High Treason (43 page)

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.

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.

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.