The Pied Piper (18 page)

The big dick rocked once, twice and smashed into the door.

It held, reinforced.

Back it came, the glowing arrow on its nose aimed for the doorknob. Again the huge ram lunged into the door. Splinters of wood flew through the air, but again the door held. Ustad cursed in Arabic. Sitting ducks—the worst of situations.

On the third attempt, the doorjamb dislodged. The next two collisions drove the door down the basement stairs in a cacophony of destruction. Ustad heard the all too familiar hand clap of small weapons fire, and saw a member of his team spin and fall to the floor. The man rolled over, wincing in agony, but not bleeding; the vest had saved his life; he had four broken ribs.

Ustad shouted, “Police!” stuck the barrel of the shotgun down the dark hole and fired off two rounds. Three to go.

Weapons firing. Voices shouting.

The sound of banging metal told Ustad the storm cellar had been breached as well. They had them from two perimeter positions. The Bad Guys were pinned.

“Drop the weapons!” echoed from below.

More gunfire, short and percussive.

Ustad heard a sliding sound directly overhead followed by the distinct snap of a marksman's rifle. He turned in time to see a body tumble off the roof into the backyard. The cookers had placed a lookout on the top floor. Watching the street instead of the backyard, he had missed the approach of the ERT unit and was hellbent on escape. Coming to his feet, he spun and let loose automatic weapons fire. Ustad was clipped in the shoulder by a bullet. Charged with adrenaline, he barely felt it. Instead, he hoisted his shotgun, got off a round and watched the fleeing man stagger with the hit. The escapee limped away following the same route Ustad and his squad had used.

Ustad depressed his radio-com button and shouted, “Devon, armed bird coming right at you!” Lightheaded, he sank to his knees, his full attention fixed on the shooter limping at a run toward the Allied moving van.

The back door of the trailer swung open and Devon Long jumped out, weapon in hand. Ustad saw him open his mouth to shout a warning but did not hear him over the surrounding chaos.

The escapee came to an abrupt stop and raised his weapon at Long.

Ustad mumbled, “No! No!”

Long elevated the barrel of his assault rifle but immediately identified that his weapon was trained in the direction of his own people. He could not fire at the escaping shooter without risk to his colleagues. Overeager, he had jumped from the trailer too soon.

Long dove to the dirt and rolled for a safer angle as the sniper unloaded his weapon wildly. A volley of muzzle flashes followed. The sniper spun and fell to the dirt. Long, favoring his right side and obviously hit, was over the man in an instant, kicking the weapon away and one good boot toe into the man's ribs.

Ustad smiled. He slumped forward, and passed out.

No deaths, Boldt reminded himself as he patiently waited for Lofgrin's SID technicians to finish with the downstairs so he could examine the second floor. No deaths. Four wounded—two on each side. But the bad guys were worse off, and the meth lab was the second largest lab bust in the city's history, netting huge quantities of meth and LSD.

The kitchen and basement were disaster areas of splintered wood, blood, discharged weapon shells, glass and debris. All was marked. All recorded. There would be more reports, more internal hearings than could possibly be justified to anyone outside the system. They would still be sorting things out on the Fourth of July. Labor Day if they weren't careful.

The kitchen was an evidentiary wasteland. Lofgrin wasn't going to find anything of interest to Boldt there. The grounds surrounding the house were no better, thanks to the army that had come and gone.

“When?” he shouted ahead at Lofgrin. It was three in the morning. He was going to need a cup of tea soon.

“You kept everyone out of there for a reason,” Lofgrin reminded, meaning the upstairs. A pair of ERT officers had conducted a body hunt upstairs and then Boldt had sealed the area. He was anxious to get up there, but only behind Lofgrin's evidence technicians. With this extreme contamination, he wanted to maintain the best crime scene possible.

According to the evacuated neighbors, the house had been lived in by an elderly couple without children. The wife had recently died, sending the husband into a nursing home and leaving the place all but abandoned for the past few months. The neighbor to the east had removed the junk mail and tended to the flower beds. Newspapers found downstairs suggested the basement had been in use as a drug lab for the last six weeks, pointing Narcotics into a new area of investigation: meth cookers in decent neighborhoods.

Boldt walked a block and a half to air out his head, picked up a tea for himself and an armful of coffees and donuts and returned to the crime scene where press and the department's people of power shared microphones. Mulwright and Hill were there, as was Dunkin Hale from the FBI and a deputy prosecuting attorney. Boldt steered clear of all of them.

He passed out the coffees, winning points with the ID technicians, and then joined Lofgrin on the back porch. The man was smoking a cigarette.

“Since when do you smoke?” Boldt asked, astonished.

“Don't start, okay? I got enough with Diane.”

“I've known you twenty-some years.”

“I turn fifty next week, okay?”

Boldt knew about the birthday. He and Dixie had once planned to take Bernie to Victoria for a men-only jazz weekend, but Liz's illness and the task force had put the plan on hold. “Okay,” Boldt said, making it sound as if he didn't know about this birthday in case they could still cook up a surprise.

“When I quit this shitty habit twenty-seven years ago, I promised myself that for the week leading up to my fiftieth birthday I could smoke. Then not again until I'm sixty-five, when I earn an entire month. At eighty, if I make it that far, all bets are off: no time limits. Smoke as much as I like, nonfilter or whatever. And to hell with anybody who has a problem with that, including Diane.”

Boldt tried the tea. It was strong and to his liking despite the Styrofoam cup. “You're about as strange as they come. You know that?”

“Yeah, I know it. So what?”

“So nothing,” Boldt replied. He returned to his tea. Lofgrin smoked the thing like it was his last on earth.

“You got lucky,” the man said, exhaling a cloud. “If you could call it that.”

“Extremely,” Boldt replied. “A little bit this way or that and I'm responsible for a screwup.”

“Learn anything?” Lofgrin asked him.

He couldn't tell if the man was serious or not. As a civilian, Lofgrin operated under a different set of rules than sworn officers. Boldt replied, “Only that I'm not looking forward to turning fifty.” He finished the tea as Lofgrin laughed through his smoke and coughed until he had tears in his eyes. They returned inside together.

“Lou, you can come on up,” Lofgrin told him forty minutes later. The sky was lighter in the east. A few birds made song in anticipation of dawn.

The second story contained old furniture, worn carpeting and tired wallpaper. There were two bedrooms, a bath and a linen closet. The rear-facing bedroom had been used as a sewing room and faced a slowly rising hill that offered a view of dozens of other homes. At four-thirty in the morning these homes were dark, streetlights etching their outlines in the fog.

Boldt heard heavy footsteps approaching and knew immediately that they belonged to LaMoia's ostrich boots. John stopped at the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Boldt was on his hands and knees engaged in carpet patrol.

“You know,” LaMoia said, “if someone had bet me, I would have put big money on us tagging this asshole before he went for another one. Now we've lost Weinstein and I'm worried about a third.”

“Don't think like that,” Boldt warned. “Deadlines make you crazy, especially when the deadline passes.”

Motioning for LaMoia to join him, he said, “Carpet patrol.”

“What about ID?”

“Busy with the mess downstairs. Bernie asked us to take the carpet. What we've got is slightly confusing,” Boldt explained. “We think the lookout for the cookers primarily used the front room. He's a smoker and that room reeks of it and there are butts and roaches everywhere. This room smells clean, and no butts. And yet that,” he said, pointing out a cane seat chair by the window, “seems to indicate someone spent time at the back window.”

“A different sentry. They took turns up here. One smoked, one didn't,” LaMoia hypothesized.

Boldt had not shared Raymond's bit about the possibility of an exterminator on the premises with anyone. If he stumbled onto supporting evidence then it was admissible, but to do what he had done—use Narcotics to assist his own needs—was an outright manipulation of the system. To inform LaMoia would make him subject to the same risks that Boldt was taking. He said, “ID found some peat moss kicked up on the sill.”

“In the rocker with his feet up,” LaMoia suggested.

“Exactly. And peat moss?”

“Flower beds.” LaMoia's jaw dropped. “Why do I get the feeling a bunch of meth rats would not be tending the primroses?” He sagged to his knees and joined Boldt in fingering through the carpet.

Boldt said, “P.S. No peat moss was found in the front room.”

They worked methodically, using coins to mark the areas they searched.

“You know what I got to ask myself?” LaMoia said, busy with his fingers.

“What's that?”

“What the hell a lieutenant—Intelligence, no less—is doing on carpet patrol at four in the morning on a drug bust. Or are you just a Renaissance man?”

“The same could be asked of a Homicide sergeant running a task force investigation.”

“Yeah? Except I'm here because you rudely woke me up and told me to get my butt down here.”

“Two officers were wounded. I thought you were on rotation to investigate an officer-involved shooting.”

“Sure you did,” LaMoia said sarcastically. “I'm here because you needed someone assigned to the task force, and you weren't about to work with Mulwright even though his squad made the raid. Curiosity is what got me out of bed, Sarge. It wasn't loyalty this time. I'm too tired for loyalty.”

“You know what Daphne says?” Boldt asked, avoiding a direct answer.

“I'm figuring you're about to tell me.”

“That the Pied Piper is a planner.”

Mention of the Pied Piper caused LaMoia to look up and lose his spot in the carpet.

Boldt said, “An advance man. He identifies them, we don't know how; watches them, we don't know from where; and only then strikes. Gets his advance work out of the way before the first kidnapping because he knows the public becomes more aware after the publicity hits. He either does the advance work himself or uses chumps like Anderson.”

“Is that what I'm doing on my hands and knees?” LaMoia asked.

“It better be,” Boldt said, “or we're going to have some rumors to live down.”

LaMoia barked a laugh. “An attempt at humor at four in the morning. I ever tell you I love this job?”