Stolen Away

STOLEN AWAY

A Nathan Heller Novel

The Memoirs of Nathan Heller

True Detective

True Crime

The Million-Dollar Wound

Neon Mirage

Stolen Away

Carnal Hours

Blood and Thunder

Damned in Paradise

Flying Blind

Majic Man

Angel in Black

Chicago Confidential

Bye Bye Baby

Chicago Lightning (short stories)

Triple Play (novellas)

STOLEN AWAY

A Nathan Heller Novel

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by AmazonEncore

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 978-1-61218-090-8

FOR LYNN MYERS, JR.

A.K.A. SAM—

MY EAST-COAST LEGMAN

“I was so fed up with this hero stuff,

I could have shouted murder.”

—Charles A. Lindbergh

“Fame is a kind of death.”

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“There are, indeed, societies for prevention of cruelty to animals, but, unfortunately, not for men.”

—Bruno Richard Hauptmann

Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1

1 THE LONE EAGLE

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

2 INTERIM

Chapter 25

3 THE LONE WOLF

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

EPILOGUE

Chapter 42

I OWE THEM ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

MARCH 4, 1932

1

The buxom blonde stepped down off the little silver metal stairs of the train with a baby bundled in her arms and a worried expression on her pretty, pockmarked face. A porter helped her by the fur-trimmed arm of her tan fur-collared coat, providing a wooden stool where the final step ought to have been, and she gave him a flickering smile of thanks before trundling away from the Twentieth Century Limited, the sleek streamliner that had whisked her here from New York.

Natural for a mother to be protective of her child—particularly right now, with the papers full of what was already touted as the “Crime of the Century”: the kidnapping, night before last, of the Lindbergh kid from his sheltered nursery in a country home in the wilds of New Jersey.

Why the hell that should make a mother nervous in Chicago, Illinois, went beyond logic, but not beyond human nature, which of course has not a damn thing to do with logic. What mother wouldn’t identify with the unlucky Lindys? What mother wouldn’t read those horrible headlines and hear those hysterical radio commentators and not clutch her sweet infant closer to her bosom, which in this case was an enviable place to get clutched.

The catch was: I didn’t figure she was the kid’s mother.

As a matter of fact, I was ready to lay odds that this was Lindy, Jr., himself, and not her own precious little flesh and blood.

Only not so little: the child was big for a babe in arms—the Lindbergh child was, after all, twenty months old. And this kid was wearing Dr. Denton’s—like Little Lindy when he got yanked from his crib—and was wrapped up in blankets, rather than the snowsuit and cap you’d expect for a toddler.

True, I’d spotted dark curly hair on the child, rather than the missing boy’s famous blond locks. But, hell—I didn’t buy the dame’s hair color, either.

I was sitting on one of three chairs at an unenclosed shoeshine stand against the wall facing the tracks in the train shed of LaSalle Street Station. This particular chair was damn near home to me when I pulled duty here; the shoeshine boy, Cletus, a lad of seventy or so, didn’t mind—as long as I got up and wandered off and let him make a living, when the station got busy.