“Three times. The Unruhs insisted on being there, which was fine with us. We didn’t want any suggestion that the child was being coached or intimidated. After the second interview, we weren’t getting anything we hadn’t heard before.”

“Nothing useful at all?”

“Nothing that went anywhere. She talked about the yellow kitten, which is how they snagged her cooperation in the first place. She said she slept in a big cardboard box that they’d done up like a little house with windows cut into it. When she woke up, she played with the kitten or the paper and crayons that had been left for her.”

“Deborah says one of the kidnappers was dressed as Santa Claus.”

“Same thing Rain told us. She said there were two of them and one was fat and had a long white beard. The other one had glasses with paper eyes and a big nose attached.”

“Which I assume was a novelty item.”

“Exactly. We showed her a pair from a local costume shop and she recognized them right off. The shop had no record of a recent sale, but an item like that could have been ordered from the back of a comic book.”

“Was she scared?”

He shook his head. “She said she liked Santa Claus. She’d sat on his lap before. When she asked where her mommy was, he said she’d be back in a bit and then he had Rain drink her lemonade and she went back to sleep. The naps were short and from what she says, she did a lot of bouncing around.”

“In the box?”

Dolan nodded. “They’d made up a little bed for her. They told her it was a playhouse just for her.”

“What about the blanket? Deborah says she was found in the park on a picnic table, covered with a blanket.”

“No help. It was the kind wrapped in plastic on airplane seats.

There are thousands of them out there. Pan Am, in case you’re wondering which airline. That’s as far as we got.”

“And in all of this, no fingerprints?”

“The only print we ever picked up was on the back of a ransom note after Mary Claire was taken. We’ve run it half a dozen times and we’ve never found a match.”

“What about suspects? You must have had your eye on someone,” I said.