The Chain(80)

“He’s lying. He was the spoiled one in the family,” Pete says.

“What was your childhood like, Ginger?” Rachel wonders.

“Wow. Crazy. Don’t get me started. I don’t even remember the commune years. We lived all over before coming back to Boston,” Ginger says.

“Is that why you were attracted to the FBI? For stability?” Rachel asks.

“Not really. My dad was an agent, my grandfather was Boston PD, so I guess it’s the family business,” Ginger says.

“Are you sure it’s OK that we dump two kids on you?” Rachel asks Marty in private when breakfast is over.

“I talked it over with Ginger. She’d love to have Kylie and her little pal down to her grandfather’s house. It’s a big old fun-packed place on the Inn River. Kids will go nuts down there. Love it.”

“A lot of those old houses in that part of Massachusetts, on the floodplain, are dangerous. Just be careful, OK?”

“Don’t worry, the house is gorgeous—they’ve spent a lot of dough doing it up.”

“Ginger does come from money, then? Lucky you,” Rachel says.

“Yeah, it must be family money, because you don’t make that much as an FBI agent,” Marty replies.

“Unless she’s one of them corrupt cops,” Rachel jokes.

“Come on, Rach, look at her—she’s from law-and-order central casting.”

Stuart and Kylie are finally ready, and Pete and Rachel walk everyone to the car. “Look after the kids,” Rachel says.

Ginger hugs her. “Don’t worry, they’ll be safe with us,” she promises.

Yeah, family money, Rachel decides, looking at Ginger’s bag, a small but gorgeous Hermès Birkin.

Hugs and kisses all around, and the four of them are off.

Back in the house, Pete places a map of New England on the table.

“Somewhere in here,” he says.

“Now we just have to wait for Erik’s call. I’ll check that the GPS tabs we put in her shoes are working.”

She turns on her phone, and, yup, there is Kylie heading south.

They check the weather. Drizzle, maybe some snow flurries.

Could be worse.

They wait for Erik’s call.

Ten o’clock comes and goes.

Ten fifteen.

Ten thirty.

Eleven o’clock.

Something is wrong.

“What do we do?” Pete asks.

“We just wait, I guess,” Rachel replies. But something terrible has happened, she knows it.

Pete knows it too. It’s that feeling you get a minute before the alarms go off and the ordnance comes raining down.

Eleven fifteen.

Eleven thirty.

A thick sea fog is rolling in from the Atlantic. Ominous pathetic-fallacy weather.

At eleven forty-five, a text comes through to Rachel’s burner phone.

If you are receiving this text, it means I have been compromised or incapacitated. Most likely I am dead. I am sending you a link to a place where you can anonymously download the hunter-killer app for phone communications and text messages. A reminder: The longer you are in direct communication, the closer you will get to finding who you are talking to, so if you choose to use it, keep them talking as long as you can. I was not able to get the app to work properly with Wickr or Kik or other encrypted apps. If they communicate with you that way, it will not work properly. Maybe version 2.0 if I’m still alive. Good luck.

The next text is a link to a site where they can download Erik’s application.

She shows the message to Pete and turns on the TV news.

It takes another forty-five minutes for the news to hit WBZ Boston.

“An MIT professor was murdered this morning. Erik Lonnrott was shot three times at his home…”

The report goes on to say that there were no witnesses to the incident. The police’s working theory is that this was a robbery gone wrong, as the house appeared to have been ransacked and various items were apparently stolen.

“He wrote my name in his notebook,” Rachel says.





63



A few weeks after Cheryl’s death, Tom promises the kids a new start. He’s a changed man and a better man, he says. He’s going to book that trip to Disneyland. He’s going to work less. He’s going to make them the focus of his life.

The better-man shtick is convincing for about ten days. Then something at work annoys him and he stops at a bar on the way home.

The bar becomes a regular watering hole on his drive back from the FBI.

One night he meets someone at the bar and doesn’t come home at all.

Oliver and Margaret don’t mind.

They’re self-reliant. Oliver spends much of his time on his home computer. Margaret is still reading a lot. Detective novels and romances are her favorites. She’s writing too. Anonymous letters.

A boy she liked asked another girl to the school disco.

The girl got a letter that convinced her not to go to the disco.

The teacher who gave her an F got a letter threatening to expose his secret. It was an old trick she’d read in a Mark Twain book, but the teacher came in the next day as pale as a ghost.

Margaret has another project she’s working on. She spends a lot of time copying and perfecting her father’s handwriting.