Pied Piper lbadm-5

by Ridley Pearson

  BRAVO 5: “I’ve got the truck’s taillights.”

  Boldt spotted Crowley then: She wore a wig of short blonde hair, a bandanna around her forehead covering her wound, a brightly colored African skullcap on top. She had used eye shadow to blacken both eyes, giving her a haunting, brooding look-urban sheik mixed with biker girl. The blue bag doubled as a backpack, and she wore it as such. A different woman.

  Boldt feigned annoyance with the caller in front of him-all an act for Flemming’s cameras. He turned and glanced down the hall following Crowley, who kept pace with other passengers.

  Teibold dropped her purse, bent to retrieve it, and stepped out of the surging pedestrian traffic. She dealt with a shoelace as she appraised her surroundings, doing a convincing job of playing a paranoid person looking for tails.

  The male agent from the newsstand, halfway down the concourse, took notice of Teibold and entered the men’s room, out of sight. Boldt marveled at the professionalism of the FBI undercover unit. He had spotted the couple with the flash camera, now headed toward baggage claim. But other than those two, and the two agents from the newsstand, he couldn’t identify any others. Flemming was probably relying on the security cameras for gate area surveillance and saving his manpower for the street.

  Pros in every regard. Boldt worried Flemming’s people would not sucker onto Teibold for long.

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Kramer whispered in his smoker’s voice, “Our friends are following the Toyota. You copy that?”

  “Got it.” They were following Teibold, just as Boldt had hoped. “How many on foot?” Boldt asked.

  “At least seven near you.”

  Boldt had missed three or more of Flemming’s agents.

  “That truck’s working a flat tire,” Kramer said, referring to Teibold’s toying with her shoes.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Back at you in a minute.” The line went dead. Warm sweat drizzled down his ribs. Above all, in case he was being watched, he had to avoid looking at Crowley-his full attention on Teibold. Only the radio kept him in touch with Crowley’s movements, and his one human link to his little girl.

  Daphne, on her way to Houston with the child, and eventually to Seattle, had spoken to Boldt twice since their separation and had correctly predicted Crowley’s change of disguise on the plane. She had also suggested that Crowley would head directly to the women’s room upon arrival for another change. “She will take a stall. Close herself in, sit down and settle herself. She won’t take her pants down, even if she might have to pee, because you can’t run with your pants down and she is in a defensive mode. She’s been here before. Every con artist has been in a bad situation. They survive by staying cool, and this is one cool woman. She will change her looks again. It’ll be a fast change. Something simple but effective. We won’t know until we see it. Something unexpected. Who knows? If she’s really good, she crawls between stalls, leaving hers closed. All I know for certain is that she’ll enter one woman, and leave another.”

  For this reason, the housecleaner polishing the mirror in the women’s washroom, concourse B, was a Sex Crimes detective by the name of Morgan Blakely. Her call sign was Bravo Three.

  Crowley was reported entering the women’s room, as Officer Blakely removed her earpiece so that it would not show. In doing so, she isolated herself.

  COMMAND: “No vehicles seen entering the car wash. Only the truck.”

  The resulting radio silence filled Boldt with anticipation. If no FBI agent followed Crowley into the washroom, then using Teibold as bait had worked. On the other hand, Flemming might have thought to cover the lavatories with someone inside, just as Boldt had. Time crawled. Women came and went from the lavatory’s open entrance. With no signal from Blakely, Boldt assumed Crowley remained inside.

  Within a few seconds of this thought, chaos broke out at the bathroom’s entrance. Women poured out into the terminal-several in the midst of zipping and buttoning themselves. A waft of gray smoke appeared. Officer Morgan Blakely appeared in the cluster, looked frantically in all directions, caught sight of Boldt, and vehemently shook her head no.

  They had lost the suspect.

  CHAPTER 75

  Lou Boldt’s hopes for finding Sarah disappeared with Lisa Crowley. Rather than storm into the women’s bathroom, which was his temptation, he casually lifted his right hand as if to scratch his head and spoke into the mic clipped there. “All units in the vicinity of the car wash, adopt one-on-one surveillance.”

  Boldt, knowing that he had been made by the FBI, could not participate in the one-on-one surveillance for fear of giving Crowley away. Fulfilling his ruse, he charged off after Teibold, who was just reaching the far end of the concourse.

  Every available SPD operative, including Blakely, was to follow one of the women leaving the bathroom. Command assigned four agents from Charlie-the baggage claim and car rental team-to head toward the concourse and join the one-on-one.

  Boldt stayed with Teibold, radio traffic blurring in his ear, the next few minutes crucial. He knew that Flemming could not overlook the commotion at the bathroom, a fire there was certain to raise the man’s suspicions. Forced to divide his efforts, he would reconsider Teibold as a suspect; she had gone nowhere near that bathroom. Flemming would, out of necessity, move to arrest their prime suspect: Teibold. Before that happened, Boldt and his team needed to find Crowley, because once Flemming discovered he had arrested an SPD operative, all hell would break loose.

  Teibold passed the security checkpoint on her way to baggage claim, both agents from the newsstand not far behind, Boldt, twenty yards back.

  Teibold slowed as she approached the escalators leading down to baggage claim, making a point of taking note of an empty bank of pay phones to her right. Boldt stepped up to a Marie Callender’s cookie counter, keeping her in sight as Flemming would expect of him.

  His earpiece sang with radio traffic, as a young Asian girl with bangs requested his order.

  “Chocolate chip,” Boldt told the girl. He pulled out two dollars and set them on the counter. Teibold picked up the pay phone’s receiver, searched her purse for a quarter and dropped it into the slot. As she did this, she glanced over her shoulder cautiously and spotted the agent from the newsstand. Her face twitched as she hung up the phone and quickly made for the escalator. At the last possible second, she joined a family moving toward the elevator.

  Boldt left the cookie and the money on the counter. The FBI agent took the stairs between the escalators. Boldt increased his stride as a series of radio transmissions confirmed that Crowley had once again been spotted.

  BRAVO 7: “We have the truck in sight. Moving east. Bravo Five and I are in pursuit.”

  COMMAND: “State location, Seven.”

  BRAVO 7: “Approaching traffic light.” The security checkpoint.

  COMMAND: “Charlie Three, do you have the truck in sight?”

  CHARLIE 3: “The purple truck?”

  BRAVO 7: “Affirmative.”

  CHARLIE 3: “Roger that.”

  CHARLIE 6: “We have a potential pileup at the freight dock. Advise.”

  The message was that the FBI agents were rushing Teibold’s elevator. Behind everyone, Crowley made her way slowly toward baggage claim. It was the worst of all possible scenarios for Boldt: By busting Teibold, the FBI would make Crowley aware of their presence.

  At the bottom of the escalator Boldt turned around to see a woman who wore a long purple dress. The purple truck: Crowley. Her hair now a curly brunette, she carried a gray tote bag, not the blue Boldt expected. She looked nothing like the short-haired blonde woman of a few minutes earlier.

  Boldt could not afford to be seen; to Crowley he was Brad Brehmer. Only a stubborn refusal to allow his daughter’s fate being put in the hands of others had put him on the concourse in the first place. He hurried to a white courtesy phone and turned to face the wall, his right hand coming up toward his lips.

  BOLDT: “Toyota, hold your positio
n. Do not move! Do you copy?”

  A beige cinder block wall separated the elevator from the automatic doors at baggage claim. Boldt stood only feet from the group of FBI agents intent on busting Teibold.

  A purple blur passed by. Boldt kept his face turned. Crowley stopped, no more than ten feet from him. The phone went damp in his hand, as he willed her to move on. In his ear, SPD tracked her movements, Command passing her from one agent to another. A commotion erupted on the far side of the cinder block wall. Boldt could not-would not-look back at Crowley. As it turned out, he didn’t have to. The purple dress entered the ascending escalator, heading back up to ticketing. Again, Boldt adjusted himself, turning right. The commotion grew louder, though the agents did an impressive job of keeping Teibold’s detention from becoming an all-out scene.

  Sea-Tac used a sky bridge to reach rentals and parking. Crowley had first headed down to baggage claim in error, before reversing herself.

  Boldt waited for her to clear the top of the escalator and then jumped on for the ride, only seconds behind her.

  Crowley followed signs to the sky bridge. Boldt followed her, Sarah’s life relying on his every footstep.

  One story below, outside the elevator, FBI agents were discovering that for the last ten minutes they had been following an SPD undercover cop. Flemming would panic, his attention certain to fall onto Boldt. Boldt walked quickly, despite the fact that it drew him closer to Crowley. He needed to clear the terminal’s security cameras.

  They crossed the sky bridge, he and his daughter’s kidnapper, fleeing the FBI, she in disguise, he with his head down, mixing in with dozens of other impatient travelers.

  He glanced out of the sky bridge windows, down to the taxi stand, where FBI agents in blue suits hurried about, checking taxis, jumping onto various buses-bees in a disturbed hive. Their blatant disregard for covert techniques informed Boldt that Flemming had indeed panicked. Two dozen FBI operatives were scrambling to salvage their operation. Boldt realized that he was his own worst enemy; he had to break away from Crowley to avoid alerting Flemming. And yet he had to stay with her.

  At the end of the sky bridge, he stopped and fished the cell phone from his pocket, using it as a prop. Crowley continued straight ahead into the parking area, not downstairs to rentals, just as Boldt had expected.

  It was Gaynes who had put him onto this over the phone; she had followed the Taurus from the Park and Ride to Sea-Tac, where the driver, a male, had parked it on the sky bridge level and then lost her. Boldt took the male to be Roger Crowley, the car having been left for his wife. Boldt had ordered Gaynes to drill the Taurus’s taillight.

  Drilling taillights was something Boldt had learned from an ATF agent named Reisnick twelve years earlier. Vehicular surveillance, even with a team of three or four tails, had less than a thirty percent success rate, contrary to its representation in film and on television. Improved technology, namely Global Positioning, had permanently changed things, but that required the surveillance team to place a transmitter on the suspect vehicle-SPD’s planned course of action. In the right hands, a drilled taillight was nearly as good as GPS. The tiny hole in the taillight emitted an unexpectedly brilliant spike of white light, laserlike in its quality, that could be seen clearly at a distance of several blocks, or from a helicopter. It singled out a vehicle from all others. Though less effective, the technique even worked in daylight hours as the brakes were applied; at nighttime it was foolproof.

  Boldt’s challenge was to double-cross SPD’s attempts to follow Lisa Crowley and to get the suspect safely out of the airport, while still keeping her under surveillance himself.

  To accomplish this, Gaynes had drilled the taillight. He and LaMoia had assembled a motley crew that included a variety of snitches hungry for a hundred-dollar hit and waiting for orders.

  The question remained: Would it work?

  CHAPTER 76

  The Taurus backed out of its parking space just as Boldt reached Gus Griswold on his cellular. Griswold had been an SPD informer for seven years. He worked part-time as a butcher for one of the supermarket chains. He lived out of the back of a Ford Country Squire, which he referred to as his mobile home.

  “You on top of this?” Boldt asked the man.

  “You want me on top of her? I thought you just wanted me to follow.” All snitches were wise-asses. The headlights from the Taurus threw long shadows across the concrete. Boldt spotted the drilled taillight without any problem. Gus Griswold’s rusted Ford pulled out of a parking space right behind that tiny white light.

  “You see that taillight?” Boldt asked.

  “Later,” Griswold said. The line went dead. The two cars disappeared into the guts of the parking garage, their engine noise fading.

  While Special Ops’ identification of Crowley played out in his right ear, Boldt cut through a tangle of parked vehicles in the darkened garage. He caught a last glimpse of Griswold’s taillights as the snitch followed Crowley down the spiral exit ramp. Boldt broke into a run heading for the fire stairs, aware that Special Ops had closed two of the three exit lanes and had placed an SPD undercover cop behind the garage’s only open cash register window. The SPD plan was to fix a GPS transmitter to whatever vehicle the suspect drove out of the garage, rental or not. The cashier was to intentionally drop the rental contract or the parking receipt as it was being passed to the driver. The cashier would then quickly leave the booth as if to retrieve it and, in the process, slip the magnetized GPS transmitter onto the undercarriage of the car. From then on, Special Ops would be able to track the vehicle’s movement and location electronically, either from the command van or the Public Safety Building, as long as the transmitter remained within the cellular telephone network.

  Special Ops-“Zulu”-also had four surveillance vehicles in place. These vehicles, called trailers, were to rotate line-of-sight surveillance, keeping the suspect in view at all times. A dozen SPD patrol cars were established along the more commonly used routes awaiting instructions.

  It was the reliance on the GPS technology that Boldt intended to exploit. A few years earlier, a similar surveillance operation might have used six or more trailers, but trailers were cops being paid overtime in city-owned vehicles burning fuel and requiring maintenance. A GPS, once installed, required one technician sitting at a computer terminal studying a moving map and directing dispatch.

  Boldt raced down the cement stairs to ground level and cracked open the steel door, gaining a view of the exit booths, their red-and-white striped barrier arms blocking lanes. With several flights having arrived within minutes of one another, and only one booth open, seven cars were lined up awaiting the cashier. The third car back was a brown Taurus, followed immediately by Griswold’s Country Squire.

  The first car paid and left, then the second. The Taurus pulled up to the booth. An exchange of radio traffic confirmed this. Boldt understood the level of tension inside that command van. SPD’s success relied entirely on their ability to place the GPS. He understood this well, because the success of his operation relied on preventing it.

  Boldt looked on anxiously as the cashier reached out for the parking stub, intentionally lost hold of it and then shoved his head out the booth announcing to Crowley, “I’ll get it!”

  But Gus Griswold beat him to it. Having left his vehicle, ostensibly to fix a wiper, he lunged for the fallen parking stub like a good Samaritan, blocking the cashier from exiting the booth.

  “Back in your car,” the undercover cashier ordered somewhat desperately. “I’ve got it.”

  “No sweat,” the snitch answered, passing the stub to the cashier and making eyes at Crowley. The GPS transmitter remained inside the booth. The red-and-white arm lifted and the Taurus motored ahead.

  Boldt hurried past the booths, the cashier’s back to him, and out into the dark and the drizzle. The Country Squire passed a moment later, and Boldt climbed inside.

  “How’d you like that shit?” Griswold asked.

  “You’re a
natural,” Boldt said, strapping in, the Taurus’s drilled taillight shining as brightly as an evening star, calling him, tugging at his heart, leading him toward his child and her abductor.

  “The bird is not in place,” Boldt heard in his right ear. “Repeat: The bird is not in place.”

  The dispatcher’s professional calm never ceased to amaze him. Command ordered Zulu’s mobile surveillance units to be on the lookout for the brown Taurus.

  Boldt winced at mention of the Taurus. Without realizing the mistake, Command had more than likely just handed Flemming everything he needed to know.

  CHAPTER 77

  Lisa Crowley’s Taurus followed signs to Seattle via 509 North; Griswold and Boldt were fifty yards back and following. Her one stunt had been to drive around the block in an effort to spot any surveillance, but Boldt picked up the ruse before her second turn, instructing Griswold to drive past, take two lefts and wait at the intersection. Moments later the Taurus sped past, silencing Griswold who was, at the time, exercising his right of free speech. They reentered traffic and followed, allowing several cars to come between, Boldt monitoring the steady flow of radio traffic as SPD attempted to keep watch on Lisa Crowley.

  “They’re two cars back,” Boldt informed the Griz.

  “Cops?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re fucked.”

  “We’re challenged,” Boldt corrected.

  “It’s that taillight. Can see the fucking thing for miles, I’m telling ya. I never knew how bright.”

  “That’s the idea,” Boldt said. And as he did so, another idea took its place. “You just earned yourself a bonus, Griz.”

  “No shit?” Griswold sat up a little higher in the seat. Squared his shoulders. “This cop shit’s okay,” he said. Regarding his filthy dash, littered with candy wrappers, he added, “Wish like hell this thing had a siren.”