Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

She couldn’t stand the tension. She blurted out, “Why exactly did you ask me over?”

“It’s Lou,” she said, tears flooding her eyes. But she would not give in to them. This woman who looked so frail had the strength of ten. She reached down and took Daphne’s warm hands in hers, as cold as tile. “I’m trusting in you as I’ve never trusted in anyone. In part because of Lou’s high opinion of you-we don’t really know each other, do we? In part because your profession requires a great deal of confidentiality, and I trust, I assume, that that is a skill one acquires, that that is something once learned can be applied to so many relationships.”

Relationships? Confidentiality? Was she going to bring up the affair? Had Lou told her? She looked down at their hands entwined together. Guilt and fear rose in her chest to a knot of pain-she couldn’t breathe. The damn bra was too tight!

Would she lie outright to this woman if asked?

Liz Boldt squeezed her hands tightly and said, “Something terrible has happened. We desperately need your help.”

The treasure revealed itself like the gold of the pharaohs. On Monday morning, March 30, the lab delivered sixty-seven full-color computer printouts to LaMoia-all photographs made with Anderson’s digital camera, all from a backup disk found hidden in Anderson’s bookshelves. As an added bonus, each was dated and time-stamped. He leafed through a series of a businessman climbing out of his car in a motel parking lot, entering a room, and leaving forty minutes later, followed shortly thereafter by a worn-looking creature bearing the heavy posture of someone defeated. Two of the many subjects depicted were shown engaged, in partial nudity or unmistakable poses, with adolescent members of the same sex. How Anderson had gone about his work was likely to have puzzled some of his clients, but it showed little imagination or creativity to LaMoia. In some cases Anderson had taken the adjacent motel room and bribed a housecleaner into unlocking the communicating door. In one daring effort, the sleuth appeared to have been hiding inside a closet with shuttered doors, implying that he had paid off the prostitute. There had been a time early in his career that LaMoia would have found one or more of such photos suggestive enough to arouse him, but those days were long gone. More than anything, he felt numb to it all, frightened for the missing children, guilt-ridden over his failure to rescue them. So many of humankind elected to lead sordid, twisted, perverted lives that any detective came to expect it rather than be fascinated by it. After a time one forgot that these people were only a fraction of society. Because of their staggering numbers, they seemed more the norm.

There were photos of storefronts, school buses, city parks, topless dancers, a bank teller, an interior of a Starbucks. Seven shots of a woman shopping various department stores. Three of a teenage girl-a daughter? a baby sitter? — giving her boyfriend head in the family hot tub, her face partially underwater, the smooth flawless skin of her bare back cresting the surface of the bubbling water like a breaching whale.

Thrown into the mix near the end of the stack, he finally reached the series that he’d been waiting for: five images from a computer file Anderson had named weinstn.pix.

The first of these, one that easily caught his attention, depicted the now familiar clapboard house that had contained Jeffry McNee’s meth lab. Closer study revealed that one of the vehicles parked in front was a white minivan, its back windows made opaque by either paint or butcher paper. On the driver’s door was an unreadable sign. LaMoia was guessing it advertised an exterminator service. Hard evidence was, on occasion, as good as sex.

The second of the five photos showed a figure walking along the building’s perimeter carrying a spray tank and hose, his head down and hidden by a gray baseball cap and a pair of goggles. He wore coveralls and looked to be about six feet tall. There was no face to pull from the shot. LaMoia silently and reluctantly congratulated him on his choice of disguises. It was no wonder they had never gotten a decent eyewitness description: nothing of him to identify but a pair of bland-colored coveralls and matching cap.

LaMoia placed the third of the images in front of himself like a poker player rolling his cards. This was of a boating marina on a gray day. The depth of field was bad, the image blurred. He wasn’t sure they would ever identify the marina from such a poor picture. The same could be said for the two figures at its center- two, LaMoia noticed. Shot at such a great distance they were little more than stick figures. Anderson had been careful not to get too close. The man wore a colorful sweatshirt, baseball cap pulled low and blue jeans. The woman wore jeans, shades and a hat. Unidentifiable. LaMoia’s initial enthusiasm was tempered by these discoveries. Anderson knew how to follow people-a photographer, he wasn’t. He cursed the man for managing a shot with no identifiable landmarks or signage. Anderson confirmed his standing as a nickel hustler, nothing more.

LaMoia dwelled on this photo for a long time, first working the magnifying glass, then the loupe. The resolution was too poor, the focus too blurred, to give up any secrets.

The penultimate image related to the final of the five shots and contributed to the story that formed the mystery of Anderson’s homicide. The scene was a greenway-a running path. It showed a man, perhaps six feet tall, in running clothes. Again, this man wore a cap on his head and sunglasses, again the shot was taken at too great a distance. The final photo, and the telling one, was nearly identical-shot in the same minute-except that the jogger’s head was turned toward the camera. But Anderson had panicked, this shot was the most blurred of all. The story of Anderson’s death unfolded for LaMoia as clearly as if Anderson had still been alive to tell it.

“So?” LaMoia asked Boldt, standing slightly behind him and looking over his shoulder.

“So?” Boldt fired back. He understood perfectly the significance of Anderson’s photographs: If handled correctly, if traced to the right marina, every possibility existed that SPD might identify a suspect. Boldt had to prevent that, but at the same time he wanted every scrap of information the photos provided. He felt incredibly tempted to share his secret with LaMoia to double his manpower, but he didn’t dare. The ransom note haunted him.

Boldt prided himself on his organization and neatness, but the clutter of his desk and office told a different story, and he wondered how much of this LaMoia picked up on. The room smelled of his fear. Two dozen or more white and blue telephone memo slips littered his desktop in various piles. They represented unreturned calls, or calls in which Boldt had no interest. He was intentionally allowing his Intelligence work to lapse; the unit was in shambles.

These memos were interspersed with hand-scrawled scraps of notes that, if viewed as a complete work, revealed a mind in turmoil, a man, a husband, a father, an investigator saddled with internal conflict. There was an empty bottle of aspirin open by the phone, the lid missing. A mug containing a moldy scum that had once been tea. Several stacks of paperwork carried office dandruff-the visible dust of neglect. If he had caught one of his detectives with a work area in similar disarray he would have chastised the guilty party.

“So the pictures tell a story,” LaMoia said. “The Pied Piper clearly made Anderson-in that last shot it’s so obvious. The thing is dated March 15, 4:22 P.M., which fits with the angle of light. Two days later Anderson does the swan dive in the tub.”