No Witnesses

shot. He was clean-shaven, dark eyes, with an average face of average looks. He was Mr. Anybody. He might have been a waiter, or an attorney, or a cop. Dark hair, a firm jaw line, and strong eyes. He was a multiple murderer, and he seemed to be looking right at Daphne with an expression of smug contempt and hatred. I hate you all, his eyes said.

Daphne continued, “The man we’re after is no shoplifter. He killed a boy young enough to be your little brother. He killed a family of four-two little girls and their parents. He’s put other people in the hospital. He has threatened much worse, and we take those threats very seriously. We believe time may be running out-and we need to know if we’re after the right person or not. We have a suspect, but no one that we know of has seen him but you. If you are able to identify him, then we know where to focus our investigation. We just may stop him in time.” She pointed back to the line of mug shots. “Do you see him, Holly? Is he any of these men?”

Without any indecision, Holly MacNamara reached down and picked up the photograph of Harry Caulfield. “This is the man I saw at Foodland.”

Bernie Lofgrin’s magnified eyeballs looked fake, like a pair of joke glasses won at the ringtoss at an amusement park. His office was crowded with stacks of reading material and reports vying for chair seats and rising like teetering skyscrapers from the office floor. A cup of steaming coffee sat by the phone and he waved a Bic pen in the air as if it were a baton.

Boldt set the jazz tapes down on the man’s cluttered desk, moved a stack of printed matter, and took a seat across from him.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lofgrin said, holding the cassettes close to his face so he could read the titles that Boldt had written on them. “Uh-huh,” he muttered and repeated with each new discovery, quite pleased. “You’re a man of your word,” he said. Peering more closely, he added enthusiastically, “‘Jumping Off a Clef!’ Chet Baker! And Red Rodney, too! Terrific.” Lofgrin liked the trumpet.

“An added bonus for my tardiness,” Boldt said.

“You mind?” Lofgrin got up, shut the office door, and put the trumpet tape into a boom box and turned it on, setting the volume low. For Boldt the jazz improved his mood immediately, and he was glad it was as familiar to him as it was, because it did not distract him, stealing his attention the way unfamiliar music did.

“We checked out all three ATMs last night. No latents. No evidence whatsoever.”

While Boldt had been investigating the poisoning of the Mishnov family, three ATMs had been hit for another twenty-eight hundred dollars. Again, Boldt’s surveillance team had been nowhere near the ATM locations hit. Bernie Lofgrin’s forensic sciences squad had dusted for prints and inspected the sites for any other evidence.

Lofgrin said, “One thing bothers me … We’ve seen four ATMs hit, right? And according to ATM security people, some fifty percent of the machines are equipped with optical surveillance-cameras. So is this extortionist of yours just lucky or what?”

“It bothers me, too, Bernie.”

“It gives you the feeling someone’s got a hand in your back pocket-know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean. I’ve got some ideas.”

“I get the hint. We’ve got other things to discuss.”

“The Longview Farms evidence,” Boldt reminded as Lofgrin sat back down.

“We focused on that basement room, as you asked. Worked closely with the fire marshal, Peter Kramer, and also Fergus in their lab because a total burn is really its own science. And there is a lot of work yet to go, I’m afraid, some of which we’ve shipped off to Washington, thanks to your agreement with the Bureau boys. There just isn’t a hell of a lot left after a fire like that. Where we got lucky is that the workbench under which all these boxes were stored was topped with sheet metal. The weight of the collapsing building, combined with the limited protection of this layer of sheet metal, compressed the contents of some of the boxes, and there just wasn’t enough oxygen for it all to burn. So we have small clusters of flaky carbon, kind of like the layers of French pastry-extremely fragile, sensitive still to oxygen, and yet basically intact. We shipped a lot of this off to the Bureau because we want to get it right, and evidence this volatile only allows you one shot. Exposed to air, it literally turns to dust before you can work with it.”

“How long?”

“The Bureau is thorough. They can, and have, taken weeks to get back to us. I’d say two weeks is average. We’ve asked for a rush, but everyone does, so I doubt it means much. They do know about the case, though, and that helps. My guess is that it will get some kind of priority, which may mean a week or ten days if we’re lucky.”

“We don’t have ten days.”

“I understand,” Lofgrin said sympathetically. “I’m just being upfront with you. It’s out of my hands.”

“So we wait?”

“For the real detail work, we do. The specifics that may turn this thing on its ear. Oh, check this riff!” He leaned back. A pair of trumpets soared on an unpredictable harmony and fluttered to a gentle landing. Lofgrin sighed, as if he had just finished a good meal. “What we have for you is not the best news,” the lab man said, sitting forward again. “The boxes beneath that workbench contained varying sizes of thin sheets of paper. Printed matter. Color, probably.”

“Labels,” the detective said.

“Yeah, labels, I’m thinking. But who knows? Could be any printed matter-church programs, political flyers. We didn’t get a good look at any of them because of the decomposition during oxidation, and that’s what we’re hoping for by sending them out: some kind of positive identification for you to work with.”

Boldt took notes despite the knowledge that Bernie Lofgrin would provide him with a copy of the preliminary report. Lab reports were overly technical and therefore difficult to interpret.

“As far as you’re concerned, the most disturbing news was the detection of strychnine.”

Boldt shouted involuntarily. “What?”

“In a basement we expect the presence of rodent poisons-anticoagulants, mostly. But strychnine has no business being down there, especially in the proximity of the workbench, which is where we detected it. We picked up traces in some of the ash samples-parts per million, mind you; trace amounts is all-but there was definitely strychnine in and around that area.”

“Cholera?”

“If it was there, the bacteria were sterilized by the fire. We’re pretty damn sure that what remained of the electrical gear we found could have fit the parameters of a light box of the kind Dr. Mann described to you, and we’ve detected abundant amounts of melted polymers, plastics specific to the manufacture of petri dishes.”

“So it was a home lab,” Boldt stated.

Lofgrin nodded. “Sure could be.” His eyeballs seemed to be on springs.

“Why strychnine?” Boldt asked himself quietly, though Lofgrin answered.

“Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid jamboree,” Lofgrin reminded. “The Guyana massacre. The Sudafed case here. The Tylenol tamperings. Poison of choice for tampering.” He explained, “Tasteless, odorless, easily blended.”

“A mass poisoning?” Boldt questioned, reminded of the faxed threats.

“With cholera,” Lofgrin said, “if it’s identified and treated properly, the patient stands a good chance of recovery. Not so with strychnine. It’s extremely fast-a few minutes is all. There’s your primary difference.”

“A few minutes,” Boldt repeated, reminded of Caulfield’s threat to kill hundreds.

Lofgrin’s phone rang. He turned down the music, answered the phone, grunted, and placed it back in the receiver.

“Matthews,” he informed Boldt. “She says she’s got some good news for you.”

“It’s about time someone did.”

“Do we dare release the mug shot to the press?” Boldt asked, buoyed by MacNamara’s positive identification.

Daphne told him, “I think not. If he sees his own photo on the news, two things are going to happen: One, he’s going to go underground-we lose any chance of catching him at the ATMs; two, he’ll feel betrayed and may attempt to deliver on his larger threat. Let me run this by Clements. He’ll have an opinion for us.”

Boldt mentioned the strychnine, and they discussed possible psychological motives for a more deadly poison,