The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  She snapped her fingers. “I almost forgot.” She hurried into the busy room and returned as quickly. She brought her hand up for him to see. “The lady police officer wanted me to give you this. Said it was a private joke, that you’d understand.”

  In her outstretched hands she held a dime-store pennywhistle.

  CHAPTER

  Unaccustomed to an invitation for coffee from Boldt, Daphne Matthews found herself caught by surprise. Neither of them drank coffee, and they didn’t arrange secret meetings. Not any longer.

  Du Jour, a small lunch cafe on First Avenue, offered yuppie chow and an expansive view of the bay. This choice also surprised her. Boldt leaned more toward tea and scones at the Four Seasons Olympic. He was known as a regular in the Garden Room.

  He occupied a table pressed up against the huge glass window overlooking the bay and the lush green of the islands beyond. She bought herself a tea at the cafeteria-style counter, her eyes on Boldt, understanding immediately and with great certainty that something was terribly wrong. Liz, she thought.

  As she approached, she noticed his slouched shoulders, the redness of his eyes and nose and his cup of tea, which was not steaming and had gone untouched. He hadn’t added the milk yet. She recognized grief when she saw it.

  “Hey,” she said casually, pulling out her own chair. He didn’t stand. Not the Lou Boldt she knew.

  “Ah!” he said, looking up at her woodenly, taking no time to express any kind of welcome. She felt unimportant. She sat down.

  “I need a favor, Daffy, and it’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to do it, but if you’re willing to do it, to help me out, then all I ask is that you don’t ask any questions. None. Not one. It’s important for both of us, for everybody, that you not ask any questions.”

  “Does that include now?”

  He looked up at her and then to the door of the cafe. “That’s a question,” he informed her. He seemed to have aged a dozen years. Liz, she thought again. She felt sad. He had broken—frankly, she had expected it sooner.

  “No questions at all?”

  “Better that way,” he answered. “Safer.” A furtive check toward the front of the restaurant. Grief could cause strange behavior in the strongest of people.

  “You can’t go back to the office looking like this,” she warned. “And that is not a question.”

  He never quite got his clothes right, tending to carry a part of his last meal on them somewhere. The new breeds of permanent press were made with him in mind, but he stayed with natural fibers, all cottons and wools, and as a result looked like an unmade bed most of the time. He rarely shaved without missing a spot or two.

  “I’ll pull it together,” he said.

  “And keep it there?” she asked.

  His eyes betrayed him. Her question brought threatening tears. He understood his own vulnerability. This was significant to her.

  “Lou, one of the slogans I use is, ‘Dare to Share.’ It takes some nerve, but it’s worth the risk.” She waited a moment, hoping this might sink in, might trigger an effort. “Trust me. Please.”

  He leaned the weight of his head into the crutch of his open palm, covering his mouth and stretching his eyes open grotesquely. He spoke through his fingers, muddying his speech. “It’s a favor is all. It’ll take you most of the rest of the day.”

  “At the hospital? At home?”

  “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

  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

  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

  Daphne approached the regular four o’clock agonized over her assignment. Hill had req
uested 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.”