The Pied Piper (27 page)

Where was Sarah? she wondered. A moment later, another, more terrifying thought occurred: Was this the question Boldt did not want asked?

Boldt sequestered himself in his office, phones off, to decide what to do, well aware that whatever his decision, it would determine not only his future but his daughter's as well.

The weather did not coincide with his mood, the heavy cloud cover having given way to warm sunlight the color of daffodils. He pulled down the office's slatted blinds to darken the room, but ended up with a striped floor, desk, walls and chair, surrounded appropriately enough in a cage of light. Jailed, just as he felt.

The kidnapper might have asked for money; for all of Boldt's worldly goods; he might have asked that Liz use her banking authority in some way, a false account, a fake loan; but instead he asked the impossible: that Boldt subvert an investigation.

In the balance hung his daughter's life. There was not, therefore, any decision to be made—the choice was obvious. And yet Boldt found himself engaged in debate, understanding how the Pied Piper had kept from being caught, had frustrated Flemming and his team, had moved city to city with a license to pluck infant children from their parents' arms. It was no wonder he hadn't been caught, that investigators had so few leads; the deck had been stacked in each city.

Once committed, there was no turning back. His powers far-reaching, the lieutenant of Intelligence had only to pick up the phone to initiate interdepartmental wiretapping. If he were to compromise the investigation, then he needed every piece of it, every whisper, every consideration. Information was everything. He had to know it all. He ran the names off to the civilian who ran Tech Services: “Hill, Mulwright, LaMoia, Gaynes, Lofgrin.” He waited for some kind of acknowledgment. When the man on the other end failed to speak, Boldt said, “Do you have that?”

“I've got it. Record all of them,” he stated. “Twenty-four hour loops or real time?”

“Real time.” He added, “What happened to live monitoring?”

“This is too many lines, unless you can provide the personnel.”

“No other choices?”

“AI,” the man offered, “artificial intelligence. It's a new system, prone to bugs, but we've used it a couple times to good effect.”

“You lost me.”

“The software monitors the phone lines, listening for key words. You put in ‘coke' or ‘smack' and if the words come up, the conversation is flagged. When it works, it works beautifully, but the bugs aren't out. It crashes from time to time; I gotta be honest with you.”

He ordered the phone lines monitored by AI.

To wiretap lines out of office required warrants, and therefore a visit to a judge. Boldt worked with only one judge, the most liberal in the state—this judge had been passed to him by the former lieutenant of the squad, like a mentor.

After hearing Boldt's arguments, viewing the numbers requested and understanding their significance, the judge asked only one question of him. “I take it you see no other way to monitor the situation, or you wouldn't ask.”

“There's an insider,” Boldt said blankly, knowing full well he was describing himself. “Has to be. Someone compromising the investigation. Steering it off course. We find that person, and the investigation just might have a fighting chance.”

The gray head nodded. The pen came out of the drawer. The signature went down. Boldt had authority to wiretap the FBI.

“They have ways of protecting themselves from such things, don't they?” the judge asked.

“The warrant gives us access to the landlines themselves. I'm told by our tech people that it makes all the difference. We go through the US West switching station.”

“I don't care who you go through, the shit's going to fly if they get onto this. You and I are going to be right in the middle of it, and that means you,” he warned.

“He who complains the loudest is the first person we investigate,” Boldt countered.
It's me
, he wanted to say. But who would listen? Lou Boldt compromise a task force investigation? Not likely.

He did it for Sarah, he reminded himself repeatedly. For Liz. For the family. But with each step he took toward his darker side, he questioned his decision. And he knew even then that before long, he would wish that he could take it all back.

Boldt reached his wife's hospital room, but stopped at the door. For these last weeks of her treatment and the complications surrounding it, his single greatest responsibility had been their children. Time and again she had offered him options, from Marina moving in with him and the kids to parking the kids with various family members until Liz was home again. But Boldt had taken these as a test, both from her and from himself: Could he handle the kids alone? With a few hours from Marina—which he could afford on his lieutenant's salary—could he make the family work? The larger, unspoken question had to do with his abilities if he lost Liz, if the cancer claimed her as the doctors suggested it would. He needed to know, and so he had repeatedly declined her proposals, reassuring her he had everything under control.

But now at the hospital room door, tears were stealing his vision for the umpteenth time, because nothing was in control. In one moment his life had become a runaway train. Nurses passing by took him as a grieving husband. Here on the C ward beds emptied quickly and forever; images like the one of Boldt weeping at his wife's door were not at all uncommon.

Despite his rehearsal on the way over, what did he hope to say to her? How would he explain the loss of their child? What effect might it have on her health? Could he live with the responsibility of knocking her out of remission and back into the hell of her disease?

Racked by ill conscience, he allowed himself the lie that he might recover Sarah in a matter of a day or two. He had every key player in the task force under wire surveillance. He had Kay Kalidja working on the victims' financials. He had Millie Wiggins' statement from the day care center about calling 911 and being put through to Boldt: an impossibility that required further investigation. Leads, the cop in him convinced the father and husband. Somewhere, something would break. And when it did, Sarah would be home again, the incident in past tense, an acceptable scenario.

“Lou?” her voice called out from the other side of the door. “Honey?”

Had she recognized the sound of her husband's tears or had her uncanny prescience of late detected his presence there?

He stepped back and away and into the center of the hall, afraid.

“Honey?” he heard her voice again.

He turned and walked as fast as his feet would carry him, tempted toward an all-out run. He might have been paged; he might have been called or summoned back to the office. It happened all the time. What of it? A dozen excuses hung there in the offering, awaiting him, memorized from decades of use. But useless because he knew the truth.

“Lies,” his own voice echoed in his head. A voice unfamiliar to him. A voice he was learning to live with.

Once begun, there was no turning back. The infection was rampant. Of the two of them, Liz was no longer the terminally ill, he was.

Daphne approached the regular four o'clock agonized over her assignment. Hill had requested a snapshot evaluation of every member of the task force—all of whom would be in attendance. Hill had offered no explanation for the unusual request, leaving Daphne anxious.

Hill had her own grand entrance planned for a few minutes into the meeting. She wanted Daphne's attention paid to this moment. “Reactions and attitude changes,” she had explained. Sheila Hill remained a nut Daphne found hard to crack.

More photographs had been added to the situation room's walls. Death and abduction. Children's faces everywhere.

In attendance were Mulwright, LaMoia, Hale, Flemming, Kalidja and herself. SID's Lofgrin had delivered a report and was available as necessary. Boldt was two floors away.

Mulwright kicked things off by complaining to Flemming about the FBI lab's failure to report back on the automotive glass found at several of the crime scenes. The lab had been asked to help ID the product number found on one of the pieces. SPD had heard nothing. Flemming defended the delay, citing recent political and media pressure that had adversely affected the FBI lab.

Daphne studied tone of voice, eye movement and body language of each and every participant. State of mind was more difficult.

The group worked well together when dealing with specifics. They anxiously awaited the analysis of the pollen, the lab work on the glass chips, and put great hope in the surveillance of the vacant houses. The proposed direction for the investigation segregated down departmental lines: SPD put faith in Anderson's killing and a possible connection to the abductions; Flemming wanted little to do with Anderson, insisting that Kay Kalidja's suggestion to pursue catalog and magazine subscriptions offered the greatest chance for a breakthrough.

Mulwright proposed concentrating all manpower on surveillance of families with infant children that lived within sight of the abandoned house Boldt had discovered. Flemming argued against this, citing manpower demands. He suggested they notify all parents in the area, reminding, “No child has been taken from a parent—only from baby sitters and relatives of the family.”

In the two weeks since the Shotz abduction, this was the first mention of this, and for Daphne it went to the psychology of the Pied Piper. She blurted out, “He doesn't want the confrontation a parent would offer. He's afraid of violence.” All heads turned to face her.

“My point is,” Flemming said, “that if a parent stays with that child there will be no kidnapping.”

Daphne said, “He's punishing the parent for leaving the child in someone else's care.” Silence overtook the room. She said, “He's giving those children to parents desperate for their own; parents who care. Parents who won't leave that child for anything.”

“Mumbo jumbo,” Hale quipped.

Flemming reprimanded his agent with a stern look. To the others he said, “The point is, if we alert the public now, we may save some children.”

Sheila Hill came through the door without knocking. She won the immediate attention of nearly every man in the room, drawn like moths to light. She wore a plain gray suit, white shirt and black flats. A simple silver necklace hung over her collarbone. Her lipstick was flesh-toned, her hair brushed smooth and held with a clip. Nothing showy. The SPD officers stood for her. The FBI followed reluctantly. In that instant, the mood changed. Authority walked through that door. Even Flemming seemed to understand this.