The Pied Piper (58 page)

“It's all legal,” the husband insisted, jumping ahead. “We haven't done anything illegal.”

“Not yet,” Boldt corrected. “But the moment you take possession of that child you will have. Knowingly or not, you are accessories to kidnapping.”

“Oh dear God, no!” Cindy Brehmer's eyes clouded and she sprang up to save her face.

Daphne told Brehmer, “You'll be asked by the court to explain what you thought you were paying all that money for, why so much money.”

Boldt contributed, “It's a felony to overpay for an adoption. There are federal statutes as well as state. How carefully did you hide the money trail, sir? Were you creative enough to fool forensic accountants?”

He might as well have slapped the man across the face. Dazed, Brehmer sputtered, unable to complete a thought. A siren wailed in the distance; perfect timing, Boldt thought.

Daphne explained, “If you cooperate, we may be able to keep you from being charged.”

Boldt cautioned, “There are no guarantees.”

“When are you scheduled to pick up the child?” Daphne asked.

“You are
not
taking this baby from me!” the wife said, leaning against the hallway wall.

“Cindy,” the husband admonished. “They're offering us a choice. A chance. We need to listen to this.”

The woman's face collapsed into tears. She staggered to her husband, embraced him and sobbed.

Daphne asked, “How much did you pay?”

“Expenses plus fifty,” the husband answered matter-of-factly. “Three separate payments. About seventy in all.” He checked with both his visitors. “He told us it was a prominent family, that it would be done very quietly. We were paying extra to get a white baby. That was never spoken, but it was understood.”

“Have you ever met Chevalier?” Boldt asked.

“Never.”

“Did you videotape yourselves or send photographs?”

“The house,” the wife answered. “The neighborhood. Not us.”

“Spoken with him?”

“He has called a few times. Spoken with Cindy mostly. About the timing, the schedule.”

“The money?”

“That was with me,” he answered. “Early on.”

“How long ago?”

“Two, three months.”

“He wouldn't necessarily know
your
voice then?” Boldt inquired.

“What is it you're getting at?” Brehmer asked curiously, beginning to understand.

Boldt told them, “Chevalier called your home yesterday.”

Teary-eyed, the wife answered, “We're booked on a flight in the morning.” She began to cry again. “We're booked into a hotel. We honeymooned there. We're to wait for his call.”

Boldt met eyes with Brad Brehmer and waited for the man to feel his intensity. Then he shifted the same attention to the woman and told them both, “If we bust Chevalier ahead of time, we might never recover the child. The child is our priority. Right? For all of us,” he said, including even Daphne. “The child comes first.”

The woman nodded.

“Good,” Boldt said.

“It's important we understand one another,” Daphne added. “If this is to work, we need to communicate. We need to know you down to your core. Unfortunately, we need it now. Tonight. Before tomorrow morning.”

“You're going to take our place,” the husband said, correctly guessing Daphne's plan. “Is that what's going on here?”

Boldt answered, “You might want to make some coffee. It's going to be a long night.”

The following morning at 11:22, Boldt and Daphne checked into the Soniat House under the name Brehmer. Deep in the French Quarter on a quiet side street away from the T-shirts and the smell of stale beer, away from the movie crews and tourists swollen with crawfish and hot sauce, the hotel's office and courtyard were accessed through a single door painted kelly green. They stepped into another, older world, a New Orleans Boldt had not yet experienced, but one he quickly realized lingered beneath the surface glitz and souvenirs. Its cobblestone courtyard resplendent in a lush jungle of deep greens and sharp vivid colors, the Soniat House delivered the New Orleans of the nineteenth century.

The male receptionist wore a dark suit, looked Boldt in the eye and bowed his head slightly to Daphne. “We have a lovely room for you, Mr. and Mrs. Brehmer. Charles will show you the way. I note that your stay is open-ended. We will need notice day after tomorrow if you're intending to spend the weekend with us.”

“That shouldn't be a problem.” Boldt paused a beat too long as he signed the guest slip, in part because he had to remember to sign Brehmer's name—it was Brehmer's credit card he was using—in part because the daily room rate was twice his rental car's weekly rate.

As a couple they were shown through the courtyard and up a century-old set of winding wooden stairs, past a seven-foot-tall oil portrait of a southern general, and a smaller oil of a harlequin in full regalia. Boldt had no way of knowing how far Chevalier's influence reached, or what kind of underground existed in this city, but it didn't take an Intelligence officer to understand it was a place of influence peddling, of favors. For this reason, they had changed nothing about the Brehmers' hotel reservation or the couple's itinerary.

Charles keyed open the extremely narrow nine-foot wooden door and motioned for Daphne to lead the way. He heard her gasp as he followed into the long hardwood hallway, its walls covered with oil paintings, light sparkling from a cut glass chandelier. The hallway ended at a large bathroom all marble and brass. Through another pair of towering doors to the left was a sitting room with a crushed velvet love seat, two French chairs and three seven-foot windows that started at floor height and led out onto a balcony with flowering baskets issuing green waterfalls of tendrils and runners and overlooking the narrow street and a nunnery beyond.

Charles, the bellman, explained in his warm affected voice that a century earlier city property taxes had been assessed according to the number of a building's exterior doors, and so huge, double-hung windows had taken their place. He lifted one, admitting the sounds of the Quarter as a horse-drawn buggy passed and the driver's voice was heard lecturing his passengers on the Soniat House's place in the city's history. Breakfast—biscuits, juice and coffee—would be served on the balcony.

The bedroom held a four-poster with a red satin duvet, flanked by antique end tables hosting leaded glass lamps. A telephone was the only fixture that brought the suite into the current century. Boldt tipped the man, whose footsteps faded down the impossibly long hallway. The door to room 22 bumped shut.

Any of the hotel staff could be on Chevalier's payroll—bellhops, chambermaids—their every move might be monitored. They would maintain the impression of being a married couple. The Brehmers had a dinner reservation arranged in advance by Chevalier that Boldt and Daphne would honor. There was no saying to what extent Chevalier screened his prospective buyers. Certainly he conducted credit reports. Perhaps he placed the adoptive parents under surveillance for a day or two preceding the adoption; this would help explain his having made various arrangements for both the Hudsons and the Brehmers. Any such possibility required Boldt and Daphne to play along, at least on a superficial level—a married couple excited by the prospect of an adoption.

“We had better practice our signatures,” she said in a businesslike manner.

She ordered a mint julep from room service; Boldt, a ginger ale. When the waiter had come and gone, they sat out on the balcony in green wicker chairs with chintz padded cushions, the sonorous clip-clop of horse and buggy carrying up the cobblestone street. They worked on their forged signatures. Intricate shadows from the wrought-iron artistry played onto the decking, black and white and gray, like Chinese shadow puppets. After attempting a page of signatures, Boldt glanced over at her, his face flushed from the heat. He said, “Want some irony?”

“The laundry service provides the irony,” she said, clearly feeling the bourbon.

Boldt smirked, finished the ginger ale and said, “The irony is that the tables have turned. Now who are the con artists trying to steal a baby?”

Commander's Palace roared with the music of gracious dining—cocktail patter, the chime of fine tableware, corks drawn from the necks of wine bottles. Boldt and Daphne, as the Brehmers, were shown to a table in the restaurant's lavishly painted second-story lunchroom. An army of waiters descended upon them, the men clearly taken in by Daphne's beauty.

She owned the place from the moment they arrived, the maître d' charmed by her fluent French and the plunging neckline of her afternoon purchase.

Boldt lowered his head and toyed with the butter on his bread plate.

“Don't sulk,” she said.

“I'm not. I'm thinking about John's call.”

LaMoia had tailed Chevalier the night before, following him north to the small town of Méchant. He had not been alone. A second car had also been following Chevalier. LaMoia had kept his distance, but he was guessing Dunkin Hale.

“So where's the Russian army?” Boldt asked Daphne. “The Bureau,” he clarified. “They have an active field office here in the city, probably a fairly large one. An out-of-town agent working a case of national importance. Where's the backup?”

“I see what you mean.” She lightly buttered a piece of bread and recommended he try it.

Boldt said, “The only explanation I can come up with is that he's running this advance work solely for Flemming, which means Flemming does not want the rest of the agency to know about New Orleans. Why?”

“There's a cornbread, and a rosemary. If you go with the pork tenderloin, the cornbread's the ticket.”

“Is Flemming so political that he would bury this kind of connection until he has hard evidence?”

She said, “Kay Kalidja painted him exactly that way. Have you decided? It's a toss-up between the pork and the catfish.”

“He must have traced the rental car to Salt Lake by now, which means he has the DeChamps identity—the credit card. How much more does he need?”

“I'm going with the catfish,” she replied. She sampled a celery stick. In an exceptionally private voice, she said, “Do you know the real story of the Pied Piper?”

“The flute and the children,” he said.

She waved the celery stick like a conductor's baton. “No. No. In the thirteenth century, the Pied Piper was hired by the German city of Hamelin to rid the town of its rat infestation. He did just that—got rid of the rats—and legend had it that he charmed them away with his flute; in fact he probably poisoned them. Once the rats were gone, the city refused him payment. He responded by killing over a hundred of the city's children.”

“This is folklore, right?”

“No, some version of the man existed. One of our earliest documented serial killers. The folklore came from Goethe and Robert Browning, who retold the story with a little sugar on it.” She placed down the celery. “The Crowleys served their time and then were denied an adoption. They are denying others children. You think his decision to play an exterminator is random? It fits his role as the Pied Piper. They could have kidnapped one of these children and kept it for themselves, but they did not. They elected to take from the fertile and give to the barren, combining Robin Hood with the Pied Piper. They hold a grudge. This is not about profit, this is about payback. I'd like to think they're predictable, but they are not. They feel justified in what they're doing. They understand the joy of adoption. It's been denied them. They're angry.”