While he was watching the ten o’clock news, his cell phone rang. The possibility that she might be calling him already made his pulse race. He picked it up from the coffee table and checked the ID. Out of area.
After grinding his teeth, he clicked on and said hello.
“It’s Lewis.”
Jake shot to his feet when he heard the agent’s voice. “What have you got?”
“Plenty. Buric’s locked up in the Lompoc pen.” Jake already knew that. “He’s forty-eight years old. His first arrest was at fifteen. He was part of a gang in the Bronx. The crimes he has committed stretch from New York to California. A half-dozen aliases.
“When told he was going to get life for abducting the McFarland baby, he denied having anything to do with it. Through a plea bargain that would cut two years off his armed-robbery sentence, he confessed to the Talbot baby abduction.”
Another kidnapping? “Did he kill the baby?”
“No. Melissa Talbot was found alive in Venice Beach, California, under the name Kit Burke, and is now united with her birth parents who live in Claremont, California. Dr. and Mrs. Talbot.
“That case was very bizarre. Kit was raised by a woman named Rena Harris who’d supposedly been married to a Frankie Burke—one of Buric’s aliases. According to Kit, he ran off when she was just a child. Rena raised Kit as her daughter. When she became very sick, she made a deathbed confession. She told Kit the McFarlands in Salt Lake were her real parents, and made her promise to go to them and let them know she was alive.
“After Rena died and it was confirmed her DNA didn’t match Kit’s, she went to Salt Lake to find out if her mother had told her the truth. But it turns out her DNA didn’t match the McFarlands, either. The investigation led back to Frankie Burke.
“His DNA proved he wasn’t Kit’s birth father, but out of fear he’d rot in prison for the McFarland abduction, he finally confessed he was the one who’d kidnapped Kit from Mrs. Talbot during a bank robbery. It’s one of the damnedest twists I ever heard of.
“I spoke with an Agent Kelly out in California. The FBI is actively investigating Buric in the hope he can solve some other kidnapping cases, including the abduction of Kathryn McFarland. There’s an obvious connection to Frankie since Rena Harris was either his wife or girlfriend, and she believed Kit was the McFarlands’ daughter.”
Jake rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand. “Sounds like Buric was involved in a baby-smuggling ring.”
“Could be.”
“Or he was a serial kidnapper acting on his own,” Jake theorized. “Maybe he made enough on ransom money to keep him alive until he turned to other forms of crime.”
“There was never a ransom note for either the Talbot or McFarland babies.”
No ransom notes? “So how come the Talbot baby lived?” He said this more to himself than the other man.
“Agent Kelly has been asking the same question. Buric told him to look up an old newspaper story about a kidnapping in Rosemead, California, twenty-six years ago. That’s what led to the reunion of Kit, otherwise known as Melissa, to her birth parents. Mrs. Talbot identified Buric as the man who’d held a knife on her during the bank-robbery getaway and abducted her baby.”
Jake was taking all of this in. “Obviously something went wrong and he didn’t have a chance to kill the baby.”
“That’s my take on it.”
“What work records did Agent Kelly find on Buric?”
“He did laundry in various hotels across the country for temporary periods. But talking with the employers hasn’t given the agent a lead on the McFarland kidnapping.”
“Buric only worked in hotels?”
“I think so.”
Jake frowned. “Unless he used an alias that hasn’t turned up yet and went to work on a ship…”
There was always laundry personnel on a ship. Jake’s stint in the navy reminded him Buric might have signed on to a tanker or even a cruise ship for that kind of job. It was safe work. Offshore, a man could hide for years….
“I’ve faxed all of Agent Kelly’s information to the number you gave me, Jake.”
“Could you give me his phone number?”
“Sure.”
Jake wrote it down. “Thanks, Lewis. You’ve given me something to chew on.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I owe you.”
“Forget it. I owe Dan, so we’re even. Call me again if you need anything else.”
After they hung up, Jake phoned Agent Kelly. It was ten o’clock in California. This was too important to wait until morning.
A man’s work record was like a paper trail. It could lead nowhere. Then again, it might lead to an important clue.
Racine, Wisconsin
August 7
“HOW DO YOU DO, Ms. Buric. Please sit down.”
“Thank you for fitting me in so fast.”
Anna took a seat opposite the desk of the immigration attorney. Anxiety caused her heart to race.
“My secretary told me it was an emergency. I see your address is Skwars Farm near Caledonia.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a wonderful place Every fall my wife and I drive there to buy apples and those wonderful Czech wedding pastries.”
“You mean kilaches,” she said with a nod. “I bake them fresh every day.”
“Well, they’re mouthwatering. My compliments.”
“Thank you.”
“What can I do for you?”
She took a deep breath. “My cousin Julia Skwars suggested you might be the person who could help me, Mr. Markham. Have you ever had a client come to you who couldn’t prove who she was?”
The middle-aged lawyer studied her for a moment. “Yes. But with research, the necessary documentation finally came to light.”
“In my case, I’m afraid there isn’t any. The family I’ve been living with all my life hasn’t been able to come up with a birth certificate or a hospital record. All they can tell me is what they heard from their parents who heard it from their parents.”
Frowning, Mr. Markham reached for his yellow legal pad to take notes. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me what you do know about yourself.”
“For as long as I can remember I’ve lived at Skwars Farm. It’s a huge family business started by my great-grandmother’s brother, Jainos Skwars. When he came to America from Czechoslovakia and became a naturalized citizen, he settled in Wisconsin so he could farm. Then he sent for his wife and two children.
“They came with his sister Marie Skwars, my great-grandmother. But she married a man from New York City named Jan Buric, an engraver, and remained in New York where they became naturalized citizens.
“According to the family history, two of their children went to the Wisconsin farm one summer for a vacation. They ended up staying there to farm along with their cousins.
“Their third child, Vaclav, helped my great-grandfather, Jan Buric. When he passed away, Vaclav stayed in New York to run the family engraving business. He married a woman named Anna Ludmilla. The two of them died in a car accident, leaving two young sons, Franz and Antonin.”
The attorney kept on writing.
“My great-grandmother Marie ended up taking care of her grandsons, but Franz and Antonin got into a lot of trouble and ran away. She never saw Franz again, but Antonin showed up several years later with a wife, Leah, and a two-month old baby, Anna. I was that child.
“From what I understand, he asked my great-grandmother if Leah and I could stay with her while he went job hunting. It might take a week before he returned. Apparently she said it would be all right. A few days later Leah went out to get more milk for me and never came back.
“At that point my great-grandmother wrote her brother Jainos in Wisconsin and told him what had happened. He was ailing, so he sent his daughter Olga and her husband to come and get me and my great-grandmother. We ended up at the farm. Both Marie and Jainos died within a year of each other. I don’t remember them, of cou
rse.
“It’s Olga who was the closest thing to a grandmother to me. But she died, too. She has eleven brothers and sisters. Between them and my great-grandmother’s two children, who bought farmland next to them, I ended up with dozens of aunts and uncles and over a hundred cousins. They all helped raise me while we worked the farm.”
He stopped writing and looked up. “How old are you?”
“Because Olga remembered the year she went to New York with her husband to get me, I have to be twenty-six.”
“How have you lived all this time without a social-security number?”
“I never had a problem or was aware I had a problem because I worked in the farm bakery during high school where I didn’t need one.”
“Who claims you on their income tax?”
“No one.”
“What about a driver’s license?”
“I don’t have one.”
“What about a bank account?”
“I never needed one. I work in the family business. I know how much is in my savings. When I want money, I ask my Uncle Petr and he gives me cash for what I want.”
He sat forward. “Has your family prevented you from talking to the authorities about your problem?”
“Not at all. My cousin Josef was the one who urged me to seek out an attorney. It was his sister Julia who gave me your name for a reference.”
Anna related what Josef had told her last night. “They’ve always been fair and kind to me, Mr. Markham. Deep down everyone believes my father wasn’t a good man, but they would never say it to my face.
“They’ve tried to shield me by not talking about him or my mother and the way they abandoned me. Like my great-grandmother, I think there’s a part of them that hoped my parents would seek me out. Certainly I did.”
“So what has changed for you?”
“Nelly, my favorite cousin who has shared the same bedroom with me for the last two years, is getting married next week. She’s the only reason I hung on as long as I did. With her gone, I don’t want to stay on the farm. What I’d like to do is go to college, but I can’t do anything without a birth certificate.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “You have a real problem, all right. What troubles me are the people who were supposedly your parents. After what you’ve told me, I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“So do I,” she whispered. “Early this morning I put in an inquiry to the New York Bureau of Vital Statistics to see if there are marriage records on my parents, and a birth record on me.
“The family says they’ve never been able to get this information, but after what I learned last night, I had to try again. The thing is, after my talk with Josef, I’ve decided I could have been born anywhere.”
Mr. Markham shifted in his leather chair. “If your father was a drifter, it might account for the reason he left you with his grandmother. Perhaps he and your mother planned to join up later, perhaps not.”
“It’s hard to imagine parents doing that to their child, but I know it’s happened to other people.” Anna looked at the floor.
“More often than you would think. If he was in a lot of trouble as you’ve indicated, it’s my guess he was on the run with the woman who could have been his wife or a girlfriend. A baby would have held them up, so he turned to his grandmother before disappearing.”
“I’m wondering if he went back to the Czech Republic where he couldn’t be traced.”
“It’s possible, but not likely.”
“Why not?” This was all very confusing for Anna.
“For one thing, American citizenship is a precious commodity. For another, if he was in trouble with the law, he would want to avoid any entanglements, especially with the immigration authorities.
“My guess is that if he’s still alive, he’s probably operating under an alias somewhere in the U.S. in case he didn’t want the family to find him. You said he had a brother who was in trouble and disappeared, too. Maybe they moved around together.”
“I have no idea.”
“What was his brother’s name again?”
“Franz.”
He adjusted his glasses. “Do you know the date you and your great-grandmother left for Wisconsin?”
“Olga said she and her husband came for us around the first of July. It had to be then, before the main harvest started.”
“So if you were with your great-grandmother a month or so, you would have been around three months old by the time you arrived at the farm?”
“Something like that. What are you thinking?”
“Several things. Maybe you weren’t his baby. Maybe you were kidnapped and the woman was his accomplice.”
She shivered. “I’ve thought of that. I never told anyone this before, but I don’t really resemble any of my family, young or old.”
After her comment he said, “There’s another possibility.”
“What?”
“About twenty-five or -six years ago there was an illegal baby-adoption ring operating in New York City. Before it was closed down and arrests were made, it was discovered they’d brought in over a hundred Czech mothers with newborns.
“They came in via Canada where immigration laws were lax. Those children were adopted by wealthy couples from all over the nation willing to pay as much as fifty thousand dollars for a white baby. The adoptive parents were told they had to pay extra for the nannies who brought the children from Czechoslovakia. In reality those women were the mothers wanting asylum and willing to give up their babies for enough money to survive here.”
“You think Leah was one of those women?” Anna cried softly.
“It’s just a theory, but not an implausible one.”
“Then maybe Antonin wasn’t my father. Maybe my birth father could still be in the Czech Republic!”
“Maybe. But at this point you have no way of knowing the men she’d been with. Your birth father might have been another nationality altogether.
“If the man you thought was your father had been involved in this adoption ring, he could have used his grandmother’s home for a holding tank until the adoptive parents came through with the money.”
“But something went wrong?” Anna hadn’t realized she’d said this aloud.
He nodded. “When he didn’t come back, the woman panicked and fled, leaving you behind. But let’s assume for the moment your great-grandmother believed you were her flesh and blood and had no idea he’d lied to her about the baby’s paternity. Naturally, she kept you and did the best she could for you.”
“If that’s the case, how am I ever going to prove who I am?”
“Don’t worry. Wherever the true answer lies, be assured I’m going to help you get legal. Give me a week to work on this and then I’ll contact you. Let me have a phone number and address.”
Once Anna had given him the information, she said, “I don’t have a lot of money. The best I can do is pay you on a monthly basis. Will that be all right?”
“Certainly. To be honest, my biggest concern is helping you be able to join the world so you can go to college or do anything else you want.”
He smiled as he said it, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Because of a force beyond your control, you’ve been obliged to live a very different life.”
“If by that you mean I wasn’t raised by my birth parents, then you’re right. But Olga loved me, and the others have been nice, kind people to me. They’d do anything for anybody because it’s in their nature. Every time I think about that, I’m thankful for the life I do have.”
After a long silence he said, “You’re a remarkable woman, Ms. Buric, and a strong one. I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
“Thank you very much.”
She turned to leave but he called her back.
“Do you have a picture of yourself with you?”
“No, but I’ll bring one to you tomorrow when I come to town with Nelly to do some shopping.”
“It would help if you brought all pictures of you,
and any of Franz, Antonin, your grandparents and great-grandparents. The FBI will be interested in anything you can contribute to help them solve your case.”
“The FBI?”
“Yes. They’re the people who can find the answers, given time.”
“My relatives won’t get into trouble, will they?”
“I doubt it, but the authorities will be making a visit to your uncle Petr since he’s the one paying you from the family business. I have no idea what will happen from there.”
She had to trust him. “Don’t let them come until Nelly’s wedding is over.”
“When is it?”
“August twelfth.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be by again tomorrow with everything I can gather.”
“Good.” He got up from his desk and walked her to the door.
Anna felt his eyes on her back as she walked down the hall past the receptionist. She had an idea he believed she’d been sold through that baby ring or kidnapped. She believed the same thing. At this point she had little hope she would ever be united with her birth parents.
CHAPTER FOUR
Salt Lake City
August 9
“…AND IN THIS CASE,” Maggie said as she put another legal brief in front of Steve, “I asked the court to strip off the wholly unsecured fourth lien. Because the creditor failed to appear, I filed a default judgment.”
“How did that go?”
“The bankruptcy court denied the motion based on the Nobelman case. I filed an appeal and I’m waiting for the bankruptcy appellate panel to reverse the court’s holding.”
“Which they should do because the bankruptcy code’s antimodification provision doesn’t protect secured credits holding completely unsecured claims.”
“That’s ten cases you already have a grasp on. I’m impressed, Steve. But I’m going to ask you one more time. Is this what you want to do? Move to Salt Lake and clerk for me?”
“Come on, Maggie,” he half laughed as he spoke. “You know the answer to that.”
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