“Absolutely there are,” Irene said. “And to go there is to mark the first day of the end of your career. The spirit of J. Edgar Hoover still wanders the halls. Any and all weaknesses are seen as deal breakers.”
“Precisely the attitude that keeps psychologists in business,” Dom said.
“But you don’t cost anything,” Irene said with a smile.
“I see. I am merely value added for your membership in the Catholic Church.”
Irene reached across the table and grasped his hand. “Do me a favor, Father. Never use the word merely in any sentence that refers to you. You’re a very special man.”
He blushed, considered saying something, then put another wad of waffle into his mouth.
“What you’re telling me is that I should put on my big-girl panties and get over it,” Irene said.
“Do yourself a favor,” Dom said, grinning. “Never use the word panties in a conversation with a priest. It makes us uncomfortable.”
Irene had burned a few hours of personal time for her meeting with Dom, and rather than driving all the way back into the District to return to work for a couple of hours, she headed home to King’s Park, a bastion of suburbia in Fairfax County, just outside the Beltway. Constructed in the early sixties, the homes here were all built like fortresses on quarter-acre parcels of land. Her model—a Duchess located on Thames Street—was the only home she’d ever seen where the sole access to the backyard was to go upstairs. That’s what happens when you build a house into the side of a hill.
She and the girls had moved here after the divorce, and over the intervening three years Irene had come to think of the place as a real home. Getting rid of the avocado appliances had helped.
Upon entering through the front door, Irene dropped her purse on the bench that sat in the foyer and crossed over to the kitchen, where she unholstered her SIG Sauer P228 pistol and deposited it into the cupboard over the refrigerator. Back when the kids were little, she’d taken the extra precaution of locking the weapon in a box, but now that they were older and accomplished shooters themselves, that no longer made sense.
With her weapon put away, she removed a Diet Coke from the fridge, popped the top, and wandered over to the answering machine on the counter next to the stove. The flashing light told her that she’d missed five phone calls today. Actually, if recent past was precedent, Ashley had missed four phone calls and Irene had missed one. Now that her naturally athletic daughter had sprouted breasts, the boys had begun to swarm.
Irene pressed the replay button. “Um, hi, Mrs. Rivers. This is Bruce Parker, coach of the War Hawks, Ashley’s team for the Northern Virginia Invitational League. Ashley was supposed to report to the gym by eight-thirty, but now it’s eight forty-five, and I was wondering if there was a problem. Give me a call, please, one way or another. If she’s not going to be able to make the game, I’m going to have to make arrangements very quickly.” He then gave a call-back number.
Irene’s stomach knotted. Ashley had been looking forward to this tournament for weeks. It was all she could talk about this morning as she left the house to walk to the school bus stop. How on earth would she—
The machine moved on to its second message. Same voice as before. “Mrs. Rivers, Bruce Parker again. It’s nine-fifteen, and we need to get on the road. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in Ashley—and, frankly, in you—for not having the courtesy of informing the team that Ashley had other plans.” Then a click as the call terminated.
Irene looked at the clock on the wall. It was four-twenty. What the hell was going on? Where was Ashley? For that matter, where was Kelly? She should have been home by now, too. A talker by nature, Kelly prattled constantly about her adolescent schedules and concerns, but as Irene scoured her brain for any snippet of conversation they might have had that would explain her absence, she came up with nothing.
The third message: “Hello, Mrs. Rivers. This is Roberta Ingersoll at Lake Braddock High School. Ashley didn’t make it into school today, and I’m just calling to make sure that you are aware, and to ask you to verify that her absence is excused. Please call me at . . .”
Irene made no note of the number. Clearly, something was wrong. Her children were missing. No, she chided herself. There has to be some reasonable—
Next message. “Um, yo, Mrs. Rivers. This is Charlie Binks, and I was wondering if Ashley could call me when she gets home—”
Irene pushed the dump button. She had no idea who Charlie Binks was, but he was clearly young, and he was one of the honey-sniffing bees.
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, the message made Irene’s heart rate triple. Her family was under attack. Moving quickly now, 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 of the fact that she was willing and able to gun down anyone who got in her way.
Irene forced herself to move slowly 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 placement of the apostrophe.
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 any 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 her own printer was new enough that she just used what the machine prescribed, so how could she know? 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 completely hide 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 all at once, 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 is 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 Bureau 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 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 would know 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 Kelley. 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 the 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.
Photo by Amy Cesal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GILSTRAP is the acclaimed author of Damage Control, Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Six Minutes to Freedom, Scott Free, Even Steven, At All Costs, and Nathan’s Run. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. An explosives safety expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Please visit him at www.johngilstrap.com.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2013 John Gilstrap, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3019-4
First electronic edition: August 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3020-0
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3020-8
High Treason Page 44