No Witnesses

“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.”