The Hydra with Many Faces

To all mothers in Aster City

'Headline: The great candy caper leaves all Aster City atwitter.

Over the weekend, supermarkets put back candies and other sweets that they had removed from their shelves six weeks ago. That event, small though it was, may have signaled the end to one of the stranger crime sprees in Aster City's post-war history. For more than three months, the public has been absorbed by a series of criminal acts directed against Jones' Candy Company. The abduction shocked many residents who for the most part enjoy a life free of crime and who feared that corporate kidnappings had arrived on their shores. Their concern turned to bewilderment, as the kidnapping proved to be only the start of trouble for Mr. Jones and his eight billion dollar a year company. No evidence of poisoning ever emerged but the scare tactics worked. Supermarkets and small shops cleared their shelves of all Jones' Candy Company products. Typical of the statewide concern, was a office worker who gave her colleagues a gift of chocolates, attaching a reassuring note that another candy maker had produced them. For Jones' Candy Company, the case became an instant financial disaster. More worrisome for many residents were signs of copycat extortions. A forty-two year old man was charged with using a similar cyanide threat to coerce two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars from the Coca-Cola bottling company. "The Jones' Candy Company case is very much our concern too," a president of a brewing company said several weeks ago. "If this kind of crime is left unpunished, there will be no stable operation of food companies." Indeed, despite the assignment of two hundred or more state and local officers to the case, the normally efficient police seemed stumped. Naturally, the big question was why all this was happening. Now and then, the police leaked clues to the press, but if they truly knew who they were after they gave no indication. That left a clear field of speculation for this country's often hyperthyroidic popular magazines. Theories ranged from disgruntled former employees who had lost their jobs in the merger of two Jones' Candy Company subsidiaries to people with a personal vendetta against Mr. Jones to stock manipulators out to drive down the price of Jones' Candy Company shares. Several people saw the possible involvement of shadowy organizations that say they are civil rights groups, but are described by the authorities as fronts for racketeers. Some Jones' Candy Company employees may have ties to these groups, it was said. Through it all many sensed that Mr. Jones was not telling all he knew and might have even struck a deal with his tormentors. "Right from the beginning, we haven't been getting much help from the Jones' Candy Company president," Head of the State Public Safety Commission told the newspaper Weazel News, a possible denouement finally materialized the other day, with still more letters to newspaper offices from people who said they were the culprits. The letters had the same derisive tone as earlier notes to the police. On Friday, Jones' Candy Company held its annual stockholders meeting, an uneventful session that lasted forty minutes. At the same time, Jones' Candy Company candy started to reappear on store shelves.'

This article was published on July 2nd.

The next day on July 3rd, a part-time auditor of Meat Foods received a letter from the monster demanding six hundred million dollar ransom at 8PM on the 6th.

Three days later, as requested, at 8:07PM, the monster calls the phone of a member of the Meat Foods board of directors. A child's recorded voice speaks, "The back of the telephone box next to bus stop sign."

It is only four kilometers from the house to the bus stop. A distance that can be reached in ten minutes by car. Because it took time for emergency deployment of police cars near the bus stop, the undercover investigator once, again dressed as the Meat Foods managing director, driven in a white Corolla, didn't arrive at the bus stop until over an hour later at 9:12PM. The letter once again found on the phone box reads, 'Enter the expressway from the interchange, go to Kanine City at eighty-five kilometers per hour, and look at the back of the bench in the waiting area of the bus stop.'