handcuffed Lisa Crowley on her knees, gripped by her hair.
No cars coming from either direction.
Boldt checked the man and found no weapon on him, not even a penknife. Daphne had been right about that: Con artists by trade, the Crowleys abhorred violence. “Clear!” Boldt shouted.
“Go!”
Boldt hurried through the ground floor of the house checking every room, every closet, every hiding place large enough to hold a two-year-old girl. “Downstairs is clear,” he reported out the door. “Basement and upstairs to go.”
“There’s no one here,” Roger Crowley complained, his face pressed into the plank flooring. “Who are you? What do you want?” A convincing performance. Ever the con man.
“Shut up!” Flemming bellowed. “Upstairs!” he shouted to Boldt, ever the commanding officer.
Boldt ran back into a kitchen he had already searched, located the narrow stairway and took it two treads at a time. The dormered roof held two cramped bedrooms and a shared bath. Three closets, a chest of drawers, a green metal steamer trunk. He checked the closets first, no longer breathing despite a heart attempting to rip from his chest. He held to the doorknob, unable to turn it, to open it, for fear of what he would see inside.
“Anything?” he heard Flemming shout.
He twisted the doorknob and pulled. Empty.
The next room, the same.
He stood then over the steamer trunk. He had worked crime scenes before with bodies in steamer trunks. Women usually. Folded up. Molested. Dead. He couldn’t see his daughter that way; he couldn’t find her like that. It was not something a father could live through. He kneeled and sniffed the seams of the trunk. Cedar-like a breath of fresh air. He threw the trunk open: blankets.
“Clear,” he shouted, heading directly into the basement.
The small cellar, lit by a single bare bulb, held a washer and dryer that had seen better days, tools, a workbench and a clutter of broken bicycles, lawn chairs and a doll collection. Boldt stopped, held in a trance by the shelves of dusty dolls. If the girls had spent much time there, the dolls would have been put to good use. His heart fluttered and he became conscious of his breathing again-slow, like a man dying.
He struggled up the stairs, one heavy foot after another, his gun hanging lifelessly at his side, walked into the living room to the front door and trained the gun at Crowley’s head. “Where’s my daughter?” he asked, his voice breaking, his eyes stinging.
Crowley cowered under the threat of the gun.
“Boldt,” he said dryly. “I’m Boldt. Sarah’s my daughter.” He glanced up into the room, the gun still aimed at the man’s head. “She sat in that chair,” he said, “while your wife shot the video.”
“We can make a deal,” Crowley offered. “A trade,” he proposed.
“A trade?” Flemming shouted in a bloodcurdling tirade.
“My wife … Our freedom for the girls.”
“Your wife?” Flemming bellowed. “I’ll give you a fucking trade.” He let go of her hair, stepped in close to his hostage, trained the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. Lisa Crowley slumped back and fell into the grass.
“Nooo!” Crowley shouted, raising up onto his arms and met there by Flemming’s weapon. His body shook as he wept, bawling on the floor.
It wasn’t enough for Boldt, to see this man grovel. He squeezed the trigger, putting a round into the floor inches from the man’s head. “Where … is … my … daughter?”
Flemming occupied the entire door, a gargantuan, his weapon aimed directly at Crowley’s head. “You want a trade? Your life for our daughters. But time’s up, fella.” He hesitated. “You got a god, you better say good-bye-or hello-whichever it is.”
“A home!” Crowley shouted. “Jesus Christ, you killed her!”
“Home?” Boldt and Flemming said nearly in unison.
Flemming added, “Say good night, motherfucker.” He stepped closer to the downed man.
“Yours,” he said to Flemming, “is in San Diego!” he sniveled. “A home for abandoned children.” He met eyes with Boldt. “Yours is in Seattle. Capitol Hill. Homeless children. We put them into the system-
Boldt raised the gun to where the bead settled on the man’s right ear. His weak arm began trembling, the bead dancing across the man’s head-temple, ear, cranium. Sarah had been available to him all along, a few blocks from Public Safety. The Crowleys had used the very system that had refused them an adoption.
“You had better kill me too,” Crowley said to Flemming, suddenly much calmer, “because so help me God, I’ll testify you did that in cold blood.”
Boldt laughed aloud and Flemming followed, the two men with their guns still aimed at the Pied Piper’s head. They laughed and suddenly sobered nearly at the same moment.
“You stupid shit,” Flemming said to the man. “I’m a cop,” he looked up at Boldt, “I’m not allowed to go around killing people, much as I’d like to sometimes.”
Crowley’s face contorted.
“I stunned her-left-handed, I might add. Aimed the piece clear of her head. She’ll be awake in twenty minutes.”
Crowley muttered, finally making sense of it. “You conned me?”
“Takes one to know one,” Lou Boldt said.
CHAPTER 85
Daphne circled the interrogation table in Room A-the Box-like a hawk after a snake. Boldt had brokered a deal with Hale, who won Chevalier’s arrest in New Orleans as an FBI collar in return for his silence concerning his overnight in an airport drunk tank.
With Chevalier under federal lockup, Crowley had been appointed a little pencil of an attorney, a man who looked about eighteen years old, a man who did not know how to handle a woman like Daphne, intimidated by both her looks and her powerful sense of control. Crowley dismissed him, electing to take Daphne on alone. He chose to do this in front of her, to make a statement about control. She continued to circle, changing strategies, attempting to find a jumping-off point. She lived for such moments.
Her concentration ever intense, she nonetheless found herself required to push away thought of Owen Adler’s invitation to dinner in the Georgian Room at the Four Seasons Olympic. He had said it was a celebration dinner, but she intuitively expected more. The Presidential Suite perhaps. A ring on her left hand-the same ring she had returned to him a year earlier. Her life moved in arcs, and she felt certain that arc was to rejoin her with Owen.
“If you are pacing out of nerves,” Crowley said calmly, “pray continue. When you feel up to it, we’ll have ourselves a talk. If you are trying to make a statement-you’re free to move around, I have my ankles shackled-save it. Been there, done that. I know where I’m going, do you? You’re good-looking but you’re single. You have a body and a face that men fall for, but something keeps you out of serious relationships, and I bet that something is you. You are your own worst enemy, aren’t you? They are never good enough for you, are they? Never quite live up to dear old dad, do they? Afraid to take them home, are we?”
She should have expected this from a con artist of his accomplishments-he could see into his marks and knew which nerve to strike without second thought; it was an instinct with him. She had prepared herself for a kidnapper, not the man Crowley turned out to be. She chastised herself for this. She wanted a confession; she didn’t want the trial left only to evidence, some of which had been compromised through the behavior of the Gang of Five.
She said, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin was caught. You knew in advance that you and your wife would be caught if you continued. You could have stopped, but you didn’t. That fascinates me.”
“Of course I fascinate you. You’re what, the staff shrink? Not a detective, are we? You don’t have the attitude, you see? You’re curious. The detectives think they know it all. Of course I’m fascinating to you. We both make our living by looking inside people. Hmm? The only difference is that I see what’s really there. You? You’re a
