Bodily Harm: A Novel Read online

  Money always did.

  The letter in Horgan’s file indicated he had sold his design to Kendall. If that were true, it could not have come at a more opportune time for the toy company. Just that morning The Seattle Times had run an article reporting that, despite apparent financial difficulties, Kendall had rejected overtures from Galaxy Toys, the second-largest toy manufacturer in the world. Speculation was that Galaxy would now make a play to obtain the company through a hostile run on its stock. Analysts were criticizing Kendall’s declination as a poor business decision, but Seattleites applauded the move by a local institution and employer of thousands in the region.

  Following the directions Sloane had plugged into the car’s GPS system, he made a right turn on State Street and drove through the heart of town, no more than a couple of square blocks of stucco buildings that looked to have been built in the 1950s. On the outskirts he drove past manufactured homes, well spaced, with metal barnlike structures in the yard and freestanding canopies under which the occupants had parked tractors and other pieces of equipment. Barbed wire on wooden fence poles pastured horses and cattle. But what caught Sloane’s attention was a large metal building that loomed over the town like Mount Rainier over Seattle. Intrigued, he decided to find out what it was.

  At aT in the road he turned and drove to a gated entrance. A ten-foot Cyclone fence with three strands of barbed wire enclosed the building and a parking area surrounding it, a white sign fastened to the chain link.

  KENDALL TOYS

  Now this was getting interesting.

  A car passed Sloane and stopped at the gated entrance, the driver talking to a guard in the booth before the gate pulled aside to allow entry. Sloane saw few cars inside the fence. Most of them were parked in a large paved area outside the compound with a footpath leading to a pedestrian entrance.

  He made a U-turn and the GPS directed him to one of the cookie-cutter manufactured homes, plain beige, with an older model Volkswagen Jetta parked in the gravel driveway. A four-foot-high Cyclone fence enclosed a simple yard with a swing set on a neatly mowed grass lawn.

  It was warmer than it had been in Seattle, but Sloane slipped on his sport coat as he walked to a small porch littered with shoes: work boots that would fit a grown man, women’s tennis shoes, children’s shoes, and rubber boots. He knocked twice. A Hispanic woman pulled open the door and gave him a curious look.

  “Good morning,” Sloane said. “I’m sorry to bother you. Are you Mrs. Gallegos?”

  The woman looked past Sloane to his Jeep parked along the road. “Yes.”

  Sloane offered a business card, which the woman accepted tentatively. “My name is David Sloane. I’m an attorney from Seattle and I was hoping for a moment of your time?”

  The woman looked up from the card, suspicious. “What is this about?” She had a Hispanic accent but her English was strong.

  A very difficult topic, Sloane thought. “I recently had a case in which a young boy got sick. His parents thought it was the flu and took him to the doctor, but he never got better. He got worse. By the time they brought him to the hospital it was too late. He died.”

  The woman stiffened and took a step back from the door, her ponytail swinging as she turned, shouting in Spanish, but which Sloane understood. “Manny, there is a man at the door asking about Mateo.”

  A Hispanic man, short but well built through the shoulders, appeared to the woman’s right, and she handed him Sloane’s business card as she told him in Spanish what Sloane had just said.

  Manny looked to Sloane, hands on his hips, the Seattle Seahawk helmet on his blue shirt sticking out. “What do you want with Mateo?” His accent was thicker than his wife’s.

  “I was telling your wife that I represent a family who also has lost their son. He died of symptoms very similar to the symptoms the newspaper reported your son suffered. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  The man shook his head. “No. We do not talk about it.”

  “I know it must be incredibly difficult—”

  Manny shook his head, already closing the door. “We do not talk about it.”

  “Please, just one question, not about your son.”

  Manny hesitated, hand on the edge of the door.

  Sloane removed Horgan’s manila file from his briefcase and pulled out the best sketch of Metamorphis. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  Manny shot his wife a side glance and appeared about to answer but his wife stopped him, again speaking Spanish.

  “No. The attorney said we cannot say anything, that it will be very bad for us. Do you want us to raise our children in Mexico? There is nothing for us there. Mateo is gone. We cannot bring him back.”

  Manny lowered his head. “No. We do not see before,” he said. Then he stepped back and shut the door.

  PRODUCT SAFETY AGENCY

  BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  ANNE LEROY HAD come to work excited, as she had each day for the past three months. With her degrees in engineering and product design from Georgetown University, her friends thought she was nuts when LeRoy told them she was going to work for a government regulatory agency. She could make three times her salary in the private sector. Call her naïve, but at twenty-four LeRoy didn’t want to be making life decisions based on the almighty dollar. Hadn’t that been the new president’s message? If people believed they could make a difference, they would, and that was the best way to ensure change.

  And now LeRoy was about to prove him right.

  She knocked on the open door and stuck her head in the office. “You wanted to see me.”

  Albert Payne diverted his attention from his computer screen and looked up.

  LeRoy paused, taken aback. Dark bags sagged beneath Payne’s eyes, accentuated by a pasty white complexion with pronounced red splotches on his neck. He looked as though he had aged ten years in the three weeks he had been gone. She wondered if he had picked up the flu on his trip to China, or food poisoning.

  “Come in and sit down,” he said.

  She made her way to one of the two chairs across from him, placing the two-inch-thick document she carried on her lap. “How was your trip? Is it as bad over there as everyone says?”

  Payne cleared his throat. “I want to talk to you about your investigation.”

  LeRoy immediately perked up, as she had that fateful morning when she fielded a cold call from a preschool teacher in Shakopee, Minnesota. The woman told LeRoy that a child in her care had swallowed a magnet no bigger than an aspirin from a broken toy and she was concerned enough that she had called the parents and suggested they take the child to the doctor. Although the doctor had assured the parents the child would be fine and would excrete the magnet, the preschool teacher remained upset. She said the toy came in a box that did not advise of a choking hazard, or even that the toy included these magnets, which she said were very powerful.

  LeRoy put the draft of her report on the edge of Payne’s desk, flipping through the sections. “Wait until you read what the doctor in Cleveland had to say,” she said.

  Starting with leads from ASTM International, LeRoy had made calls to different experts around the country. The magnets, manufactured mostly in China, were called neodymium magnets. Comprised of a metal alloy and artificially magnetized, they were many times more powerful than typical iron magnets, so much so that the attractive forces could be a potential danger, such as to people with pacemakers. Despite this, LeRoy was astounded to find just a single report, funded by the Toy Manufacturer’s Association, that concluded the magnets were safe. Her own investigation had revealed that no one had actually done any tests to confirm the findings, or to determine what might happen if a child were to swallow more than one of these magnets, or a magnet and metal ball, for instance. She also found evidence that the China Toy Association knew that the plastic used for the toy that had broken was a problem but had not reported the problem, and that some American toy manufacturers had been complicit in the cover-up, fearing product
recalls or, at a minimum, consumer restraint.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull the plug, Anne.”

  LeRoy continued to flip the pages, searching for the section in which she quoted the expert from Cleveland. “He was extremely helpful—”

  “Anne.”

  LeRoy stopped flipping the pages and looked up. Specks of dry skin and dust covered the lenses of Payne’s glasses.

  “More budget cuts have left us with just no money to be doing independent investigations.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But . . . but you told me to do it. And I’m nearly done. All I have to do is finalize it.”

  Payne shook his head.

  “The expert in Cleveland said the danger isn’t in a child swallowing one magnet. The danger is if they swallow more than one. He said—”

  “I need you to work on a potential enforcement action against TBD.”

  LeRoy knew TBD to be a manufacturer of detergent, and that there had been recent reports of the product causing chemical burns.

  “TBD? That’s a waste of time; it will go nowhere.” She caught herself, not believing what she had just said to her boss.

  But if Payne was upset he didn’t reveal it. He looked almost bored. “Nevertheless.”

  “I’ll finish it on my own time; I’ll write it up at home.”

  He shook his head. “I know you worked hard on this investigation.”

  “Hard? I’ve spent three solid months on it. I thought it was going to be part of the congressional hearing? How can you just pull the plug? What about Senator Tovey?”

  “It’s out of my hands, I’m afraid.”

  “Is it Maggie Powers?”

  “I’d like you to provide me with all of your research and any drafts you have on your computer. If we get the funding in the future perhaps we can pursue it further.”

  “But it will be too late. The problem is already out there, and the Senate hearing will have passed. Most doctors don’t even consider X-rays because eighty percent of the things a child swallows will just pass through their system. But when you have two—”

  “I’m sorry,” he offered again.

  She became more adamant. “Don’t you want to hear what the doctor in Cleveland said? There is a significant danger to American consumers, to children.”

  “I’ll need all of your files on my desk by this afternoon.”

  “We could take it to the media.”

  Payne pounded the desk, a burst of anger that caused LeRoy to jump back in her seat.

  His gaze focused and his face had flushed an even darker shade of red. “You will do no such thing. Do you understand me?” He tapped the desk with his finger as he spoke. “You work for me. That means you do what I tell you. Your work here belongs to this agency. It’s proprietary. If you release an unauthorized report I will see that you are fired and that the Justice Department prosecutes you to the fullest extent of the law. Do you understand me?”

  LeRoy’s lower lip quivered, but she fought back the tears. A stabbing pain pierced her, exactly where she would have expected, just between the shoulder blades.

  LEROY HURRIED BACK to her cubicle and began to dump the contents of her desk drawers into the cardboard box she found in the supply closet, pausing briefly to dab her eyes with a tissue. She wasn’t bothering to organize her belongings. She didn’t care. Pens and pencils mixed with paper clips and scraps of paper. She grabbed the picture frame with the photo of her former boyfriend, over which she had drawn a bull’s-eye in permanent marker, and tossed it in with a snow globe from Fort Lauderdale. A tear trickled from the corner of her eye but she quickly wiped it away, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction.

  “You’re upset, Anne. Take a minute to think about this.” Peggy Seeley stood outside her cubicle, alternately trying to calm LeRoy and to ask her further questions.

  “There’s nothing to think about. This is a waste of my time.”

  “Did he say why he was pulling the plug?”

  “He said they didn’t have the funds.”

  “Well, that’s probably true,” Seeley said.

  LeRoy stopped what she was doing. “Then why did he bother to have me pursue it at all?” she countered. “What a colossal waste of time. It’s exactly as everyone said it would be.”

  “Calm down. Don’t make any rash decisions.”

  LeRoy didn’t want to hear it, especially not from Seeley, who didn’t even like to order food in a restaurant unless she could see the cook making it. The two had little in common except their jobs. Seeley was overweight and didn’t care. LeRoy worked out daily to try to keep her weight at an even 120 pounds. At twenty-nine, Seeley wore no makeup, wire-rimmed glasses, and did little but brush her light brown hair that extended to the middle of her back. LeRoy wasn’t a fashion princess by any stretch of the imagination, but she did take a few minutes each morning to apply basic makeup. She suspected their friendship would fizzle after she had left the agency.

  “‘Rash’? The only rash decision I made was taking a job at this shithole in the first place.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “We don’t get paid squat. We’re not appreciated, and he just confirmed that we serve no purpose. What’s the point?”

  “This isn’t exactly the best economy to be out looking for a job.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll work in a restaurant again before I stay here another day.”

  “Give it a day or two. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “Trust me; he’s not changing his mind. When I pushed him on it he pounded his fist on the desk and—”

  “Albert pounded his fist? Are you sure you were in the right office?”

  The staff had often joked that Payne’s bland demeanor and passive nature were the result of twenty-five years of boredom that had desensitized him. The man had to be desensitized to put up with all the bureaucratic bullshit for so long. LeRoy wasn’t about to suffer the same fate. Though she had been optimistic about the new administration, she wouldn’t sit around and wait to find out if things really would change.

  “He looked like a thermometer popping out from a cooked turkey. I thought his head was going to explode.”

  LeRoy pulled out a memory stick from her backpack, shoved it into a UBS port on her computer, and sat at the keyboard.

  “What are you doing?” Seeley asked.

  “I’m not done with this, not after all the time I’ve invested.”

  “You can’t take your work; it’s proprietary.”

  “They’re not going to get away with this.”

  “Who?”

  “The agency, Powers, whoever is behind pulling the plug.”

  “You’re going to get yourself in trouble, Anne, and for what? Didn’t you learn anything working around here? You just said it, people don’t care. Nobody cares.”

  “I care.”

  Seeley’s eyes widened. “Well, whatever you’re going to do, you better do it fast because Payne just walked around the corner in this direction and he’s bringing a security guard with him.”

  LEWIS COUNTY COURTHOUSE

  CHEHALIS, WASHINGTON

  PERPLEXED, SLOANE DOUBLE-CHECKED the spelling with the article clipped in Kyle Horgan’s file and retyped the name, but the computer again indicated no match.

  He approached the clerk’s window of the Lewis County Courthouse, located about twenty minutes from Mossylog. A middle-aged woman with reading glasses dangling from a colorful beaded chain around her neck sat behind the glass.

  “I was wondering if you might be able to help me. I’m a bit of a computer dinosaur,” Sloane said.

  “I’m with you,” the woman replied, smiling up at him. “But I can try.”

  “I’m looking for the name of the attorney who represented a young boy who recently died in Mossylog.”

  “Mateo Gallegos,” the woman said without hesitation. “It was in the papers. He got an infection from a rusted nail. It was so s
ad. Cute little guy.”

  “A rusted nail?”

  “That’s what I heard. The family didn’t have insurance, so they waited to bring him to the hospital, and by that time it was too late. We get that here with the migrant workers.”

  The information puzzled Sloane further. “So do you know if there was a lawsuit?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, “but I heard that Dayron Moore was their attorney.”

  Sloane retrieved a pen attached to a chain glued to the counter and wrote down the name. “Darren?”

  “Day-ron.” She wrote the name on a slip of paper despite three-inch-long red nails adorned with stars and moons and handed it to him. “Day-ron.”

  “Interesting name.”

  “Wait until you meet him.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everyone knows Dayron around here. He’s here so often he could do my job.”

  “He files a lot of lawsuits?”

  “He files his share.”

  Which made it even more perplexing that Moore had apparently not filed a lawsuit in this particular instance. “Does he handle a lot of personal injury cases?”

  “Dayron does anything that walks in the door, has a heartbeat, and can pay fifteen hundred dollars up front.”

  Sloane pointed to the computer terminals. “So I gather that if I type in his name it will bring up a list of his cases?”

  The clerk smiled back at him. “Sure. But be prepared to sit there for a while.”

  HALF AN HOUR after leaving the courthouse, Sloane got out of his car and walked the block but could not find the address on State Street in Mossylog. He stepped into Smokey’s House of Billiards on the corner to ask for help. The man behind the bar pointed to a small sign on the wall at the back of the building that said LAW OFFICE. A bent arrow directed anyone interested up a narrow staircase. Dayron Moore likely didn’t get many walk-ins.

  As the clerk had warned, Sloane’s search using the attorney’s name pulled up a long list. Scrolling through the cases, Sloane had quickly deduced that most of Moore’s clients had Hispanic surnames. Clicking on a few of those particular cases he found a paucity of pleadings after the initial complaint. That meant Moore routinely settled, and quickly, which gave Sloane a pretty good idea about Dayron Moore the lawyer.