Message five. “Hello, Irene,” a voice said. “When you get a chance, check under the welcome mat outside your front door. This should be fun.” Click.
The caller’s voice had a gravelly quality that made Irene wonder if the voice was being faked. The tone was all menace. Taken in context with the rest, Irene’s heart rate tripled. Her family was under attack. Moving quickly, her hands trembling, she pulled her firearm back out of the cupboard and slid it back into her holster, high on her right hip. Normally, she went to considerable lengths to hide the weapon from sight, but now she didn’t care. In fact, she wanted the neighbors to be fully aware that she was willing and able to gun down anyone who got in her way.
Irene forced herself to slow down as she approached the front door. Frightened and jumpy, she recognized this as the time when she would be most likely to make a bad judgment. Panic was the number-one killer among law enforcement personnel. Adrenaline rushed, hands shook, and the first casualty was situational awareness. She’d seen it happen countless times, both in the heat of a firefight, and in the evidence that followed such firefights.
She walked to the front door and pulled it open, standing there for a moment, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. More specifically, for anyone out of the ordinary. The world seemed stable. Glancing at the stoop, she saw where the mat lay askew. Welcome to the Rivers’s. The girls had bought her that for her birthday last year and she remembered suppressing the urge to correct the spelling of the possessive.
Never taking her eyes away from the horizon for more than a few seconds at a time, Irene squatted low and lifted the corner of the mat with her left hand. The right stayed free for the SIG, just in case.
She thought the envelope was small for its color. Generally, manila envelopes were big things—eight and a half by eleven, minimum, designed to mail documents flat—but this one was actually smaller than a white envelope you’d use for the mail. Even as she lifted it, she knew that she was breaking the most basic rules of evidence gathering. She was contaminating what might otherwise be a trove of trace, but to the depths of her soul, she didn’t care. Ashley and Kelly were missing. The weight of that word, and all that it implied, made her knees sag.
The envelope bore no markings on the outside. What was she expecting, a return address? Stupid criminals had done stupider things. As she pinched open the butterfly clip at the top of the back side of the envelope, she made note of the fact that the glue on the flap hadn’t been moistened. That meant that the guy who was responsible—Jennings—had been smart enough not to leave DNA evidence. And if he’d been smart enough to do that, then he’d no doubt been smart enough to wear gloves and some kind of outer garment that would keep fibers and hair from settling onto whatever the envelope brought.
She told herself that that meant there was no harm in ignoring the evidentiary procedures. As she pulled the contents out, she noted the details. White printer paper, folded in half, words in, not out. That told her that Jennings had a gift for drama. Hide the reveal until the last possible moment.
Her mind screamed for her to stop and call the CSU—crime scene unit. This document needed to be processed. It needed to be evaluated for all manner of trace evidence. The ink on the paper could be traced, and the grammar could be evaluated for ethnic patterns. All of it could be pristine only once, and here she was ruining that moment.
Ashley and Kelly are missing.
Opening the paper, she noted that the words were printed in a standard typeface—she thought it was called Times New Roman, but maybe not. She did see, however, that the print was fancy, not the work of the upscale dot matrix printer that she’d paid a fortune for. Did that mean that Jennings was rich, or did it mean merely that he had access to a good printer, one of those ink jet jobs that she’d seen in the director’s office?
Her hands shook.
I have them. If you contact your colleagues, I will know and I will kill them. That would be such a sad end for two such beautiful little girls. As long as you suffer in the knowledge that they are gone, they needn’t suffer at all. One day, if you behave, I’ll give them back to you. If you talk to the police, you’ll get them back one part at a time. If you just play the game, you’ll get them back whole, older, wiser, and very street smart.
Irene’s vision blurred as she read the words. The air became too thick to breathe. Honest to God, if this monster so much as touched her girls—
What? What would she do? What could she do? He’d already touched them, for Christ’s sake. How else would he have shoved them into a car, or done whatever he’d done to snatch them off the street? Her anger melded with her fear, and the resultant stew of emotion was a toxic one. Irene felt overwhelmed by the need to kill someone. To kill Barney Jennings. Could it be that simple?
Her stomach seized as she thought about that smirk in his press conference. It was his way—well established via the Harrelson boys—to hide very well those he took. If Irene killed Jennings, then she would never know where her girls were.
Her head ached as thousands of thoughts flooded her brain simultaneously, as if they were trying to expand the volume of her skull. Maybe this is what panic felt like. Panic: the emotion that everyone promised was the big killer in an emergency. It occurred to her in a bitter haze just how easy it was to think of panic as a weakness when it’s considered in the third person, yet it was so organic in the first.
A monster had taken her children. She saw their innocent faces, smiling under their helmets of blond hair, and then she saw those angelic faces morphing into masks of terror. Of pain. She saw them wondering when their mother was going to come and rescue them.
The only rational course was for her to call her office and get the Bureau involved. This was precisely the kind of case that would galvanize every agent in the country to avenge the harm that had befallen one of their own.
I will know and I will kill them.
The words terrified her. Instinctively, intuitively, she knew that the kidnapper was bluffing—how could he possibly know what was going on inside of the closed sphere that defined the law enforcement community?—but Jennings had shown a disturbing level of cunning and cleverness. Would he state something so dogmatically if it were not true? She sensed not.
Irene tried to corral her thoughts, bring order to the blooming panic. It was obvious what she should do, what she would tell the person on the other end of a phone call to do. But this was real. This was first person, and deep in her soul, she knew that Jennings—the author of the note—was telling the truth.
So, what was she supposed to do with that? Was she supposed to just trust this asshole with the lives of her daughters? That was as nonstarting as any nonstarter could be. Was she supposed to pretend that none of this had happened, and pray that it would come to a happy ending? Surely Jennings knew that that would never happen.
Maybe he was expecting her to go to the police, and as soon as she did, he would use that as an excuse to kill Ashley and Kelly. She had to assume that was the case.
Irene stepped back into the foyer and pushed the door closed. When she was confident that she was invisible to the outside world, she sat down on a patch of tile floor and read the note again. And again. It was all too much to process. What was that monster—?
No. She couldn’t go there. That was a trip from which there could be no happy return. Once you started to imagine the harm that could befall a loved one, no scenario but the worst could possibly resonate.
She needed to remain positive. Or, if not positive, then optimistic. Not pessimistic. There was a way to solve this.
But how?
Irene needed help, but all of the standard avenues for assistance—the ones who carried badges and guns—were out of the question, at least for the time being.
I will know and I will kill them.
Jesus.
Jesus. Exactly. In that moment, in that single rush of clarity, she knew exactly what she needed to do.
Chapter 3
It tur
ned out that driving to Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, was a hell of a lot easier than finding it on the map. Irene’s AAA map of the Commonwealth showed it as a tiny speck on the banks of the Potomac River, but to get reliable driving directions, she had to buy an ADC map from a 7-Eleven in Colonial Beach.
The ninety-minute drive helped to soothe her nerves—to prioritize her options—and as she finally drove down Church Street on her way toward the water, she was struck by just how charming a place it was. By all appearances, it was a fishing village, but unlike most such villages in the final decade of the twentieth century, this one still appeared to thrive. On the corner where you would expect to see a big-name chain drugstore, she noted Hamilton Pharmacy, and just from the looks of the place, she knew there had to be a soda fountain in the back corner.
The streets weren’t crowded, exactly, at this hour of a weekday afternoon, but they weren’t empty, either. In fact, as she drove past the Cricket Shop, a throwback haberdasher, she witnessed a handshake between a customer and the man she presumed to be the proprietor as the former left with a plastic bag draped over a hanger. From the size and shape, Irene assumed it was a suit, and from the look of satisfaction on the customer’s face, she assumed that it was a nice one.
Everyone seemed so damned contented. It was like entering a world that had somehow insulated itself from the cruelties that savaged the rest of the planet, and she at once admired and pitied them. It was the burden of the life she’d chosen to know the terrible facts that the rest of the world was shielded from. She was among the few who anguished so that the rest of the population could sleep soundly.
I will know and I will kill them.
Irene was not well trained in the science of avoiding detection or shaking trackers, but she’d been watching, and as far as she knew, she hadn’t been followed. And even if she had, surely even the most monstrous of monsters would not harm her for seeking counsel from her priest. That’s what she told herself, anyway.
Still two or three blocks from the river, she passed an enormous mansion on the left. Easily the largest residence she’d seen, it seemed to be nearly the same size of the church that loomed farther down the hill—Saint Katherine’s Catholic Church. Between the two structures sat a two-story colonial that she pegged as late-eighties construction. It was served by a two-hundred-foot driveway, which ended with a small white-on-black metal sign that read, RECTORY.
Irene swung the turn and drove toward the house. By the time she got to the space in front of the garage, Father Dom was already standing on the front stoop, waiting. The clerical suit was gone, replaced by blue jeans and a Washington Redskins T-shirt. He approached the car as she opened her door, and was there at the opening as she started to climb out.
“Are you okay, Irene?” he asked. “You sounded so frantic on the telephone.” He extended his arms wide for an embrace, which she accepted.
When her lips were very close to his ear, Irene whispered, “Someone has kidnapped my girls.”
She felt his shoulders stiffen. He pushed her out to arm’s length. “Oh, my heavens, Irene. What are—?”
“Can we go inside, Dom? I don’t want to talk about this out here. I don’t want anyone to see.”
“See what?”
“Please, Father. Can’t we—?”
“Of course, of course. Please come this way.”
He led the way up the brick walkway to the house’s front door and opened it, gesturing for Irene to cross the threshold first.
Inside, the rectory looked like, well, a home. Why did that surprise her so? Moreover, it looked like a home that could have been in any suburb of any city in the country. In fact, it didn’t look all that much different from her own home. The dining room lay on the left of the center hall, the living room to the right. She was struck by just how homey the place felt. A television on the far side of the living room showed a golf game in progress, and an even younger priest than Dom sitting on the sofa, thoroughly engaged.
“Father Tim?” Dom said, breaking the reverie.
The sound of Dom’s voice seemed to startle the other priest, and his head whipped around. “Yes?”
“Can you excuse us, please? I need to speak—”
Father Tim shot to his feet. “Yes, yes,” he said. He seemed self-conscious of the open beer on the end table. As he scooped it up, he made a valiant but ineffective effort to hide it. “I’ll get right out of your way.” He made no attempt to introduce himself to Irene, nor to seek her introduction.
Irene suppressed a laugh as the young man rushed past and hurried toward the stairs to the upper level.
“He’s very new,” Dom explained, answering her question before she could ask it. “He gets a little twitchy at times.”
Dom gestured to the chair that Father Tim had just vacated. “Please,” he said, “have a seat. Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
“Why are you so sure that this is the work of Jennings?” Dom asked when she was done.
“How could it be anyone else?”
Dom cocked his head and gave a little smirk. “You know that another question is never an answer, right?”
Irene conceded the point by sagging her shoulders. “I know it because I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Dom smiled.
“Am I missing a joke?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s just that a friend of mine is fond of saying the same thing. There’s no one else who would fit the profile of someone who might threaten you through your children?”
Irene felt her jaw drop. What the hell kind of question was that? They were children.
Dom held up his hands. “I mean no offense. But you’ve been with the FBI for what? Ten years? Twelve?”
“A little over thirteen.”
“Which is the same as a little under fourteen,” Dom said. “My point is that that you’ve had time to make a lot of arrests and accumulate a lot of enemies. Yet you seem so sure that your enemy in this case is Barney Jennings.”
Irene saw his point. “There are . . . similarities,” she said. “The Harrelson boys disappeared without a trace. I mean, literally without a trace. We don’t begin to know where to start looking for them.”
“And you determined that after a full investigation that was run by your entire team.”
“Yet Jennings stayed ahead of us. Not far ahead, mind you, but just a step or two.”
Dom scowled. “Are you suggesting inside information?”
Irene steeled herself with a deep breath. She didn’t want to say what was coming next. “Truthfully, I don’t know what I think.”
“But you know what you suspect.”
“Yes, I do. I’d had hints of it other times during the investigation—that sense that Jennings was either the luckiest or smartest son of a bitch on the planet—” She caught herself cussing and blushed. “Sorry.”
“Oh, that that were the worst that I heard on an average day, even coming from the school.” He waited a beat. “You were about to tell me whether you think there’s some kind of inside-the-FBI involvement.”
“I worry that there is,” Irene said.
“And because of that, you fear that if you involve the police, Jennings will find out and do something to the girls.”
Hearing the words from someone else churned her stomach. “Yes.”
“So, what’s your plan?” Dom asked. “What do you need from me?”
Irene felt tears pressing in and she shut her eyes tight. She took a huge breath and held it, hoping that her nerves would settle. After a long time, she said, “I’m not sure I even know, Father. I was hoping that by talking it through I might . . . I don’t know, I might get an idea.”
“Why don’t you pay Mr. Jennings a visit yourself?” Dom asked.
“I have no official probable cause,” she said.
Dom scowled deeply and cocked his head to the side. “You’re putting bureaucracy ahead of your daughters’ welfare?”
Sadness became anger in the
space of half a heartbeat. “Dom!”
“Again, no offense,” he said. “But I’m confused. If you know who the perpetrator is, and you know where he lives, and you fear that he’s snatched Ashley and Kelly, I don’t understand why you’re here instead of there.”
“What if I’m wrong?” she asked. “Suspicions are not facts. If I charge into Jennings’s house and demand an answer and he is not the right guy, I can lose everything. The real kidnapper can know what I’ve done, he’ll hurt the girls, and I’ll be boiled in oil by the Bureau.”
Dom looked at her for a long time, and as he did, his gaze narrowed. “Sounds like you need a reliable team,” he said, after a long silence.
“What I need is a suspension of the Constitution and the rules of discovery. I need to find out what has happened to my kids.”
“And it needs to be outside of the law,” Dom said. “May I ask why you came to me?”
The question confused her. “I didn’t come to you for answers, Father. I came to you to talk things through. You’re a friend, a priest, and a shrink. This is the only moment in my life I can think of where I’ve needed all three at exactly the same time.”
She smiled as she said that, but Dom’s face showed no humor. She feared that she’d offended him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“How far are you willing to go?” Dom asked in return.
“Excuse me?”
“How far are you willing to go to be reunited with your daughters?”
“I don’t understand the question.” If it had come from someone else, she might have, but coming from Dom, it was a complete cypher.
“I’m not speaking in riddles,” Dom said. “If it came to a binary choice between not getting Ashley and Kelly back or violating every known rule on the collection of evidence and prosecution of witnesses, which would you take?”
Something tugged in Irene’s spine. She’d never seen Dom like this before. “Are we speaking in hypotheticals here?”
Soft Targets Page 3