Ridley Pearson: Pied Piper

She walked away from the shouting as if unable to hear it, sensuous and fluid, right toward LaMoia.

“Sergeant.” She looked LaMoia up and down.

“Captain.” He locked eyes with her.

“Lou,” she addressed Boldt, while continuing to look at LaMoia.

“I asked the lieutenant to join me, Captain.”

“We paged you,” Hill reminded Boldt, as if it had been her idea, not LaMoia’s, to include Boldt. Ever the politician.

“I was on private time,” he explained. One of the luxuries of Intelligence was its lack of being on-call. “John chased me down.”

“I see,” she said, weighing Boldt’s presence. As long as Boldt was around, LaMoia would listen to him, regardless of assignments, and Hill wanted full control. “You heard me just now,” she said. “How much of what I just told that horde is bullshit?”

LaMoia knew that Boldt would leave it to him to answer. “The Bureau withheld a couple signatures. From all of us,” he added.

She glanced at Boldt-Intelligence was expected to know everything about anything, even FBI investigations. “We can assume they’ve withheld some of those crime scene reports to protect the Need to Know. Not all of them,” he cautioned, “but some of them.” He reminded, “We would have done the same.”

“If the FBI had asked?” she countered. “No, we wouldn’t have. It’s a one-way street, Lieutenant. We both know that.” She pursed her lips. LaMoia considered them full and luscious lips-kissable lips surprisingly void of any age lines.

“AFIDs,” LaMoia said. “An air TASER, not a stun stick.” He carried his own stun stick under the Camaro’s front seat. “And a penny flute left behind in the crib.”

“He’s leaving a calling card?” she exclaimed. “He’s proud of these kidnappings? What kind of creature are we dealing with?”

“Matthews can help there,” Boldt contributed.

“One of those dime-store flutes,” LaMoia said.

Perplexed, Hill asked incredulously, “He wants us to connect these kidnappings? What the hell is that about?” She nodded, thinking to herself, her expression grim. “Shit,” she mumbled.

LaMoia explained, “We’ll get the parents’ permission to trap-and-trace the phone. Get Tech Services over here to put a tape recorder on the line. Until Flemming confirms the signatures we’ll still hope it’s not him and that there might be a ransom call.” The Pied Piper had yet to request a ransom. The suspicions ranged from a child molester to an illegal adoption ring.

Glancing at her watch, Hill said, “How long has he had?”

“Two-hour lead,” LaMoia answered.

“That’s an eternity.” Her ice blue eyes flickered with worry.

LaMoia reminded, “Dispatch has already notified the airlines, rail and bus carriers. Canadian Immigration. Sheriff’s Department. The ferries-”

“Two hours? Shit.” She filled her chest with a deep breath and exhaled slowly, shaking her head. “Shit.” She glanced around as if the press might be overhearing them. She ordered LaMoia, “Get in that house and find me a picture I can use. If we don’t fax that image around, we haven’t got a chance of saving this baby.”

LaMoia returned inside and searched. In the living room he found a stack of photos showing a tiny baby in the arms and on the breast of her mother. Any of three close-ups in the pile would fax well enough: a tiny glowing face with bulging cheeks and clear blue eyes. He suddenly felt unbearably cold.

As he rejoined Boldt and Hill, SID’s black panel truck pulled up into the space cleared for them. Hill took the packet of photos from LaMoia and leafed through them. She said, “God, I hate this job sometimes.”

As a group, the three caught up to Bernie Lofgrin heading toward them. The Scientific Identification Division’s director, a small man with a beer belly, wore thick glasses that grossly enlarged his eyes. He walked quickly with stiff legs, carrying a large red toolbox at his side that weighed him down and tilted him to his right. As a group they spun around and matched pace with him.

“We need it quick but we need it right, Bernie,” she told him.

“This time of night and you hit me with cliches? Tell me something new, Captain,” Lofgrin quipped. “I was in the middle of dinner.”

“I stepped on this,” LaMoia interrupted, reaching out to hand Lofgrin the evidence bag. “May be nothing.”

Hill snatched it up for herself, held it up closely to her eyes and passed it on to Lofgrin. “I didn’t hear about this,” she complained.

Lofgrin stopped, as did LaMoia, Boldt and Hill. His team of technicians raced past the four of them.

“AFIDs where the body fell,” Boldt added, “and a calling card in the-”

The cry of tire squelches cut him off as a Town Car and a black van blocked the narrow residential street. Boldt had seen the FBI’s evidence van enough times to recognize it. The Town Car produced two men and a woman.

“Get your people to work, Bernie,” Hill ordered. “I’ve got this,” she announced, peeling away and cutting to intercept the Feds.

As LaMoia followed Hill with his eyes he saw beyond her to a set of six balloons waving in the wind up the street.

Lofgrin asked, “You coming, John?”

“Flemming, Hale and Kalidja,” Boldt told his former detective. At Hill’s request, Boldt had done background checks on all three. “This is the wrong place, the wrong situation for me,” he said. “Hill is going to squirrel the moment. I need to be able to work with these people. We’ll talk later, John.”

“Sure,” LaMoia confirmed, still intrigued with what he saw across the street. “Later,” he called out to Lofgrin, who hurried on.

Boldt headed to his car. He stopped and shook hands with the FBI agents on his way.

LaMoia followed, but steered clear of Hill and the FBI agents. As he approached the officers responsible for crowd control, they all noticed him; another of those effects of being a sergeant that bothered him. As a detective, the uniforms had rarely noticed. Two of the officers, anticipating him, lifted the yellow police tape and cleared a hole in the gawkers-neighbors and police-scanner junkies who had nothing better to do-and helped him through. LaMoia walked straight to those balloons, and their ribbons stretched tight. The small metal realtor sign flapped lightly in the breeze: Represented by Sherry Daech-McCann, Daech, Fenton . The sergeant tugged on the balloons. Tight. Fresh helium. Open House Tonite! it read on a smaller sign. If the open house had been the day before, the balloons would have sagged by now. It meant that the open house had been this same evening.

Out came his notepad.

If the realtor had kept track of her visitors, then the police had possible witnesses coming and going throughout the evening. On occasion potential buyers even took photos. LaMoia finished writing this down, closed his eyes and whispered, “Please.”

Behind him, Hill and the FBI agents were marching in lockstep toward the Shotz house.

LaMoia toed the cracks in the sidewalk in front of the Wasserman home, tracing them like veins beneath the skin. He felt in no particular hurry to get inside.

A steady cool breeze blew east out of the Olympics and up into the heart of the city.

Daphne Matthews arrived in her red Honda. She deftly parallel parked behind LaMoia’s Camaro. As staff psychologist, Matthews was an anomaly within the department. She operated on a cerebral plane, erudite, always choosing her words carefully. LaMoia guessed that her dark, brooding beauty had forced her as a young woman to erect a wall that as an adult she now found difficult to dismantle; he found her remote. Whatever the case, her controlled distance and unavailability attracted him just as it did so many others. Her close friendship with Boldt was a matter of departmental history: The two had collaborated successfully on several major investigations. Other rumors surrounded them as well, but LaMoia discounted these.