The Pied Piper Read online

  PRAISE

  This year marked the passing of three men instrumental to my work habits and my being published. No words of thanks or praise could ring loudly enough to acknowledge all that they gave to me, both as professionals in their fields and as dear and trusted friends and advisers. There is no greater argument for the importance of mentoring. Separately, these men took hold of my hand and led me, editorially, into the creative life of writing and publishing fiction, for which I am eternally grateful.

  Gentlemen, you are here, on every page. You always will be.

  IN MEMORY

  J. Bradbury Thompson

  Franklin Heller

  Ken McCormick

  DEDICATION

  For Paige and Marcelle

  (Will miracles never cease?)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Praise

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Copyright

  CHAPTER

  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.

  CHAPTER

  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 L
iz 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?”