Boldt 03 - No Witnesses (25 page)

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 it,” 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.”

“Terrific,” 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.”

“Harder than you think, lady. Pat Shawnesea is long dead. Lung cancer, and he never smoked a single cigarette in his life. Radon, I heard it was. Living atop a hot spot. Makes sense: The wife died of woman problems two years and change before Pat. Cut everything off her and outta her and she still up and died on him.”

She thought that maybe Shawnesea’s death explained the change of date on the document, for it had been backdated eleven days, and that had been bothering her the whole way out here. Why backdate a document? Unless you need a window of time in which Pat Shawnesea was still working, so that the only person who could answer important questions was certain not to be available. She had a few nuggets of what she wanted, though the mother lode still avoided her. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said, slouching her shoulders forward involuntarily because of this man’s insistence on fixing his eyes on her chest. “Shawnesea took this case over from you eleven days
before
your initial investigation began. He decided the illnesses had been caused by salmonella, not staphylococcus, which was the finding of your investigation.”

“Let me explain something—”

“Please do,” she interrupted.

“They wasn’t
my
findings, the way you say—they was Jefferson’s. He’s the one done the tests, okay? And as for Pat, I don’t remember exactly what he had to do with any of this.”

“But it’s his name on this second document—the
altered
document.”

“I understand that, lady, but it don’t necessarily mean it makes sense, now does it?”

“But you knew Mark Meriweather.”

“Sure I did.”

“And Mr. Shawnesea?”

“What do you mean?”

“He knew Mr. Meriweather, too? He inspected Longview, too?”

“Well, he must have, now mustn’t he?”

“I thought you said Longview was part of your—”

“We picked up each other’s slack.”

“But did you investigate this New Leaf contamination or Mr. Shawnesea? I remind you that your signature is clearly visible on the original document.”

“I did.” The man looked confused. “How many years that been? There one of them statues of elimination on this thing or what?”

In another interview, Daphne might have cracked a smile, but Hammond disgusted her, and she immediately felt tempted to lie. What the general public failed to understand—to their loss, she thought—was that there existed no code of ethics or other formality instructing or limiting law enforcement officers to speak the truth, except while under oath. No place was this more evident than in the Box—the interrogation room, where police officers commonly invented any truth that helped their cause, and their cause was to put criminals away. The best liars were the best interrogators, and Daphne Matthews was considered close to the top. The only real difference she could see between an interrogation and an interview was the location of the discussion. What Hammond did not know was that she was out of her jurisdiction and had made no formal application to conduct this interview with King County police, meaning that everything either of them said was off the record from the moment she first opened her mouth to speak. Meaning also that she could tell as many lies as she wanted, and could act on anything Hammond told her, but could use none of the interview itself in a court of law. These thoughts circulated through her conscious mind before she answered untruthfully, “I believe the statute of limitations has expired on the Longview contamination. I don’t believe there’s any way we can prosecute anyone for what happened to this document. But to be honest, I don’t really care: It’s the truth I want, Mr. Hammond. A man may go to jail for a very, very long time if we can’t find the real truth about Longview.” There was a joke that lived on the fifth floor that she heard circulate year in and year out: What’s a Chinese court deputy say to those in the courtroom at the start of every trial? “All lies.”