“No, he isn’t. He’s parked right down the road in his truck. You want to see him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come with me, then. It’s just a little way.”
He held out his hand, and after a moment the little girl took it.
The armored car had just pulled up in front of Independent Electronics Corporation when the young man left his parked auto and walked quickly toward the entrance. He paced himself well, so that his route intercepted that of the uniformed man who was carrying a heavy white sack in one hand and a drawn revolver in the other.
“George Lambeth,” he said, making it a statement and not a question. The guard turned and slowed his pace. In the armored car the driver suddenly became alert. The young man extended his hand, revealing a child’s crumpled red T-shirt. “We have your daughter. She’ll be dead in ten seconds unless you give me that money.”
“What?” The color drained from the guard’s face and he glanced toward his partner in the truck.
The driver had his gun out now and was opening the door. “What is it, George?”
“Five seconds, Mr. Lambeth.”
“They’ve got my daughter,” Lambeth told the driver. “They’ve got Liz.”
The uncertain driver raised his gun, but the young man stood his ground. “Shoot me and she dies. My partner is watching from that car across the street, and he has a gun at her head.”
“Give him the money, George,” the driver said.
George Lambeth handed over the heavy white sack. The young man accepted it with a nod and tossed the red T-shirt on the pavement. Then he turned and walked back the way he had come.
In another minute his car disappeared from view around a corner.
Lieutenant Fletcher brought the report to Captain Leopold’s desk shortly after one o’clock. “This looks like another one, Captain. He snatched the nine-year-old daughter of an armored-car guard and threatened to kill her if the guard didn’t hand over the Independent Electronics payroll.”
“How long ago?”
“Just before noon. The girl was released unharmed a few blocks away. They’re questioning her now, but it sounds like our loner again. He lured her into his car near the playground, then bound and gagged her and left her on the floor in the back seat.”
Leopold nodded. “How much money?”
“Eighty-seven thousand, mostly in small bills. It seems the company maintains a check-cashing service for employees.”
“Description fit last week’s bandit?”
“Close enough, and the modus operandi is identical.” A week earlier the son of a supermarket manager had been kidnaped and held for ransom — all the cash in the supermarket safe. Then, too, a lone young man — apparently unarmed — had made the demand for money, and calmly carried it away in a supermarket shopping bag.
“Get those guards down to look at pictures. The little girl, too, if she’s able to.” Leopold felt a surge of anger at the crimes. There was something about the endangerment of children that hit at his gut the way not even a murder could. Perhaps it was because he had no children of his own. Perhaps this made all of them his children.
Lieutenant Fletcher scratched his head. “I’ll do that, Captain. But there’s another angle we might check out. Connie Trent was at my desk when the first report came in. She has an idea about it.”
“Connie? Send her in.”
Connie Trent was easily the best-looking member of the Police Department. Tall and dark-haired, with a constant twinkle in her large brown eyes, she’d managed to charm the entire Detective Division after only six months on the job. But it wasn’t only her face and figure that Connie had going for her. A college graduate with a degree in sociology, she had joined the force as an undercover narcotics agent. Her cover had been blown after four months when she helped set up the biggest drug raid in the city’s history, but she had continued working among addicts as a known member of the police force. Oddly enough, the people she encountered seemed to show little resentment against her former undercover role. It was almost as if they welcomed the relief that arrest sometimes brought.
Connie still carried a snub-nosed Colt Detective Special in her handbag, but she was unarmed when she entered Leopold’s office. The tight green dress she wore was hardly immodest, but Leopold observed that it wasn’t designed to hide everything either.
“Good to see you again, Connie,” he greeted her, extending his hand. It wasn’t his practice to shake hands with women, but he felt somehow that a policewoman was different — especially when she was as attractive and feminine as Connie Trent.
“You’ve heard about the armored-car robbery?” she asked, getting right to business.
“Fletcher just told me.”
“It’s the same as last week’s supermarket job, and I may have a lead for you. I didn’t want to say anything till I was certain, but with this second robbery I can’t take a chance any longer. Next time this guy might kill a child.”
“It’s someone you know?” Leopold asked.
“Not exactly.” Connie Trent sat down, crossing her long legs. “When I was doing undercover work I met a girl named Kathy Franklin. She was on heroin, and she led me to a lot of the others who were arrested later. I helped Kathy get a suspended sentence, and signed her onto a methadone maintenance program. I’ve seen her about once a week over the past two months, and she’s really straightening herself out. She has a job as a waitress in a bowling alley, down near the Sound.
“Anyway, she has a boy friend named Pete Selby who’s still on heroin. I think he’s the one who got her hooked originally, though she’d never admit it. I’ve never seen Pete, so I figure he’s been avoiding me. But one night last week when I stopped by to check on Kathy it was obvious Pete had just left.”
“How obvious?”
“You know — she was sort of tensed up, and there were cigar butts in the ashtray. I asked her and she admitted he’d been there. In the kitchen there was a shopping bag from the Wright-Way Supermarket. It’s way the other side of the city from Kathy’s apartment, but there was this bag on the table next to a bottle of rye and two glasses. So when I heard about the robbery the next day I was suspicious. The robber carried the money away in a shopping bag just like that one.”
“You didn’t report it then?”
Connie Trent shrugged. “You can’t convict anyone with just a shopping bag. But he’s still on heroin, and that means he needs money. I figure someone would have to need money a great deal to pull anything like these two jobs, with the children.”
“She’s worth talking to,” Leopold agreed. “Want to go there with me?”
“Of course!” Connie said quickly. She seemed honored by the invitation, which surprised Leopold.
“Let’s go, then. Fletcher, you talk to the guards and the little girl, see if you get anywhere with the pictures on file.”
Kathy Franklin lived in a fourth-floor walkup apartment near downtown.
The area was part of a much-delayed urban renewal program that had left the blocks around her building barren and scarred as if by war.
Here and there a single sickly tree grew, revealed after years of hibernation by the demolition work around it; but for the most part the setting was depressing even on a sunny July afternoon.
Leopold stepped over a shallow puddle of water that had accumulated from the recent rains and followed Connie up the steps of the building. As they climbed to the fourth floor he wondered for the first time if Kathy Franklin was black or white, and he found out when a pretty white girl opened the door to Connie’s knock.
“Oh! Come in,” she said, her voice a bit reluctant as she stepped aside.
Connie introduced Leopold and explained why they had come. “Today an armored car was robbed, Kathy. By the same person who robbed the supermarket last week.”