My Husband Dismissed Seven Ransom Calls as AI novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Seven Calls
Kidnapped at 34 weeks, Elora listens on speaker as the head nurse answers her husband's phone and calls the ransom demand an AI scam; her family code word is waved off, and when the photo of her father's ring arrives, the nurse deletes it and her husband says good.
Seven times the man who took me phoned my husband.
Seven times his head nurse picked up and said it was the AI scam everyone had been warned about.
I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, zip-tied to a folding chair in a storage unit, listening on speaker.
It was a Tuesday in October, 6:52 p.m.
They had taken me at 5:41 in the school parking lot, where I had stayed late to tune the choir room piano.
The man in the gloves held my thumb to my phone, switched it off and zipped it into his jacket so nobody could trace it.
Now he held a cheap prepaid phone with a voice-changer app open on the screen.
Everything on the call went through the app, so anything I said would come out as a robot.
That was what the rag in my mouth was for.
A short, younger man stood by the door and watched the road.
The man in the gloves dialed and put it on speaker.
"We have your wife," he said, in a flat metal voice.
A woman answered, and I knew her voice.
Janelle Pratt, my husband's head nurse.
She had dated Ansel for two years when he was a resident, before he ever met me.
Everyone at Ardmore General joked that she was his other wife, and she had never once corrected them.
"Who is this?" she said.
Then, away from the phone: "It's that AI scam from the email, Dr. Erickson. Hang up."
Far behind her, over running water, I heard my husband.
He was scrubbing in for surgery.
"Hang up," Ansel said.
The call ended.
I knew that email. Ansel had read it to me at dinner on Monday, laughing.
Every doctor in the hospital got it: AI voice-clone kidnapping scams, fake crying, hang up and call your family member directly.
Janelle had printed it and taped it over the scrub sinks.
The chief of orthopedics had just wired fifty thousand dollars to a voice that sounded like his daughter.
His daughter had been at soccer practice.
So my husband had been warned about me.
Ansel is chief of trauma at Ardmore General, the only trauma center in Teague County.
Anyone hurt in this county ends up on his table, and he has never lost a mother there.
He never looks at a patient's face in surgery. Janelle drapes the head end for him.
"A face makes my hands hesitate," he told me once.
At 7:05 the man in the gloves dialed again.
This time he yanked the rag down for a second.
"Pip!" I screamed. "Ansel, it's Pip!"
The speaker flattened it into a buzz, but the word came through.
Pip is what we call the baby. Only at home, only in bed, with his hand on my belly.
It was also our family code word now, because the hospital email said every family should pick one.
I had texted it to him at 7:02 that morning, before we fought and he left without reading it.
The last time I checked, before school let out, it still said Delivered. Not Read.
The rag went back up.
"...Pip?" Ansel said.
"She calls the baby that on Instagram," Janelle said. "Everybody knows."
I have never once written that word online.
I heard him breathe in to ask a question.
"You want to scroll her whole feed with your hands in a patient?" Janelle said.
He shut his mouth.
"Hang up," he said.
Janelle said the third demand, fifty thousand in gift cards, was the same script that had robbed orthopedics.
On the fourth call I heard my own playlist behind her, the mix I made Ansel for the operating room.
The song playing was track nine, which starts thirty minutes in.
He had been at the table half an hour, holding a stranger's life, while mine sat in his nurse's hands.
The man in the gloves went outside to smoke.
The short one stayed by the door, chewing his thumbnail.
He had not looked at my belly once.
I decided to get my hands in front of me.
I bent over and groaned into the rag. Some of it was real, because my stomach had been going hard all evening.
He tugged the rag down. "What?"
"Contractions," I gasped. "My hands. Please. Not behind my back. I can't breathe like this."
He looked at the door, and then at me.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Look at me."
He cut the tie and bound my wrists again, in front this time.
Tighter, but in front. My fingers could move.
I laid both hands on my belly and tapped the lullaby I wrote for Pip in March. Four bars.
Last night Ansel had tapped it back to her through my belly and got the second bar wrong, as always.
Pip kicked back.
At 8:40 the man in the gloves came in, grabbed my left hand and held it under the bare bulb.
He took a picture with the flash.
My fingers were swollen together under the ties.
Between them was a ring of copper wire.
My father tuned pianos. When he died, Ansel had a jeweler twist two rings out of a bass string from Dad's old piano, one for each of us.
There is no other pair in the world.
Ansel would know it in one look.
The man pulled the rag tight and took one more picture, of my face.
At 8:41 he sent both to my husband's phone and called.
Janelle answered. Water was running again behind her, because Ansel was scrubbing in for his second surgery.
"Check your texts, doctor," the gloved man said.
For a moment the line was only water.
Then Janelle's voice came low and close to the phone, not meant for anyone.
"...That's her ring."
A tiny sound followed. A fingernail on glass. Once. Twice.
Then, louder, bright and bored: "They sent a ring and a face, Ansel. AI-generated, straight off her Instagram. I deleted both."
The water kept running.
"Good," my husband said.
Janelle knew it was me, and she had just wiped me off his phone.
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