At five o’clock Thursday, July 12, Bernie Lofgrin poked his head into Daphne’s office waving a plastic bag containing the State Health document. “You win the Kewpie doll, Matthews. This report is one legal-size piece of bullshit.” He looked more closely at her, “What did you do to yourself?”
“A box fell off my closet shelf and got me.”
“That was a heavy box,” he said.
She caught sight of a man just over Lofgrin’s shoulder and asked, “Can I help you, Chris?” She was asking Danielson, who seemed to be loitering within earshot.
Danielson fumbled with his words, claiming to be reading the bulletin board just outside Daphne’s office, but to her the excuse fell short. She waved Lofgrin inside and asked him to shut the door.
“I’ve got a better idea,” the ecstatic Lofgrin said. “You come down to my office and I’ll show you my etchings.” He winked, which with his magnified eyeballs felt to her a little bit like a camera’s flash going off.
A few minutes later, Lofgrin eased his office door shut. Through the large window the lab was mostly empty of workers at this hour. The office was its usual mess. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” he asked, as Daphne moved two stacks of papers in order to win a seat. “You mind?” He put on a jazz tape and set the volume low. “Helps me think,” he said, grinning widely. Lofgrin had a contagious enthusiasm when he was happy. And he was happy whenever the lab results gave him conclusive findings—which filled Daphne with optimism.
“It has been altered?” she repeated.
“A lousy job. A bunch of amateurs. They used Wite-Out and typed over it. At least someone was smart enough to use the same typewriter to make the changes—but the carriage alignment of those changes ran fractionally on an incline, just as you spotted.”
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.”
“That boy, Harry,” he said.
“Yes, Harry,” she repeated, her heart backfiring.
“A real troublemaker, Harry was. Got it in his head all wrong and wouldn’t have it any other way. Disappeared as fast as he arrived. Called me a liar to my face. Stood there looking me in the eye and called me a liar.”
“What did you say his last name was?” she asked quickly, hoping to trick it out of him.
“I didn’t say. I got no idea. Seeing people around a place and knowing them is two different things, lady. I regularly inspected seven dairies, five bird operations, a rabbit farm, a goat cheese outfit, and eleven food manufacturers. More, some years. People like Mark Meriweather, I had a business knowing. But his hired hands? Some drifter who thought he was God’s gift to chickens? Hang it up!”
And yet by this very statement, Hammond revealed he knew more about Harry than he had first let on.
“I understood that he was college educated,” she tested.
“Was going to take over for Hank Russell when Hank stepped aside. Sure—that was the story anyway. Mark spent too much time and too much money on that boy, you ask me, treating him the way he did. Just a no-good drifter, and Mark goes treating him like a son. He mixed the boy up is what he done. Went to jail or something, I heard.”
She carefully wrote down: Jail?
“Mr. Russell was part-time, was he?”
“Hank Russell? He ran that place, lady. Was foreman for half a dozen years. Damn fine operation, too.”
She pretended to check some papers. “I don’t show any record of a Henry Russell.”
“What kind of record? Taxes, I’ll bet.” He laughed and had to wipe his chin afterward. “Pay Uncle Sam? Not Hank Russell. My guess is that he worked it out with Meriweather, just like when he was over to Dover’s Butter-Breast before that. Roof over his head, some food, some cash under the table—that’s Hank for you. Part of the family.”
“I’m confused about something.” She held up one document, then the other. “Was it a staph or salmonella outbreak?”
Hammond’s eyes were glassy from the booze, of which he took another long swallow as he stewed on this. Boiled was more like it, she thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed as if food were going through the boa. His left hand gripped the arm of the chair in a choke hold. She felt him on the verge of opening up to her. When his throat cleared he said, “I got nothing to say to you, lady. Take it somewhere else, why don’t you?”
“It’s just that—”
He interrupted her with a bone-numbing delivery that drove his face scarlet and overfilled a blue vein in his long, pale forehead to where it jumped right off his face. “I said take it somewhere else! Get outta here. You get outta here now, ’fore I make you pay for that comment!” She was up and out of her chair, struggling with her briefcase.
“I don’t want to talk no more,” he said. He turned his back on her, snatched his nearly empty drink from the side table, and headed back for the tall bottle that awaited him.
She was out of there in a matter of seconds, in her car, and down the road. Exhausted, and still tense from the encounter, she drove until the phone cooperated and placed three calls—one of them downtown, one to the owner of Dover’s ButterBreast turkey farm, and the third to a tiny farm up the road toward Sammamish. After telling the farm’s owner that she worked for Publishers Clearing House, he claimed that Hank Russell was out in his trailer “watching the game, I think.”
She disconnected the phone, placing it on the seat beside her, and drew in a deep breath. She shifted gears, took a curve suicidally fast, and whispered under her breath the punch line to that joke—“All lies”—a wry smile twisting up the edges of her lips, where her color had finally returned.
“Where’s your jacket?”
“Pardon me?”
Hank Russell was short and solid. He looked like a fifty-five-year-old rodeo rider—jeans, dusty cowboy boots, and an azure blue work shirt with a western yoke and snap pockets. He had a silver belt buckle the size of a salad plate, and when he turned around to silence the television with a remote, she saw that on the back of his brown leather belt it read simply HANK, in big embossed letters. His twangy voice sounded like tires on gravel: “Them Publishing House Clearance folks got them blazers like I seen on the tube. You ain’t one of ’em, are you?”
“No, sir.” She liked his smile immediately.
“You lied to me, young lady.”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“You’re too damn pretty to be a tax lady, and it’s too damn late at night. Tell me you’re not a tax lady. God help me!”
“I’m not a tax lady.”
His relief was genuine. “Some unknown relative of mine died? You look more like an attorney than a tax lady.”
“I’m not an attorney either,” she told him. “I’m a policewoman, Mr. Russell. I think Harry may be in trouble.”
“Harry Caulfield? Again? Well, Jez-us!” he swung the screen door open wide. “Come in. Come in!” He zapped the TV this time killing the picture as well. She thought of cowboys and six-guns; and now they used remotes. “How about some lemon pie?” he asked with a twinkle in his green eyes. “Made it myself. It’s the best damn pie you’ve ever ate.”
She and Boldt wandered his small backyard, side by side, the sergeant stopping every now and then to pick up one of the brightly colored plastic toys that were scattered about everywhere.
“Last name of Caulfield,” she said. “Harry Caulfield. Wandered onto the farm at seventeen. Wouldn’t talk about his past. Not to anyone. Worked hard, learned fast. Everyone treated him like family. The owner, Meriweather, made him earn his high school equivalency if he wanted to stay on at Longview. Sent him on to college after that. Paid for everything for the boy.”
“Here?” Boldt asked, briefly pausing in their slow stroll.
She nodded. “That’s how the foreman remembers it. The university. Studied sciences, he said.”
“Like microbiology?”
“Could be,” she agreed. “It would help him with the poultry business—the diseases, the doctoring.”
“It’s him.”
“Worked back at the farm summers and on breaks. Evidently loved the work. Named a bunch of the hens. Really took to it.”
“And came down hard.”
“Russell says someone got paid. Said there was a break-in about a week before State Health shut them down, but that nothing was taken, and they blamed it on some kids and paid no attention. Never reported it.”
“Someone doctored their birds,” Boldt speculated.
She nodded. “Set them up. They never saw it coming. About the time the infection spread, the State Health inspector, Hammond, shows up and shuts them down that very day. It happened real fast. Too fast for Hank Russell; that’s how he claims he knew it was rigged. The farm was ordered to destroy the birds, and the boy was there, back from college. Meriweather wasn’t himself. His wife got into the booze. The people who got sick threatened lawsuits. He was going to lose it all, and worse: He and the boy both knew it. Russell says Meriweather wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t think clearly. He refused to poison the birds, so instead they butchered them—all of them. All in one day. Over a thousand birds. By hand. The boy, too—Harry. Russell says he’s never had a day like that in his life. Ankle-deep in blood, covered in it. ‘A mountain of headless birds,’ he said. And another pile of just the heads. And Mark Meriweather and Harry Caulfield crying the whole time, crying for sixteen hours while they slaughtered those birds and put an end to the farm.” The psychologist in her said, “They should have never involved the boy.”
Boldt stopped and rocked his head back toward the moon, and his voice cracked as he tried to say something to her but stopped himself. When he did manage to speak, he said, “I don’t know that I can go on being a parent.” He picked up another piece of plastic—it looked like a bridge—and stacked it with the others. Maybe they combined to make a fort or a house, she could not tell which.
“The lawsuits did come, and on an icy fall night Mer-iweather drove himself off Snoqualmie Pass for the insurance money. The wife ended up committed; the way Russell described it, it sounded like wet brain. Ownership of the farm was never worked out. Meriweather owned it outright, and the wife was still living. So it just rotted away, according to Russell.”
“And our friend Harry?”
“Wouldn’t speak after Meriweather died. Nearly starved himself to death by not eating. Russell said he was hospitalized for a while, and that when he got out, he came to Russell with a plan to prove they had been framed.”
Boldt sat down into one of the midget swing-set seats and stretched his legs out. The swing set was bright blue in the moonlight, with a yellow wrapping like wide ribbon. Daphne took the swing next to him, but was afraid their combined weight might break the set, so she stood up and held the chains, feeling awkward.
“But Russell didn’t want any of that,” Boldt guessed.
“Hank Russell is what you might call the original honest outlaw. He’s simply not in the system. Doesn’t drive. Doesn’t pay taxes, I don’t think. But he knows livestock, and he seems to have been around every kind there is, if you believe him.”
“And you do.”
“I do.”
“So Harry launches his own crusade against Owen Adler.”
“No,” she corrected. “This is several years ago when Harry gets this idea.”
“I don’t get it,” Boldt said, looking over at her.
“Russell’s story stops there. He heard the boy had gotten into some trouble, but never knew what it was.”
“Jail?”
“Hammond mentioned jail. I didn’t call in a request because I wasn’t sure about using the radio.”
“You did exactly right.” This pulled Boldt out of the swing and to his feet. “So we check Corrections.”
“The kid’s a mess, Lou.”
“The kid is killing people, Daffy. You want me to feel sorry for him?”
She did not answer.
“Maybe I can see it,” he said. “Maybe someday even come to understand it on some level. But I’ll never condone it. I’ll never forgive him for Slater Lowry.”
“It’s not him doing this.”
“Don’t start with me.”
“It’s not, Lou.”
“Yes it is, Daffy. He is the one doing this. Don’t kid yourself. You found him, Daffy: You identified him. You did it! You should feel proud about that.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, following him toward their cars.
Boldt, too, elected not to use the radios, to take no chance whatsoever that the name Harry Caulfield might be overheard by an eavesdropping reporter. Instead, he and Daphne returned separately to the fifth floor and immediately sought the man’s prior convictions and outstanding warrants through Boldt’s computer terminal. The search for H. Caulfield produced a single hit.
“Harold Emerson Caulfield,” Boldt read to her from the screen. “Twenty-eight years old. A narco bust. Arrested and convicted four years ago for possession of two kilos of cocaine. Paroled four months ago. Home address—get this!—Sasquaw, Washington.” He looked up at her excitedly and confirmed, “That’s our guy.” He took her by the arm, pulled her down to him, and kissed her quickly on the lips. Their faces just inches apart, hers alive with excitement, there was a brief moment in which he felt confused, but he let go of her arm in time to allow the sensation to pass. She smiled and laughed somewhat nervously. “Well!” she said, letting out a huge sigh.
“Come on!” he encouraged, tugging on her hand. “Let’s pull the file.”
They hurried across the floor in brisk elongated strides that neared an all-out run—which, at that early hour of the morning, caught the attention of the few members of Pasquini’s squad who were at their desks. “Where’s the fire?” one of the men called out. Another answered, “In their pants!” And laughter erupted all around. Boldt knew it probably looked that way—running off together to find an empty room—and this once, he did not care. The discovery of Caulfield made him feel drunk.
There was only one elevator in use this time of night, and it was a long time coming, so Daphne suggested the stairs. They raced each other down, in the middle of which she called out to him: “I want to run this by Clements if it’s all right with you.”
“Is he here?”
“Arrived this afternoon. There’s a meeting called for tomorrow. Any objections?”
“None at all.”
“It will help with his profile.”
“No objections,” he repeated, winded already.
They reached the basement floor and started first at a walk, and then broke into a run simultaneously. All police of the rank detective or higher possessed keys to the three file rooms, and Boldt used his to open first the door, and then the interior chain-link gate. This basement room was nicknamed “the Boneyard,” and contained the files for all cleared cases three to seven years in the past. Twice a year the oldest of these files were removed to a permanent graveyard for police files in a warehouse off Marginal Way.
There were thousands of files contained in row after row of gray-metal racks, all color-coded with the same system used by doctors and dentists. The lighting was dreary, the files thumbworn, and the organization miserable. But the colored stickers, marked by alphabetical reference, made it easy to find C-A-U-.
Boldt had to pry one file from the next, they were crammed in so tightly. Daphne lent a hand, opening a space between files so that Boldt could read the case number and name.
He made one pass, then another. He glanced down at her—she was standing on her toes to reach this shelf—and said, “I don’t see it.”
“You hold,” she instructed, and they switched jobs. She became somewhat frantic on the fourth pass. “It has to be here.”
“It isn’t.”
“Misspelled maybe.”
Boldt checked the tattered ledger by the door, leafing through the scrawled listings of what files had been signed out, and by whom. It was an archaic system where half the entries were illegible. “Not here,” he called out.
At Daphne’s frustrated insistence, together they spent another ten minutes leafing through all the files beginning with the letters Ca and found no file for Harry Caulfield, at the end of which Daphne was out of breath. She blew on her bangs to move them off her forehead, but the hair was stuck there and she brushed it out of the way.
They stood in an uncomfortable silence staring at the towering wall of smudged and ragged files, both of them seething with anger. The room seemed the size of a football field to Boldt, and the records on Caulfield could have been misfiled.
“Someone took it,” Boldt finally said, voicing what he knew she too was thinking.
She looked up at him, so frustrated that her eyes were brimmed with tears, and she said in a tense and raspy voice, “What do you want to bet that whatever went on with Longview Farms reached further than State Health?”
“I’m not a betting man,” replied Lou Boldt.