FLORENCE - The psychic's name was Alice. She came on a Tuesday. Ron Beck had to know the future: What would become of his wife and little girl?
Where was their abductor taking them?
Cassidy, Alice wrote on a stenographer's pad. Her penmanship was impeccable. Crown Point, she wrote.
No. 67.
No. 27.
No. 8 on a road sign.
Nowhere on the list was there an 87 - the number of the school bus Katina Beck once climbed down from each afternoon.
Katina can't be found in the usual places. The 6-year-old is missing. So is her mother, 47-year-old Kathy Beck.
Police say they've been kidnapped by a man wanted for violating the terms of his parole. Who's next? It doesn't take a psychic to know some other fugitive will prey upon someone else some other day.
We're all Katina Beck. Northern Kentucky is a house held hostage, overflowing with outlaws, at the mercy of desperate men. As many as 20,000 criminals roam free in Kenton, Boone and Campbell counties, where a backlog of arrest warrants was ignored for too long.
The Becks are not the first to pay the price for such sloth. In April, Sandra Colston was murdered by her estranged husband in his Fort Wright home. The killer, Donald Colston, was free despite being wanted on a year-old arrest warrant for failure to report to his probation officer. His original crime was armed robbery.
Clearly, a long-term solution is needed. The state Legislature must clarify whose job it is to serve and track outstanding arrest warrants; and specify which part of the judicial system is responsible for maintaining the computer database of warrants.
How many Katina Becks need fail to get off the bus before we act?
Wanted but not sought
The man police want in her kidnapping should have been in jail. Carl Ashcraft, 38, had violated his parole in a hauntingly similar case: the kidnapping and rape of his wife and children.
More than once, police could have found Mr. Ashcraft sitting in the lime-green chair at the top of the stairs inside 7764 Arrowwood Drive. The Becks live there.
Mr. Ashcraft visited from time to time, sometimes after absences of up to a year. Kathy Beck had befriended him when both lived in a trailer park off Frogtown Road.
Mrs. Beck didn't know about the rape charge, Mr. Beck says. She didn't know about the parole violation.
Even so, Mr. Beck wasn't enamored of his wife's scruffy friend. Each time Mr. Beck came home, Mr. Ashcraft would leave abruptly, declining invitations to stay for dinner.
''I don't want to impose,'' he would say. And then he was gone.
What happened?
The last time he left the house, Mr. Ashcraft didn't wait for Mr. Beck to get home. He and Mrs. Beck hit the road with Katina around noon Feb. 25. It was time to take the girl to the bus stop a block away at the corner of Arrowwood and Walnut Creek.
Her daddy calls Katina a surprise. Ron and Kathy, both on their second marriage, weren't planning a family of their own. They're good parents. They watch the little girl like hawks.
Once Tina became a ''kindygartner,'' as her daddy says, she was never allowed to walk that block between home and the bus stop alone. Her mother walked her there and waited until she boarded. Her father, who had started working an earlier shift just so he could be there for Katina, met her on that same corner at 3:30 each afternoon.
But on Tuesday, Feb. 25, something strange happened: Katina never got off the bus. She'd never been to school. The little girl had left her daddy's life mysteriously, as unexpectedly as she had entered it.
Following the trail
No doubt it had surprised Mrs. Beck when Mr. Ashcraft drove right on by the bus stop that day without stopping to let Katina out, Mr. Beck says.
They turned right at the end of the street, headed down Walnut Creek, past the park and out onto Dixie Highway.
A trail of automated-teller transactions and attempts, all on Mrs. Beck's card, show they headed north into Ohio, then southeast to West Virginia and back to Ohio.
But that was several days ago. Where they are now is anybody's guess. On Wednesday, Ron Beck stood in front of the television clicking through a videotape of Kathy and Katina to send to America's Most Wanted. The day before, he had invited a psychic into the house.
Mr. Beck doesn't really believe in such things, he says. But a desperate man tries anything. A desperate man takes solace in details when staring down the maw of nothingness.
Dairy farm. Morton Salt.
Culvert City. Car overheating.
Clown-circus. Triple Crown Cola.
April - a girl's name.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.