Again she wonders why she was singled out. She wouldn’t have picked herself. No way. She was going to pick someone much more together. A married couple, maybe, with money.
She gets out her legal pad and comes up with some criteria so she can narrow down her long list. No one who knows her and might possibly recognize her voice. No one in Newburyport or Newbury or Plum Island. But also not someone who is too far away. No one in Vermont or Maine or south of Boston. People who have dough. People who look steady. No cops, journalists, or politicians.
She scrolls through names and faces and again marvels at how willing people are to spill their intimate secrets on the web for anyone to see. Addresses, phone numbers, occupations, number of kids, where their kids go to school, all their hobbies and activities.
A kid is probably the best bet. The most pliable. The least likely to struggle or escape and the most likely to pull at the heartstrings of loved ones. But kids are well watched in this day and age. It might be tricky to grab a child without being seen.
“Except for my kid. Anybody can take my kid,” Rachel says and sniffs.
She goes through Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and applies the criteria. She culls her long list down to five kids. She ranks the children in order of preference.
1. Denny Patterson of Rowley, Mass.
2. Toby Dunleavy of Beverly, Mass.
3. Belinda Watson of Cambridge, Mass.
4. Chandra Singh of Cambridge, Mass.
5. Jack Fenton of Gloucester, Mass.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Rachel says to herself. Although, of course, she doesn’t have to do anything. She could go to the cops or the FBI.
She takes time to consider it. To really think about it. The FBI are professionals, but the woman holding her daughter isn’t afraid of the criminal justice system; she’s afraid of The Chain. The person above her on The Chain has her son. And if Rachel is perceived as a defector, this woman’s instructions are to murder Kylie and select a new target. The woman is sounding increasingly on edge. Rachel has no doubt she will do anything to get her son back…
No, no FBI. And furthermore, when she makes the phone call that the woman made to her, she’ll have to sound equally determined and dangerous.
She looks at the notes she’s made on her various targets. Her number-one choice looks very good indeed: Denny Patterson. Twelve. Lives with his mom, Wendy, in Rowley. Single mom, dad out of the picture. She isn’t bankrupt. In fact, she seems to be quite well-off.
Rachel considers that. What is it that the operators of The Chain want? The most important thing is that The Chain itself continues. Some of the people on it will be richer than others, but more crucial than their wealth is the fact that they have to be clever and discreet enough to add another link and keep the whole thing going. Each individual link in The Chain is precious. The targets have to have money but they also have to be competent and pliable and afraid. Like she is now. A strong link with a few hundred dollars in the bank is better than a weak link who is a millionaire.
Kierkegaard said that boredom and fear lay at the root of all evil. The evil people behind The Chain want the money they collect, and what they fear is the individual who might bring the whole thing crashing to a halt.
Rachel is not going to be that person.
Back to Denny. Denny’s mom had a company that was bought by AOL back in the day. Loves her son, brags about him all the time. She seems tough and unlikely to go to pieces. Forty-five years old. Ran the Boston Marathon twice, in 2013 and again last year. Faster last year. Four hours, two minutes.
Denny likes video games, Selena Gomez, and the movies, and the best thing—from Rachel’s point of view—is that he’s crazy about soccer. Goes to practice three times a week after school and often walks home.
Walks home.
Curly-haired, nice, normal kid. No allergies, no health problems, is not big for his age. In fact, he looks a little bit smaller than the average. Definitely not the goalkeeper for his team.
The mom has one sister; she lives in Arizona. Dad not around. Lives in South Carolina. Remarried.
No family cop or political connections.
Wendy has embraced the digital future, Instagramming or tweeting her location and what she is up to practically every waking minute of the day. So if Rachel spies the kid at soccer practice, Wendy will let her know where the hell she is.
Kid 1 sounds very promising. She looks now at Kid 2: Toby Dunleavy, also twelve, from Beverly. Has a little sister. Mother continually updating everything they do on Facebook.
She pulls up Helen Dunleavy’s Facebook page. A smiling, pleasant-looking blonde about thirty-five. I’m not neurotic. I am too busy to be neurotic are the words under her photo. Helen lives in Beverly with her husband, Mike, and her son and daughter, Toby and Amelia. Mike is a management consultant in Boston with Standard Chartered. Helen is a part-time kindergarten teacher at North Salem Elementary School.
Amelia is eight years old, four years younger than Toby. Rachel scrolls through the Facebook feed. Helen teaches kindergarten two mornings a week and the rest of the time she seems to spend updating her friends on Facebook about the family’s doings. Mike Dunleavy apparently works long hours in Boston and most nights doesn’t come home until late. Rachel knows this because Helen posts about what train Mike is coming back on and whether she is going to have the kids wait up for him or not.
Rachel finds Mike’s résumé at LinkedIn. He’s thirty-nine, originally from London, and recently lived in New York. No political or police background, and he looks stable enough. He likes soccer, and he used to be an auctioneer before going into management consulting. His claim to fame is selling a can of Merda d’Artista by Piero Manzoni.
Helen is one of three sisters. She’s the middle child. Both of her sisters are homemakers. One is married to a lawyer; one is divorced from a food scientist.
The kids get picked up from school every day without fail, but what makes Toby attractive is the fact that he has just started archery. Goes twice a week to the Salem and District Archery Club.
Archery is Toby’s big new passion. There’s a link on his Facebook page to an adorable YouTube video of him shooting at various archery targets to the music of Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” And the great thing is that he walks home from the archery club. All by himself. He’s a good boy. Kids should be doing more of that, Rachel thinks and then remembers that she is exactly the reason why helicopter/overprotective parents exist.
Kid 1 and Kid 2 both look promising and she has three solid backups too.
She closes the computer, gets her coat, and drives into town to visit the hardware store. In the car her phone begins to ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, could I speak to Rachel O’Neill, please.”
“This is she.”
“Hi, Rachel, I’m Melanie, calling from the fraud department at Chase. I wanted to alert you to some unusual activity on your Visa card this morning.”
“OK.”
Melanie asks her some verification questions and then gets to the point: “Apparently someone used your card to purchase ten thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. Do you know anything about that?”
“You didn’t stop the order from going through, did you?”
“No, we didn’t. Um, but we were wondering—”
“It was me. I did it. It’s all fine. It’s an investment I’m making with my husband. Look, I’m really in the middle of something, I have to go.”