The Pied Piper (74 page)

“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.

“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 heard.”

“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.

“Telephone tones.”

“Move to the front of the class.”

“So what?” LaMoia asked.

“Umm,” Boldt muttered. Guilt was a difficult cross to bear, but more difficult to break. “I needed you,” he explained. Or he thought he did. “I trusted you. I needed you.”

“You need a Valium is what you need. Word is, you're coming back to the shop next week.”

“Tech Services wiretapped every member of the task force—their phones—for me. I ordered it.”

“When?”

“After Sarah.” He hesitated. “But before your suspension.”

Boldt rewound and replayed the telephone tones—a long string of tones with a few, equally long pauses. “It took me forever to figure out the code. I broke it when I realized the first numbers were your pager. Tech Services, actually. They're the ones that filled in that blank.”

“You tapped Hill's line?” LaMoia barked in astonishment, not listening clearly. “You tapped a fucking captain's phone line?” A touch of reverence. He glanced around, embarrassed by the loose tongue. “You're outta your gourd,” he whispered. Then the realization Boldt had awaited finally cascaded over LaMoia's face as he added the information together. His brow tightened and his mustache and mouth sagged into concern.

“You?” the sergeant asked, incredulous.

“She told me that she was going to assign you the accident in Boise.”

“You?” Outright astonishment.

“I couldn't allow that. I needed to short-circuit Flemming's plan to steal the task force and preserve you for my team. For New Orleans. For Sarah.”

“You bastard.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Silence hung between them, and with it, Boldt feared their friendship as well. LaMoia's record would forever be blemished; it was an unspoken rule that a suspension, even though cleared by review, affected an officer's rate of advancement forever.

Miles cried out LaMoia's name from the other room—a child's shrill peal of pure pleasure. A moment later, Sarah's tiny voice echoed the same delight.

John LaMoia grinned, lifted his head, shut his eyes and drank in the sounds like sweet perfume. “You bastard,” he said, offering Boldt his back and hurrying into the room to play with the kids.

The author wishes to thank the following for their help and time in providing background information for
The Pied Piper
:

Sergeant Donald Cameron—Seattle Police Department, Crimes Against Persons

Mr. Ralph Stroup, Director—Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys, The Waldo Burton Home, New Orleans, LA

Ms. Claudine Wilkerson—Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys

Mr. J. Thomas Lewis—Monroe & Lemann, New Orleans, LA

Mr. Thomas B. Lemann—Monroe & Lemann, New Orleans, LA

Ms. Diana Lewis—New Orleans, LA

Lexis-Nexis—Dayton, OH

Dr. Donald Reay—King County Medical Examiner, Seattle, WA

Mr. Steven Garman—Mt. Medical & Security, Ketchum, ID

C. J. Snow

Editors:

Mr. Albert Zuckerman

Mr. Brian DeFiore

Office:

Mrs. Mary K. Peterson

Ms. Nancy Litzinger

Ridley Pearson
is a
New York Times
bestselling author of crime fiction (
Probable Cause, Middle of Nowhere
); suspense/horror (
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
); and children's chapter books (coauthor of
Peter and the Starcatchers
). His forty-plus novels include
Undercurrents, Chain of Evidence
, and
The Body of David Hayes
. In 1991 he became the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford University. Ridley, his wife, Marcelle, and their two daughters currently divide their time between the Midwest and the Northern Rockies.

www.ridleypearson.com

By Ridley Pearson

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red

(writing as Joyce Reardon)

Peter and the Starcatchers

(co-written with Dave Barry)

Cut and Run

The Body of David Hayes*

The Art of Deception*

Parallel Lies

Middle of Nowhere*

The First Victim*

The Pied Piper*

Beyond Recognition*

Chain of Evidence

No Witnesses*

The Angel Maker*

Hard Fall

Probable Cause

Undercurrents*

Hidden Charges

Blood of the Albatross

Never Look Back

*features Lou Boldt / Daphne Matthews

W
RITING AS
W
ENDELL
M
CCALL

Dead Aim

Aim for the Heart

Concerto in Dead Flat

S
HORT
S
TORIES

“All Over but the Dying” in
Diagnosis Terminal,
edited by F. Paul Wilson

“Close Shave” in
Murder Is My Racquet,
edited by Otto Penzler

C
OLLECTIONS

The Putt at the End of the World,
a serial novel