Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

“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.

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 cockatoo.

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 Coke-bottle eyeglasses, 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 analyzing 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 shipment. 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 quantities 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 assumption 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 hell 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.”