Pied Piper

CHAPTER 35

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.”