The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  “Lieutenant!” Hill chided. “Although we were in fact blind-sided by the reward and the flood of calls it caused, let none of us forget that the task force phone number was our idea. We asked for this.”

  Flemming spoke in his low, warm voice, “Special Agent Kalidja is our research expert and our fact-finder.” Delegate the problems: what every bureaucrat learns early on.

  Kay Kalidja’s parents had immigrated from the Caribbean. She had lighter skin than Flemming and widely set, Asian eyes. Bone thin, she looked more like a runway model than an FBI agent. She wore a starched white shirt and crisp gray suit. Her tobacco-colored hair was done in corn rows with terra-cotta beads that clicked if she shook her head quickly. She kept her attention on Flemming like a benched athlete watching her coach, and took her cue.

  Her voice was musical, her accent vaguely British. The moment she spoke, she captivated everyone. “The press release was our doing, it is true. We have case history to support that an informed public, an alert public, a motivated public, can and does lead to arrests. Also, although there is no apparent direct link between widespread publicity and the abrupt end to the kidnappings in the prior cities, its influence cannot be discounted. In each case, the louder the cry of the press, the quicker the kidnapper moved on.”

  Daphne Matthews objected, “Moved on, yes. But that’s all.”

  Flemming reminded, “It’s to our benefit if we keep this guy on the run.”

  Daphne Matthews contested, “The penny flutes indicate a person intent on making a statement. We put him between twenty-five and forty. High school graduate at least. Organized—he knows what the hell he’s doing; what comes next. Most likely scenario: He never met his father, mother died before he was fifteen. He’s never known any family. If he’s using the children sexually, then he will have been arrested on similar though lesser offenses—he may or may not have served time. If he’s selling the children, then we can be fairly certain he was an only child, and that his mother either sexually abused, physically mistreated or abandoned him. We have a disturbed but rational individual who suffers no remorse. The children are either a form of company—we call it the Boo Radley Syndrome; a source of physical pleasure for him—a diddler; or a means to financial enrichment. He’s a con artist—”

  “Now wait just a minute!” Flemming said, cutting her off. “This is where you and five of this agency’s best criminal behaviorists happen to disagree, Ms. Matthews.”

  “Lieutenant,” she corrected.

  It won a grin from Flemming, an act that seemed foreign to his face. “Irrespective of your profile, our people give great weight to the influence of publicity on the perpetrator’s behavior.”

  “He’s monitoring the press,” Daphne confirmed. “I have no argument there. But allowing it to dictate his actions? He’s an organized personality, a control freak. He’s not going to let the news services, the FBI or the police run his show. There is no consistent thread linking news reporting and his abandoning a city. To the contrary, the decision seems random—designed to keep law enforcement off guard.” She paused, the silence in the room suffocating. “How thoroughly have you investigated known confidence men?”

  “Con men?” Dunkin Hale asked, chiding her. “These are kidnappers.”

  Flemming focused on Daphne, clearly interested.

  “Our man is an actor,” she explained. “He enjoys playing roles. It’s the one consistent element to every kidnapping. A person doesn’t develop such abilities overnight. Only a con man has such talents.”

  “Forget it,” Hale said rudely, his wide neck florid and bulging like a blowfish.

  “What we will do,” Flemming answered her calmly, ignoring Hale and nodding toward Kalidja, “is check for releases from correctional facilities, six months and prior. The Club Feds, and state minimum security facilities.” Kalidja copied all this down.

  Sheila Hill spoke up for the first time in several minutes. “We’re crossing the forty-eight-hour mark, a mark none of us wanted to see. Some of us are preciously low on sleep. We need to pull together if we’re going to be an effective task force. Judging by his history, we have another five to fifteen days before he’s back for another one. If we’re not going to work as a task force then let’s drop the charade right now, issue a joint press release and go to our corners. S-A-C Flemming?” she said, knowing that with the evidence controlled by SPD, Flemming had little choice.

  Flemming looked up and said, “We’re in.”

  LaMoia reviewed all this as he left the office, scrawling LUNCH onto the scheduling board between the numbers 12 and 1. He took the stairs, not the elevator, an act that had nothing to do with fitness and everything with impatience. He had never been a person to wait. His motto was, This Ain’t No Dress Rehearsal, and he lived accordingly.

  The air, heavy with fog, delivered a bone-cutting chill. Every person’s face advertised their eagerness for spring. LaMoia charged through this malaise like a beam of light through darkness, grinning to himself, his long legs stretching out before him in defiant strides. To hell with those poor slobs—you either swam with them or against them, and LaMoia had made his choice a long time ago.

  He jumped a bus and rode it eight blocks and walked the rest of the way to the Mayflower, a corner hotel with a lot of class. The last three digits on his pager referred to the room number. Codes. Little games. He’d been doing this for months. An unfamiliar feeling blossomed in the heart of a cynic formerly confused by easy sex and his own silver tongue. Attracting women had never been a problem for LaMoia, only staying interested in them. He rode them hard, put them away wet, and rarely returned. The first attempt at hand holding or sweet talking and LaMoia launched into his litany of excuses, only to find himself in a bar or the gym or a coffee shop working his magic all over again.

  The bounce in his step had little to do with the promise of a nooner, and everything to do with a light flutter in his chest. He didn’t tire of this new woman in his life, didn’t look for ways out of their next encounter. As unlikely a match as he might have ever imagined, he nonetheless felt an attachment, a profound desire, a need, to spend increasing amounts of time with her. The hotel rendezvous was getting old; he wanted to share a bed, a sunrise, a shower, a cup of coffee. He wanted to test himself, to see how real or unreal these feelings actually were. He believed he wanted a relationship with her—an unthinkable thought given his history. He felt terrified to mention this change in himself, partly because she remained always at an arm’s length. He hoped like hell that wasn’t part of his attraction.

  He rode the elevator to the seventh floor wondering if he was in control or on a leash, light headed and slightly afraid. The idea of sleeping with the teacher had always appealed to him—he had done so more than once—but his current arrangement threatened his career, not just an A in math.

  He knocked sharply, already aroused by expectation. The door cracked open, and by the time he stepped inside, she was nothing more than a terry cloth robe walking away toward the bed. Then the robe fell away as LaMoia helped the door shut and threw the security bar in place. He turned to face a black teddy overflowing out the top with soft flesh, and tight and bulging where her legs met.

  He hurried out of his crisply pressed jeans. Every square inch of her was darkly tanned, no bikini line whatsoever as she unsnapped the teddy in three short pops.

  “Leave it,” he said. She enjoyed instruction.

  “Come and get it,” she offered, “though not necessarily in that order.” She grinned behind eyes flashing with excitement.

  In the bedroom, Sheila Hill put rank aside and willingly took orders.

  The resulting forty minutes of athletics left the thick scent of woman in the air and a sheen on their skin, the bedding off the mattress and Sheila Hill still on all fours, her hands holding loosely to the headboard, her glistening back heaving from her panting.

  “Oh, God,” she said deliciously, “you’re going to kill me if we keep this up.”

  “It
would be more fun if we didn’t have to leave,” he risked saying. “If we could wake up at three in the morning and go again.”

  “Not this lifetime,” she quipped. “I like my job. Besides,” she added, “my bed never would have made it through that.” She let go the headboard and slouched down so that her head found the pillow but her buttocks remained hoisted high in the air.

  With her he found himself in a nearly constant state of arousal. He felt seventeen again.

  She lowered herself and stretched out, and he wished she would have stayed like that a little longer.

  “They can’t dictate what we do in our off hours,” he reminded.

  “One of us would be off the task force in a heartbeat. Flemming would see to that. Count on it. It would look wrong, and it would damage both of us. We’ve been over this. God …,” she moaned. “Get me a cigarette, would you?”

  He obeyed, though he wondered why. No woman had ever ordered him about.

  “And the lighter,” she reminded.

  He didn’t like the smoking, but he never said anything. He climbed off the bed and found her purse and delivered the cigarettes and lighter. She rolled over, her upper-chest rash red and shiny with sweat, lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Okay, fun is fun, and that was fun! But we’ve got work to do.” She worked the cigarette down hungrily, arched her back and lifted her pelvis. “God, you’re something,” she whispered through the smoke.

  “A dinner over at your place, early to bed but not to sleep. Who’s going to know?”

  “We start that, and it won’t stop.”

  “So?” he complained. “What’s wrong with that?”

  She said soberly, “We agreed up front about all this, John.”

  “Things change.”

  “This hasn’t. We’re attracted to each other. We enjoy each other’s company. The sex is out of this world—and I mean that. But we’re both Crimes Against Persons, we’re both on the task force; that’s conflict of interest. That’s a no-no. We are not taking this to the next step. Not so long as the present situation exists.”

  LaMoia felt a tightening in his throat and chest, and felt almost obliged to break something. “Bernie says the glass chips are automotive.”

  She rolled up onto an elbow and cast a knee forward. She looked like a model to him despite a few extra pounds. He would never get tired of looking at her. He had tired so quickly of the others. She smiled coyly, “You got this when?”

  He gave her the answer required of him, “This morning, Captain.” She knew immediately that he had received the information ahead of yesterday’s four o’clock.

  “Well, you little shit.” She grinned widely. “I love the way you operate, you rogue son-of-a-bitch. Have I told you that?”

  He wanted a different statement of love from her, and the comment stung him in a way she wouldn’t understand.

  “The glass is from a side window, not the windshield. They picked up some tiny lettering on one of the chips. Ironically, the Bureau may be able to help us trace the manufacturer.”

  “Ford Taurus?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “The pollen has been passed along to the botany department at the university for analysis. If Flemming finds out and grabs the sample, there’s not much we can do. The university needs federal money. The Bureau can make up all kinds of shit to justify taking the samples.”

  “Flemming doesn’t need any justification. He’s going to do what he likes.” A seagull cried outside the window. LaMoia looked up to see a gray and white blur. A second echoing cry, farther away. He wondered about the Shotz baby and if she was crying too.

  “Yeah, Flemming’s little speech,” she said to herself. “Got to respect him, though. Did you know that he worked that CEO in New Jersey found buried alive? Intelligence dug this up,” she said, meaning Boldt.

  LaMoia could feel her nervousness. He didn’t want to operate in Flemming’s shadow any more than she did.

  “Consulted Hale from the start of this—from San Diego on. They’d worked other kidnappings together. Didn’t bring Hale or Kalidja on until Portland, after he’d cleaned house a few times.” She added softly, “He meant what he said about walking right over us. But then again, he doesn’t know us.”

  LaMoia had not seen her like this—Flemming had knocked the wind out of her, not an easy thing to do. “Hale bothers me,” he confessed. “He’s Flemming’s hit man. He’s the one that’s going to do the damage, if any’s done. Flemming keeps himself squeaky clean. Knows what he’s doing. Fraternity types were never my favorites.”

  “Hale is ambitious. Tough. He’s married—the only one of the three of them who’s married. Three kids. He must feel these kidnappings as much as Boldt and I do. Yet Flemming’s the one who’s all passionate about the kids. Protecting his rank is more like it.”

  “That’s not how it felt to me. He meant that shit.”

  “Hale made a name for himself with the Bureau down in Texas by solving some border kidnappings—kids—Mexican fathers taking their kids away from Mom and back across the border. I agree that Hale’s the wild card. We keep an eye on him.”

  “And Kalidja?” he asked, appreciating the information.

  “Boldt couldn’t dig much up. Came out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office. Background in analysis is about all that Boldt did find. That would imply she’s Flemming’s fact-checker. But she may be more than that: With her ties to Washington, Flemming buys himself a field agent with good contacts at headquarters. He gets a spy; a liaison. With the kind of heat he must be taking—”

  “That would be invaluable.”

  “Exactly.” She stubbed out the cigarette in a water glass.

  He said, “We gotta do something for the mother—Doris Shotz. Counseling? I don’t know. She sits outside the fifth-floor door all day long. Barely moves. Just sits there.”

  “We find her kid. The rest will take care of itself. We’re not in the baby sitting business. She shouldn’t be spending so much time with us. It doesn’t help anyone.”

  “You’re a mother,” he reminded. “Where would you spend your time?”

  She rolled onto her back and put her knees up. “You want to hear something strange?” she asked rhetorically. “That child went missing, and I had an incredible urge to have another baby. You’d think just the opposite, you know? But not me. I wanted a child.”

  “I could arrange that,” he said.

  “Oh no, you don’t. You keep those things on.”

  “I mean a family, a child of our own.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long, long time.

  A nude in a Rubens oil, he thought. Round in all the right ways. She cast her hair off her face and behind her ear, exaggerating her graceful neck. “Spare me. Your reputation precedes you, pal.”

  “People change.”

  “People maybe, but not men,” she said. “Believe me, I have a divorce to prove it.” She said, “We shouldn’t be talking about kids. Not with Rhonda Shotz out there somewhere. Probably shouldn’t be here at all, although I work better when I’m relaxed. And you do relax me. You want the shower first?”

  “No,” LaMoia said, edging closer to her. “I want something else first.” He ran his hand lightly from her ankle to her pubis and watched her hair stand on end under his touch.

  “Oh, Jesus. I’m going to be late for my one-thirty.” She sighed.

  “You want me to stop?” he asked, his fingers gently massaging her.

  “What do you think?” she asked, separating her legs for him.

  “I think you’re going to be late for your one-thirty,” he answered. He no longer cared about nights with her, another half hour would have to do.

  “That’s absolutely perfect,” she said, leaning her head deeply back into the pillow with a warm smile of satisfaction curling her lips. “Absolutely perfect.” She arched her back higher and sighed.

  Music to his ears.

  CHAPTE
R

  Accustomed to his wife’s bald head and lack of eyebrows, Boldt decided she looked wise, like a Buddhist monk, not sick like a cancer patient. He hated the smell of hospitals.

  “It’s early,” she said.

  “Priorities.”

  “Progress?”

  The adjacent bed lay empty and made, its surrounding tables neat and cleared of anything personal. In a ward where people went missing for good, the void pulled at Boldt. Had Rhonda Shotz gone missing for good as well?

  Distracted, Boldt answered, “Five days now. Precious little to go on. We’ve lost her for the time being. Worse, we know he’ll strike again in the next few days.”

  “What’s he doing with them?”

  He shrugged. “Speculation.”

  “You’re in a sick business.”

  “With sick people. LaMoia calls the kidnapped children thumb-suckers. One of the Feds, a guy named Hale, he calls them ‘milk cartons,’ because their pictures used to be on the sides.” He saw a dying mother, not a sick woman—this happened occasionally. “You don’t need to hear this.”

  “You could use some sleep,” she said kindly.

  He couldn’t take sympathy coming from her.

  She needed the sleep, not him, the insomnia having come with the bed rest, the bed rest with the treatment, the treatment with the disease. She refused the pills. She gladly accepted his reading to her, if and when his schedule allowed, which depended on Marina’s schedule. Lately, everything depended on something. Nothing stood alone: Even the grandest of trees anchored itself in the earth.

  “Did you see the kids at all today?” she asked in a tone that bordered on accusation.

  He answered with silence, for he would never lie to her. He devoted every spare minute to his two children, but to a mother in a hospital room this would seem like too little.