U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

“What’d they feed her?”

“Nothing fancy. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

“And as far as she knew, she hadn’t encountered either one before?”

“Nope. They were either smarter than we thought or the luckiest sons of bitches on the planet.”

“You’re convinced there were only two?”

“Two would have been optimal; one on the phone to the mother while the other took the kid. If more guys had been involved, we might have had a better chance for a break. With three or four guys, somebody’s bound to blab or start throwing money around.”

For the next twenty minutes we kept the subject afloat, like a badminton cock being lobbed back and forth over a net. With the right mix of minds, tossing ideas around can be productive, not to mention endlessly entertaining.

“Deborah tells me Patrick photocopied the bills and marked them before he paid.”

“She told us as well. We made photocopies of his copies and sent ’em out to all the banks and savings and loans. Businesses, too, for all the good it did.”

“They could have circulated the money somewhere else.”

“Or they might not have spent a dime. In effect, the ransom was radioactive. Not literally, of course.”

“I got that,” I said. “So far, I haven’t talked to Mrs. Fitzhugh because I didn’t want to intrude. You think I should contact her?”

“She’ll probably get in touch with you. That’s how this whole thing got started. She’s been calling me once or twice a year for the last twenty-one years, asking for updates. I told her we had nothing new as far as I was aware, but I’d check with Cheney Phillips and get back to her. That’s when I heard Michael Sutton had come in and Cheney’d sent him over to you.”

Stacey said, “What about this Sutton kid? How solid is his claim? He sounds like a nutcase to me.”

I had to shrug. “Well, it’s really not such a stretch. He was playing on a property owned by a family named Kirkendall, just up the hill from the Unruhs. As Dolan says, there are horse trails running through that area. The spot where he saw them digging was not far from the horse trough off Via Juliana.”

“You believe him?”

“What he says makes sense. He sees the two guys and they see him so they know they’ve been busted. They can’t count on a little kid to keep his mouth shut so they swap out the little girl’s body for the dog’s. That way if he properly identifies the place, it looks like he’s made a mistake.”

“Why’d they choose that property?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” I said. “It might have been an attempt to point a finger at Shelly and Greg. The Unruhs were convinced the pair had a hand in it because the total they asked for—adding Rain’s ransom to the demand made of the Fitzhughs—was forty thousand dollars, exactly what Greg’s grandfather left for him in trust.”

Dolan said, “That’s a detail I find puzzling—and this has bugged me for years—a ransom demand for fifteen thousand dollars seems odd to me. Even a forty-thousand total seems screwy. Why not a hundred thousand? Better yet, half a million? Why risk the electric chair for chump change? I mean, who kidnaps a kid and asks for so little?”

“I’ll tell you who,” Stacey said. “Amateurs, that’s who. Which is why they never tried it again. The second kidnap blew up in their faces and that was the end of it. Two career criminals cured of the urge. Speaking of which, I’m out of here. You come up with anything good, you can wake me later on.”

“I have a question before you go,” I said. “Have either of you ever run across a Lompoc PI named Hale Brandenberg?”

Stacey said, “Sure, I know Hale. He started out about the same time I did, only he was younger by a goodly number of years.”

“You think he’s still around?”

“Last I heard. You want to talk to him?”

“I’d love to. It’s not about this case. It’s something else.”

“Let me make a few calls and see if I can find out where he ended up.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

Saturday morning I slept in until 8:00, a luxury for me. My breakfast meeting with Rain was scheduled for 9:00, which gave me time to dawdle over the newspaper and my first cup of coffee. Once I’d showered and dressed, I walked two blocks over to Cabana and two blocks down. On the beach I could see where ropes of kelp had washed up on the sand. The tide was going out and the waves rushed forward and then receded, tugging the gray-green fronds into the depths again. The wind was up and I could see whitecaps ruffling the water beyond the surf. In the harbor the masts of sailboats swayed back and forth in a rhythm of their own. Countless gulls formed a gray funnel cloud and descended on the beach, two of them squabbling over an abandoned cellophane bag half filled with Cheetos. The public swimming pool was still closed for the season and the children’s play area was deserted.