Stolen Away

around.”

“Oh,” I said again.

Lindbergh opened the front door and led me outside into the chilly overcast afternoon; he nodded to the trooper on guard at the door. Lindy hadn’t bothered with a topcoat, so I didn’t say anything, but it was goddamn cold. I followed him across the yard to the left, back toward where his study would be.

We walked directly outside his study window, below the second-floor corner window, which faced southeast. He pointed up.

“That’s where they went in,” he said, meaning the kidnappers.

“Why isn’t this area roped off?” I said, looking at the ground, hands tucked under my arms. “Was it ever roped off?”

“No,” he said.

“Weren’t there footprints?”

There certainly were now. Hundreds of them. Grass might never grow on this ground.

Lindbergh nodded, breath smoking. “There was one substantial footprint-belonging, apparently, to a man. It seemed to be that of a moccasin, or a shoe with a sock or perhaps burlap around it. There were also the footprints of a woman.”

“A woman? So there were two of them, at least.”

“So it would seem.”

“Have the moulage impressions been sent to Washington?”

Lindbergh narrowed his eyes. “Moulage impressions?”

“Plaster casts of the footprints. Say what you want about J. Edgar’s boys, they have a hell of a lab. For one thing, they’ll tell you exactly what that man was wearing-moccasin or potato sack or glass slipper.”

“Colonel Schwarzkopf’s man took photographs, not plaster impressions. Was that a mistake?”

I sighed. “Is Bismarck a herring?”

Lindbergh shook his head wearily. “I know mistakes were made that night. It’s possible plaster casts weren’t taken simply because the reporters trampled this area before there could be.”

That was still the fault of the coppers in charge; but I’d said enough on this subject.

“Look, Colonel. We can’t do anything about mistakes past. The early hours of this case were understandably a jumble.”

Of course, a good cop knows that the early hours of any major felony investigation are the most important, the time during which you allow no mistakes. But I didn’t say that, either.

“What we can do,” I said, “is not make any more of ’em. Mistakes, I mean.”

He nodded gravely. “Would you like to see the nursery?”

“First, I’d like to see the ladder they used. Is it still around?”

It ought to be in an evidence locker in Trenton, but with the command post here, I figured it was worth asking.

He nodded. “It’s in the garage. I’ll have the troopers bring it around. Excuse me for a few moments.”

Lindbergh loped off; he had a gangling gait, and seemed slightly stoop-shouldered-as if he were embarrassed to be so tall, or so famous. Or perhaps it was the weight of it all-from the kidnapping itself, to living out this tragedy in the center ring of a goddamn circus.

Despite the trampled ground, blurring any footprints, there still remained in the moist clay, near the side of the house, the indentations of the feet of the ladder. The indentations were below, but to the right of, the window of the study, which explained why Lindbergh might not have seen anybody going up a ladder outside his curtainless window.

Two troopers returned, Lindbergh leading them; each of the men carried a section of the thing, and “thing” more than “ladder” was the correct word: a ramshackle, makeshift affair that seemed composed of weathered, uneven lumber scraps. The rungs were spaced too widely apart for even a tall man to make easy use of it.

Lindbergh set his section down. “Put it together, would you, men?”

“Good God,” I said. “That thing’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“It’s ingenious in its way,” Lindbergh said. “Slopped together as it is, inexpert as the carpentry may be, it was designed so that each section fits inside another. One man could carry it, though it’s been kept separate like this, for examination.”

The troopers were inserting wooden dowels to connect the sections. The top rung of the bottom section had broken, apparently under a man’s weight.

I walked over and pointed to the broken pieces. “One of the kidnappers did that?”

Lindbergh nodded. “And I may have heard the bastard climbing either up or down. I heard what sounded like the slats of an orange crate breaking, around nine o’clock.”

“Were you in the study?”

“No-the living room, with Anne.”

“Did you check on the sounds?”

“No,” he said glumly. “I just said, ‘What was that?’ to Anne, and she said, ‘What was what?’ and we both went back to our reading. Shortly after that, she went upstairs to bed and I went into the study.”

So Lindbergh was probably in the study at least part of the time the kidnapping was taking place.

“Place that in the holes, would you?” he said to the troopers.

It took both of them to maneuver the clumsy, towering affair. They placed it carefully in the indentations in the ground and placed it against the side of the house, where it rose several feet above, and to the right of, the nursery window, stretching damn near to the roof.

“Well, it’s way off,” I said, craning my neck back. “Obviously.”

“I just wanted you to see that,” he said. “We figure the kidnappers miscalculated on the ladder.”

“They sure as hell didn’t have a carpenter on their team,” I said. “So, what? They must have just used the lower two sections.”

Lindbergh nodded. “The ladder was found over there…” He pointed about sixty feet to the southeast. “…with the two bottom sections connected.” Then he directed the troopers to haul the ladder down, remove the dowel and lift off the top section, and put the now two-sectioned ladder back up.

“It’s still way off,” I said.

Now the ladder was about three feet below the nursery window. And, again, to the right. You could see the places on the whitewashed fieldstone where the ladder had scraped; no doubt about it: only two sections of the ladder were used, and this was where it rested.

“Well, what do you make of it, then?” Lindbergh asked.

“I’m revising my opinion about this not necessarily being an inside job.”

Lindbergh’s frown was barely discernible, but it was there. “Why, Mr. Heller?”

“Somebody had to have handed your baby out to an accomplice on the ladder. That’s about the only way it figures…unless two people went up the ladder, one at a time. I doubt that thing would support two people at once.”

“Perhaps that’s why it broke,” he suggested.

“The weight of the child, added to whoever carried him down, probably did that.”

“Good God. If Charlie fell…”

I lifted a hand. “From that height, there’d have been the impression of whoever fell-and it would’ve probably been both of ’em, the child and the kidnapper. If…excuse me, Colonel…if the kidnapper dropped the child, but managed to retain his own footing on the ladder, there still would’ve been an impression in that wet ground.”

Which even the New Jersey cops couldn’t have missed.

“Perhaps a woman went up first,” Lindbergh said, studying it, hand on his chin. “We know a woman was standing around out here…”

“A woman’s touch might explain the baby staying quiet. I mean, the baby didn’t wake up crying, or someone would’ve heard him, I would imagine.”

“Yes. My wife was in the next room, separated only by a bath.” Impulsively, grabbing my arm, he said, “Come. Look the nursery over.”

We went up the uncarpeted stairs, and the upstairs was as clean, fresh-smelling and impersonal as below.