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.