still leafing through the dozens of Longview crime scene photographs, Boldt said to the lab man, "I need an opinion."

"That's my middle name."

"If I take a bobby pin and insert it into an electrical outlet, and I'm wearing gloves, would there be enough heat to burn through the glove and get my finger?"

"This is not something you want to experiment with," Lofgrin teased, though serious. "If you're lucky, all you'll come away with is a burned finger. If they're thin gloves, if the circuit is carrying a lot of amps, maybe your heart stops, too, and then you're all Dixie's."

Kenny Fowler's fingertip had been burned. He had made a joke about it to Boldt, but something he had said later in their conversation about Daphne's head injury continued to trouble Boldt.

"Here it is!" Boldt pa.s.sed the photograph to the lab man.

Lofgrin's head rose slowly, his eyes suddenly the size of dinner plates. Little Orphan Lofgrin, Boldt thought. In a hushed voice, uncommon in the confident Lofgrin, the man said, "Same colors."

He set the photograph down. It showed the cement floor of the slaughterhouse-a blend of spray paints in a rigidly straight line left by the removal of a drop cloth intended to catch the paints.

Boldt said, "Yellow, blue, and red." He held the color photograph up to the computer screen, and the colors matched nearly perfectly.

The phone rang. Boldt s.n.a.t.c.hed it up first and barked his name into the receiver. LaMoia's voice said, "Grambling Printers, here in the city."

Boldt's stubby finger, with its dirty fingernail, ran down the customer list for Everest Forest Products and came to a quick stop at the end of the G's: Grambling Printers.

"It's here," he said to LaMoia. "Get a car ready." He hung up the phone. Boldt kissed Lofgrin on the forehead. "You're a genius."

"Lou?" Lofgrin asked, scrubbing his forehead vigorously.

Boldt's voice cracked as he said, "Caulfield's threat-to kill hundreds. It's for real. The strychnine, another food company's labels, spray painting a truck-maybe a delivery truck-he's got everything in place."

"So what's the good news?" Lofgrin asked.

Boldt hoisted the photograph. "We've got these colors."

LaMoia drove a white Pontiac with privacy gla.s.s. The vehicle had been confiscated by SPD in a p.o.r.n video bust. It had custom, wire-spoke aluminum wheels and a red velour interior, the backseat of which folded down and converted into an impressive bed. It was said to be featured in several of the videos, though only Special Ops and some attorneys had ever viewed them. This was the car that LaMoia drove regularly and had since been dubbed the Pimpmobile by his colleagues. He called it Sweetheart, as in, "Let's take Sweetheart," or "I gave Sweetheart a bubble bath and a wax today." He treated it better than he did some of his friends.

From behind the wheel, LaMoia queried Boldt. "Fowler already ran the mug shot by all the Adler printers, right?"

"In theory."

"Meaning?"

"What a guy like Fowler tells you he does, what he does, and what he gets from whatever he does are all different animals. He's got a company to protect. He's working for people."

"Kenny Fowler hosed us?"

"Kenny has some explaining to do. He's been putting his nose where it doesn't belong. My guess is that it's just compet.i.tive bulls.h.i.+t-trying to keep a step ahead. But if I'm right, it's ugly stuff. Dirty. The kind of stuff you can't forgive him, whatever the motivation."

LaMoia pulled the car to an abrupt stop, forcing Boldt to brace himself against the fringe-covered dash. "Nice driving," Boldt said.

"Need the brakes adjusted."

The office was all cheap furniture and bowling trophies. Boldt pushed the door shut. It rubbed against the floor, requiring an extra shove. There was a skim of oil on the vinyl seats from fast-food bags. He and LaMoia remained standing.

"Does this man look familiar?" Boldt asked, pa.s.sing Caulfield's mug shot to Raymond Fione.

"Never seen him before," the man said bluntly. Fione made it clear that he did not like cops.

"Look again," Boldt encouraged.

"My vision's fine."

"A minimum-wage job. Maybe you just haven't seen him around."

"Listen. It's true, Sergeant ..." He searched for the name. "Blot?"

Boldt corrected his name.

"Sure-I spend nearly every waking hour with my head buried in a d.a.m.n computer screen. Who doesn't these days? It's like the lead in the Roman pipes, right? Machines this smart, they're going to make us all dumb. But I sure as s.h.i.+t know who's on my payroll, and this guy here is not one of them."

"Do you run your own deliveries?"

"With the insurance what it is? h.e.l.l no."

"So maybe he trucks your product."

"Maybe he does," Fione agreed, "so what the f.u.c.k do I care?"

"You care," LaMoia said.

Fione glared.

Boldt asked, "Who delivers the Adler product for you?"

"They're a good customer of ours, Adler is. Listen, Fowler and I already did this dance. Okay? What I'm supposed to say? You want I should lie to you? Tell me."

"Who delivers the Adler product?"

Fione answered, "Pacer handles all our s.h.i.+pping."

LaMoia wrote it down.

Taking a wild guess, Boldt handed the mug shot back to Fione and said, "This man applied for a job with you." He paused. Fione's face flushed and he would not look at either of them. "He had a prison record. He was fresh out of prison and you turned him down."

The man spoke to the desk. "He was wired. All hyped up, you know? I didn't like the guy." He braved a look at Boldt. "Is that a crime?"