Boldt 03 - No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson Read Free Book Online

base,” Mann mumbled, nodding. And then to explain himself, “The cholera needs a protein base to survive. Soup would provide that.” He rubbed his eyes. “What’s this world coming to?”
    Boldt was thinking that this man could be the bastard behind it all. His lab. His cholera. Why not? Except that Dixie swore by Mann, and that was good enough for Boldt.
    “How many have access to the cholera? To the lab?” he questioned.
    “Too many,” Mann said. “Coffee?”
    “No thanks.”
    “Anything?”
    “Tea would be nice.”
    “Give me a minute, will you? I pulled some stuff for you to read.” He stood. Boldt called out, “No cream. No sugar.”
    “Be right back.”
    A lot of what Boldt read was over his head, but some was not. He was distracted, in part by the fact that this was a children’s research hospital. In the last forty-eight hours, he had seen precious little of his boy. Liz, too, for that matter. When he was away from Miles for too long, he missed him in a way that until the boy’s birth he had never experienced, and would never have expected. It was a chemical longing, like an addict after his fix.
    “Make any sense of that?” Mann asked, setting down Boldt’s tea in a Styrofoam cup. Liz would not drink out of Styrofoam cups anymore.
    The tea tasted terrible, but Boldt choked it down for the caffeine. “If I’m the person doing this, why do I choose cholera?”
    Dr. Mann considered this a long time. When he finally spoke, it was cautiously, a man unfamiliar and uncomfortable with being inside the mind of a stranger. “It depends on what you hope to accomplish. I would guess he considered three choices—a poison, a viral contaminate, a bacterial contaminate. The toxins, the poisons—strychnine, or something like what we saw in the Sudafed product tampering—can and will be immediately detected in the blood of the victim. If you’re just looking to kill a few people, then that’s the poison of choice, I would think. Most of your other choices, if you’re talking food products, will give themselves away, either by producing a gas you can smell or a taste that warns you immediately what you’re into. Also, all of the more common of these would be immediately detected in the state lab. If it was me, I too would choose cholera if available. What’s interesting about cholera is that labs around here once tested for it, but many don’t any longer. This gets political, I’m afraid; this enters into health care and insurance costs, and believe me, you don’t want to get me started. But the point is, this is the exact area where reduced health care costs are felt. The lab has to cut something and they cut right here. We see virtually no cholera up here. Dropping that test is justifiable at every level of bureaucracy. Don’t tell that to these two kids, mind you.”
    “You’d miss the cholera. Is that what you’re saying?”
    “It would take longer to type—which is what happened. If I wanted to make a few people real sick, if I wanted to use something that would take awhile to detect, confuse the authorities, then I’d look to something like this strain of cholera.”
    “A scare technique?” Boldt took out his notebook and pen.
    “Could be.” Mann tasted his coffee. He grimaced, but drank it. “Is it?”
    Boldt did not answer.
    “Make this company look bad?” Mann glanced up. Again, Boldt did not answer. “Which company? Or can’t you say?”
    “Adler Foods,” Boldt answered. He wrote the product-run number on a page of his notepad, tore it out, and handed it to Mann. “They’re clearing the shelves of this product-run number as we speak. The number will be announced on the news tonight, and in the papers for the next couple of days. At this point the public won’t be told exactly why there’s a recall.”
    “Why not tell them?”
    “The individual has warned against police involvement. And there’s also a concern about copycats. It’s the biggest risk with product