Set Free (23 page)

The plan had come to Katie late on a dark, rain-soaked Friday night. She was alone, as usual, in her one-room studio just off downtown, eating flavorless Thai takeout. She was at her wits end, and having to admit something she never thought she would: she missed her one-pony, Hicksville hometown.

No one could ever claim that her high school “stunt” had resulted in anything less than a mighty uproar. Within hours, everyone in town knew who Katie Edwards was and what she’d done. It all happened a long time ago, but she’d bet her bottom dollar—which was pretty much all she had left in her bank account—that the residents of Hobart, Indiana still talked about her to this very day. But here in Boston? Not a peep. She might as well be invisible. To her great irritation, she was living the same dismal life she’d had as a “pre-stunt” high schooler. No one noticed her. No one knew she existed. No one cared.

Katie’d had enough. She’d fixed the problem before; she could do it again. This time, though, she’d need to think bigger. Right now she was a nobody, staring at the bottom from underneath. This was war. She was meant to be a frontline hero, not a measly foot soldier. Everyone knew, when it came to war, it was the foot soldiers who were the first to end up in a pile of dead bodies—a fate Katie Edwards simply refused to accept.

To make a name for yourself, a journalist had to be top dog on a big story. The first one on the scene. The one people turned to when they wanted information, or had it to share. No one bothered with a no-name reporter who couldn’t see the door, never mind get her foot in it.

Katie had given the issue considerable thought. She concluded there was only one way to get the jump on a story before anyone else did. She had to be the only one who knew about it. Or, at the very least, the first to know about it with as much lead time as possible. The only way that was going to happen was if she created the story herself. Which was pretty much what she’d done in Hobart. Sure, it was the kids who got pregnant and stole sports equipment from Walmart, but it was Katie who’d found out and made it newsworthy.

The idea was big. Ballsy. Alarming. Almost too daunting to contemplate.

Almost.

If she was really going to do this, Katie knew she’d have to go all out. She had to come up with something that was going to enthrall every last person in Boston and beyond. She considered the options. Human interest stories weren’t big enough and had short shelf-lives. Crimes stories were good, but Katie wasn’t into committing petty crime. Robbing the corner Chinese store was too small, too boring. No, this had to be something with teeth. Shark teeth. Maybe a crime of passion? That was better. Something that not only interested the masses, but titillated them. Or made them mad. Or sad. Something with children in peril was always a winner.

Concept in mind, Katie set to work with the same fervor and dedication she’d applied to her Hobart High exposé. But this time, her end goal was considerably more grandiose than breaking free of her mind-numbing hometown. This time she had an even bigger break in mind. Katie was going to orchestrate her coming out party, as Boston’s newest star journalist.

The more Katie thought about it, the more excited she became. A huge story was about to hit the city.

And it was all hers.

Although it would have certainly added juice and gravitas to the story, Katie adhered to one steadfast rule in planning her next career move: thou shall not kill to get ahead. She just couldn’t see herself doing that. She might be capable of ending someone’s life—she believed most people would in the right circumstance—but why take the risk if you didn’t have to? It hadn’t come to that yet. Besides, she had ingenuity and tons of smarts. All she needed was to put her prodigious creative juices to work.

Katie knew the answer was the kid angle. Madeline McCann. Elizabeth Smart.
Caylee Anthony. JonBenét Ramsey. Jaycee Lee Dugard.
Right back to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Any story with a child in danger captured the public’s attention, and—best of all—kept it, sometimes for decades.

She could snatch a child from a playground or someplace like that, ask for ransom. Of course she’d keep the kid blindfolded so she’d never be recognized once she’d wrung the story dry and let the kid go. And she
would
let the kid go. She wasn’t
that
kind of monster. In the meantime, she’d be the lead reporter on the biggest story in the city. That kind of exposure could bring her to the precipice of the type of career and recognition she’d always wanted and definitely deserved.

The idea was sound. But it needed something more. Something that would get her play outside of the city, outside of the state, on a national stage, maybe even international. Unfortunately, kids were being taken and having their faces plastered on milk cartons all the time in this country. The tale was sure to be harrowing, but not unusual. It was just too white bread. She needed a story with more oomph. Something exotic but not too exotic. Something with widespread appeal that not only piqued curiosity but held it.

A rich kid?

Still not good enough. Being rich didn’t make a missing child more interesting unless…unless they were already famous.

Katie felt a trilling in her stomach. Neurons fired in her brain as she considered the new notion. She could kidnap a famous kid. A Justin-Bieber-ten-years-ago type.

Definitely better. But riskier. Certainly more difficult to pull off. Famous kids came with security and entourages and constant media attention. There’d be all kinds of challenges to overcome.

Then it hit her.

What if the kid wasn’t famous, but the parents were? Justin Bieber would be impossible to take. But if he had a kid out there, and of course he must by now, that would be much easier pickings by a mile. Less risk, easier access, but with the reflected benefit of being tied to celebrity; it would be a story
everybody
wanted to hear about.

Katie smiled.

For weeks, Katie Edwards mulled over her plot. Hours of research resulted in a list of potential targets. Of course, nothing was as simple as it might have seemed on a depressing, rainy Friday night after one too many glasses of cheap, red wine. Even the child of someone famous was not going to be an easy grab. It’s not like they were a pair of boots left unattended for too long on the front porch. And the list of celebrities who: (a) lived in Boston; (b) were big enough names to elicit the kind of attention Katie was after; and (c) had a child she could finagle reasonable access to, was pitifully short. But one name continued to pop up at the top of her list: Mikki Wills.

My daughter.

What had started out as an incredible turn of professional good fortune for me and my family, was about to become the cause of our greatest nightmare.

I had somehow become Boston’s—and really the country’s—flavor of the year. I’d written one of those books that, for reasons baffling to most—like
Fifty Shades of Grey
,
Gone Girl
,
The Fault in Our Stars
,
The Da Vinci Code
—hit the zeitgeist in just the right way. Suddenly a mostly unknown author—me—was a huge celebrity, and everyone was reading my book and clamoring for a new one.

While I was not the biggest star on the horizon by anyone’s estimation, and my five minutes were already running short, I was the perfect target for Katie’s scheme. I was a native son to the Bostonians, and in their typically exuberant and generous way, they loved me. Thanks to nature’s grace and prevailing trends, I had the right “look” and, whenever it was needed, I could pour on the charm. All forms of media ate me up, as did their viewers and subscribers.

Katie, no slouch when it came to figuring out what the public hungered for, knew that if something bad happened to me, people would care. They’d be rapt, and rapturous with attention, on both the story and the person who told it. I had a child about the right age, who hadn’t yet morphed into a rebellious teen or gotten into trouble with drugs, the law, or the wrong paramour. I’m probably the only parent in history who ever wished for the opposite to have been true. Any of those things might have made Mikki less sympathy-inducing, less relatable, less saleable to the masses—and therefore less attractive to Katie Edwards.

In so many ways, Mikki was the perfect mark. With me being a relatively new celebrity and only modestly well off, my daughter still went to a public school. She had nary a bodyguard, guardian, or paparazzi trail of any kind to get in Katie’s way. And she was local, which made logistics, planning, and implementation much easier.

Once she had the “who,” Katie turned to the “how.” She was clever. She knew she couldn’t just nab Mikki and hope for the best. She needed to plan two dozen steps ahead. Long before Mikki was ever taken, Katie had to be cemented in position as the most likely person Jenn and I would turn to, and trust, to tell our story. She concluded that a friendship with my wife was her best hope of slipping into our circle of influence.

Jenn was a busy lawyer, working long hours. She had few friends outside of the office, something Katie could definitely relate to. And, Jenn had a secret. Something no one—not even I nor our daughter—knew about. A secret ripe for exploitation.

Every so often, Jenn would leave work early under the guise of having to meet a client or attend to a fictional private matter. Regularly maintaining an eighty-to-ninety-hour billing week, it wasn’t her professional responsibilities she was short-changing. It was her personal ones. The associated guilt was why she kept this from me.

On these occasions, still rare by most anyone’s standard, Jenn would leave her office and, instead of joining a client or carrying out a family errand, she would indulge in what could only be described as “me time.” She’d window shop at a mall, visit a spa, or take in a movie. She always did these things by herself, never veering off radar for more than a couple of hours. A little slack in the self-awareness department, Jenn was a woman screaming out for a BFF. Long before she began playing hooky, even I knew she needed to. I just didn’t know what to do about it. Katie Edwards did.

Reporters and lawyers can be formidable adversaries or staunch allies, depending on who needs what, when, and how badly. Katie wasn’t taking any chances. She’d pull the “reporter” card much later in her game. Her first priority was to develop a friendship with Jenn. One based, in part, on the simple supposition that women need time together, to the exclusion of the men in their lives.

Reporters and lawyers also share a tendency towards a sort of God complex, characterized by the firm belief that they alone can solve people’s problems. A reporter does it by digging up and disclosing the unknown, a lawyer by wielding the strong arm of the law. To kick-start this new friendship, Katie knew she’d have to temporarily allow Jenn to play God, leaving her the role of a troubled woman in need of help.

Katie knew that in Massachusetts, common law relationships are legally recognized only if created outside the state. This fact was essential to her plan. She needed to present Jenn with a problem she’d want to fix, but couldn’t. This would allow the relationship to move from professional to personal more quickly than might otherwise be the case. The story of an abusive boyfriend who’d left her, taking their beloved cat with him, was pure fiction. Unless the fake boyfriend had done something out-and-out illegal, Katie knew Jenn would be forced to tell her there was little she could do.

That was the easy part.

The difficulty for Katie was playing her role well enough, and subtly enough, so Jenn would like her, but not be suspicious of future overtures of friendship. Katie immediately sensed that my wife was starving for female companionship. She also knew Jenn was whip-smart and not easily fooled. In the end, all it took was a “chance” run-in at a local lunch spot, a follow-up phone call suggesting a quick drink after work, and the strategy was a success. Katie was in, and Jenn, taken in. 

Oddly enough, the most important part of Katie’s plan was also the simplest: the kidnapping of my daughter.

Katie Edwards—or as my daughter knew her, Gail Dolan—never wanted money. Money was how kidnappers got caught. Either when they picked it up, or when investigators later tracked it down. The fact that Katie never intended for the ransom demand to be met, freed her of any sense of worry about whether or not the scheme would be successful. It allowed her to ask for a ridiculous sum of money—ten million dollars—and threaten we’d never see Mikki again if she didn’t get it.

She made no demand that police not be involved. In fact, she wanted them all over it. Once police were involved, the media were involved. Once media were involved, Katie Edwards was involved. No, Katie did not want money. She wanted attention. And a starring role in a career-making story.

The outrageously excessive ransom demand was perfectly designed to force our hand. Katie knew we couldn’t afford anything close to ten million dollars. If we could have, we might have decided to keep the story quiet, make the payoff, and get our daughter back. None of which did Katie any good.

Jenn had confided in Katie during a girls-night-out that our financial situation, although good, was not ten-million-dollars-good. Yes, sales of
In The Middle
had gone through the roof. But that was a while ago. Much of the royalty payout had been sucked up by debt we’d accumulated while allowing me to stay home to pursue a writing career (no one’s idea of a get-rich-quick scheme), raise a child, and have a nice home in an expensive city. Because I’d been foolish and blindly rushed into signing a contract without proper advice, the movie option money wasn’t the windfall everyone assumed it to be either. The movie did well, but my share of the notoriously stingy, nebulously-defined “Producer’s Net Profits” was spectacularly chintzy.

As Katie hoped, the police were called. Unlike how it’s often portrayed in movies, a command post is typically set up away from the kidnappee’s home. Only a small team is stationed at the residence to coordinate with lead investigators. The off-site team consisted of a supervisor, investigative coordinator, search coordinator, media specialist, communication specialist, logistics specialist, and various administrative personnel. Because of the “Lindbergh Law”—which immediately gives the FBI jurisdiction to investigate any reported mysterious disappearance or kidnapping involving a child of “tender age,” usually defined as twelve or younger—the team was ultimately under the control of a cadre of FBI agents.

Whether real or perceived, as the parents, Jenn and I believed we had some say in what was being done to save our daughter. Knowing that, Katie moved swiftly. She subtly and skillfully pushed the right buttons and yanked the perfect chains to encourage us to insist that she should be the lead media contact, all the while making it seem like it was our idea.

In the blink of an eye, we’d found ourselves trapped inside our own home, under siege by a press corps ravenous for information, Katie right there with us. Her strategy was a bit of brilliance. She played us like a virtuoso. At first, her sole purpose in the house was to bring us hot tea, run bubble baths for Jenn, deal with incoming casseroles and platters of cold cuts delivered to our door by neighbors and friends, screen phone calls, and selflessly carry out all the mundane chores we just couldn’t think about. Every so often she’d make a passing comment about the reporters outside, sometimes even mentioning that she knew one or two of them, reminding us that she, too, was a journalist. Subliminally, the idea was planted. Without us knowing, we’d been force-fed in itty bitty, nearly imperceptible pieces. To this day, Jenn insists the idea of using Katie as our mouthpiece was hers. But she’s wrong.

Katie had the goods, which made the whole notion simpler and smarter. She was a damn good reporter. She was comfortable in front of the camera. She was instantly relatable, oozed compassion, and was trustworthy. Whatever she reported, people believed they were getting it from as near to the horse’s mouth as they were ever going to. And they were right. Katie told our story from inside the bunker that was our home. She alone held the ticket that allowed her access across enemy lines, with impunity. She quickly became the bridge between the famous author and his grieving wife and the viewers. What we didn’t know, is that we’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book: Katie Edwards was a modern day Trojan Horse.