repackage, and reintroduce a product or an entire line, with the insurance company footing the bill. It would require convincing the police a crime had taken place, and it would require paperwork from police files supporting this. Such paperwork existed already, no doubt, thanks to her enlisting the help of Lou Boldt, and the company had already issued one recall of Mom’s Chicken Soup, which Taplin had claimed would cost the company a quarter-million dollars. But according to this document, it would not cost the company at all. So why had Taplin lied about the cost to the company?
A hollow, sinking feeling stole into her. Her mouth went dry; her palms grew sticky. She loosened her scarf. It did not help.
She backed up in the indexes. She touched N, in the general index and found an entry for New Leaf Foods , the original company name that Adler had operated under until his reorganization several years before. She found the appropriate disk and inserted it into the machine, hit the ENTER key, and was faced now with yet another index. She browsed a variety of categories, astounded by the wealth of information and how easily available and accessed it was.
She browsed New Leaf’s legal documents and used a hypertext SEARCH function to locate all documents containing the word contamination . She took another ten minutes to narrow the result of this search down to several business letters and memos sent between New Leaf and the Washington State Health Department. All of these documents were shown in the index to have archived hard copies.
The first of these letters documented a phone call from the State Health Department alerting New Leaf to a possible contamination of their soup products. This and all subsequent correspondence was handled by Howard Taplin who, judging by the tone, had been cooperative but denied any wrongdoing on the part of Adler Foods. A product recall had been issued.
The dates of the correspondence were filed chronologically. In the middle of the electronic stack, Daphne discovered a copy of a State Health lab report that showed a technical analysis of New Leaf’s Free Range Chicken Soup. The details of Slater Lowry’s death did not escape Daphne’s attention. The psychologist in her suddenly had not only a possible motivation, but a convincing similarity between the two crimes.
She anxiously hurried forward in the correspondence searching for further explanations. Memo after memo blurred past. Too many to read thoroughly, but she scanned them all. She resorted to the FIND function, searching first for “chicken” and, faced with dozens of documents, changed the search string to “poultry,” which produced only six hits. She viewed the documents individually, reading each one carefully. On the third document she read the name: Longview Farms .
A rural route address was listed in Sasquaw, Washington. She wrote this down, including the phone number, and continued to speed-read the rest of the documents. Lawsuits and countersuits had been filed. State Heath had charged Longview Farms with the contamination, clearing New Leaf.
Her eye caught the slight uphill angle of a typed word, salmonella . She zoomed in on the image.
Daphne would realize later that had the lab report not been scanned into the computer, had the image not been placed on a large screen that allowed her to zoom in with the magnifying glass icon, she might have missed this and the other changes that appeared to have been made. One of these changes was the date— September 15 —which appeared slightly askew, imperceptibly misregistered on the line with the rest of the typewritten data. Over the next fifteen minutes she scrutinized this document, studying all the vital information and discovering what appeared to be five separate changes. Six or seven, possibly. At last she leaned back in the chair studying the screen and released a huge sigh that she had unknowingly been containing. It seemed possible that this lab report had
A hollow, sinking feeling stole into her. Her mouth went dry; her palms grew sticky. She loosened her scarf. It did not help.
She backed up in the indexes. She touched N, in the general index and found an entry for New Leaf Foods , the original company name that Adler had operated under until his reorganization several years before. She found the appropriate disk and inserted it into the machine, hit the ENTER key, and was faced now with yet another index. She browsed a variety of categories, astounded by the wealth of information and how easily available and accessed it was.
She browsed New Leaf’s legal documents and used a hypertext SEARCH function to locate all documents containing the word contamination . She took another ten minutes to narrow the result of this search down to several business letters and memos sent between New Leaf and the Washington State Health Department. All of these documents were shown in the index to have archived hard copies.
The first of these letters documented a phone call from the State Health Department alerting New Leaf to a possible contamination of their soup products. This and all subsequent correspondence was handled by Howard Taplin who, judging by the tone, had been cooperative but denied any wrongdoing on the part of Adler Foods. A product recall had been issued.
The dates of the correspondence were filed chronologically. In the middle of the electronic stack, Daphne discovered a copy of a State Health lab report that showed a technical analysis of New Leaf’s Free Range Chicken Soup. The details of Slater Lowry’s death did not escape Daphne’s attention. The psychologist in her suddenly had not only a possible motivation, but a convincing similarity between the two crimes.
She anxiously hurried forward in the correspondence searching for further explanations. Memo after memo blurred past. Too many to read thoroughly, but she scanned them all. She resorted to the FIND function, searching first for “chicken” and, faced with dozens of documents, changed the search string to “poultry,” which produced only six hits. She viewed the documents individually, reading each one carefully. On the third document she read the name: Longview Farms .
A rural route address was listed in Sasquaw, Washington. She wrote this down, including the phone number, and continued to speed-read the rest of the documents. Lawsuits and countersuits had been filed. State Heath had charged Longview Farms with the contamination, clearing New Leaf.
Her eye caught the slight uphill angle of a typed word, salmonella . She zoomed in on the image.
Daphne would realize later that had the lab report not been scanned into the computer, had the image not been placed on a large screen that allowed her to zoom in with the magnifying glass icon, she might have missed this and the other changes that appeared to have been made. One of these changes was the date— September 15 —which appeared slightly askew, imperceptibly misregistered on the line with the rest of the typewritten data. Over the next fifteen minutes she scrutinized this document, studying all the vital information and discovering what appeared to be five separate changes. Six or seven, possibly. At last she leaned back in the chair studying the screen and released a huge sigh that she had unknowingly been containing. It seemed possible that this lab report had
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