The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

In Seattle, they're calling him The Pied Piper - someone who comes in the night and takes children away. To newly promoted police lieutenant Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews, it's clear this isn't about a single lunatic or random kidnappings: these crimes are well orchestrated, well executed, and, most chilling of all, occurring in cities across the country.

Boldt is the first to establish that behind the kidnappings is a well-financed and brilliantly planned network, and his investigation soon attracts the FBI, which also brings heavy manpower - and political competition - that Boldt fears could slow them down until the trail runs dry. As long as the kidnappings continue, there may be a chance of getting the children back alive. Or is it already too late?

Release date: August 14, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 528

Sample

The train left the station headed for nowhere, its destination also its point of embarkation, its purpose not to transport its passengers, but to feed them.

By early March, western Washington neared the end of the rinse cycle, a nearly perpetual curtain of ocean rain that blanketed the region for the winter months, unleashing in its wake a promise of summer. Dark, saturated clouds hung low on the eastern horizon. Well to the west, where the sun retreated in a violent display, a glimpse of blue cracked the marbled gray, as welcome to the residents of Seattle as any sight alive.

Arrival at the dinner train surprised Doris Shotz. She had thought her husband Paul was taking her to Ivar’s, one of Seattle’s more popular fish-house chains. A simple dinner date had presented her with a test of sorts, being that it was her first evening leaving her four-month-old baby girl, Rhonda, with a sitter. She’d finally decided she could handle an hour or two a few blocks away from home. But an entire evening stuck on a train in the woods was unimaginable, unthinkable!

“Surprised?” he asked, displaying the tickets proudly.

On the verge of total panic, Doris reminded herself that Julie was an experienced sitter, having taken care of Henry for the last year, as responsible a fifteen-year-old as one could ask for. Better to give Paul his moment than to start a fight.

They’d been talking about the dinner train for years. And Doris had to concede that over the last nine months, Paul had been a saint. She owed him.

“I can’t believe it!” she said truthfully.

“I know. You didn’t guess, did you?”

“Not for an instant. I promise: It’s a complete surprise.”

“Good.” He reached down and took her hand and squeezed. She felt flushed. She wanted to be home with the kids.

“All aboard,” he said.



The train lurched. Doris Shotz shifted to avoid spilling the cheap champagne that Paul had ordered. Although she didn’t want to drink while nursing, she knew Paul would consider it an act of defiance to say no to any part of the celebration, and given that she had already gone this far to please her husband, she wasn’t going to let one glass of champagne ruin the evening. When the train turned east, the frosted mountains flooded crimson with the sunset, Paul said with obvious satisfaction, “This is a long way from the backside of a computer.”

Paul repaired PCs for Micro System Workshop, a name his employer had invented because it could be reduced to MS Workshop, and in an area dominated by Microsoft those two initials meant dollars. Paul drove a blue MS Workshop van around the city, crisis to crisis, fire to fire: hard drives, networks, IRQ ports—Doris had heard all the buzzwords enough times to think she might be capable of a repair or two herself.

Paul provided for them adequately. He loved her in his own way. She loved him too, though differently than she once had. Now the children absorbed most of her time and much of her love, too. She wasn’t sure exactly how to categorize her love for Paul; she simply knew that she would always be at his side, would attempt to put up with his moods. But the truth was that she lived for her children, Rhonda and Henry. She had never before known such a complete feeling. It warmed her just thinking about it.

She politely refused a refill of champagne as she watched her husband’s cheeks redden behind the alcohol’s effects. Clearly carried away with happiness and the light buzz that came from the champagne, he talked at her, but she didn’t hear. Boys and trains, she thought.

“Do you think I should call home?” she asked him.

“Call?”

She motioned to the rear of the train car. “There’s a pay phone. Cellular. I could call them.”

“You know how much those things cost? Fifteen minutes, Doro,” he pointed out, checking his Casio and saying sarcastically, “we’ve been gone a whole fifteen minutes!” He leaned closer and she could smell the sweet alcohol on his breath, a smell that reminded her of the occasional drunken violence that Paul had sometimes brought with him to their bed. “They’re fine. Julie’s perfectly capable.”

“You’re right,” she said, offering him a fragile smile. He nodded and stared out the window. She felt sick with anxiety.

It occurred to her that in a few minutes she could excuse herself to go to the bathroom and use the phone. Paul would probably never know. The champagne bottle’s white plastic cork rolled noisily at his feet. The train clattered past condominiums that reminded her of a Monopoly board. A few of the couples had dressed for the occasion, though most wore jeans and sweatshirts. It wasn’t exactly the Orient Express.

It soon became clear that Paul’s romance was with the train rather than her. Flushed cheeks pressed to the glass, his right foot tapping quickly as it always did when he drank in excess, her husband disappeared into the alcohol and she retreated into thoughts about her children.

Ten minutes passed with minimal conversation. Doris excused herself and made the call home. It rang and rang, but there was no answer.

Wrong number, she decided. At those prices—$3.95 for the first minute, $.99 each portion of a minute thereafter—Paul was certain to catch the charge on the credit card bill. But so what? She pressed NEW CALL. She redialed, again suffering under the weight of its endless ringing. She could envision Julie busy with a diaper, or in the middle of feeding. It didn’t necessarily mean trouble. ...

A fire, she thought. Paul’s home entertainment center—a sports center was more like it—crowded the outlets with far too many wires. What would Julie do in a fire?

The knot in her stomach twisted more tightly. Her fingers went cold and numb. Julie might be in the bathroom. Nothing more than that.

But her imagination wouldn’t let it go. Perhaps Julie had a boyfriend with her in the house. In that case, she wouldn’t be paying attention to either the kids or the phone. Doris stole a look around the corner and down the shifting train car’s center aisle to the back of her husband’s head. She had already been gone a few minutes, and it would ruin everything if he caught her at the pay phone. She had promised him she would wait to call until after dinner.

She hung up the receiver, deciding to slip into the washroom and then try again when she came out. But she emerged only to find someone else using the phone, ironically a mother happily talking to her children.

When the woman hung up, Doris tried again. This time the phone’s endless ringing seemed a kind of punishment for trying at all. She glanced up the aisle at Paul, but now all she could think about was that there was something terrible going on. She decided to call her neighbor Tina, who answered on the second ring.

Doris concentrated on removing any panic from her voice. “Tina, it’s Doris. I have a really weird favor to ask of you. ...”

In her mother’s heart she knew: Something was dreadfully wrong.

Hope sprang eternal. For Lou Boldt, who lived in a world of innocent or guilty, alive or dead, where the patrol officers drove cars painted black and white, hope rarely surfaced though always lingered, teasing and enticing.

A woman’s rail-thin body lay in the hospital bed before him, dressed not in the familiar hospital gown but in the pink seersucker he had brought her two weeks before their fifteenth anniversary. Beneath that gown, as well as on the exposed skin, not a single hair. The chemotherapy had claimed the body fat, the hair, even any expression of joy from her sunken eyes. Her alien looks signified either a preparation for death, or a rebirth. The vomiting and complete lack of energy left Boldt with the impression of a woman half-dead. Despite his hope.

He placed a DO NOT ENTER—OXYGEN IN USE sign on the door to the room, a door that he shut tightly before jamming a white towel up against the crack at its base. He briefly caught sight of himself in the bathroom’s mirror: a tired forty-two, thinner than he’d been since college, tough in the face, but kind in the eyes. Even dressed in his ubiquitous khakis and blue blazer, he no longer looked professorial but more like retired military—”a dog trainer,” one friend had laid on him. The cop shop lived for such insults. Approaching his wife’s roommate, a woman who liked afternoon tabloid television, Boldt knocked on the bed stand before pulling back the privacy curtain. “Medication time,” he announced.

Stark and clinical, the room felt like a place to stockpile auto parts, not heal the sick—stainless steel, electric cable, faux grain vinyl veneer, bleach-white sheets—the room’s only warm color came from the patches of pale human skin that escaped the bedding.

“Count me in,” declared the roommate, Roberta, who was undergoing chemo for stage-four leukemia, her life expectancy, thirty to ninety days.

Elizabeth was battling lymphoma, life expectancy, three to six months. This lodged in Boldt’s throat like a stuck bone.

The two windows looked out on a parking lot filled with the cars of visitors to the “C ward”—sad people carrying flowers on the way in, burdened by tears on the way out. Boldt parked out there among them. He opened both windows.

“Compliments of Bear,” he explained to his wife, producing a perfectly rolled joint. Bear Berenson, a friend of twenty years, owned the comedy club Joke’s On You, over on 45th near Stoneway.

Liz smirked. “A twenty-four-year veteran, a Homicide cop, pushing drugs.”

“Medication,” he corrected. “And I’m not Homicide any longer.”

“Intelligence,” she said. “There’s an oxymoron.”

He stood on a chair unsteadily and slipped a glassine bag, normally used for evidence collection, over the smoke alarm. His advancement to lieutenant had necessitated a transfer from Homicide; in a year or so he’d be back, and at a higher rank, better pay, better benefits, all made necessary by the mounting bills and loss of her banker’s income. Change—Boldt’s nemesis. Homicide was home; this woman was home. Home was changing.

“Disabling the lavatory smoke alarm can get you thrown off the flight, you know?” Roberta had been an Alaska Airlines flight attendant for eleven years.

Boldt put the finishing touches on his effort and climbed down.

Liz grinned widely—a moment Boldt lived for. She put the joint between her lips, saying, “Times like this I miss the Jefferson Airplane.” Boldt lit it for her and sat between the two beds passing the joint back and forth between the two women. Roberta smoked greedily and coughed loudly, bellowing smoke into the room, worrying Boldt that he too might get high.

“I don’t know why we ever gave this up,” Liz said, her eyes bloodshot, a wry smile forming. “God, I feel good.”

“We had children,” Roberta answered, and both women laughed hysterically, although Boldt missed the humor.

“Music,” Liz requested, snuffing out the roach and eating it. She chased it with a glass of water and smacked her lips. “Some good old rock and roll.”

Boldt tuned in a local TV channel that used an oldies FM station as its background music. Creedence Clearwater. Liz asked for more volume.

“Not until all the smoke is out,” Boldt answered.

“Use the flower spray in the bathroom,” Roberta suggested, cranking up the volume from her remote.

Boldt sprayed the room with an aerosol labeled Fields of Dreams. It smelled chemical, not floral. He removed the plastic bag as the two women began to sing along with John Fogerty, their transformation nothing short of miraculous.

“Pizza!” Liz hollered over the music.

“Pizza!” Roberta echoed, followed by a roar of laughter.

Boldt felt gratified by their request. He’d succeeded. He told Liz that he would head off for the pizza if she would prep herself for the kids.

“You mean the wig?” the bald woman asked. “I’m already wigged out.” Both women erupted yet again. “Okay, okay, okay,” his wife added, seeing the frustration on her husband’s face. “I’m all eyebrows and hair. You get the pizza!”

Boldt drove into the heart of the U-District to Angelo’s and bought a medium sausage and mushroom, a milk and a Pepsi. Pot smoking and pizza purchases—he felt transported back to college.

His concept of time had evolved from an internal clock predictable to within a matter of minutes, to where days now stretched on endlessly, driven by a doctor’s prediction of a shortened life span and a husband’s prayers for miracles.

He returned to the C ward to find Liz and Roberta in hysterics. Liz had drawn a pair of “wire rim” glasses around her eyes with eyebrow pencil, as well as a Marilyn Monroe birthmark mole on her cheek. Boldt made no comment; he simply served them the pizza. While Liz ate, her husband erased her spectacles with a face cloth and made an attempt at adding eyebrows to the hairless skin. Liz was well into her third slice by the time he offered her a hand mirror.

Chewing, she nodded approval.

He then placed her wig on in reverse, which caused Roberta to spit out some pizza in laughter.

“How much time?” Liz asked, sobering slightly, realizing that the arrival of her children was imminent.

“Ten minutes,” he answered.

“Well, I’ll say one thing: At least the pot allows me to smile. I want my kids to see me smiling.”

Roberta struggled with her own hairpiece. Boldt offered to help, but she declined. “I’ve seen your work,” she teased.

Liz hooked a finger into her husband’s belt and pulled him in for a kiss.

A knock sounded. Boldt expected the pizza aroma to cover any evidence of the pot—ever the policeman.

He rose and answered it, thinking that nurses and doctors rarely knocked.

John LaMoia stood an inch over six feet, with sunken cheeks and a full mustache. He dressed like someone in a Calvin Klein ad.

LaMoia said, “Your pager and cell phone must be off.”

“I’m on private time here,” Boldt reminded. LaMoia had been on his Homicide squad for the last seven years; he had taken the sergeant’s post Boldt had vacated. “Intelligence doesn’t do on-call.”

“John?” Liz called out.

LaMoia stepped in and said hello to both women by name, the room no stranger to him. He and Liz Boldt were gin rummy opponents.

“We got the call,” LaMoia said, meeting Boldt’s eyes seriously. “I tried calling you.”

Judging by LaMoia’s tone of voice, Boldt knew which call he meant. Boldt reminded, “I don’t handle fieldwork.” The words stung him. He missed it badly; LaMoia had come to exploit that.

“As a favor then,” LaMoia suggested, appealing to Liz to help with Lou. She was the one in the hospital, but it was her husband who had lost forty pounds and the glint in his eye. The desk job was killing him.

“Go on, love—humor him,” Liz encouraged. “What kind of case is it, John?”

LaMoia started to mumble but did not answer. No wife and mother would want her husband, the father of her children, on such a case.

“Wait for me downstairs,” Boldt told his former detective. “I’ll wait with you until Marina and the kids arrive,” he told his wife after LaMoia had left.

“No need.” All humor had left the room. “Go,” she said. But Boldt stayed.

Five minutes passed in relative silence before Liz sat up sharply and Boldt recognized the sound of his son’s voice approaching.

“You all set?” Boldt asked.

She nodded faintly, squeezed her husband’s arm and mouthed the words, “I love you.”

Boldt leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Likewise,” he whispered.

Her cheek felt inhumanly cold.

John LaMoia double-parked his red 1974 Camaro in front of 2351 51st North and set its wide taillights flashing amid a veritable light show of emergency vehicles. He sat behind the wheel for a moment gathering his strength. Any apparent kidnapping automatically evolved into an enormous investigation, requiring tact and diligence on the part of the lead investigator, and he’d been named lead. Tact was not necessarily LaMoia’s long suit, and he knew it. His fellow officers called him Floorshow, what with his creased blue jeans, steel gray ostrich boots and rock star hair. Because of the Big-A attitude. LaMoia knew he wore an attitude, but to hell with it: He was good at what he did. People talked about talking the talk, but John LaMoia talked it. He’d been the same cocky son-of-a-bitch since junior high; he wasn’t about to change now.

Boldt’s beat-up department-issue Chevy slipped in behind him and parked.

This particular kidnapping—of a white infant—would stir not only the city’s conscience but, quite likely, the nation’s. Before even stepping out of the car at the crime scene, LaMoia already had a few suspicions about how it had happened, but for the moment he pushed them away. Not for anyone, including his ambitious Crimes Against Persons captain Sheila Hill, would LaMoia guess at a crime’s solution before he could gather the necessary evidence, witnesses and facts.

“It’s my job to make the call,” he told Boldt. “Either I group it with the others, or it stands alone.” Domestics and gang killings had occupied his past few months—grounders for the most part. A serial kidnapping case with national importance? He tried not to think of himself as Lou Boldt’s replacement, even though others saw his promotion that way.

“So why drag me along?” Boldt asked.

“Maybe I’m insecure.”

“Yeah, right. And it’s going to be sunny tomorrow.”

They ducked under the police tape onto the lawn. Officer Jonny Filgrim said to LaMoia, “Bad Guy used the back door, Detec—, Sergeant,” he corrected himself. “It’s him, right?”

“Keep the vultures back, Jonny,” LaMoia said, indicating the press. “They want an interview, it’s Hill, not me.”

“Mulwright’s here. Back door.”

“Already?” LaMoia asked. He and Boldt met eyes in the flashing blues and reds of the emergency lights.

Boldt questioned, “Mulwright at a crime scene early?”

“Any of his boys?” LaMoia asked the uniformed officer.

“Special Ops?”

“Yeah, any of Mulwright’s guys,” LaMoia answered. Some of the patrolmen were thick as bricks.

“Ain’t seen none,” Filgrim answered.

“There was a woman watching the child,” Boldt said.

Filgrim nodded, though seemed bewildered that Boldt already knew this. “The sitter? Yeah? Knocked out cold.”

“Where’d they take her?”

“University Hospital.”

Boldt offered LaMoia a look; they had passed an arriving ambulance on their way out of the hospital.

LaMoia ordered, “Get someone over to the hospital,” as he took in the chaotic scene of the reporters and cameras at the edge of the property. “And make sure SID gets room to park their van close by.”

“You got it.”

Boldt caught him by the arm. “The baby sitter was unconscious?”

“Like I said, out cold on the kitchen floor. It’s gotta be him. Right, Floorshow?” Filgrim said excitedly. “A kid, right? I mean, we’ve been expecting this, right?”

“The parents?” Boldt asked, releasing the man.

“Mulwright spoke to a neighbor lady. She’d heard from the parents, which is how come she was here. She got the other kid.”

“Other kid?”

“A little boy. She took him home with her.”

Boldt nodded.

“Go!” LaMoia ordered.

Filgrim hurried off at a run, grabbing his gun to keep it from beating his side.

LaMoia tongued his mustache nervously and said softly, “I’ll tell ya, I am not calling it until we can rule out a copycat or a coincidence.” He looked to Boldt for help but was met with the blank face of a teacher waiting out his pupil. “I suppose it is him. Baby sitter unconscious? The kid’s age is right. Both parents out of the house.”

“Even so,” Boldt cautioned.

“I know. I know,” LaMoia said nervously. “Where the hell is SID?” He checked his watch. Once the lab techs controlled a crime scene, the Feds would have a hell of a time trying to take over. No one in the Seattle Police Department wanted to play second fiddle to the Feds. An investigation’s power remained with whoever controlled the evidence.

LaMoia studied the house, trying for a moment of calm. He then said to Boldt, “You’re thinking the baby sitter is, by definition, also a victim.” Boldt maintained that a victim, dead or alive, could tell an investigator more than a dozen witnesses. But the true victim had been taken from the crime scene.

“The sitter won’t remember much,” Boldt cautioned. “None of the others have.”

“So I’ve got shit to go on.”

“You’ve got a crime scene and the chance for physical evidence, a missing victim, a hospitalized victim. You’ve got neighbors, the possibility of unfamiliar vehicles in the neighborhood—maybe Neighborhood Watch,” Boldt listed for the man.

“That’s what I’m saying: We’ve got shit,” LaMoia repeated.

Another patrolman approached. Name tag read Rodriguez. These guys were all over him at a crime scene, working for brownie points, hoping their names would be mentioned to someone, that they’d get a shot at something better than driving the streets. The advancement to sergeant had made LaMoia painfully aware of just how servile these guys could be. The female uniforms were a lot less so. Too bad.

He raised his index finger to stop Rodriguez from interrupting his thoughts. He spoke to Boldt. “Some asshole comes here to lift a toddler. He’s got it all planned out, right? Use the back door, where no one’s gonna see him. Whack the baby sitter, heist the little thumb-sucker and make tracks. So … is he alone, or does he have company?”

“He’d have a wheel man, I guess,” Rodriguez answered.

“Not you!” LaMoia chided. “I’m asking the lieutenant.”

“Let him answer,” Boldt said. “You don’t need me.” The two exchanged a look, teacher to student.

Rodriguez waited until LaMoia nodded approval for him to speak. “Wheel man? Parked out front, where the neighbors can see him?” LaMoia wanted the man to think.

“Keeps moving, maybe. Driving around, you know, until the doer needs him.”

“And if there’s a sudden problem with their little visit?” LaMoia asked. “What’s the Bad Guy gonna do, make a phone call, stand on the curb with his thumb in the air? Think!”

The patrolman paled.

“How would you do it?” LaMoia asked, as Boldt had asked of him dozens of times. “That’s what a detective asks himself, Rodriguez: How would I do it?”

“I gotta get me inside the house. I come on as a plumber or something.”

LaMoia looked back toward the house, nodding. “Yeah. A plumber, a fireman, a cop. He’s played them all, if he’s who we think he is.”

“No shit?”

“No child,” Boldt supplied.

“I zap the sitter in the kitchen and grab the kid out of the crib,” Rodriguez said, getting into it. “Wrap it up in something, I suppose. I don’t know.”

“She’s not an ‘it,’” Boldt corrected harshly. “She’s a four-month-old baby girl who has been abducted from her home.” Boldt had kids of his own; kids LaMoia thought of as his own niece and nephew.

LaMoia patted the uniformed officer on the cheek. “You’re excused.”

They found Mulwright on the back stoop smoking a nonfilter cigarette. He looked about sixty. He was forty-one. Part Native American Indian, part Irish with a liver to prove it. Teeth that looked like a rotted picket fence hit by a truck. Skin that made enough oil for a refinery. Black hair and unibrow and five o’clock shadow. One eye green, the other nearly brown, like a junkyard dog. He held the constant expression of a person who didn’t feel well.

“Lieutenant,” Boldt said from a distance.

“Well, look what the fucking dog drug in.” Mulwright’s resentment of LaMoia’s assignment to lead the task force was public knowledge. The task force itself was the source of much politicking because it had been formed ahead of any kidnapping, effectively limiting the FBI’s powers by assuming that power for itself. It was the brainchild of Sheila Hill, captain of Crimes Against Persons, who now commanded the task force she had created. Mulwright was next in line seniority-wise, but as lieutenant of Special Operations he was more accustomed to surveillance and busting down doors than conducting an evidence-driven investigation. For that reason, Hill had chosen LaMoia, whose experience was mainly as a homicide detective, as lead investigator, which left Mulwright with an ambiguous job assignment until and unless they had surveillance to conduct.

To make matters worse, Mulwright blamed Boldt for ending his twenty-seven-year drinking spree, which had culminated in suspension and treatment programs. Rumor had it that the latter had not worked. The thick cone of cigarette smoke he blew into the air fairly reeked of resentment.

“Who called you to the scene, Lieutenant?” Boldt asked.

“I got a scanner in the kitchen. You? You got no business being here. You ain’t got nothing to do with this task force.”

“Adviser,” Boldt reminded. As a division, Intelligence intimidated some detectives, especially those like Mulwright who got themselves into trouble. “I’m one of the task force links to the Bureau.” It occurred to Boldt that Mulwright should not have arrived on the scene until after a call from LaMoia. “I’m also supposed to prevent press leaks.”

“Is that right?”

LaMoia said, “The National Insider is offering two grand for task force information.”

“Don’t know nothing about it.”

“So who called it in?” Boldt asked.

“I don’t have to answer to you.”

“No, you don’t.” Boldt waited along with the man through several long seconds of silence.

“A neighbor lady.” Mulwright had no fondness for women, other than as the objects of obscene humor. “Name of Wasserman. Tina. Down the street.” He checked his notes—every detective carried a notebook, even Mulwright. “Fifty-three hundred, Fifty-first North. Was asked to check on the place by the mother when the baby sitter failed to answer the phone. You ever heard of a dinner train takes off from Renton?”

“Sure,” LaMoia answered.

“Yeah? Well, I hadn’t. The parents are still stuck on the train. Due back any minute.”

Boldt asked, “Does the press know about this neighbor?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Do we have someone meeting the parents?”

“I put someone with the neighbor. That redhead with the big tits. You know her? Motor patrol?”

“McKinney,” LaMoia supplied.

“McKinney’s with her.”

“And who’s meeting the parents at the station?” Boldt asked, checking his watch.

“Don’t know,” Mulwright answered.

LaMoia said, “You did or did not assign someone to pick up the parents?”

“This isn’t my scene,” Mulwright reminded.

“You’re senior officer present,” LaMoia countered. “Are the parents covered or not?”

Boldt turned to LaMoia, “What are the chances our kidnapper has someone watching the parents to make sure they don’t return unexpectedly?”

LaMoia judged the question, hesitated, then nodded. “I can see that.”

“He’d be on the fucking dinner train,” Mulwright answered, tossing his cigarette into the grass. Boldt took note of where it landed; the cigarette had contaminated the crime scene.

Mulwright’s eyes awakened, his face expanding. “We should have both the train station and the parents under surveillance.”

“Can we handle that?” LaMoia asked, as innocent-sounding as possible. He agreed with Boldt’s attempt to lead Mulwright away from the crime scene. Few officers, despite all the training, understood the delicate nature of a crime scene. LaMoia realized that if Mulwright had read the advance briefing papers he would have known the FBI had all but ruled out surveillance by the kidnapper—he was believed to be a solo operator.

“Got it,” Mulwright announced, standing. “We’ll watch the station and the train for strays. We’ll work out a way to notify the parents we’re with them. We’ll make sure they head straight to the neighbors.” He asked, “ID? How do we ID them?”

“Wait here a moment,” Boldt said, leaning his weight against a sapling and slipping on a pair of paper shoe covers. He donned a pair of latex gloves and entered the kitchen, stepping carefully. Mulwright or the first officer on the scene had used blue painter’s tape to indicate the position of the baby sitter’s body on the floor. Boldt stayed clear of what looked like red confetti and the medical litter the paramedics had left behind. He located a family photo hanging to the side of the kitchen sink. It reminded him of his four favorite photos of Liz and the kids—three at home, one at the office. He suddenly wished that he had more photos of Liz in the prime of her health—he thought of her this way: her face full of color, her limbs lean but strong.

He removed the photo from the wall feeling pained—he hated to disturb any evidence no matter its apparent insignificance.

He renegotiated his way out of the house and handed the framed photo to Mulwright. “If you spot a suspect,” he said, “he’s better followed than confronted.”

“I know the drill, Boldt. I’ve worked a hell of a lot more hostage situations than you.”

LaMoia believed that Boldt could probably recite the names of each of those hostages for Mulwright if pushed. But it wasn’t Boldt’s way to throw around his knowledge; he hid himself from all but the most intimate friends.

“What time’s that train arriv