No Witnesses

“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.