No Witnesses

from the cement ceiling.

“I know.” She avoided his gaze.

“You’ll share everything with me. No stonewalling.”

“Agreed.”

“Well … maybe not everything,” he corrected.

It won a genuine smile from her, and he was glad for that-though it deserted her as quickly as it had come. His frantic footfalls on the formed stairs sounded like the beating of bats’ wings as he descended at a run.

The newspaper article had listed one of the hospitals. For Lou Boldt, the victim was where every investigation began.

TWO

Boldt stood at the foot of the bed in the Harborview Medical Clinic’s ICU ward. Slater Lowry lay unconscious, the repository of a half-dozen tubes, the source for the weakened signals charted on a variety of green video monitors. KIRO’s morning news had picked up the story of a “mysterious infection.” There had been no mention of Owen Adler or the threatening faxes.

The boy was a towhead with a short, turned-up nose and monkey ears he would hopefully grow into. The hospital gown fit him awkwardly, riding up tightly against his neck; Boldt glanced toward the door, then to the large viewing window, and found himself alone with the boy. He reached out and tugged the white seam to a moonlike crescent at the boy’s collarbone. Better now. Despite the child’s beauty, he did not sleep peacefully. His was a tormented unconsciousness. This room was too bright, too clinical for a child: more an operating theater with a bed in it. Too many machines, too much tile and stainless steel-a place to die rather than to recover. No window to the outside, nothing human about it whatsoever. It had been created to be sterile, and had greatly succeeded.

“Hold on,” Boldt whispered encouragingly, willing him stronger, unable to fight off the thought that this might be his own son just as easily. That this condition had been inflicted on him by a complete stranger so repulsed Boldt that he, too, felt briefly nauseated and sought a chair where there was none to be found.

Miles. His two-year-old. All the cliches held true: the sun rose and set on the boy; the light of his life. And what if? What then? How does a parent stand idly by at a hospital bedside and watch a child shrink from this earth? Who deserves that? A sickening energy invaded him. He shuddered and pulled at the gauze mask that suffocated him.

There was no consideration of ducking this one, black hole or not. It qualified as “crimes against persons,” and as such, was to be handled by Homicide. It was his; he owned it. He wanted this case now-eager, like a boxer climbing into the ring.

Pressed into the wall, concentrating on the boy-the victim-a greenish haze clouded the room. Boldt had heard all the stories of cops who could place themselves into the head of the killer. Not him: He was no mind reader, but an observer. An evidence hound. His strength was not so much intuition as an uncanny ability to listen to the victim. Empathy. In this regard, he had what the others did not.

But for the moment he was stumped. The victim typically brought along a crime scene, a foundation of physical evidence from which Boldt built a case. Slater Lowry offered him nothing. Or did he? the detective wondered, stepping closer to the bed again. True, the crime scene was now well separated from the victim. But there was, in fact, an intended weapon: this bacteria or virus. Boldt called down to the basement of this same building and after a long hold connected with Dr. Ronald Dixon-“Dixie”-pathologist and chief medical examiner for all of King County. A man recruited by San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York at twice the salary, twice the vacation; a man who stayed at half the salary and half the vacation and ten times the friends. Boldt asked Dixie to join him, and without any questions Dixie agreed. There was, quite possibly, a crime scene somewhere. Somehow the food eaten by Slater Lowry had been contaminated, intentional or not.

Waiting, Boldt fell victim to his own active imagination. He pictured a man’s hands injecting a piece of fruit with a syringe; he saw a fast-food chef worker squeezing several drops of fluid onto a roll. He saw a cannery, a thousand cans an hour whirling down roller chutes and a single square inch of a stainless steel cutter somewhere in the maze holding a green fuzzy mold that the swing-shift cleaners had failed to notice. It was this last thought that caught him. What if Adler Foods was responsible? What if these faxes were merely a ruse to cover up a massive blunder, a contaminated product-their own product? What if Daphne had been used-manipulated. What if she were the real victim?

Suspicion. He lived with it, always casting as wide a net as possible, encompassing every possibility, distasteful or not. He worked systematically, methodically following up each thought, each suspicion. He processed, considered, weighed, tested, and then compared with whatever evidence was available.

“It’s a strain of cholera.” It was Dixie’s voice. He was reading the boy’s chart. A youthful face for a fifty- year-old. Somewhat oriental eyes. Dixie was a big man like Boldt. Thinning brown hair juxtaposed by bushy eyebrows. He wore a gold wedding ring and a black rubber watch. Wide shoulders that hunched forward from years of leaning over a stainless steel slab.

“I’ve gotten a couple of calls about this,” he informed Boldt. They had worked maybe two hundred crime scenes together. “The girl, Lori Chin, is much improved. She’s going to pull through.”

“Who’s on this?”

“State Health investigates infectious diseases. CDC, if it’s a real bastard.”

“It’s a real bastard,” Boldt said, staring at the boy. “It’s unofficial.”

“No, it’s cholera. Cholera is quite official.”

“How did he get it?” Boldt asked.

Dixie referenced the boy’s chart. “They have names, you know? Numbers really: the strains. They can be followed that way-tracked.” Boldt felt his eye twitch. Dixie continued: “It’s a particularly virulent strain, this one, whatever it is. Normally, cholera responds to rehydration. Antibiotics can speed the recovery but this strain is resistant to the usual antibiotics. Theoretically,” he said, sounding suddenly detached, “antibiotics are not necessary for recovery. This boy is dying from shock, Lou. His dehydration progressed too far, and when rehydrated he showed a temporary recovery and then went into severe shock that has resulted in organ failure. Acute tubular necrosis of the kidneys, which will result in renal failure and fluid overload. And something called ARDS-adult respiratory distress syndrome, which can occur in children-also the result of rehydration shock. ARDS causes pulmonary failure.”

“He’s going to pull through,” Boldt stated emphatically.

Dixie shifted uneasily, returning the chart to a plastic file holder on the wall. “No,” Dixie corrected. “He’s not going to pull out of this, Lou.”

Boldt heard the words, but would not allow them to register. His eyes flashed darkly at his friend. “How’d he get it?” Boldt repeated, teeth clenched.

“Listen, there are bacterial outbreaks like this all the time. Maybe not cholera, but plenty just the same. You don’t hear about most of them, only the sensational ones. Typically, it doesn’t take State Health very long to identify the source: a restaurant, a fish stand. It goes down pretty quickly. But this one’s a bastard. An uncommon strain of an uncommon bacteria. They’re unlikely to track down the source before IDing the strain.”

“What if I knew the source?” Boldt asked. “What if I think I knew the source?” Boldt modified.

Dixie bore down on him intensely. “Then we’ve got to move on this, Lou.”

“I’ll need some techs. I’ll need a cover-something to fool the neighbors.”

“I can help with that.” Dixie pointed urgently to the door. He said, “After you.”

Boldt glanced back at Slater Lowry. The nausea had grown into a knot.

THREE