No Witnesses

TEN

Boldt’s attempts at sleep proved restless and unforgiving. His appetite abandoned him and he found himself back on a routine of antacids and warm milk. On the fifth floor he was the recipient of cautious looks and deliberate avoidance maneuvers. He thought of the child on the way to the grave. He thought of the child inside his wife-and none of it made any sense to him. Where he strived for order and understanding, none was to be found.

At the office the initial reports were not good. Using computers, the Adler employee lists had been electronically compared to those of Foodland and Shop-Alert, in hopes of finding a disgruntled employee who had switched jobs and was now repaying Adler. But no overlaps were found. Every detective assigned a black hole hoped for a lucky break, an unexpected, quick solution, and Boldt was no exception. It was not something he talked about, but nonetheless this hope was harbored secretly inside him. With this news, coupled with the loss of Slater Lowry, any such hopes were abandoned.

This negative news was soon balanced by something more promising: Cash register receipt tapes from the Broadway Foodland supermarket that included purchases of Adler soup products had been sorted and printed out for the two-week period prior to Slater Lowry’s illness. These cash register tapes were shown to Betty Lowry, who despite the loss of her son, or perhaps because of it, seemed eager to help. Hours later she notified Boldt that she recognized a receipt that included the purchase of soup, soy sauce, and a wooden spoon. It was the wooden spoon she remembered most of all. The receipt indicated payment in cash, which also fit her buying habits.

Using the date and time from this receipt, Boldt notified Shop-Alert Security and requested they search their store surveillance videos for the twenty-four-hour period prior to and including Betty Lowry’s purchase of Mom’s Chicken Soup.

Redmond, Washington, a forty-minute drive from the city in good traffic, was home to Microsoft and other technocracies. Its boom in the eighties was partly responsible for the unwanted Californication that had spawned the unprecedented traffic, fast-food joints, air pollution, and Armani suits.

Shop-Alert’s interior appeared to have been constructed of materials found at Saturday-morning hardware store sales. All artificial everything: faux wood paneling, adjustable Tru-Grain shelves. Overhead fluorescent lighting caused human skin to take on the pale green hue that Boldt associated with tainted meat. The individual office cubicles were cramped and dark despite the lighting, in part because of a brown-purple carpeting that absorbed light like a black hole. And he thought that it was dirty enough that heretofore undiscovered life forms probably lived down inside it.

Money saved by this tacky interior had been spent instead on state-of-the-art electronics heaped and stacked and connected in a spaghetti of multicolored wires, keyboards, and screens.

Boldt had already forgotten the name of the computer nerd who had met him in the lobby. Ron something-or was it Jon? He was a particularly unattractive human with no social graces, so stereotypical that Boldt hated himself for having expected someone like this. He talked through his nose and blinked continually. Maybe it was Don. He looked to be about twelve years old. His loafers had tassels and he had a Motorola pager strapped to his belt. It made Boldt want to throw his own away.

“Foodland is part of our StopLifters program. Let me explain. When we receive the videos from our StopLifters stores, stores like Foodland, before we analyze them we transfer the data to OM disk-optical magnetic. Kind of like CD-ROM, only more flexible to our needs. That allows us to turn over the videotape-zero it and send it back out there for use in one of our client’s systems while we retain the original images. Phase one of our analysis is handled here,” he said, directing Boldt’s attention to a dozen young people studying black-and-white television screens showing store interiors, “reviewing the in-store images, alert for shoplifters or taggers.”

“Taggers?”

“Price-tag switchers. It used to be pulling a price tag off of one, lesser-valued item and attaching it to another of higher value. The tagger pockets the difference in savings. Because of nonremovable and now optical pricing systems, the taggers are more sophisticated than they used to be: They arrive in-store with preprinted UPC-code labels on their person. They attach these fraudulent pricing mechanisms to the package of their choice and leave the store having paid a serious discount, usually only on one or two big-ticket items, mixed in with many smaller purchases. This makes it difficult for the checkers to spot the game. That’s what we call any of these techniques: ‘games.’”

Original, Boldt thought.

“Another benefit to our clients of our transferring the tapes to OM disks is that we are able to catalogue months, even years, of a store’s history, making it possible for us to present a very serious legal case against repeat offenders. Typically they move from store to store, too smart to keep hitting the same place. But the advantage of being a Shop-Alert StopLifters client is that we’re essentially building a database of offenders, giving us a much better shot at moving these offenses past the probationary sentence and really slam-dunking these bastards.”

I’ll never use that expression again, Boldt thought. He said, “What have you got for me?”

Don(?) led the detective over to an unoccupied viewing station amid the others, where a folded piece of paper with the hand-scrawled word Reserved had been placed. He sat Boldt down in the chair directly before the large monitor. Don explained, “A real advantage of the OM disk format is taking the signal digital. We can not only enhance and zoom but we have the ability to instantly jump position without suffering through fast-forward or rewind. If you think of it as picking up the needle on an LP record and moving it to the song you want to hear, and comparing that to a cassette tape where you have to wait for the thing to fast-forward, you’ll see what I mean. We can jump an hour, a minute, twenty seconds ahead or behind by simply dialing in the specific time request. We can cut and paste to other disks and build the records of these offenders I was talking about, or we can highlight a particularly vulnerable area of a store by clipping together shots of lost angles. It’s really very versatile.”

“I’m not buying anything,” Boldt reminded him.

“Right.” He turned a vivid red and toyed with his smudged glasses.

“What’s your name again?” Boldt finally asked.

“Gus.”

“Gus?”

“That’s right.”

Gus sat down alongside Boldt. He worked a computer keyboard as fast and as delicately as Boldt’s grandmother used to knit. “Your request was easy,” he bragged. “You told us which aisle and what to look for. Without that, it might have taken us a day or more. I think I may have your offender, although I’m not familiar with this particular game-placing product onto a shelf. What’s your interest in this anyway?”

“Corporate espionage,” Boldt lied, making it up on the spot and feeling self-conscious until the technofreak grinned enthusiastically as if he’d been let in on something.

“Cool,” he said. “What I’ve done is catalogue the images I have found so far and placed them in chronological order. Here’s the first image in the progression. This is the entrance door to Foodland as caught by one of our cameras.”

On the screen was displayed a slightly fuzzy black-and-white image that showed a pair of automatic doors. The left door swung open admitting a person wearing a gimme cap and a dark jacket. Medium height and weight. He (she?) turned into the store and walked off the screen.

“That’s our first look,” Gus muttered. “Not much.”

The bottom right of the screen was date and time-coded. The suspect had entered Foodland at 5:02 P.M. on June 21. Clearly a busy time of day for the store. And late in the day, when the shelves were more likely to have room for the killer’s substitution. Boldt experienced a pang of anxiety: Was this the Tin Man?

“Our next decent hit is three minutes later. And you should know something here, Lieutenant.” Boldt didn’t bother to correct the mistaken rank. “Your average shopper-your innocent shopper-ends up all over these videos. But except for a flash here and there, this mark has avoided the cameras for nearly three minutes. And that’s not easy. Granted, Shop-Alert didn’t install the Foodland system-we only analyze their images, and it isn’t the greatest system, but even so, to avoid these cameras is something of an art form. It requires prolonged study of the facility, and even at that, a hell of a lot of luck. Of course, dress has a lot to do with it. You’ll note the dark clothing and the hat. Dark clothing in saturated black-and-white video-in this kind of light, as you can see-tends to absorb too much light, throwing off the gray-scale balance on the areas immediately around it, causing a graininess like a shadow that renders the image difficult to evaluate. The dark clothing makes it difficult to see her face.”

“Her?” Boldt asked. “She looks a little androgynous to me.”

“A woman, I think so, yes.”

Gus consulted a time log on a clipboard in front of him, then keyed in a set of numbers. “For the time being, we’re going to jump ahead two minutes and fifty seconds to show you this.” He hit the ENTER key. A new image appeared, ran for only half a second, and then, as he struck another key, was freeze-framed. It was this same person in another area of an aisle. The person’s head turned slightly, which was where Gus stopped it. “I’m going to zoom and enhance now. It takes a second or two for the screen to refresh at each phase.” Using a computer mouse, Gus dragged a box around the face. This box then filled the entire screen. Box by box the electronically enhanced enlargements continued, and the suspect’s head grew ever larger. The tighter the image, the fuzzier it grew, because “enhancement can’t keep pace with enlargement,” as Gus explained. By the time the process was completed, much of what was on the screen was only made discernible by Boldt’s imagination and the images that had come before. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking at.

“Lower head and neck,” Boldt guessed.

“Exactly right, Lieutenant.” The boy sounded impressed. He typed additional instructions into the machine and sat back. “Now let’s run that again.” He ran it several times, like instant replay, before Boldt saw it.

“The bounce to the hat?” Boldt asked.

“It’s oversize. And the way it bounces means there’s a lot of hair up inside there.”

“You’re good at this,” Boldt complimented.

“We spend enough time at it.” Gus drew a box around the woman’s ear, and the computer began a series of enhancements. At the same time, the sequence played in slow motion, backed up, and played again repeatedly. Gus slowed the motion even further. “There!” he declared excitedly-and a little too loudly for Boldt’s ear. “It’s our only real chance to see it.” He pointed to the earlobe, where a square black mark winked at them.

Boldt studied the repetition for several passes, and Gus had the good sense to keep quiet and let the detective have some room. Boldt finally tested, “A freckle? A mole? I’m not sure I see the importance.”

“Lower earlobe,” the boy hinted. This was a contest.

“Pierced ears!” Boldt said loudly, briefly drawing the attention of the other video attendants in the room. “No earring, but that’s a hole in the ear! Even so, that hardly indicates a woman.”

“Added to the height of the individual and the apparent weight of hair inside that hat-”

“It may be a woman!” Boldt stated. “I’ll give you that,” although this shattered his image of the Tin Man, whom he had assumed to be male. “I need to follow her every movement.”

The technician showed him all the images in which the female suspect was captured by the cameras. At no point did she reveal her face. “Here’s where we vote her All-Pro,” Gus said. “There are only a few shoplifters as good. Note her position to the camera. She’s in aisle four: soup and vegetables. Positioned this way, she fully blocks any chance we might have of seeing her specific actions. She checks her watch-see that?” He replayed the moment. “And now she’s gone from our view for over seven seconds. By the time we pick her up again, she has moved quickly down the aisle. She bumps into that man with the cart, there-see that? — and by the time we pick her up again, she is paying cash, head still down, for a candy bar, and she’s gone. The thing is, checking her watch: She had the cameras timed.”

“A woman?” Boldt asked uneasily. The Tin Man? he wondered.

“Now check this out. This is beautiful!” the technician said enthusiastically. The screen blanked to a deep blue. When an image reappeared again, it showed aisle 4. The technician blocked a segment using a white box, tripped a key, and leaned back. The area zoomed and enlarged several times, the shelves moving increasingly closer, the products-soup cans-more easily identified: Adler soup cans. “This is where the woman was standing,” he explained. He split the screen into two similar images and said: “Before and after. See the difference? She’s not a lifter after all; we’ve got nothing on her!”

The right-hand screen showed five soup cans that were not present in the earlier image.

“Five?” Boldt asked in a panic.

“Something wrong?” the young man queried. “She’s not a lifter at all,” he repeated.

“Is it possible?” Boldt muttered.

“Five cans of soup?” the young man asked, misunderstanding the question. “You should see some of the clothing that’s been used, the amount of stuff they can hide. We offer a seminar on clothing used in shoplifting-you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff!”

Boldt could only account for two, possibly three, cans: the Chin girl and Slater Lowry. So where were the other three cans?

“Listen up,” Boldt announced to his squad: LaMoia, Gaynes, Danielson, and Frank Herbert.

Herbert, fifty, stood five feet five with a pot belly that made him equally wide. His balding head was spot-shined. Lieutenant Shoswitz stood by the door.

Homicide’s situation room contained a half-dozen Formica desks, a retractable projection screen, and a large Wipe-It board that at the moment contained several profanities and a graphic cartoon.

Boldt briefed them on the case, taking them through his visit to Shop-Alert and the discovery of several unaccounted-for soup cans. He had been on the phone the entire afternoon; his voice was hoarse. Or maybe that was nerves.

“We’re missing two to three cans: Lori Chin’s mother doesn’t have any on her shelf, so I’m guessing there are still three at large. The surveillance video has given us a window of time during which the suspect was inside the store, making the drop,” Boldt continued. “Thanks to a computerized cash register system, we can identify any bank check or credit card purchases and then trace them back to whoever made that purchase. We’ve identified thirty-four people who we know were shopping inside this Foodland supermarket at the exact same time as our suspect. We have also identified eleven customers who purchased the Adler chicken soup within the twenty-four hours that followed the contaminated cans’ being placed on the shelves.

“Here’s the drill: First, I’ve attempted to contact these eleven individuals, but I only reached three. Your job is to do a follow-up. You proceed to their homes, collect any cans-treated as evidence, don’t forget-and conduct a thorough interview to make sure no cans were given away or placed somewhere that’s been forgotten about.”

Boldt said, “If we get lucky-if we locate these extra cans-then, beginning tomorrow morning, I want each of you to contact and interview these thirty-four others who were present at Foodland during the time of the drop.” He added as a footnote: “Obviously, this case gets our priority, although technically you’re not detailed to it, so you’ll have to stay current on the Book as well. It’s a lot of work, I know.” He continued, “These shoppers-and anyone they were with-are all potential witnesses and should be dealt with as such. We contact them first by phone, and with the hot ones, we conduct follow-ups. Interviews are tape-recorded, where we can get permission. I want you keeping good notes.” He glanced at Shoswitz.

“Okay? Questions?” Shoswitz said, “Let’s go.”