The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  His eyes stung with encroaching tears. If there was one thing he felt, it was alone. “Thanks,” he said.

  She drank the Scotch in two swigs and banged the glass down. She cleared her throat, burned by the drink. Without looking at him, she added, “You need a shoulder, I’m here.”

  “What about Anderson’s front door video? Any progress?”

  “I’ll be through it by tonight, promise.”

  “Didn’t you say that last time?” He checked his own notes. “And the earwax?” he asked. “Anderson’s earwax?”

  “I put in the request with the Doc. He should a sent it over to SID.”

  “Follow it up,” he instructed.

  “Can I ask something?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered bluntly, surprising her. He tempered it by saying, “No, I’d rather you didn’t.”

  He had hurt her. “Fine,” she said, toying with the empty Scotch glass. She slipped off the stool. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “Bobbie!” he called out, wishing he’d handled her differently.

  Some guy in red suspenders turned his head. He looked about twelve years old and was smoking an illegal cigar. “What?” he said. “I’m Bobby. What the hell you want?”

  Boldt walked past him, too annoyed to think what to say.

  Sheila Hill’s office lacked any feminine touches. Cluttered with paperwork, newspapers and stacks of files, it nonetheless had an image of control. She motioned Boldt into one of the two straight-backed gunmetal gray chairs and clicked a shoe off unseen under her desk. “You mind?” she asked, lighting up a cigarette. It was illegal in a public building. “First things first,” she said. “Anderson’s computer. How we let the Feds get hold of it is beyond me. It’s obvious we need to know whatever they know the minute they know it.”

  “I can try,” Boldt said, thinking of Kalidja, “but it’s not as if I have ears over there.”

  “Yeah? Well get some. Get a line on them—this is Need to Know, this is no bullshit.”

  “They sent it to Washington,” Boldt reminded. “Bernie knows a couple civilians in the lab.”

  “Whatever it takes. Which brings me to my more important point.”

  He felt it coming: She knew about the wiretap and she was about to cut him off at the knees.

  She stood and checked her door. She locked it. She took the smoke over to the window, sat down, turned toward Boldt and faced him with her stockinged feet up on the desk. She spoke unusually softly for her. “This goes no further than us.” Boldt felt a chill up his spine. He was busted; he felt certain of it. “Okay. Are you with me?”

  Boldt nodded tentatively. Hill had an imposing femininity about her. Sitting so close to her, Boldt felt drawn into her. Captivated.

  “We’re all thinking adoption ring at this point. Okay? So if we’re right then there’s some serious money in play. Market price for an illegal is anywhere from twenty to seventy thousand. White babies on the high side. That’s a million bucks and counting.”

  Boldt wondered why Hill had waited to weigh in behind the adoption theory. Where was she leading?

  “Plenty of spare change for a few favors.” She met eyes with Boldt. “You see what I’m driving at?”

  “Maybe I do,” he said.

  “You look at these reports, and you realize that in each and every city the Pied Piper blows town only days ahead of a major attempt to collar him. San Francisco. Portland. It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Fairly,” he answered.

  “And you,” she said strongly. “You’re in the perfect position.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course.”

  He had never understood the idea of a person’s world collapsing in an instant—worlds took time to collapse—but all at once that was how he felt, as if the walls, furniture, the ceiling and floor began to suck in toward him, crushing air out of the room and him along with it. She knew! She had found out. Next came his confession about Sarah, and then what?

  “Me?” he repeated, his voice breaking.

  “Who else?” she asked, confirming she had thought long and hard about this. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he let slip in a sad, quiet voice. She understood too much. His daughter was his world. He and Liz had taken a bath with Sarah not two months ago, her little feet frantic in the water—a different world now for everyone.

  “You’re positioned so perfectly. Who would think?”

  He felt true hatred. “Who would think?” he repeated.

  “Are you with me on this? Do you feel all right? You’re looking awfully pale, Lou.”

  How should I feel? he wanted to say. “With you.”

  “Who else? Not Mulwright. Not John. They’re too close to the center.”

  “You see, I differ there,” Boldt objected. “The closer to the center the better, if it was me.”

  “Forest for the trees, in my opinion. I thought about Matthews, and maybe she becomes part of this—”

  “She’s not involved,” Boldt interrupted strongly.

  “But she could be. If you wanted her to be, she could be. In some ways she’s perfect for this.”

  “I’ve barely spoken to her in the past few days,” he protested. But I tapped her phone! And yours … and LaMoia’s!

  “But if you wanted her to, she could help you on something like this.”

  A high-voltage spike struck him; his fingers tingled. He had misconstrued everything she had said. “Captain …,” he began. “Sheila … what the hell are we talking about here? Me? Matthews?”

  “I’m thinking it’s a reporter. You know: exclusive rights for a little cooperation. Book deal. TV movie. It happens,” she added with a strong twinge of regret.

  “Are we talking the same thing?”

  “A hundred grand? Two hundred?” she added quickly. “I’m thinking a reporter is buying inside stuff and supplying it back to the Pied Piper in exchange for exclusive rights. One of the tabloids.”

  Boldt took a long deep swallow. “Just to clarify,” Boldt said dryly, “you’re asking me to flush out an insider?”

  She cautioned, “One of the Feds would make the most sense. Hell of a source. A little cash under the table. Happens all the time.”

  “You want me to flush the insider?” He felt giddy, he nearly laughed aloud at the irony: She was asking him to trap himself.

  She said, “Yes. How else has this person gone undetected for so long? Inside information. Has to be.”

  “We sting the Feds with disinformation,” Boldt proposed, “and see who surfaces.”

  “Whatever you can come up with.” Unknowingly, Sheila Hill had just provided him the justification for the wiretaps he had ordered.

  He would need to go through with something—no matter how poorly conceived—to placate her. Maybe use Daphne, maybe not.

  “I think you’re onto something, Captain. It makes sense.”

  “You’re damn right it does. We get this insider out of play—we keep our efforts from being sabotaged—and we just might collar the Pied Piper.”

  “Right,” Boldt agreed. It was all he could think of.

  CHAPTER

  Boldt parked outside the Shotz house shortly after 8:00 P.M. that same Thursday. The warm evening air carried the scent of a budding earth—rich, black, wet soil pushing up life after months of sponging up the sky’s discharge. Boldt recalled an early winter evening when just he and Sarah had been home. He had put a Scott Hamilton CD on the stereo, a cup of hot tea on the table and little Sarah warmly into his lap. Flipping pages of The Lovables—he remembered the book so clearly—he had been pointing out the pictures to her when suddenly she had wheeled her head around and up and had met eyes with him, her father, so absolute a connection, so strong, this little person making contact, real contact with him, and then the long, sustained smile, gradually forming and then occupying her entire face, and an overwhelming sense of love choking his heart, filling his throat and unl
eashing from his eyes. Father crying, baby smiling, the book slipping to the floor, its pages slowly shutting.

  Daphne’s red Honda arrived a few minutes later, and she joined him in the front seat of the Chevy. She smelled of lilac and her face carried worry poorly. For a moment they sat in silence, and he knew she was mad at him for not explaining his moving Miles out of the city. But there wasn’t any explaining to do; he wasn’t going to start now. He had dug himself in too deeply.

  “I’ve had time to go over the files, found some interesting coincidences.” Everyone, including Daphne, knew he abhorred the word. “Take a look at these,” he said, handing her a stack of lab prelims from the task force book. She would not question his being in possession of these. Boldt worked evidence—it was his lot.

  “The parents’ statements,” she observed, reading.

  “One is Shotz,” he explained. “The other is taken from a report the Bureau provided. It’s Portland … the Portland kidnapping.”

  “You want me to read these?” she said impatiently.

  “Skim is okay.”

  “Portland is in interview form,” she noted.

  “All right. Here!” he said, pointing, “… swaddled in a receiving blanket at the time of the abduction. The mother calls it a ‘custom’ blanket.”

  “All mothers think that,” Daphne said.

  “No, no, no! She calls it a custom blanket. No one asks anything more. Here!” he said, rearranging the pages. “Doris Shotz says her baby was wearing ‘an outfit with her picture on it.’ Her words.”

  “Custom,” Daphne said, following his logic.

  “Custom,” he agreed.

  “Weinstein?”

  “No mention I can find. No reference. But that’s why we’re here,” he informed her. “Doris Shotz is organized. She’ll know what we’re after.”

  “And me? What’s my role in this?”

  “Downplay it. I don’t want it going to the press. I need this to be a conversation, not an interrogation. She’s a wreck.”

  “You don’t look so swift yourself. You setting a record on that shirt or what?”

  “He picks his victims somehow.”

  “Custom blanket?”

  “Why not?”

  “Just asking.” She informed him, “The Bureau is pursuing magazine subscriptions and catalogs. It came up in the four o’clock.”

  “No kidding,” Boldt said, hoping to sound surprised.

  She knew him too well. “I won’t ask,” she said. “I promised not to ask. But I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Me too.”

  Doris Shotz answered the door with her three-year-old son clutched in her arms. Boldt had seen her only a few hours earlier outside Davidson’s office and knew of her vigils over the past two weeks. In an environment that could and did cast humor onto any subject no matter how grim, Boldt did not know of a single joke that had been voiced about Doris Shotz. Each day she returned, unwilling to give up on her daughter. She was admired by captain and patrol officer alike.

  A woman in her thirties, she had the look of an old lady on her deathbed, wan and thin. She admitted Boldt and Daphne, but they were not welcome. Doris Shotz had quickly developed a deep-seated hatred for the police.

  The kitchen table held two empty place mats from an earlier dinner. Shotz never let go of her boy while preparing coffee and tea, even though she looked as if she might snap under the weight. Boldt and Daphne took tea. Paul Shotz poured himself a cup of coffee laced with rum, despite his wife’s protests. He had the unfocused glass eyes of a taxidermied rat. He had shaved carelessly, a day or two gone by, lending him a worn and beleaguered look. His shirt had been slept in, on the living room couch if Boldt had it right. Sitting at the table with them, Paul Shotz stared beyond Boldt—right through him—so that the detective had the feeling that someone was standing right behind him.

  “What is it you want?” Doris Shotz asked impolitely. Two weeks earlier she would have done anything to help; but now she had little room left for hope. The Pied Piper claimed far more lives than just the children he abducted.

  Daphne said, “We’re making headway—real headway—in the case, Mrs. Shotz. Police work is about fitting pieces together. We’re here in search of more of those. We need to seize chances when they arise. That’s why we’re here. Some of what we’d like to discuss has been brought up before, perhaps so many times that you’re sick of it, that you think we already have the answers. If we did, we wouldn’t be here. What we need to do, all of us,” she said, including the dazed husband, “is do our best to imagine that none of this has been discussed before. Erase the slate. Allow things to rise to the surface through the grief and pain of your loss. We all want Rhonda back home. As much hostility and anger as you feel toward us, it’s important you believe that, trust that, because it is the truth: We’re in this together.” She shot Boldt a look—this last statement aimed at him.

  Losing her patience, Doris Shotz said, “We have been over all of it a dozen times. You take notes. Don’t you read them?”

  “What happens,” Boldt informed her, “is that answers change.”

  “Shock affects memory,” Daphne said. “You think you’ve told us something because it’s so clear in your mind, but in fact it never made it into words. The mind can play tricks. It’s the same with us: We can be so caught up in pursuing one line of evidence that we hear, but don’t process, an important fact. When that resurfaces—if it ever does—the entire investigation may change.” She added, “In just a little over three weeks, Mrs. Shotz, we’ve made significant progress. We came here to listen. Help us, please. Help us find Rhonda.”

  “Rhonda,” the intoxicated husband mumbled. “You never even met her.” He looked at all three of them as a silence fell between them.

  The wife took in the husband as if tolerating an unwelcome stranger. She looked back at Daphne with despair in her eyes. “We’ll try,” she said.

  Boldt explained, “The report filed with our department lists a missing receiving blanket. Her ‘Rhonda blanket,’ you called it.”

  “Her Rhonda blanket,” the woman echoed. “Yes.”

  Daphne glanced to Boldt signaling that she wanted to lead. Boldt gave a slight nod.

  “Can you describe the item for us?” Daphne asked. “Was it personalized in some way?”

  “I did this already … I’m sure I told you,” Doris Shotz complained.

  “It’s not the point, Doris,” the husband admonished drunkenly. “You’re so damn concerned about who’s to blame here.” He tapped the coffee cup against the table rhythmically. “It’s not their fault. It’s not mine. It’s not yours. It just happened. They took her.”

  “Things like this don’t just happen! If we hadn’t taken that dinner train …”

  “Oh, bullshit!” the husband roared. “What? We would have been back here an hour sooner. So what? She still would have been gone, Doro. They took her. They took our baby—” He sniffled. His rheumy eyes spilled tears. He stood and poured himself another rum, the coffee abandoned as unnecessary.

  “We might have misplaced the description,” Daphne allowed, hoping to avoid a domestic battle.

  “It had her picture on it,” Doris Shotz explained.

  “Gail, wasn’t it?” the husband asked, returning to the table with his mug full of rum.

  “Paul’s sister gave it to us.”

  “A gift?” Daphne nudged. She needed the woman to stay focused.

  Boldt withdrew his notepad, trying not to attract attention to it. Most people were intimidated by their words being written down.

  “It was cute,” the woman explained. She scratched absent-mindedly at the table.

  “We sent out a photo with our announcements,” the husband explained. “Gail found some place that silk-screened the photo onto the baby blanket. It was a really good job. Doro used it all the time.”

  “Silk-screened,” Boldt repeated.

  “Digitally enhanced,” said the c
omputer repairman. “Nice color, good resolution.” He rocked the bottom edge of the mug in circles against the table.

  The mother said mournfully, “It was adorable.”

  “She was wrapped in it that night?” Boldt asked cautiously.

  The woman lifted her eyes to meet Boldt’s, and he saw in there a building uncertainty. “It was missing. I assumed I had her in it.”

  Trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, Daphne asked, “But now?”

  “It’s definitely missing,” the drunken man replied.

  Doris Shotz shook her head slowly side to side. She glanced back to Boldt. “This is important, isn’t it?”

  “It’s all important to us.” He didn’t want to fuel her hope unfairly, but they needed her attention focused on the blanket.

  She said, “A drawer was found open.” Adding, “It wasn’t us. Julie maybe—the sitter.”

  Boldt nodded. He had read about the drawer in the report. It was what had focused him onto the possessions of the victims. He wrote into his notebook: the sitter?

  Boldt said to the husband, “If you could provide a way for us to reach your sister?”

  “Sure.” He motioned for Boldt’s pen and paper. His handwriting was more of a scrawl.

  Boldt thanked him.

  Doris Shotz said out of her silence, “It was a cute name. On the label. Mirror Image? I don’t remember. Something cute. Does that help?”

  Boldt took this down.

  Daphne reached over and touched Doris Shotz’s nervous hand. “Can you get a picture in your head of that label?”

  She squinted. “No, not the label. The blanket, sure.”

  “But not the label?”

  “No.”

  Boldt’s sense of time had been destroyed by Sarah’s abduction—everything took too long. His patience frayed. He spoke somewhat harshly to the husband. “Tell me about the dinner train again … who knew you’d be on that train?”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” he said, eyeing his wife. “We’ve been over this.”

  “You booked it yourself,” Boldt stated.