The Chain Read online

  She opens her eyes.

  She looks, really looks.

  She sees everything there is to see.

  18

  Thursday, 3:31 p.m.

  Wendy Patterson picks up Denny from Rowley Elementary School, takes him to soccer practice at Rowley High School, then drives into Ipswich and gets herself a soy chai latte from the Starbucks. She Instagrams a picture of the latte and a Thanksgiving cookie that she got for Denny.

  Denny has changed into his soccer clothes and is doing dribbling drills with the team. Rachel watches him from her Volvo 240 parked across the street while using her phone to monitor Wendy’s tweets, Facebook updates, and Instagrams. She watches him and feels sick with doubt. How can she do this? It’s the most evil thing you could ever do to a mom, to a family. But then she thinks about Kylie locked in some crazy woman’s basement. It’s the most evil thing you can do but it has to be done.

  She watches Denny play, and when the practice is over she sees that, yup, Wendy is still in Ipswich at the Starbucks. The drizzle has stopped now and it looks like Denny is going to be walking home. Wendy doesn’t indicate on her Facebook feed that she is coming to pick him up.

  Could Rachel grab him now?

  She had thought that this would be a scouting trip, not a snatch-and-grab mission. She hasn’t prepared the Appenzeller house yet. The board isn’t over the basement window; she doesn’t have a mattress down there. But if the opportunity presents itself?

  She follows the little boy in her car as he walks home with a friend. Obviously, she can’t grab two kids, so she’ll have to wait until they part.

  She knows she must look very suspicious, creeping along at five miles per hour following two little boys.

  She hasn’t thought this through properly. She has no idea where in Rowley Denny’s house is. Is he on the main road? Down a cul-de-sac? She curses herself for not figuring out the route from the high school to his house on Google Maps.

  The friend hangs with Denny for a few blocks but then waves and leaves, and Denny is by himself.

  Little Denny all alone.

  Rachel’s pulse quickens. She looks at the front passenger seat. Gun, ski mask, handcuffs, blindfold.

  She rolls the window down and checks her mirrors.

  There are witnesses. An old man with a dog. A high-school girl jogging. Rowley is a sleepy little community but not quite sleepy enough today. And then, just like that, Denny walks up a driveway, takes a key out of his pocket, and goes into his house.

  Rachel parks the Volvo on the other side of the street and checks Wendy’s Facebook feed. Now she is coming home, it says.

  Rachel has about eight or nine minutes with Denny in there by himself. Is he by himself? Is there a dog or a housekeeper or something?

  Can she just put on the ski mask, march across the road, and ring the doorbell? How can she get him into the car if she has to make a quick getaway? In the movies, lone kidnappers used chloroform-soaked rags to get their victims. Could you buy chloroform at the pharmacy? What if she used too much and sent the frickin’ kid into cardiac arrest?

  She puts her face in her hands.

  How is this happening to her? When is she going to wake up from this nightmare?

  She goes through these thoughts over and over until it’s too late. Wendy’s white VW SUV rolls up in front of the house, and Wendy gets out.

  Rachel curses herself.

  She’s blown it. Almost on purpose. Almost on purpose out of sheer cowardice.

  But as soon as his mom appears, Denny comes outside, and he and a kid from next door start playing basketball on the other kid’s hoop.

  She watches them both greedily. The way a predator watches its prey.

  Either would do in a pinch. If she could get one of them alone…

  She looks at her watch. Not yet five o’clock. This morning when she woke up, she had been a completely different person. As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.

  When the one-on-one basketball game is over, Denny goes back inside. A few moments later, a Lowell Police Department patrol car pulls up in front of the Pattersons’ house and a six-foot-three uniformed cop gets out.

  Rachel slinks down in her seat, but the cop hasn’t come for her. He is carrying a giant box of Legos. He rings the Pattersons’ bell and Wendy answers. She gives him a kiss, and Rachel watches the cop go inside. She watches through the living-room window as he ruffles little Denny’s hair and gives him the Legos.

  I guess Wendy doesn’t report everything on Facebook and Instagram, Rachel thinks. And there goes Kid 1. No law enforcement. The rules are clear. She takes out her notebook and her phone. Kid 2 is now Kid 1.

  Toby Dunleavy.

  Rachel looks at Helen Dunleavy’s Facebook feed. She selected Helen because she was another one of those people who felt the need to share everything that was happening to them every half an hour or so. She seems like a nice lady, though, and a good mom. That’s the kind you want: a good mom who will do anything to get her child back.

  She deep-dives on Mike, Helen’s husband. Standard Chartered is a safe, boring enough place to work. He’s probably used to dealing with stress and he’ll have money to pay a ransom. Mike is English but lived in Manhattan for many years. He has a food blog and he’d written a funny post titled “What Came First, Zabar’s or the Upper West Side?” Another nice guy. Not a guy you’d want to put through hell.

  But then, nobody should be put through what she’s going through.

  She pauses and again racks her brain for any other way out of this, but nothing comes to mind. Follow The Chain. That’s all. If you follow The Chain you get your kid back. If you don’t…

  Her iPhone begins ringing as she’s looking at Toby’s Tumblr feed. The screen says Unknown Caller.

  “Hello?” Rachel says hesitantly.

  “How are things going, Rachel?” a voice asks. It’s someone speaking through a voice distorter. The original someone who contacted her this morning when she was on I-95.

  “Who are you?” Rachel demands.

  “I’m your friend, Rachel. A friend who will tell you the truth no matter how bitter that truth is. You’re a philosopher, aren’t you?”

  “I guess—”

  “You know what they say. The living are only a species of the dead, aren’t they? And a very rare species at that. The cradle rocks over the abyss. Your daughter’s named Kylie, is that right?”

  “Yes. She’s a great kid. She’s all I have.”

  “If you want her to stay in the land of the living, if you want her to come back safely, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty.”

  “I know. I’m researching targets right now.”

  “Good. That’s what we want. Do you have a piece of paper nearby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Write this down: 2-3-4-8-3-8-3-h-u-d-y-k-d-y-2. Say it back to me.”

  Rachel repeats it.

  “That’s the Wickr account name for this part of The Chain. That’s W-i-c-k-r. You’ll need to download the app on your phone. Send the details of the targets you are considering to that account. Someone here may vet this list. We may veto some of your choices. Sometimes we veto all the candidates, and occasionally we suggest some of our own. Is that clear?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is it clear or not?”

  “It is. Look, I might need help with this part, but I don’t know if I can bring in Marty, my ex-husband. He might want to go straight to the cops.”

  “Then you’d better not bring him in,” the distorted voice says quickly.

  “His brother, Pete, was in the Marines, but he’s definitely not a fan of law enforcement. He had some trouble with the police when he was a kid, and I think he was arrested last year in Boston.”

  “That doesn’t mean much. I hear the Boston PD will arrest you for anything.”

  Rachel sees a small opportunity here. A l
ittle seed of something that might never grow but that is nevertheless a seed.

  “Yeah,” Rachel says and then adds with seeming indifference, “They’ll arrest you for jaywalking, arrest you for banging a uey.”

  The distorted voice stifles a laugh and mutters, “Very true,” before immediately getting back to business. “We may allow this ex-brother-in-law of yours. Send me his details on Wickr.”

  “I will.”

  “Very good. We’re making progress. This is how it’s worked for many, many years. The Chain will get you through, Rachel,” the voice says and then the line goes dead.

  The Lowell cop exits the Patterson house and walks to his car. Wendy comes to the door and waves.

  It’s time to leave this street and this town.

  Rachel puts the key in the Volvo’s ignition. The car backfires, and the cop turns to look at her. She has no choice but to wave to him through the window. Yet another person who has seen her do something weird or suspicious today.

  She drives along Route 1A onto Rolfes Lane, takes the turnpike, and goes over the bridge to Plum Island.

  Half a block from her house, she sees Kylie’s geeky friend Stuart approaching. Shit!

  She rolls her window down, stops the car. “Hello, Stu,” she says casually.

  “Mrs. O’Neill, um, I mean, Ms. Klein, um, I was wondering…I was wondering where Kylie was today? I didn’t get a text from her. Mrs. M. said she was sick.”

  “That’s right, Kylie’s not well,” Rachel says.

  “Oh? What’s wrong?”

  “Um, stomach flu, that kind of thing.”

  “Wow. Really? She seemed OK yesterday.”

  “It was very sudden.”

  “Must have been. She texted me this morning and didn’t say anything. I thought she might have been trying to get out of that Egyptology presentation, which is crazy because, you know—”

  “She’s the expert, I know. Like I said, it was, uh, very sudden.”

  Stuart seems puzzled and not entirely convinced. “Anyway, we all texted her and she never got back to us.”

  Rachel tries to think of a reasonable explanation. “Um, yeah, we’ve lost wireless in the house, which is why she’s been out of touch. She can’t text or Instagram or anything.”

  “I thought she still had minutes left on her phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hey, do you want me to come over and look at your wireless? It might be a router issue.”

  “No, better not. I’m coming down with the flu bug as well. It’s very contagious. Don’t want to get you sick too. I’ll definitely tell Kylie you were asking for her.”

  “Um, OK, ’bye,” he says, and she stares at him until, intimidated, he turns and waves and walks back down the road again.

  She drives the remaining fifty yards to the house. She hasn’t thought of that. Kylie’s school friends text and message all the time. If Kylie goes radio silent for more than an hour, it creates a big vacuum in their lives. And soon she’ll start running out of plausible excuses. Another thing to worry about on top of everything else.

  19

  Thursday, 5:11 p.m.

  Pete isn’t home yet but he can’t take it anymore. He’s been in the woods all day.

  His skin is crawling; his skin is on fire. It is, as old man De Quincey said, the itch that can never be scratched.

  He pulls the Dodge Ram off Route 2 and into the Wachusett Mountain State Reservation. There’s a pond there that nobody ever goes to.

  He reaches over the seat and grabs his backpack.

  He looks up and down the road but there’s no one around. From the backpack he removes a small plastic bag of premium-grade Mexican heroin. The DEA crackdown on legit opiates has affected all the patients who get their meds through the VA; Pete was able to fill the gap through the dark web for a while but then the feds got active there too. Heroin is actually easier to obtain than OxyContin now, and heroin is much more effective anyway, especially golden-triangle H and the new stuff coming up from Guerrero.

  He takes out a spoon and his Zippo lighter and a syringe and a rubber arm tie. He cooks the heroin, ties off a vein, sucks the drug up into the syringe, and flicks the needle to get the air bubbles out.

  He injects himself and then quickly puts the paraphernalia in the glove compartment in case he passes out and a National Park Service clown gets nosy.

  He looks through the windshield at the fall foliage and the azure pond water. The trees aren’t at their peak but they’re still beautiful. Fiery oranges and reds and crazy sunburned yellows. He relaxes and lets the heroin dissolve in his bloodstream.

  He’s never looked at the statistics, so he has no idea how many veterans are opiate addicts of some sort, but he imagines the number is quite high. Especially for people who have done a couple of combat tours. During the ’08 surge, every single member of his company had been injured or wounded. After a while people just stopped reporting themselves to the medics. What was the point? Nothing they could do about a concussion or a broken rib or a sprained back. You were just taking up a bed when your buddies were out there clearing roads and removing explosive charges from bridges.

  What these opiates do, what heroin does, is remove the pain from your body temporarily. All the accumulated pain of all those decades walking the Earth. Pain from the grinding of bone on bone, pain from falls, pain from people dropping girders on you, pain from the incompetent operation of machinery, pain from falling thirty feet into a wadi, pain from an overpressure shock wave from an IED thirty feet to your rear.

  And that’s just the physical pain.

  He tilts the car seat back and lets the heroin ease his burdens in a way that even sleep cannot. The μ-opioid receptors in his brain activate a cascade that leads to a release of dopamine and a rush of well-being.

  His eyes flicker and he zoetropes the strange twiggy trees on the pond’s far shore, the falling leaves, and the thin-legged wading birds walking over the pond’s mercury surface. Memories and images flood his mind whenever he uses. Usually bad memories. Usually the war. Sometimes 9/11. He thinks about Cara and Blair. He’s just over forty, but he has been married and divorced twice. Nearly everybody he knows is in the same boat, of course, and it’s worse among the enlisted men. Sergeant McGrath, a guy on his last tour, had been divorced four times.

  Cara was just a youthful mistake—they were married for only thirteen months—but Blair…oh boy, Blair was a Townes Van Zandt song. She had taken a big chunk of his heart, his life, and his money.

  Money. Another worry. Seven more years in the Marines and he could have retired on half pay. But the truth was that he had just barely avoided court-martial for what had happened at Bastion in September 2012.

  Women, money, the goddamn war…hell with it all, he thinks and closes his eyes and lets the heroin fix him.

  The H fixes him.

  Fixes him in spades.

  He sleeps for about twenty minutes and wakes and drives to a 7-Eleven to buy a pack of Marlboros and a Gatorade. The worry about Rachel has temporarily slipped his mind.

  He gets back in the cab and turns on the radio. They’re playing Springsteen. It’s new Springsteen and he doesn’t know new Springsteen but it’s all right. He lights himself a cigarette and sips the Gatorade and then drives to Holden, where he takes 122A into town.

  He’s been back in Worcester about two months now. He doesn’t feel sentimental about the place. He has no family left here and very few friends from the old days.

  The apartment is in an old mill that has been converted into condos. It’s only a flop to crash in and get mail.

  He parks the car and goes inside.

  He grabs a Sam Adams from the fridge and plugs the iPhone into the charger. When it comes back to life, he looks at a second text from Rachel.

  They said it was OK for me to bring you in. Call me, please! it says.

  He dials her number and she answers immediately. “Pete?” she asks.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”


  “Are you home?”

  “Yeah. What’s going on?”

  “I’ll call you right back,” she says.

  The phone rings. It says Unknown Caller. “Rachel?”

  “I’m calling you from a burner phone. Oh, Pete, I need to talk to somebody. I tried to talk to Marty but he’s in Georgia. Oh God,” she begins and dissolves into sobs.

  “Have you been in an accident? What’s happening?” he asks.

  “It’s Kylie. They’ve taken Kylie. They’ve kidnapped her.”

  “What? Are you sure she’s not just—”

  “They’ve taken her, Pete!”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “I can’t call the cops, Pete. I can’t call anybody.”

  “Call the police, Rachel. Call them now!”

  “I can’t, Pete, it’s complicated. It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”

  20

  Thursday, 6:00 p.m.

  Pete has the same recurring thought as Rachel does: If they harm one hair on Kylie’s head, he will scorch their world and stamp on the smoldering ashes. He will spend the rest of his life hunting them down and killing them all.

  No one is going to harm Kylie, and they are going to get her back.

  Pete drives the Dodge Ram hard to the front gate of the self-storage yard on Route 9. He parks outside locker 33. It’s the biggest locker you can get, the size of a couple of garages. He had graduated from the small locker to the medium one and now to their “deluxe storage facility.” He opens the padlock, rolls up the metal door, finds the light switch, and pulls the door closed behind him.

  When his mom sold the house and moved to that place near Scottsdale, Pete had just taken all his stuff and dumped it in here, adding to it over the years. Until he bought the apartment he’s in now, he had never really had a civilian house. He’d lived in the married quarters at Camp Lejeune and a succession of billets in Iraq, Qatar, Okinawa, and Afghanistan. This anonymous self-storage place between the road and the old ruined freight railway is the closest thing he’s got to a permanent home.

  He can spend hours here going through his old crap but today he ignores the nostalgia boxes and goes straight to the gun cabinet on the wall at the back. Rachel was confused and unclear on the phone. Kylie had been kidnapped and at this stage Rachel didn’t want to go to the police. She wanted to cooperate with the kidnappers and do what they asked. If he can’t persuade her to bring in the FBI, the two of them will need to be well armed. He unlocks the gun cabinet and takes out both of his handguns—his grandfather’s navy-issue .45 ACP and his own Glock 19—and finally his Winchester twelve-gauge. His rifle is in the cab already.