Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

“Produce,” Daphne declared. “Truck farmers. He could be out there anywhere, selling spinach out of a pickup.”

During the summer months, truck farmers proliferated on Washington’s back roads, interstate rest areas, and downtown parking lots.

“Buy it, shoot it up with strychnine, and sell it off the back of your truck. He keeps moving, he keeps killing.”

“Or deliver it to grocery stores.”

“Or restaurants.”

His pager sounded. Reluctantly, he reached down and shut it off, not wanting to read its tiny LCD display and whatever information was contained there. Just the sound of the device turned Boldt’s stomach; it was actually worse than a telephone ringing.

Boldt read the code on the display. He felt the blood drain from his face, and his hands go cold.

“Lou?”

He stole Daphne’s purse, rummaged through it, and removed her cellular phone. He called downtown, and the moment the dispatcher answered, he spoke his name clearly, “Boldt,” though to him it sounded like somebody else talking. “Who is it?” He waited to hear the answer, then shut off the phone and handed it back to Daphne, his hand visibly shaking.

She grabbed his pager from him and read the display. “An officer down?” she said, her voice wavering. There was nothing so painful as this for any cop. “Who?”

“Striker just shot Chris Danielson in a hotel room over on Fourth.”

Boldt had been to over a hundred such crime scenes, but with his friends and coworkers involved, this hotel room looked somehow different. Shoswitz had assigned Sergeant David Pasquini as primary in the officer-involved shooting, and Boldt tried to stay out of the man’s way.

According to a uniform by the door, Danielson had gone out on a stretcher, alive but critical; Striker was in handcuffs, ranting and raving about what a lousy shot he was.

There was a good amount of blood on the bed, and two piles of clothes on chairs, with Danielson’s weapon still snapped into its holster. Four shells had been discharged onto the carpet. An ID man was taking photographs of them. The air still smelled of cordite. Boldt crossed the room and glanced out the window. Downstairs on the street, a media circus was brewing.

“Where’s that coffee?” Pasquini shouted after cracking open the bathroom door a few inches.

Boldt, back at the room’s entrance, grabbed the green Starbucks coffee from the patrolman and delivered it himself, inching the door open with his foot and not allowing Pasquini to get full hold of it.

“Okay,” Pasquini said, relenting, and admitting Boldt to the tiny bathroom.

Elaine Striker, wearing a hotel towel wrapped around her middle, sat on the closed toilet. A woman officer was braced in the tub, a notepad in hand.

Boldt pushed the door shut.

Pasquini removed the lid from the coffee and handed it to the woman, who used both hands to steady the cup before taking a sip.

Elaine had mascara on her cheeks, bloodshot eyes, and a mottled chest. Her skin was freckled-a good deal of it showing-and her tousled red hair framed her face in a ring of fire. She looked up at Boldt with hollow, apologetic eyes. “It just happened,” she said.

Pasquini wanted her talking to him, not Boldt. “He had a key?”

“He came in without us knowing. We were … busy. He must have just stood there watching.” She broke down crying. Pasquini shook his head impatiently and took the cup from her as she spilled some coffee across her hands. Boldt offered her a towel. She dried off her hands, tucked herself into the towel that was wrapped around her, and looked back up at both policemen. “Chris sat up, and Mike started firing.”

Boldt could see the blood in her hair. There was some on the left of her neck, too. And only then did he notice the small pile of bloodstained washcloths used to clean her up.

“How many shots?” Pasquini asked.

“No idea.”

“One? Ten?”

“More than one. Several. And then Chris-” She broke down again. Boldt had heard enough. He leaned in closely to her, offered some reassurance, and took her hand as she reached out to him. It took a few seconds to win his hand free again, and he left.

Using an address listed on Caulfield’s employment form with Pacer Trucking, warrants were issued to search the rooming house, and that afternoon seventeen uniformed and plainclothes officers descended on Caulfield’s room like a swarm of bees. A check of records confirmed that Caulfield had moved out of the hotel the day following the murder of Sheriff Turner Bramm-a date Boldt could not get out of his mind. Since that time, the room had been home to a grunge musician and his girlfriend, destroying any chance the lab techs would recover anything of use-and nothing admissible in a court of law. Boldt was reviewing the search with Shoswitz and Lofgrin when Daphne entered the lieutenant’s office and said, “I can get us into Striker.”

The nurses in Harborview’s psych ward knew Daphne by name, and allowed them to bypass much of the red tape usually required. Even so, before being allowed into the ward that housed Michael Striker’s barren hospital room, she and Boldt were required to leave behind their weapons, badges, belts, pens and pencils, and Boldt’s shoelaces. This was their first indication of Striker’s condition. Daphne had stretched the truth to gain them access so quickly, saying she was here for “a session” with the suspect, and explaining Boldt’s presence as “some protection.” After the shooting, Michael Striker had broken a patrolman’s arm before jumping into traffic in an apparent act of suicide. This, she explained to Boldt, was the reason for his admission to the psych ward, and his doctor’s refusal for police interrogation. A male nurse unlocked and then relocked the door behind them.

Striker had cut up his legs by running into traffic, though nothing was broken. He was under physical restraints. And Daphne informed Boldt in a whisper that he was also mildly sedated.

“Hey,” Boldt said, trying to sound casual.

The room’s mood was grim. In place of a real window, there was an electronic contraption mounted to the wall that emitted light and offered an incredibly lifelike pastoral view of the Canadian Rockies.

“So I can’t jump out,” Striker informed him from his bed. “They pay ten grand for those things. Supposed to help improve your state of mind.” He grinned thinly at this. “Supposedly, the thing even does sunrise and sunset.” He wore a blue-and-white hospital gown that used Velcro instead of ties, to eliminate the chance of hanging oneself. Striker had sad, lifeless eyes. He had hollow, drawn cheeks and bulging eyes that indeed made him look a little crazy.

“They’ve got so much shit in me,” he said, “that I’m basically a walking pharmacy. Check that,” he corrected. “I’m not doing much walking.” He tugged at his strapped-down arms.

Daphne spoke with him for the better part of twenty minutes, through which she remained incredibly calm and Striker slowly began to make some sense.

“Listen,” he said, in what sounded to Boldt like the man’s familiar intolerant attorney voice, “I was out of my gourd to do what I did. And that includes diving for the grille of that truck. But it’s over now, and I feel great . Valium is a wonderful thing.”

“Can you tell us about it?” Daphne asked.

“What’s to tell? The guy was fucking my wife; so I fucked him.” His cheek twitched and he asked Boldt to scratch his neck for him.

Boldt said, “You found him with Elaine. Is that it, Mikey?”

“You warned me, Lou. I know that. I thought about that right after I did it, too.”

“But you followed her anyway.”

“Sort of. Right.”