The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  “Queen for a Day, you mean. Flemming shows up, my brass bends over and greases up the old red eye and says, ‘Park it here please, Mr. Federal Officer.’ We form a serious Crimes Unit, but all we end up with is bottle washers for Flemming’s suits. He’s a monster, you know—Flemming, I’m talking about. A dictator. Eyes in the back of his head, an ear to every wall. Knows what you’re thinking before you do. On edge. I had the feeling that at any moment … he used us. Manipulated us, worked us—and the brass seemed to never catch on. We processed the evidence, but they analyzed it. I gotta admit, he played it brilliantly, like a quarterback working a cheerleader to get her panties down. We get the public exposure, the blame, if it goes south; Flemming gets the real control. Knows which wheels to grease, which buttons to push. Has our chief bragging at cocktail parties that he’s taking phone calls and sharing beverages with our U.S. Senator. It’s all politics, Boldt. Blame management: Who’s to blame if the investigation goes south? Who takes the front page if the guy walks into the seventh precinct and gives himself up? Let me tell you this: Talk radio has done in law enforcement. The public is like a child, you know? You give them too much information too soon and they’re dangerous with it.” He killed the Scotch. “To hell with it.”

  “How’re the kids?” Boldt asked.

  Tom Bowler’s jaw set and his eyes grew large as they met and held Boldt’s. He shouted a little too loudly. “Ginger?” Barroom shorthand. She delivered the two drinks. “What about my kids?”

  Boldt said, “Let me run a hypothetical situation past you, Tom, and maybe you can help me see clear of it.”

  “What about the kids?” the man asked, mean in a way only a drunk can get.

  Boldt had won the man’s attention. The room suddenly felt warmer.

  “What the—?”

  “Sarah’s going to be two. Can you believe it?” Boldt sipped his juice. It was from a can. He set it aside. He locked into Bowler, saying no more. The man’s expression slowly hardened. He knew why Boldt had made the trip. “So let’s just say, hypothetically,” Boldt continued, “that a cop is working a case, a big case, like a string of kidnappings or something.”

  Bowler shifted uncomfortably.

  Boldt continued, “And let’s say the doer is no dummy. He knows he either has to have an enormous string of luck or someone pulling strings for him. He knows the Feds will be players. Tens of thousands of kids vanish every year. Few, if any, of these disappearances are ever connected. Fewer prosecuted. But this guy is making a statement. He leaves a calling card.”

  “A penny flute.”

  “Exactly.” Boldt hesitated. Other than Liz he had not told a soul. He couldn’t bring himself to. Instead he said, “The doer understands it’s the local cops who will work the crime scenes for evidence, the locals who will most likely process the lab work on that evidence. In that way it’s the locals’ case to give away, not the other way around. The Bureau may be running things, maybe not, but the local cops control the evidence and therefore the success or failure of the investigation.”

  A bead of sweat ran from Bowler’s sideburn into his collar. He looked jaundiced. Malarial.

  “One other thing: The doer is much more frightened of the Feds than he is of local law.” He paused briefly. “Did I ask you about your kids?”

  Bowler coaxed the shiny surface of the Scotch into a swirling disk of light suspended in the glass. “You wasted a trip,” he said.

  “I’m just talking hypothetically,” Boldt reminded.

  “How’s Liz?”

  “Cancer,” Boldt fired back harshly. Mentioning it didn’t sting him the way it used to. If he expected Bowler to talk to him, then he had to reciprocate. “They cut her open. They ran her full of drugs and radiation. Now she’s found religion.”

  “Connie’s joined the God squad. Me?” He lifted the Scotch.

  “Is it working?” Boldt asked. Maybe it was the fear loosening him up. Maybe it was the look in Bowler’s eye that confirmed Boldt was right. His voice faltered as he said, “I’m begging you here, Tom.”

  “The Sonics are murdering us this year. Once we lost Clive the Glide it was all over. They should have thrown it in back then.”

  “Let’s say this guy—the doer—has something that’s mine,” Boldt said angrily, “and I don’t know whether or not I can trust it’ll be returned in one piece.” He stared at the man, hoping he might win eye contact, but it was a bust. “Let’s say that made my interest in the Portland file all the stronger.”

  “I took the file—the master file—home one night. Stopped for a drink right here. Car was busted into. My car! Briefcase was stolen. The file was gone. Hey, we got triplicates, but it takes a while to pull it all together.”

  “I need it to pull together, Tom. I need any leads I can get.”

  “No, that’s wrong. You know your best bet? Play by the rules. You’ll be glad you did.” He waited for this to sink in, and met eyes with Boldt. He held him in a prolonged stare and said, “Penny is fine. Did I mention that? Thanks for asking.”

  Tom Bowler stood, sliding his chair back with the effort. The legs cried out on the tile floor sending chills down Boldt’s spine. Bowler was unsteady on his legs. And he was dead inside. He had apparently played by the rules and had a daughter to show for it. But Boldt’s daughter was gone. The Shotzes’. The Weinsteins’. Bowler had to live with that, or try to. The man walked past Boldt and said something to Ginger about his tab. He left without looking back.

  CHAPTER

  Daphne hurriedly changed her outfit for the third time, studying herself in the full-length mirror that attached to the back of her houseboat’s bathroom door, and decided she looked too contrived: Annie Hall on a Sunday stroll. She hadn’t been this clothes-conscious since her dinner a month earlier with Owen Adler, her former fiancé, perhaps her future fiancé as well.

  She undressed to her bikini underwear, shedding the underwire bra in the process and leaving it in a pile with the rest of her failures. Her body was winter pale, but her stomach flat and firm, her hips wide and her thighs lean. Her breasts were high on her chest, her nipples angling up and out to the sides. Men found her breasts attractive because of that; why, she wasn’t sure. She worked hard at preservation, chased her youth like a dog after a moving car—four miles a day, weight training—these weren’t God-given assets, she earned them through a daily regime. She ran through the houseboat all but naked hoping to death no one was happening down the dock, for one of the front blinds was open. She scrambled up the narrow ladder to the tiny loft bedroom where she kept her underwear, socks and bras separate from her other clothing—for reasons she had never fully understood. The rest of her wardrobe was divided between two closets, a trunk and a chest of drawers, all located down by the bathroom. She stuffed herself into a constricting jog bra, feeling much better. Hide the chest. Baggy is best.

  Bailing out of any attempt to invent herself otherwise, she returned to a pair of gardening blue jeans that were a little too big in the back and a pink cotton sweater that revealed nothing of what it contained.

  She brushed her dark hair back and shook her head, reconsidered and tried a hair band and settled finally with it pulled back sharply into a “squishy,” as she called the elastic fabric bands. She liked the results: plain, confident, but boyish and even a bit severe.

  She drove the Honda at warp speeds, picking out a route that allowed a lot of turns on red.

  Liz Boldt had never invited her to anything.

  She approached the front door aware of her stride. She had a sexy, athletic gait that came naturally, and she dismantled it as best she could in the event Liz Boldt might be watching her. She walked stiffly.

  The closer she drew to the house, the closer to an internal honesty. There had been several years of her life when she would have willingly exchanged places with this woman, when her need of Lou Boldt had built to an obsession that had driven her to prove herself not only professionally but as a woman. When her moment with Boldt
finally occurred—a passionate and tumultuous tumble under a dining room table—it only drove her further over the edge. For months she had thought of nothing but possessing him, consuming him so that he would abandon his wife for her. She loved his kids and the way he was with them—she wanted her own with him; Liz be damned.

  And now Liz was damned, and Daphne lived with the guilt of her former hopes and ambitions. She had broken off an engagement because of her inability to settle for less than Boldt, and now she felt ready to renew that commitment to Owen Adler, with none of her former passion for Boldt, but strangely with a form of love for him still intact. How this transition had occurred would puzzle the psychologist part of her for the rest of her days, but she no longer had to own Boldt, did not want to. Knowing him, working with him, was enjoyable, but her heart no longer fluttered when he entered the room. Her greatest fear was that this ability in her to let go might have coincided with the discovery of Liz’s illness—that only by facing the possibility of getting what she wanted did she discover she did not want it. She didn’t know if this were true or not, but even the possibility terrified her. If Liz died, if Boldt made advances, would she reject him? She caught herself standing at the door unable to lift her arm to knock. She wanted to turn around and run.

  The door came open.

  “You look great,” Daphne said, nervous and lacking the composure that was her trademark.

  “I look awful.” Liz smiled and tugged on the wig, making a point of it. “Bald as an eagle under this thing.” Another smile.

  The poor woman was all bones and cosmetics—there wasn’t a hair on her body.

  “It takes a generous person to say otherwise. Thank you.” Showing her into the living room, Liz offered Daphne a cup of tea, the pot steaming on the coffee table.

  Passing her a cup, Liz said, “You’re puzzled by the invitation.”

  “I’m honored, actually. Your first day home, isn’t it? I didn’t think—”

  “It’s probably not what the doctors would call for, but neither is attending church, and I did that this morning, so why not break all the rules?” She placed her own tea back on the table. “I’ll tell you something about cancer: It changes you. It changes everything about you.” She paused and Daphne could see the woman searching for the right words, the way an athlete concentrates just before competition. “You and I share a mutual interest. For the last couple of years, I’ve allowed that to threaten me. You’re quite beautiful, extremely smart—if Lou’s opinion is to be trusted—and you have clearly captivated a part of Lou’s heart. He cares for you deeply—”

  “Liz—”

  She cut her off with a raised hand. “He does. What of it? Why shouldn’t he? You’ve got a hell of a lot going for you.”

  Was she intending to tell her that her husband was fair game after she died? Was she going to get morbid and coach her competition on the raising of the children? Daphne wondered why she’d come. She should have seen clear of the trap. Liz Boldt intended to punish Daphne for her brief love affair. She wanted out of there.

  “My point is, he trusts you. He believes in you.” Her eyes teared up. “That’s extremely important right now.”

  “He believes in your recovery, too,” Daphne said. “We all do.”

  “Oh no, is that what you think? That this is about me? That I called you because—Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! A dying woman’s maudlin attempts to—” She laughed and looked around the room as if suddenly seeing it for the first time. “I’m not dying. I’m healed.” She said freshly, “Miles is coming home tomorrow.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “You drove him to Kathy’s. Lou told me. Drove him without ever asking why. You see the kind of person you are? You know what that means to us, that kind of trust?”

  She couldn’t stand the tension. She blurted out, “Why exactly did you ask me over?”

  “It’s Lou,” she said, tears flooding her eyes. But she would not give in to them. This woman who looked so frail had the strength of ten. She reached down and took Daphne’s warm hands in hers, as cold as tile. “I’m trusting in you as I’ve never trusted in anyone. In part because of Lou’s high opinion of you—we don’t really know each other, do we? In part because your profession requires a great deal of confidentiality, and I trust, I assume, that that is a skill one acquires, that that is something once learned can be applied to so many relationships.”

  Relationships? Confidentiality? Was she going to bring up the affair? Had Lou told her? She looked down at their hands entwined together. Guilt and fear rose in her chest to a knot of pain—she couldn’t breathe. The damn bra was too tight!

  Would she lie outright to this woman if asked?

  Liz Boldt squeezed her hands tightly and said, “Something terrible has happened. We desperately need your help.”

  CHAPTER

  The treasure revealed itself like the gold of the pharaohs. On Monday morning, March 30, the lab delivered sixty-seven full-color computer printouts to LaMoia—all photographs made with Anderson’s digital camera, all from a backup disk found hidden in Anderson’s bookshelves. As an added bonus, each was dated and time-stamped. He leafed through a series of a businessman climbing out of his car in a motel parking lot, entering a room, and leaving forty minutes later, followed shortly thereafter by a worn-looking creature bearing the heavy posture of someone defeated. Two of the many subjects depicted were shown engaged, in partial nudity or unmistakable poses, with adolescent members of the same sex. How Anderson had gone about his work was likely to have puzzled some of his clients, but it showed little imagination or creativity to LaMoia. In some cases Anderson had taken the adjacent motel room and bribed a housecleaner into unlocking the communicating door. In one daring effort, the sleuth appeared to have been hiding inside a closet with shuttered doors, implying that he had paid off the prostitute. There had been a time early in his career that LaMoia would have found one or more of such photos suggestive enough to arouse him, but those days were long gone. More than anything, he felt numb to it all, frightened for the missing children, guilt-ridden over his failure to rescue them. So many of humankind elected to lead sordid, twisted, perverted lives that any detective came to expect it rather than be fascinated by it. After a time one forgot that these people were only a fraction of society. Because of their staggering numbers, they seemed more the norm.

  There were photos of storefronts, school buses, city parks, topless dancers, a bank teller, an interior of a Starbucks. Seven shots of a woman shopping various department stores. Three of a teenage girl—a daughter? a baby sitter?—giving her boyfriend head in the family hot tub, her face partially underwater, the smooth flawless skin of her bare back cresting the surface of the bubbling water like a breaching whale.

  Thrown into the mix near the end of the stack, he finally reached the series that he’d been waiting for: five images from a computer file Anderson had named weinstn.pix.

  The first of these, one that easily caught his attention, depicted the now familiar clapboard house that had contained Jeffry McNee’s meth lab. Closer study revealed that one of the vehicles parked in front was a white minivan, its back windows made opaque by either paint or butcher paper. On the driver’s door was an unreadable sign. LaMoia was guessing it advertised an exterminator service. Hard evidence was, on occasion, as good as sex.

  The second of the five photos showed a figure walking along the building’s perimeter carrying a spray tank and hose, his head down and hidden by a gray baseball cap and a pair of goggles. He wore coveralls and looked to be about six feet tall. There was no face to pull from the shot. LaMoia silently and reluctantly congratulated him on his choice of disguises. It was no wonder they had never gotten a decent eyewitness description: nothing of him to identify but a pair of bland-colored coveralls and matching cap.

  LaMoia placed the third of the images in front of himself like a poker player rolling his cards. This was of a boating marina on a gray day. The depth of field was bad, the image
blurred. He wasn’t sure they would ever identify the marina from such a poor picture. The same could be said for the two figures at its center—two, LaMoia noticed. Shot at such a great distance they were little more than stick figures. Anderson had been careful not to get too close. The man wore a colorful sweatshirt, baseball cap pulled low and blue jeans. The woman wore jeans, shades and a hat. Unidentifiable. LaMoia’s initial enthusiasm was tempered by these discoveries. Anderson knew how to follow people—a photographer, he wasn’t. He cursed the man for managing a shot with no identifiable landmarks or signage. Anderson confirmed his standing as a nickel hustler, nothing more.

  LaMoia dwelled on this photo for a long time, first working the magnifying glass, then the loupe. The resolution was too poor, the focus too blurred, to give up any secrets.

  The penultimate image related to the final of the five shots and contributed to the story that formed the mystery of Anderson’s homicide. The scene was a greenway—a running path. It showed a man, perhaps six feet tall, in running clothes. Again, this man wore a cap on his head and sunglasses, again the shot was taken at too great a distance. The final photo, and the telling one, was nearly identical—shot in the same minute—except that the jogger’s head was turned toward the camera. But Anderson had panicked, this shot was the most blurred of all. The story of Anderson’s death unfolded for LaMoia as clearly as if Anderson had still been alive to tell it.

  “So?” LaMoia asked Boldt, standing slightly behind him and looking over his shoulder.

  “So?” Boldt fired back. He understood perfectly the significance of Anderson’s photographs: If handled correctly, if traced to the right marina, every possibility existed that SPD might identify a suspect. Boldt had to prevent that, but at the same time he wanted every scrap of information the photos provided. He felt incredibly tempted to share his secret with LaMoia to double his manpower, but he didn’t dare. The ransom note haunted him.