Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

“Let’s hope not,” Boldt said. “If your husband calls-”

“I tell him to get his butt home,” she interrupted.

“First you find a way to get the name of the town and the place he’s calling from. That first! A motel, a bar, it doesn’t matter. Then, and only then, you try to get him home.” He read her his cell phone number and made sure she took it down correctly. “It’s on twenty-four hours a day. You call the minute you hear.”

“I’ll call,” she promised, “but he won’t.”

With the help of Theresa Russo’s computer expertise, Boldt avoided including anyone in his search for Spitting Image’s home page. Within minutes of reading her the Internet address supplied by Daniel Weinstein she was reading back to him the company’s physical address, E-mail address, and phone and fax numbers. Russo kept him on the line while she used an Internet mapping service to pinpoint the location of the company, and faxed him the resulting map. Within five minutes of phoning her, he had an address and map and was headed for the residential community of Felton, California, north of Santa Cruz.

A flight from Sea-Tac left for San Jose less than an hour later.

Boldt had seen Sidney Weinstein in action with a weapon once before. He had no desire to face the two men alone. He called LaMoia from his car phone, awakening him. Weekend mornings were the detective’s only opportunity to sleep in; Boldt destroyed this chance. “I’m about to break your investigation wide open,” Boldt told him, assuming the Romeo was with a woman and probably sporting a Scotch-induced headache. “Southwest flight 192 leaves in fifty minutes.” He hung up, knowing that if he stayed on to argue his point LaMoia would worm his way out. As it was, LaMoia arrived at the gate with seven minutes to spare. He wore dark glasses, wet hair, a fresh pair of pressed jeans and his signature black leather jacket and ostrich boots. He drank buckets of coffee and ate pretzels for breakfast.

“You’re not going to tell me anything?” the detective complained from the front seat of the rental car.

“Of primary importance-” Boldt began to repeat himself.

“Yeah, I know. I heard you. It’s yours over in Intelligence for the first forty-eight hours. I keep my mouth shut for two days.” He added, “Two days is an eternity for those babies, you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Don’t push, John. You’re going to come out smelling like a rose.”

LaMoia burped on cue. “Better than I smell now,” he said.

Boldt stepped him through the evidence reports, the interviews with the Shotzes and Weinsteins, Daniel Weinstein’s credit card statements, the Internet site.

“Damn Internet,” LaMoia said. From homosexual abductions to fraud, the World Wide Web had brought police added caseloads. Only the white-collar crime boys sang its praises. “So this Daniel Weinstein, along with our pal Sid, are down here boozing it up with heat in the trunk. Does that about recap it?”

The drive was made longer by a thousand cars all trying to get to different places ahead of anyone else. The same in Seattle. A predictable impatience. Any lane, any highway, always the same race. LaMoia felt it too. “They don’t drive for pleasure. Not like the Italians. They drive to get somewhere. To beat the clock, save gas, bring home the bacon. I hate California.” He slouched down in the seat, napping behind his dark glasses. They ran past cardboard houses cut out and pasted onto hills dotted with live oaks that looked too beautiful to be real. The crush of humanity depressed him. LaMoia, who couldn’t nap if he’d been awake a week, reached out and dialed in a talk radio station.

“You’re depressing me,” Boldt said.

“What? You got no interest in prostate cancer? This is good Saturday morning stuff.” He kept searching until he found sports talk. “There we go,” he said. “I love this country!”

“I like to travel alone,” Boldt said.

“Should have thought of that.”

The housing developments streamed past. Pieces on a Monopoly board. Boldt said, “Aren’t the basketball play-offs still a couple months off?”

“Na, not the start of them. Besides, with the talk stations you just gotta go with it. Know what I mean?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, you probably don’t.” LaMoia passed some wind and cracked open the window.

“Wider,” Boldt said.

LaMoia turned off the radio. As much as Boldt disliked talk radio, he didn’t want to talk, and he knew LaMoia too well. The detective said suddenly, “The thing about Matthews I can’t figure out is what she wants, you know? What she’s up to. You know? First the engagement to Adler is on, then it’s off. Now, maybe on again, I hear.

“I collar a few bad guys along the way,” he continued. “You know? But Matthews-all she wants is to get inside their heads, take the gears out of their clocks. Wouldn’t you think that would get a little old? You ask me, we’re talking about a screwed-up childhood or something.”

“Who’s trying to get inside whose head?” Boldt asked. “She’s complicated. That’s what you don’t like about her. She’s more than perfume and lace and you can’t get close.”

LaMoia clutched his chest. “Oh! You’re killing me here!” He glanced over. “You don’t want to talk sports, you don’t want to talk legs.” He shook his head. “You know, we don’t talk all that much, Sarge, I mean aside from business.”

It wasn’t true and both men knew it. LaMoia was close to Boldt’s family, especially the kids. A long silence overcame them as Boldt negotiated several severe turns. LaMoia, one of the best drivers on the force, said, “I should have been wheel man.”

The road climbed out of the developments and into thick woods, winding through sharp turns. Cabins had been tucked up into the hill; many went unseen, marked only by numbered mailboxes. The air smelled thickly of pine sap. The bows of the towering firs hung heavy with age, like a ballerina’s upturned arms, her fingers drooping.

Boldt slowed and negotiated the turns carefully. The street numbers indicated they were close.

“We work these people as a team. Who knows if they’re connected or not.”

LaMoia sat up. “Providing the Weinsteins haven’t killed them.”

“Maybe no one’s here. Maybe they are the Pied Piper. Maybe they know nothing about it.”

“I’m hip,” LaMoia said.

“If we need to role-play,” Boldt said, “I’m sweet, you’re sour.”

“How else could we play it?”

Boldt passed the mailbox, backed up and pulled the car into the driveway.

The sign out front read Tiny Tots-Home Schooling. Hanging from this shingle was another smaller one: Spitting Image Designs. A cottage industry, literally. It was a small log house tucked up into and surrounded by tall evergreens. No lawn to speak of, just forest floor. A walkway of chainsawed slices of tree trunks led from the drive to the front door, past a six-year-old Chevy four-wheel-drive with body rust behind the rear wheels. Everything in these woods-living and inanimate-was in a constant state of rot.

A woman answered the door with a welcoming smile. Nearly six feet tall and sporting an imposing nose, she reminded Boldt of a high school phys. ed. teacher. She wore a faded blue sweatshirt and gray sweatpants, suede Birkenstocks with yellow socks. Her hair was pulled back into a black fuzzy band. “Hi,” she said, studying them as a pair. “If you’ve come about enrollment, we’re all filled up. But I can put you on the waiting-”

“Us?” LaMoia gasped, believing she was mistaking them as a married gay couple.

Displaying the badge, he said, “Sergeant John LaMoia, Lieutenant Lou Boldt.” He put the badge away quickly before she identified them as Seattle. “We’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind?”