Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

“You have a real poetry about you,” Boldt sniped. He studied the man’s use of gas and brake, marveling the car could ride so smoothly. LaMoia was the same with women: It came naturally to him. Boldt studied the Spitting Image invoices. The backseat contained a cardboard filing box going back two years. Stonebeck had cooperated. Boldt thumbed his way through December a year earlier, starting at the beginning as a cop always did, looking for San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland-looking for a paper trail. Shotz and Weinstein had both been found.

“He needs clients too. Maybe word of mouth. Maybe he simply runs credit checks on names he finds on adoption waiting lists, IDs the high rollers and makes a phone solicitation: You pay, you play. Must be plenty of those types waiting out there. Some of those lists run five, six, seven years deep, and then your name comes up and you get offered a five-month-old with learning disabilities. Fuckin’ A, I’d buy from this guy.”

“You probably would,” Boldt said, but it stung his former detective.

“I’m just talking hypothetically,” LaMoia complained. “I’m brainstorming here.”

Boldt said, “He gets the bright idea to hack an Internet site devoted to children’s clothing-”

“He stumbles onto Spitting Image. It’s perfect for him. Some of the orders, like Daniel Weinstein’s, include digitized photos, and suddenly he knows that he’s getting a white kid with the right looks. What a sicko.”

“He’s got a shipping name and address, almost always the residence. If he’s a good hacker, or if he has access to credit histories, he can lift credit card records-”

“Which is how he knew the Shotzes would be on that train, that Trish Weinstein would be at the supermarket-”

The pieces clicked into place for Boldt: isolating his targets; establishing a schedule or routine to time his hits. His fatigue lifted like a fog burning off. “So he has computer skills,” he said.

“They teach computers in the Big House, Sarge. Could be one of the family.”

“If we had all the invoices, I’d feel a little better,” Boldt said. “The fact that she remembered a couple of shipments to Seattle doesn’t leave me with the best feeling.”

LaMoia said, “It’s her E-mail orders we want.”

“We’ll get them,” Boldt reminded. “She’s forwarding them.”

“Thank God they were backed up.”

Boldt checked the map. “Next exit. Then east.”

“You’re sure they’re there?”

“Trish Weinstein said he called. She got the name of the motel out of him and then told him to get his butt home before he ended up in jail. She said he sounded pretty convinced.”

LaMoia said, “So now we help convince the cousins Weinstein to turn the show around.”

“And maybe some day we thank them,” Boldt replied.

“How’s that?”

“If Weinstein and cousin Daniel hadn’t headed down here to pay a call on Ms. Stonebeck, would we have jumped on that plane?”

“Point taken.”

“We tough them up,” Boldt advised. “We put the fear of God into them if they get within ten miles of Ms. Stonebeck.”

“I love this job,” LaMoia said, slouching down behind the wheel and letting out a long sigh, “but this rental is a piece of shit.”

Boldt pored over the Spitting Images documents, the time pressures nearly too much to bear. Rhonda Shotz, Hayes Weinstein, his own Sarah … Stonebeck had underestimated her sales volume by a factor of two or three, but even so, five or ten detectives working in concert could have completed the work in a matter of hours. For Sarah, Boldt handled it alone, cross-checking names and dates against the Pied Piper victims. Slowly he built convincing, and finally irrefutable, evidence that the custom silk-screener linked at least four of the Pied Piper’s victims. Such information could set a task force on fire and provide the good, solid leads that led to real suspects.

Boldt kept it all to himself.

The stakes were high enough. Added to them was the possibility that within these documents or Stonebeck’s E-mailed orders-which she had promised to deliver to Boldt-existed the name and address of the Pied Piper’s next Seattle victim. For Boldt to hoard such information not only was a crime but went against everything in his nature. To share this would be to advance the investigation, prohibited in the ransom. But his commitment to proceed with his own investigation forbade expansion. He didn’t know how long he could keep LaMoia at bay, but he believed he could stall longer than the forty-eight-hour grace period using Intelligence’s Need to Know exclusion as his excuse. As a last resort he could share the secret of Sarah’s abduction and pray that LaMoia’s loyalty would hold.

Boldt’s trying to balance these two forces, Sarah’s well-being versus the abduction of another innocent child, failed with each internal argument. “You picked the wrong man,” he mumbled nearly incoherently at his desk. “You picked the wrong cop.”

On some of the Spitting Image invoices the handwriting barely rose above a scrawl, making Boldt’s task even more difficult. Interestingly, the numbers read fine.

Name by name, date by date, month by month, Boldt slogged through the paperwork. If he could find another Seattle customer, he might have a way to locate and follow the Pied Piper back to his daughter. Twice he fell asleep and had to start farther back in the pile, finding an invoice he clearly recognized. In between pages, he glanced furtively at the wall clock, feeling the minute hand like blows to his chest. You’re risking another child, the voice inside him reminded. He thumbed faster and fell asleep a third time.

John LaMoia wondered what kind of importance Intelligence could assume over the needs of the task force. How could Boldt care about busting someone or protecting sources when the lives of children were at stake? Or was Intelligence, a unit that thrived on secrecy, directly involved in the Pied Piper investigation without the knowledge of the task force? The only reason LaMoia kept his promise to Boldt was that he trusted the man in ways he trusted no other.

His decision came more easily due to the fact that he was overwhelmed with paperwork of his own. On Saturday night, he worked at his cubicle reviewing property damage reports he had sought for the better part of a week. He hoped Hill might show up and offer a night together; he caught himself glancing toward the door each time it was opened. But Sheila Hill never showed. He worked alone.

Even in the greatest of emergencies, the incompetence of SPD’s bureaucracy lived up to its stereotype. People could move quickly, meeting to meeting, floor to floor; paperwork never did. It lumbered under the control of a civilian labor force, many of whom worked for minimum wage and to whom the word urgent was seen so often that it blended into any request form. The joke around SPD was that if you needed a vacation, if you wanted to slow an investigation down to a crawl, place a request for an archived file.

Ironically, LaMoia was working off of a suggestion made by Boldt, the theory being that the chips of automobile glass might be the product of vandalism or theft-car windows shattered for kicks by teens, or for profit by petty thieves looking for car stereos-that the Pied Piper may have repeatedly walked through a field of such glass and, by the rule of mutual exchange, carried the evidence into his crime scenes. It was vintage Boldt.

Frustrated by the failure of the FBI to deliver a lab report on the glass, LaMoia turned to the time-honored process of reading each and every property damage report filed in the prior six weeks, trusting that for insurance the owners of the vehicles would report any damage to the police-a requirement for insurance reimbursements. He read reports on every kind of damage conceivable, from the bizarre to the mundane-from thousand-dollar leather jackets torn by bar bouncers to a home stereo thrown across an apartment and out a patio window by a jealous lover; random vandalism, including spray painting, rock throwing and minor arson. Any such report involving a vehicle, LaMoia read carefully. If a shattered windshield, or any vehicular glass was listed anywhere in the report, or if it seemed to LaMoia that the only way a dashboard might have been torn apart was to break into the vehicle and therefore smash a car window, he set aside the report.