Pied Piper

CHAPTER 75

Lou Boldt’s hopes for finding Sarah disappeared with Lisa Crowley. Rather than storm into the women’s bathroom, which was his temptation, he casually lifted his right hand as if to scratch his head and spoke into the mic clipped there. “All units in the vicinity of the car wash, adopt one-on-one surveillance.”

Boldt, knowing that he had been made by the FBI, could not participate in the one-on-one surveillance for fear of giving Crowley away. Fulfilling his ruse, he charged off after Teibold, who was just reaching the far end of the concourse.

Every available SPD operative, including Blakely, was to follow one of the women leaving the bathroom. Command assigned four agents from Charlie-the baggage claim and car rental team-to head toward the concourse and join the one-on-one.

Boldt stayed with Teibold, radio traffic blurring in his ear, the next few minutes crucial. He knew that Flemming could not overlook the commotion at the bathroom, a fire there was certain to raise the man’s suspicions. Forced to divide his efforts, he would reconsider Teibold as a suspect; she had gone nowhere near that bathroom. Flemming would, out of necessity, move to arrest their prime suspect: Teibold. Before that happened, Boldt and his team needed to find Crowley, because once Flemming discovered he had arrested an SPD operative, all hell would break loose.

Teibold passed the security checkpoint on her way to baggage claim, both agents from the newsstand not far behind, Boldt, twenty yards back.

Teibold slowed as she approached the escalators leading down to baggage claim, making a point of taking note of an empty bank of pay phones to her right. Boldt stepped up to a Marie Callender’s cookie counter, keeping her in sight as Flemming would expect of him.

His earpiece sang with radio traffic, as a young Asian girl with bangs requested his order.

“Chocolate chip,” Boldt told the girl. He pulled out two dollars and set them on the counter. Teibold picked up the pay phone’s receiver, searched her purse for a quarter and dropped it into the slot. As she did this, she glanced over her shoulder cautiously and spotted the agent from the newsstand. Her face twitched as she hung up the phone and quickly made for the escalator. At the last possible second, she joined a family moving toward the elevator.

Boldt left the cookie and the money on the counter. The FBI agent took the stairs between the escalators. Boldt increased his stride as a series of radio transmissions confirmed that Crowley had once again been spotted.

BRAVO 7: “We have the truck in sight. Moving east. Bravo Five and I are in pursuit.”

COMMAND: “State location, Seven.”

BRAVO 7: “Approaching traffic light.” The security checkpoint.

COMMAND: “Charlie Three, do you have the truck in sight?”

CHARLIE 3: “The purple truck?”

BRAVO 7: “Affirmative.”

CHARLIE 3: “Roger that.”

CHARLIE 6: “We have a potential pileup at the freight dock. Advise.”

The message was that the FBI agents were rushing Teibold’s elevator. Behind everyone, Crowley made her way slowly toward baggage claim. It was the worst of all possible scenarios for Boldt: By busting Teibold, the FBI would make Crowley aware of their presence.

At the bottom of the escalator Boldt turned around to see a woman who wore a long purple dress. The purple truck: Crowley. Her hair now a curly brunette, she carried a gray tote bag, not the blue Boldt expected. She looked nothing like the short-haired blonde woman of a few minutes earlier.

Boldt could not afford to be seen; to Crowley he was Brad Brehmer. Only a stubborn refusal to allow his daughter’s fate being put in the hands of others had put him on the concourse in the first place. He hurried to a white courtesy phone and turned to face the wall, his right hand coming up toward his lips.

BOLDT: “Toyota, hold your position. Do not move! Do you copy?”

A beige cinder block wall separated the elevator from the automatic doors at baggage claim. Boldt stood only feet from the group of FBI agents intent on busting Teibold.

A purple blur passed by. Boldt kept his face turned. Crowley stopped, no more than ten feet from him. The phone went damp in his hand, as he willed her to move on. In his ear, SPD tracked her movements, Command passing her from one agent to another. A commotion erupted on the far side of the cinder block wall. Boldt could not-would not-look back at Crowley. As it turned out, he didn’t have to. The purple dress entered the ascending escalator, heading back up to ticketing. Again, Boldt adjusted himself, turning right. The commotion grew louder, though the agents did an impressive job of keeping Teibold’s detention from becoming an all-out scene.

Sea-Tac used a sky bridge to reach rentals and parking. Crowley had first headed down to baggage claim in error, before reversing herself.

Boldt waited for her to clear the top of the escalator and then jumped on for the ride, only seconds behind her.

Crowley followed signs to the sky bridge. Boldt followed her, Sarah’s life relying on his every footstep.

One story below, outside the elevator, FBI agents were discovering that for the last ten minutes they had been following an SPD undercover cop. Flemming would panic, his attention certain to fall onto Boldt. Boldt walked quickly, despite the fact that it drew him closer to Crowley. He needed to clear the terminal’s security cameras.

They crossed the sky bridge, he and his daughter’s kidnapper, fleeing the FBI, she in disguise, he with his head down, mixing in with dozens of other impatient travelers.

He glanced out of the sky bridge windows, down to the taxi stand, where FBI agents in blue suits hurried about, checking taxis, jumping onto various buses-bees in a disturbed hive. Their blatant disregard for covert techniques informed Boldt that Flemming had indeed panicked. Two dozen FBI operatives were scrambling to salvage their operation. Boldt realized that he was his own worst enemy; he had to break away from Crowley to avoid alerting Flemming. And yet he had to stay with her.

At the end of the sky bridge, he stopped and fished the cell phone from his pocket, using it as a prop. Crowley continued straight ahead into the parking area, not downstairs to rentals, just as Boldt had expected.

It was Gaynes who had put him onto this over the phone; she had followed the Taurus from the Park and Ride to Sea-Tac, where the driver, a male, had parked it on the sky bridge level and then lost her. Boldt took the male to be Roger Crowley, the car having been left for his wife. Boldt had ordered Gaynes to drill the Taurus’s taillight.

Drilling taillights was something Boldt had learned from an ATF agent named Reisnick twelve years earlier. Vehicular surveillance, even with a team of three or four tails, had less than a thirty percent success rate, contrary to its representation in film and on television. Improved technology, namely Global Positioning, had permanently changed things, but that required the surveillance team to place a transmitter on the suspect vehicle-SPD’s planned course of action. In the right hands, a drilled taillight was nearly as good as GPS. The tiny hole in the taillight emitted an unexpectedly brilliant spike of white light, laserlike in its quality, that could be seen clearly at a distance of several blocks, or from a helicopter. It singled out a vehicle from all others. Though less effective, the technique even worked in daylight hours as the brakes were applied; at nighttime it was foolproof.

Boldt’s challenge was to double-cross SPD’s attempts to follow Lisa Crowley and to get the suspect safely out of the airport, while still keeping her under surveillance himself.

To accomplish this, Gaynes had drilled the taillight. He and LaMoia had assembled a motley crew that included a variety of snitches hungry for a hundred-dollar hit and waiting for orders.

The question remained: Would it work?