No Witnesses

TWELVE

At seven o’clock Tuesday morning, Daphne faxed Owen Adler at his home with the words, “The eighteenth step; eight o’clock,” knowing he would recognize the shadowed heart that she drew on all her notes. One of the benefits of intimacy, she thought, is that shared experiences need only reference, not explanation. They had visited the locks on their first date.

At eight o’clock, beneath a canopy of steel-wool clouds and chilled by a temperature too cool to possibly be June, Daphne parked her Honda on the north side of the locks. Here, where the darkened waters of Lake Union spilled into the estuary of Puget Sound, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built a set of locks to account for and correct the difference in elevations between the two bodies of water, overcoming what previously had been a minor set of waterfalls.

Daphne hurried through the verdant park, barely taking notice of the sweep of green lawn and the colorful beds of annuals, the dogs out on their morning constitutional with owners in tow, continuing past the refurbished administration buildings that offered postcards and maps in the lobby.

Inside the lock, a thirty-foot ketch by the name of Heather was being eased lower as the water beneath it was evacuated at the far gates. Line was fed down as overhead the lock attendants kept the craft secure, while a handsome young couple monitored the bumpers and tracked the descent. Daphne crossed, at a brisk gait, the narrow footbridge with its chain handrails, not noticing that she turned the heads of several of the male attendants who then eyed one another with lustful expressions. She continued past the fixed floodgates, following signs to the fish ladder. Below, to her right, silver streaks sliced through the turbulent green water like knife blades in bright light, followed by an explosion of white foam as the salmon leapt and tumbled three feet out of the water, a cascade of brilliance before crashing back to the surface and disappearing.

She descended the stairs past various platforms of the fish ladder, turned and entered the bunkerlike cement viewing station where a prerecorded female voice said through thin speakers, “This is the eighteenth step.”

Owen Adler, dressed in a dark blue business suit and wearing a pink shirt with French cuffs, stood alone before the viewing glass, where an enormous salmon slowly waved its tail and maintained a stationary hold in the strong current. The narrator’s voice droned on overhead, but Daphne tuned it out. She approached him and they kissed, not as lovers, but as acquaintances. This bothered her.

“Not followed?” she asked.

“No. Not that I could tell. You?”

“No.”

“So,” he said. “It’s good to see you. How did it go last night? Did you get in all right?”

“Fowler found me out.” She explained her interruption in the file room. “I have to ask you a few things,” she said, “that are not easy to ask, but they need answering. They need honest answering. And if the answers aren’t what I hope they will be, then I want you to know that I would sooner leave the case, even leave the department than betray your confidence. I don’t know how you find it, but it’s hard for me, Owen, to be divided between work and you this way.”

“Divided? Aren’t we working together? Perhaps you should ask those questions,” he said, revealing his concern.

She nodded, glancing briefly at the lumbering salmon, nearly three feet long, whose journey had carried it from the ocean to this fish ladder and soon beyond into the waters of Lake Union-a long, arduous journey.

She said, “The company is insured to the tune of eighty million dollars in the event of product tampering. How stable is the company financially? Is there any chance that anyone around you might have created this incident in order to win enough insurance money to redesign or remarket your product line?”

To her relief, the shock and astonishment that froze his features confirmed to her that he had never heard of, had never considered such a possibility. He finally managed to say, “Is it that much? Eighty?”

“Is that your answer?”

“Financial stability? We’re an international corporation now, Daphne. We have assets and liabilities that are managed and juggled and manipulated to please those who issue us our credit. It’s unprofitable to make too much profit, so you leverage your profits for more credit to expand your business and you go deeper in debt. It’s a huge wheel. My job is to keep the wheel moving, for it’s movement that sustains growth and therefore an ever-increasing asset base. At any one time we’re seriously in debt, if that’s what you’re asking. But the product line is both well designed and marketed, and I, for one, can’t see any reason to change that. And to go to such lengths to change it is absurd.”

“If you wanted to redesign the line, could you afford to?”

“Right now? Is that what you’re asking? We’re moving into Europe. At this very moment our resources would be a little slim.”

“Has anyone made such a suggestion?”

“Within the company? We’re always getting those kinds of suggestions! Listen, we invented a market niche: the low-fat, organic ingredient-wholesome soups, frozen dinners, desserts. For a while we existed there in a vacuum; we owned that niche. Not so anymore; we’re under attack from every major out there. There’s always someone within our ranks who thinks we’ve got the wrong look or that we’re missing a major play that could be accomplished by a few subtle changes. I encourage that kind of independent thinking. There are some who want a more unified labeling to our products, others who understand the success of our diversity. Inventing a new look for our cans. You name it, I have heard about it.” He studied her. “You’re suggesting that, meeting my resistance, someone may have gone to this kind of extreme to see their ideas through to fruition. I don’t believe that for a second. Absolutely not. We’ve lost market share, sure we have; this push into Europe has strained our pocketbooks, no question; but resort to something like this? Forget it!”

Another large salmon entered at the left of the window and swam forward, crowding out the one that was resting and sending it out of view, off to the nineteenth step. They watched it, the narrator’s voice going on about breeding grounds.

“Tell me about Longview Farms,” she said, facing the Plexiglas viewing window, but alert for any other early-morning visitors. The tourists wouldn’t get here until mid-morning, and if it rained, maybe not at all.

“That’s going back,” he said. “Did you dig up that name in the files?”

She did not answer. She saw how scarred and beat-up this latest fish seemed to be, and thought that the sea was a much more hostile environment than she had envisioned it. The jaws of the big fish opened rhythmically, followed by a fanning of the gills.

“A supplier back in our New Leaf days. A family venture. Poultry farm. Good people to work with. Good product.”

“Tainted product.”

He nodded. “You’re speaking of the salmonella contamination,” he stated. “So you were able to find that, were you? That’s what you wanted, right?” he asked reproachfully. “Honestly, that surprised me at the time. Mark Meriweather produced good birds, ran a solid operation. That’s why I used him in the first place.”

“That was also chicken soup, Owen. And that’s the kind of coincidence that cannot be ignored. A company put out of business-bankrupted-by a series of lawsuits directly connected to your former company.

“Owen, I need an absolute point-blank answer …” She waited and then asked, “Are you aware that the State Health lab report that blamed the Longview Farms poultry for the salmonella contamination may have been altered?”

“Come again?”

“Altered. Forged. Changed.”

The blank expression on Adler’s face was all the convincing she needed. She felt the knot that had formed in the center of her chest loosen as a drip of perspiration skidded coolly down her ribs, sending a chill down her side. She told herself that he did not know anything about this. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

“I don’t have proof,” she said. “Not yet.” She stepped closer to him. “But if someone at State Health altered that report in order to frame Longview Farms, then we have some serious motivation that may help to explain or even identify your blackmailer.” She added, “Even if there was only the perception that Longview Farms was unjustly accused, it could be enough to set someone off.”

“That was four, maybe five years ago.”

“Part of the thrill of revenge is in the plotting, the planning. Strangely enough, the execution of the plan is often a letdown. It’s one of the reasons the individual will stretch it out, given half a chance. Revenge-motivated crimes are unpredictable that way.”

A young couple entered, hand in hand. Daphne studied the transparencies of the varieties of fish that might be seen in the viewing window. The woman said to her, “Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Daphne mugged a smile and waited the full five minutes until the couple left. Alone again, she approached Adler.

She said, “I need access to the New Leaf archives-the hard copies of what I saw on the computers at the Mansion. I need the original of that lab report.”

“What about getting it from State Health?”

“If someone at State Health altered the file, I’d rather know that before paying them a visit. We may get some arrests out of this, and if we do, we may get some answers.”

The big salmon grew active as smaller fish crowded the tank. After a few minutes they settled down, their mouths moving as if talking, as if mocking Daphne Matthews and Owen Adler, she thought.

“Can you get me in?” she asked.

“Hmm?” Adler was lost in thought.

“Without a lot of hassle.”

“Of course I can.”

“Without Howard Taplin knowing,” she clarified.

“But you don’t think-”

“Don’t ask,” she interrupted. “It’s part of my job to be suspicious. Not that I always like it.”

“I suppose it ruined Meriweather, something like that. Busted him, probably. What about the wife?” he asked. “Where did she end up in all of this?”

Daphne hesitated a second, reluctant to answer, but then decided that honesty was a two-way street and that she owed him hers. “At the top of my list,” she said.

The salmon turned viciously and bit one of its smaller cousins. The water clouded with an explosion of activity, and when it cleared again the big salmon was all alone and the bench at the viewing station was empty.