Chapter 3
It turned out that driving to Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, was a hell of a lot easier than finding it on the map. Irene’s AAA map of the Commonwealth showed it as a tiny speck on the banks of the Potomac River, but to get reliable driving directions, she had to buy an ADC map from a 7-Eleven in Colonial Beach.
The ninety-minute drive helped to soothe her nerves—to prioritize her options—and as she finally drove down Church Street on her way toward the water, she was struck by just how charming a place it was. By all appearances, it was a fishing village, but unlike most such villages in the final decade of the twentieth century, this one still appeared to thrive. On the corner where you would expect to see a big-name chain drugstore, she noted Hamilton Pharmacy, and just from the looks of the place, she knew there had to be a soda fountain in the back corner.
The streets weren’t crowded, exactly, at this hour of a weekday afternoon, but they weren’t empty, either. In fact, as she drove past the Cricket Shop, a throwback haberdasher, she witnessed a handshake between a customer and the man she presumed to be the proprietor as the former left with a plastic bag draped over a hanger. From the size and shape, Irene assumed it was a suit, and from the look of satisfaction on the customer’s face, she assumed that it was a nice one.
Everyone seemed so damned contented. It was like entering a world that had somehow insulated itself from the cruelties that savaged the rest of the planet, and she at once admired and pitied them. It was the burden of the life she’d chosen to know the terrible facts that the rest of the world was shielded from. She was among the few who anguished so that the rest of the population could sleep soundly.
I will know and I will kill them.
Irene was not well trained in the science of avoiding detection or shaking trackers, but she’d been watching, and as far as she knew, she hadn’t been followed. And even if she had, surely even the most monstrous of monsters would not harm her for seeking counsel from her priest. That’s what she told herself, anyway.
Still two or three blocks from the river, she passed an enormous mansion on the left. Easily the largest residence she’d seen, it seemed to be nearly the same size of the church that loomed farther down the hill—Saint Katherine’s Catholic Church. Between the two structures sat a two-story colonial that she pegged as late-eighties construction. It was served by a two-hundred-foot driveway, which ended with a small white-on-black metal sign that read, RECTORY.
Irene swung the turn and drove toward the house. By the time she got to the space in front of the garage, Father Dom was already standing on the front stoop, waiting. The clerical suit was gone, replaced by blue jeans and a Washington Redskins T-shirt. He approached the car as she opened her door, and was there at the opening as she started to climb out.
“Are you okay, Irene?” he asked. “You sounded so frantic on the telephone.” He extended his arms wide for an embrace, which she accepted.
When her lips were very close to his ear, Irene whispered, “Someone has kidnapped my girls.”
She felt his shoulders stiffen. He pushed her out to arm’s length. “Oh, my heavens, Irene. What are—?”
“Can we go inside, Dom? I don’t want to talk about this out here. I don’t want anyone to see.”
“See what?”
“Please, Father. Can’t we—?”
“Of course, of course. Please come this way.”
He led the way up the brick walkway to the house’s front door and opened it, gesturing for Irene to cross the threshold first.
Inside, the rectory looked like, well, a home. Why did that surprise her so? Moreover, it looked like a home that could have been in any suburb of any city in the country. In fact, it didn’t look all that much different from her own home. The dining room lay on the left of the center hall, the living room to the right. She was struck by just how homey the place felt. A television on the far side of the living room showed a golf game in progress, and an even younger priest than Dom sitting on the sofa, thoroughly engaged.
“Father Tim?” Dom said, breaking the reverie.
The sound of Dom’s voice seemed to startle the other priest, and his head whipped around. “Yes?”
“Can you excuse us, please? I need to speak—”
Father Tim shot to his feet. “Yes, yes,” he said. He seemed self-conscious of the open beer on the end table. As he scooped it up, he made a valiant but ineffective effort to hide it. “I’ll get right out of your way.” He made no attempt to introduce himself to Irene, nor to seek her introduction.
Irene suppressed a laugh as the young man rushed past and hurried toward the stairs to the upper level.
“He’s very new,” Dom explained, answering her question before she could ask it. “He gets a little twitchy at times.”
Dom gestured to the chair that Father Tim had just vacated. “Please,” he said, “have a seat. Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
“Why are you so sure that this is the work of Jennings?” Dom asked when she was done.
“How could it be anyone else?”
Dom cocked his head and gave a little smirk. “You know that another question is never an answer, right?”
Irene conceded the point by sagging her shoulders. “I know it because I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Dom smiled.
“Am I missing a joke?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s just that a friend of mine is fond of saying the same thing. There’s no one else who would fit the profile of someone who might threaten you through your children?”
Irene felt her jaw drop. What the hell kind of question was that? They were children.
Dom held up his hands. “I mean no offense. But you’ve been with the FBI for what? Ten years? Twelve?”
“A little over thirteen.”
“Which is the same as a little under fourteen,” Dom said. “My point is that that you’ve had time to make a lot of arrests and accumulate a lot of enemies. Yet you seem so sure that your enemy in this case is Barney Jennings.”
Irene saw his point. “There are . . . similarities,” she said. “The Harrelson boys disappeared without a trace. I mean, literally without a trace. We don’t begin to know where to start looking for them.”
“And you determined that after a full investigation that was run by your entire team.”
“Yet Jennings stayed ahead of us. Not far ahead, mind you, but just a step or two.”
Dom scowled. “Are you suggesting inside information?”
Irene steeled herself with a deep breath. She didn’t want to say what was coming next. “Truthfully, I don’t know what I think.”
“But you know what you suspect.”
“Yes, I do. I’d had hints of it other times during the investigation—that sense that Jennings was either the luckiest or smartest son of a bitch on the planet—” She caught herself cussing and blushed. “Sorry.”
“Oh, that that were the worst that I heard on an average day, even coming from the school.” He waited a beat. “You were about to tell me whether you think there’s some kind of inside-the-FBI involvement.”
“I worry that there is,” Irene said.
“And because of that, you fear that if you involve the police, Jennings will find out and do something to the girls.”
Hearing the words from someone else churned her stomach. “Yes.”
“So, what’s your plan?” Dom asked. “What do you need from me?”
Irene felt tears pressing in and she shut her eyes tight. She took a huge breath and held it, hoping that her nerves would settle. After a long time, she said, “I’m not sure I even know, Father. I was hoping that by talking it through I might . . . I don’t know, I might get an idea.”
“Why don’t you pay Mr. Jennings a visit yourself?” Dom asked.
“I have no official probable cause,” she said.
Dom scowled deeply and cocked his head to the side. “You’re putting bureaucracy ahead of your daughters’ welfare?”
Sadness became anger in the space of half a heartbeat. “Dom!”
“Again, no offense,” he said. “But I’m confused. If you know who the perpetrator is, and you know where he lives, and you fear that he’s snatched Ashley and Kelly, I don’t understand why you’re here instead of there.”
“What if I’m wrong?” she asked. “Suspicions are not facts. If I charge into Jennings’s house and demand an answer and he is not the right guy, I can lose everything. The real kidnapper can know what I’ve done, he’ll hurt the girls, and I’ll be boiled in oil by the Bureau.”
Dom looked at her for a long time, and as he did, his gaze narrowed. “Sounds like you need a reliable team,” he said, after a long silence.
“What I need is a suspension of the Constitution and the rules of discovery. I need to find out what has happened to my kids.”
“And it needs to be outside of the law,” Dom said. “May I ask why you came to me?”
The question confused her. “I didn’t come to you for answers, Father. I came to you to talk things through. You’re a friend, a priest, and a shrink. This is the only moment in my life I can think of where I’ve needed all three at exactly the same time.”
She smiled as she said that, but Dom’s face showed no humor. She feared that she’d offended him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“How far are you willing to go?” Dom asked in return.
“Excuse me?”
“How far are you willing to go to be reunited with your daughters?”
“I don’t understand the question.” If it had come from someone else, she might have, but coming from Dom, it was a complete cypher.
“I’m not speaking in riddles,” Dom said. “If it came to a binary choice between not getting Ashley and Kelly back or violating every known rule on the collection of evidence and prosecution of witnesses, which would you take?”
Something tugged in Irene’s spine. She’d never seen Dom like this before. “Are we speaking in hypotheticals here?”
Dom’s expression remained rock hard. “I’m asking you a question. How far are you willing to go to get them back?”
“Whatever it took,” Irene said. “I’d move heaven and earth.”
Dom leaned in closer. “Would you violate the very laws that you swore to uphold?”
“Father, I’m not comfortable—”
“Answer the question,” Dom snapped. “Would you be willing to break the law and risk prison yourself if it meant your children being set free?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Dom, what are you talking—”
“Are you sure?”
“They’re my children, Dom.” Irene didn’t get why he was being so strained, so weird in this discussion. How could he think otherwise? And what was he implying in the first place?
“I need to know, Irene. I have an idea, but I need to know how far you are willing to go.”
Irene scoffed, “What, do you, like, know a hit man or something?”
Dom’s expression remained stone.
The realization hit her like a slap. “Oh, my God, Dom, what are you suggesting?”
He pulled back. “I’m suggesting nothing,” he said. “I’m waiting to hear a request from you.”
“Are you suggesting that you know someone who could . . . address this problem for me?”
Dom reached out and grasped her hand. “Ask me for what you want.”
This was a side of the priest that she had never seen—a side that she was fairly certain no one had ever seen. “I want to find someone who can help me get my daughters back,” Irene said. “And who can punish the son of a bitch who took them.” That last part was important, too.
Dom’s eyes bored into her for a long time, presumably assessing her seriousness. After maybe thirty seconds, he said, “Hang tight for a few minutes. I need to make a phone call.”