Two Little Girls in Blue (15 page)

Dr. Harris was sitting erect in the wing chair, her hands clasped in her lap. There was no sign of fatigue in either her posture or expression. It had occurred to Carlson that this must be the way she looked when she was sitting with a desperately sick patient. A calm and calming presence, he thought. Just what was needed.

Despite trying to sound encouraging, he knew that every passing minute suggested that they would not hear from the kidnappers. The Pied Piper told me that sometime after midnight we'd get a call about where to pick up the twins. Steve's right. They've had the money for hours. For all we know the twins are already dead.

Franklin Bailey heard their voices on Tuesday, he
thought. That means we know that a day and a half ago the girls were alive, because they talked about seeing their parents on television. That is, if we believe Bailey's story.

As the hours wore on, a hunch had been taking shape in Carlson's mind, the kind of gut-level hunch that had served him well throughout his twenty years with the Bureau. The hunch was to check out Lucas Wohl, the ubiquitous chauffeur who so conveniently happened to be parked exactly where he could observe the kidnappers carrying the money, and then could give a description of the car they were supposedly driving.

Carlson conceded that maybe it was exactly as Bailey had claimed, that while he was being driven around in the Excel car, he had received instructions from the Pied Piper about where Lucas should meet him and that he had relayed those instructions to Lucas. But the now persistent thought that kept biting at him was that perhaps Bailey had made fools of them.

Angus Sommers, the FBI agent in charge of the New York group, had driven up with Bailey and was convinced he and the chauffeur were on the level. Even so, Carlson decided, he was going to put in a call to Connor Ryan, Special Agent in Charge in New Haven, and Carlson's immediate boss. Ryan was in his office now with his guys, ready to jump if the word came that the twins had been left in the northern part of Connecticut. He could start doing a rundown on Lucas immediately.

Margaret was slowly pulling herself up. She brushed
back her hair with a gesture so weary that Carlson thought the effort to raise her arm was almost too much for her to make. “When you spoke to the Pied Piper, didn't he say that he would call around midnight?” she asked.

There was no answer to give her except the truth: “Yes, he did.”

C
lint knew they were nearing La Cantina Restaurant and was worried about overshooting it. With narrowed eyes, he anxiously scanned the right side of the parkway. He had spotted the state trooper patrol car and dropped back to make sure the cop didn't get the idea he was following Lucas. Now Lucas was out of sight.

Angie was sitting beside him, rocking the sick kid in her arms. Since the minute they set foot in the van, she'd been singing the same “Two Little Girls in Blue” song over and over and over again.
“ ‘But . . . we . . . have . . . drifted . . . apart,' ”
she crooned now, drawing out the last line.

Was that Lucas's car up ahead? Clint wondered. No it wasn't.

“ ‘Two little girls in blue, lad,' ”
Angie began again.

“Angie, I wish you'd quit that damn singing,” Clint snapped.

“Kathy likes me to sing to her,” Angie retorted, her voice steely.

Clint glanced nervously at her. There was something strange about Angie tonight. She was in one of her crazy moods. When they'd gone into the bedroom to get the kids, he had seen that one of them was sleeping
with a sock tied around her mouth. When he started to take it off, Angie had grabbed his hand. “I don't need her hollering in the van.” Then Angie insisted that he put that kid on the floor of the backseat and cover her with an open newspaper.

His protest that she might suffocate had set Angie off. “She's not going to suffocate, and if by any chance we hit some kind of roadblock, we don't need to have the cops looking at identical twins.”

The other kid, the one Angie was holding, was kind of restless and whimpering. It was a good thing that she'd be back with the parents soon. You didn't have to be a doctor to see that she was pretty sick.

That building had to be the restaurant, Clint decided as he peered ahead. He edged the car into the right lane. He could feel perspiration begin to drip from all over his body. It was always like this at a crisis point in a job. He drove past the restaurant and turned right into the driveway beside it, then made another right into the parking lot behind. He could see that Lucas had stopped close to the building, so he pulled up directly behind him.

“ ‘They were sisters . . . ' ”
Angie sang, her voice suddenly louder.

In her arms, Kathy stirred and began to cry. From the floor of the backseat, Kelly's muffled whimper echoed her sister's tired protest at being awakened.

“Shut up!” Clint pleaded. “If Lucas opens the door and hears you making noise, there's no telling what he'll do to you.”

Abruptly, she stopped singing. “I'm not afraid of him. Here, hold her.” With a swift movement she thrust Kathy into his arms, opened the door, ran up to the driver's door of the stolen car, and rapped on the window.

As Clint watched, Lucas rolled down the window, and Angie leaned inside the car. An instant later, a loud bang that could only be caused by a gunshot echoed through the deserted parking lot.

Angie ran back to the van, opened the back door, and grabbed Kelly.

Still too numb to move or speak, Clint saw her deposit Kelly in the backseat of the stolen car and get in the front seat on the passenger side. When she came back she was holding both of Lucas's cell phones and a ring of keys. “When the Pied Piper calls, we have to be able to answer,” she told him, her voice warm and bubbly.

“You killed Lucas!” Clint said numbly, his arms still around Kathy, whose crying had again dissolved into a coughing fit.

Angie took Kathy from him. “He left a note. It's typed on the same typewriter as the ransom note. It says that he didn't mean to kill Kathy. She was crying so much he put his hand over her mouth and when he realized she was dead he put her in a box and flew out over the ocean and dumped it. Wasn't that a good idea? I had to make it look like he committed suicide. Now we have the whole million dollars, and
I
have my baby. Come on. Let's get out of here.”

Suddenly panicking, Clint turned on the engine and floored the gas.

“Slow up, you stupid jerk,” Angie snapped, the bubbly tone vanishing from her tone. “Just drive your family home, nice and easy.”

As he turned back onto the highway, Angie began to sing again, this time sotto voce:
“ ‘They were sisters . . . but they have drifted apart.' ”

T
he lights had been burning all night in the executive offices of the C.F.G.&Y. building on Park Avenue. Some of the members of the board of directors had kept the vigil, wanting to be part of the triumphant return of the Frawley twins to the arms of their parents.

Everyone was keenly aware that the Pied Piper had promised that once the cash ransom had been successfully paid, he would make contact around midnight. As the hours after midnight wore on, the anticipation of generous press coverage and a huge public relations boost for the firm changed to worry and doubt.

Robinson Geisler knew that a number of newspapers had editorialized that paying a ransom was playing into the hands of kidnappers, thus making everyone vulnerable to becoming victims of copycat criminals.

Ransom,
the Glenn Ford film in which the father sits in a television studio at a table piled with stacks of bills and warns the kidnappers that he will not pay the ransom, but instead will use that money to track them down, was being played on a number of TV channels. The happy ending in that movie was that the child was released unharmed. Would there be a happy ending to
this
story?

At five
A.M.
Geisler went into his private bathroom, showered and shaved, and changed his clothes. He remembered that the late Bennett Cerf, whom he had enjoyed watching on television, always looked as if he had stepped out of a bandbox. Cerf often wore a bow tie. Would it be too much to wear a bow tie when they film me with the twins? he wondered.

Of course it would. But a red tie always suggested optimism, even victory. He chose one from his closet.

He went back to his desk and rehearsed aloud the victory speech he would give to the media. “Paying the ransom may seem to some to be cooperating with criminals. Talk to any FBI agent and they will tell you that their first concern is always to get the victims back. Only then can they relentlessly pursue the criminals. The example these criminals will set is not that they received ransom money, but that they never got a chance to spend it.”

Let Gregg Stanford top
that,
he thought with a thin smile.

“T
he first thing we've gotta do is get rid of his car,” Angie said matter-of-factly as they drove into Danbury. “First we get his share of the money out of the trunk of his car, then you drive it back and park it in front of his apartment. I'll be right behind you.”

“We're not going to get away with this, Angie. You can't hide the kid forever.”

“Yes, I can.”

“Somebody might connect Lucas to us. Once they take his fingerprints, they'll figure out that the real Lucas Wohl's been dead for twenty years, and this guy's real name was Jimmy Nelson, and he was in prison. And I was his cellmate.”

“So your real name isn't Clint Downes. But who else knows that? The only time you and Lucas were together was when you met for a job. The only times he came to the house were these past few weeks at night.”

“He came yesterday afternoon when he picked up all that stuff.”

“Even if somebody saw his car turn into the service road of the club, do you think they thought, ‘Hey, there goes Lucas in his old brown Ford that looks like every other old brown Ford on the road'? It might be different
if he came over in the limo. We know he never called you on the special phone, and now I've got it.”

“I
still
think . . .”

“I still think we've got a million bucks, and I've got the baby I want, and that creep who always treated us like dirt is out of the way with his head on the steering wheel, so shut up.”

At five after five, the special phone the Pied Piper had given Lucas began to ring. They had just pulled into the driveway at the cottage. Clint looked at the phone. “What are you going to tell him?”

“We're not going to answer,” Angie said with a smirk. “Let him think we're still on the highway and maybe talking to a cop.” She tossed him a set of keys. “These are his. Let's get rid of his car.”

At five twenty, Clint parked Lucas's car in front of the hardware store. On the second floor a faint glow showed through the shaded window. Lucas had left a light on for himself.