Once she had reached the first floor, she unlocked the front door and opened it a few inches, then turned around and tiptoed toward the back of the house to the basement door. In the inky darkness she crept down the basement stairs. The laundry room with two high cellar windows was less dark. She paused to let her eyes adjust. Pushing the wooden table would make too much noise. It took all her strength to lift it and place it under one of the windows. She put the infant carrier and backpack on the table, climbed on top of it, unlatched the window, and carefully lowered it. It was a tight squeeze to get her long body through the opening. Once through she reached back inside for the infant carrier and the backpack. Then she reached down and pulled the window closed.

She was hidden by the bushes and crouched there unmoving for a time. She heard the front door being pushed open. Footsteps on the porch. Billy was trying to push the pacifier from his mouth, but she held it there with one hand and frantically unbuttoned her shirt with the other and scooped her baby from the carrier.

She was sure the kidnapper was not alone. He had already given Sally Ann to an accomplice and returned to kill Jamie. Probably there were others besides those two. They would fan out to look for her.

She nursed Billy until she was sure that he wouldn’t cry then put him back in the carrier and crept across the deep shadows between Ruby’s apartment house and the one next door, quickly taking cover behind its overgrown shrubs. Pressed against the wall, she made her way toward the front of the building and climbed over the railing onto the covered porch. Keeping to the shadows, she tiptoed across the porch and climbed down into the shrubbery on the other side of the building, which was on a corner. The bus-stop corner. She waited for a few minutes, watching for any sort of movement. Then she sat in the moist dirt behind a huge, overgrown lilac bush to wait for morning and to cry for her little dead dog. She knew what had happened. Someone had been watching her and knew that she took Ralph out front last thing every night and had left a piece of poisoned meat by the front steps.

After they had killed her, they would have disposed of her and Ralph’s bodies and made it look as though she had fled in the night with her baby and dog. Ruby would have remembered her bruised forehead and concluded that Jamie was once again running away from an abusive boyfriend.

Except the kidnapper had taken the wrong baby. Soon someone was going to realize that. Jamie closed her eyes and prayed. Please don’t let them kill Lynette’s baby. Please.

She imagined Lynette coming in the morning and getting Ruby to open the door when Jamie did not respond to her knock. The police would be called. Would the police think that the woman who called herself Janet Wisdom had fled with both babies?

By now the kidnapper and his accomplices would be driving up and down the streets looking for her. Maybe they had called in others to help with the search.

She tried to make herself as comfortable as possible, leaning against the side of the house. She could feel the moisture from the damp earth penetrating the seat of her jeans and scooped a layer of dead leaves between herself and the ground.

And so she stayed. For hours. Grieving for her dog. Holding her baby. Wondering what was going to happen to them.

“We have the baby,” Felipe said when he had Hartmann on the line. He was in the back of a panel truck parked inside a garage at the end of the alley. “Carl and Luis have gone back to deal with the girl.”

“Is the baby all right?”

“Seems to be. It is with the woman in the other vehicle.”

“Good. You figured out how to get the girl’s body out of the apartment?”

“Toss it out the window. The dog, too. Then we will pick them up and be on our way. The plane is waiting at a rural airstrip south of here. After we leave the baby in Virginia, we will fly over the ocean and dump the bodies.”

“Call me before you take off.”

Next Felipe called the woman. “The baby okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I thought you said it was a boy.”

Felipe’s blood ran cold. “What are you saying?”

“The kid crapped and I just changed its diaper. This baby is a girl.”

Felipe paused for only a moment. He’d always known a time like this would come-a time when he himself would become the focus of Gus Hartmann’s rage. He got out of the truck, opened the garage door, then got back in and drove away. The waiting plane would take him to an island off the coast of Honduras. From there he would take a boat to the place that only he knew about. It was a relief, really. He had enough money in Swiss accounts to last three lifetimes.

At midnight, Amanda-wearing a flowing blue bathrobe-had joined Gus in his office. She would pace for a time then lie on the sofa, all the time offering a running monologue about how they needed to get this thing over with, how wonderful it would feel to finally have the baby in her arms, how no baby could ever replace Sonny but this child was the next best thing. How it didn’t feel right when she was holding that other baby.

Finally she ran out of steam and dozed off. Gus didn’t wake her after he’d talked to Felipe. He would wait until the plane was ready to take off. Until he was absolutely sure nothing had gone wrong.

He sat at his desk staring at the minutes ticking by on the clock. The plane would take off in about an hour.

After two hours had gone by, he finally had to admit that something was amiss, but he waited another thirty minutes to shake Amanda’s shoulder. “Something’s gone wrong,” he said.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“My man would have called by now. I’ve tried to reach him, but his phone is either turned off or he ditched it.”

“Why would he do that?” she asked.

“Because he screwed up and is running for his life.”

“What about the men he hired to help him?”

“The same,” Gus said, his jaw clenching.

“But you’ll still be able to get the baby, won’t you?” Amanda asked, panic in her voice.

“Yes, of course,” Gus said soothingly. “But it may take a few days. You might as well go on upstairs. Take something to help you sleep.”

“I won’t have my baby tonight?” she asked, her voice getting shrill.

“No, not tonight.”

Gus went to the sofa and took her in his arms. He spoke to her in his most soothing voice, telling her that everything was going to be all right, that it was just going to take a little bit longer than he had at first thought. He smoothed her hair and told her that he loved her and that they were going to be so happy with Sonny’s little boy to raise and to love. But right now, he needed for her to go to bed and let him think. And make a few phone calls.

It was noon before he had pieced together the story. Jamie Long had been caring for her neighbor’s kid. Felipe’s man had taken the wrong kid, and Jamie Long had gotten the hell out of there. The woman working with Felipe had left the baby girl in a hospital waiting room.

“What rotten luck,” Gus said with a slam of his fist on the desk. “Damned rotten luck.”

Then he calmed himself. A young woman with a small baby and no luggage and no one to turn to for help shouldn’t be too hard to track down.

When Jamie saw the morning’s first bus approaching, she crawled stiff and dirty and disheveled from the bushes. She was greeted by startled stares as she walked toward the cluster of waiting people, the infant carrier bumping against her leg. She got on the bus last, gave a crumpled bill to the driver, and sat in the seat immediately behind him.

When the bus reached Classen Boulevard, she got off and walked to the last of the three used-car lots she had visited. The same salesman was already there unlocking the door to the office. “You come back for the car?” he asked.