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?”