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Davis ran to a closet, yanked out a suitcase, and threw it in the middle of the living-room floor. “Rabbit, you get out of here—get in my car,” Davis told Murray. “Let’s all get ready!”

Dock Barker’s voice was even. “Rabbit, you stay right where you are,” he said. “You don’t leave this apartment. If fireworks start, you get behind me and this tommy and I’ll take you out of here.”

Suddenly Barker uttered an oath and swung his submachine gun toward a pair of men who had appeared across the street. One lit a cigarette. Barker thought it was a signal for FBI men to attack. He raised the gun to fire.

Dillinger’s voice was a harsh whisper. “Don’t do that, Dock!” he snapped. “Wait till we’re sure we’re right. Then we’ll give it to ’em!” The room went quiet. Murray could hear herself breathe. The two men in Barker’s gun sights walked on, disappearing around a corner. Barker lowered his gun. The moment passed. It wasn’t the FBI.

They remained like that, poised with guns at the windows, until later that night, when Dock’s pal Russell Gibson pulled up in front. He came to the door and was surprised to find himself staring into the barrel of Dillinger’s Thompson gun. Inside, Gibson told them everything was okay: McLaughlin wasn’t talking. How long that would last he didn’t know. He urged everyone to leave as soon as possible.10

Dillinger talked it over with Van Meter. They decided to stay another night.

At the Cook County Jail, Purvis’s men questioned Boss McLaughlin until dawn. Only after they threatened to bring charges against his son did the wily old pol decide to talk. He said he had been approached three weeks earlier by a con man he knew who had introduced him to two men named “Smith” and “Jones.” McLaughlin insisted he never found out more about the pair, nor met any members of the Barker Gang. But he did say Smith and Jones were working out of the Irving Park Hotel and seemed to be from Toledo. It was the first hint the FBI fielded that the Barkers were in Toledo, but in the uproar over Dillinger, Purvis never found time to pursue it. In a subsequent search of Dr. Moran’s phone records, there were several calls to Toledo, but Purvis’s men wouldn’t get around to checking them for months.

They were swamped. Purvis was grappling with a deluge of new information that flowed to the FBI in the wake of Little Bohemia. New leads, most of them worthless, poured into the office. Dillinger was dead, Dillinger was in California, Dillinger was in Canada. By now reporters had created a permanent encampment in the hallway in front of Doris Rogers’s desk; Purvis couldn’t go to the bathroom without one of them shouting questions. Worse, every sheriff in Indiana was certain Dillinger was hiding in his jurisdiction, and each one cried out to be debriefed. Every day that week, while Dillinger sat watching John Hamilton die in Aurora, Purvis dispatched agents to a new town to check out a new tip: On Wednesday it was East Chicago, Thursday Muncie, Friday Fort Wayne, Saturday South Bend. None of it led anywhere.

The three Dillinger women captured at Little Bohemia, ferried to a jail in Madison, Wisconsin, were all but useless. Facing charges of conspiracy and harboring a fugitive, they gave fake names and fake stories and initially resisted all efforts to question them. After a few days Jean Delaney and Mickey Conforti finally talked, but they said little the agents could use. Conforti gave her correct name but said she had no idea her boyfriend “Wayne Huttner” was really Homer Van Meter. Agents found Conforti’s invalid mother in a Chicago-area sanatorium and fired questions at her as she drooled. Just the fact the women were in FBI custody was a cause for mockery. Coming on the heels of Billie Frechette’s capture, wiseacres cracked that the Bureau may not always get its man, but it always got his women.

What Purvis had was cars. They found the ones Nelson and Tommy Carroll used to escape, both abandoned on dirt roads deep in the north woods. They found the car Nelson had wrecked on the way to Little Bohemia.