The Pied Piper (23 page)

“They had a housedress I really wanted. Kind of like this one, only red.”

“Mrs.—” He searched for the name. Couldn't find it. A year earlier it would have been on the tip of his tongue.

“The housedress was up at the same time I saw him, and I thought about those earwigs in there and I thought, ‘That's who I need.' So I get up and go out back and shout over to him. That's a big deal for me—going out like that. And could he care less? How's someone that rude stay in business anyway?”

“The housedress,” Boldt said in earnest, returning to the language of her world. There were no minutes and hours, only items for sale. “What day was that?”

She looked up at him for only the second time. “He's been around a couple of times, but hell if I'm going to give him the time of day.”

“You've seen him more than once?” It had been a long time since Boldt had conducted this kind of interrogation, and he felt out of sorts, his timing off. It was an art form when done right. Handled incorrectly, even the best witness could become confused and begin to believe he or she had it wrong. “When? How often?” He was rushing her, pushing her, supplying her with the answers he wanted to hear. If he had seen one of his detectives handling a questioning that same way, he would have been livid.

“Couple a times. At a distance. Sure I have. But to hell with him.”

“When?” He had trapped himself; he couldn't seem to break out of what he knew to be poor practice, like bogging down in an argument going nowhere.

“Yesterday maybe. The day before.”

“Recently.”

“I said ‘yesterday,' didn't I? How recent do you want?”

“Have you seen him today?” Boldt asked.

“No.”

Boldt handed her his card. “My number,” he said, “in case you remember anything else about him. We'll want to talk with you some more.”

“Not this time of day you won't. You wait until the gadget part of the show. Who cares about computers and VCRs anyway?” Eyeing Boldt's business card, she allowed a large grin to superimpose itself upon her features. “Say,” she said, causing Boldt to turn from the door to face her, “you know anyone sprays for earwigs?”

Boldt tried LaMoia from the cellular, his intention to inform him that he was going to enter the residence on a determination of probable cause. He couldn't get through, but penned a note of his attempt in his notebook. He walked around back of the vacant house, not wanting to draw any attention, his senses on full alert. It took him a total of three minutes to find the spare key—under a potted plant. He paused at the back door and unsnapped his service handgun.

The brief touch of the weapon brought with it dread and anxiety. Fieldwork was for the younger officers—he understood this well.

He moved cautiously through the building, clearing rooms in succession, allowing for no surprises. The house smelled dusty and shuttered. Boldt climbed the stairs as silently as possible, slowly and carefully. His imagination attempted to suggest the Pied Piper was upstairs at that very moment. A confrontation. Violence. He pushed the images aside and measured every footfall, listening intently after each. Anxious cops made mistakes, he reminded himself. They shot small kids who surprised them, allowing adrenaline and imagination to distort reality, they shot the legal residents, they got addresses wrong, they believed witnesses without a second source.

The upstairs landing came into view. The clarity of such moments astounded him. He could make out the dust particles like beach sand on the upstairs floor planks. They swirled in the air like a curtain of mist in a silent and slow dance. The pounding blood in his ears was deafening—
ba-bump … ba-bump … ba-bump.
He understood that fear corrupted such moments, caused poor decisions and overreactions. He stood away from it as he stepped onto the upper landing and faced a hallway with four doors—all closed.

He threw open the first, shielding himself behind the jamb. He searched the room and its closet, but found no one and nothing of interest.

The second room was the same, no one, the smell of old age and medicines in the air.

He cleared the next two as well, one a bedroom, the other a guest bath. He returned his weapon to its holster. He examined the three bedrooms more carefully. The street-facing bedroom had a wooden rocker that faced a window, the curtains to which were pulled partially shut, unlike the other curtains in the room. The placement of this rocker reminded him of that of the chair in the sewing room at the makeshift drug lab—an unmistakable similarity.

He could visualize the Pied Piper sitting in the chair, rocking and watching, the gap in the curtains framing his target. Boldt sat down into the rocking chair, its frame creaking beneath his weight, his fingers held away from its frame.

He looked out across the geometric landscape of a hundred houses or more. Leaning back, he saw the curtains restricted this to thirty or so houses over six to ten blocks. Somewhere in this limited field of view was the Pied Piper's next target.

Boldt combed the landscape and the houses presented him. It was said one couldn't see the forest for the trees, and no one knew this better than a cop.

His eyes searched each roof, each tree, each street. Suddenly, among all the houses, driveways, porches, windows and roofs, Boldt's eye caught something indelibly familiar. He strained to see more clearly at such a distance. Could it be? And then, all at once:
yes!
He was looking directly at his own house.

Boldt left the place at a sprint, found himself inside the Chevy, foot to the floor.

Some cops attracted trouble, the way a good-looking girl incited catcalls. Paroled cons stalked them, threatened them, assaulted them; attorneys filed lawsuits against them. Boldt had only once been such a target. The thought that his children, not him, might be the true target hurried him blindly through intersections, through traffic and down quiet residential streets.

He skidded to a stop in his own driveway, the left door open, the engine running, and ran to the back door, charging inside and startling his housekeeper so that she dropped an armful of clean laundry onto the kitchen floor and ran screaming from the room.

“Marina!” he called out. “The kids?”

She returned sheepishly. “Day care,” she answered in her thick Mexican accent, her face flushed.

“You took them yourself?”

“Who else?”

Marina had a temper. He had to watch himself. He settled down: The kids were not going to be kidnapped from day care. Nonetheless, he called Millie Wiggins and confirmed. Could coincidence explain his seeing his own house from that window? He hated the word. There was no case history to support his fears. Cops' children had not been targeted in any of the previous cities.

Nonetheless, coincidence was not in his detective's vocabulary. In police work, things happened for reasons.

The Pied Piper hunted white children under ten months old. Sarah was two, Miles, four.

“I take the children. I always take the children. What you mean coming in here like that? You scar-ed me half to death like that. Look at this laundry! On the floor. A mess. I have to wash it over.”

“It's fine.”

“It is not fine. You scar-ed me half to death like that … coming in that way like that. Shouting! Of
course
I take them to day care. What do you think? Mother of Jesus—you scar-ed me half to death!”

“Have you seen anyone around the house, Marina? Think! An extermina—… a man spraying for the bugs?”

“No such man.”

“You're sure?”

Her nostrils flared. Trouble. He asked, “Am I picking them up, or you?” His heart rate settled back down. Without Liz around, Boldt deferred to the woman's decisions. Convinced that when it came to raising the children, any woman knew better than any man, Boldt kept his mouth shut. If he made Marina mad, Liz would have his head.

“
You
picking them up,” she informed him. She shook her head in disgust, her rich brown eyes trained on him in disapproval. “After work. What are you doing here, anyway? It is too early.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he confessed.

“Yes? Well, I am not through the cleaning. And you know how I am about people being in this house when I am to do the cleaning.”

“I'm leaving.”

“Yes, and you are picking up the children.”

“I'm picking them up.”

“Mother of Jesus, the t'ings I put up with around here!”

Boldt returned to the vacant house and relocked the door. Back at the office he avoided making a report to LaMoia ahead of the four o'clock, so that LaMoia would not have to share the information. SPD would keep the vacant houses under surveillance through the night, Boldt's discovery at the top of their list. To this end he chased down Gaynes, who was noisily eating biscotti in the coffee lounge.

“Any luck?” she asked, her mouth full.

“A home west of Green Lake. Neighbor saw an exterminator casing the place.”

She stopped chewing and stared at him. Then, through the biscotti, she said, “Better than what I got.” She formed her fingers into a zero. “You check it out?”

“Promising. Chair aimed at a window on the second floor. I want to get back over there.”

“You mean you want me to get back over there,” she corrected, understanding him. “You? You've got kids and a wife to worry about.” She said quickly, “I didn't mean it like that.”

He asked her, “What about Anderson's security tape?”

“I'm through about half of it. It's my late-night viewing—finger on the fast forward button. Not the best plot. I tend to fall asleep pretty quickly. And if you're sending me out tonight …”

“I'm not sending anybody anywhere. I work upstairs.”

“I'm volunteering then,” she said. “The point is, I won't be watching much tape. I'll take the first shift. Eight to two. That okay?”

“It's LaMoia's call,” he reminded.

“You could always barge in on the four o'clock and see if Flemming's boys would like to help out.”

He grinned. “What about—”

“Dixie did Anderson today,” she said, interrupting, referring to the medical examiner. Gaynes had a way of anticipating Boldt's thoughts. It endeared her to him.

“All done?”

She nodded and said, “All but the pen and ink,” and continued to chew. “Guy did the rubber ducky all right. Hit his throat on the tub. But the tub didn't do him. It was a twist to cervical vertebra number three. And that came
before
the rubber ducky by the Doc's account.”

“Before.”

“Doc says the twist and shout came
before
the fall. It won't get any better than theory. But he does have lividity and a hematoma to suggest blockage of the carotid artery—although the rubber ducky was a little too on target to be absolutely sure.”

“The doer knows his anatomy?”

“That rubber ducky was either done by someone hoping to intentionally muddle an autopsy or simply in a hurry trying to cover his crime, and he got lucky.”

“Carotid artery,” Boldt repeated. “Strangled? From behind?”

“Cervical vertebra three is what iced him,” she reminded. It was her turn to test him.

“From behind?” he guessed. The contact between the two might have explained the pollen being found on Anderson's clothing, although he doubted it: The knees of Anderson's pants had been covered with the yellow pollen.

“Snap, crackle, pop.”

“Anderson turned his back on his visitor—and good night. So it's a person tall enough and strong enough to work Anderson from behind. A man as paranoid as Anderson. The two must have known each other. At the very least Anderson trusted him enough to invite him in.”

She asked, “One of his snitches? Someone like that? You start talking about the guy's head and you sound more like Matthews than yourself, you know that?”

The comment stung him; he didn't want anyone connecting them too closely. The ghost of their one night together, years earlier, still lingered. He had put it behind him, as had she.