Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

Griswold said, “I told you we should’a listened to the Sonics game. At least we would’a known when it was getting out. Who needs this shit?”

“She does,” Boldt answered. “She knows exactly what she’s doing.”

Boldt took off on foot through the drizzle, slamming the car door while telling Griswold to park somewhere within a few blocks and pointing to a corner where he wanted Griswold to wait for him.

Boldt now believed that the Crowleys had timed Lisa’s flight for an arrival to coincide with the end of the basketball game and the guaranteed mass confusion that always resulted around the Seattle Center. Slip a car into any one of dozens of emptying parking garages, and it would not be spotted for hours, perhaps days. Grab a bus, or go on foot with the thousands of people crowding the sidewalks; it was a place and time of night to get lost.

Crowley had been less than a hundred yards in front of the Country Squire when it had entered the tunnel. Boldt knew that if he had any chance of locating her, it was now-immediately-while she, like them, was still crushed and hemmed in by the traffic. With traffic barely moving, she couldn’t have made it far-on one of three or four streets, or inside one of the two parking garages that were in plain sight.

The rain fell as a cold mist, a gray swirling curtain that seemed to go unnoticed by all but a few of the hundreds of pedestrians.

Boldt cut across the moving traffic, horns firing off at him in volleys of protest. He wished like hell that they had never plugged up that drilled taillight; it would have stuck out like a searchlight. He looked left, right: endless lines of cars. Every possible direction. But with eastbound traffic the worst-the traffic moving toward I-5-and with westbound traffic aimed directly at the Seattle Center, into the lion’s mouth, Boldt chose straight ahead.

The sidewalks were more packed with pedestrians than the streets with cars. He threaded his way through and around groups, couples, families, all gabbing about the game and a great shot at the buzzer that had won it for the Sonics. The mood of the crowd was festive, even carnival-like. Although he was polite at first, Boldt’s patience wore thin quickly, and he began to bump and claw his way through the melee, his efforts unappreciated. He craned over shoulders, stole his way to the curb, hoping for sight of the Taurus. Whereas the teeming horde walked, Boldt ran, faster and faster, driven at first by curiosity and finally out of desperation; he would not see Sarah’s chances swallowed by a crowd, would not write her off. He charged through the elbows, the bumps and the complaints, a man driven by love and a fear of the future. He had spent over twenty years in the company of victims-he knew their fate. He would not become one.

At the intersection, he looked right, straight, left, and then started the process again; right, straight ahead, left, searching shapes and colors. The cars all looked the same, he realized. In shape and styling, so little difference existed. LaMoia, a gearhead, might have spotted the Taurus, might have singled it out from the Lexus, the Toyota, the Nissan, but to Boldt they blended homogeneously into a moving parking lot of identical vehicles. The light changed and, driven at the front of the pack, Boldt found himself caught in the current of pedestrians, carried across the street like a pile of snow in front of a plow.

He would later think that prayers are often answered in strange ways. There is no voice from heaven, no finger pointing the way, only unexplained coincidences that, coincidentally, happen to follow moments of prayer. Pushed across the street by the throng, Boldt stepped up onto the curb and saw the Taurus in traffic, five cars away. He could even make out a small black blob, Raymond’s patch of chewing gum on the taillight. Crowley.

Behind him and to his left he heard a car door open and shut. A group of teenagers formed a knot in the sidewalk in front of him.

He took avoidance maneuvers and ran smack into another man, like hitting a brick wall. He apologized, but the brick wall remained firmly in his way. He stepped back to untangle himself and looked up into the eyes-they were dead eyes-of Special Agent in Charge Gary Flemming.

They wrestled briefly, locking forearms with matched grips, Flemming the larger, more powerful man. The crowds flowed around them, barely paying them any mind.

“Fight!” a kid shouted.

“Forget about it,” Boldt said, struggling, glancing around furiously through the mist for Flemming’s backup.

“It’s my investigation now,” Flemming announced, shaking him like an angry parent. “It’s my task force, not Hill’s. I took over in Boise.”

“It’s irrelevant,” Boldt conceded. He wondered about what Hale had told him. If true, he was looking into the eyes of the Pied Piper’s insider, his accomplice, a traitor.

Hundreds of people streamed past, most oblivious to the weather. The Taurus inched forward in gridlocked traffic, the rain in the headlights swirling like oil in water.

“You’re within my jurisdiction,” Boldt reminded. “This is my city.” It seemed possible that Flemming might have gained control of the task force, and if so the investigation was indeed his, its outcome his to bend, break or detour. But Boldt remained proud of Seattle and his own place within it.

“You’ll follow orders, Lieutenant. You’ve run investigations. You know the importance of-”

Boldt managed to yank his right arm free, reached in for his ID wallet and pressed it into Flemming’s huge open hand. “Wrong.”

Flemming glanced down at the ID wallet. “Nice try.” He attempted to pass it back.

Boldt threw his arms in the air and said, “No harm, no foul. The investigation is all yours.” He inched his way to Flemming’s left and into an area of clear sidewalk that had formed around them like an eddy behind a rock in a stream. He turned his back on the man and took a tentative step forward.

Flemming roared over the noise of the passing crowd, “She celebrated her birthday in captivity.”

The words froze Boldt. He turned, and said, “Not yet she hasn’t.”

“Stephanie,” Flemming told him, eyes shifting nervously among the passers-by. “I’m talking about my daughter.”

“You aren’t married,” Boldt said. “Have never been married,” he corrected. Drawn to the Taurus, he couldn’t keep his eyes off it. Flemming was not one to look away from. Following Sarah’s abduction Boldt had looked into the private lives of the various members of the FBI team; only Hale was married and a father, only Hale had made sense as a candidate for the Pied Piper’s insider. Everything was turned around. He backed off, taking another step toward the Taurus, which had crept even further down the street. He wasn’t going to lose that car. Again, he threw his hands in the air and said, “You’ve got to shoot me, Flemming, you want to stop me.”

That comment won him some extra room from the pedestrians.

“Gun!” a shrill voice called out. The pace of the crowd picked up, but it did not scatter as Boldt expected.

Flemming’s hand was indeed stuck inside his sport coat.

Flemming explained loudly, “She’s white, Boldt-my woman. We never married, no. We thought it a bad idea for both of us. Our daughter was two-and-a-half when this monster took her.” He said clearly, “I know about Sarah. That is, I suspected. I didn’t exactly know until right now.”

Boldt’s knees felt weak. He sagged. Sarah … Flemming knew. “Not possible,” he mumbled to himself, the Taurus slipping away. The ransom demands were violated. He felt comfortable with Flemming as a traitor; Flemming the victim was all too unreal for him. Six months of abduction? Impossible to survive such a thing. Flemming? he wondered. Had Hale lied to protect his own interests? Or was this a smoke screen to allow Crowley to escape?