The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt prided himself on his organization and neatness, but the clutter of his desk and office told a different story, and he wondered how much of this LaMoia picked up on. The room smelled of his fear. Two dozen or more white and blue telephone memo slips littered his desktop in various piles. They represented unreturned calls, or calls in which Boldt had no interest. He was intentionally allowing his Intelligence work to lapse; the unit was in shambles.

  These memos were interspersed with hand-scrawled scraps of notes that, if viewed as a complete work, revealed a mind in turmoil, a man, a husband, a father, an investigator saddled with internal conflict. There was an empty bottle of aspirin open by the phone, the lid missing. A mug containing a moldy scum that had once been tea. Several stacks of paperwork carried office dandruff—the visible dust of neglect. If he had caught one of his detectives with a work area in similar disarray he would have chastised the guilty party.

  “So the pictures tell a story,” LaMoia said. “The Pied Piper clearly made Anderson—in that last shot it’s so obvious. The thing is dated March 15, 4:22 P.M., which fits with the angle of light. Two days later Anderson does the swan dive in the tub.”

  Playing devil’s advocate, Boldt said, “The photographs show no crime being committed. They are of an unknown subject in an unknown location. They are from a computer disk that, according to you, has never been mentioned at a four o’clock, never presented to the task force. Is there proper paperwork on the removal of the disk from Anderson’s residence?”

  “I wrote it up. Hill knows all about it.”

  Boldt warned, “Okay. So let’s say the evidence holds in court. It still shows no crime.”

  “The file has Weinstein’s name on it.”

  “It has a piece of Weinstein’s name,” the more veteran cop corrected.

  “In computers, that’s the same thing.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” He couldn’t afford LaMoia running to the task force with these photos. He needed first crack at them if he were to have any chance of finding Sarah. He looked for LaMoia’s angle in bringing them to him first. It wasn’t the good student wanting to show off to his former teacher—LaMoia wanted something more than praise or evaluation. But what? And could Boldt turn whatever it was to his own advantage?

  “So?” LaMoia asked, forcing Boldt to make a hasty assessment.

  His basic problem was that he couldn’t think clearly, certainly not quickly. He felt drugged, not himself. Fatigue swam in his head as if his ears were filled with water. Aspirin dulled it briefly, but did not remove this pain. It was his to live with. Why? he asked himself again. He voiced the only thought that entered his weary mind. “You’re reluctant to turn this over to Flemming.”

  LaMoia took this as an accusation. “Their lab has had Anderson’s computer forever. If they had come across these same pix when would we have heard about it? I’ll tell you when: Once they had located that marina and made inquiries—and only then, and don’t you believe otherwise.”

  “I don’t,” Boldt said, rubbing his neck with as strong a grip as he could muster. That was the other thing: He had lost his strength. He walked at half his former pace. His arms felt heavy, as if someone else’s. “You’re right, I’m sure of it.” He said, “And if you so much as breathe a word of this—”

  “They’ll run with it. They’re pigs in shit with this kind of evidence. Fly a few more suits in to canvass marinas, and once they find the place we’ll read about the Piper’s arrest on the front page.”

  “Probably right,” Boldt said, not believing a word of it. He had no great love for the Bureau—he’d been bitten as many times as he’d been fed, but Flemming struck him differently than most. The man wanted this over, wanted the Pied Piper in custody as badly as anyone. Boldt wasn’t certain how he had managed to remain on the case as long as he had; the Bureau had a way of exorcising inefficiency. Typically, Flemming would have been off the case by the San Francisco kidnappings, having failed in the previous two cities. He either had friends in the right places, or his reputation as their top kidnap cop was well founded.

  “You’re damn right I’m right.” LaMoia could get worked up.

  Boldt played on that. “Unless you beat them to it. This is our city, John. Those are our marinas.”

  “Exactly! Don’t I know it? Damn right. Our city, god damn it! But the shot! Look at those two pictures. There’s nothing in them but a bunch of masts. Nothing to identify them. It’s like Anderson worked on screwing it up. You know how many boatyards and marinas there are? Lake Union. Lake Washington. The shore. Mercer Island. Kirkland. Medina. Jesus! Vashon. The islands, for Chrissakes. It’s endless.”

  “And you want me to find it for you,” Boldt said, knowing and exploiting LaMoia’s needs. Intentionally misusing their friendship. He wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  The comment sobered LaMoia’s hysteria. He looked his former sergeant in the eye and nodded grimly. “You mean I’m using you?” he asked, getting it all wrong. “Yeah, that’s about right. If I have anything to do with this, the existence of Anderson’s photos gets out and I’m butting heads with Flemming, which means I’m butting heads with Hill, which means I’m screwed. Anyone I ask to look into this is going to know it’s task force related. But Intelligence? No one knows what the hell you do up here all day. Everyone’s worried you’re looking up their skirt. And with manpower being what it is—”

  “I use the snitches to do the legwork.”

  LaMoia acted slightly embarrassed. “That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. A color Xerox. Pass ’em around and see if we can’t kick a location.”

  “My snitches don’t exactly work the yachting circuit. They aren’t the deck-shoe set, John.” He couldn’t jump at the offer without raising suspicions. No cop glorified himself with extra work; he or she spent too much time and effort defending turf and protecting positions. Boldt had to dismiss the offer. “You could use a few uniforms.”

  “It would leak.”

  “It might.” Both knew damn well it would.

  “I gave you forty-eight hours with the Spitting Image evidence,” he reminded, playing the trump card Boldt hoped he might use.

  “I was doing the legwork. This is a little different,” Boldt countered. It took all his strength not to agree too quickly.

  “Seventy-two hours,” LaMoia requested. “Work the photos for three days. After that, I take it to the task force.”

  “Forty-eight.” Boldt wanted the evidence for a week or two, and there he was suggesting a shorter period than he was being offered.

  “It’ll take you one day just to get the pix out on the street. Right? Once they’re out there, you’re giving me forty-eight, same as I’m giving you.” And then the word LaMoia rarely, if ever, spoke. “Please, Sarge.”

  “You’ve changed,” Boldt said, knowing correctly that LaMoia would take it as a backhanded compliment.

  “‘You don’t work cases, you work deals,’” LaMoia quoted the man sitting in front of him. “A wise old soldier once told me that.”

  “Get out of here,” Boldt said, his fingers sweating on the photographs he held.

  As had LaMoia before him, Boldt worked the photocopies with a magnifying glass and a jeweler’s loupe. He pored over the images for the better part of an hour and then, just ready to give it up, he noticed what he had missed in all the other passes. It came under the heading “forest for the trees.”

  Of late, he realized, a detective mined his crime scene for evidence that he then turned over to SID for lab tests. Too often, that reliance translated into a dependence on the lab—a belief that the lab had all the answers. In the process, old-fashioned police work suffered.

  For an hour, Boldt searched the photos for a readable license plate, a landmark, any unique piece of evidence that might help. He sought out patterns, anything unique.

  What he discovered was easily missed. It was not a sign, nor a number or a name. It was much more simple. It was right there in the center of the photo. Rig
ht there staring back.

  CHAPTER

  Dr. Ronald Dixon’s home was an impressive three-story Victorian, on the west side of 16th East, near Volunteer Park. Appointed with marble and antiques, Heriz rugs and a Steinway Concert grand, the living room had at its center two couches that faced each other across a low walnut coffee table and were perpendicular to the fireplace, its mantel painted an eggshell enamel white and holding a glass-encased clock whose pendulum issued a steady click, click, click.

  Boldt knew the living room well, having spent many hours there exchanging jazz favorites with Dixie, who opened the front door admitting Boldt. Dixie thanked him for coming over.

  “You made it sound so urgent,” Boldt said of the request for a lunchtime meeting. Their friendship went back decades, not years. Dixie rarely, if ever, asked favors.

  His host motioned Boldt toward the living room. The lieutenant rounded the corner and stopped cold, glancing back at his trusted friend and then into the room again and the people assembled there. A trap! Boldt realized, his first instinct to run. Run and never trust anyone again.

  Daphne Matthews stood admiring one of the antiques, a hammered brass lamp and mica lamp shade.

  LaMoia also stood, though with his back pressed firmly against the mantel, his bloodshot eyes trained on his mentor. SID’s Bernie Lofgrin was on the couch working a beer. Bobbie Gaynes occupied the end of the piano bench. She straddled it, legs spread, leaning on her hands planted together in front of her. A group that knew each other well, a working family. Boldt did not like the looks, nor the silence. He had been found out! By whom? LaMoia? Daphne?

  But one other person appeared to his right, stepping out of the sunroom. Liz said, “This is an intervention.”

  It was not Boldt’s life that passed before his eyes, but the image of Sarah on the video clip: the pleading eyes, the frightened voice, “Daddy!” It wasn’t these people to whom she was calling out, but to him, her father. He wanted no part of an intervention, whatever the hell that meant; he wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a cop who wanted his daughter back.

  Liz said, “You can’t do this alone, love. No matter how badly you want to, and God knows I love you for it—” She was crying now, “You can’t. We can’t. We made the decision to save her. These are our closest friends. They can help.”

  “Liz!” he protested.

  “If we’re careful—” Daphne began, immediately interrupted.

  “No one asked you!” Boldt shouted, his skin numb and tingling. Liz had killed their child …, “or you, or you,” he said to the others.

  “Your wife asked me,” Daphne contradicted in the voice of a friend, not a psychologist.

  “You could have told us,” an angry LaMoia delivered. “What’d you think I’d do, rat on you?”

  Daphne said, “This isn’t about you, it’s about Sarah—”

  “Don’t lecture me on what this is about.” To his wife he complained bitterly, “We talked about this. No one was to know.”

  “And no one does,” Dixie pointed out in his resonant baritone. “Only we know, Lou. Only those of us in this room. It isn’t a conspiracy with only one person. You need us.”

  LaMoia jumped in. “You want to find her, we’ll find her. You want to screw up the task force, brother we’ll fuck it up but good!” He smiled a patented LaMoia smile. Overconfident to the point of cocky.

  Lofgrin said, “We can misplace some evidence if necessary.”

  Bobbie Gaynes stood from the piano bench. “Sarge, I got to get back to the Park and Ride surveillance. What you got to know—we’re with you on this. We all love little Sarah. We all love you. So stop being so ungrateful and figure out a way to put us all to work. John, you’ll catch me up?”

  “Got you covered.”

  Gaynes walked to Boldt, leaned forward on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. She had never done this before and it brought a frog to his throat. “You got your own secret little task force now, Sarge. Take advantage of it.” She left, the large front door thumping shut behind her.

  LaMoia checked his watch. “We got about two hours to debrief you and get a game plan before we raise suspicion by being away from the office.”

  Dixie said, “There’s tea water on. And sandwiches.”

  “Have a seat, Sarge,” LaMoia said, patting the couch.

  Boldt sat down, not by his detective but by his wife. The meeting began in earnest a few minutes later.

  CHAPTER

  The Intelligence offices were a quiet place to work. Boldt had learned to appreciate the quiet. Phones purred softly, answered in hushed voices that didn’t carry. Secrets. A two-way street of constantly shifting information. Computers hummed. Outside, the sun appeared for the first time in several days, painting brushstrokes of silver in the windows of neighboring buildings.

  Surrendering his secret added to Boldt’s exhaustion, driven by an overwhelming sense of relief. The burden of withholding the truth of his daughter’s situation released, he found himself able to concentrate, focus and redirect his energies. He spent his time reviewing the Spitting Image invoices, including the E-mail orders he had received from Stonebeck earlier that same morning.

  He attempted to contact the various cable television companies that served northwest Washington, hoping to determine which of them had run a weather alert at 12:02 P.M., March 25, the moment of Sarah’s video ransom, and he was in the middle of just such a call when he was interrupted by a patrol officer. “You have a visitor, Lieutenant. A woman.”

  “No visitors,” he said, believing it a snitch. “Pass her off to someone else.”

  “She’s from out of town. Says it’s urgent. It’s not a squirrel, Lieutenant. This one is Talbots and Eddie Bauer. You know? What should I tell her?” the uniform asked.

  “Out of town?”

  “She didn’t say where.”

  “An attorney. You’ve got to at least get a name. I’m busy here.”

  The uniformed woman stood up artificially erect. “She wouldn’t give me a name. But she did say that you spoke to her yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” He couldn’t remember back twenty-four hours. He glanced at the call sheet he kept by the phone. Sunday. Nothing. It didn’t make sense to him. It was someone trying to weasel an unscheduled appointment out of him. He had spent most of the day before, in, or en route to, Portland.

  He dragged himself out of the chair. The patrol officer stepped out of his way. Boldt peered around the jamb.

  In her mid-thirties, she dressed well, wore her hair extremely short and wire glasses that added a thoughtful intelligence. The face seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t come up with a name. He stared at her searching for a name. She sensed it and turned and met eyes with him.

  “Connie,” he called out. “Connie Bowler.” He had in fact spoken to her the day before. She had helped him to locate her drunken husband. It felt as if a week had gone by.

  Boldt showed her to a seat and shut the office door for privacy.

  She clutched her purse tightly. Sarah had a favorite blanket she held to this same way. Beneath the purse lay a bulging oversized mailer. Boldt found it difficult to take his eyes off that envelope. Connie Bowler spoke in a high, rushed voice. “If Tom asks, I’ll say I drove up here to do some shopping. But he won’t ask, so it doesn’t matter.” She rattled on, “It’s a bit of a stretch, because the shopping in Portland is just as good, but we do have a few friends up here,” she said, thinking aloud, “you and Elizabeth among them, but I wouldn’t dare use that because he might follow up on it.”

  “How long has Tom been drinking like that?” Boldt asked, getting directly to the point.

  “How is Elizabeth?” she asked, avoiding an answer. “I was so sorry to hear—”

  “Better, I think.” He didn’t want a twenty-minute heaping of sympathy. He had grown to resent such offers. “I wanted to work with Tom on this kidnapping case—”

  “The Pied Piper.”

  “Yes,” he answered.
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br />   She toyed with the chain to her purse, eyes cast down in avoidance. She pulled out the manila folder and Boldt stepped up to accept it. He did not open it despite himself. He set it aside. “That’s why I’m here. Why I came. Tom—” She caught herself and glanced over at his office door as if to make sure it was closed, their conversation private. “We don’t know each other very well, do we?”

  He knew Bowler from the constant traffic of information between departments, and because Bowler had once chaired a conference of Northwest Law Enforcement at which Boldt had been one of the speakers. “Well enough,” he attempted to reassure her.

  “Tom was lead detective on the Pied Piper. Did you know that?”

  “Yes. That’s why I came down yesterday.” He added, “To ask about Penny.”

  She blushed—an involuntary act that spoke volumes. Boldt felt flooded with anxiety. Connie Bowler glanced quickly at the door again, drawn perhaps by a uniform passing close to the office.

  Once the uniform was well out of earshot, she whispered, “Penny was taken from us in the middle of the second week of the investigation.”

  For Boldt, this meant the Pied Piper had routinely blackmailed local police officers, that in all likelihood, the evidence from each city was tainted, that Flemming and the FBI had been following bad information all along. Sheila Hill had suspected as much. Connie Bowler now confirmed it.

  “Tom won’t talk about it, but I know he concealed evidence. He said the case file was stolen, and he kept it from the FBI that way. That’s not right. I can’t let it happen again. I mean … it already has, hasn’t it? Sarah. He told me. And these other children up here. I’m so sorry. I know that if Tom … but you have to understand … we got her back safely. Penny … It was all we dreamed for.” The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears, her lips quivered and her face collapsed like a balloon losing air. She shrank down into herself, suddenly half her size. Her tears spilled onto her blouse, leaving constellations on her chest. “And Tom? He’s convinced that if it came out how he intentionally threw the case—for whatever reason—that they’d pull his badge and his benefits and kick him out into the street. And the way it is, we’re just not prepared to start over like that. You know? The kids and all.”