The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  “Damn right I am.”

  “That bears further investigation.”

  “Bullshit,” the husband spit out.

  “Sid!” the wife chided sharply.

  “It isn’t something we do, sir.” Daphne explained, “We do not attribute a criminal act to any individual without due cause. We treat each crime uniquely, your son’s included. To group his abduction with the other kidnappings would be premature and unfair to Hayes.” To the wife she said, “I need you both to answer some questions. The sooner we get those answers, the better our chances of recovering Hayes.”

  “You know exactly who did this!” the father objected, erupting to his feet. “You let this man into our house! What good are you people?”

  “Time,” Daphne said, maintaining her calm and poise, “is working in our favor now. Every minute wasted, every minute lost diminishes those odds.” Directing herself to the father, she said, “You want to make assumptions, Mr. Weinstein, I don’t blame you. This could well be the work of the Pied Piper—”

  “Of course it is, and you know it! I told you people!” he blurted.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “Ten days ago, I told you people that someone was watching our house, and you ignored me, gave me the runaround. Ignored me! Now our son is missing, and goddamn it, you are to blame! This did not have to happen!”

  “Back up,” Daphne said, her composure lost. “Ten days ago you told us what? Exactly what?”

  “Go ask your nine-one-one operators, for God’s sake. They’re the ones that screwed me over.”

  “You actually saw the individual?”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “What then?”

  “I felt him.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know that feeling of being watched. Don’t tell me you don’t,” Weinstein complained. “It’s not like anything else.” He glanced searchingly between his wife and Daphne for support, but found little.

  “You never told me any of this,” the wife complained.

  “Sure I did.”

  “You told me some kidnapper was watching our house? I don’t think so.” A look of discovery swept the wife’s face. “Is that what has been bugging you?” To Daphne she explained, “He’s been acting like a nutcase for two weeks.” Returning to her husband, she told him, “I thought you were having an affair, however unlikely that is.” She returned her chin to between her knees.

  Daphne said slowly, “Tell me how you knew you were being watched, Mr. Weinstein.”

  “First off, there were noises one night. I heard them, even if she didn’t. … That’s when I called you people. Right outside the house, they were. ‘Someone out there,’ I told the woman who answered. ‘Send someone.’ But did you? She wanted a full description. Can you imagine? I’m being burglarized and the person who answers wants a description of every sound. ‘Oh, hang on a minute,’ I say to her. ‘I’ll go get my tape recorder. It sounds like a burglar,’ I tell her.” He sought sympathy between them. Found none. “She told me a car would do the neighborhood, but did I ever see one?”

  “Were you burglarized?” Daphne asked. “A patrol car may have in fact come by.”

  “That’s a crock of shit, and we both know it.”

  “On any other occasions did you—”

  “The next time I was in my car. I was driving the neighborhood, coming home from work. Two, three blocks north. I passed a guy getting into his van. You know, what do you call them? A bug sprayer—”

  “An exterminator,” Daphne answered, feeling weak in her stomach. This matched Daech’s information.

  “An exterminator!” Weinstein agreed. “And I swear he was watching me, even though he looked away. It may sound crazy to you but—”

  “It doesn’t,” Daphne assured him. She appreciated witness testimonies and put more faith in them than her colleagues. Sometimes the content was off, but the littlest details right on target.

  “And so I called again. Right? Same thing from you people: Was he on my property? Did he make a verbal threat? Was there any physical contact?” He shook his head disgustedly. “And now this …,” he mumbled.

  “The vehicle?” Daphne asked, displaying no excitement in her voice. “A van, you said. What color van?”

  “So now you care? Is that what you’re saying? You people are too much, you know that?”

  “The color of the van?” Daphne pressed.

  “White.”

  “Tell me about the driver,” she encouraged.

  “What’s to tell?” he asked. “Face was covered up. Goggles. One of those mouth things.”

  “A respirator,” she supplied.

  “Yeah. And what do I get from the cops? Questions. And here you are again, same thing. What’s any of it matter to Hayes? A dollar short and a day late is what it is. I’m going to sue you people. Goddamn it, I’m going to sue you!”

  The door was opened by a woman doctor wearing a white lab coat and a grim expression. She took in both Weinsteins with her sad eyes and slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this—” she said.

  CHAPTER

  “Lou! We have a situation!” Daphne shouted frantically as she ran past his office door. Boldt knew her well enough not to question. He left his office at a run and followed her down the stairs, two at a time. The fifth floor, Crimes Against Persons—Homicide—remained his emotional home. His time with Intelligence, required for his advancement, felt more like a probationary sentence.

  He guessed: two officers going at it; a suspect loose; a threatened suicide—police work did strange things to people.

  They reached the entrance to Homicide and peered through the safety glass. “Who is that?” Boldt asked, seeing a man waving a police-issue 9mm at a semicircle of a dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers, all perfectly still.

  “Sidney Weinstein. Father of the second child,” she answered. “His mother is the homicide. We asked him down to view mug shots because he may have had a look at the Pied Piper.” Her breath fogged the glass.

  “This is not good,” he said.

  “You see who I see?” she asked.

  “Wish I didn’t.”

  Well behind Sidney Weinstein and just around the corner, Dunkin Hale and Gary Flemming, there for the four o’clock task force meeting, observed the chaos.

  Boldt signaled the receptionist to admit them. Weinstein was shouting obscenities and complaints about the incompetence of the police. “My mother and my child!” he cried out.

  The receptionist slowly lifted her arm and depressed the button that freed the secured door. Sidney Weinstein, hearing the electronic buzzing, waved the gun frantically, parting the semicircle. “No one comes in here!” he shouted.

  “It’s only me,” Daphne announced, stepping inside. “I’m with Lieutenant Boldt. He’s the one who has been looking into those nine-one-one calls. Your grudge is with them, Sidney, not any of these people.”

  Boldt stepped through behind her, knowing nothing of any 911 calls.

  The heavy door closed with a thump, distracting Weinstein.

  In that instant, Boldt caught a signal from Flemming, who pointed to the coffee lounge—the glass wall on which Weinstein was leaning. Formerly a copy room, the lounge had two doors around the corner from each other. Flemming intended to reach Weinstein through the lounge if Boldt could shift the man closer to the door that stood open to Weinstein’s left.

  Daphne continued to work with the man, Boldt blocking out her words, his attention riveted on Flemming, who gently twisted the doorknob and slipped into the lounge. Daphne ignored Flemming, her methods psychological, not physical. “Let’s think about Hayes for a moment,” she encouraged, winning back Weinstein’s attention. She didn’t want any mention of his deceased mother—there was still hope for Hayes. She stepped closer.

  “You stay where you are!” he thundered, shaking the gun at her.

  Daphne stopped short. “Okay … okay … let’s think about t
his. Together. Sidney? Okay. You are an intelligent man, not a criminal. If you shoot one of us, where does that leave you? Where does that leave Hayes? You are going to be shot dead or locked up if you fire that weapon. That’s what they’ll do to you,” she said, indicating the gathering of uniforms and detectives. “Where does that leave Hayes?”

  “He’s never coming back. Not one of those kids has been found.”

  “Are you giving up?” Daphne asked. “Do you want us to give up?”

  Weinstein strained to make a decision. “My mother,” he moaned.

  “Put down the weapon, Sidney,” Daphne advised. “Right now.” The man continued to wave the gun. “What if Hayes, right this minute, has a weapon aimed at him, the same way you’re aiming it at us? Are you going to condone that?”

  The weapon bobbed in Weinstein’s grip, his finger dangerously on the trigger. Daphne took another step forward.

  “No,” Boldt hissed at her.

  She motioned Boldt away. She had spotted Flemming and wanted to prevent a violent solution.

  Boldt knew that her ambitions could blind her. She carried an ugly scar on her neck from an encounter with the Cross Killer and wore turtlenecks and scarves to cover her mistake.

  She asked Weinstein, “How do you think these people feel with a gun trained at them?”

  Weinstein swept the crowd with the barrel of the weapon. To Boldt, he looked unpredictable and crazed.

  Flemming, unseen on hands and knees, reappeared briefly at the door nearest Weinstein. He needed Boldt to move Weinstein closer.

  Boldt edged right, threw his hands over his head, and said loudly, “Most of us in this room have children, Mr. Weinstein. I have two. Miles and Sarah.”

  Weinstein tracked Boldt with the gun and in the process shifted slightly closer to Flemming. “You stay where you are.”

  Daphne glared at Boldt, angry that he would assist a violent solution. “Yes,” she said, “you stay where you are.”

  Keeping his hands over his head, Boldt continued to his right, maintaining Weinstein’s attention.

  “You see this man?” Daphne asked Weinstein, gesturing at Boldt. “He has been working around the clock on these kidnappings, and now here he is having to deal with you instead. Is that fair to Hayes, Sidney? Think about it. Put the gun down!”

  Flemming, still on all fours, again appeared in the doorway to Weinstein’s left. Everyone saw him but Weinstein, whose back remained pressed against the wall.

  “You’re incompetent! All of you!” the man shouted. “Stop!” he ordered Boldt, taking yet another step closer to the door.

  Boldt moved with him, one final step. Weinstein tracked him, nervously pulled in the same direction. Flemming looked prepared to spring.

  “Put the gun down!” Daphne begged, not wanting the risk of a physical intervention. “Please, Sidney. For Trish, for Hayes. Put … the gun … down … now!”

  Weinstein’s face bunched in grief and his shoulders shook. He could no longer support the weight of the weapon. Its barrel sagged toward the floor.

  Flemming sprang like a cat, chopped the man’s arm to the floor, dislodging the gun, yanked an arm back hard and threw a choke hold onto the man, all in one fluid movement. He kneed the back of the man’s legs, dropped him to the floor face down and fell atop him. Boldt reached them, fished under Flemming and cuffed Weinstein’s wrists. “Got him,” Boldt announced.

  “Check it,” Flemming demanded, not letting up the pressure, charged with anger.

  A uniformed cop toed the fallen weapon away and retrieved it.

  Boldt tugged. “Okay. He’s cuffed.” He overheard Flemming whisper menacingly into Weinstein’s ear, “You’re a son-of-a-bitch. You know how hard these people are working for you?” Flemming smacked the man’s forehead to the floor and then climbed off, panting.

  As he stood, the room exploded into applause.

  Weinstein was hauled off to booking, Daphne by his side. Boldt, Hale and Flemming gathered in the coffee lounge. Hale shook Flemming’s hand like a player to the coach. Flemming’s black face shined bright with sweat as he met eyes with Boldt and said, “You’re thinking I was a little rough with him.”

  “I’m thinking you’re fast for your size, and I’m grateful for it.”

  “He’d lost control of himself. That’s something I abhor. Emotion and reason—it’s a delicate balance. Got the better of me for a moment.”

  “He’d flipped out,” Hale said, eager to be part of the conversation.

  “Not that I don’t empathize,” Flemming added. “I can imagine the loss he’s suffered, a parent’s grief, the guilt. Who wants to sit on the sidelines? I wouldn’t. And given his history—having called nine-one-one but to no good—one can hardly blame him for the anger, the frustration. The rage.”

  Boldt said, “You don’t settle it with a gun.”

  “You have children,” Flemming said. “How would you feel if the situation were reversed?”

  “How I would feel, and what I would do about it are separate matters,” Boldt said.

  “Are they? Only if you have reason and emotion balanced and in check,” Flemming explained. “Weinstein didn’t. Once a person loses that balance, there’s no telling what’s going to happen, what he’ll do. I’ve seen it firsthand, maybe you have too. I even feel that way myself sometimes,” he said more quietly, “on the edge like that.”

  “I’ve been there.” Hale sounded proud of himself.

  “We all have our breaking points,” Boldt agreed. “Weinstein certainly found his.” Boldt realized he and Flemming had not broken eye contact since the start of their conversation. Flemming came off as an intense man; he took over without any apparent effort on his part. “A born leader,” men like Flemming were called. “Thanks for what you did out there.”

  The two men shook hands again. “Thanks for moving him toward me. We made a pretty good team out there.”

  Boldt didn’t want to think of himself as part of Flemming’s team. He took the stairs back to his own floor, considering the line between emotion and reason, wondering what it had felt like inside Weinstein’s mind at that moment of uncontrollable rage, and knowing it was not a place he ever wanted to be.

  CHAPTER

  A sympathetic judge prevented an overnight stay for Weinstein in city lockup, reducing the charge to reckless endangerment. His bail waived, Weinstein was released on his own recognizance and ordered to appear in two weeks’ time.

  Friday morning, March 20, arrived on the back of monsoon rains and wind gusts to fifty knots. Rain pellets struck Public Safety’s fifth-floor windows sounding like handfuls of gravel, forcing those with adjacent desks to shout into their phones. Morale was low, moods sour. The task force team sagged: the further away from a kidnapping, the further away from the hope of recovering the victim.

  John LaMoia slept three hours, showered, changed clothes and returned to Public Safety in a pair of unpressed blue jeans, making himself as noticeable as if he’d set himself afire. After three consecutive lattés he felt as if someone had sewn a string through his scalp and was tugging hard in poorly timed jerks. Two missing kids and a dead grandmother. The shit was well through the fan, and it was sticking to him. He had long since learned from Boldt that in police work one expected the unexpected. He thought he had had about all he could take. Again, he was proved wrong.

  Detective Bobbie Gaynes marched stridently toward LaMoia’s upholstered office cubicle, her shoulders arched forward as if fighting a wind or climbing a long hill. Small and strong, Gaynes had short brown hair and hands like a man. Homicide’s first female detective—Boldt’s protégée—Gaynes was known for thoroughness, punctuality and professionalism.

  LaMoia had no desire to meet with her. He had assigned her an accidental death in Fremont, a case he wanted closed and out of the way, allowing him and his squad to focus on the Pied Piper. He had assigned her the case thinking she could clear it without his involvement. He had his own dead body now—he didn’t want hers
.

  “I don’t want this right now,” he groaned, raising his hands like a traffic cop to stop her.

  “Oh, yes you do,” she informed him obstinately, coming to a breathless stop. Like LaMoia, Gaynes took the stairs most of the time, not the elevator. She was small-chested and firm, carrying twice the strength her looks suggested. “This will have you changing your shorts it’s so good.”

  “From the mouths of babes …” He unwound the string from the paper button that sealed the heavy manila envelope she delivered and withdrew the contents. “A lab prelim?” he asked incredulously. “And I was hoping for eight-by-ten glossies of First Avenue strippers.”

  “This is better, believe me.”

  Tossing the folder aside, he said, “You want to give me the Cliff Notes?” He caught himself using a Boldt line and wondered how much of his job he did on autopilot, and how much was he himself.

  “This so-called accidental death?” she reminded. “The belly flop in the tub with the crushed windpipe? Name of Anderson. White male, mid-forties. First officer’s report had it down as an accident.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” LaMoia said. “Just clear the thing, would you?”

  “So I do the scene, search the guy’s crib, make the sketches, hit the neighbors. The usual dime tour. He’s neat and tidy. A woman notices that. He’s got a T-shirt folded up under his pillow for crying out loud. Everything in its place. He’s found by a neighbor, face down in the tub. The idea is he’s taking a shower, slips, and does the funky chicken: busted neck. It happens, sure—to eighty-year-olds. This guy’s mid-forties?”