Pied Piper

CHAPTER 41

The Intelligence offices were a quiet place to work. Boldt had learned to appreciate the quiet. Phones purred softly, answered in hushed voices that didn’t carry. Secrets. A two-way street of constantly shifting information. Computers hummed. Outside, the sun appeared for the first time in several days, painting brushstrokes of silver in the windows of neighboring buildings.

Surrendering his secret added to Boldt’s exhaustion, driven by an overwhelming sense of relief. The burden of withholding the truth of his daughter’s situation released, he found himself able to concentrate, focus and redirect his energies. He spent his time reviewing the Spitting Image invoices, including the E-mail orders he had received from Stonebeck earlier that same morning.

He attempted to contact the various cable television companies that served northwest Washington, hoping to determine which of them had run a weather alert at 12:02 P.M., March 25, the moment of Sarah’s video ransom, and he was in the middle of just such a call when he was interrupted by a patrol officer. “You have a visitor, Lieutenant. A woman.”

“No visitors,” he said, believing it a snitch. “Pass her off to someone else.”

“She’s from out of town. Says it’s urgent. It’s not a squirrel, Lieutenant. This one is Talbots and Eddie Bauer. You know? What should I tell her?” the uniform asked.

“Out of town?”

“She didn’t say where.”

“An attorney. You’ve got to at least get a name. I’m busy here.”

The uniformed woman stood up artificially erect. “She wouldn’t give me a name. But she did say that you spoke to her yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” He couldn’t remember back twenty-four hours. He glanced at the call sheet he kept by the phone. Sunday. Nothing. It didn’t make sense to him. It was someone trying to weasel an unscheduled appointment out of him. He had spent most of the day before, in, or en route to, Portland.

He dragged himself out of the chair. The patrol officer stepped out of his way. Boldt peered around the jamb.

In her mid-thirties, she dressed well, wore her hair extremely short and wire glasses that added a thoughtful intelligence. The face seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t come up with a name. He stared at her searching for a name. She sensed it and turned and met eyes with him.

“Connie,” he called out. “Connie Bowler.” He had in fact spoken to her the day before. She had helped him to locate her drunken husband. It felt as if a week had gone by.

Boldt showed her to a seat and shut the office door for privacy.

She clutched her purse tightly. Sarah had a favorite blanket she held to this same way. Beneath the purse lay a bulging oversized mailer. Boldt found it difficult to take his eyes off that envelope. Connie Bowler spoke in a high, rushed voice. “If Tom asks, I’ll say I drove up here to do some shopping. But he won’t ask, so it doesn’t matter.” She rattled on, “It’s a bit of a stretch, because the shopping in Portland is just as good, but we do have a few friends up here,” she said, thinking aloud, “you and Elizabeth among them, but I wouldn’t dare use that because he might follow up on it.”

“How long has Tom been drinking like that?” Boldt asked, getting directly to the point.

“How is Elizabeth?” she asked, avoiding an answer. “I was so sorry to hear-”

“Better, I think.” He didn’t want a twenty-minute heaping of sympathy. He had grown to resent such offers. “I wanted to work with Tom on this kidnapping case-”

“The Pied Piper.”

“Yes,” he answered.

She toyed with the chain to her purse, eyes cast down in avoidance. She pulled out the manila folder and Boldt stepped up to accept it. He did not open it despite himself. He set it aside. “That’s why I’m here. Why I came. Tom-” She caught herself and glanced over at his office door as if to make sure it was closed, their conversation private. “We don’t know each other very well, do we?”

He knew Bowler from the constant traffic of information between departments, and because Bowler had once chaired a conference of Northwest Law Enforcement at which Boldt had been one of the speakers. “Well enough,” he attempted to reassure her.

“Tom was lead detective on the Pied Piper. Did you know that?”

“Yes. That’s why I came down yesterday.” He added, “To ask about Penny.”

She blushed-an involuntary act that spoke volumes. Boldt felt flooded with anxiety. Connie Bowler glanced quickly at the door again, drawn perhaps by a uniform passing close to the office.

Once the uniform was well out of earshot, she whispered, “Penny was taken from us in the middle of the second week of the investigation.”

For Boldt, this meant the Pied Piper had routinely blackmailed local police officers, that in all likelihood, the evidence from each city was tainted, that Flemming and the FBI had been following bad information all along. Sheila Hill had suspected as much. Connie Bowler now confirmed it.

“Tom won’t talk about it, but I know he concealed evidence. He said the case file was stolen, and he kept it from the FBI that way. That’s not right. I can’t let it happen again. I mean … it already has, hasn’t it? Sarah. He told me. And these other children up here. I’m so sorry. I know that if Tom … but you have to understand … we got her back safely. Penny … It was all we dreamed for.” The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears, her lips quivered and her face collapsed like a balloon losing air. She shrank down into herself, suddenly half her size. Her tears spilled onto her blouse, leaving constellations on her chest. “And Tom? He’s convinced that if it came out how he intentionally threw the case-for whatever reason-that they’d pull his badge and his benefits and kick him out into the street. And the way it is, we’re just not prepared to start over like that. You know? The kids and all.”

As he waited for her to continue, he understood that he had already violated the ransom demands, and a sinking terror filled him that he had done the wrong thing in giving in to the intervention. But in the same thought he realized that Bowler could not live with what he’d done.

Connie Bowler’s tear-streaked face confronted Boldt, who caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He lifted his hand to stop Daphne from entering his office. Connie looked in Daphne’s direction, but by the time she did, she saw only her back as Daphne walked away, no questions asked.

Connie said softly, “Penny’s fine. Not a scratch on her. No sign of … you know … nothing. He’d done nothing bad to her.”

“He?”

The question puzzled her. “The kidnapper. A woman couldn’t possibly put a child through this.”

Playing his cards closely, Boldt said nothing to contradict her. “Did Tom make contact with him?”

She shook her head. “No. He would have told me.” She teared up again. “We heard nothing for over three weeks.”

Sarah had been missing six days; he could not fathom the concept of three weeks.

“She was found in the Clackamas Town Center. It’s a mall. Her name, our address and phone number were found on a card in her pocket. Left there like a lost package.” She sprouted more tears and mumbled, repeating, “Nothing was wrong with her. She was fine. Just a little scared was all.”

“The card. Handwritten or typed?”

“On a computer, Tom said.” She forced a smile. “It’s funny that that would matter to both of you, isn’t it? I remember he mentioned it was a computer. It struck me as so strange that he would care about that.”

Boldt’s speech came out hoarse and dry. “I will need to talk with Tom about his case.”

“I told him he had to talk to you, that we couldn’t allow it to continue, but he said that Penny came first, that he had gone to the devil to save Penny and keep her safe and that he wasn’t going to throw that all away now.”

Boldt wasn’t sure he had the courage to do what Connie Bowler had done-to get Sarah back safely and then risk it all over again.

“What we went through … what we’ve gone through … well, you know, don’t you.” She made it a statement. “You of all people would understand. That’s what I tried to tell Tom. If we can tell anyone …” She teared up again and spoke to Boldt the father, the parent, her voice earnest and strong. “No one should ever have to go through what we went through. It has to stop.” Holding his gaze, she silently pleaded with him. Then she stood, wiping away her tears, and indicated the thick manila envelope. “I put our address on top. Mail it back to me, please. He still looks at it occasionally.”

Boldt offered to copy the file while she waited. This appealed to her, and Boldt left her in his office while he copied it, the action reminding him of copying LaMoia’s task force book only days earlier.

If he did not act, if he allowed the Pied Piper to continue the abductions, in all likelihood Sarah would be returned unharmed. This possibility tugged at him but was quickly replaced by an image of Bowler cradling the glass of Scotch. The child had been saved but the father lost-the family broken.