THE BABYSITTER

The babysitter, Paula Aherne, is found dead in the living room, the child gone. The Wrights have little or no faith in the ability of the police and FBI to find the kidnapper, so they begin to conduct their own search. But so far, there has been no ransom note, no phone call, no connection at all between the death of the babysitter and the missing child. Chief Tull wants desperately to help the bereft parents, but feels he is lost in a fog of misdirection.

Agents Cooger and Spence play their own game of cat and mouse with a suspect who knew Paula from the university where she was a student. Soon it becomes clear that there is a bigger mystery here, one that leads deep into the heart of Boston's North End, where Paula is apparently known by an entirely different name, and the mystery of the missing child becomes a search into the past...