Pied Piper

CHAPTER 39

The treasure revealed itself like the gold of the pharaohs. On Monday morning, March 30, the lab delivered sixty-seven full-color computer printouts to LaMoia-all photographs made with Anderson’s digital camera, all from a backup disk found hidden in Anderson’s bookshelves. As an added bonus, each was dated and time-stamped. He leafed through a series of a businessman climbing out of his car in a motel parking lot, entering a room, and leaving forty minutes later, followed shortly thereafter by a worn-looking creature bearing the heavy posture of someone defeated. Two of the many subjects depicted were shown engaged, in partial nudity or unmistakable poses, with adolescent members of the same sex. How Anderson had gone about his work was likely to have puzzled some of his clients, but it showed little imagination or creativity to LaMoia. In some cases Anderson had taken the adjacent motel room and bribed a housecleaner into unlocking the communicating door. In one daring effort, the sleuth appeared to have been hiding inside a closet with shuttered doors, implying that he had paid off the prostitute. There had been a time early in his career that LaMoia would have found one or more of such photos suggestive enough to arouse him, but those days were long gone. More than anything, he felt numb to it all, frightened for the missing children, guilt-ridden over his failure to rescue them. So many of humankind elected to lead sordid, twisted, perverted lives that any detective came to expect it rather than be fascinated by it. After a time one forgot that these people were only a fraction of society. Because of their staggering numbers, they seemed more the norm.

There were photos of storefronts, school buses, city parks, topless dancers, a bank teller, an interior of a Starbucks. Seven shots of a woman shopping various department stores. Three of a teenage girl-a daughter? a baby sitter? — giving her boyfriend head in the family hot tub, her face partially underwater, the smooth flawless skin of her bare back cresting the surface of the bubbling water like a breaching whale.

Thrown into the mix near the end of the stack, he finally reached the series that he’d been waiting for: five images from a computer file Anderson had named weinstn.pix.

The first of these, one that easily caught his attention, depicted the now familiar clapboard house that had contained Jeffry McNee’s meth lab. Closer study revealed that one of the vehicles parked in front was a white minivan, its back windows made opaque by either paint or butcher paper. On the driver’s door was an unreadable sign. LaMoia was guessing it advertised an exterminator service. Hard evidence was, on occasion, as good as sex.

The second of the five photos showed a figure walking along the building’s perimeter carrying a spray tank and hose, his head down and hidden by a gray baseball cap and a pair of goggles. He wore coveralls and looked to be about six feet tall. There was no face to pull from the shot. LaMoia silently and reluctantly congratulated him on his choice of disguises. It was no wonder they had never gotten a decent eyewitness description: nothing of him to identify but a pair of bland-colored coveralls and matching cap.

LaMoia placed the third of the images in front of himself like a poker player rolling his cards. This was of a boating marina on a gray day. The depth of field was bad, the image blurred. He wasn’t sure they would ever identify the marina from such a poor picture. The same could be said for the two figures at its center-two, LaMoia noticed. Shot at such a great distance they were little more than stick figures. Anderson had been careful not to get too close. The man wore a colorful sweatshirt, baseball cap pulled low and blue jeans. The woman wore jeans, shades and a hat. Unidentifiable. LaMoia’s initial enthusiasm was tempered by these discoveries. Anderson knew how to follow people-a photographer, he wasn’t. He cursed the man for managing a shot with no identifiable landmarks or signage. Anderson confirmed his standing as a nickel hustler, nothing more.

LaMoia dwelled on this photo for a long time, first working the magnifying glass, then the loupe. The resolution was too poor, the focus too blurred, to give up any secrets.

The penultimate image related to the final of the five shots and contributed to the story that formed the mystery of Anderson’s homicide. The scene was a greenway-a running path. It showed a man, perhaps six feet tall, in running clothes. Again, this man wore a cap on his head and sunglasses, again the shot was taken at too great a distance. The final photo, and the telling one, was nearly identical-shot in the same minute-except that the jogger’s head was turned toward the camera. But Anderson had panicked, this shot was the most blurred of all. The story of Anderson’s death unfolded for LaMoia as clearly as if Anderson had still been alive to tell it.

“So?” LaMoia asked Boldt, standing slightly behind him and looking over his shoulder.

“So?” Boldt fired back. He understood perfectly the significance of Anderson’s photographs: If handled correctly, if traced to the right marina, every possibility existed that SPD might identify a suspect. Boldt had to prevent that, but at the same time he wanted every scrap of information the photos provided. He felt incredibly tempted to share his secret with LaMoia to double his manpower, but he didn’t dare. The ransom note haunted him.

Boldt prided himself on his organization and neatness, but the clutter of his desk and office told a different story, and he wondered how much of this LaMoia picked up on. The room smelled of his fear. Two dozen or more white and blue telephone memo slips littered his desktop in various piles. They represented unreturned calls, or calls in which Boldt had no interest. He was intentionally allowing his Intelligence work to lapse; the unit was in shambles.

These memos were interspersed with hand-scrawled scraps of notes that, if viewed as a complete work, revealed a mind in turmoil, a man, a husband, a father, an investigator saddled with internal conflict. There was an empty bottle of aspirin open by the phone, the lid missing. A mug containing a moldy scum that had once been tea. Several stacks of paperwork carried office dandruff-the visible dust of neglect. If he had caught one of his detectives with a work area in similar disarray he would have chastised the guilty party.

“So the pictures tell a story,” LaMoia said. “The Pied Piper clearly made Anderson-in that last shot it’s so obvious. The thing is dated March 15, 4:22 P.M., which fits with the angle of light. Two days later Anderson does the swan dive in the tub.”

Playing devil’s advocate, Boldt said, “The photographs show no crime being committed. They are of an unknown subject in an unknown location. They are from a computer disk that, according to you, has never been mentioned at a four o’clock, never presented to the task force. Is there proper paperwork on the removal of the disk from Anderson’s residence?”

“I wrote it up. Hill knows all about it.”

Boldt warned, “Okay. So let’s say the evidence holds in court. It still shows no crime.”

“The file has Weinstein’s name on it.”

“It has a piece of Weinstein’s name,” the more veteran cop corrected.

“In computers, that’s the same thing.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He couldn’t afford LaMoia running to the task force with these photos. He needed first crack at them if he were to have any chance of finding Sarah. He looked for LaMoia’s angle in bringing them to him first. It wasn’t the good student wanting to show off to his former teacher-LaMoia wanted something more than praise or evaluation. But what? And could Boldt turn whatever it was to his own advantage?

“So?” LaMoia asked, forcing Boldt to make a hasty assessment.

His basic problem was that he couldn’t think clearly, certainly not quickly. He felt drugged, not himself. Fatigue swam in his head as if his ears were filled with water. Aspirin dulled it briefly, but did not remove this pain. It was his to live with. Why? he asked himself again. He voiced the only thought that entered his weary mind. “You’re reluctant to turn this over to Flemming.”

LaMoia took this as an accusation. “Their lab has had Anderson’s computer forever. If they had come across these same pix when would we have heard about it? I’ll tell you when: Once they had located that marina and made inquiries-and only then, and don’t you believe otherwise.”

“I don’t,” Boldt said, rubbing his neck with as strong a grip as he could muster. That was the other thing: He had lost his strength. He walked at half his former pace. His arms felt heavy, as if someone else’s. “You’re right, I’m sure of it.” He said, “And if you so much as breathe a word of this-”

“They’ll run with it. They’re pigs in shit with this kind of evidence. Fly a few more suits in to canvass marinas, and once they find the place we’ll read about the Piper’s arrest on the front page.”

“Probably right,” Boldt said, not believing a word of it. He had no great love for the Bureau-he’d been bitten as many times as he’d been fed, but Flemming struck him differently than most. The man wanted this over, wanted the Pied Piper in custody as badly as anyone. Boldt wasn’t certain how he had managed to remain on the case as long as he had; the Bureau had a way of exorcising inefficiency. Typically, Flemming would have been off the case by the San Francisco kidnappings, having failed in the previous two cities. He either had friends in the right places, or his reputation as their top kidnap cop was well founded.

“You’re damn right I’m right.” LaMoia could get worked up.

Boldt played on that. “Unless you beat them to it. This is our city, John. Those are our marinas.”

“Exactly! Don’t I know it? Damn right. Our city, god damn it! But the shot! Look at those two pictures. There’s nothing in them but a bunch of masts. Nothing to identify them. It’s like Anderson worked on screwing it up. You know how many boatyards and marinas there are? Lake Union. Lake Washington. The shore. Mercer Island. Kirkland. Medina. Jesus! Vashon. The islands, for Chrissakes. It’s endless.”

“And you want me to find it for you,” Boldt said, knowing and exploiting LaMoia’s needs. Intentionally misusing their friendship. He wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

The comment sobered LaMoia’s hysteria. He looked his former sergeant in the eye and nodded grimly. “You mean I’m using you?” he asked, getting it all wrong. “Yeah, that’s about right. If I have anything to do with this, the existence of Anderson’s photos gets out and I’m butting heads with Flemming, which means I’m butting heads with Hill, which means I’m screwed. Anyone I ask to look into this is going to know it’s task force related. But Intelligence? No one knows what the hell you do up here all day. Everyone’s worried you’re looking up their skirt. And with manpower being what it is-”

“I use the snitches to do the legwork.”

LaMoia acted slightly embarrassed. “That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. A color Xerox. Pass ’em around and see if we can’t kick a location.”

“My snitches don’t exactly work the yachting circuit. They aren’t the deck-shoe set, John.” He couldn’t jump at the offer without raising suspicions. No cop glorified himself with extra work; he or she spent too much time and effort defending turf and protecting positions. Boldt had to dismiss the offer. “You could use a few uniforms.”

“It would leak.”

“It might.” Both knew damn well it would.

“I gave you forty-eight hours with the Spitting Image evidence,” he reminded, playing the trump card Boldt hoped he might use.

“I was doing the legwork. This is a little different,” Boldt countered. It took all his strength not to agree too quickly.

“Seventy-two hours,” LaMoia requested. “Work the photos for three days. After that, I take it to the task force.”

“Forty-eight.” Boldt wanted the evidence for a week or two, and there he was suggesting a shorter period than he was being offered.

“It’ll take you one day just to get the pix out on the street. Right? Once they’re out there, you’re giving me forty-eight, same as I’m giving you.” And then the word LaMoia rarely, if ever, spoke. “Please, Sarge.”

“You’ve changed,” Boldt said, knowing correctly that LaMoia would take it as a backhanded compliment.

“‘You don’t work cases, you work deals,’” LaMoia quoted the man sitting in front of him. “A wise old soldier once told me that.”

“Get out of here,” Boldt said, his fingers sweating on the photographs he held.

As had LaMoia before him, Boldt worked the photocopies with a magnifying glass and a jeweler’s loupe. He pored over the images for the better part of an hour and then, just ready to give it up, he noticed what he had missed in all the other passes. It came under the heading “forest for the trees.”

Of late, he realized, a detective mined his crime scene for evidence that he then turned over to SID for lab tests. Too often, that reliance translated into a dependence on the lab-a belief that the lab had all the answers. In the process, old-fashioned police work suffered.

For an hour, Boldt searched the photos for a readable license plate, a landmark, any unique piece of evidence that might help. He sought out patterns, anything unique.

What he discovered was easily missed. It was not a sign, nor a number or a name. It was much more simple. It was right there in the center of the photo. Right there staring back.