The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  Crowley protested from behind the duct tape. She squirmed and writhed and then settled down.

  “Do you always tape their mouths?”

  “You won’t see that on TV,” Flemming said. He popped off the brake and put the car in reverse. He had not wanted this stop, had agreed to it only in negotiation for Boldt’s sharing the contents of the FedEx delivery manifests.

  Boldt leaned his head out as the car backed up and addressed a stunned Millie Wiggins, standing in her driveway beneath an umbrella with rain cascading from its rim. “Only our most difficult suspects,” he informed her. He thanked her and got the window up. The headlights spilled over her, throwing an enormous shadow against the garage door.

  “You see? We didn’t need her,” Flemming protested, repeating an argument he had beaten to death. “You knew you had the right woman.”

  Flemming’s silent rage terrified Boldt; he was glad to have the man talking. By his own admission, for six months Flemming had attempted to piece together any evidence that might lead him to the Pied Piper, while at the same time continually compromising the public investigation. Now that Boldt had done his job for him, the man seemed hell-bent on handling the Crowleys in the same manner he had handled Anderson. The end justified the means. Boldt, who understood such reactions, who empathized with them, found himself defending the suspect’s rights and wondering how far Flemming might go—if he too might end up a victim if he crossed the man.

  In the name of probable cause, Boldt had just tricked Flemming into buying himself a second witness, and both men knew it, perhaps Flemming even understood it, though he was difficult to judge. Millie Wiggins, and Liz along with her, could place Crowley and Boldt in that car. Both women had taken good long looks at Flemming.

  “Cross over to I-5 on 145th,” Boldt said. “There’s an on-ramp off Fifth Avenue.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Flemming warned, letting Boldt know that he understood everything. “If you fuck this up, if you can’t find this place, I’ll pull her eyelids off and drip battery acid in them until she talks, until she tells me where I can find my daughter. And if you even think about trying to stop me—” He didn’t bother finishing the threat. Flemming was played out, any ability to reason in him long since exhausted. He had waited for this day for six months, and Boldt or no Boldt, he knew what had to be done. Boldt had tried to use Anderson as a bargaining chip, reminding Flemming that no evidence linked him to the man’s murder—implying Boldt would not make a case of it if Flemming played this right. But Flemming was numb from the neck up, lacking any concept of prison terms or punishment. He simply didn’t care. He wanted his daughter back. Nothing—no one—would come between him and that end.

  Pressured into an alliance of which he wanted no part, Boldt found himself an unwilling passenger. He might as well have been handcuffed and in the backseat himself.

  The interminable drive north on I-5 left Boldt referencing the FedEx manifests and plotting delivery routes for March 25 on or about twelve noon, creating small boxes on the map with arrows to the appropriate location. Darkness outside, darkness inside, the rain obscuring the windshield, his own fears obscuring his efforts.

  Boldt decided to speak directly to the issue. There were questions to answer and he had no way of knowing if he might be around to hear them later. Without backup, anything could happen. He said to the driver, “According to Hale, the Hoover Building thinks you may be working for the Pied Piper.”

  “Hale knows?”

  “He’s been spying on you ever since your girlfriend disappeared and your bank account grew.”

  The big man nodded, a man defeated. “The money—cash—was deposited in five-thousand-dollar amounts into my account. She,” he said, pointing toward the backseat and their prisoner, “knew it would appear that I had misplaced loyalties, that I wouldn’t be able to explain the deposits. And of course I wouldn’t have been able to. So they had my child, and my career. I sent Gwen away the minute they got our child. Told her not to surface. Believe me,” he added, “she’s under so deep no one will ever find her unless I’m involved.”

  “She could support your story. You just might get yourself out of this.”

  “It’s Stephanie I care about, not me. Stephanie first. The rest comes later. The rest hardly matters.”

  “Yes, I know,” Boldt replied.

  “You?”

  “No money. Just my child.”

  Flemming confessed, “They had me use E-mail to supply the information they requested. I tried to trace it back to a source, but they knew their stuff: bogus accounts, bogus credit cards paying for those accounts.”

  “So they knew when to pick up and leave.”

  Flemming nodded again, though reluctantly and with a heavy heart. “I misled and delayed the investigations as best I could. When it got away from me, I sent off a warning and they packed it up.”

  “Me?” Boldt asked. “Did you give them me? Was it you who IDed the local cop to go after?”

  “It was.”

  The road whined, the wipers lapped at the water. “I’d like to apologize for that, but I can’t,” Flemming said. “I did what I thought I had to do.” He admitted softly, “I worked constantly to ID them. If I had managed, it would have stopped right there. I would have seen to that, as we will see to that tonight,” he said, stealing a glimpse at the prisoner in the rearview mirror. “You’re a better cop than me, Boldt. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I want to hear how you could volunteer another person’s child,” Boldt whispered hoarsely.

  Flemming said nothing.

  “You gave them my daughter.”

  “And I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he admitted. He switched the wipers to high. The rain was too loud to think.

  Boldt knew intuitively that following Anderson’s murder Flemming had settled on killing the Crowleys as the only form of justice. Perhaps it was only by seeing such a thing in another that Boldt could exorcise it from his own thoughts, but he wanted no part in it. Death was too easy for the Crowleys and Chevalier. A life sentence in a maximum facility where the inmates would not tolerate any crime to do with children seemed a far more appropriate sentence. Boldt wanted this done legally, correctly. He wanted Millie Wiggins on the stand, and Chevalier in manacles; he wanted Daphne called as an eyewitness to Lisa Crowley’s baby-selling. He could see the logical steps toward conviction. He continued to plot delivery times onto the map.

  “So?” Flemming asked, a while later, shattering the monotonous grind of the wipers and interrupting a bass solo on the radio.

  “Four delivery trucks servicing Skagit the twenty-fifth. At noon, two were on lunch break, two still delivering. I have one truck delivering at 11:37 and again at 12:12. The second truck made drops at 11:51 and 12:19. Two stretches of road to search for a house that sits up a slight knoll, a tree directly outside.”

  “How many miles of road?” Flemming asked.

  Boldt took rough measurements. “Twenty to thirty, all together.”

  “It’s too much.” Flemming told their hostage, “You could simplify this,” studying her in the rearview mirror. But as did Boldt, Lisa Crowley assumed the driver intended to kill her no matter what she did; Flemming had played his cards far too early, not thinking anything of it. She had only her husband to sacrifice by cooperating. She would not talk, unless Flemming resorted to torture. Perhaps not even then. In a way difficult for Boldt to grasp, he felt sympathy for this woman, his daughter’s abductor. After weeks of wanting her dead himself, he had agonized for the better part of the last hour over his strange association with her, an us-against-them mentality directed at Flemming and including Lisa Crowley. Nothing surprised him any longer; there was no room left for such luxury.

  CHAPTER

  The small brick town of Mount Vernon, Washington, spread out almost entirely on the eastern banks of the Skagit River, had served as a timber course for the better part of half a century, until every stand of old-growth forest
had been cut to the ground, stripped of its branches and skidded and floated to the mills. Throughout the winter the river pushed against its banks, swelled by weeks of rain or unseasonable snowmelt from the east, sometimes jumping and driving the residents to band together in a pitched and fevered battle, lacing together lives in a way only shared disaster can. For millennia, those same seasonal floods had driven silt and topsoil out across the surrounding plains, fertilizing and enriching the soil. Combined with the mild season offered up by the Pineapple Express ocean currents, it made for thousands and thousands of acres ideally suited for the cultivation of bulb flowers. Little Holland, the area was called. More tulips were produced here than in any spot on earth.

  Boldt tracked the second hand of his wristwatch. Flemming drove Boldt’s selection for the most likely route between the two deliveries, drove five miles an hour over the 35 mph speed limit, knowing FedEx’s tough policy for its drivers, drove from a point marked on Boldt’s map as 11:37 A.M. following a southerly arrow and a line finally joining a box indicating 12:12 P.M. Flemming drove the entire route, although Boldt was guessing the delivery van had driven a minimum of five miles before the noon hour, and therefore restricted their area of intensive search to a four-mile stretch roughly three-quarters of the way along the route, believing that, in order to have been captured on video, the delivery truck had passed the Crowley safe house somewhere along that same four-mile stretch.

  Given the direction of the delivery route, and the direction of the FedEx truck in the video, the safe house had to be on their left. Boldt impatiently studied the homes they passed, annoyed and frustrated that the farmhouses were few and far between. Along the four-mile stretch that Boldt had highlighted, they passed only six homes, not one of which was close enough to the road to explain the FedEx truck’s presence in the video; nor did any of the six houses sit up on a slight rise, also apparent in the ransom.

  “It’s a strikeout,” Boldt said, checking his watch.

  Flemming drove the same route back toward Mount Vernon, his eyes divided between the road, the houses and Crowley in the backseat. The tension in the car built as Boldt sensed Flemming’s desire to beat the truth out of Crowley. He double-checked the route of the second delivery truck, measuring and approximating the timing. “It’s about a three-mile stretch,” he said.

  “We drive the whole route.”

  The rain let up and the swiftly moving clouds raced east as if a curtain had been drawn. Moonlight streamed down onto the surrounding tulip fields bleeding lush colors into the black of night. Every available strip of asphalt, gravel patch and turnout was occupied to overflowing with RVs and Westfalias. The annual tulip festival under way, Mount Vernon swelled with thousands upon thousands of tourists. With only a few hundred beds available between Bed and Breakfasts and motels, most of the visitors slept in, and lived out of, their vehicles. During daylight hours, travel by car bordered on impossible. Given the location, the bumper-to-bumper traffic often moved less than five miles an hour. The fields of color spread out like quilt patches a quarter mile square. Even in moonlight, the sight was breathtaking: yellow, reds, deep violet.

  Noticing all the traffic pulled off for the night along the road’s shoulders, Flemming said to the woman in his rearview mirror, “Planned it this way, didn’t you? Mount Vernon. The festival. The crowds and all. Who would notice a couple of renters this time of year?”

  With her lips taped shut, the hostage said nothing. Caught in the faint glow of ambient light, her eyes seemed heavy and sad. Fatigue caught up to her and dragged her down. Depression set in. Boldt realized it was all but over for her. He wondered silently if the safe house was better off left undiscovered. He was debating intentionally misleading Flemming, when the man tugged the map off Boldt’s lap and struggled with the wheel and the map light. A moment later he said, “Okay, a left up here. Then another left at the tracks. Then across the bridge and we’re basically at the first delivery: 11:51. Twelve minutes later your daughter is on the video as this truck passes behind her. Have I got this right?” he asked aloud. “We’re approximately twelve minutes from finding this safe house?” He drove faster. “Let’s shave a little off of that, shall we?” He said to the mirror, “You better say your prayers that we find it. If my friend here is wrong about all this, then it’s my turn. And believe me, I’ve been waiting for this.” He said, “I’ve got a cattle prod in the trunk. A couple other little toys: phosphorus, stun grenades. All courtesy of the U.S. Government. You ever had a stun stick light up your private parts while you’re half blind and completely deaf? I’d be thinking about that, if I were you. You can save yourself a lot of grief. Boldt here gives me thirty minutes with you in one of these barns? You won’t know what hit you, sweetheart, and you’ll be talking a blue streak, believe me.”

  Mention of the weapons brought Boldt a step closer to realizing the task before them. Of primary importance was to keep Flemming screwed into his socket. But of equal concern was that their daughters were in that house under the watch and care of Roger Crowley. Besides his sidearm and the stun stick, Flemming had pressure and phosphorus grenades, but the latter were useless with kids in the picture. Stun grenades could rupture a victim’s sinuses and eardrums if detonated too close. Phosphorus grenades occasionally did permanent eye damage in the process of “momentarily” blinding a suspect; they were also on record as having set a great many structural fires. Flemming sounded eager to use his toys. Boldt would not allow that. The man was a greater liability than their passenger.

  “There,” Flemming said, pointing out a white house to their right. “That’s the 11:51 delivery. That house, right there. By 12:19 he’s made—”

  “She’s made twelve miles,” Boldt answered, correcting the driver’s gender.

  “So she was going at a decent clip.”

  “Highway 536,” Boldt reminded, naming the state highway. “It’s probably posted at fifty-five.”

  Flemming picked up the speed, and Boldt’s heart rate right along with it. Sarah was somewhere within a few miles, he felt certain of it. His palms sweating, he took back the map, measured distances and checked street names.

  Flemming glanced at his watch. “Somewhere past here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Within the next five miles.”

  “On our left again,” the driver said.

  “Correct.” Boldt checked the hostage, hoping to see some faint recognition in the woman’s eyes, but she was either in shock or in complete control of herself. He saw nothing at all, a smug vacancy that made him fear they were nowhere near the safe house.

  The miles ticked on. Not one of the houses had a decent size tree planted close enough to a central window to qualify. Again, the property lining the roadway was dead flat, not elevated as had clearly been the case in Sarah’s video.

  “I’m not liking this,” Flemming said.

  “No,” Boldt agreed.

  “I got a hunch your little theory stinks,” the driver said. He glanced into the rearview mirror. “I think we’re wasting our time.” He added, “We’ve got all the answers we need right there. You may be too weak to stomach it, but I’m not. I’ve waited six months for this.”

  “Drive it again,” Boldt said.

  “What for? Those houses weren’t even close.”

  “Maybe another route,” Boldt said, vamping for time. “Maybe I got the route wrong. Turn around.”

  Flemming hung a U-turn, but drove fast. “And make that kind of time? No. You picked the right route. That delivery truck had to be doing forty or fifty to make it to that next drop by twenty after twelve. It’s your theory that’s wrong. Fuck the FedEx truck—she’s a witness, Goddamn it. An accomplice! We’ve got an accomplice in the backseat, and there is no way under heaven I won’t get her to talk. She’ll be telling me her life story if I want her to.”

  “And any chance of conviction—”

  “Oh, bullshit! Does Sarah care about conviction? Do you? Are you honestly going to go Boy Scout on me here?
You gonna explain that to your wife, to Sarah? Forget about it. Nice try. No sell. You want this as badly as I do. Admit it. You don’t give a shit about this scumbag in the backseat, about conviction. You want justice, same as me. Believe me, justice will be served.” He stopped the car. In the distance, in the moonlight, a barn shimmered in a dark field of cut-flower stems that without their blossoms reminded Boldt of long rows of thin soldiers.

  “Looks good to me,” Flemming said. He rocked his head to look at Crowley. He looked half mad. “How ’bout to you?”

  CHAPTER

  Flemming took the car keys as he climbed out, and Boldt lost any hope of stealing the car and the hostage while Flemming walked back to the trunk. The FedEx truck was not theory, he reminded himself, but evidence. It had appeared on that video clip and was, as such, irrefutable evidence. The video included a piece of a noontime CNN program, and the cable carrier had been identified as serving this community. With only four trucks delivering on the twenty-fifth, two of which were down for lunch break, Boldt had set his sights on locating the safe house and recovering Sarah. By dawn Seattle time Hale would be released—if he hadn’t been already—and the Chevalier-Crowley connection exposed, and Sarah’s ransom demands failed. He glanced at his watch, then at the trunk coming open, and finally back to the FedEx manifest, at which point it hit him.

  He came out of the car in a hurry.

  “I knew you’d come around,” Flemming said, collecting pieces of his traveling arsenal from the trunk, including a shotgun.

  “The driver took his lunch hour,” Boldt said, offering the map.

  Flemming slapped the open map away. “Eliminating two of the four trucks.”

  “No,” Boldt contradicted, “that’s where I had it wrong. Look at this manifest: The first drop after the lunch break is south of La Conner.” He paused. Flemming wasn’t interested. He explained, “The driver took his lunch in La Conner, not Mount Vernon.” Flemming looked up from the trunk. Now it was indeed all theory, but Boldt was loathe to admit it. “He drove from Mount Vernon to La Conner right at lunchtime. We ruled him out when we shouldn’t have: That fourth truck was on the road at the same time.”