No Witnesses

with corporate security is that it’s only as smart as your employees.”

As he appeared in the doorway, his pager sounded. The key to the printer dangled from a small key chain, held out like a carrot in front of her. She wanted to snatch it away from him. “I gotta answer a page,” he said, catching her eye. He glanced at the key, then back to Daphne.

He tossed her the key.

The key flew through the air toward her on a flight path headed straight for the keyboard to the second terminal. If she missed it, it would hit the keys and reveal the lab report hidden behind the screen-saver. She took quick measure and swiped the air, attempting the catch, and miraculously snagged the key just inches above the keyboard. But her elbow thumped against the computer mouse poised alongside the keyboard and the screen came to life, the altered lab report glaring back at her.

The sound of Fowler’s voice electrified her: She was caught. Then she realized he was not talking to her, but was on the phone in other room.

Glancing between Fowler’s back and the computer screen, she shoved the key into the printer’s security box and twisted it. The printer’s amber power light flashed, the machine hummed, and the computer screen blinked.

A new message appeared. Daphne did not read the message. All she saw were the words:

CANCEL THIS PRINT JOB

YES NO

?

She zipped the mouse into place and clicked “Yes.” The printer error message vanished from the screen. She pulled down the file menu.

Fowler said, “Okay,” and hung up the phone.

Her heart in her throat, Fowler now approaching, Daphne clicked the mouse through a series of steps: File … Close … Menu … Main … her full attention on the screen, and the task before her.

The lab report left the screen, replaced by the main menu.

Kenny Fowler stepped through the door.

“Pretty easy, once you get the hang of it,” she said. Her face felt burning hot. Her fingers were trembling. Would he notice? “Thanks,” she said, trying to get rid of him.

“You okay here?” he asked. “I gotta look into something.”

“Fine.”

“Key goes in the center drawer, second desk over.” He added, “I’m going to have to do something about that.”

“No problem,” she said, but her voice broke, and he looked at her strangely. He glanced over at the two screens, and she thought that he must have wondered why she was not sitting at the first terminal. But he did not say anything.

Kenny Fowler instructed her. “Use the same security code when you leave.” He turned and headed up the stairs.

A few minutes later, with the file room door locked tightly, enclosing her, the first pages of the State Health Department lab report for New Leaf Foods slid out onto the printer’s plastic tray.

Daphne wasted no time in folding them and slipping them into her purse.

TWELVE

At seven o’clock Tuesday morning, Daphne faxed Owen Adler at his home with the words, “The eighteenth step; eight o’clock,” knowing he would recognize the shadowed heart that she drew on all her notes. One of the benefits of intimacy, she thought, is that shared experiences need only reference, not explanation. They had visited the locks on their first date.

At eight o’clock, beneath a canopy of steel-wool clouds and chilled by a temperature too cool to possibly be June, Daphne parked her Honda on the north side of the locks. Here, where the darkened waters of Lake Union spilled into the estuary of Puget Sound, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built a set of locks to account for and correct the difference in elevations between the two bodies of water, overcoming what previously had been a minor set of waterfalls.

Daphne hurried through the verdant park, barely taking notice of the sweep of green lawn and the colorful beds of annuals, the dogs out on their morning constitutional with owners in tow, continuing past the refurbished administration buildings that offered postcards and maps in the lobby.

Inside the lock, a thirty-foot ketch by the name of Heather was being eased lower as the water beneath it was evacuated at the far gates. Line was fed down as overhead the lock attendants kept the craft secure, while a handsome young couple monitored the bumpers and tracked the descent. Daphne crossed, at a brisk gait, the narrow footbridge with its chain handrails, not noticing that she turned the heads of several of the male attendants who then eyed one another with lustful expressions. She continued past the fixed floodgates, following signs to the fish ladder. Below, to her right, silver streaks sliced through the turbulent green water like knife blades in bright light, followed by an explosion of white foam as the salmon leapt and tumbled three feet out of the water, a cascade of brilliance before crashing back to the surface and disappearing.

She descended the stairs past various platforms of the fish ladder, turned and entered the bunkerlike cement viewing station where a prerecorded female voice said through thin speakers, “This is the eighteenth step.”

Owen Adler, dressed in a dark blue business suit and wearing a pink shirt with French cuffs, stood alone before the viewing glass, where an enormous salmon slowly waved its tail and maintained a stationary hold in the strong current. The narrator’s voice droned on overhead, but Daphne tuned it out. She approached him and they kissed, not as lovers, but as acquaintances. This bothered her.

“Not followed?” she asked.

“No. Not that I could tell. You?”

“No.”

“So,” he said. “It’s good to see you. How did it go last night? Did you get in all right?”

“Fowler found me out.” She explained her interruption in the file room. “I have to ask you a few things,” she said, “that are not easy to ask, but they need answering. They need honest answering. And if the answers aren’t what I hope they will be, then I want you to know that I would sooner leave the case, even leave the department than betray your confidence. I don’t know how you find it, but it’s hard for me, Owen, to be divided between work and you this way.”

“Divided? Aren’t we working together? Perhaps you should ask those questions,” he said, revealing his concern.

She nodded, glancing briefly at the lumbering salmon, nearly three feet long, whose journey had carried it from the ocean to this fish ladder and soon beyond into the waters of Lake Union-a long, arduous journey.

She said, “The company is insured to the tune of eighty million dollars in the event of product tampering. How stable is the company financially? Is there any chance that anyone around you might have created this incident in order to win enough insurance money to redesign or remarket your product line?”

To her relief, the shock and astonishment that froze his features confirmed to her that he had never heard of, had never considered such a possibility. He finally managed to say, “Is it that much? Eighty?”

“Is that your answer?”

“Financial stability? We’re an international corporation now, Daphne. We have assets and liabilities that are managed and juggled and manipulated to please those who issue us our credit. It’s unprofitable to make too much profit, so you leverage your profits for more credit to expand your business and you go deeper in debt. It’s a huge wheel. My job is to keep the wheel moving, for it’s movement that sustains growth and therefore an ever-increasing asset base. At any one time we’re seriously in debt, if that’s what you’re asking. But the product line is both well designed and marketed, and I, for one, can’t see any reason to change that. And to go to such lengths to change it is absurd.”

“If you wanted to redesign the line, could you afford to?”