Kidnapping in Kendall County by Delores Fossen Page A

took my twin daughters with me. Rosalie and her sister were young, barely six years old. But our boys were older and could speak for themselves. They wanted to stay with their father, so Roy raised them.”
    Unlike Rosalie, there was no bitterness in Jewell’s tone or body language, but Rosalie figured it had to be there somewhere under all that calm composure. Despite the rose-colored spin her mother had just put on things, Rosalie believed that Roy had demanded that she leave.
    “Five months or so after Sadie was taken,” Jewell continued, “Roy and I were worried when the cops and FBI weren’t finding anything. So, we put out the word through some shady sources that we were looking to buy a baby. One that we hoped to use to help heal Rosalie’s heart.”
    “That wouldn’t have happened,” Rosalie jumped to say.
    “I know,” her mother assured her. “But we thought saying that might convince the person behind the black market adoptions. And it did, I guess. Weeks later, someone finally called Roy using a voice scrambler, and whoever it was used a prepaid cell that couldn’t be traced. The person said someone would contact Roy when they had a baby for us.”
    Rosalie hadn’t suspected any of this. Of course, she’d been so involved with her own search and her own pain that she wasn’t looking for clues that her mother had been doing the same thing.
    With Roy’s help, no less.
    Rosalie remembered something else and shook her head. “But Vickie knew your names. She said you were to adopt Austin’s nephew. Why did you ask for a boy if you were looking for Sadie?”
    “We didn’t ask for a specific baby. If we had, we would have asked for a baby Sadie’s own age, but we thought that would make them believe we were only searching for our granddaughter. Instead, we said we wanted to adopt a child. Any child.” Her mother stopped again, gathered her breath. “Roy paid them twenty-five thousand through a wire transfer to an offshore account with the agreement that they’d get another twenty-five grand once we had the baby.”
    Fifty thousand. That was the going rate for one of these babies? It sickened Rosalie to think of these monsters selling babies for cash. There was no price tag she could put on her precious daughter.
    “Finally, Roy and I got a call that a baby boy was ready for adoption, and that we could have him within a week,” her mother went on. “We were told to wait and that we’d get instructions about the pickup and how to make the final payment. After I was arrested, the person didn’t contact us again.”
    Her mother’s arrest had happened nearly four months ago. Right about the time that Austin’s nephew had been kidnapped.
    Maybe the arrest had scared off the baby broker?
    That had to be it because these baby sellers wouldn’t have cared if the arrest made Jewell an unsuitable mother. However, they might have thought Roy would be under some kind of police surveillance.
    Austin added some profanity under his breath and gave Jewell a hard stare. “I can’t believe Seth would have let you do something like that. It was dangerous. The person behind this could have killed both of you.”
    “Seth didn’t know.
Doesn’t
know,” Jewell corrected, her cheeks flushing a little. “I’d like to keep it that way, especially since the deal didn’t go through. And if it had, we would have gladly brought in Seth, Cooper and anyone else to catch these monsters. We would have done anything to rescue not only that child but any others we might have found.”
    Rosalie and Austin exchanged another glance, and she saw the questions in his eyes. If Yancy was indeed behind the baby farms, then he could have targeted Austin’s nephew to give to Roy and Jewell. A way to dig the knife in even deeper to punish Austin for the investigation that had nearly landed Yancy in jail.
    But if so, it was risky, too, since Yancy must have suspected that her parents would have just turned the baby over to the