Grave Doubts (A Paranormal Mystery Novel) (22 page)

Lee was focused
on the lab tech and almost missed her cue. “Oh,” she uttered, “Sure.”

Lee’s off-the-mark
reply brought a look of irritation from Ruth, but the lab tech left the area
making it unnecessary to continue the charade.

“You’ll have to
do better than that,” Ruth chided.

“Sorry, I was
distracted. So, how would someone run an unordered test?”

Ruth thought a
moment. “They could spike a sample with what we call a standard. If they did it
with a positive standard, the sample would test positive.”

“Even though
the sample initially had no trace of drugs?”

“That’s right.”

“And then the
sample would go to the drug confirmation room?”

“Not
necessarily. If they were only running controls it wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“What’s a
control?”

“Quality
control tests,” she clarified. “Every tech has some responsibility for quality
control. Routine controls are run daily.”

“Could someone
fake a quality control run?”

“I suppose so,
although I’m not sure why they would.”

“Would anyone
notice if they did?”

“You mean,
would they notice if someone was running something they shouldn’t be?”

“Yeah.” Lee
felt her pulse quicken at the thought she may be onto something.

“They could
probably do it undetected. The techs work on a variety of samples during their
shift. And as you can see, this place is a bit like a maze, and no one looks
over their shoulders.”

There was a
black ribbon stretched across the flat screen of the computer right next to
them. Lee noticed it.

“Whose station
is this?” she asked, indicating the ribbon. “Did someone die?”

“Yes. Her name
was Martha Osgood. She had this station for seven or eight years.”

“Wow, that’s
sad. What happened to her?”

Ruth’s face
fell. “She was killed last night…in a hit and run accident. Somebody mowed her
down right in front of her own apartment. She worked the night shift and was on
her way to work. I think that’s probably why no one’s at the computer today.
Out of respect.”

“No one saw who
hit her?”

Lee turned
slowly to stare at the refrigerator and for the second time in just a few days,
she felt like someone had crossed over her grave.

“I’m told they
found the car, but it was stolen. Martha was very nice. She’ll be missed.” Just
then a woman appeared at the corner of the aisle.

“Ruth, you have
a phone call. It’s Mary Jacobs from the blood bank. And everyone is in the
break room. Jack is just about to start the meeting.”

“I’ll take the
call. And tell Jack I’ll be a few minutes late.” With a look of apology, she
said to Lee, “I’ve got to take this call, but I’ll come right back. The meeting
can wait.” In a flurry of colorful folds of fabric, she billowed away.

Lee was left to
survey her surroundings. The reflection in the window drew her attention again.
It was directly above Martha Osgood’s station. Lee looked from the reflection
back to the refrigerator. During the daytime, the reflection in the window was
faint, but Lee imagined how crisp it might be at nighttime, set against the
darkness outside. The refrigerator opened from right to the left. That way, the
interior would also be reflected in the window, along with whatever anyone was
doing. The newspaper ad for the refrigerator suddenly made sense. Somewhere
behind her a door closed.

She looked
around to make sure no one was coming back to the work stations and then moved
over to the refrigerator. With a momentary heart flutter, she opened the door
and glanced inside, sure that she was shattering yet one more rule of order.
Leaning on the counter with her right hand, she leaned in to peer into the cold
interior. She studied the labels attached to the small cups, wondering again
what exactly the anonymous tip about the refrigerator meant. Was someone doing
something illegal using this refrigerator? And was the messenger Martha Osgood?

Without
warning, the warm flesh of another hand landed directly on top of hers. Lee jerked
her hand back as a shriek erupted from her throat. A dark blue sleeve
disappeared from the other side of the counter. Lee backed up against the
opposite counter, wheezing like an asthmatic. She glanced to her left. She could
make a dash for the main hallway. Just as she was about to move, something
brushed against the lobe of her right ear. Lee rebounded to her left and bumped
against the counter like the steel ball in a pinball machine. Her foot got
caught under the wheel of a cart, and she would have fallen had it not been for
a strong hand. She was about to say thank you, when she found herself staring
once more into the leering face of Bud Maddox. He held her wrist in a firm
grip, the blue sleeve of his shirt folded back against his forearm.

“I didn’t scare
you, did I?” he smiled. “I couldn’t resist, you know. There you were, sneaking
a peak into a restricted refrigerator. This is the second time I’ve saved you
from a nasty fall.”

The aroma of
his aftershave lingered in her nostrils from where he had touched her ear. The
smell immediately took her back to the night in her hallway, and her entire
body went rigid.

“It was you,”
she exhaled. “You…you…” she couldn’t finish her sentence. But the thought of
his hand on her skin made her anger boil over. “You fucking bastard,” she said
in a low voice.

She wrenched
her arm free, but Maddox’s smile only broadened. “Well, now, we didn’t get to
that part, did we?  I mean the fucking part. We were just warming up.”

“I’ll report
you.”

“No you won’t,”
he smiled, leaning in. “Because if you did, I’d have to tell them about that
file you had on me. The one you stole from HR. It would get you − and
probably your friend, Robin − fired.”

He continued to
chuckle, the way a schoolyard bully laughs when his victim pleads to get his
lunch money back. But Lee had finally hit her limit. She took a deep breath and
leaned toward him.

“If you EVER
touch me again, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

He waited a
moment and then grinned.

“Gee, thanks
for the warning.” Suddenly, the arrogant expression was gone. “I’d be careful,
Lee, if I were you. You’re digging yourself into a pretty big hole around here.
And there are people who don’t like it.”

With that, he
turned and left. Lee remained where she was, her body numb. A moment later,
Ruth appeared at the end of the aisle.

“What did Mr.
Wonderful want?” she asked, looking at his departing figure.

Lee took a deep
breath to quiet her thoughts.

“Nothing,” she
lied. “Can we go back to your office?”

Ruth gave her a
suspicious look. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just
need to get rid of the stench left behind by that guy.”

When they’d
gone back to Ruth’s office and closed the door, Lee sat in a chair for a
moment, catching her breath.

“Lee, what
happened out there? You look a little green.”

Something
inside her told Lee to play down the incident. “Everything about that guy makes
me sick, that’s all.” She wiped perspiration from her forehead. “Listen, I have
just a couple more questions and then I’ll get out of your way. So, how would
someone produce a phony report?  Wouldn’t you have to put it into the
computer?  And if you did, wouldn’t that produce a record?”

“Not
necessarily,” her friend replied. Ruth reached into a pile of papers on her
desk and produced a piece of paper, carefully putting her thumb over the name
of the patient. “Here’s what the report looks like. If the person had any
knowledge of computer programming, it would be easy to run a phony report like
this, and it would never show up officially.” Ruth looked closely at Lee, her
dark eyes straining to understand. “Is that what you think happened, Lee?”

Lee didn’t hear
the question because she had stopped breathing. “I found a report like this in
Diane’s condo.”

“You’re
kidding?  Did it have Diane’s name on it?”

“I didn’t
notice.”

“You need to
get that piece of paper, Lee,” she said with earnest. “And find out what it is.”

“Can I keep
this?”

“Sure.” Ruth
took a marking pen and blotted out the name before giving it to Lee.

The pounding in
Lee’s ears was loud enough to make her feel like she was at a nightclub. She
got up and reached for the door handle, but was caught off-guard by the sight
of a card pinned to a bulletin board right next to the door. Her eyes locked on
four-lines of verse written in familiar, cursive handwriting.

“Who gave this
to you?” Lee demanded, her head suddenly clear as glass.

“Martha,” Ruth
replied, standing behind her. “She was an odd little woman. Meek and mild, I
suppose you’d say. Most of the time you forgot she was even here, she was so
quiet. But she liked to write limericks and left little notes for people in
verse all the time. She gave me that to welcome me back on Monday.”

“Did she ever
quote Shakespeare?” Lee asked, knowing the answer.

“Yes. But
usually she wrote the verse herself.”

Lee stared at
the card until she heard Ruth clear her throat. Lee looked up to see Maddox
staring at them from across the room, a deeply satisfied grin on his face. Lee
knew she should be unnerved, perhaps even scared, but something inside her had
shifted with the realization that Bud Maddox was the one who had broken into
her house and terrified her. With a firm set of her jaw, she stared back at the
man she now believed may have killed not once, but twice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lee pulled in
at the east entrance to the Green Valley Lumber Company a few minutes after two
o’clock. After her conversation with Ruth, her mind was working overtime trying
to figure out how she could regain entrance to Diane’s condo to find that sheet
of paper. Also fighting for her attention were images of Maddox and the death
of the lab technician, Martha Osgood. It was a miracle her mind cleared in time
to prevent her from driving right through the yellow guardhouse barrier, but
she slammed on her brakes half a second before the grille of her car broke it
in two. A young man with wispy brown hair and a thin mustache came to the
passenger side window.

“Good
afternoon,” he said crisply.

“I’m here for a
tour,” she said, wondering if he’d noticed she’d almost smashed through his
barrier. “I’m with Twin Rivers Hospital.”

“Yes.” He
consulted a clipboard. “You’ll be meeting with Mr. Gilman.”

He directed her
to the Research and Development office, before returning to the guardhouse to
lift the barrier. She managed to pull forward without mishap and find the right
building. She parked next to a blue Ford pickup, but sat for a moment taking a
few deep breaths to regain her composure before heading up to the second floor.

“There she is,”
Jay Gilman offered amiably when she finally made an appearance. “Come on in,
Lee.”

Gilman was a
small man in his early forties, with round, dark eyes and thick, dark hair. A
nervous energy punctuated every gesture, as if he were inhabited by another
person trying desperately to get out. He nodded to a man who stood to his left.

“I assume you
know Mr. Rupert?”

“Yes.” Lee
greeted the photographer with a formal nod.

Gilman was
already pointing to a second man who stood behind a metal desk. “This is Arthur
Masterson. He’s our environmental specialist.”

Masterson was
about thirty-five with a lock of bright red hair that flopped into a set of
piercing blue eyes. He stood by passively, giving the floor to his boss.

“Arthur will
take you on the tour,” Gilman rattled on. “I’m expecting a phone call, and
Arthur knows the plant as well as anyone.” Everyone smiled and nodded. “We’re
very excited you’ll be doing the article on our night shift. They don’t get
much attention. So, now we need to get you guys into hard hats.”

Gilman turned
and pulled two yellow hard hats from a shelf behind him and handed them over.
Lee’s was too large and it slipped to one side. She pushed it back up with a
snap, wishing she could be anywhere but here right now. She had things to do.

“And, here,”
Gilman said, reaching into a drawer. He pulled out two small packets and handed
one to Lee and one to Rupert. “Ear plugs – in case you need them. It gets
pretty loud out there. Okay, follow Arthur and he’ll take good care of you.”

Lee thanked him
and Gilman left. She and the photographer trailed behind their leader like a couple
of kids on a field trip. They descended the stairs and sloshed across the yard,
through sawdust and mud, to a building about a hundred feet away. Masterson
stopped at a metal staircase that led up to an unmarked door.

“This mill only
works the day shift, but the South mill runs twenty-four hours a day. If you
choose the mill for the photograph, you’ll go over there tonight. The two
plants are identical.”

Rupert towered
over everyone else; he nodded without uttering a sound. Lee remembered that
Sally had remarked once that Rupert preferred to deal in images rather than
words. Watching him swivel his dark head back and forth taking in his surroundings,
he looked like a human camera, mentally photographing his environment.

Masterson
climbed the stairs and yanked open the door, releasing the dull roar of a
working sawmill. The sounds of metal on metal, metal on wood, and the rattle
and clank of moving chains created a crushing disharmony of noise. Lee
momentarily cupped her hands over her ears to block it out and then remembered
the ear plugs. She quickly opened the packet and stuffed one in each ear,
before following the group onto a steel catwalk that jangled underfoot and
swayed under the combined weight of three people.

Lee glanced
through the steel grids to the floor below, thinking that wearing a dress would
have been unthinkable. She looked out over the operating mill. It seemed that everywhere
she looked, something was moving − sawing, flipping, or sorting. Conveyor
belts ran in every direction. When a piece of machinery finished its job,
multiple conveyor belts transported the wood or its byproducts to the next
location. Lee was transfixed, momentarily forgetting the events from earlier
that afternoon.

The group kept
moving to a flight of stairs that led to a small structure mounted above the
operation. It looked to be about the size of a studio apartment, with a front
door and two windows looking out over the mill. Masterson stopped at the foot
of the stairs, turned and yelled back at them.

“This is the
filing room.”

Rupert had to
lean down to shout in his ear. “What’s the filing room?”

“It’s where we
repair and sharpen the saw blades,” he yelled. “Could be a good backdrop for
the photo.”

Rupert nodded.
They climbed the short staircase and entered through a single door. When the
door closed, the blaring sounds of the mill were partially muffled, and Lee
removed the ear plugs. Masterson motioned for them to come closer.

“This is what’s
called a vibration-free room,” he announced, his hands making a wide arc to
include the entire room. “We strive to achieve precision accuracy. The higher
our accuracy, the more lumber we produce. In fact, we beat our competition by
using thinner saws.” He walked over to a stack of ribbon-like saw blades that
sat on the floor behind him. “See this saw tip?  This is called stellite.” His
fingers touched the point of a blade where there was a color differentiation in
the metal. “It’s harder than steel, which means it’s harder than the saw blade
itself. When it’s applied, it actually becomes part of the blade.”

Lee took a
closer look at the band of dark color where the two metals had become one. She
pointed this out to Rupert, but his thoughts were imperceptible as his dark
eyes clicked away.

“These are band
saws.” Masterson gestured to a set of blades that looked like large steel
rubber bands. “The blade is wrapped around two wheels and then stretched tight
with 35,000 pounds of pressure. It’s important that sawdust doesn’t build up
down here in the gullet. If it fills up with sawdust, the blade will heat up.”

“And that’s a
problem?”  Rupert finally joined the conversation, putting a sick of gum in his
mouth.

“Think of it
like a rubber band. If you stretch the rubber band and then heat it, it will
become limber. If the blade becomes limber, it will move through the wood like
a snake. Not good.”

Masterson moved
to the other end of the room, where a trap door opened to the floor below.

“Once the
blades are sharpened, they’re lowered back into the mill from here,” Masterson
pointed. “And here are the trim saws.”

He turned and
they moved to another machine busy grinding a more traditional round saw blade.
When the sharpener met the blade, it emitted a high-pitched metallic whine and
shot off a ring of sparks. Lee walked past it and poked her head into a small
workroom that sat off to one side. Just then, Masterson called her back.

“Let’s go back
the way we came in,” Masterson offered quietly.

Re-entering the
mill deafened Lee’s sensitive ears and she replaced the ear plugs. They crossed
more catwalks until Masterson crowded them into a small room and closed the
door, again shutting out much of the noise. A heavy man in overalls sat on a
metal stool at the far end of the room staring at a computer. A large picture
window extended the length of the room, reminding Lee of the surgical
observation rooms in teaching hospitals.

“This is where
it all begins,” Masterson explained. “The log comes in from the yard and goes
through the de-barker. The de-barker spins around the log and scrapes the bark
off as it travels through. The log then comes through the head rig just
outside,” he said, pointing to his right. “It’s sent in here, scanned and sent
to the saw.”

They looked out
the window and saw a log as it was flipped up onto a turning chain and held.
Something that looked like a short, covered bridge on wheels suddenly whizzed
over it.

“Wow, what was
that?” Lee asked in awe.

“That’s the scanner,”
Masterson replied with a slight smile. “The scanner measures the log and
decides how to cut each one.” He pointed to where the log was now positioned
between two steel pads. “Those pads are called dogs. They’ll hold it in place
while the log is sawed.”

As they
watched, the log was carried through the saws and quickly cut into three
pieces. The cut timber instantly fell onto a conveyor belt and returned to the
area in front of the windows. In the blink of an eye, chains picked it up and transferred
it to another set of conveyors moving in the opposite direction, while a second
log took its place. The whole system reminded Lee of the Matterhorn ride at
Disneyland.

“Where does the
junk go?” Rupert inquired, his jaws working the gum in his mouth.

“The trim ends
and edgings go to the chipper. I’ll take you down there in a minute. First, I
want you to look over there.” He pointed to the left where an operator stood at
a console, monitoring the timber as it left the saws. “He’s like a traffic cop.
Boards that need additional cuts get diverted up here.” Masterson pointed to
the far left where a set of irregular cut boards were moving more slowly up
another set of conveyors. “Thinner boards go straight through.”

Lee looked
back. The operator had stopped the conveyor and stepped out to reposition a
board. He grabbed what looked like a long handled pick to move the board into
its new position, reminding her of pictures she’d seen of loggers who
skillfully rolled logs in the river.

“That’s called
a picaroon,” Masterson offered, following Lee’s gaze. “It has an extremely
sharp tip and helps move the wood in the direction they need it to go.”

“That’s got to
be dangerous,” she mused out loud.

“Everything
around here is dangerous.”

As he said
this, a huge set of rollers appeared suddenly out of the framework like some
fiendish monster in a cheap science fiction movie and pushed a board forward.

“Jeez,” Lee
said in admiration. “This is pretty amazing.”

He smiled
indulgently. “C’mon, I’ll take you downstairs.”

Masterson led
them through a maze of ductwork and conveyor belts and down a cement staircase
until they were at the back of the building. They crossed a small open area
surrounded by large metal cylinders and climbed a short set of steps onto a
platform, which opened up to the yard below. A large trough, filled with small
pieces of wood, shavings, and sawdust, ran from right to left about two feet
off the floor.

“This is called
a vibrating conveyor. The sawdust falls through those holes at the bottom and
is carried off to another building. Nothing goes to waste here.”

Three loud
whistle bursts startled them, and an operator off to the side punched a button
that made the trough begin to shake. While the sawdust fell through the holes,
the larger wood products were left behind and moved forward until they
disappeared over a ledge into something that thrashed and churned.

“That’s the
chipper,” Masterson said to Rupert. “You wanted to know where the waste goes.
Well, the chipper takes the waste material from the logs and does just what the
name implies, makes them into chips.”

Lee remembered
a groundskeeper at the hospital that had gotten his hand caught in a backyard
chipper the summer before. She often passed him in the hallway and felt cold
when she saw his bandaged arm, imagining how it must have felt. Watching this
chipper now made her think bandages here wouldn’t be necessary, because there
would be nothing left to bandage.

Masterson
gestured for them to follow him back down the short staircase to where several
lines of ductwork converged on the ceiling above. He turned to his right and
led them under the pipes, around a few corners, to a metal ramp that zigzagged
back up to the catwalks. The group left the building through an exit door and
sloshed through the mud again to an adjacent wooden building. This building was
connected to yet a third building by a conveyor chain above them. Lee thought
the most important employee here had to be the guy who kept all these moving
parts moving.

Masterson led
them through a steel door where they found themselves in a cavernous room that
resembled a large barn. In the far right corner was a huge pile of bark. A
large crane sat in the middle of the room, connected to a platform above it.

“This is what
we call the fuel house,” he explained. “We produce our own steam on the
property to heat the kilns.” He pointed to the roof that was more than two
stories high. “See that conveyor that crosses the building up there?”

Lee dropped her
head back to see a large chain that ran across the roofline. Intermittent
daylight flashed by as the chain moved and bark floated down from the roof onto
the bark pile.

“That chain
carries bark from the mill and drops it in here,” Masterson continued. “The
rake,” Masterson gestured to the crane, “is hooked up to the rake carriage above.”
He pointed to where the crane was attached to a platform that ran the width of
the building. “The rake, or crane, is powered by hydraulics and can swing from
side to side. The carriage, or the bridge it sits on, rolls up and back. And a
boiler operator in the other building watches through a camera and can see when
he has to move fuel around in order feed the chain.”