The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  He professed his innocence, demanded representation, and otherwise kept his mouth shut. He was booked, printed and humiliated by a full body search. LaMoia’s internal representative rescued him from an interrogation. No one seemed clear on the exact crime for which he was being accused. It involved the briefcase and crack cocaine. Sheila Hill had led him by his dick into a heap of trouble. For what? he wondered. Revenge?

  Why get him arrested and suspended only a half hour before sending him to Siberia? Had she found out about Boldt’s Gang of Five and the work being done behind her back? Was this retribution? Or was it repayment for leaving her handcuffed and naked?

  LaMoia left Public Safety without his badge or gun—suspended without pay pending review. “It won’t be review,” his representative warned. “They intend to prosecute.”

  Boldt showed up as he was being released and offered a ride. LaMoia didn’t know their destination until under way. Daphne’s houseboat was a twenty-minute drive in good traffic. There was never good traffic.

  LaMoia said, “Let me tell you something—you never want to be on the receiving end of our business. Never.”

  Boldt said. “What happened?”

  LaMoia’s hesitation caused Boldt to say, “The truth will work until you can think of something else.”

  “I’ve been snaking the captain.”

  Boldt released a pent-up sigh.

  “I know … I know … okay?”

  “Stupid, John. Very stupid.”

  LaMoia chewed at his mustache out of nervous habit. “It’s usually lunch with us, but this time—today—it was afternoon. Next thing I know I’m in cuffs. What the hell?”

  “Drugs made a good bust last night. This morning I’m told there’s an unidentified cop who plans to swap out evidence: street-grade crack for what’s currently in the evidence room.”

  “What’s in there?” LaMoia asked.

  “Bad formula. Freelance lab, just like McNee’s. Six deaths in the last three weeks. Prosecutor was going for the death penalty, and she would have gotten it. The switch knocks it down to dealing. It’s a first offense, a nonevent. Lab test will come back clean. No aggravated assault, no prosecutable deaths.”

  “I walked into that? Oh, shit.”

  “The bad cop is Kevin McCalister,” Boldt informed him. The car bounced through construction.

  “We know this?” LaMoia asked.

  “Some of us do,” Boldt answered. “It’ll sort itself out. Faster, if you explain why you were there in the first place. It doesn’t look so good, you know?”

  “I can’t do that. Not now. She’ll deny it, of course. Besides, if I give up the captain, Flemming will take over the task force. You know that’s true. And where does that leave Sarah?”

  “Hale was overheard saying Flemming could win control of the task force. I guess we now know how.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Daphne, via Kalidja.”

  LaMoia said, “Something else, Sarge. I think my desk was broken into.”

  Boldt sidestepped the comment. “So you ride it out,” he told him. “A trip to New Orleans will keep your mind off it.”

  LaMoia glanced over at Boldt.

  Boldt explained, “Daphne got an emergency call from Kalidja, who is herself in Boise with Flemming. Dunkin Hale is AWOL. Flemming is furious.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “Has to be,” Boldt agreed. “The tattoos,” he reminded. He turned off Fairmont and pulled to a stop where Daphne stood at the end of the dock by a box of mailboxes. A moment later they were headed south on I-5 toward the airport.

  LaMoia told his story to Daphne, who offered no sympathy.

  From the backseat, Daphne suggested to Boldt, “You aren’t taking three of us to New Orleans based on an FBI agent’s curiosity.”

  “No,” Boldt confirmed.

  LaMoia said to Boldt, “You worked the credit cards.” He then told Daphne, “Six of the Spitting Image customers have contested charges on their cards in and around the dates of the earlier abductions.”

  Boldt explained, “The rental car abandoned in Boise was paid for using a credit card belonging to Lena Robertson, a Spitting Image customer. The rental agreement called for a drop-off in San Francisco. With the car turning up in Boise, it’s fairly obvious San Francisco was never in the picture; she, or her accomplice, is smart enough to book the car for one destination and then drive it and deliver it to another. The rental company accepts the car and simply charges more. By using the rental car to get clear of the kidnap city—in this case Seattle—they avoid the law enforcement watching the airports.

  “This morning,” Boldt continued, “less than half an hour after the Boise pileup, another Spitting Image customer’s card was used to book an Avis rental from Boise to Reno. She knew we would quickly have the Lena Robertson ID. The name on this second card is Julie DeChamps. The same card—DeChamps—was then used to book a plane flight from Salt Lake City to Cancún.”

  Daphne complained, “Cancún doesn’t fit the profile. They are not taking these kids into Mexico. They know the FBI is involved. Immigration officers are alerted. They’re not going to risk that.”

  Boldt nodded agreement and said, “The flight makes one stop.” He caught Daphne’s eyes in the rearview mirror, acknowledging her.

  “In New Orleans,” LaMoia guessed. “She rented the car in Boise with no intention of heading to Reno. She’s headed for Salt Lake, for that flight.”

  “For New Orleans,” Boldt confirmed. “That flight will be short passengers on the leg to Cancún.”

  Daphne said, “She’s going down there to sell Trudy Kittridge into adoption.”

  “She thinks she is,” Boldt corrected, driving well above the speed limit in the HOV lane, his dashboard flasher pulsing blue against the glass. He pushed the Chevy a little harder.

  LaMoia said, “We can’t stop her without putting Sarah at risk.”

  Daphne suggested, “Maybe we don’t stop her. You can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  An uncomfortable silence—the silence of frustration—filled the car. “The thing about blackened catfish,” LaMoia told them, breaking that silence, “you either love it or you don’t. But if you don’t, you got no business being in the Big Easy.”

  CHAPTER

  Boldt failed to see the romance of the French Quarter. For years he had heard stories about the mix of French and black cultures, of voodoo, umbrella drinks, of Creole bar girls with bodies like centerfolds, of blues and jazz drifting onto cobblestone streets at three in the morning and fresh oysters the size of golf balls. Instead, he saw only a giant tourist attraction, a Disneyland for alcoholics and unfaithful husbands masquerading as conventioneering businessmen. The locals provided color in street music, juggling and costuming, but to Boldt it felt contrived. The Quarter had been great once—it reeked of history—but the Chamber of Commerce and tourist board had cleaned it up for the McDonald’s crowd in a way that left it too slick, too polished, too Kodak, too little of the soul that had once fueled its engines.

  The tattoo shop was called Samantha’s Body Art. Its wooden sign hanging out front depicted a large-breasted woman vampire clad in black lingerie and straddling a Harley holding a delicate paintbrush trained onto the naked form of a pale female ghost. Located outside the Quarter in an area of hairdressers, Tarot card readers and personal injury attorneys, the shop made the most of neon. The smell of pot and incense tainted the air.

  Samantha did not exist. In a city of pretense, the tough behind the needle went by the name Maurice. He wore a silver stud in his left ear, had biceps the color and density of ebony and a shaved head that looked like an eight ball. He wore a T-shirt that showed two women fornicating in the palm of an outstretched hand. No explanation. The place was for bikers and sailors. Its walls bore hundreds of designs. It took Boldt a minute to locate the eagle, wedged as it was between the space shuttle and the butt end of a pig, but when he finally did identify it, the likeness to Tommy Thomp
son’s rendition was unmistakable.

  “Help you?” Maurice asked. A voice dipped in roofing tar saturated by nonfilters.

  “I’m interested in this design,” Boldt said, pointing out the eagle.

  “You heat?”

  “Who’s asking? And why?”

  “You ain’t drunk enough and you ain’t young enough to be wanting something like that. As for what you is, you got the look, you know? I can spot that look.”

  “Apparently you can,” Boldt agreed. “But you missed with me. I’m private heat.”

  “Not from around here, you ain’t.”

  “Not from around here, no.”

  Boldt pulled a fifty dollar bill from his pocket that he had waiting. “A client of mine is interested in a man who’s wearing one of these birds on his forearm.”

  “It ain’t a bird, it’s an eagle.”

  “Do a lot of them, do you?” Boldt toyed with the fifty, a man who wasn’t certain if he would spend it or keep it.

  “Not many.”

  “I tell my client I paid fifty for information, and I get reimbursed whether I paid it out or not.” He slipped it into his pocket and then pulled it back out.

  “That’s a good gig.” The guy liked the sight of the fifty. The public wasn’t exactly banging down his doors.

  “I’d be pleased if you remembered a name or a face.”

  “Bet you would.”

  “A date, a time of year. Anything like that and the fifty’s yours.”

  The man’s fingers reminded Boldt of chocolate candy rolls, thumbs like cigar butts. One of those fingers pointed out a half dozen black vinyl photo albums chained to the wall and sitting atop a small counter. The counter was pockmarked with an army of cigarette burns, lined up like a regiment. The man explained, “They sell better in person. Look better than hanging on the wall. Besides, guys get off looking at all the tits and ass—you wouldn’t believe some of the shit girls want, and where they put it. And we take pictures of all of it, man. ’Cause the way it works out—you think nobody never done something like that, but shit, then you see it there in the book and it don’t look half bad and you think, maybe you want one too. Least that’s the way it works out. Anything you can think of, it been done. And I personally have laid some art down on inner thighs, ass, pussy, tits, cocks—you name it. I seen it all, done it all.”

  “These are photo albums?”

  “Damn straight.”

  Boldt opened one of the books. For shock value, he supposed, female genitalia and breasts occupied the first page. He blushed at what he saw exposed there, and what the owner of the tattoo had chosen to do to her body. One woman’s shaved crotch had been painted into a face with an obvious mouth. It stood out from the snake winding up to an enlarged nipple, the daisy around the navel, the hummingbirds in cleavage, and the inner thigh with Cupid’s arrow aiming at labia. “These are disgusting,” he said, “you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “’Course I mind. It’s art, man. You’re looking all wrong. That there is quality work. Fine pitch, good solid color. A person wants to ’xpress hisself, that’s a good thing. It’s a free fucking country.”

  Boldt leafed through the plastic pages of Polaroids. “They let you take pictures like this?” he gasped. Page upon page of buttocks and breasts, penises, ankles, necks, eyelids, fingers. Gray’s Anatomy courtesy of the Cartoon Network.

  “It’s not like you know who they are.”

  No, it’s not, Boldt thought, wondering why he would bother to look on. Driven by a voyeuristic curiosity, he did just that, landing on a page of motorcycles and nudes on forearms, male chests and biceps. The detail and color were in fact extraordinary for flesh art. “It’s good stuff,” he said conversationally.

  “A couple my pieces been in a gallery down in the Quarter,” the man bragged. “A swan I done using a guy’s dick, and another of Van Gogh’s irises right up the bikini line, you know? This girl could’a walked the beach and you wouldn’ta even known she was bare ass.”

  “Impressive,” Boldt muttered cynically. “You have repeats in here,” he said.

  “Same artwork, different body location. The images look different, depending where you put them. We try to show it all.”

  “You have eagles in here?”

  “Third or fourth book, I think. One of ’em’s nothing but animals: frogs, lizards, snakes. I do a lot of reptiles, for whatever reason.”

  “And you do all of this work?”

  “I didn’t do all of it, no. ’Course not. But I could. Sure. What my eye sees, my hands can paint.”

  “That includes the women?”

  “Some guys get their girls to pose. I’m not shitting you. Imagination plays into it,” said the artiste. He had a wide boyish smile, not at all what Boldt might have expected from such a brute.

  Boldt worked through the lions, pussy cats, tigers, an aardvark, pandas, teddy bears and landed on a series of bald eagles. A profile of just the beak and head. An eagle in flight. A number of eagles with various messages or items clutched in the talons. An eagle with its wings wrapped around its body like a cape.

  Boldt pointed it out.

  “My own design. Maybe half what you see is original design. The rest I rip off from magazines, film or whatever, or I do custom from a photo or something. I charge extra for the custom work.”

  “Any others?” Boldt asked, flipping the page of Polaroids, his eye immediately answering his own question as it landed on an eagle drawn onto a knotty biceps. “You did this?”

  “I told you: It’s original. It’s mine.”

  “There’s one missing,” Boldt stated.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s missing. Maurice,” Boldt encouraged, making a point of the fifty, “it showed an eagle on a forearm, not a biceps.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Someone else was here ahead of me,” Boldt suggested to the man.

  Boldt handed him the fifty. It had come out of his and Liz’s joint account using the ATM card. The account was seventeen hundred dollars in the red, thanks to the hospital. More now with the airfare. “Guy looks like a surfer but has an attitude. He tell you who he was?”

  Maurice considered the money. “Like I gotta ask? A suit like that?”

  “He took a photo with him,” Boldt stated. “He paid you how much?” Boldt asked.

  Maurice pocketed Boldt’s cash. “Not enough. Fucking prick Fed.”

  “Threatened to bust you.”

  “The half of it,” the man said. Boldt produced another fifty. Maurice said, “I gave him the picture and I kept my door open for business.”

  “He told you how to reach him in case your memory came back.” Boldt knew the routine. He pulled a third fifty out of his pocket.

  “He might have mentioned the Hyatt.” The fifty disappeared into the jeans.

  “Anything you left out? Anything you forgot to tell him?” Boldt’s time at the Intelligence desk had not been for naught.

  The big stump of an index finger pointed out several other photos on the page. He flipped forward a page, then back two, and pointed out another row of photos. “You see that gray wall? The background? You know what that cement wall means?”

  Many of the photos were shot against the same gray background. “Tell me, Maurice. What is the significance of that wall?”

  “Couple times of year they bring one or another of us inside. Ends up like a fucking arts and crafts fair, know what I mean?”

  Boldt felt his system charge with adrenaline. “We’re talking about the penitentiary, Maurice. The guy with the eagle on the forearm—he was doing time.”

  “You got it.”

  “When?”

  Maurice slipped out a photo and flipped it over. “Nineteen ninety-five.”

  “The suit … does he know this?”

  “He didn’t ask,” Maurice said, his face spreading into a smile.

  CHAPTER

  “Jesus, su-gar, what da hell dey got going up in
Seattle we ain’t got down here? You ever consider yourself a transfer, how ’bout looking down our way?”

  NOPD’s detectives division was a mismatch of gray metal government furniture, paddle fans and noisy, window-mounted air conditioners. Half the building had been remodeled, but they were working from the top down—from the chief to the garage—and the detectives division was low in the building and low on the list.

  Daphne bristled at the man’s sexist attitude but played to him rather than make trouble. Priorities.

  Detective Broole was white, thirty-five, modestly good looking, with acne scars and sleepy brown eyes. He wore his hair like a Las Vegas showman and talked with a Dixie drawl that she had to mentally replay to understand.

  “He was in your medium lockup in ’95. He’s white, with an eagle tattoo on his left forearm. Six foot, maybe six-one. In for fraud or bunco—”

  “A confidence artist?” Broole said, planting his swagger down in front of an outdated computer terminal. “Well, hell, if that don’t describe half the population, sugar.” He hooked another chair with his toe and pulled it close to him on its casters. He lit up a nonfilter and blew the smoke away from her. “Shitty habit,” he said, “but somebody’s got to die young.” He motioned for her to sit in the chair, but she remained standing.

  “Maybe kiddie pornography. Stalking.” She couldn’t mention the abduction of children without risking connecting herself to the Pied Piper. “He may work with a female accomplice,” she said.

  “We’d all like one of those,” he conceded, turning his sweaty face toward her.

  “Maybe ran a telephone scam using nine-one-one,” she suggested.