He looked a question at me. I unpeeled the label carefully, handed it over.
“Vancouver. I was there once for a tournament. It’s … Wait a minute, this isn’t Vancouver in Canada, it’s in Washington State.”
“Yeah.”
“And she had a whole roll of these labels?”
“Uh-huh. Probably printed them up herself, on a home computer. Pretty handy things to have if you’re remailing everything that comes in. They probably send everything back to her, too. That way, there’s a local postmark on everything.”
“You put it all back the way you—?” He caught my expression, cut himself off in mid-sentence. “Can you hang around another couple of days?”
“I’m in no hurry,” I told him.
The bar was in a part of Chicago called Uptown. Clancy was at a table with two other guys, one built like a bull, with “COP!” written all over his face, the other a young blond guy with Slavic cheekbones and the flat expression of a working thug. They both spent about a minute memorizing my face, not making any secret about what they were doing.
“See you later,” the big one said, as he got up to leave. He might have been talking to anyone at the table.
The younger one got up, too. He didn’t say a word.
“Friends of yours?” I asked Clancy.
“Good friends.”
“They both on the job?”
“Mike is. Zeffa was,” he said, explaining the pistol I’d seen in her purse. “Zak isn’t.”
“The kid? What’s he, between jobs?”
“He’s a writer,” Clancy said, pride strong in his voice. “In fact, both of them are.”
“They’re here gathering local color?”
“No,” cutting it off.
“It’s your car,” I told him. “And you’re driving.”
“Here’s what I got,” Clancy said, getting down to it. “The little boy’s mother reported him missing on June 29, 1990. His DOB’s April 4, 1986, so he’d just turned four. No signs of a ransom kidnap—and no note ever turned up. The parents were together, so it wasn’t one of those custody grabs. Whoever took him came right into the back of the house. Like with Polly Klaas, only nobody actually saw this one go down.”
“Or found a body.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Or the dirtbag who did it, either. None of the kid’s possessions were missing. You know how it works after that: they checked the kid’s friends, used the search-and-rescue dogs working off his scent, combed the maximum area a kid his age could travel by himself … everything. Finally, he went from missing to missing- and-presumed.”
“Presumed dead?”
“Not necessarily. But with no ransom note, no contact from anyone, and no body, we figured it for a sex- snatch. And that maybe the kid was still alive. Some of them turn up, even a lot of years later, like the Stayner kid out in California. If we haven’t found a body, the BOLOs stay out there for every confirmed abduction, no-clues disappearance.
I took a sip of my ginger ale, thinking Wolfe was right—this was a personal thing with Clancy. “When does school let out around here?” I asked him.
He gave me a sharp look. “End of May,” he said.
I gave him a neutral look back.
“Yeah,” he said, quietly. “And it was broad daylight, that time of year.” He put two fingers to his forehead. “It wasn’t my case.”
“I know. When did the Gee come in?”
“Maybe a week later. The record’s not clear.”
“I saw that story in the newspaper.…”
“That was a while afterwards. They kept it quiet, didn’t want to spook the kidnappers, in case it
“Maybe it wasn’t about money
“What, then?”
“They, the parents, they knew how to find the … guy who got shot in New York. If they were players in the Russian mob, maybe washing money, the snatch could have been a message.”
“It’s possible, I suppose. But nothing like that came up when they were being investigated. Look, that kind of case, you have to eliminate all the possibilities. You know how many kids are killed every year by their parents, or the boyfriend of the mother, or …? Dumped in some vacant lot, reported missing. And the perps go on TV crying
