by Ace Collins
“I think she’s just plain tuckered out,” the heavyset, middle-aged woman answered. “I can’t find anything else bothering her. Does she have a weak heart or anything?”
What had they done to her? Had she been assaulted? George studied his wife carefully. Her breathing was regular, but she was so pale. There were no bruises or obvious signs of violence. It was just as if she was asleep. Had they drugged her? Maybe that was it! Glancing back to the woman who’d been caring for Carole, he shook his head. “She’s never had any health problems at all,” he choked out. “What did they do to her?”
The kindly woman with deep blue eyes and salt and pepper hair smiled, “Well, it looked like she had walked a long way down the road. Maybe she’s just wore out. Has she had anything to eat today?”
“No,” George answered, his eyes going back to his wife. “Neither of us has eaten much this week.” He ran his hand over Carole’s cheek. Maybe Rose could tell him. He needed to see his little girl, give her a hug, and ask what happened to her mommy. Looking back toward a man in overalls standing in the archway between the living room and kitchen, he asked, “Where’s my child? The little girl about three who was with my wife?”
The man slowly shook his head. “I only saw the woman.”
“What?” George asked, his voice rising.
The man again shook his head.
What had happened? Why hadn’t she gotten Rose? Glancing back to Carole, tears now filling his eyes and panic squeezing his heart, he pleaded, “What happened? Where is she? You have to wake up!”
Looking back toward the farmer the now unhinged husband cried, “What about a car, a yellow Packard sedan?”
“I saw it at the picnic grounds earlier this morning,” the man assured him. “That was the first time I saw your wife. She was walking south. I tried to give her a ride, but she refused. Said she needed the exercise. The car was there then, but not when I returned. And it wasn’t on the side of the road between there and here either. Did you two have some kind of fight?”
“No,” George answered, “we had something much worse.”
The room was silent for a few moments. Finally, Carole opened her eyes and weakly whispered, “She wasn’t there.”
George nodded. He didn’t have to hear anymore, he knew what she meant.
Jenny Willis leaned closer and asked, “Who wasn’t there?”
“Our daughter,” he softly replied, tears clouding his eyes. “Somebody took her. They were supposed to give her back if we gave them five thousand dollars. It seems they took the money and our car but didn’t bring us our Rose.”
“We should call the sheriff,” the farmer matter-of-factly said.
“Use our phone,” the woman suggested. “Better call Dr. Russell, too.”
“They didn’t leave her,” Carole moaned. “George, what did we do wrong? I tried to follow their directions. I really did. What did I do wrong?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he replied. “Did they take the money? What about the car?”
“Oh, George,” she whimpered, “I messed up. They took it or at least someone took it. And they still have Rose. What does it mean?”
He patted her hand and shook his head. Yet as he stared into her round face he saw nothing. The nightmare he thought would soon be over had just begun. This nightmare might never end.
Chapter 27
Henry Reese was thirty-five. With a rock-solid jaw and his blocky build, he would have been at home playing for the Bears. While he did play football when getting his degree from Iowa, his focus had always been the law. After passing the bar, the six-foot-two-inch, black-haired man worked for the Windy City’s district attorney for six years before joining the FBI. His singular determination and clear view of right and wrong made him perfect for the bureau.
While Reese, with his good looks and dark brown eyes, was the Hollywood mold for a G-man, the other investigator was just the opposite. Helen Meeker could have been a model. With her piercing blue eyes, auburn hair, and willowy frame, she would have turned heads in showrooms in New York or Paris. But her father had been a skilled prosecutor and her grandfather a homicide detective, so Helen naturally followed in their footsteps. She graduated at the top of her class from New York University at just eighteen and received her law degree from Columbia when she was twenty. As the FBI only took single men as agents, Helen had to use her father’s impressive contacts to knock down the bureau’s door.
J. Edgar Hoover was opposed to her working in any capacity with the bureau, but Meeker didn’t let that fact stop her from getting to where she wanted to be. When Hoover turned her down on the grounds that women would not be a part of his organization, she went to work for the Secret Service. Within a year she was assigned to the White House and renewed a family friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. On a lunch date with the First Lady, she explained her dream of working as an FBI agent. Eleanor took her pleas to her husband. As Franklin was already impressed with Meeker’s work as a part of his staff, he didn’t put up much of a fight before calling Hoover and ordering him to participate in what Eleanor called “The Grand Experiment.” Thus Meeker, though technically still employed by the Secret Service and under the supervision of the President, was on loan to the FBI, where she essentially had all the powers of any other agent. When this case, involving the kidnapping of a little girl, fell into the FBI’s lap, she called Eleanor again, and that led to Meeker and her partner being assigned as the lead investigators. The determined twenty-eight-year-old woman was on a plane to Chicago within two hours of getting the assignment. Now she stood at the picnic area with Henry Reese.
“They were so stupid,” Reese barked. “If they’d called us in the minute she was taken, we might have the kid back now.”
As Meeker watched the rest of the FBI team search the site for evidence, she nodded. He was right, but she also understood why many folks wouldn’t make that call. Fear often overcame logic even in smart people when their child was involved. She’d seen it happen on at least one other occasion. Besides there was no time to blame the parents—a child’s life was at stake. Clues had to be found, and the puzzle of who took the girl, why it happened, and where she was now had to be put together. The clock was ticking.
Meeker marched through knee-high grass to a place on the far side of the car. An Indiana state trooper was on his hands and knees studying the ground. She allowed him to work for a few more seconds before asking, “Any blood or signs of violence?”
He shook his head. Strolling back over to Reese, she looked down the road in both directions before mumbling, “What would they need with the car?”
“What?” he shot back.
“The car. It makes no sense.” Turning to where their eyes met, she added, “The only thing I can think of is the fear of fingerprints or other evidence that they might have left when picking up the money. Did they hot-wire it, or did the mother leave the keys?”
Reese shrugged. “They likely hot-wired it, though in questioning the victim’s father I found out there was an extra set of keys hidden under the mat. So they might have found those and used them.”
Meeker’s blue eyes shot back to the road. “Have they searched the ditches and fields between here and the next towns?”
“They have, and they found nothing.”
She crossed her arms over her dark blue coat; something wasn’t right. The case didn’t fit the norm. No one kidnapped a girl from a middle-class family. After all, money was the motive in crimes like this, and risking the death house over five thousand was simply not logical. She marched back to where a dozen agents were carefully studying the spot where the car had been parked.
“What about the car?” she barked. “What do we know about it?”
Reese walked up beside her and shoved a piece of paper into her hand, “Here is the license number. It was a 1936 Packard four-door sedan in very good condition. There was no body damage. They family tells me it looked almost new. It was an eight cylinder model.”
> “That limits our search to tens of thousands of vehicles,” the woman complained. “I know that fact from having walked through the Packard plant back in 1936. It was their most popular model. The license plate will surely be switched, so not much to go on.”
“There is one unique thing about the vehicle,” Reese cut in. “It’s bright yellow.”
Meeker turned as if to study her partner, but she didn’t see him. Her eyes were focused on something that happened almost four years before. Could this yellow Packard be the same one that had stopped the assembly line the day of her visit?
“You said bright yellow?” she almost whispered.
“It is supposedly a one-of-a-kind yellow,” Reese explained. “The owners never saw another one like it.”
Meeker walked back toward Reese’s Ford sedan. As she leaned against the fender, she once more studied the spot where the Halls’ car had been taken. Could this Packard be the same one she’d encountered at the plant? Could this same car have now been involved in two tragedies? What were the odds?
“We need to talk to the parents. Maybe they can offer us something.”
“The father was taken to Chicago this morning,” he explained. “We can interview him at the FBI headquarters there.”
Opening the passenger-side door, Meeker slid into the seat. As her partner ran around the front of the Ford, she took one final look at the crime scene. She prayed that the missing girl was alive, but in her heart she doubted that to be true, and she wondered how the parents would ever cope if that was the case.
Chapter 28
Meeker knew the type well. She figured George Hall for a small-town boy who had no real interest in the big city, unless it was a day trip to watch the Cubs. On top of losing his daughter and dealing with a wife who might well be suffering a complete breakdown and was under doctors’ care and on sedatives, he found himself in FBI headquarters in an office with four other people. Two he at least knew. On the suggestion of the FBI, Samuel Johns and Jed Atkins, the local sheriff, had driven up from Oakwood to sit in on the meeting. The other two in the small office on the seventh floor of the Illinois headquarters of the FBI were complete strangers. Now, as the quintet sat down at a conference table, it was time to see if Hall knew anything he hadn’t shared with the field agents.
“Mr. Hall,” Meeker began, “we have no time for formalities. Our people on the scene have given me the little information they could piece together. We visited the scene as well, and I have read your and your wife’s statements. I’m hoping, as is Agent Reese, that we can come up with something the others might have missed in earlier interviews. My first question is very simple.” She paused and licked her lips. “Why didn’t you contact us when your daughter was taken?”
George looked down at the oak table and shook his head. He didn’t look up when he mumbled his explanation, “The note said not to. I was just doing what I was told.” He finally turned his gaze toward the FBI agent, tears in his eyes, and sobbed. “If I called the authorities they told me they would kill Rose.”
Reese, his voice firm and unapologetic, stepped into the dialogue. “And that is what they always say. Did you ever hear you daughter on the phone calls, or were you given any proof that she was alive?”
“No,” George admitted.
Meeker jumped back in, “From your earlier interview, you seem to believe that the kidnappers thought you had money because of the advertisements you did for the Packard Company. Is that right?”
“What else could it be?” George replied. “Neither Carole’s nor my family have any money. This was all just a big mistake.”
Meeker nodded, glanced over to her partner, and signaled for him to follow her to the window. The two got up and moved across the room. They turned their backs to the others and spoke in hushed tones so that their visitors couldn’t hear.
“Any word on the car?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “It’s as if it disappeared into thin air.”
“Kind of hard to hide a bright yellow Packard,” she observed.
“But there’re a lot of barns in Indiana, and we have no probable cause to search any of them.”
Meeker stared out the seventh floor window at the Chicago skyline, but she saw none of it. The only thing she saw was a frightened little girl desperately wanting her parents. The image was so sharp and defined she could almost hear her cries. But too much time had passed since the girl had been taken. The delay in calling them in on the case not only put them in a deep hole but also likely meant the young girl was dead. What a senseless tragedy. Something that might have been avoided if the flower shop’s phone line had just been tapped when the kidnapper called.
“Any leads on where the ransom calls came from?” Meeker asked.
“There are no records that we’ve found that indicate they were long distance.”
She nodded. That wasn’t unusual—most kidnapping victims were known by those who kidnapped them. In fact, the child’s body, if she was dead, was likely very close to the family’s home.
“Henry,” Meeker whispered, “something really bothers me here. Hall thinks this is tied to the mistaken impression that he had money. Yet if someone local pulled the job, they would have been aware the family didn’t have five thousand dollars to their names. There is something we are missing here. There has to be another reason for setting this whole thing up.”
“Are you thinking,” Reese grimly whispered, glancing over her shoulder to make sure those sitting at the table couldn’t hear them, “that we’re dealing with a sicko who likes little girls?”
“Could be.” She cringed as the words came out of her mouth. “We need to check and see if there are any ex-cons with that kind of record living in the area who might have spotted Rose and pegged her to grab.”
“If that is the case,” Reese soberly added, “then the money would have been a ruse.”
“Could be,” she agreed, “or the icing on the cake. They get what they want, and the cash as a bonus. Five thousand seems like such a small amount when being caught buys the person a ticket to the electric chair. Logic tells me they would have gone after someone with a lot more ready cash if it were just kidnapping.”
Turning and striding back to the table, Meeker opened the file and studied Hall’s statement one more time. Taking a seat, she drummed her fingers for a few seconds, her nails clicking like the keys of a typewriter, before looking back to the distraught man.
“Mr. Hall, you said in your previous interview you found ten one-hundred-dollar bills you needed to make the down payment on the flower shop. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Well, actually Rose found them beside the garage door.”
She quickly looked to the sheriff. “Anyone report a robbery or losing any C-notes?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Nothing that we know of. Since we got word of the kidnapping I’ve made a lot of calls, and no one reported any money missing. It seemed the cash literally fell out of midair.”
“And no more was found?” she asked.
Atkins and Hall shook their heads.
“Henry, why don’t you get a team down there to really look over that garage. See if you can find any more cash. Look under the floor, in the rafters, everywhere.”
“You thinking,” the other agent chimed in, “there could be a connection to a larger chunk of cash?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m grasping at straws. I mean, why kidnap the kid rather than just grab the loot from where it was hidden?” She drummed her fingers for a few more moments and added, “Unless they didn’t know where it was hidden.”
“I’m following you,” Atkins said. “An old bank job or a robbery where the loot was never recovered. Maybe part of the gang that pulled the job got double-crossed somehow and came back looking for it. So when those bills showed up, they assumed George found the cash.”
George’s eyes widened at the comment. “So, what are you saying?”
“Then,”
Reese added, ignoring Hall, “we need to go through local and state records, as well as those of the Treasury Department and the FBI, and try to find a robbery where five thousand dollars was taken.”
“No,” Meeker corrected him, “more than that. The kidnapper knew that a thousand had been spent on the down payment. They couldn’t get that back, so they opted for what was left.”
“A kidnapping as a cover for the recovering of stolen loot,” Reese noted, “that’s a new one on me.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Meeker explained. “In fact it makes a lot more sense than this kidnapping than if they had just demanded the five thousand out of Mr. Hall; he’d have gone straight to the police. But if you steal the kid, make it look like a kidnapping, then the family is much more likely to produce the cash and not involve us. And when you think about it, it worked perfectly.”
The room grew suddenly silent as each of the five considered the theory. It was George who finally posed the haunting question that demanded an answer. His voice shaky and tired, he asked, “So this had nothing to do with anything Carole and I did?”
Meeker’s businesslike tone grew soft and compassionate. “Probably not. How long have you lived in your home?”
“A couple of years.”
She looked toward Johns and Atkins. “Did either of your know the people who lived there before the Halls?”
Johns nodded. “The Casons were there for about ten years or so. They built the house.”
“What kind of people were they?” Meeker asked.
“Good folks,” Johns replied. “Went to church, helped in the community. Ben was a car salesman at the Ford house. They had three kids, all of them graduated from high school.”
“You’re almost right about them being a good family,” Atkins noted, “but you forgot about Milt. He got into a couple of scrapes when he was in his late teens. Ran around with a rough crowd in Danville. Spent a few months in the county jail before joining the military.”
