Pied Piper lbadm-5

by Ridley Pearson

  “A drive.”

  “A drive,” she repeated. “You and me? Me alone?”

  “All questions,” he answered, his eyes betraying his pain.

  She hated herself. “Let me start all over. Please, please forgive me. Let me just say yes. Whatever it is, whatever it entails: Yes. The answer is yes.”

  “The thing is,” he explained in a lifeless drone, “I’m preoccupied with something else and Marina is out. It’s you, or Bear, or Dixie. I’m asking you first is all. It doesn’t mean you have to do it.”

  “And I’m honored. I have already accepted,” Daphne reminded him. “I could use a drive.” She added, “Where to, what for?” Then she caught herself in another question and apologized softly. He needed soft at the moment.

  “You remember the Lux-Wash up above Green Lake? The arson case?”

  “Of course.”

  “Be there in an hour.” He checked his watch. “One hour.”

  She tensed at the request. Intelligence involved itself in a variety of complex investigations, from political corruption conspiracies to eavesdropping on the Asian mob. Was this work-related or personal? Had she gotten it wrong? “One hour at the Lux-Wash,” she repeated dryly.

  “I can make it sooner if you want. But no later,” he cautioned.

  “An hour is fine. Plenty of time.”

  “An hour then. Park to the east out on Eightieth. I’ll pull past. I won’t honk or anything; you’ll have to be watching. You’ll come in behind me and we pull into the line that way: me directly ahead of you. Decline the interior cleaning. That means you can stay in your car and won’t go into the waiting room. You’ll need a full tank. Maybe a snack. Animal Crackers,” he blurted out, as if picking her snack.

  “Miles,” she said, suddenly understanding. She had been around the boy enough to make that connection.

  His eyes flashed angrily. “Maybe an apple. Granny Smiths.”

  “Got it.” It was Miles. Sarah too? she wondered. She wanted to ask about car seats, but didn’t.

  Genuinely concerned, he asked her, “You’re sure you don’t mind?” He glanced once again toward the cash register as if expecting someone else.

  “One hour at the Lux-Wash,” she repeated.

  “Do exactly as I’ve told you,” he stated harshly. Then he stood, the chair legs crying against the floor.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Don’t follow out for several minutes.”

  “No.”

  “That’s important. Several minutes.”

  “I understand.” She didn’t at all.

  He walked out of the cafe, filling the light in the doorway, moving into silhouette, which removed all identity. It was raining again. Gray begetting gray. She wanted springtime. She wanted Boldt well again. She kept track of the time on her watch, knowing from experience that minutes took forever to pass when she was rattled. A ferry sounded, its call haunting and lonely. It reminded her of him, vacant and distant and casting no reflection.

  She checked her watch again. Three minutes had passed. In fifty-seven more she was due at the car wash.

  She waited for him, parked on 80th Street North, her attention trained on the outboard rearview mirror. He was five minutes late, which was not like him. She understood the car wash routine. They had used similar tricks before. Life as a cop was part deception. Of all the cops on the force, she was the most devoted to Boldt.

  His Chevy pulled past. No acknowledgment. She couldn’t see into his car through the light drizzle, but she suspected Miles was in there.

  She remained attentive as she followed him into the car wash entrance.

  The Chevy rounded the back corner, and an attendant, armed with a long vacuum hose, arrived at the driver’s door carrying an umbrella. Boldt waved him off.

  Daphne pushed the SEND button on the cell phone at the same time as she rolled down her driver’s window and also declined the interior work. Two in a row was too much for the attendant. He looked at her with a slack jaw and asked, “No?”

  “No,” she answered definitely, rolling up the window and hoping Boldt would answer his own cellular.

  The Chevy pulled into the foaming shower of soap and spray followed a moment later by her Honda, both cars swallowed by the machinery. The rinse water followed, and immediately behind that, powerful jets of air that drove rivulets of water out across the hood and up the windshield like a silver fan. Within that blur, Boldt emerged from his car carrying a large child seat with his son strapped inside. In his other hand he carried a duffle bag. The exchange happened quickly, and in the bending, distorted light of the car wash, Boldt appeared to jump across the front of her car and, suddenly, was wrenching open her side door and working the car seat into the back and fixing a seat belt across it as he moved to keep pace with the wash conveyor. He handed her a crushed and wrinkled sheet of paper saying something about it being “their address.” He told her not to stop at the end of the wash-he would pay for her. He added, “You’re not to use your cell phone for any reason.” The car door thumped shut. Soaking wet, Boldt hurried and reentered the Chevy just before it emerged from the throat of the machinery.

  At a red light she reached down and unfolded the piece of paper he had handed her. Katherine Sawyer. Boldt’s sister. A street address in Wenatchee, Washington. A phone number. A long drive ahead of her.

  Where was Sarah? she wondered. A moment later, another, more terrifying thought occurred: Was this the question Boldt did not want asked?

  CHAPTER 24

  Boldt sequestered himself in his office, phones off, to decide what to do, well aware that whatever his decision, it would determine not only his future but his daughter’s as well.

  The weather did not coincide with his mood, the heavy cloud cover having given way to warm sunlight the color of daffodils. He pulled down the office’s slatted blinds to darken the room, but ended up with a striped floor, desk, walls and chair, surrounded appropriately enough in a cage of light. Jailed, just as he felt.

  The kidnapper might have asked for money; for all of Boldt’s worldly goods; he might have asked that Liz use her banking authority in some way, a false account, a fake loan; but instead he asked the impossible: that Boldt subvert an investigation.

  In the balance hung his daughter’s life. There was not, therefore, any decision to be made-the choice was obvious. And yet Boldt found himself engaged in debate, understanding how the Pied Piper had kept from being caught, had frustrated Flemming and his team, had moved city to city with a license to pluck infant children from their parents’ arms. It was no wonder he hadn’t been caught, that investigators had so few leads; the deck had been stacked in each city.

  Once committed, there was no turning back. His powers far-reaching, the lieutenant of Intelligence had only to pick up the phone to initiate interdepartmental wiretapping. If he were to compromise the investigation, then he needed every piece of it, every whisper, every consideration. Information was everything. He had to know it all. He ran the names off to the civilian who ran Tech Services: “Hill, Mulwright, LaMoia, Gaynes, Lofgrin.” He waited for some kind of acknowledgment. When the man on the other end failed to speak, Boldt said, “Do you have that?”

  “I’ve got it. Record all of them,” he stated. “Twenty-four hour loops or real time?”

  “Real time.” He added, “What happened to live monitoring?”

  “This is too many lines, unless you can provide the personnel.”

  “No other choices?”

  “AI,” the man offered, “artificial intelligence. It’s a new system, prone to bugs, but we’ve used it a couple times to good effect.”

  “You lost me.”

  “The software monitors the phone lines, listening for key words. You put in ‘coke’ or ‘smack’ and if the words come up, the conversation is flagged. When it works, it works beautifully, but the bugs aren’t out. It crashes from time to time; I gotta be honest with you.”

  He ordered the phone lines monitored by AI
.

  To wiretap lines out of office required warrants, and therefore a visit to a judge. Boldt worked with only one judge, the most liberal in the state-this judge had been passed to him by the former lieutenant of the squad, like a mentor.

  After hearing Boldt’s arguments, viewing the numbers requested and understanding their significance, the judge asked only one question of him. “I take it you see no other way to monitor the situation, or you wouldn’t ask.”

  “There’s an insider,” Boldt said blankly, knowing full well he was describing himself. “Has to be. Someone compromising the investigation. Steering it off course. We find that person, and the investigation just might have a fighting chance.”

  The gray head nodded. The pen came out of the drawer. The signature went down. Boldt had authority to wiretap the FBI.

  “They have ways of protecting themselves from such things, don’t they?” the judge asked.

  “The warrant gives us access to the landlines themselves. I’m told by our tech people that it makes all the difference. We go through the US West switching station.”

  “I don’t care who you go through, the shit’s going to fly if they get onto this. You and I are going to be right in the middle of it, and that means you,” he warned.

  “He who complains the loudest is the first person we investigate,” Boldt countered. It’s me, he wanted to say. But who would listen? Lou Boldt compromise a task force investigation? Not likely.

  He did it for Sarah, he reminded himself repeatedly. For Liz. For the family. But with each step he took toward his darker side, he questioned his decision. And he knew even then that before long, he would wish that he could take it all back.

  CHAPTER 25

  Boldt reached his wife’s hospital room, but stopped at the door. For these last weeks of her treatment and the complications surrounding it, his single greatest responsibility had been their children. Time and again she had offered him options, from Marina moving in with him and the kids to parking the kids with various family members until Liz was home again. But Boldt had taken these as a test, both from her and from himself: Could he handle the kids alone? With a few hours from Marina-which he could afford on his lieutenant’s salary-could he make the family work? The larger, unspoken question had to do with his abilities if he lost Liz, if the cancer claimed her as the doctors suggested it would. He needed to know, and so he had repeatedly declined her proposals, reassuring her he had everything under control.

  But now at the hospital room door, tears were stealing his vision for the umpteenth time, because nothing was in control. In one moment his life had become a runaway train. Nurses passing by took him as a grieving husband. Here on the C ward beds emptied quickly and forever; images like the one of Boldt weeping at his wife’s door were not at all uncommon.

  Despite his rehearsal on the way over, what did he hope to say to her? How would he explain the loss of their child? What effect might it have on her health? Could he live with the responsibility of knocking her out of remission and back into the hell of her disease?

  Racked by ill conscience, he allowed himself the lie that he might recover Sarah in a matter of a day or two. He had every key player in the task force under wire surveillance. He had Kay Kalidja working on the victims’ financials. He had Millie Wiggins’ statement from the day care center about calling 911 and being put through to Boldt: an impossibility that required further investigation. Leads, the cop in him convinced the father and husband. Somewhere, something would break. And when it did, Sarah would be home again, the incident in past tense, an acceptable scenario.

  “Lou?” her voice called out from the other side of the door. “Honey?”

  Had she recognized the sound of her husband’s tears or had her uncanny prescience of late detected his presence there?

  He stepped back and away and into the center of the hall, afraid.

  “Honey?” he heard her voice again.

  He turned and walked as fast as his feet would carry him, tempted toward an all-out run. He might have been paged; he might have been called or summoned back to the office. It happened all the time. What of it? A dozen excuses hung there in the offering, awaiting him, memorized from decades of use. But useless because he knew the truth.

  “Lies,” his own voice echoed in his head. A voice unfamiliar to him. A voice he was learning to live with.

  Once begun, there was no turning back. The infection was rampant. Of the two of them, Liz was no longer the terminally ill, he was.

  CHAPTER 26

  Daphne approached the regular four o’clock agonized over her assignment. Hill had requested a snapshot evaluation of every member of the task force-all of whom would be in attendance. Hill had offered no explanation for the unusual request, leaving Daphne anxious.

  Hill had her own grand entrance planned for a few minutes into the meeting. She wanted Daphne’s attention paid to this moment. “Reactions and attitude changes,” she had explained. Sheila Hill remained a nut Daphne found hard to crack.

  More photographs had been added to the situation room’s walls. Death and abduction. Children’s faces everywhere.

  In attendance were Mulwright, LaMoia, Hale, Flemming, Kalidja and herself. SID’s Lofgrin had delivered a report and was available as necessary. Boldt was two floors away.

  Mulwright kicked things off by complaining to Flemming about the FBI lab’s failure to report back on the automotive glass found at several of the crime scenes. The lab had been asked to help ID the product number found on one of the pieces. SPD had heard nothing. Flemming defended the delay, citing recent political and media pressure that had adversely affected the FBI lab.

  Daphne studied tone of voice, eye movement and body language of each and every participant. State of mind was more difficult.

  The group worked well together when dealing with specifics. They anxiously awaited the analysis of the pollen, the lab work on the glass chips, and put great hope in the surveillance of the vacant houses. The proposed direction for the investigation segregated down departmental lines: SPD put faith in Anderson’s killing and a possible connection to the abductions; Flemming wanted little to do with Anderson, insisting that Kay Kalidja’s suggestion to pursue catalog and magazine subscriptions offered the greatest chance for a breakthrough.

  Mulwright proposed concentrating all manpower on surveillance of families with infant children that lived within sight of the abandoned house Boldt had discovered. Flemming argued against this, citing manpower demands. He suggested they notify all parents in the area, reminding, “No child has been taken from a parent-only from baby sitters and relatives of the family.”

  In the two weeks since the Shotz abduction, this was the first mention of this, and for Daphne it went to the psychology of the Pied Piper. She blurted out, “He doesn’t want the confrontation a parent would offer. He’s afraid of violence.” All heads turned to face her.

  “My point is,” Flemming said, “that if a parent stays with that child there will be no kidnapping.”

  Daphne said, “He’s punishing the parent for leaving the child in someone else’s care.” Silence overtook the room. She said, “He’s giving those children to parents desperate for their own; parents who care. Parents who won’t leave that child for anything.”

  “Mumbo jumbo,” Hale quipped.

  Flemming reprimanded his agent with a stern look. To the others he said, “The point is, if we alert the public now, we may save some children.”

  Sheila Hill came through the door without knocking. She won the immediate attention of nearly every man in the room, drawn like moths to light. She wore a plain gray suit, white shirt and black flats. A simple silver necklace hung over her collarbone. Her lipstick was flesh-toned, her hair brushed smooth and held with a clip. Nothing showy. The SPD officers stood for her. The FBI followed reluctantly. In that instant, the mood changed. Authority walked through that door. Even Flemming seemed to understand this.

  Daphne sat up and took notice.

>   At a few minutes before four that same afternoon, a rainstorm relenting to the east, Lou Boldt crossed an internal threshold and, like an ex-drunk sitting in front of a bottle of whiskey, reached out and took his first sip. He simply couldn’t sit there staring at it. If the two who had abducted his daughter had believed him capable of passivity, they had guessed wrong. The cop in him won out. The only way he would ever see his daughter alive again was to beat his own people to the Pied Piper, locate his daughter and do whatever had to be done to take her back. He ruled out nothing. The plan was a simple one-eat or be eaten. His choice was made.

  Tech Services was to provide him twice daily with cassettes of conversations that contained the key words he’d specified: “kidnap,” “kidnapping,” “abduction,” “babies,” “infants,” “task force,” and the names of every player, including the victims and Andy Anderson. The tapes were delivered in an interdepartmental envelope that had to be signed for by Boldt himself. Just another day in Intelligence, but this time Boldt was eavesdropping on his own people.

  He listened to most of the conversations with the tape speed doubled. Voices like chipmunks, but the spoken words understandable. A two-minute phone call became one. Life in half time.

  As he listened, he thought that he had failed as a father, husband and cop. A dozen should-have-dones presented themselves, but all in hindsight.

  He recalled bottle-feeding Sarah in the living room as the morning sun warmed a darkened sky, the smell of the top of her head, the delicious sounds she made while eating. He recalled the softness of her feet and the strong grip of her toes. He ached beyond anything he had ever experienced. A knot of pain seized his chest, unrelenting. Adding to this anguish was the solitude of his secret. He could not face people. He shut and locked his office door and turned off his phone. But he locked himself in another room as well.

  The father in him-the failure-wouldn’t let him out of the dark room of his guilt and grief. A glimpse of a family photo, Sarah’s crayon art, the tiny baby shoes on the bookshelf. These were the personal reminders he could not live with, and yet could not bear to remove.