The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  He struggled up the stairs, one heavy foot after another, his gun hanging lifelessly at his side, walked into the living room to the front door and trained the gun at Crowley’s head. “Where’s my daughter?” he asked, his voice breaking, his eyes stinging.

  Crowley cowered under the threat of the gun.

  “Boldt,” he said dryly. “I’m Boldt. Sarah’s my daughter.” He glanced up into the room, the gun still aimed at the man’s head. “She sat in that chair,” he said, “while your wife shot the video.”

  “We can make a deal,” Crowley offered. “A trade,” he proposed.

  “A trade?” Flemming shouted in a bloodcurdling tirade.

  “My wife … Our freedom for the girls.”

  “Your wife?” Flemming bellowed. “I’ll give you a fucking trade.” He let go of her hair, stepped in close to his hostage, trained the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. Lisa Crowley slumped back and fell into the grass.

  “Nooo!” Crowley shouted, raising up onto his arms and met there by Flemming’s weapon. His body shook as he wept, bawling on the floor.

  It wasn’t enough for Boldt, to see this man grovel. He squeezed the trigger, putting a round into the floor inches from the man’s head. “Where … is … my … daughter?”

  Flemming occupied the entire door, a gargantuan, his weapon aimed directly at Crowley’s head. “You want a trade? Your life for our daughters. But time’s up, fella.” He hesitated. “You got a god, you better say good-bye—or hello—whichever it is.”

  “A home!” Crowley shouted. “Jesus Christ, you killed her!”

  “Home?” Boldt and Flemming said nearly in unison.

  Flemming added, “Say good night, motherfucker.” He stepped closer to the downed man.

  “Yours,” he said to Flemming, “is in San Diego!” he sniveled. “A home for abandoned children.” He met eyes with Boldt. “Yours is in Seattle. Capitol Hill. Homeless children. We put them into the system—your system. We knew you’d never look.”

  Boldt raised the gun to where the bead settled on the man’s right ear. His weak arm began trembling, the bead dancing across the man’s head—temple, ear, cranium. Sarah had been available to him all along, a few blocks from Public Safety. The Crowleys had used the very system that had refused them an adoption.

  “You had better kill me too,” Crowley said to Flemming, suddenly much calmer, “because so help me God, I’ll testify you did that in cold blood.”

  Boldt laughed aloud and Flemming followed, the two men with their guns still aimed at the Pied Piper’s head. They laughed and suddenly sobered nearly at the same moment.

  “You stupid shit,” Flemming said to the man. “I’m a cop,” he looked up at Boldt, “I’m not allowed to go around killing people, much as I’d like to sometimes.”

  Crowley’s face contorted.

  “I stunned her—left-handed, I might add. Aimed the piece clear of her head. She’ll be awake in twenty minutes.”

  Crowley muttered, finally making sense of it. “You conned me?”

  “Takes one to know one,” Lou Boldt said.

  CHAPTER

  Daphne circled the interrogation table in Room A—the Box—like a hawk after a snake. Boldt had brokered a deal with Hale, who won Chevalier’s arrest in New Orleans as an FBI collar in return for his silence concerning his overnight in an airport drunk tank.

  With Chevalier under federal lockup, Crowley had been appointed a little pencil of an attorney, a man who looked about eighteen years old, a man who did not know how to handle a woman like Daphne, intimidated by both her looks and her powerful sense of control. Crowley dismissed him, electing to take Daphne on alone. He chose to do this in front of her, to make a statement about control. She continued to circle, changing strategies, attempting to find a jumping-off point. She lived for such moments.

  Her concentration ever intense, she nonetheless found herself required to push away thought of Owen Adler’s invitation to dinner in the Georgian Room at the Four Seasons Olympic. He had said it was a celebration dinner, but she intuitively expected more. The Presidential Suite perhaps. A ring on her left hand—the same ring she had returned to him a year earlier. Her life moved in arcs, and she felt certain that arc was to rejoin her with Owen. But not now, she willed, finding her way back to the dismal room and the sad excuse of a man handcuffed at the table.

  “If you are pacing out of nerves,” Crowley said calmly, “pray continue. When you feel up to it, we’ll have ourselves a talk. If you are trying to make a statement—you’re free to move around, I have my ankles shackled—save it. Been there, done that. I know where I’m going, do you? You’re good-looking but you’re single. You have a body and a face that men fall for, but something keeps you out of serious relationships, and I bet that something is you. You are your own worst enemy, aren’t you? They are never good enough for you, are they? Never quite live up to dear old dad, do they? Afraid to take them home, are we?”

  She should have expected this from a con artist of his accomplishments—he could see into his marks and knew which nerve to strike without second thought; it was an instinct with him. She had prepared herself for a kidnapper, not the man Crowley turned out to be. She chastised herself for this. She wanted a confession; she didn’t want the trial left only to evidence, some of which had been compromised through the behavior of the Gang of Five.

  She said, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin was caught. You knew in advance that you and your wife would be caught if you continued. You could have stopped, but you didn’t. That fascinates me.”

  “Of course I fascinate you. You’re what, the staff shrink? Not a detective, are we? You don’t have the attitude, you see? You’re curious. The detectives think they know it all. Of course I’m fascinating to you. We both make our living by looking inside people. Hmm? The only difference is that I see what’s really there. You? You’re a phony.”

  She grinned at him, though it didn’t come naturally. She guessed at people’s secrets; this man seemed to know them in advance. He made no reference to the kidnappings or his crimes, steering the topic back to Daphne. She wanted that confession. “You put Lieutenant Boldt’s child into a home. What made you think that would work?”

  “I see you more as a mistress, someone’s mistress. It leaves the door open, doesn’t it? Always open, easy to walk out. Get your jollies—you’re a hell of a ride, aren’t you?—but sleep in your own bed, thank you very much.”

  The attack struck home, and Daphne’s only defense was an immediate rebuttal—focus his attention away from her. She had played the role of mistress with Owen Adler; she owed him more than that. She countered, “I think I would pose as a social worker. Your wife too; a team is more effective, more believable. I deliver little Sarah to the institution saying that her parents are dead, a cop and his wife—what? a car accident?—that the child hasn’t been told yet, that I’m looking for closest living relatives. I need her taken care of for a week or two, maybe a month or more. Something like that. If the child is capable of communicating her surname or that her father is a cop or an FBI agent, her comments will not draw reactions from her keepers because they know she hasn’t been told about her parents—that’s the key to the deception I would think: the child is still in the dark about all this. They will placate her, patronize her, but ultimately she’s a victim of the system, which was just what you wanted. She’ll be looked after, treated well, and in the case of Bowler in Portland, and who knows how many others like him, when all is said and done, once you’ve packed your bags, you can return as the same pair of social workers, pick up the child and deliver him or her back to the parents. Nice and clean. How am I doing?” She saw perfectly well that she had guessed accurately. Crowley’s complexion went the milky white of the acoustical tiles overhead.

  “Or maybe not a social worker. A cop? A pair of cops? You used that at the day care center. I don’t know that it matters.”

  “You didn’t answer me, about your being a mistress. I was right
about that, wasn’t I? You’re the Teflon woman. You never stick to anyone you get close to.”

  She fired back, “You want to discuss relationships? Good. Glad you brought it up. Your inability to have children. It’s your problem, isn’t it, not your wife’s? Lisa is fertile, isn’t she? And yet no kids. I bet a man like you made her go through a dozen tests while all the time knowing that your seed was at cause. Your seed is dead, isn’t it. Like you. You can’t admit that, can you? Dead seed, dead man.”

  “Shut up!”

  Knowing she had scored a direct hit, she withheld any self-congratulations. She wanted him on record as confessing the crimes.

  She hurried, “You don’t want kids anyway. It’s Lisa who wanted them, not you. They would only get in the way of your brilliant career. Tie you down. Take your wife off the team, leave you working alone. What fun is that? The fun is showing off for her, isn’t that right? For Lisa. Showing her how good you are. What a liar you can be. No audience, what’s the fun? It’s not the money. You spend any money you win because you want her to need you again, you want to keep up the game. It’s all about the game. The confidence game. It owns you—that thrill of deception. Or maybe she’s the one with the brains. I bet that’s hard for a man like you, a man with dead seed, to accept that your wife is more clever than you. She came to you with the plan, didn’t she? She wanted to kidnap a baby and keep it.”

  “Absurd,” he protested.

  “It was her plan,” she fired off.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “She wanted a child badly enough to steal one, and you saw your life in flames if she pulled it off—”

  “We both wanted that child, but you people took him away from us. Why? Because we’d served some time? So what?”

  “So you got back at the system.”

  “Damn right!”

  She knew that to beat him she had to con him, exactly as Boldt and Flemming had done. She saw only the one area of vulnerability and decided to exploit it, making assumptions that were only that. “She wanted the baby, but you couldn’t live with that. It was you who suggested to give other women what the two of you had been denied. I don’t see you as the compassionate type, but I have a hunch it was your idea nonetheless. Why? Because it was another game. You didn’t want a baby underfoot; you didn’t want your precious team broken up. Give your wife children to take care of, but keep the game alive.” She leaned her hands onto the table and said confidently, as if every word was knowledge not guesswork. “What if I go next door and tell your wife that all those tests she did were for nothing? All that equipment up inside her. All those doctors, the drugs, the grief. That very early on you lied to her about the results of your own fertility test because you couldn’t live with the dead seed inside of you. That you’re shooting blanks now and that you always were, and that everything she did was for nothing? Maybe we should test you. How about that? How do you think she’s going to feel about that level of betrayal? You think she won’t give you up?”

  “That’s lies!”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” She added, “It makes a hell of a story, doesn’t it? One I’m sure she’d pay particular attention to.”

  “You … You can’t do that!”

  “I can do anything I want,” she corrected. She waved her hands in the air—his were manacled. “Why else would you talk her out of keeping the first baby? You made her think it was her idea, didn’t you—selling them to women like her? You conned your own wife. You never stop, do you? How often did she ask you to end the kidnappings and keep one of the babies? To make a life with her? And you always had a reason for her, didn’t you? Always a reason waiting on the end of your lying tongue.”

  “She wanted the money just as much as I did,” Crowley objected, confessing for the first time their involvement in the kidnappings. Daphne felt a triumphant surge of adrenaline. He shouted angrily, “She wanted the kid to have all the chances, all the opportunities. The schools, the clothes, the whole nine yards. Bank a million bucks for ourselves and then keep a kid of our own. And you’re wrong about me not wanting our own—” He caught himself. If he could have rewound the tape and erased the last few sentences he would have, but instead he stared at Daphne and a grin slowly stole over his thin lips and his sweaty face rose into a smile that gave way to laughter. He tried to communicate something to her through eye contact, but the message was lost on the volume of his laughter and the keen concentration in his eyes. He stopped laughing, maintained the eye contact, and said, “I think I’ll take that attorney now.”

  “So noted,” she said. The comments were as good as a confession.

  As she placed her hand on the doorknob, Roger Crowley conceded, “Well done.”

  Daphne hesitated there a moment, knowing that Boldt and Flemming had had the chance to kill this man, to bury him in a tulip field never to be found.

  She looked back at the man in the orange coveralls and steel handcuffs. “They should have killed you,” she said.

  “Opportunity is the name of the game,” Roger Crowley said back to her.

  CHAPTER

  “How’s my hair?”

  “What hair?” Boldt answered.

  “The wig, stupid.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Miles held tightly to his father’s neck, clutching to him like a drowning man to a lifeboat.

  After only a few yards of controlled walking, Liz and Boldt broke into a run at the same time, their speed having little or nothing to do with the rain as it began falling, and everything to do with a parent’s excitement.

  Liz laughed into that rain, part primal scream, part cry, chin up, mouth catching the drops. It was not the voice of a dying woman, her husband noted. This woman alongside of him was very much alive. “I can’t stand it!” she shouted in glee.

  Boldt endeavored to speak, to say something, to answer his wife, to acknowledge her, but his tears mixed with the rain and his eyes blurred and he reached out for her arm like a blind person wanting guidance. This woman had guided him through so much. Reluctantly, he left her disease to her and her god; willingly, he turned over his soul and heart, abandoning the isolation he had felt since her hospitalization. If she died, he would come to terms with that. In the meantime, he would hold no part of himself in reserve, would seek no shelter in moods or in his work. He gave himself back to her freely, and of his own will.

  Miles shouted his sister’s name, for the small girl stood in the gothic doorway of the institution’s entrance, jumping up and down on both feet, a black social worker at her side.

  They hurried up the stone steps, splashing puddles of rainwater like small explosions at their feet, Miles calling her name, Liz reaching, straining forward to touch her daughter.

  They came together then, a family, a rich embrace that for Boldt defied time or description. The moment—a single moment in time he had been living for. Not a bit like anything he had dreamed or imagined. Something else entirely better.

  Little Sarah cried for days off and on—months, if measured in fear—and Boldt would listen painfully as his wife attempted to soothe the child with that calming voice of hers. Each sob stabbed his heart viciously and unforgivably. Up and down the West Coast, a dozen other children sobbed this same way, clutched tightly in their parent’s embrace, most too young to know the source of their tears, too young to ever remember clearly the days, weeks or months of separation they had endured.

  But Lou Boldt remembered. In the darkness of a room without lights, a haunting tenor wailing from the stereo, he sat in the corner blinded by a consuming guilt that would not pass. He picked up the phone and called LaMoia to his house.

  Thirty minutes later the reinstated sergeant stood in Boldt’s music room, not a wrinkle in his jeans, not a dull spot on his steel gray ostrich boots.

  “You rang?” LaMoia said. He had regained some of the weight the suspension had cost him. He looked good. Nothing new there. “You hear the engagement is back on?”

  “I he
ard.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Happy for her.”

  “Will we lose her?” LaMoia asked, genuinely concerned—he, the man who often battled with her.

  “It’s possible. But not forever. She can’t leave this forever. It’s in her, same as you and me.”

  “The Anderson case is still not cleared,” LaMoia reminded. “We can’t get a confession out of him.”

  “Crowley didn’t do Anderson,” Boldt informed him, “Flemming did.”

  LaMoia stood perfectly still. “Jesus.”

  “Crowley spotted Anderson while out on that run. He got a message to Flemming telling him Anderson was taking pictures, that something had to be done. Flemming knew that for his daughter’s sake Anderson had to be shut up. Flemming used his FBI ID to get him through the front door—I’ve got to admit that fooled me, threw me off. I thought it had to be someone who knew Anderson or had a relationship with him. He claims he went there to convince Anderson that he had it all wrong, arrest him if necessary, but that Anderson knew he was onto the Pied Piper, and that he got arrogant about it. Things went bad. Anderson’s neck ended up snapped. Flemming covered himself.”

  “And he just walks?”

  “It’s your investigation. Yours and Gaynes’s. You have any evidence linking Flemming to that kill? You want to prosecute it?”

  “You’ve changed, Sarge.”

  “Yes. I’m a lieutenant now,” Boldt said. But he was a father most of all, and he knew what Flemming had endured for those six months. The man had announced his retirement. He would go into security work somewhere, ride out the next fifteen years being bored behind a desk. How much more did society require of him?

  Boldt rose out of the chair and switched some buttons on the stereo. He pushed PLAY on his cassette deck. A series of familiar tones filled the room, not quite music.

  “Know what that is?” Boldt asked his former detective.