Paying The Piper (23 page)

F
riedkin hummed the tune to Elvis
Costello’s “Watching the Detectives.” From behind a pair of night-vision binoculars, he watched the FBI swarm over the abandoned factory. He surveyed the action from a quarter mile up the hill, looking down on the old industrial section. His binoculars propelled him into the thick of the action. He recognized Sheils and several of his agents. Scott and Jane were off in the distance.

Friedkin was glad he was back in the hunt, no thanks to Rooker. The man’s insistence that he work Scott’s surveillance alone had almost botched his assignment. Rooker called him to tell him the ransom drop was tonight and to stick close to the house. He picked up Scott easily enough when he left the house in his car. The lack of an FBI tail worried him. How the hell had Scott talked Sheils into letting him go alone?

The shortcomings of his solo surveillance showed themselves when Scott went into the Powell Street BART station. If Rooker had allowed him to use a second investigator, Friedkin could have made it work easily, but alone, he was at a distinct disadvantage. When Scott descended into the station, he had no choice but to follow, dumping his car. When the train arrived, he slipped into the car next to Scott’s. He stood by the doors instead of sitting, ready to hop off the moment Scott got off the train. He noticed BART cops at every stop. Placed
there at Sheils’s request, no doubt. When Scott got off at Glen Park, he fell in behind him.

Street level was where a second investigator would have saved the day. A second person could have driven to meet him there. Instead, the situation forced him to get on the bus with Scott where he risked being spotted. Luckily, Scott seemed too intent on the situation to notice him. He stayed on the bus after Scott got off and waited until it had gone half a dozen blocks before crying for the driver to let him off. The “missed stop” line worked every time.

His luck ran out when Scott emerged from Lake Merced with a motorcycle. Talk about caught with your pants down.

He wasn’t about to let Rooker’s need for privacy ruin his surveillance. Rebecca, his office manager, lived a dozen blocks from the lake. He called her to pick him up, but by the time she’d arrived, Scott was long gone.

Castrated by Rooker’s stupidity, he was forced to default to his fallback position and return to the Fleetwood house. He gave Rebecca his car keys and cab fare and told her where to find his car. Armed again with a vehicle, he tailed Sheils and company when they had leapt into action. He peeled off when they turned into the industrial section, in favor of higher ground where he could watch.

He wished his binoculars were equipped for sound. He could read between the lines well enough, though. The Piper had screwed them again. It was a ransom drop with no exchange.

The Piper wasn’t working to his usual MO this time, but then again, this wasn’t a usual Piper kidnapping. He felt for the Fleetwoods. Their kids were going to wind up dead. The Piper was stringing them along, and nothing but misery waited for them.

Sheils was on the move. He crossed the factory parking lot to where the Fleetwoods stood. Friedkin zoomed in on their faces. He tried to read their lips but only made out the odd word here and there. He turned to the agents at
work. Without a view into the factory, he couldn’t see much.

He pulled the binoculars away to rub his eyes. Eye strain was killing his vision. Everyone was taking on a blurry edge. He scanned the sorry set of buildings surrounding the factory. Then a flash of something caught his eye. A dot of light reflected off the building opposite from the FBI. He stared hard, not sure if he’d really seen something or if it was just eye strain.

There it was again. Something was definitely catching the light on that rooftop.

He trained his binoculars on the spot. His breath caught when he focused on the source of the flicker. A man clad in black from head to toe, his head covered by a ski mask, lay flat on the top of the building with a night scope aimed at the factory.

“Shit,” he cursed. “The son of a bitch is watching them.”

As if his words had carried across the air, the Piper edged back from his position before getting to his feet and backing away.

“I don’t fucking think so,” Friedkin said and raced back to Rebecca’s car. He yanked out his cell phone and punched in Rooker’s number. “It’s Friedkin. Tell Sheils the Piper is watching him from another building.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I’m cutting him off.”

“Which road are you on?”

“Don’t know. Tell Sheils to listen. I’ll be making some noise.”

Friedkin hung up, got behind the wheel of the Chevy, and floored the gas. A main service road encompassed the shipyard industrial park. The Piper had to use it to get back to the freeway. He’d be meeting him head-on. He killed the headlights and held the wheel steady.

A sedan rounded the corner ahead of him and rolled slowly toward him with its lights off. Friedkin had gotten lucky. The Piper hadn’t spotted him watching from the hillside.

But he spotted him
now.

Suddenly, the sedan accelerated. The high beams ignited, bathing Friedkin in blinding light. Friedkin returned the favor, switching on the Chevy’s high beams. Rebecca’s dirty windshield refracted the light to create a total whiteout. He aimed the car at the light.

The light intensified. He glanced at the speedometer. The needle nudged sixty. A head-on collision would be nasty. He tugged on the seat belt to tighten it against his chest.

The light in front of him jerked to his right. He jerked with it.

The light jerked back, and he mirrored the move. The Piper wasn’t escaping this shipyard.

The headlights seared his eyes. He held up his hand to block the light. The ghost image of the car swelled before him.

The Piper killed the lights. Friedkin’s eyes saw nothing but starbursts and afterglow against the darkness.

The Piper jerked the car out of Friedkin’s path. Friedkin didn’t notice until the cars skimmed each other on the drivers’ sides, shearing off door mirrors. Exploding glass clattered against the window.

Driver’s door to driver’s door, Friedkin was the closest anyone had come to the Piper. If the cars had been stopped, he would have been close enough to grab him by the throat. He stared into the car to see the face of a child-killer, but saw only a blur.

The impact rocked Rebecca’s Chevy and it fishtailed. Friedkin fought to control the car but overcorrected. The tires clawed at the asphalt but lost their grip and the car spun out. He yanked on the emergency brake to provoke a faster, tighter spin. The Chevy whirled around, coming to an untidy halt with its back end tight against the curb.

Friedkin yanked the emergency brake down and punched the gas, chasing after the disappearing sedan. The alignment had taken a pounding, and the steering wheel shimmied in his hands.

The Piper was way ahead of him
now. He accelerated but failed to cut into his lead.

His night vision returned to him steadily. He glanced over at Sheils and his people at the factory. He hoped to see them flying into action. Instead, they remained focused on the crime scene. Obviously, Rooker hadn’t gotten through to Sheils yet.

Friedkin chased the Piper over the connecting roads. The Piper knew how to handle a car. Friedkin’s high-performance driving training gave him an edge, but he still fought to keep up. He pushed Rebecca’s Chevy to the breaking point just to maintain the gap.

The Piper joined the road, heading back to I-80. Friedkin didn’t stand a chance of keeping up once the Piper hit the freeway. There was no traffic to slow him down at this time of night.

The Piper roared through a signal light that had turned to red by the time Friedkin reached the intersection. An eighteen-wheeler, a pickup, and a couple of cars on the cross streets lurched forward. Friedkin had no intention of stopping for them and jammed his hand down on the horn and flashed his brights. The cross traffic hesitated in confusion. Without lifting his foot off the gas, he slalomed between the moving targets. He hoped he wouldn’t have to do that again.

He closed on the Piper as the kidnapper slowed for the westbound I-80 on-ramp. He left his braking to the very last second to slice into the Piper’s lead, then stood on the brake pedal. The Chevy’s antilock braking system worked overtime to prevent a skid and gained him two hundred feet on the Piper.

The Piper joined the interstate with a healthy lead on Friedkin, but it was the closest he’d gotten to the kidnapper. They both weaved in and out of the scant traffic at over a hundred miles per hour, their speed scaring the drivers out of their way. They shifted to the fast lane unhindered. Friedkin glanced down at the speedometer to see the needle wavering over 120. The Piper’s sedan inched away from him. Traveling
at two miles a minute, Friedkin watched his advantage ebb away.

A siren split the air a second before red-and-blue lights splashed the night. Friedkin looked in his mirror. A highway patrol cruiser peeled out from the Carquinez Bridge toll plaza. The CHP Crown Vic ate up the road behind him.

“Shit,” Friedkin cursed. He knew the cop had locked onto him. It wouldn’t occur to the cop to go after the leading car.

The highway patrol cruiser was two miles behind him. Friedkin estimated he had less than five minutes before the officer caught up with him. Five minutes to make a difference. Five minutes to stop the Piper.

The CHP’s siren blaring and lights flashing, the other drivers got religion and clung to their lanes, forcing both Friedkin and the Piper to swerve around them. Their speeds dropped below a hundred. CHP might have been reeling him in, but he was also reeling in the Piper.

“Just a little more time,” he murmured.

An eighteen-wheeler sealed the deal for Friedkin. The trucker spotted the Piper racing up behind him in the empty fast lane. As the Piper came up on the trucker’s left, he drifted his big rig over. The Piper’s lane narrowed to a sliver, and he jumped on his brakes to avoid being crushed between the truck and the center divider.

“Thank you, Mr. Trucker!” Friedkin said as he closed onto the Piper’s tail. He got close enough to read the license plate, but not to see the driver.

His euphoria didn’t last. His five minutes were just about up. They hurtled past another on-ramp, and a pair of CHP cruisers joined the chase.

The Piper dropped back from the truck, jerked right, then accelerated hard. The lumbering big rig lurched to block, but the Piper had three open lanes, agility, and horsepower on his side and he blew by the eighteen-wheeler. He was off and away.

Friedkin sneaked by on the truck’s left, with the three CHP cruisers snapping at his
heels. The Piper began to ease away. Friedkin looked at the Piper for an ID. He made a partial profile. White. Brown hair.

That was all he got before the impact from the rear. CHP were all over him. They were attempting to box him in and squeeze him against the median. Standard highway procedure. Except, the cruiser behind him moved in before the other two had positioned themselves to create the box. The thump destabilized the Chevy’s rear. It shimmied and bumped the second cruiser coming up on his right. The car pinballed off the cruiser. The rear wheel slipped off the highway and onto the uneven shoulder. The Chevy bucked on the rough surface and smacked into the second CHP cruiser again. The bucking grew into a fishtail at ninety-five, and Friedkin lost control of the car.

The CHP cruisers dropped back to let physics do its worst to Rebecca’s Chevy and Friedkin, now a passenger at the wheel. The car’s rear end snapped out. Friedkin attempted to correct, but it was too late. The tires lost traction and momentum took over. The car spun around. Friedkin feared the Chevy would roll, but the front end connected with the median first.

The windshield fractured as the hood concertinaed. The driver’s door window exploded, spitting diamonds of glass over him. The air bag detonated into his face before the car snapped back to spin in the opposite direction, pirouetting three times and crossing all four lanes.

Just as it looked as if the Chevy was losing its steam and the incident was coming to an anticlimactic end, one of the CHP cruisers slammed into the car. Both vehicles came crunching to a halt, half on the shoulder and half in the slow lane.

Friedkin didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Too dazed, he was welded to his seat.

The CHP officers were out of their cars, weapons drawn.

“Hands up where we can see them,” a voice ordered.

The flashing red-and-blue lights scorched
his eyes and he couldn’t see who issued the order, but he wasn’t about to argue and raised his hands.

An officer rushed in, his weapon extended. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t be, you dumb son of a bitch.”

Systems check
, he thought. He recounted the Piper’s license plate. He was good.

A
gent Richard Jessup did a damn good impression of looking
bored, because he
was
bored. He made up part of a three-person team inside the Caltrain station waiting for the Piper to claim his money. He and Guerra pretended to be passengers waiting for the next Caltrain to arrive. Dunham patrolled the station dressed as an employee. All were positioned in different locations, but each had a clear view of the luggage lockers. Jessup covered the main entrance to the station. The Piper would have to pass him to get to the lockers.

That simple fact kept him charged. He, a new boy at the bureau, would literally be the first law enforcement officer to come into contact with the notorious kidnapper. This had been the reason he’d joined the FBI, to take bad guys off the streets.

As yet, he hadn’t been on the front line of any major busts during his eleven-month tenure at the San Francisco field office. This was the closest he’d come, and he couldn’t see anything coming of it, either. Not tonight.

“Lone male approaching the station. Blue jeans. Hoodie. Slim build. Approximately six feet in height. He’s coming your way, Jessup,” a voice said over his earpiece.

“Got it.”

He mainlined the adrenaline his body
fed him. The lethargy from an eighteen-hour workday evaporated. He was awake and sharp. He was ready.

The automatic doors slid back, and Jessup’s excitement left him as quickly as it had entered. The lone male was in his twenties. The Piper was in his fifties and athletic, by all accounts. This guy was skinny and looked like a bum or a junkie.

The guy shuffled by Jessup.

He whispered into his mic. “Suspect does not match the Piper’s description. Repeat. Does not match the Piper’s description.”

As he was saying this, conviction left his words. The lone male, instead of going to the ticket kiosk or bumming change from the waiting passengers, headed toward the luggage lockers. His breath caught in his throat as the suspect looked the lockers up and down.

“Suspect has gone to the lockers,” Jessup said. His words scraped his dry throat.

“Guerra, Jessup, move in,” Dunham said. “Take him down when his hands are on the ransom. He’ll be vulnerable.”

Jessup rose to his feet. He moved with speed and stealth, making sure he kept in the guy’s blind spot. He opened his jacket. His hand rested on his weapon.

The lone male stopped in front of the locker with the ransom inside. He reached above the lockers for the hidden key.

“He’s going for the key,” Dunham said. “Watchers cover all exits. He doesn’t leave the station.”

The suspect inserted the key, unlocked the locker, and opened it.

Jessup swooped in fast. In his peripheral vision, he saw Dunham and Guerra speeding across the station to cut off any escape routes. Jessup removed his weapon from his holster.

The suspect reached inside the locker and tugged out the backpack with the two million packed inside.

Jessup reached him first and aimed his weapon. “Freeze. FBI.”

Dunham and Guerra arrived a second later, blocking off his only avenue of escape.

Shock and confusion masked the
guy’s face. Without being told, he dropped the backpack and raised his hands.

“You’re under arrest,” Jessup said.

The Piper went down as simple as that.

Sheils didn’t have to be told they hadn’t captured the Piper. He knew just by looking on the video monitor from the viewing room. Barrington “Baz” Reagan sat alone in the interview room, vibrating from nerves.

“I’m going to talk to this clown,” Sheils said to Dunham. “Keep the Fleetwoods occupied. I don’t want them getting their hopes up on this one.”

He’d brought Scott and Jane back with him to the field office. He left Brannon to oversee the crime scene in Vallejo. The Piper had stretched them thin tonight. His people were now spread out in three locations. If something else broke, he didn’t have the resources to cover it.

Sheils traipsed down the corridor to the interview room. The seemingly never-ending series of failures had drained his energy. He shook the fatigue off before entering the interview room.

“Hello, Mr. Reagan, I’m Agent Tom Sheils.”

“Can I go?” It was a plea, not a question.

Sheils didn’t need to be a specialist in body language to read Reagan. The guy was wound tighter than a clock spring. He bounced his right knee with such vigor his whole body trembled, beating a tattoo on the ground with his heel. Sheils sat at the table across from the Piper’s unwitting pawn.

“No, you can’t go. May I call you Baz?”

“Yeah. Sure. Call me Baz. I hate Barrington. I got my butt kicked throughout school because of it. Technically, I’m Barrington Reagan the Fourth. Shit, I sound like a duke.”

“You’re a bicycle messenger for Bay Bike Messengers?”

“Yeah.”

“Good job?”

“Great one. I bike for
a living. Shit pay, though. Didn’t used to be. Traffic sucks in this town at any time. A bike was the answer to gridlock.”

“Was?”

“E-mail. No one uses couriers much anymore. It can all be done with the click of a mouse.”

The banal chat helped pacify Reagan. He still bounced his leg, but it had lessened to a steady bob.

Sheils opened the file with Reagan’s brief statement and his DMV record. “So is that why you took two hundred bucks to collect a ransom?”

“Hey, I didn’t know the guy was a kidnapper. He just told me to come to the Caltrain station, take a bag from a locker, and hand it off to him.”

“At two in the morning? You didn’t think there was anything suspicious in that?”

Reagan’s bouncing knee ramped back up to two hundred beats a minute. “Okay, okay, I didn’t think I was picking up his forgotten luggage, but I didn’t know he was the Piper.”

“So what did you think you were collecting?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t want to know. Drugs. Guns. Dirty money. Stolen kittens. It wasn’t any of my business.”

“Not very smart of you.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“You said it, Einstein.”

Reagan’s leg ceased bouncing, and he leaned across the table, with his hands out in a pleading gesture. “Look, I’m not saying I’m an angel, but I don’t know where those kids are and I don’t know anything about the Piper.”

“I disagree, Baz. You know a lot. You’re the first person who’s encountered the Piper without a mask. I think that makes you very important.”

The color drained from
Reagan’s face. Sheils guessed the realization had just sunk in. Reagan’s foot bouncing restarted. “How did you get this gig?”

“He approached me.”

“Through Bay Bike Messengers?”

“No. At the Mechanics’ Memorial on Market and Battery. A lot of us messengers hang out there between jobs.”

“How many of you were there at the time?”

“Three or four,” Reagan said and reeled off names.

“Did he offer the job to all of you?”

“No. Just me.”

“Why you, Baz?”

Reagan shrugged his shoulders.

Sheils could hazard a guess. Reagan looked as if he’d do anything as long as cash came attached.

“What did he ask you to do, exactly? Word for word.”

Reagan thought hard. “He asked if I wanted to earn two hundred bucks. I said yes. He said he needed the contents of a locker at the Caltrain station on Fourth brought to him. I asked when, and he said he’d call with details, but to expect it to be a night job.”

“After you collected the backpack, then what were you supposed to do?”

“Go to Fort Mason.”

“Were you supposed to call first?”

“No. Just go there.”

He wasn’t sure if a window of opportunity had just closed up on him. A catch-and-release approach with Reagan might lead him to the Piper, but the Piper had to know Reagan had been waylaid. He knew just about everything they did. They would have been better off letting Reagan collect the ransom and follow him to wherever he took it. Sheils cursed himself. He should have known the Piper would pull a stunt like this.

The best he could hope for now was to milk Reagan for all he could get.

“Can you describe the man who approached
you?”

“Sure.”

“I’m going to get a sketch artist.”

Friedkin hit a wall with the CHP officers. They weren’t in the listening mood when it came to the Piper. They wanted to know why he was driving like a madman on I-80, endangering lives, in a vehicle that didn’t belong to him. Mentioning he was snooping on the FBI while they worked a crime scene didn’t help, either.

Rebecca changed matters when they contacted her about her now deceased Chevy Cavalier. She confirmed Friedkin’s account. Since CHP didn’t let him go, Rebecca realized the seriousness of the situation and called Friedkin’s lawyer. He knew the right people to wake up. Within twenty minutes, Sheils had a fast-and-dirty version of events over the phone, and in another thirty, officers escorted him through the doors of the FBI field office.

Sheils met him as he stepped off the elevator. The FBI agent looked less than ecstatic to see him.

“I can do without the granite stare. I’ve had enough of that with the CHP boys.”

Sheils sighed. “I think it’s been a long day for everyone.”

Friedkin followed Sheils to his office. He’d expected other Feds to be in on the meeting, but it was just the two of them. Sheils fell into the chair behind his desk. Friedkin lowered himself into a visitor’s chair, his body bruised and aching from the crash.

“You hurt?” Sheils asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. I told you to stay out of this.”

It’s going to be one of those meetings
, he thought.

“Do you want to explain what you were up to tonight?” Sheils asked. “Did the Fleetwoods have any knowledge about your plans?”

This was where it got tricky. Telling
the truth meant betraying his client, and privacy was what his clients paid for. Breaking that fundamental trust would destroy his reputation, but he couldn’t avoid it. The lives of two boys were more important than Rooker’s business.

“The Fleetwoods had no knowledge.”

“But they’re your clients.”

Friedkin squirmed, but Sheils wanted him to squirm. Mission accomplished.

“Rooker is also my client. He wanted me to tail Scott—see where he went, who he spoke to.”

Sheils leaned back in his chair with a mug of coffee in his hand. He didn’t offer Friedkin any. “For what reason?”

“Rooker hopes Scott will lead him to the Piper.”

Sheils leaned forward onto his desk, the coffee mug held in both hands. “Does he think Scott is colluding with the Piper?”

“Don’t know. He just wants to find the man who killed his son.”

“Okay. Scott leads you to the Piper. What was the plan then?” Friedkin shifted in his seat. It set off the headache he’d been trying to suppress.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” Sheils said. “You were going to do your citizen’s duty and come straight to me to tell me where I could find the Piper.”

“Agent Sheils, I have vital information, and we’re wasting time.”

“Okay, tell me about this guy on the roof.”

Friedkin outlined what had happened from when he’d spotted the Piper on the roof until he totaled Rebecca’s Chevy.

“As soon as you saw this bastard, why didn’t you contact me?” Sheils demanded. “I could have alerted CHP and they could have shut him down without the carnage.”

“I did. I called Rooker and told him to call you.”

“He never called.”

Why didn’t Rooker call?
Friedkin thought.
It would have put
him in an awkward position with Sheils, but so what? Catching the Piper outweighed the embarrassment factor.

“What makes you think this guy on the rooftop was the Piper?”

“I have a hard time believing it was a coincidence. Someone wearing a ski mask just happens to be on a rooftop in the early hours of the morning across from a building where two kidnapped children were kept? I don’t think so. Do you?”

Sheils said nothing.

“Did you run the plate?”

“The car’s a rental. We’ll get a name and face when we track down the manager from the rental company. In the meantime, there’s an alert out on the car. SFPD are combing the streets for it now.”