Pied Piper lbadm-5

by Ridley Pearson

  “No, in the crib,” LaMoia said, leaning back and seeing the smudge of a fine yellow powder on the crib’s frame. “It’s a penny flute I think. One of those dime-store-variety penny flutes.”

  “Well, at least that explains how they named him,” Boldt said. “Another convenient detail the Feds neglected to share.”

  “A fucking calling card? We wouldn’t have shared it either, John.” He added, “You know, just because Hill feels competition with the Bureau-”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to,” LaMoia completed. “I know that. It gets a little contagious though.”

  “Daphne can help you with the penny flute. His leaving a calling card presents an entirely different profile. Baiting. Taunting. It helps explain some of Flemming’s reticence to share: the AFIDs and the penny flute. If they’re this guy’s signatures, they’re certainly the angles he’s working.”

  “I’d wondered how they came up with that handle,” LaMoia said, again referring to the FBI’s nickname. His job to make the call, LaMoia spoke the words that would set into motion one of the highest profile cases in the city’s history, involving three states and nine missing babies. Ten, LaMoia corrected himself, staring back into the crib. The words came out of his throat stubbornly. “It’s the Pied Piper,” he said.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Boldt advised, “we have visitors.”

  Captain Sheila Hill’s yelling at the media filtered through the walls. LaMoia confirmed her presence through the window.

  Over the long haul, police work typically hardened many of its women-language toughened, even a woman’s walk became more angular, less gracious. But Sheila Hill was the exception. At forty-two she looked thirty-five. She wore her blonde hair shoulder length, and today wore a navy blue sport jacket, khaki shirt and a pair of brown corduroy pants. Her Italian loafers gleamed.

  Divorced with an eight-year-old son named Tommy, Sheila Hill still managed to work twelve-hour days, six, sometimes seven, days a week. No one on the force, including LaMoia, expected her to stop at captain.

  She carried a knowing self-importance in her posture, transforming her five feet six inches into a much taller figure. Her voice, strident and defiant, carried through the walls as she addressed the press. “We have confirmed an apparent kidnapping, a missing infant by the name of Rhonda Shotz. The relation of this crime to the nine earlier kidnappings in California and Oregon, currently being investigated by the FBI, is not known at this time, so please spare me any such questions; you’re wasting your breath. You can help the parents of this girl, and all of us in law enforcement, by getting an image or a description of that child in front of the public just as quickly as possible. We should have an image for you shortly. Beyond that, it’s far too early to comment. Please, allow us the room to do our jobs efficiently, and I promise you a full press conference in the next six to nine hours. That’s all, people. Thank you.”

  She walked away from the shouting as if unable to hear it, sensuous and fluid, right toward LaMoia.

  “Sergeant.” She looked LaMoia up and down.

  “Captain.” He locked eyes with her.

  “Lou,” she addressed Boldt, while continuing to look at LaMoia.

  “I asked the lieutenant to join me, Captain.”

  “We paged you,” Hill reminded Boldt, as if it had been her idea, not LaMoia’s, to include Boldt. Ever the politician.

  “I was on private time,” he explained. One of the luxuries of Intelligence was its lack of being on-call. “John chased me down.”

  “I see,” she said, weighing Boldt’s presence. As long as Boldt was around, LaMoia would listen to him, regardless of assignments, and Hill wanted full control. “You heard me just now,” she said. “How much of what I just told that horde is bullshit?”

  LaMoia knew that Boldt would leave it to him to answer. “The Bureau withheld a couple signatures. From all of us,” he added.

  She glanced at Boldt-Intelligence was expected to know everything about anything, even FBI investigations. “We can assume they’ve withheld some of those crime scene reports to protect the Need to Know. Not all of them,” he cautioned, “but some of them.” He reminded, “We would have done the same.”

  “If the FBI had asked?” she countered. “No, we wouldn’t have. It’s a one-way street, Lieutenant. We both know that.” She pursed her lips. LaMoia considered them full and luscious lips-kissable lips surprisingly void of any age lines.

  “AFIDs,” LaMoia said. “An air TASER, not a stun stick.” He carried his own stun stick under the Camaro’s front seat. “And a penny flute left behind in the crib.”

  “He’s leaving a calling card?” she exclaimed. “He’s proud of these kidnappings? What kind of creature are we dealing with?”

  “Matthews can help there,” Boldt contributed.

  “One of those dime-store flutes,” LaMoia said.

  Perplexed, Hill asked incredulously, “He wants us to connect these kidnappings? What the hell is that about?” She nodded, thinking to herself, her expression grim. “Shit,” she mumbled.

  LaMoia explained, “We’ll get the parents’ permission to trap-and-trace the phone. Get Tech Services over here to put a tape recorder on the line. Until Flemming confirms the signatures we’ll still hope it’s not him and that there might be a ransom call.” The Pied Piper had yet to request a ransom. The suspicions ranged from a child molester to an illegal adoption ring.

  Glancing at her watch, Hill said, “How long has he had?”

  “Two-hour lead,” LaMoia answered.

  “That’s an eternity.” Her ice blue eyes flickered with worry.

  LaMoia reminded, “Dispatch has already notified the airlines, rail and bus carriers. Canadian Immigration. Sheriff’s Department. The ferries-”

  “Two hours? Shit.” She filled her chest with a deep breath and exhaled slowly, shaking her head. “Shit.” She glanced around as if the press might be overhearing them. She ordered LaMoia, “Get in that house and find me a picture I can use. If we don’t fax that image around, we haven’t got a chance of saving this baby.”

  LaMoia returned inside and searched. In the living room he found a stack of photos showing a tiny baby in the arms and on the breast of her mother. Any of three close-ups in the pile would fax well enough: a tiny glowing face with bulging cheeks and clear blue eyes. He suddenly felt unbearably cold.

  As he rejoined Boldt and Hill, SID’s black panel truck pulled up into the space cleared for them. Hill took the packet of photos from LaMoia and leafed through them. She said, “God, I hate this job sometimes.”

  As a group, the three caught up to Bernie Lofgrin heading toward them. The Scientific Identification Division’s director, a small man with a beer belly, wore thick glasses that grossly enlarged his eyes. He walked quickly with stiff legs, carrying a large red toolbox at his side that weighed him down and tilted him to his right. As a group they spun around and matched pace with him.

  “We need it quick but we need it right, Bernie,” she told him.

  “This time of night and you hit me with cliches? Tell me something new, Captain,” Lofgrin quipped. “I was in the middle of dinner.”

  “I stepped on this,” LaMoia interrupted, reaching out to hand Lofgrin the evidence bag. “May be nothing.”

  Hill snatched it up for herself, held it up closely to her eyes and passed it on to Lofgrin. “I didn’t hear about this,” she complained.

  Lofgrin stopped, as did LaMoia, Boldt and Hill. His team of technicians raced past the four of them.

  “AFIDs where the body fell,” Boldt added, “and a calling card in the-”

  The cry of tire squelches cut him off as a Town Car and a black van blocked the narrow residential street. Boldt had seen the FBI’s evidence van enough times to recognize it. The Town Car produced two men and a woman.

  “Get your people to work, Bernie,” Hill ordered. “I’ve got this,” she announced, peeling away and cutting to intercept the Feds.

  As LaMoia followed Hill wit
h his eyes he saw beyond her to a set of six balloons waving in the wind up the street.

  Lofgrin asked, “You coming, John?”

  “Flemming, Hale and Kalidja,” Boldt told his former detective. At Hill’s request, Boldt had done background checks on all three. “This is the wrong place, the wrong situation for me,” he said. “Hill is going to squirrel the moment. I need to be able to work with these people. We’ll talk later, John.”

  “Sure,” LaMoia confirmed, still intrigued with what he saw across the street. “Later,” he called out to Lofgrin, who hurried on.

  Boldt headed to his car. He stopped and shook hands with the FBI agents on his way.

  LaMoia followed, but steered clear of Hill and the FBI agents. As he approached the officers responsible for crowd control, they all noticed him; another of those effects of being a sergeant that bothered him. As a detective, the uniforms had rarely noticed. Two of the officers, anticipating him, lifted the yellow police tape and cleared a hole in the gawkers-neighbors and police-scanner junkies who had nothing better to do-and helped him through. LaMoia walked straight to those balloons, and their ribbons stretched tight. The small metal realtor sign flapped lightly in the breeze: Represented by Sherry Daech-McCann, Daech, Fenton. The sergeant tugged on the balloons. Tight. Fresh helium. Open House Tonite! it read on a smaller sign. If the open house had been the day before, the balloons would have sagged by now. It meant that the open house had been this same evening.

  Out came his notepad.

  If the realtor had kept track of her visitors, then the police had possible witnesses coming and going throughout the evening. On occasion potential buyers even took photos. LaMoia finished writing this down, closed his eyes and whispered, “Please.”

  Behind him, Hill and the FBI agents were marching in lockstep toward the Shotz house.

  CHAPTER 4

  LaMoia toed the cracks in the sidewalk in front of the Wasserman home, tracing them like veins beneath the skin. He felt in no particular hurry to get inside.

  A steady cool breeze blew east out of the Olympics and up into the heart of the city.

  Daphne Matthews arrived in her red Honda. She deftly parallel parked behind LaMoia’s Camaro. As staff psychologist, Matthews was an anomaly within the department. She operated on a cerebral plane, erudite, always choosing her words carefully. LaMoia guessed that her dark, brooding beauty had forced her as a young woman to erect a wall that as an adult she now found difficult to dismantle; he found her remote. Whatever the case, her controlled distance and unavailability attracted him just as it did so many others. Her close friendship with Boldt was a matter of departmental history: The two had collaborated successfully on several major investigations. Other rumors surrounded them as well, but LaMoia discounted these.

  Matthews approached him with her game face firmly in place. She held a leather briefcase, her wrist laden in bracelets that rattled like dull bells.

  “Who’s in there?” she asked, all business.

  LaMoia answered, “Father, Paul; mother, Doris. Their little boy, Henry. The neighbors, the Wassermans. She’s Tina. Don’t know his name. They’ve got kids, I think. McKinney’s inside.”

  She wanted full control of the environment. “We’ll lose McKinney for the time being. Let’s try to get Henry moved upstairs with the neighbors. I doubt the mother will let him out of her sight, but ultimately we want only the Shotzes downstairs with us. Once we’re settled, we offer our sympathies. We try to avoid letting them find out that neither of us has kids, because we lose rapport there. We give them a little background about the task force, try to build up their hope, their faith in us. All this before we ask a single question. I’ll handle it. When we reach question time, you’ll take the wheel. Start all your questions with your eyes toward the floor,” she acted this out as she explained, “lifting them slowly as you work into the question, punctuated by eye contact as the question is completed. Soft voice. And something new for you, John: humility.

  “There are things you should know,” she continued. “For a parent, a kidnapping is more difficult to endure than a death. We can expect some guilt, maybe blame between them. They may even blame us. They are desperate. Vulnerable. They’ll turn to anything, anyone that they believe might return their child to them: psychics, private investigators, clergy, you name it. Part of our job is to protect them from this. We want their faith in us. This is, more than likely, their first contact with SPD beyond a traffic cop. This first impression will carry lots of weight as to how much cooperation we get. You like to fly by the seat of your pants. Fine. You’re great in the Box because of that. But this is not an interrogation. Keep reminding yourself of that. They are convinced they know nothing that could help us. TV, movies, novels, make them expect miracles. So we go easy with reality for now. We soften them up. If we do our jobs properly tonight-we go slowly-by tomorrow they’ll be feeding us information even they didn’t know they knew. We step on the gas too hard,” she said, adjusting to his language, “and we’ll flood it, and it won’t restart.”

  “I’m with you, Lieutenant.” She knew that her senior rank bothered LaMoia. Most psychologists would have been on the civilian payroll. She had done the academy, carried a weapon and a shield believing one could not consult and advise cops without knowing everything there was to know.

  She said, “For the record, we’re going to get her back, John. Never mind that the other cities failed. That doesn’t have to affect us. If we start discouraged we’ll never overcome it.” Looking toward the house she said, “These people have information for us. We both know that. They doubt it. The clock is running. If everyone does their job-and we’re part of that-then by morning that child is back in her crib.” She glanced over at him. “Believe it.”

  “Save the cheerleader routine for them, Lieutenant. They’re the ones who need it.”

  The woman-the mother, Daphne thought-looked a wreck. The father was drunk and had been for some time. Daphne introduced LaMoia and herself twice but knew the only thing that registered was their occupation: police.

  The mother clung to her three-year-old son like life itself. Daphne offered her sympathies and the husband burst into tears, mumbling apologies to his wife, who clearly did not want to hear them.

  The parents had been briefed by Mulwright concerning the baby sitter’s ordeal as the victim of a stun gun and that she had been transferred to the hospital. Daphne drew this out of the mother, regretting she had not had the opportunity to tell them herself and gauge their reactions. Doris Shotz then rambled on about asking her neighbor to check the house for her, and the neighbor’s discovery of the unconscious sitter and little Henry, who had been found safe hiding in a corner of the kitchen. The neighbor had rescued Henry, phoned the police and had called back the train car’s cellular pay phone connecting with Doris-which, according to the husband, “was when all hell broke loose.”

  LaMoia mentioned the string of kidnappings that had swept up the West Coast and that the Feds attributed the abductions to a man they had dubbed “the Pied Piper.”

  Doris Shotz said she’d heard about the kidnappings, but her next words were absorbed in her sobs and lost to both police officers.

  Together, Daphne and LaMoia then filled in the blanks: the FBI’s involvement in the investigation, the task force headed by SPD. Determining that the husband had purchased the dinner-train tickets, LaMoia directed to him, “Do you remember who you told about the dinner train?”

  “No one,” he said, numbly.

  “A co-worker, a secretary, a neighbor?”

  “No one. It was a surprise. Doro thought we were going to Ivar’s.”

  Doris Shotz nodded.

  “You made the arrangements yourself?” LaMoia inquired.

  “Yeah, yeah. Had the tickets mailed to the shop.”

  LaMoia checked his pad. “Micro System Workshop.”

  “Doro,” the husband chastised his wife, “are you listening? These other kidnappings? They have not gotten one of t
hese kids back.” He asked LaMoia, “Isn’t that right?”

  LaMoia avoided an answer, directing himself to the wife. “Can you explain some pieces of broken glass found in front of your daughter’s crib? A drinking glass, maybe-a mirror?”

  “There was nothing like that when we left,” the wife replied. “I cleaned the room just this morning.”

  “Vacuumed?” Daphne asked softly, doubting the woman could focus on anything but her missing child.

  LaMoia sat forward on the edge of his chair, the detective in him smelling hard evidence: the Pied Piper’s shoes, his pants cuffs, his pockets. …

  Doris Shotz mumbled nearly incoherently, “There’s never been any broken glass in Rhonda’s room. That carpet was laid a month before she was born-”

  “That’s true,” the husband responded, reaching for his wife’s hand. “If there’s glass in that carpet, this bastard brought it with him.”

  “My baby,” Doris Shotz pleaded.

  “We’re going to bring her home,” Daphne declared. She met eyes with the mother: Doris Shotz did not believe.

  CHAPTER 5

  No one knew better than a homicide cop the ability of the human mind to forget.

  Not only was LaMoia required to locate and interview any potential witness, but on occasion such a witness had the potential to blow a case wide open. A realtor-whose job requirements included sizing up potential clients-seemed a decent place to invest his energies. The door-to-door work, conducted by a combination of task force detectives, FBI and SPD alike, had produced little of value. If Sherry Daech had seen anything-suspicious or not-the night before, LaMoia needed to interview her immediately. Memories deteriorated quickly.

  He feared that any attempt to bring her downtown would send the wrong message. He did not want attorneys involved. A quiet chat in her office seemed more the thing.

  But when his first two attempts to make an appointment failed, he placed his third call as a prospective buyer, and this time he scored, convincing him that Sherry Daech wanted nothing to do with the police, good citizen or not.