A Justified Murder (Medlar Mystery #2)(54)

“We decided to tell you everything we know,” Sara said. “But you first.”

He nodded, pleased that a deal had been struck.

Chet looked at Kate. “You asked about a divorce. Yes, they did. He filed, and Janet took nothing from him. Appears to have been as friendly as those things can be. But...” He paused. “After the divorce, Carl Olsen moved a lot. I had a hard time tracking him. My guess is he’s a bit of a squirrely character. She did well to get away from him.”

Kate nodded. It fit with everything they’d heard about Janet Beeson.

Chet pulled three boxes off the top of the stack, put them on the table, and opened them. Inside were thick file pockets, some of them tied together with string. Some were old and worn, a few were new and plastic. He was showing them twenty-plus years of collected data. The first box contained printouts of the original interviews with each of the customers and the sales staff of the store. The hundreds of pages had notes in different colors of ink.

“I use colored pens too,” Sara said and she and Chet looked at each other as though they’d discovered yet another cosmic coincidence.

Jack and Kate rolled their eyes.

Chet began talking about the contents. There were many boxes of data from the first year after the case. Two boxes held ledgers with records of every call that had come in, crank and otherwise. It seemed that many people had seen Mrs. Crawford go into the store. They had noticed the pretty baby in her pink-and-white outfit.

When the alarm went off and half a dozen police cars arrived, people outside the store had stopped to see what was going on. Within minutes, there was a crowd. Many of those people had also been interviewed.

Chet picked up a handful of papers. “Everyone said the same thing. They saw the baby in the stroller go in but no one came out carrying a baby. Right after the kidnapping, the whole city seemed to shut down. Everyone was involved. I arrested two drunks who got into a knife fight. One said the baby was dead, the other said she was alive. They were willing to kill each other over it.”

“But little Jeanne was found,” Kate said.

“In the fire station. I talked to the men who found her. At first I suspected one of them, but...” Chet’s head came up. “I’m not proud of the way I was back then. I was obsessed. I wanted to know who had done such a heinous thing. I needed to know. That’s why later, I put ads in the papers. I went on the radio asking people to come forward and tell what they’d seen or heard. Anything.”

“You did this after the baby was returned?” Jack’s meaning was clear: Why?

Chet glared at him. “Yeah.” His belligerent tone said that he’d been asked that question before and he didn’t want to hear it now.

Leaning back in his chair, Jack gave a smile. “Don’t blame you a bit.”

Sara explained. “We were the same when it came to finding out about the Morrises. We had to know.” She put her hand on his wrist. “Were you given a lot of grief because you persisted?”

Chet put his hand over hers. “Endless. But the captain understood. He said there were cases in his past that he wished he’d pursued. And he was afraid it would happen again. Whoever did it, didn’t get the first kid so maybe he/she would try again. We sent out alerts to hospitals to watch out. And we kept up with the questions about who and why.”

He pulled out a box about four down from the top. “We got a lot of theories. One guy said a baby adoption ring had tried to steal the child but gave up under all the publicity. Others said the baby was going to be used for child porn. One woman who used to work at the store told us that a baby could have been stuffed in a heat register and taken out later. Someone else said the sliding doors under the jewelry case could hide an infant.”

“I guess you checked it all out,” Sara said.

“Everything. And we were glad because we stopped some creeps who were selling babies. Found two porno sources. We got a heating company to send a man through the entire system of the store. We hoped we’d find a torn piece of clothing, or something. But there were just dead rodents, bugs, and a little bag of diamond rings that we think had been there since the 1950s. We never found out how they got there.”

Chet picked up another box, set it on the table, and opened the lid. He began pulling out plastic bags. Inside were pink sweaters in various forms of decay. One had a plastic flower glued onto it. They ranged in size from something for a doll to one that would fit a two-year-old. None of them came close to the description Everett had given.

“Should you have these?” Kate asked. “Aren’t they evidence?”

“The case was closed years ago. The new guy who replaced the old captain said there never really was a case. He thought maybe it was all mistaken identity. Some woman got her kid mixed up with another one and panicked when the sirens went off.”

“Because women do silly things, right?” Sara said.

Chet smiled. “Exactly. He didn’t last long at the job. But by that time, I’d started my own evidence file.” He lifted a bag. “For about five years after the kidnapping, people turned in anything that looked like what baby Jeanne was wearing when she was taken. What we didn’t tell the public was that when she was returned, she was wearing the same clothes that she’d had on when she’d been taken. Whatever they found couldn’t be her clothes.”