n a recent night, a woman named Robin was asleep next to her husband, Steve, in their Brooklyn home, when her phone buzzed on the bedside table. Robin is in her mid-thirties with long, dirty-blond hair. She works as an interior designer, specializing in luxury homes. The couple had gone out to a natural-wine bar in Cobble Hill that evening, and had come home a few hours earlier and gone to bed. Their two young children were asleep in bedrooms down the hall. “I’m always, like, kind of one ear awake,” Robin told me, recently. When her phone rang, she opened her eyes and looked at the caller I.D. It was her mother-in-law, Mona, who never called after midnight. “I’m, like, maybe it’s a butt-dial,” Robin said. “So I ignore it, and I try to roll over and go back to bed. But then I see it pop up again.”
She picked up the phone, and, on the other end, she heard Mona’s voice wailing and repeating the words “I can’t do it, I can’t do it.” “I thought she was trying to tell me that some horrible tragic thing had happened,” Robin told me. Mona and her husband, Bob, are in their seventies. She’s a retired party planner, and he’s a dentist. They spend the warm months in Bethesda, Maryland, and winters in Boca Raton, where they play pickleball and canasta. Robin’s first thought was that there had been an accident. Robin’s parents also winter in Florida, and she pictured the four of them in a car wreck. “Your brain does weird things in the middle of the night,” she said. Robin then heard what sounded like Bob’s voice on the phone. (The family members requested that their names be changed to protect their privacy.) “Mona, pass me the phone,” Bob’s voice said, then, “Get Steve. Get Steve.” Robin took this—that they didn’t want to tell her while she was alone—as another sign of their seriousness. She shook Steve awake. “I think it’s your mom,” she told him. “I think she’s telling me something terrible happened.”
Steve, who has close-cropped hair and an athletic build, works in law enforcement. When he opened his eyes, he found Robin in a state of panic. “She was screaming,” he recalled. “I thought her whole family was dead.” When he took the phone, he heard a relaxed male voice—possibly Southern—on the other end of the line. “You’re not gonna call the police,” the man said. “You’re not gonna tell anybody. I’ve got a gun to your mom’s head, and I’m gonna blow her brains out if you don’t do exactly what I say.”
Steve used his own phone to call a colleague with experience in hostage negotiations. The colleague was muted, so that he could hear the call but wouldn’t be heard. “You hear this???” Steve texted him. “What should I do?” The colleague wrote back, “Taking notes. Keep talking.” The idea, Steve said, was to continue the conversation, delaying violence and trying to learn any useful information.
“I want to hear her voice,” Steve said to the man on the phone.
Read the full story at the New Yorker.
