Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

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.”