Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

“Or maybe not a social worker. A cop? A pair of cops? You used that at the day care center. I don’t know that it matters.”

“You didn’t answer me, about your being a mistress. I was right about that, wasn’t I? You’re the Teflon woman. You never stick to anyone you get close to.”

She fired back, “You want to discuss relationships? Good. Glad you brought it up. Your inability to have children. It’s your problem, isn’t it, not your wife’s? Lisa is fertile, isn’t she? And yet no kids. I bet a man like you made her go through a dozen tests while all the time knowing that your seed was at cause. Your seed is dead, isn’t it. Like you. You can’t admit that, can you? Dead seed, dead man.”

“Shut up!”

Knowing she had scored a direct hit, she withheld any self-congratulations. She wanted him on record as confessing the crimes.

She hurried, “You don’t want kids anyway. It’s Lisa who wanted them, not you. They would only get in the way of your brilliant career. Tie you down. Take your wife off the team, leave you working alone. What fun is that? The fun is showing off for her, isn’t that right? For Lisa. Showing her how good you are. What a liar you can be. No audience, what’s the fun? It’s not the money. You spend any money you win because you want her to need you again, you want to keep up the game. It’s all about the game. The confidence game. It owns you-that thrill of deception. Or maybe she’s the one with the brains. I bet that’s hard for a man like you, a man with dead seed, to accept that your wife is more clever than you. She came to you with the plan, didn’t she? She wanted to kidnap a baby and keep it.”

“Absurd,” he protested.

“It was her plan,” she fired off.

“That’s bullshit.”

“She wanted a child badly enough to steal one, and you saw your life in flames if she pulled it off-”

“We both wanted that child, but you people took him away from us. Why? Because we’d served some time? So what?”

“So you got back at the system.”

“Damn right!”

She knew that to beat him she had to con him, exactly as Boldt and Flemming had done. She saw only the one area of vulnerability and decided to exploit it, making assumptions that were only that. “She wanted the baby, but you couldn’t live with that. It was you who suggested to give other women what the two of you had been denied. I don’t see you as the compassionate type, but I have a hunch it was your idea nonetheless. Why? Because it was another game. You didn’t want a baby underfoot; you didn’t want your precious team broken up. Give your wife children to take care of, but keep the game alive.” She leaned her hands onto the table and said confidently, as if every word was knowledge not guesswork. “What if I go next door and tell your wife that all those tests she did were for nothing? All that equipment up inside her. All those doctors, the drugs, the grief. That very early on you lied to her about the results of your own fertility test because you couldn’t live with the dead seed inside of you. That you’re shooting blanks now and that you always were, and that everything she did was for nothing? Maybe we should test you. How about that? How do you think she’s going to feel about that level of betrayal? You think she won’t give you up?”

“That’s lies!”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” She added, “It makes a hell of a story, doesn’t it? One I’m sure she’d pay particular attention to.”

“You … You can’t do that!”

“I can do anything I want,” she corrected. She waved her hands in the air-his were manacled. “Why else would you talk her out of keeping the first baby? You made her think it was her idea, didn’t you-selling them to women like her? You conned your own wife. You never stop, do you? How often did she ask you to end the kidnappings and keep one of the babies? To make a life with her? And you always had a reason for her, didn’t you? Always a reason waiting on the end of your lying tongue.”

“She wanted the money just as much as I did,” Crowley objected, confessing for the first time their involvement in the kidnappings. Daphne felt a triumphant surge of adrenaline. He shouted angrily, “She wanted the kid to have all the chances, all the opportunities. The schools, the clothes, the whole nine yards. Bank a million bucks for ourselves and then keep a kid of our own. And you’re wrong about me not wanting our own-” He caught himself. If he could have rewound the tape and erased the last few sentences he would have, but instead he stared at Daphne and a grin slowly stole over his thin lips and his sweaty face rose into a smile that gave way to laughter. He tried to communicate something to her through eye contact, but the message was lost on the volume of his laughter and the keen concentration in his eyes. He stopped laughing, maintained the eye contact, and said, “I think I’ll take that attorney now.”

“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.