The Pied Piper (68 page)

Before Raymond raised his rag, the second driver waved him off. The street person worked the windshield to the third car and the driver passed him some money. Boldt had been approached this same way, also during a light rain—the fluid Raymond was selling repelled water off the glass windshield, making it far easier to see. The stuff actually worked.

Thirty seconds …

“Hurry up,” Boldt mumbled.

Crowley waved, refusing the service, but Raymond went at her windshield anyway. Her window came open and he gave up, shouting, “No charge! No charge!” He crossed in front of her, walked along the curb, and patted her car on the rear fender to let her know he was there. In a sleight of hand worthy of a magic show, Raymond stuck a piece of chewing gum over the drilled hole in the taillight.

At this same moment, across the intersection, the hood of a car stuck its nose out onto 99.

Lofgrin allowed the light to go green, and the first cars surged forward.

“Go ahead,” Boldt told Griswold, “but allow this car up here—you see it?—to cut in ahead of us.”

“I got it.”

A car horn sounded impatiently from behind. The Country Squire rolled but allowed Crowley to gain a car's length that was quickly filled by the car pulling out. It was a dark car, a Nissan, its shape similar to a Taurus. They nearly rear-ended the car.

Griswold honked before Boldt could stop him. “Turn your fucking lights on!” Griswold roared.

As if hearing him, the car in front did just that, and as the taillights flashed red a white pinprick hole appeared.

Griswold understood the switch then and said to Boldt, “You sneaky bastard.” He added, “He got us close like that so we'd block him—”

“Screen him,” Boldt supplied.

“So like the others don't see the lights come on.” The driver grinned. “They just see the hole in the same taillight.” He added, “What's all this about, anyway?”

“It's about a little girl,” Boldt said. He held his breath awaiting radio traffic to confirm the ruse.

“Anything?” he heard over the radio.

“Nothing yet … check that … Affirmative, I've got the target up ahead.”

Boldt heaved a sigh of relief: Surveillance had bought the switch.

As instructed, LaMoia waited a mile before turning off, making a right onto Royal Brougham and immediately speeding up. At 4th he would make a left and then would join the long on-ramp to 90, with each turn going faster, making sure to keep enough distance to use the darkness to hide the make of the car.

Crowley, and Boldt with her, climbed the viaduct, the traffic thickening. Behind them, three vehicles turned right in pursuit of the drilled taillight.

Griz, checking the rearview mirror, said, “I don't get it. Aren't those
your
guys?”

“In a matter of speaking,” Boldt replied.

“I suppose that's the part I don't get,” he said.

Boldt gloated at his success. Through the rain, the skyscrapers shimmered to his right. Viaduct traffic was clocking sixty. It was fast for wet highway, fast for Boldt, but there were no more drilled taillights to follow. They had to stay close to the Taurus.

“She sure is checking her mirror a lot,” Griz reported.

“Back off,” Boldt ordered.

“We could lose her.”

“Back off!” Boldt saw the nervous head movement in silhouette.

“She's changing lanes—”

“Get over!”

Griswold dropped back further and slipped in behind a limousine. “Can't see her.”

“Shut up!” Boldt barked nervously, his stomach a knot.

“Tunnel,” Griswold said, as the limousine slowed for the short tunnel further separating them.

“This is not good,” Boldt said, “
not
good.” The Country Squire flowed with traffic into the tunnel.

Boldt caught a faint glimpse of taillights.

“Exit!” Boldt shouted at the driver.

Griswold jerked the wheel and negotiated a sharp right immediately at the tunnel's end. He slammed on the brakes. Every street, every intersection, was jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Griswold said, “I told you we should'a listened to the Sonics game. At least we would'a known when it was getting out. Who needs this shit?”

“She does,” Boldt answered. “She knows exactly what she's doing.”

Boldt took off on foot through the drizzle, slamming the car door while telling Griswold to park somewhere within a few blocks and pointing to a corner where he wanted Griswold to wait for him.

Boldt now believed that the Crowleys had timed Lisa's flight for an arrival to coincide with the end of the basketball game and the guaranteed mass confusion that always resulted around the Seattle Center. Slip a car into any one of dozens of emptying parking garages, and it would not be spotted for hours, perhaps days. Grab a bus, or go on foot with the thousands of people crowding the sidewalks; it was a place and time of night to get lost.

Crowley had been less than a hundred yards in front of the Country Squire when it had entered the tunnel. Boldt knew that if he had any chance of locating her, it was now—immediately—while she, like them, was still crushed and hemmed in by the traffic. With traffic barely moving, she couldn't have made it far—on one of three or four streets, or inside one of the two parking garages that were in plain sight.

The rain fell as a cold mist, a gray swirling curtain that seemed to go unnoticed by all but a few of the hundreds of pedestrians.

Boldt cut across the moving traffic, horns firing off at him in volleys of protest. He wished like hell that they had never plugged up that drilled taillight; it would have stuck out like a searchlight. He looked left, right: endless lines of cars. Every possible direction. But with eastbound traffic the worst—the traffic moving toward I-5—and with westbound traffic aimed directly at the Seattle Center, into the lion's mouth, Boldt chose straight ahead.

The sidewalks were more packed with pedestrians than the streets with cars. He threaded his way through and around groups, couples, families, all gabbing about the game and a great shot at the buzzer that had won it for the Sonics. The mood of the crowd was festive, even carnival-like. Although he was polite at first, Boldt's patience wore thin quickly, and he began to bump and claw his way through the melee, his efforts unappreciated. He craned over shoulders, stole his way to the curb, hoping for sight of the Taurus. Whereas the teeming horde walked, Boldt ran, faster and faster, driven at first by curiosity and finally out of desperation; he would not see Sarah's chances swallowed by a crowd, would not write her off. He charged through the elbows, the bumps and the complaints, a man driven by love and a fear of the future. He had spent over twenty years in the company of victims—he knew their fate. He would not become one.

At the intersection, he looked right, straight, left, and then started the process again; right, straight ahead, left, searching shapes and colors. The cars all looked the same, he realized. In shape and styling, so little difference existed. LaMoia, a gearhead, might have spotted the Taurus, might have singled it out from the Lexus, the Toyota, the Nissan, but to Boldt they blended homogeneously into a moving parking lot of identical vehicles. The light changed and, driven at the front of the pack, Boldt found himself caught in the current of pedestrians, carried across the street like a pile of snow in front of a plow.

He would later think that prayers are often answered in strange ways. There is no voice from heaven, no finger pointing the way, only unexplained coincidences that, coincidentally, happen to follow moments of prayer. Pushed across the street by the throng, Boldt stepped up onto the curb and saw the Taurus in traffic, five cars away. He could even make out a small black blob, Raymond's patch of chewing gum on the taillight. Crowley.

Behind him and to his left he heard a car door open and shut. A group of teenagers formed a knot in the sidewalk in front of him.

He took avoidance maneuvers and ran smack into another man, like hitting a brick wall. He apologized, but the brick wall remained firmly in his way. He stepped back to untangle himself and looked up into the eyes—they were dead eyes—of Special Agent in Charge Gary Flemming.

They wrestled briefly, locking forearms with matched grips, Flemming the larger, more powerful man. The crowds flowed around them, barely paying them any mind.

“Fight!” a kid shouted.

“Forget about it,” Boldt said, struggling, glancing around furiously through the mist for Flemming's backup.

“It's
my
investigation now,” Flemming announced, shaking him like an angry parent. “It's my task force, not Hill's. I took over in Boise.”

“It's irrelevant,” Boldt conceded. He wondered about what Hale had told him. If true, he was looking into the eyes of the Pied Piper's insider, his accomplice, a traitor.

Hundreds of people streamed past, most oblivious to the weather. The Taurus inched forward in gridlocked traffic, the rain in the headlights swirling like oil in water.

“You're within my jurisdiction,” Boldt reminded. “This is my city.” It seemed possible that Flemming might have gained control of the task force, and if so the investigation was indeed his, its outcome his to bend, break or detour. But Boldt remained proud of Seattle and his own place within it.

“You'll follow orders, Lieutenant. You've run investigations. You know the importance of—”

Boldt managed to yank his right arm free, reached in for his ID wallet and pressed it into Flemming's huge open hand. “Wrong.”

Flemming glanced down at the ID wallet. “Nice try.” He attempted to pass it back.

Boldt threw his arms in the air and said, “No harm, no foul. The investigation is all yours.” He inched his way to Flemming's left and into an area of clear sidewalk that had formed around them like an eddy behind a rock in a stream. He turned his back on the man and took a tentative step forward.

Flemming roared over the noise of the passing crowd, “She celebrated her birthday in captivity.”

The words froze Boldt. He turned, and said, “Not yet she hasn't.”

“Stephanie,” Flemming told him, eyes shifting nervously among the passers-by. “I'm talking about
my
daughter.”

“You aren't married,” Boldt said. “Have never been married,” he corrected. Drawn to the Taurus, he couldn't keep his eyes off it. Flemming was not one to look away from. Following Sarah's abduction Boldt had looked into the private lives of the various members of the FBI team; only Hale was married and a father, only Hale had made sense as a candidate for the Pied Piper's insider. Everything was turned around. He backed off, taking another step toward the Taurus, which had crept even further down the street. He wasn't going to lose that car. Again, he threw his hands in the air and said, “You've got to shoot me, Flemming, you want to stop me.”

That comment won him some extra room from the pedestrians.

“Gun!” a shrill voice called out. The pace of the crowd picked up, but it did not scatter as Boldt expected.

Flemming's hand was indeed stuck inside his sport coat.