The Family Way (Molly Murphy, #12)

“Not yet. I suspect it’s the work of a gang of some sort. Not one of the big gangs because they assure me they are not involved.”


“You take their word?”

“In this case yes. We have a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that they provide cooperation if I overlook certain things.”

“What sort of things?”

He chuckled. “I certainly couldn’t share this information with you. It’s entirely confidential. But I do trust Monk Eastman enough that when he tells me it’s not his men, I have to believe him. No, I believe we’re looking at a gang of petty thieves who maybe tried this once and realized they were onto a good thing. It’s easy money with little risk. Who’s going to notice if someone takes a baby in those crowded streets?”

“So how will you ever catch them?”

“We’ll catch them in the end because like most criminals they’ll become more greedy and more daring. The first three babies were left to the care of their older sisters and they were all Jewish families who could find a local synagogue or benevolent society to come up with the money. So now they’ve branched out further afield—an Italian baby and now this one—an American-born couple from Pennsylvania, and they’ve started taking babies from under the noses of their mothers. Soon they’ll start demanding more than a hundred dollars, or start moving uptown to better neighborhoods, and then we’ll nab them.”

“Could you gain no clue from the ransom notes? What kind of hand wrote them?”

“No kind of hand. They were made up of words cut from a newspaper or magazine.”

“So the kidnappers are literate, then.”

“They can read, if that’s what you mean. Or at least one of them can read English, which might rule out a foreign gang, like those new Italian fellows. And frankly I don’t think they’d stoop to baby snatching. The one thing they value is the family.”

“What about fingerprints on the ransom notes?” I asked suddenly as the idea occurred to me.

Daniel laughed. “You’re too sharp for your own good. We haven’t been able to take any prints that we recognize yet. The trouble is that we need to build up a bigger repository of fingerprints. Most police departments don’t bother with them since they’ve never been admissible in a court of law. Myself I think they are the way of the future, but it’s hard to make people change their thinking.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across the table from him. “You’d think that some nosy old lady would have seen something from an upstairs window, wouldn’t you? Or a woman hanging out laundry.”

“If some man had sneaked up and furtively grabbed a baby and run with it, then yes. But if the kidnapper was smart he’d have leaned over the buggy and acted as if the child was his. Then who would have noticed?”

“You speak as if it was a man,” I said. “What if a woman is doing the actual kidnapping—a gangster’s moll?”

“Quite possibly,” he said.

“That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? The woman comes along, wheeling a baby carriage of her own, whisks the sleeping baby into her carriage, and pushes it away.”

“I’m glad you’re married to a policeman or you might have ended up as a devious crook,” he said, smiling at me as he got to his feet. “I’ve already shared more than I meant to, and I have to go.”

“Have you had breakfast? Let me at least cook you an egg.”

“I’ll survive,” he said. “I’ve a meeting at eight-thirty. We have something a little more worrisome on our plate at the moment. We’ve been tipped off about a new anarchist group who have apparently set up shop in the city. I’d like to hand these kidnappings over to a junior officer, but we’re shorthanded at the moment, and since I’m the only one who is on good terms with Monk Eastman, I had to take this on myself or risk losing the goodwill I’d worked hard to establish.”

He took his hat from the peg on the wall and bent to kiss me.

“I could help,” I said, making him stop in his tracks.

“Help doing what?”

“With these kidnappings. I am an experienced detective, after all. I could help patrol the streets, keeping my eye open for kidnappers.”