No Witnesses

“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.

TWENTY-TWO

“It’s no secret that some of you consider this voodoo,” the renowned forensic psychiatrist and FBI special agent Dr. Richard Clements said in a deep-throated voice that filled Homicide’s situation room. Thirty minutes into