'Elizabeth's been taken at gunpoint!'

First excerpt in a series of four.

The lead-in to Tom Smart's narrative: Tom, a photographer for the Deseret Morning News, receives a frantic phone call from his brother, Ed, in the early morning hours of June 5, 2002.

When the phone rang in our home sometime between 4:15 and 4:30 A.M., I did not look at the clock or even budge. After getting home from a late assignment and getting to sleep after midnight with the help of an Ambien sleeping pill, a quick reaction wasn't possible. My wife, Heidi, answered. Ever since our three daughters were small the phone has been on her side of the bed; she's the night watchman and mother superior at our house. A marshmallow could fall on the driveway at four in the morning and Heidi would hear it. She picked up the phone after one ring.

"Elizabeth has been kidnapped at gunpoint!" Ed told her.

"What?" said Heidi.

"Elizabeth has been kidnapped at gunpoint," he repeated, at which point Heidi handed me the phone. Fighting to wake up as Ed spoke the awful words yet again, I mumbled, "How can we help?" Ed told me to please come over, and hurry. Then he hung up.

Heidi and I just lay there as if we were paralyzed. We'd just received the proverbial phone call in the middle of the night. It was not unlike the shock of getting drenched by a bucket of cold water.

We had hardly moved when the phone rang again. It was Ed. Sensing my grogginess on the first call, he was calling back to make sure I had heard him correctly. "Haven't you left yet?" Ed said. "Please come, please hurry." The panic in his voice was now even thicker. ...

Ed called all his siblings within the first hour. In every instance, it took a moment for the news to register. Part of it was the early hour, but the bigger part was the shock. "Elizabeth has been taken at gunpoint!"

Once reality did sink in, we all went into action. My brother Chris grabbed his gun, a ZA nine-millimeter, semiautomatic — a serious handgun. Before he left his house, he put it in the car, locked and loaded.

The phone ringing in the early morning dark hadn't initially alarmed Chris. As an engineer who buys energy for Duke Energy, he's used to fielding phone calls at odd hours. But the look on his wife Ingrid's face as she handed him the phone did alarm him. "I'll be right over," Chris had told Ed as he leaped out of bed. Ingrid wasn't as fast. "I was scared," she remembered. "If I went over (to Ed's house), it would be true and, more than anything, I didn't want it to be true. I heard Chris fiddling in the study. 'What are you doing?' I asked. 'Getting my gun,' he said. 'If I see him, I'm going to kill the son of a bitch.' " Within minutes, Chris and Ingrid left their house in Centerville, about fifteen miles from Ed and Lois's, hugging their eighteen-year-old daughter Alicia on the way out, and asking her to watch their younger kids.

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