Boldt - 05 - Pied Piper, page 25
“Do you have a warrant?” she said. “That’s what I’m supposed to ask, isn’t it?”
“No warrant,” Boldt answered, returning to the conversation. “We had hoped to keep this as informal as possible.”
“But you want to rifle my invoices? That’s cute.”
LaMoia glanced at Boldt, who nodded his consent. He said, “In your estimation how secure is your Web page?”
“Meaning?”
“What precautions have you taken to secure your Web page?”
“This is a cottage industry, fellows. I keep telling you—it’s not Land’s End. We post the same warning everyone else does—you play at your own risk. We encourage customers to call us direct and place the order that way. You know what it costs me to file with one of these security providers? Forget it. Arm and a leg. Maybe down the road.”
“To call you is a toll call or an 800 number?”
“Do I look like I’d have an 800 number? I’m out of my basement. I do a couple dozen pieces a week.”
“So they place the orders through the Internet to save the toll charges.”
“The orders come to me as E-mail. E-mail is pretty secure, right?”
“We’re interested in attempting to identify some of your customers,” LaMoia explained.
“No kidding?” she asked sarcastically. The water boiled. She poured the beverages and delivered them. “What I want to know is why?”
“We just want to check a couple of names,” Boldt said as respectfully as possible.
“Yeah, but how’s it connect to these kidnappers?”
“That’s police business,” LaMoia said harshly.
“I kinda figured that,” the woman fired back, “or you wouldn’t be here.”
“If you wouldn’t mind?” Boldt asked. “Time is our biggest enemy.”
She put down her tea and stood. “You can see whatever you like.” She asked cautiously, “Am I in any kind of trouble here?”
LaMoia grinned that LaMoia grin that showed his teeth and bent his mustache into a pair of wings. “Not yet,” he said, joining her.
“You single?”
To Boldt, LaMoia said, “Wait here, Lieutenant.”
As their voices descended the stairs, Boldt heard her say, “Maybe I like you after all, Mr. Smooth. Which one are you?”
“LaMoia.”
“Italian?”
“Every inch.”
“Don’t go getting personal on me.”
Boldt listened in, thinking only LaMoia got away with such things. One of these days his libido would get him in trouble. Sooner than later. After twenty minutes he emerged, that same irritating self-confident smile pasted under his mustache. In his right hand he carried a number of invoices. “Bingo!” he said, waving the paperwork.
“So the doer, soon to become the Pied Piper, decides he wants to establish a little under-the-table adoption business.” LaMoia drove the curves effortlessly and at twice the speed, like water running through a pipe. “He needs product: white babies, good solid stock.”
“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.”
CHAPTER
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.
One by one these separated reports stacked up. He had been reviewing documents for over three hours when the first hint emerged. Establishing a pattern—any pattern—was reason for excitement.
Human behavior could be broken down into a series of learned patterns. In the shower, a person soaped his or her body parts in the same order, day after day. A man shaved in the same sequence. The cop’s job was to identify as many of these patterns as possible in his suspect’s behavior or his crimes. Patterns proved predictable. Predictability meant arrests.
At first there was nothing to tie one broken car window to another—a truck, a car, a minivan; the parking lot of a mall, a Sonics game, a supermarket. But when the fourth property damage report indicating window damage cited a northbound I-5 Park and Ride, the similarity jumped out at LaMoia. Two of the four dates were the same, but two others were not, meaning the Park and Ride had been hit a minimum of three times on different dates, which in turn meant that an individual or gang had targeted the Park and Ride as a good place to pick up car stereos. The Pied Piper might have picked up the broken glass anywhere—from his own garage, to an auto shop, to any of the locations listed on the reports he was collecting into a stack—but police work meant playing percentages, and the area of highest percentage was this Park and Ride. LaMoia saw one clear way to narrow the field. He picked up the phone and called Bernie Lofgrin at home despite the late hour.
LaMoia spent five minutes describing his discoveries to Lofgrin, the head of SPD’s Scientific Identification Division. Lofgrin, a civilian, did not work weekends unless on call and attending a crime scene, neither of which was the case, but he took to LaMoia’s discoveries like a bloodhound on a scent. The detective pointed out the increasing importance of determining the make and model of the vehicle or vehicles from which the chips had come. Whatever pressure Lofgrin could apply to the FBI’s Washington, D.C., forensics lab would be appreciated.
At the same time, LaMoia elected to place the Park and Ride under twenty-four-hour surveillance, hoping to use a combination of detectives under the direction of Bobbie Gaynes. In a political nod to Sheila Hill and the politics of the task force, he took his recommendations to Patrick Mulwright, whose Special Operations unit was the department’s premiere surveillance squad. Mulwright, who had undergone a suspension ten months earlier for boozing on the job, was caught drunk as a sailor by LaMoia’s midnight call. After a rambling attempt to sound coherent, the lieutenant assigned the surveillance back to LaMoia, mistakenly assuming LaMoia was currently on call. LaMoia awakened Gaynes and told her to organize a rotation. Reminding him that with over a dozen vacant houses under surveillance and Hill squawking about overtime pay, the manpower was not there, she suggested he rethink the assignment. “So work the uni’s,” LaMoia told her. Uniformed patrol officers would, on occasion, work plainclothes detail gratis for the chance to be noticed and recommended for advancement.
“Do it yourself if you have to, just get that Park and Ride covered.”
CHAPTER
Boldt sensed someone behind him, spun in his chair in time to see a woman at his office door, emaciated and pale. His wife.
Her release had been postponed twenty-four hours because of a scheduling conflict. He did not expect her, and so for a moment simply stared.
“Forgive me,” she said calmly. She stepped inside and closed the door.
Forgive you? he thought, a bubble of painful guilt overwhelming him. No words came out. He stood and approached her.
“I’ve acted foolishly,” she said, “unchristian in every way, and I—”
Boldt hugged her unfamiliar body, once soft but now sharp with bone. “No. You have every right—”
“Nonsense. I was horrible to you. I apologize. Please forgive me.”
They spoke, simultaneously, their apologies blurred.
“We’ll get her back,” the wife said.
“We’ll get her back,” the husband echoed.
“The two of us.”
“I never thought—”
“Tell me,” she said, gently breaking the embrace and holding him at a distance. “Tell me everything. Time is against us, isn’t it? I know it is. And yet I also know that God will not allow this. God will see her safely returned. But not without you, love. You’re the best cop there is.”
Words he had lived to hear spoken; words she had never said, instead voicing resentment, anger and frustration at the demands and risks of his job. Words he would have gladly given back in a heartbeat for Sarah’s safe return.
Sensing his every emotion, she said, “We aren’t alone in this.”
His enormous emptiness waned. A state of mind, he realized, not reality, for what else could explain it passing so quickly and completely? With Liz in the picture, everything changed.
“Together,” he said, his lips gracing her ear, her cheek hot against his neck.
His wife gave in to her tears like a tree uprooted by the wind, begrudgingly and with much protest. “Together,” she agreed. “Bring her home.” She wept openly.
For a moment Boldt thought she meant him, but then she whispered so closely that he felt it clear through to his soul, “Please God, bring her home.”
“Together,” Boldt repeated, a single word as healing as any he had known.
CHAPTER
Boldt awakened Liz at four in the morning from a deep sleep. She came awake, arms flailing, from either the clutches of a nightmare or reaching out for a husband who had not slept by her side for far too long.
There had been no lovemaking between them—Liz needed more strength—but the loving had been intense and more intimate than many other nights shared physically. Boldt had found a brief piece of the sleep that for days had eluded him.
“Something you said,” he told her.
“Love? What is it,” she said, using her private name for him.
“You said we aren’t alone—”
“I meant that God—”
“Yes, I know. But it’s more than that, you see? I think I know now why we have never received the Portland file. The same for San Francisco. What if it wasn’t the Bureau dragging its feet, but the police departments themselves, someone in our exact situation?”
“Wouldn’t you know that by now?”
“Would I? Does anyone know about us? About Sarah?” He switched on the room light and she flinched. He said, “I let myself believe that. But why should anyone know? Hill’s wrong about a reporter working an insider. It’s not one, but a string of insiders, a string of cops, city to city, in the same situation as we are.”
“And what if it is?” she questioned, confused and even frightened by his excitement.
“Then there’s evidence that has been withheld. Victims we don’t know about, some of whom may have information they’ve never disclosed.”
