Chapter 4

What the four heads saw when they snapped around to look at the door was the servant standing in the doorway holding up a big manila envelope. Mike reached out with gloved hands and accepted it from the servant.

"It's addressed to 'Cindy's Concerned Father'," said Mike. "Looks like it is from our kidnapper. It was mailed locally; the cancellation was done yesterday in downtown Chicago. There's no return address. Just this address with the name I told you."

Mike carried it over to the dressing table he had been examining the ransom note at. He picked up a handheld scanner that looked a little like the ones used at checkout counters except it didn't emit a red bar of light. He ran it back and forth over the entire package while watching the screen of the computer that it was attached to. "The MixerF is only picking up one set of prints where Roger's staff member was holding it. I'll try the other methods later, but most likely whoever put this together used gloves and between machine processing and getting into the middle of a pile of envelopes nobody at the post office touched it at all."

To the servant still standing at the door, Mike said, "Could you come over here and let me scan your fingerprints so we can verify that the prints on the envelope are yours?"

Paulers looked at the servant and jerked his head towards Mike. The servant quickly went over and stood by Mike and his machines.

"Just place your fingers one at a time on the touch pad here as I tell you to. Okay, left thumb first."

The nervous servant placed his thumb where Mike told him to. In about a minute Mike had walked the servant through all of his fingers and thanked him for his cooperation. He then turned back to his computer and hit a few keys. Before another minute had passed, results started filling the screen and Mike looked up. "Yeah, just as I thought. The fingerprints that the MixerF picked up are his."

Paulers looked at the equipment in front of Mike with a bit of curiosity. "I don't know that much about fingerprint equipment, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything quite like what you've got."

Sarah spoke up. "No you never have seen anything quite like that. There's only six of them in the world and all of them are owned by E&A Group. Some bright boys at Los Alamos thought up the basic idea a year or two ago and we, ahhh... liberated the information and gave it to our Lab. Our gadget wizards made up these peripherals that we can use with our laptops. It's much quicker than older methods and it's completely non-invasive to the sample, so other methods can still be applied afterwards if necessary.

"Okay, Mike, you can do more tests on the outside later. Let's see what's in the envelope."

Mike took out a small knife and very carefully cut along one end. He cleared off a section of the dressing table and put down a metal tray that he took out of his bag. He then very gently shook the contents of the envelope out and onto the tray. Another piece of plain white paper with cut out magazine letters came out as well as a large hank of blonde hair with a silver hair comb decorated with a bunch of small red rubies.

"That's Cindy's comb. It's an antique that I gave her for her birthday last year. That must be Cindy's hair. Her mother will stoop to anything to hurt me."

"It's okay Roger. It's just hair. That can always grow back. Let's let Mike check the note and read it to us."

Mike ran his scanner over both sides of the note and consulted his screen before looking up at the gathered group. "As I suspected, it's clean. Whoever put this together knew enough to avoid getting his prints on it.

"I'm sure you all read it while I was scanning it, but I'll read it through for anybody who didn't. 'Paulers, This is just a graphic example of what we can do to your daughter. If you fail to carry out any of our instructions exactly as we give them, it will be something that doesn't grow back quite so quickly next time. We will call you tomorrow morning with instructions. Don't make us wait and don't involve the authorities. You don't want to receive another package from us.'"

Hock mused aloud, "Why would they send us a letter to tell us they are going to call us? Why not just send the demands in the letter or just call? Why give us time to set up a trace on the line?"

"Good questions," said Sarah. "Most likely they are going to be using some sort of throw away phone, so don't care about the trace. Though, the trace will give us the location the call was made. They could either not know we'll get the location, even if we don't get a name, or they figure they are far enough away, that they can leave the location long before anybody could get there. I assume the letter is just a scare tactic."

"Yeah, I can see that," said Hock, "but there is still something a little odd about this whole situation."

"Agreed. Let's get back to work and see if we can figure out what that oddness is."

Hock and Sarah went back to their investigation of Cindy's room, while Mike continued working on the messages.

Mike spoke up a few minutes later. "I fed the images of the notes back to Analysis and had them search through our media image database to see if they could determine what magazines the letters came from. It turns out they could and here's the list they sent back: Cosmopolitan, Teen People, The Economist, Car & Driver, The Chicago Tribune, Hustler and Seventeen. None of the letters were more than three months old. They also checked subscription records and found that this address has subscriptions to all of them."

"Hustler, Roger? You've got to be kidding me," said Sarah. "I thought you had better taste than that."

"Hey, we all have our little guilty pleasures. And how do you have access to the subscriber information for all of those periodicals?"

"You know I can't tell you that."

"Fine. You forget about my magazine taste, and I'll forget your data access. What does this mean that the magazines were all available here in the house?"

"Well, let's see if we can find any of the magazines that the letters came from and see if they were the ones used. It could just be a coincidence, but given that mix, I doubt it.

"Mike can you print out the list of issues we're looking for and give it to Roger to get his staff on it? And let's look around in here; some of those had to have been Cindy's magazines."

Mike handed Roger the list and he left to get the staff going, while Sarah and Hock looked for magazines in Cindy's room. Sarah stood up from bending over next to Cindy's bedside table and said, "Got some."

She put a small pile of magazines down on the bed and began going through them. "Okay, Mike, let's check these against the list. I've got the current issue of Teen People and one four months old."

"Those two weren't used, but the two missing ones were."

"Right. For Seventeen, I've only got last month's issue."

"There were only a couple of letters from the current month's issue, so it looks like a pattern is emerging."

"Yeah, well there's one more set of magazines on the list in the pile. It looks like we've got Car & Driver from three months ago, going back over a year."

"That fits the pattern. The Car & Driver letters came from the most recent two issues only. Where are the Cosmo's? The letters come from the last two issues and not the current one."

"No Cosmos here at all. Let me check the other side of the bed.

"Nope, none over here either."