The Abduction of Margaret O’Shea - 4. Chapter 4

Chief Morton looked up from his desk to the sound of stampeding cattle. At least, that’s what it sounded like to him. He was shocked to see Ken and his entire family rushing into the precinct.

Ken and George ran immediately to Ken’s computer while Joe and Tom filled the Chief in on what had transpired during the last few days. Joe commented that since a possible kidnapping was involved, it was police business. He added the little bit of information that he and his sons were positive it was a scam, but Ken didn’t want to take any chances.

“Ken wants to check a few facts to help him decide what he should do,” Joe said.

“Sure,” was all Morton could think to say. Joe and Tom then joined their men at the computer.

“Let’s try the Motor Vehicles Bureau first,” Ken said. “I’ve accessed them many times in the past.”

He signed into the MVB data base with his special clearance and requested to see Iris O’Shea’s driver’s license. It appeared on the screen in seconds. Tom jotted down her address, and Joe noted how beautiful a woman she was. He commented that she must have given birth to Maggie while she was still a teenager. Since none of them had ever met Iris, this proved nothing.

They next pulled up a picture of Maggie’s driver’s license. It was true that she resided in Little Italy, and Tom wrote down her address. The date of birth on the license would have made Maggie twenty not twenty-five.

The big shocker was her picture. This girl was not the Maggie they had wined and dined last night. The girl in the picture was absolutely beautiful, but she was a mixed-race woman. There was no way Ken could be her father because he and Iris were lily white. Obviously, her parents had never married. Her father was African American and Maggie had her mother’s surname.

“Shit,” Tom said. “We should have taken photos last night and put Maggie’s picture through facial recognition.”

“Relax, Sonny,” Chief Morton said. “There’s no guarantee we would have gotten a match.”

Ken sighed with relief. It was a scam after all, but he continued to gather more evidence. He wanted to access the UPI employees’ data base. It took some doing and lots of patience, but he and George reached their destination. They requested a list of all foreign correspondents currently on assignment. They were rewarded (more aptly said: bombarded) with over two hundred names, but the list only contained five Marks. Not one of them had the same address as Maggie, and not one had an Italian name. That didn’t prove anything. His name may have been anglicized as so many foreign names were. Even Joe had seriously considered dropping the ‘e’ in his name and becoming Vincent, but he never acted on it out of sheer inertia.

“What happens now?” Joe asked.

“The young woman has committed identity theft, and that’s a crime, isn’t it Chief?” Tom asked.

“A big one,” Chief Morton replied.

“How would she know that you were a sperm donor?” George asked Ken.

“The only thing I can figure is that someone close to her worked at the clinic and kept a log of all the donors. It would be easy to pinpoint a time just nine months before Jane Doe was born.”

“In that case that person would be aiding and abetting a felon, and should be apprehended as well,” Tom observed.

“Yes,” Ken said, “and you’ve given me an idea. We should begin our investigation at the sperm bank if it’s still there.”

“It’s after nine,” Joe observed. He excused himself to make a phone call. When he returned, he informed everyone that the DNA Lab had confirmed that there was no relationship between Ken and Jane Doe. In fact, one of her parents came from Iberia, and the other from Scandinavia. Ken was all Scotch – Irish.

That gave Ken more to think about. How did Maggie get an Irish name if she was half Hispanic and half Scandinavian? The theory of scam and extortion was looking more certain every minute.

“I want you all to go home now, “Ken said. “Joe, I want you to be at home to answer the phone when the perps call to give us instructions on how to deliver the ransom money.”

“Okay, fellows,” Joe said, “let’s allow the professionals to investigate from here on out. They have a bunch of phony kidnappers to apprehend, but they also need to determine who’s responsible for a bad security breach at the sperm bank.”

“Good luck,” George said as he, his brother and father left the precinct.

“You’re a little long in the tooth to be a sperm donor,” the very young female receptionist said. “Old men have lazy swimmers.”

Ken was more than insulted. He flashed his badge and said, “I’m not here to be a donor. I’m here on official police business. Who’s in charge? I need to speak to that person immediately.” He was very curt. He didn’t feel like being sweet after the supreme insult he had just been handed.

“Mrs. Fielder is in charge. Hold on. I’ll buzz her.”

“There’s a policeman here to see you,” she enlightened Mrs. Fielder.”

“She’ll be right out,” the snippy receptionist said.

Mrs. Fielder came into the reception area at a fast clip. She seemed to be in her early sixties and getting ready for retirement. Still, she had a great figure, and was very comely looking. She didn’t. fer Ken a hand or make small talk.

“Look,” she said, “we are constantly being harassed by the Police Department, the Board of Health, and the Fire Department. Our establishment operates within the law, and it’s so clean you can eat off the floor, so whatever you expect to find, you won’t.”

Ken couldn’t help it. He allowed himself to relax and even to smile.

Mrs. Fielder,” Ken said, “I assure you; I am not here to harass you. I know damn well what a fine place you run here. I was a donor myself twenty-five years ago when I was in college.”

Mrs. Fielder relaxed and she too smiled. “Then what are you here for? What can we do for you?”

“Right now, I’m working a case which involves stolen identity, kidnapping, fraud, and aiding and abetting in the perpetration of a crime. You name it and it’s part of my investigation.”

“Wow! Come into my office. We can talk freely there.”

When they were comfortably seated, Ken dared ask, “May I ask you how long you have worked here?”

“Of course, you may ask. I started here right after I graduated college. I was twenty-two and now I’m sixty-two, so forty years. I acted as assistant director for twelve years, and then the director retired, and I took over. I’m hoping to retire on my sixty-sixth birthday. My husband has already retired, and I’d like to spend more time with him, traveling and the like. I suspect that you’re not interested in my autobiography, so ask your questions, young man.”

She called him ‘young man,’ and some of Ken’s animosity disappeared.

“Of course. Let me get started. How far back do your records go?”

“It depends on what records you need to see. The list of donors goes back to when we first opened our doors nearly sixty-years ago. Of course, I can’t let you see the list, even with a search warrant. The confidentiality of that list is protected by law.”

“Is that list available to your staff?”

“No, it’s been computerized, and I’m the only one on the premises who knows the password. We keep the password in a vault should something happen to me, but only The President of the Board has access to it.”

“That’s a lot of security,” Ken commented.

“We also have a list of the doctors who purchased the sperm. Some doctors ordered it, and then never picked it up. The sperm gets stale quickly, so we have to destroy it. We only keep that list for ten years. Receipts and expenditures are only kept for five years, and still our files are bursting at the seams.”

“What about payroll records?”

“Funny you should ask. My predecessor destroyed them after ten years, but I think they are too important to throw out. I have saved the payroll records from the day I took over, twenty-eight years ago.”

Ken had donated sperm over the course of two years. He gave Mrs. Fielder the time span.

Ken put on his ‘please do it for me face,’ a trick he had learned from his son, Tom. “Could I see the payroll records for that period of time, please,” Ken asked.

“The records were manual then, and they’re in storage in our basement. It will take me a little time to retrieve them. Why don’t you just relax, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Ken tried to recall his own experience. His first contact was with the receptionist, who took his name, address, and his social security number. Nobody worried about identity theft back then. She then gave him a number and when one of the nurse attendants came to get him, he was only known by his number. Ken remembered that his nurse was a cute young guy who was obviously gay. He had no trouble getting hard and jerking off into a bottle.

Ken concluded from his interview that the leak could only have come from either of two people: Mrs. Fielder or the receptionist. He ruled Mrs. Fielder out immediately, leaving only the receptionist.

“Which one of these names was the receptionist at the time?” Ken asked Mrs. Fielder when she brought him the payroll records. He was lucky again. There was only one receptionist during this time frame.

“This one, Rose Gustafson.” Mrs. Fielder pointed at her name. “She left us a few months after your time period. She got pregnant herself, in the usual way. She had a little girl, I believe, and she never came back to work for us.

When they parted, Ken and Mrs. Fielder shook hands, something they failed to do when they met.

“Thank you, Mrs. Fielder,” Ken said. “You’ve been most helpful.”

Ken walked out of the building feeling pretty good. This interview yielded more information than he dared to hope for. He now had a prime person of interest, her social security number, and the address where she lived twenty-five years ago or so.

The moment Ken decided how good the interview went, he began to feel euphoric. Bad! Immediately, he had a thought which dampened his spirit.

What if Maggie was pulling a scam on him, and somehow the wrong people heard about it, and decided to do better than she was doing. What if they believed he bought her story, and they kidnapped her for real? If Ken did not produce the ransom money, they would harm her.

He shuddered at the thought, and he knew that he couldn’t confide with Joe about this. From the get-go, Joe believed Maggie to be the sole, or at least, the chief scammer.