The Pied Piper (36 page)

She smoked two cigarettes by the open window, stark naked, her feet kicked up onto the round table that bore tented cardboard advertisers heralding pizza delivered to the room. She hadn't spoken a word. Either mad at him, he thought, or out of gas.

He said, “Have you heard the rumor that Liz Boldt is coming home?”

“Coming home to die, I hear.”

“Don't say that.”

“You asked,” she said, entwined with a large cloud of cigarette smoke. She stared through the gauze curtains at the cement wall across the alley. “Leave Boldt to me. Don't you worry about Boldt. You worry about the evidence. About how long I'll put up with a task force that isn't delivering.”

“Meaning?”

“Read between the lines,” she said, flipping him her three middle fingers held together like a scouting hand sign. “You're not exempt, John. Fucking me a couple times a week does not buy you exemption. It's nice, don't get me wrong. You are very good. But you have to prove you're a good cop as well, one capable of running other men. I want something useful out of those glass chips, and don't tell me about FBI delays—you sort that out. I want financials. I want some progress I can take to Mr. and Mrs. Shotz and the Weinsteins. Having their children back would do just fine, thank you very much. You've got a wonderful sense of timing, but that won't cut it at the four o'clock. Don't think you're the teacher's pet just because you've got your hand up her skirt. To the contrary—” now she chose to look back at him, “if anything that makes you more of a liability. We get caught like this and the shit is going to fly. They'll say it could compromise the task force. Thing is, they don't know me. It compromises nothing.”

“That's all this is to you?” LaMoia blurted out. “Some fluids? Some sweating? What, I'm your gigolo?”

LaMoia dressed without showering and was out the door, but not before Sheila Hill called out, “You can go away mad, but you'll be back. You enjoy screwing the teacher. Nothing wrong with that, John. Teacher likes it too.”

He slammed the door and was still tucking in his shirt by the time he reached the elevators where a mother and small child stood waiting. Sight of the child stung LaMoia. They boarded, but he declined to join them. He couldn't stand that close to a child. He took the stairs. Running hard. Running fast. Running away.

David and Carlie Kittridge, both setters on the Mick's Grill volleyball team that had taken third in the inter-city competition a year earlier, had their eye on the big prize this year, thanks to a Boeing recruit who had played for USC's junior varsity. The guy could spike and block right up there with the best of them. The Kittridges were such fanatics that they had timed Carlie's pregnancy so that she delivered between the summer outdoor and the winter indoor seasons. Trudy was a week shy of five months old. Reddish blonde hair, green eyes—the cutest, most precious baby since Evelyn, her older sister.

The Wednesday night games took place in the gym of Rainier Junior High, just four blocks from the cheapest gasoline in Seattle. Carlie teased her husband for always managing to leave his tank empty until Wednesday night. After the game they would stop and he would fill up, proud of his savings. Summer months he brought his lawnmower tank along as well. If there was a deal to be had, David was first in line.

The winner of Wednesday's game would go on to represent Wallingford in the indoor championships. Carlie Kittridge prepared to serve against the brick wall thirty feet away where a line was painted eight feet high. Hers wasn't the most powerful serve on the team, but it was arguably the most difficult to return because of a wicked reverse spin she had perfected.

As she stood in the backcourt preparing to serve, Carlie Kittridge glanced down at Trudy's car seat to make sure her daughter was content, and saw the little angel's eyes closed. Evelyn was at day care. All was well. She smacked the ball and watched its beautiful rotation, the seams running back toward her. Wednesday was only a few short days away. She looked forward to it with an antsy hunger. Mick's Grill was currently ranked number-one inter-city. David and Carlie had every intention of keeping it that way.

Boldt had put off telling Liz for two days. He had a decision to make regarding the most recent evidence—the FedEx truck in Sarah's ransom—and he needed Liz's involvement, illness or not. He elected the hospital stairs over the elevator, to buy him time to compose his thoughts.

He found her in bed reading a small pamphlet. Her roommate's bed was lived in but empty. Her face had its natural color back, not makeup. Her eyes had lost their dullness. She looked tired and older than the woman he knew, but far better than the Liz Boldt who had been admitted some weeks earlier.

“You look great,” he said, kissing her on the lips.

“Wish I could say the same. Not that it isn't good to see you. We've been playing phone tag. I've missed you.” She waited for him to say something. When he failed to do so, she asked carefully, “Is it her?” The face behind the question twisted as she sized him up. She drew in a sharp breath. “It is, isn't it?” She gasped, drained of color.

Boldt choked on his attempts to speak, implying acknowledgment. She meant Daphne; she had it all wrong.

“We can work through anything,” she said bravely.

Boldt teared up, confused and sorry and angry.

Her eyes held a softness, seen for the first time in months. Her pain was gone, he realized.

“Where is she?” he asked, indicating the roommate's empty bed.

Liz pointed to the bathroom door.

“Feel like a walk?” he asked, offering his hand.

She swung her legs out of the raised bed. “I'll need my robe,” she said. “Home tomorrow. I need the practice.” Believing her husband in the midst of an affair, she nonetheless held her composure. He stood there in awe of her, feeling small and pitiful. There was a girl involved, but he couldn't bring himself to explain it. He handed her the robe and fished her slippers out from under the bed. Her bottom showed as he helped her into the robe. It was different than the one he remembered. She needed twenty pounds. He ached, praying for her health.

He walked alongside of her down a corridor void of character to an empty waiting room called the Solarium. He turned down the TV and they sat in a far corner. “It's not
that
, Liz. Not even close. My love for you … it's stronger, more clear to me than it's ever been. My admiration for what you've been through … for the strength … the courage—”

“It's not me, love. It's much bigger than me. But thank you.” Studying him she said, “We can get through anything, you know.”

Did she mean money? The banker in her had a way of neatly tracing most problems back to money, of seeing most solutions in financial management.

“I'm not so sure,” he said, thinking aloud.

She smiled warmly. “Whatever it is, we're in it together.”

He burst out crying, so suddenly, unexpectedly, that he buried his face first in his arm, and then on her shoulder. She held him and rubbed him. “We're almost out of this, love.”

He wasn't going to tell her with his eyes buried. He leaned back, frozen by her expression. There was no good time. All his rehearsal failed him—paralyzed by her soft eyes.

“It's Sarah,” he blurted out.

Her face went blank, her words caught in her throat. Tears spurted from her eyes, raining onto him. Her face collapsed and she struggled to swallow.

“An accident?” she mumbled.

He shook his head, no. “They took her … kidnapped her out of day care.”

Her face pale, her chin trembling, she offered only a blank stare. He had lost her to anger, as palpable as the bones in her back.

“Alive?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Yes.”

“You were looking after them. You said … You said you could handle it!” Her eyes pleaded him to tell her it wasn't so. He couldn't think what to say.

“They need her alive,” he said stupidly.

She pushed away and crossed her arms. She glanced around as if looking for a place to hide. “You did this? You let them take my baby?” She fired at him quickly, “Miles?”

“With Kathy.”

“You bastard! That's why you vanished. You coward.”

“We had some leads,” he exaggerated. He caught himself worming his hands, just like Doris Shotz. He understood suicide then. A place for everything.

“Get out,” she ordered through blurred eyes. She repeated herself until it became a mantra.

“Liz,” he pleaded.

She curled up on herself like a crab retreating into its shell. Speaking wetly into her knees, she said, “You get out, and you bring me back my daughter.”

“I need you, Liz. I need you to help me with this.”

“This is your world, not mine,” she fired back. “I wanted none of this.”

She had asked him to quit the department too many times to count. He had nothing to say. It was a point she could hold to and that he could not argue.

He said, “She needs us both, Elizabeth.”

“You bastard!” She pulled in on herself even more tightly. “You bring me my baby!”

“I'm going to find her,” he said, his decision made, but his policeman's logic countering everything he said. “I'm going to get her back.” He felt small and cowardly.

She pointed, her bone-thin ashen arm aimed stridently toward the door.

Boldt reached out to touch her, but she jerked away, revolted. “Liz, I …” He could not think what to say. Her arm trembled, still holding point. Wiping back tears, he moved reluctantly toward the door. A sense of nothingness overwhelmed him, a feeling of being horribly alone. He left without another word. He knew what had to be done.

Boldt drove into his driveway and then, before killing the engine, threw it into reverse, backed up and sped away. The same for the last several days: The house was Sarah. He couldn't go in there.

He returned to the office, too sick to eat, and spent all of Friday night into the wee hours reviewing the computer printouts from Tech Services that detailed conversations caught by the electronic trickery of their AI eavesdropping software. For one who hated coincidences, Boldt was forced to live with the fact that had Seattle not been a port city used to smuggle everything from chopped autos to crack cocaine to illegals, and a reputed hub of organized Asian crime, his department's Tech Services unit would never have had such sophisticated software. But with the current administration's emphasis on returning law enforcement power to the state level, they did have it, and by a fluke of good salesmanship combined with Sheila Hill's unquenched ambitions, it was Boldt's to misuse legally.