Boldt 03 - No Witnesses Read Free

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 clichés 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