Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

She said, “Quickness is not something that could be stuck on you. You are anything but quick.”

“Do you honestly think I would choose work over you?”

“I’m not sure it’s your choice. A person’s behavior can change-but I’m not sure the person ever does.”

He took the lobe of her ear in his lips and nibbled there. “I’ll send you flowers every day,” he promised. “And every day I’ll wish I were here. And as soon as this is over, I’ll leave Corky with Mrs. Crutch and we’ll hole up in a hotel somewhere and make up for lost time.”

“That’s quite an incentive program.”

They made love after that-a quiet, peaceful union that made up for their earlier frenetic effort. There was nothing frantic about it, but instead it felt to her that they briefly found one another-purely-the way she hoped for.

Her dreams were peaceful for the first time in weeks, and when she awakened he was gone, having left behind a heart drawn in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and the scrawled words, “Miss you already.” There had been a time, in her early twenties, that such sugary sentiments would have provoked an uncomfortable reaction in her, but on this day, both older and wiser, she relished them: There was nothing quite like the feeling of being wanted and needed.

She decided not to clean the mirror until this investigation was over-her own childish reaction. This would serve as her reminder, her purpose.

In the kitchen she found his master key and his note to her explaining the Mansion’s security system, including the code needed for the keypad. She picked up the key and it felt cool in her hand.

As it warmed, she felt convinced of its importance.

Boldt’s attempts at sleep proved restless and unforgiving. His appetite abandoned him and he found himself back on a routine of antacids and warm milk. On the fifth floor he was the recipient of cautious looks and deliberate avoidance maneuvers. He thought of the child on the way to the grave. He thought of the child inside his wife-and none of it made any sense to him. Where he strived for order and understanding, none was to be found.

At the office the initial reports were not good. Using computers, the Adler employee lists had been electronically compared to those of Foodland and Shop-Alert, in hopes of finding a disgruntled employee who had switched jobs and was now repaying Adler. But no overlaps were found. Every detective assigned a black hole hoped for a lucky break, an unexpected, quick solution, and Boldt was no exception. It was not something he talked about, but nonetheless this hope was harbored secretly inside him. With this news, coupled with the loss of Slater Lowry, any such hopes were abandoned.

This negative news was soon balanced by something more promising: Cash register receipt tapes from the Broadway Foodland supermarket that included purchases of Adler soup products had been sorted and printed out for the two-week period prior to Slater Lowry’s illness. These cash register tapes were shown to Betty Lowry, who despite the loss of her son, or perhaps because of it, seemed eager to help. Hours later she notified Boldt that she recognized a receipt that included the purchase of soup, soy sauce, and a wooden spoon. It was the wooden spoon she remembered most of all. The receipt indicated payment in cash, which also fit her buying habits.

Using the date and time from this receipt, Boldt notified Shop-Alert Security and requested they search their store surveillance videos for the twenty-four-hour period prior to and including Betty Lowry’s purchase of Mom’s Chicken Soup.

Redmond, Washington, a forty-minute drive from the city in good traffic, was home to Microsoft and other technocracies. Its boom in the eighties was partly responsible for the unwanted Californication that had spawned the unprecedented traffic, fast-food joints, air pollution, and Armani suits.

Shop-Alert’s interior appeared to have been constructed of materials found at Saturday-morning hardware store sales. All artificial everything: faux wood paneling, adjustable Tru-Grain shelves. Overhead fluorescent lighting caused human skin to take on the pale green hue that Boldt associated with tainted meat. The individual office cubicles were cramped and dark despite the lighting, in part because of a brown-purple carpeting that absorbed light like a black hole. And he thought that it was dirty enough that heretofore undiscovered life forms probably lived down inside it.

Money saved by this tacky interior had been spent instead on state-of-the-art electronics heaped and stacked and connected in a spaghetti of multicolored wires, keyboards, and screens.

Boldt had already forgotten the name of the computer nerd who had met him in the lobby. Ron something-or was it Jon? He was a particularly unattractive human with no social graces, so stereotypical that Boldt hated himself for having expected someone like this. He talked through his nose and blinked continually. Maybe it was Don. He looked to be about twelve years old. His loafers had tassels and he had a Motorola pager strapped to his belt. It made Boldt want to throw his own away.

“Foodland is part of our StopLifters program. Let me explain. When we receive the videos from our StopLifters stores, stores like Foodland, before we analyze them we transfer the data to OM disk-optical magnetic. Kind of like CD-ROM, only more flexible to our needs. That allows us to turn over the videotape-zero it and send it back out there for use in one of our client’s systems while we retain the original images. Phase one of our analysis is handled here,” he said, directing Boldt’s attention to a dozen young people studying black-and-white television screens showing store interiors, “reviewing the in-store images, alert for shoplifters or taggers.”

“Taggers?”

“Price-tag switchers. It used to be pulling a price tag off of one, lesser-valued item and attaching it to another of higher value. The tagger pockets the difference in savings. Because of nonremovable and now optical pricing systems, the taggers are more sophisticated than they used to be: They arrive in-store with preprinted UPC-code labels on their person. They attach these fraudulent pricing mechanisms to the package of their choice and leave the store having paid a serious discount, usually only on one or two big-ticket items, mixed in with many smaller purchases. This makes it difficult for the checkers to spot the game. That’s what we call any of these techniques: ‘games.’”

Original , Boldt thought.

“Another benefit to our clients of our transferring the tapes to OM disks is that we are able to catalogue months, even years, of a store’s history, making it possible for us to present a very serious legal case against repeat offenders. Typically they move from store to store, too smart to keep hitting the same place. But the advantage of being a Shop-Alert StopLifters client is that we’re essentially building a database of offenders, giving us a much better shot at moving these offenses past the probationary sentence and really slam-dunking these bastards.”

I’ll never use that expression again , Boldt thought. He said, “What have you got for me?”

Don(?) led the detective over to an unoccupied viewing station amid the others, where a folded piece of paper with the hand-scrawled word Reserved had been placed. He sat Boldt down in the chair directly before the large monitor. Don explained, “A real advantage of the OM disk format is taking the signal digital. We can not only enhance and zoom but we have the ability to instantly jump position without suffering through fast-forward or rewind. If you think of it as picking up the needle on an LP record and moving it to the song you want to hear, and comparing that to a cassette tape where you have to wait for the thing to fast-forward, you’ll see what I mean. We can jump an hour, a minute, twenty seconds ahead or behind by simply dialing in the specific time request. We can cut and paste to other disks and build the records of these offenders I was talking about, or we can highlight a particularly vulnerable area of a store by clipping together shots of lost angles. It’s really very versatile.”