“Thirteen years ago, eight-year-old Laura Chaucer disappeared from her home along with her nineteen-year-old nanny, Angelina Antonelli. On the morning of October 14, Whit Chaucer found a ransom note warning him not to contact the authorities or his daughter would be tortured and killed. Tracy, Mrs. Chaucer, was terrified of the consequences to her daughter, but despite her pleas not to, Whit had the good sense to call 911.
“I was a beat cop in Piney Trails at the time—my partner and I took the call. Later, Piney Trails got an assist from the Denver PD and the CBI got involved. Many of us here in this room had a hand in the investigation—when we heard Laura had gone missing again, we wanted in. So if you’re hungry for cold case details, we can dish ’em up hot.”
“Mid October.” Spense hadn’t remembered the dates surrounding the first case.
“So this isn’t a coincidence. It’s an anniversary,” Caity said. “I understand a ransom was paid. Is that what led to Laura’s safe recovery?” She emphasized the words safe recovery as if to remind Hatcher that no matter what else had gone wrong, the authorities had achieved an all too rare victory. They’d brought a kidnap victim home alive.
“Probably. We orchestrated a ransom drop with marked bills. We took every precaution. Did it by the book, but things didn’t go as planned . . .” He coughed into his hand. “We had eyes on the bag containing the payoff. Then a small fire broke out in the trees that concealed our men, and they had to put it out or risk a major forest fire—not to mention their lives. During the ensuing chaos, the money disappeared. We never got a bead on the kidnapper. Once the fire was out, we initiated an area search based on a tracking chip sewn into the lining of the bag. We later located it—empty—a few miles up a trail leading into the Gore mountain range. Laura was found nearby, huddled behind a bunch of boulders, less than fifty yards from a park-service cabin. She was covered in blood. Turned out not to be hers. Thank God. She was unharmed except for minor scrapes and cuts.”
“I don’t remember reading about a cabin,” Caity said.
“That’s because we held the information back from the press. Not even the family knows.”
“So the cabin is a test of guilty knowledge.” Caity nodded. “Got it.”
“Did Laura give a statement after she was found?” Spense asked.
“Chaucer allowed it, but only after his buddy, Dr. Grady Webber, talked to her first and gave the go-ahead. Laura had no memory of anything that happened after being tucked into bed by her nanny the night of October 13. Last thing she recalled was arguing with Angelina, because she’d refused to let her watch a scary movie on television.”
“Was that the routine, for the nanny to put her to bed?”
“Either the nanny or Chaucer. Apparently Mrs. Chaucer liked to retire early.”
“Earlier than an eight-year-old?”
“Tracy Chaucer suffered from migraines and an assortment of other ills. Took pills—and by her staff’s reports, boozed more than a little.”
“What about the blood they found on Laura?” Caity steered them back to the track Spense had jumped.
Hatcher grimaced. “Angelina’s. A few yards from where we recovered Laura, we located a corpse, thinly covered in leaves. Angelina had been stabbed over one hundred times.”
“And he—the kidnapper—Angelina’s murderer—has never been apprehended,” Spense said. Just tying things up. It was a well-known fact. Led to a public outcry and the belief that shoddy police work had left a deranged monster prowling the streets of Denver.
“Here’s the thing. We think Angelina was not an entirely innocent victim. Experts later determined the handwriting in the ransom note to be similar to samples from Angelina’s diary, and the note included several idiosyncratic phrases, also consistent with her journal entries.”
“So you think the nanny was involved in the kidnap.”
“Sure seemed like an inside job. No signs of forced entry to the house.”
“Signs point to the nanny,” Caity agreed. “But then again, she wound up dead, whereas Laura was left unharmed.”
“Sure. But we believe Angelina had an accomplice, a boyfriend. That he got rid of her in order to eliminate any witnesses. Wanted to keep the money for himself.”
“Then why leave Laura, a potential witness, alive?” It didn’t add up for Spense.
“We don’t think he planned to let Laura go. We think, somehow, she managed to get away while he was dealing with Angelina. There were no rope marks on Laura’s body to suggest she’d been bound, and she didn’t have any defensive wounds.”