Pied Piper

CHAPTER 65

Posing as Cindy Brehmer, Daphne dressed in Ferragamo flats, a cream linen sleeveless shift and a simple string of pearls with matching stud earrings. She wore a light blush, pale red lipstick, mascara, a hint of eye shadow and a bead of penciled eyeliner.

Boldt’s wrinkled khakis and blue Oxford button-down did not live up to his wife’s appearance. His pale, gaunt face with its prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes lent him the look of a man struggling with disease. Little more than his wife’s escort, a man to carry the empty child seat, he took to opening doors for her, arranging transportation for her and carrying on a one-sided conversation, playing the doting husband perfectly, caught in his wife’s wake like a piece of flotsam rising and falling beneath her mood swings.

He took the wheel of the Volvo rental, chauffeuring her out of the Quarter, through downtown and into a mixed neighborhood that bordered the Garden District. He drove several blocks out of their way to arrive heading south so that the Volvo could pause briefly immediately below the burned-out shell of a structure that LaMoia had described to him.

“Lou-” Daphne began.

“I know,” he answered.

“You wait for chances like this, you work toward them, and then suddenly they’re upon you and-”

“I know.”

“This is going to be a mess to untangle, Lou.”

“Chevalier’s phone records and the paperwork filed at Vital Statistics will give us all these kids back. It may take awhile to sort it all out, but it’ll happen. These kids are going home: Trudy Kittridge first.”

“How do we live with ourselves if something goes wrong?”

“Trudy’s going home,” he repeated defiantly. There was no mention made of Sarah. LaMoia had to stay with Lisa Crowley at all costs, providing Lisa Crowley showed.

Boldt pulled the Volvo into the back lot. He shut off the engine, but neither passenger nor driver moved, frozen in concentration and second thought. Boldt’s hands remained on the wheel; Daphne’s sat folded in her lap.

“Kiss me,” said the psychologist. “The Brehmers would kiss before going inside. And remember: We’re excited, Lou. We’ve never felt so in love. This is a moment we’ve been awaiting a long time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Kiss me.”

“For them. Okay.”

He kissed her quickly for the benefit of any surveillance, LaMoia included.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Brad Brehmer,” Boldt introduced himself.

“Vincent Chevalier.”

“My wife, Cindy.”

Daphne smiled at the man, studying his cheap suit, his eye movement, his posture, his stubby fingers with their manicured nails. His tongue teased his bottom lip before each word spoken.

“Come in,” he said, staring at Daphne’s chest and smiling through wet lips.

The office suited him: mobile-home wood paneling, a ragged couch facing a low table that offered a half-full ashtray and dogeared magazines. A giveaway girlie calendar from Pennzoil. Chevalier’s early-generation computer did not belong to a man surfing the Internet for victims’ credit cards. Classical “hits” played from a thin-sounding radio.

What would the Brehmers have thought? she wondered. How would they have reacted? It did not strike Daphne as a place to start a family. Friday-night poker perhaps. A place to annul a Las Vegas chapel marriage. “Oh, my,” Daphne remarked with just a hint of the Carolinas. “How authentic looking,” she said to her husband.

Chevalier said, “The paperwork will go pretty fast. You’ll see.” He checked his watch. “Have a seat.”

Chevalier snatched the ashtray, dumped its contents into a wastebasket and then lit a cigarette without asking and without offering one. “Been busy around here,” he offered.

Chevalier was smaller and more pitiful than Daphne had pictured him in her mind’s eye, a sluggish little creature who overate and gambled with people’s lives. She didn’t doubt his resolve-he was in bed with a pair of con artists that had pulled in nearly a million dollars as baby brokers. She pasted a smile onto her face and asked, “When do we get to meet our little darling?”

“City services lady should be here soon,” he acknowledged. “Let’s take pen to paper, roll up the sleeves and get down to brass tacks, whataya say?”

“There’s more paperwork?” Boldt complained.

“Hell, you pick up a package, you sign for it.” The troll winked at her. She felt numb, capable of anything.

Chevalier transferred documents from his desk to the coffee table, and placed pens down in front of them.

“Full signature here and here, and again,” he said, flipping pages manically, “well, initials there, again here, and then signature there. That last one you wait on so that it can be witnessed by two parties-that’s me and the social worker, the two parties. Whataya say?”

Boldt had Brehmer’s scrawl down pat, an indistinguishable mass of loops with a few vertical lines thrown in for the sake of the B’s and the H. Give a first-grader an hour with a #2 pencil, and he or she could be forging Brehmer’s checks. Daphne faced the greater challenge. Cindy Brehmer’s signature was controlled and pretty. Not that Chevalier would think to check. The paperwork was a masquerade for the buyer’s benefit. Chevalier was not the brains of the operation; he was, at best, a facilitator.

The attorney nervously checked his watch, offered them both coffee and then edged over to the window, parted the blinds and looked down at the street. “Should be here any minute,” he said.

“I just can’t wait!” Daphne cried out. “How about a cup of that coffee?” asked a woman who, like Boldt, drank nothing but tea. She reached over and took her husband’s hand lovingly in hers.

Chevalier complied with her request and turned to address Mr. Coffee.

Daphne squeezed Boldt’s hand hard, signaling him and directing his attention away from the attorney and onto Boldt’s open sport coat where his handgun and holster showed. He buttoned up.

“How many of these adoptions do you arrange in a year?” Boldt asked conversationally.

Chevalier spun around and glared, fixing onto him like an attack dog on an intruder. “We agreed previously never to discuss anything to do with my business, Mr. Brehmer.” The man behind the invective did not share much of anything with the gawking attorney of a few moments earlier. This new man, at once dangerous and unpredictable, intrigued the psychologist. Chevalier, wound up like a venomous snake ready to strike, threatened, “I suggest we stick to our agreement.”

“Bradley!” Daphne barked at her husband, “don’t you dare mess this up.” To the attorney she said, “He didn’t mean a thing by it, Mr. Chevalier. Not a thing. Bradley just likes to talk, that’s all.” She added teasingly, “Whataya say?”

“Bradley?” Chevalier questioned suspiciously, throwing the name into the air with great disdain. “Bradley?” he repeated.

Boldt blanched the moment Daphne barked at him. He had practiced the signature enough times to recognize her mistake.

Printed in capital letters on the documents in process of being signed-documents that shouted up at him from the low table where they lay open to the last page-was the name she should have called him: Bradford, not Bradley, as his make-believe wife had misspoken.

Attorneys caught such details. Chevalier had drawn up the documents, likely without the word processing abilities of an assistant: Why involve anyone else? He had typed them, printed them and proofed them. He certainly knew Brehmer’s first name. He had to be wondering why the man’s wife did not.

Tension hung in the air as thick as the smell of smoke and burned coffee.

Chevalier’s head snapped toward the street; he had heard something only a resident of the building could discern. He eyed Boldt cautiously, crossed to the window and peered down into the street. When he looked back into the room his eyes flashed angrily between his two guests, and though Boldt scrambled for an alternate plan, his mind wouldn’t function, clouded by thoughts of his daughter.

Smoke caught in the man’s throat, burning it dry as Chevalier said, “She has arrived.”