Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

It wasn’t so bad this time. At least she didn’t steal my watch. She brushed my beard with her lips, told me she had been lucky, that she liked me, had enjoyed her stay at the cabin, looked forward to more staying at the cabin, that she hadn’t really joined me on false pretenses, the photos on the Web site turned her on, and that my actual presence, the sincerity and wisdom of which showed in the wording of the ad, and later in reality, turned her on even more.

Well, that was nice. Wasn’t it?

The next day the entire Bunkport motel was booked by an FBI cloak-and-dagger squad, consisting of nice enough middle-aged men in suits and ties and a motherly woman wearing sensible clothes and no makeup. Like everybody, Elizabeth had a badge pinned to her jacket but she didn’t show her gun. The motherly type didn’t either. The nice enough middle-aged men did: big super-shooters stuck in shoulder holsters under unbuttoned jackets.

A photographer/filmer and a pathologist arrived by helicopter bringing cyber-age tools and body bags for the kids. The squad started early, finished late, and were done. There were gory details. Shanigan had amused himself with the kids. A sadistic pedophile, and I had been drinking with the guy! “Hi Freddie, cold enough for you today? Bourbon on the rocks? There you go. Our health, Doc.”

Good actor, Dr. Shanigan.

Dumb audience, me.

That night Elizabeth was still at my place, explaining — while we sipped Cuban rum-laced coffee — the situation.

She told me Shanigan might, however unlikely, be on the loose somewhere and would be on a top-priority list of suspects. His corpse had not been found.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things...

Many things indeed. More than shoes and ships and sealing wax, although, as it turned out, these items were part of the present situation.

It took awhile, Elizabeth said, before the FBI squad that got assembled to take on a case of two kidnapped children, both of wealthy parents, both living in exclusive homes just outside Boston — it took awhile for the squad to get started.

Lazy? Slow? Red tape?

None of the above.

All traces were cold, because the parents delayed their 911 calls for three days. Why? Because it took three days before the parents, knowing that they had bought a doll each, for their two-million-dollar payout each, were scared to show their faces to the authorities.

“Dolls? What dolls?” I asked.

She waved to shut me up. The dolls came later.

It took awhile, Elizabeth told me, to get some relevant info out of the fathers of the kids. They turned out to be con men, specializing in fleecing the rich, preferably doctors, dentists, and other top-income medical types who didn’t know about small, exclusive hedge and mutual funds. The con men kept their schemes going for two years, then suddenly folded their corporations and kept the money stolen from their clients, in cash, at home.

Shanigan was an investor in funds set up by the fathers of the kids.

He lost serious money.

Rather than go to the authorities, and facing the delays such actions produce, he became the winged avenger, or kidnapper, rather.

The con men, when they were contacted by cell phone (a throw-away item that couldn’t be traced), suspected that they were being blackmailed by one of their former investors but had no idea who. Having destroyed their records in a fire, they had no list of names for the FBI to check.

Shanigan put the kids on the phone, too. Both were begging their fathers to please save them. The little girl shouted something about a boat, and said, “You too,” and the letters M and E, before being shut up by what sounded like a slap in the face.

Shanigan, talking to the fathers — at an interval of some ten minutes between the two calls — gave them the coordinates of a parking lot belonging to an out-of-business shopping mall. The fathers were told to appear, at eight the next morning, with the money, at the mall’s southwest corner. Shanigan would be there with the kids handcuffed to a metal fence, at the mall’s northeast corner. The fathers were to put down the money, one suitcase each. Shanigan would walk toward them, holding the key for the handcuffs. He advised the fathers not to come armed, for his associate would be watching the scene, and shoot them, and the kids, with a sniper’s rifle, if anything at all looked the slightest bit suspicious.

“Yes?” Shanigan had asked. “Would you mind repeating my instructions?”