The Pied Piper (60 page)

“How do we live with ourselves if something goes wrong?”

“Trudy's going home,” he repeated defiantly. There was no mention made of Sarah. LaMoia had to stay with Lisa Crowley at all costs, providing Lisa Crowley showed.

Boldt pulled the Volvo into the back lot. He shut off the engine, but neither passenger nor driver moved, frozen in concentration and second thought. Boldt's hands remained on the wheel; Daphne's sat folded in her lap.

“Kiss me,” said the psychologist. “The Brehmers would kiss before going inside. And remember: We're excited, Lou. We've never felt so in love. This is a moment we've been awaiting a long time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Kiss me.”

“For them. Okay.”

He kissed her quickly for the benefit of any surveillance, LaMoia included.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Brad Brehmer,” Boldt introduced himself.

“Vincent Chevalier.”

“My wife, Cindy.”

Daphne smiled at the man, studying his cheap suit, his eye movement, his posture, his stubby fingers with their manicured nails. His tongue teased his bottom lip before each word spoken.

“Come in,” he said, staring at Daphne's chest and smiling through wet lips.

The office suited him: mobile-home wood paneling, a ragged couch facing a low table that offered a half-full ashtray and dogeared magazines. A giveaway girlie calendar from Pennzoil. Chevalier's early-generation computer did not belong to a man surfing the Internet for victims' credit cards. Classical “hits” played from a thin-sounding radio.

What would the Brehmers have thought? she wondered. How would they have reacted? It did not strike Daphne as a place to start a family. Friday-night poker perhaps. A place to annul a Las Vegas chapel marriage. “Oh, my,” Daphne remarked with just a hint of the Carolinas. “How authentic looking,” she said to her husband.

Chevalier said, “The paperwork will go pretty fast. You'll see.” He checked his watch. “Have a seat.”

Chevalier snatched the ashtray, dumped its contents into a wastebasket and then lit a cigarette without asking and without offering one. “Been busy around here,” he offered.

Chevalier was smaller and more pitiful than Daphne had pictured him in her mind's eye, a sluggish little creature who overate and gambled with people's lives. She didn't doubt his resolve—he was in bed with a pair of con artists that had pulled in nearly a million dollars as baby brokers. She pasted a smile onto her face and asked, “When do we get to meet our little darling?”

“City services lady should be here soon,” he acknowledged. “Let's take pen to paper, roll up the sleeves and get down to brass tacks, whataya say?”

“There's
more
paperwork?” Boldt complained.

“Hell, you pick up a package, you sign for it.” The troll winked at her. She felt numb, capable of anything.

Chevalier transferred documents from his desk to the coffee table, and placed pens down in front of them.

“Full signature here and here, and again,” he said, flipping pages manically, “well, initials there, again here, and then signature there. That last one you wait on so that it can be witnessed by two parties—that's me and the social worker, the two parties. Whataya say?”

Boldt had Brehmer's scrawl down pat, an indistinguishable mass of loops with a few vertical lines thrown in for the sake of the B's and the H. Give a first-grader an hour with a #2 pencil, and he or she could be forging Brehmer's checks. Daphne faced the greater challenge. Cindy Brehmer's signature was controlled and pretty. Not that Chevalier would think to check. The paperwork was a masquerade for the buyer's benefit. Chevalier was not the brains of the operation; he was, at best, a facilitator.

The attorney nervously checked his watch, offered them both coffee and then edged over to the window, parted the blinds and looked down at the street. “Should be here any minute,” he said.

“I just can't wait!” Daphne cried out. “How about a cup of that coffee?” asked a woman who, like Boldt, drank nothing but tea. She reached over and took her husband's hand lovingly in hers.

Chevalier complied with her request and turned to address Mr. Coffee.

Daphne squeezed Boldt's hand hard, signaling him and directing his attention away from the attorney and onto Boldt's open sport coat where his handgun and holster showed. He buttoned up.

“How many of these adoptions do you arrange in a year?” Boldt asked conversationally.

Chevalier spun around and glared, fixing onto him like an attack dog on an intruder. “We agreed previously never to discuss
anything
to do with my business, Mr. Brehmer.” The man behind the invective did not share much of anything with the gawking attorney of a few moments earlier. This new man, at once dangerous and unpredictable, intrigued the psychologist. Chevalier, wound up like a venomous snake ready to strike, threatened, “I suggest we stick to our agreement.”

“Bradley!” Daphne barked at her husband, “don't you dare mess this up.” To the attorney she said, “He didn't mean a thing by it, Mr. Chevalier. Not a thing. Bradley just likes to talk, that's all.” She added teasingly, “Whataya say?”

“Bradley?” Chevalier questioned suspiciously, throwing the name into the air with great disdain. “Bradley?” he repeated.

Boldt blanched the moment Daphne barked at him. He had practiced the signature enough times to recognize her mistake.

Printed in capital letters on the documents in process of being signed—documents that shouted up at him from the low table where they lay open to the last page—was the name she should have called him: Bradford, not Bradley, as his make-believe wife had misspoken.

Attorneys caught such details. Chevalier had drawn up the documents, likely without the word processing abilities of an assistant: Why involve anyone else? He had typed them, printed them and proofed them. He certainly knew Brehmer's first name. He had to be wondering why the man's wife did not.

Tension hung in the air as thick as the smell of smoke and burned coffee.

Chevalier's head snapped toward the street; he had heard something only a resident of the building could discern. He eyed Boldt cautiously, crossed to the window and peered down into the street. When he looked back into the room his eyes flashed angrily between his two guests, and though Boldt scrambled for an alternate plan, his mind wouldn't function, clouded by thoughts of his daughter.

Smoke caught in the man's throat, burning it dry as Chevalier said, “She has arrived.”

People were creatures of habit, LaMoia thought, as he watched a Ford Taurus pull into the postage-stamp parking lot behind Chevalier's office. Such habits were a detective's bread and butter; they offered behavioral links to the past and future alike. People chose to dress the same, eat the same food at the same places, travel in the same circle of friends, frequent the same bars—drive the same cars.

Lisa Crowley had a thing for the Ford Taurus.

She parked in the first open spot in the lot, the one immediately adjacent to the street, providing LaMoia a good look and the driver a quick exit.

As the driver's door came open, LaMoia prepared himself for the ready, putting away the .38 Boldt had loaned him and the stun stick he routinely carried tucked into his right boot, a handheld, less powerful version of the Pied Piper's air TASER. He confirmed the pick gun's location in the pocket of his windbreaker. No cuffs, no ID wallet. His life had changed, no doubt about it.

He did not recognize Lisa Crowley from the mug shot provided Daphne by NOPD's Detective Broole. Dressed in a professional style in keeping with a job of such responsibility, and yet a state employee, this woman wore a starched white cotton top and a pair of crisp, pleated khaki pants. He assumed the hair was not hers, but one of many wigs, and yet it seemed perfectly in keeping, fitting her face and complementing her looks remarkably. She wore a colorful scarf on her head and a pair of shades. She might have been anybody.

LaMoia wondered if the scarf and glasses concealed head injuries sustained in the Boise pileup. If so, there was little she could do to fully hide herself. Body markings, regardless of how small, were an investigator's God-given gift.

Confidence artists were fully versed in identity changes. LaMoia was prepared for Lisa Crowley to enter a building with one look and, moments later, leave as an entirely different person. The woman who climbed back in the Taurus and drove it away might not be the same woman who had arrived and now climbed out. Opening the car's rear door, Crowley leaned inside and retrieved the baby seat.

LaMoia headed for the burned-out tenement's fire escape and the blistering heat of another hazy morning. His assignment was simple in word, difficult in practice, and yet critical to Sarah's rescue: to place Lisa Crowley under surveillance and never lose track of her. Boldt had entrusted him with nothing less than his daughter's life. He had no intention of letting anyone down.

“Bradley?” a suspicious Chevalier repeated curiously, stepping away from the window.

“Cindy's way of putting me in my place,” Boldt told the man, vamping. “One of those husband and wife things, that goes back to a childhood story I wish I'd never told.” Looking at Daphne, Boldt said for the benefit of the attorney, “No one but the teachers ever got my name right in school. It was always ‘Bradley' this and ‘Bradley' that. It really got on my nerves after a while. I came to hate the name. Still do. No one ever seems to get Brad
ford
.”

“Bradley gets your attention, sweetheart,” she said without hesitation, picking up the ruse beautifully. “And you know how I just love to have your full attention.” She tugged on the hem of her shift, lifting it a little more open than necessary, well aware of how to win Chevalier's attention as well.

Chevalier sucked on the cigarette, his small eyes flitting between his two clients.

Boldt felt a tear of sweat charge down his ribs. He knew that Trudy Kittridge's keeper had arrived when footfalls in the hall drew Chevalier to his office door.