He wondered what she found so fascinating about the silent colors flashing at her that she couldn’t so much as glance at him. “Visitors?” His chest tightened.
“People wandering around, that sort of thing. At first I thought they might be church members. People used to bring Eleanor meals from time to time. But they weren’t. Parasites is what they were-insurance men, real estate agents, tax assessors. Never knew all the fuss dying created. Been more activity over there since Eleanor died than when she was living.”
“Recently?”
“I look right out that window, don’t I? You can see that, can’t you? It’s distracting, people walking around like that. How do I know who they are?”
“Anyone been around recently?” Boldt repeated. “Quite recently?”
“I bought me a gun. It’s legal,” she informed him, making eye contact for the first time, but briefly. “Had it nearly two years now. They better not mess with me; I’ll show them.”
“Next door,” Boldt said. “These people have been walking around recently? Ma’am?”
“You got earwigs where you live? Silverfish? I hate those damn things. Goddamn, they bother me.”
He didn’t look at the television. Perhaps it was selling a roach hotel. “Have you seen anyone recently, ma’am? Over next door, I mean.”
“They hide in all the dark, damp places you know. Kitchen is the worst. Under the edges by the trash. Enough of ’em to make me sick. All I wanted was to know how much to get rid of them, you know? You’d think he could have told me that.”
“Who’s that?” Boldt asked, his thoughts finally connecting her words and his heart racing away.
Pointing to the television, she said, “That’s Jerry. He sells all the electronic stuff. Could care less. It’s Dorothy I like. The clothes. Haven’t you ever watched this? Where you been?”
“Who was it you were asking about silverfish?” Boldt asked.
“The man spraying,” she answered matter-of-factly.
“The house next door,” Boldt supplied, violating a fundamental precept of interrogation. “Someone spraying the house next door?”
“‘I’d have to call the office for a quote,’ he said. Screw him. Didn’t even give me a card. I’ll tell you something: If you’re too busy for my trade, then someone else gets it. Plain and simple, far as I’m concerned.”
“You spoke with him. You got a look at this exterminator,” Boldt stated. He wanted this badly. The Pied Piper had used his exterminator disguise to scout the home, or as an excuse to be seen entering. This woman was an eyewitness.
“You kidding? Wouldn’t give me the time a day. Never even so much as turned around.” She added incredulously, “You’ve never actually watched this channel?”
“Was he spraying the vacant house?” Boldt asked. “Is that what you’re telling me? When?”
“They had a housedress I really wanted. Kind of like this one, only red.”
“Mrs.-” He searched for the name. Couldn’t find it. A year earlier it would have been on the tip of his tongue.
“The housedress was up at the same time I saw him, and I thought about those earwigs in there and I thought, ‘That’s who I need.’ So I get up and go out back and shout over to him. That’s a big deal for me-going out like that. And could he care less? How’s someone that rude stay in business anyway?”
“The housedress,” Boldt said in earnest, returning to the language of her world. There were no minutes and hours, only items for sale. “What day was that?”
She looked up at him for only the second time. “He’s been around a couple of times, but hell if I’m going to give him the time of day.”
“You’ve seen him more than once?” It had been a long time since Boldt had conducted this kind of interrogation, and he felt out of sorts, his timing off. It was an art form when done right. Handled incorrectly, even the best witness could become confused and begin to believe he or she had it wrong. “When? How often?” He was rushing her, pushing her, supplying her with the answers he wanted to hear. If he had seen one of his detectives handling a questioning that same way, he would have been livid.
“Couple a times. At a distance. Sure I have. But to hell with him.”
“When?” He had trapped himself; he couldn’t seem to break out of what he knew to be poor practice, like bogging down in an argument going nowhere.
“Yesterday maybe. The day before.”
“Recently.”
“I said ‘yesterday,’ didn’t I? How recent do you want?”
“Have you seen him today?” Boldt asked.
“No.”
Boldt handed her his card. “My number,” he said, “in case you remember anything else about him. We’ll want to talk with you some more.”
“Not this time of day you won’t. You wait until the gadget part of the show. Who cares about computers and VCRs anyway?” Eyeing Boldt’s business card, she allowed a large grin to superimpose itself upon her features. “Say,” she said, causing Boldt to turn from the door to face her, “you know anyone sprays for earwigs?”
Boldt tried LaMoia from the cellular, his intention to inform him that he was going to enter the residence on a determination of probable cause. He couldn’t get through, but penned a note of his attempt in his notebook. He walked around back of the vacant house, not wanting to draw any attention, his senses on full alert. It took him a total of three minutes to find the spare key-under a potted plant. He paused at the back door and unsnapped his service handgun.
The brief touch of the weapon brought with it dread and anxiety. Fieldwork was for the younger officers-he understood this well.
He moved cautiously through the building, clearing rooms in succession, allowing for no surprises. The house smelled dusty and shuttered. Boldt climbed the stairs as silently as possible, slowly and carefully. His imagination attempted to suggest the Pied Piper was upstairs at that very moment. A confrontation. Violence. He pushed the images aside and measured every footfall, listening intently after each. Anxious cops made mistakes, he reminded himself. They shot small kids who surprised them, allowing adrenaline and imagination to distort reality, they shot the legal residents, they got addresses wrong, they believed witnesses without a second source.
The upstairs landing came into view. The clarity of such moments astounded him. He could make out the dust particles like beach sand on the upstairs floor planks. They swirled in the air like a curtain of mist in a silent and slow dance. The pounding blood in his ears was deafening-
He threw open the first, shielding himself behind the jamb. He searched the room and its closet, but found no one and nothing of interest.
The second room was the same, no one, the smell of old age and medicines in the air.
He cleared the next two as well, one a bedroom, the other a guest bath. He returned his weapon to its holster. He examined the three bedrooms more carefully. The street-facing bedroom had a wooden rocker that faced a window, the curtains to which were pulled partially shut, unlike the other curtains in the room. The placement of this rocker reminded him of that of the chair in the sewing room at the makeshift drug lab-an unmistakable similarity.
He could visualize the Pied Piper sitting in the chair, rocking and watching, the gap in the curtains framing his target. Boldt sat down into the rocking chair, its frame creaking beneath his weight, his fingers held away from its frame.
He looked out across the geometric landscape of a hundred houses or more. Leaning back, he saw the curtains restricted this to thirty or so houses over six to ten blocks. Somewhere in this limited field of view was the Pied Piper’s next target.
Boldt combed the landscape and the houses presented him. It was said one couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and no one knew this better than a cop.
His eyes searched each roof, each tree, each street. Suddenly, among all the houses, driveways, porches, windows and roofs, Boldt’s eye caught something indelibly familiar. He strained to see more clearly at such a distance. Could it be? And then, all at once:
