Pied Piper

CHAPTER 80

The contents of the envelope left for him by Theresa Russo lay scattered across the front seat of Flemming’s Town Car along with a map of Skagit County. Liz had passed them through the passenger’s window with a simple kiss to Boldt’s cheek, a suspicious glance at the driver and a look of hatred aimed at Lisa Crowley, handcuffed in the backseat. They drove with the windows partially down, delivering a wet, heavy air. Little more remained to be said. They had decided on a course of action. They intended to see it through, regardless of the outcome.

Millie Wiggins’ address in Haller, near Bitter Lake, proved difficult to find. After several incorrect guesses on Boldt’s part, the Town Car drove into the paved driveway in the Pinnacle Point subdivision. Flemming locked the parking brake and kept the car running. A moment later the front curtains parted, an expectant face peered out into the dark and the front door opened.

The detour, while not costly in time, offered the unlikely partners substantial long-term risks that, if taken to their limit, included imprisonment. But the cop in Boldt had overruled the father for the first time in weeks, and he accepted that as progress.

In blue jeans and a green flannel shirt, Millie Wiggins looked nothing like she did while running her day care preschool. She hurried down the brick walkway carrying an umbrella open over her head and called hello from a distance. Boldt signaled her around to his side of the car.

As she stepped up to Boldt’s window, she bent over and studied Flemming. Boldt said calmly, “Just a yes or no is all we need. You must be definite. There must be no doubt whatsoever. Even a hint of doubt and I’d rather you say no.” He hesitated. They needed probable cause to ever hope for criminal charges. Without the chance of criminal charges, Boldt feared it would, quite possibly, come down to killing this woman. Strangely, he felt no remorse at the idea. He told Wiggins, “You know you don’t need to do this. No one is forcing you to do this.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry, but we can’t open the back door. You’ll have to look from here.”

“That’s fine.”

Flemming switched on the car’s interior light, illuminating the woman in the backseat. Boldt rocked his head to the side, affording her a better view, and Millie Wiggins stared long and hard, unknowingly in the act of determining Boldt’s future. She blinked repeatedly, nervous and under the strain of his requirement to be definite. He appreciated the difficulty of her task, having been through countless lineups himself.

“You’ve taped her mouth shut.”

“She was a little noisy,” Boldt said.

“It isn’t easy without the mouth.”

“Do your best.”

“The hair’s a different color,” Wiggins said, close enough to Boldt that he could smell wine on her breath.

He said nothing, waiting patiently for her to remember the rules. Flemming had yet to speak.

“Yes,” she said strongly, delivering Boldt a jolt to his system. He hadn’t realized how good it could feel, how different for the father than the cop.

“You’re positive?”

“She was in her uniform, of course,” Wiggins said, assuming Boldt’s passenger to be a cop. “But that’s her.” She looked directly into Boldt’s eyes. “That’s the woman who picked up Sarah. That’s her.” She asked, “What has she done?”

Crowley protested from behind the duct tape. She squirmed and writhed and then settled down.

“Do you always tape their mouths?”

“You won’t see that on TV,” Flemming said. He popped off the brake and put the car in reverse. He had not wanted this stop, had agreed to it only in negotiation for Boldt’s sharing the contents of the FedEx delivery manifests.

Boldt leaned his head out as the car backed up and addressed a stunned Millie Wiggins, standing in her driveway beneath an umbrella with rain cascading from its rim. “Only our most difficult suspects,” he informed her. He thanked her and got the window up. The headlights spilled over her, throwing an enormous shadow against the garage door.

“You see? We didn’t need her,” Flemming protested, repeating an argument he had beaten to death. “You knew you had the right woman.”

Flemming’s silent rage terrified Boldt; he was glad to have the man talking. By his own admission, for six months Flemming had attempted to piece together any evidence that might lead him to the Pied Piper, while at the same time continually compromising the public investigation. Now that Boldt had done his job for him, the man seemed hell-bent on handling the Crowleys in the same manner he had handled Anderson. The end justified the means. Boldt, who understood such reactions, who empathized with them, found himself defending the suspect’s rights and wondering how far Flemming might go-if he too might end up a victim if he crossed the man.

In the name of probable cause, Boldt had just tricked Flemming into buying himself a second witness, and both men knew it, perhaps Flemming even understood it, though he was difficult to judge. Millie Wiggins, and Liz along with her, could place Crowley and Boldt in that car. Both women had taken good long looks at Flemming.

“Cross over to I-5 on 145th,” Boldt said. “There’s an on-ramp off Fifth Avenue.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Flemming warned, letting Boldt know that he understood everything. “If you fuck this up, if you can’t find this place, I’ll pull her eyelids off and drip battery acid in them until she talks, until she tells me where I can find my daughter. And if you even think about trying to stop me-” He didn’t bother finishing the threat. Flemming was played out, any ability to reason in him long since exhausted. He had waited for this day for six months, and Boldt or no Boldt, he knew what had to be done. Boldt had tried to use Anderson as a bargaining chip, reminding Flemming that no evidence linked him to the man’s murder-implying Boldt would not make a case of it if Flemming played this right. But Flemming was numb from the neck up, lacking any concept of prison terms or punishment. He simply didn’t care. He wanted his daughter back. Nothing-no one-would come between him and that end.

Pressured into an alliance of which he wanted no part, Boldt found himself an unwilling passenger. He might as well have been handcuffed and in the backseat himself.

The interminable drive north on I-5 left Boldt referencing the FedEx manifests and plotting delivery routes for March 25 on or about twelve noon, creating small boxes on the map with arrows to the appropriate location. Darkness outside, darkness inside, the rain obscuring the windshield, his own fears obscuring his efforts.

Boldt decided to speak directly to the issue. There were questions to answer and he had no way of knowing if he might be around to hear them later. Without backup, anything could happen. He said to the driver, “According to Hale, the Hoover Building thinks you may be working for the Pied Piper.”

“Hale knows?”

“He’s been spying on you ever since your girlfriend disappeared and your bank account grew.”

The big man nodded, a man defeated. “The money-cash-was deposited in five-thousand-dollar amounts into my account. She,” he said, pointing toward the backseat and their prisoner, “knew it would appear that I had misplaced loyalties, that I wouldn’t be able to explain the deposits. And of course I wouldn’t have been able to. So they had my child, and my career. I sent Gwen away the minute they got our child. Told her not to surface. Believe me,” he added, “she’s under so deep no one will ever find her unless I’m involved.”

“She could support your story. You just might get yourself out of this.”

“It’s Stephanie I care about, not me. Stephanie first. The rest comes later. The rest hardly matters.”

“Yes, I know,” Boldt replied.

“You?”

“No money. Just my child.”

Flemming confessed, “They had me use E-mail to supply the information they requested. I tried to trace it back to a source, but they knew their stuff: bogus accounts, bogus credit cards paying for those accounts.”

“So they knew when to pick up and leave.”

Flemming nodded again, though reluctantly and with a heavy heart. “I misled and delayed the investigations as best I could. When it got away from me, I sent off a warning and they packed it up.”

“Me?” Boldt asked. “Did you give them me? Was it you who IDed the local cop to go after?”

“It was.”

The road whined, the wipers lapped at the water. “I’d like to apologize for that, but I can’t,” Flemming said. “I did what I thought I had to do.” He admitted softly, “I worked constantly to ID them. If I had managed, it would have stopped right there. I would have seen to that, as we will see to that tonight,” he said, stealing a glimpse at the prisoner in the rearview mirror. “You’re a better cop than me, Boldt. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I want to hear how you could volunteer another person’s child,” Boldt whispered hoarsely.

Flemming said nothing.

“You gave them my daughter.”

“And I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he admitted. He switched the wipers to high. The rain was too loud to think.

Boldt knew intuitively that following Anderson’s murder Flemming had settled on killing the Crowleys as the only form of justice. Perhaps it was only by seeing such a thing in another that Boldt could exorcise it from his own thoughts, but he wanted no part in it. Death was too easy for the Crowleys and Chevalier. A life sentence in a maximum facility where the inmates would not tolerate any crime to do with children seemed a far more appropriate sentence. Boldt wanted this done legally, correctly. He wanted Millie Wiggins on the stand, and Chevalier in manacles; he wanted Daphne called as an eyewitness to Lisa Crowley’s baby-selling. He could see the logical steps toward conviction. He continued to plot delivery times onto the map.

“So?” Flemming asked, a while later, shattering the monotonous grind of the wipers and interrupting a bass solo on the radio.

“Four delivery trucks servicing Skagit the twenty-fifth. At noon, two were on lunch break, two still delivering. I have one truck delivering at 11:37 and again at 12:12. The second truck made drops at 11:51 and 12:19. Two stretches of road to search for a house that sits up a slight knoll, a tree directly outside.”

“How many miles of road?” Flemming asked.

Boldt took rough measurements. “Twenty to thirty, all together.”

“It’s too much.” Flemming told their hostage, “You could simplify this,” studying her in the rearview mirror. But as did Boldt, Lisa Crowley assumed the driver intended to kill her no matter what she did; Flemming had played his cards far too early, not thinking anything of it. She had only her husband to sacrifice by cooperating. She would not talk, unless Flemming resorted to torture. Perhaps not even then. In a way difficult for Boldt to grasp, he felt sympathy for this woman, his daughter’s abductor. After weeks of wanting her dead himself, he had agonized for the better part of the last hour over his strange association with her, an us-against-them mentality directed at Flemming and including Lisa Crowley. Nothing surprised him any longer; there was no room left for such luxury.