Listening to the story as I relayed it to him, I could still see a certain logic in play. My prime assumption had been wrong, but there were pieces that still intrigued me, even at this late date. Ulf, the wolfdog. The similarities between the two crimes. The ransom demands that totaled forty grand. I couldn’t see the links, but they had to be there.

Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”

“Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”

“Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand might have seemed like a fortune.”

“Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them . . .”

Henry frowned. “How?”

“Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”

“They must have figured it out.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”

“Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”

Henry said, “I’ll tell you something else that just occurred to me. Suppose when Sutton stumbled into the clearing, the two weren’t digging the hole to bury a child. What if their intent was to bury the tainted money?”

I stared at him. “And they buried the dog instead? How’d they manage that?”

“Simple. One stays in the woods to keep an eye on the site. The other goes off, steals the dog’s corpse, and brings it back. They drop the mutt in that hole and hide the money somewhere else.”

“How’d they know about the dead dog?”

“Beats me,” he said. “You told me yourself that a couple of hundred people could have known about the shed and the pickup routine.”