Tell him, she thinks. Tell him everything. No, I can’t, they’ll kill her, they will. That woman will do it. “I know I shouldn’t be parked here. I was on the phone to my oncologist. It—it looks like my cancer has come back.”
The trooper gets it. He nods slowly. “Ma’am, do you think you’re capable of continuing your journey at this juncture?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to write you a moving violation, but I would ask you to proceed with your journey, please, ma’am. I’ll halt traffic until you get into the lane.”
“Thank you, Officer.”
She turns the key in the ignition and the old Volvo grumbles back to life. The trooper stops the vehicles in the slow lane and she pulls out without any difficulty. She drives for one mile until she hits the next exit and then gets off at the slip road. South is the hospital where they can maybe fix her but she doesn’t care about that now. That’s utterly irrelevant. Getting Kylie back is the sun and the stars and the entire universe.
She takes I-95 northbound, pushing the Volvo harder than it has ever been pushed in its life.
Into the slow lane, into the medium lane, into the fast lane.
Sixty miles an hour, sixty-five miles an hour, seventy, seventy-five, seventy-eight, eighty.
The engine is screaming but all Rachel can think is Go, go, go.
Her business now is north. Get a bank loan. Get the burner phones. Get a gun and everything else she needs to get Kylie back.
5
Thursday, 9:01 a.m.
It had all happened so fast. A gunshot and then they had driven off. Driven for how long? Kylie had lost track. Maybe seven or eight minutes before they had turned onto a smaller road, gone down a long driveway, and stopped. The woman had taken a picture of her and gotten out to make a phone call. Probably to her mom or dad.
Kylie’s in the back seat of the car with the man. He is breathing hard, swearing under his breath, and making strange animal-like whimpering noises.
Shooting the policeman was clearly not part of the plan and he isn’t handling it well.
Kylie hears the woman come back to the car.
“OK, it’s done. She understands everything and knows what she has to do,” the woman says. “Take this one down to the basement and I’ll hide the car.”
“OK,” the man replies meekly. “You have to get out, Kylie. I’ll open the door for you.”
“Where are we going?” Kylie asks.
“We’ve set up a little room for you. Don’t be worried,” the man says. “You’ve done very well so far.”
She feels the man reach over her and unclick her seat belt. His breath is acrid and repulsive. The door opens next to her.
“Keep your blindfold on; I have a gun pointed at you,” the woman says.
Kylie nods.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Move!” the woman says in a shrill, hysterical voice.
Kylie swings her legs out of the car and starts to get up.
“Watch your head, please,” the man mutters.
She stands slowly, carefully. She listens for highway traffic or any other noise, but she doesn’t hear anything. No cars, no birds, no familiar Atlantic breakers. They are somewhere well inland.
“This way,” the man says. “I’m going to take your arm and lead you downstairs. Don’t try anything. There’s nowhere you can go and we’re both prepared to shoot you, OK?”
She nods.
“Answer him,” the woman insists.
“I won’t try anything,” she says.
She hears a bolt being dragged back and a door being opened.
“Careful, these stairs are old and sort of steep,” the man says.
Kylie walks slowly down the wooden stairs while the man holds her by the elbow. When she gets to the bottom of the steps, she can feel that she’s standing on concrete. Her heart sinks. If it had been a crawl space like the one beneath her house, she would have had just dirt and sand underfoot. You could dig your way through dirt and sand. You couldn’t dig your way through concrete.
“Here,” the man says and leads her across the room. It’s a basement, obviously. The basement of a house deep in the country, far from anyone.
Kylie thinks about her mother and feels another sob welling up in her throat. Her poor mom! She’s supposed to be starting a new job soon. She’s just beginning to turn her life around after the cancer and the divorce. It isn’t fair.
“Sit here,” the man says. “Sit all the way down. It’s a mattress on the floor.”
Kylie sits on the mattress, which feels like it’s covered with a sheet and a sleeping bag.
She hears the click of the woman taking a photo. “OK, I’m going to the house to send her this and check Wickr. I hope to God they’re not angry with us,” the woman says.
“Don’t tell them anything went wrong. Tell them everything went according to plan,” the man says.
“I know!” she snaps.
“It’s going to be OK,” the man says unconvincingly.
Kylie hears the woman run up the wooden steps and close the basement door. She’s alone with the man now and this scares her. He could do anything.
“It’s OK,” he says. “You can take your blindfold off now.”
“I don’t want to see your face,” Kylie replies.
“It’s fine, I’ve got the ski mask on again.”
She removes the blindfold. He’s standing near her, still holding the gun. He has taken his coat off. He’s wearing jeans, a black sweater, and loafers caked with clay and mud. A heavy man in his forties or fifties.
The basement is rectangular, roughly twenty feet by thirty feet. There are two small square windows choked with leaves on one side. A concrete floor, a mattress, and an electric lamp next to the mattress. They’ve given her a sleeping bag, a bucket, toilet paper, a cardboard box, and two large bottles of water. The rest of the basement is empty but for an antique cast-iron stove against one of the walls and a boiler in the far corner.
“You’re going to be staying here for the next few days. Until your mother pays the ransom and does the other stuff. We’re going to try to make you as comfortable as possible. You must be terrified. I can’t imagine…” he says and begins to choke up. “We’re not used to this, Kylie. We’re not people like this. All of this has been forced on us. You have to understand that.”
“Why have you taken me?”
“Your mother will explain everything when you get back to her. My wife doesn’t want me to talk to you about it.”
“You seem nicer than her. Is there any way you could possibly let—”
“No. We’ll—wow—kill you if you try to escape. I mean that. You know what we’re c—capable of. You were there. You heard. That poor man…oh my God. Put this on your left wrist,” he says, handing her a handcuff. “Tight enough so you can’t escape, not so tight so that it chafes you…that’s it. A little bit tighter. Let me see.”
He takes her wrist and examines it and ratchets the handcuff tighter. Then he takes the other cuff, attaches it to a heavy metal chain, and attaches that to the iron stove with a padlock.
“You’ve got about nine feet of chain, so you can move around a bit. Do you see that, over there by the stairs? That’s a camera. We’ll be keeping an eye on you even when we’re not down here. The fluorescent light will always be on so we can see what you’re doing. So don’t try anything, OK?”