The Big Bad Wolf

Chapter Twenty-Six

No one had been able to figure out the Wolf yet. According to information from Interpol and also the Russian police, he was a no-nonsense, hands-on operator, but one who had originally been trained as a policeman. Like many Russians, he was able to think in very fluid, commonsense terms. That native ability was sometimes given as the reason the Mir space station was able to stay in space so long. The Russian cosmonauts were simply better than the Americans at figuring out everyday problems. If something unexpected went wrong in the spacecraft, they fixed it.

And so did the Wolf.

On that sunny afternoon, he drove a black Cadillac Escalade to the northern section of Miami. He needed to see a man named Yeggy Titov about some security matters. Yeggy liked to think of himself as a world-class website designer and cutting-edge engineer. He had a doctorate from Cal-Berkeley and never let anyone forget it. But Yeggy was just another pervert and creep with delusions of grandeur and an ‘attitude’; a really bad attitude.

The Wolf banged on the metal door of Yeggy’s apartment in a high-riser overlooking Biscayne Bay. He was wearing a skullcap and a Miami Heat windbreaker, just in case anyone saw him visiting.

‘All right, all right, hold your urine!’ Yeggy shouted from inside. It took him another couple of minutes to finally open up. He had on blue jean shorts and a tattered, faded-black novelty-store sweatshirt with Einstein’s grinning face on it. Quite the kidder, that Yeggy.

‘I told you not to make me come and see you,’ the Wolf said, but he was smiling broadly, as if he were making a big joke. So Yeggy smiled too. They had been business associates for about a year – which was a long time for anyone to put up with Yeggy.

‘Your timing is perfect,’ he said.

‘How lucky for me,’ said the Wolf as he strolled into the living room and immediately wanted to hold his nose. The apartment was an incredible dump – littered with fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, and dozens, maybe a hundred, old copies of Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the largest Russian-language newspaper in the United States.

The odor of filth and decaying food was bad enough, but even worse was Yeggy himself, who always smelled like week-old sausages. The science-man led him into a bedroom off the living-room area – only it turned out not to be a bedroom at all. It was the lab of a very disorganized person. Ugly brown carpeting, three beige CPU boxes on the floor, parts in a corner – discarded heatsinks, circuit boards, hard drives.

‘You are a pig,’ the Wolf said, then laughed again.

‘But a very smart pig.’

In the center of the room was a modular desk. Three flat screen displays formed a semicircle around a well-worn rumble chair. Behind the display screens was a fire hazard of intertwined cables. There was only one outside window, the blind permanently drawn.

‘Your site is very secure now,’ Yeggy said. ‘Primo. One hundred per cent. No possible screw-ups. The way you like it.’

‘I thought it was already secure,’ the Wolf replied.

‘Well now it’s more secure. You can’t be too careful these days. Tell you what else – I finished the latest brochure. It’s a classic, instant classic.’

‘Yes, and only three weeks late.’

Yeggy shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘So what – wait’ll you see my work. It’s genius. Can you recognize genius when you see it? This is genius.’

The Wolf examined the pages before he said anything to the science-man. The brochure was printed on 8½- by 11-inch glossy paper, bound in a clear report cover with a red spine. Yeggy had cranked it out on his HP color laser printer. The colors were electric. The cover looked perfect. The elegance was weird, actually, as if the Wolf were looking at a Tiffany’s catalog. It sure didn’t look like the work of a man who lived in this shithole.

‘I told you that girls number seven and seventeen were no longer with us. Dead, actually.’ The Wolf finally spoke. ‘Our boy genius is forgetful, no?’

‘Details, details,’ said Yeggy. ‘Speaking of which, you owe me fifteen thousand cash on delivery. This would be considered delivery.’

The Wolf reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a Sig Sauer 210. He shot Yeggy twice between the eyes. Then, for laughs, he shot Albert Einstein between the eyes too.

‘Looks like you are no longer with us either, Mr Titov. Details, details.’

The Wolf sat at a laptop computer and fixed the sales catalog himself. Then he burned a CD and took it with him. Also several copies of the Russian newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo that he had missed. He would send a crew to dispose of the body and burn this shithole later. Details, details.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I skipped a class with a topic on ‘Arrest Techniques’ that morning. I figured I probably knew more on the subject than the teacher. I called Monnie Donnelley instead, and told her I needed whatever she had on the white slave trade, particularly recent activity in the US, that might relate to the White Girl case.

Most of the Bureau’s crime analysts were housed ten miles away at the Criminal Incident Response Group (CIRG), but Monnie had an office at Quantico. Less than an hour later, she was at the doorway of my no-frills cubicle. She held out two disks, and looked proud of herself.

‘This should keep you busy for a while. I concentrated on white women only. Attractive. Recent abductions. I also have a lot on the crime scene in Atlanta. I expanded the circle to get a read on the mall, owner, employees, the neighborhood in Buckhead. I have copies for you of the police and the Bureau’s investigative reports. All the things you asked for. You do your homework, don’t you?’

‘I’m a student of the game. I prepare as best I can. Is that so unusual? Here at Quantico?’

‘Actually, it is for agents who come to us from police departments or the armed forces. They seem to like to work out in the field.’

‘I like field work too,’ I admitted to Monnie, ‘but not until I’ve narrowed it some. Thank you for this, all of this.’

‘Do you know what they say about you, Dr Cross?’

‘No. What do they say?’

‘That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe gifted. You can think like a killer. That’s why they put you on White Girl right away.’ She remained in the doorway. ‘Listen. Some unasked-for advice if I may. You shouldn’t piss off Gordo Nooney. He takes his little orientation games seriously. He’s also basically a bad guy. And, he’s connected.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

I nodded. ‘So there are good guys too?’

‘Absolutely. You’ll see that most of the agents are real solid. Good people, the best. All right, well, happy hunting,’ Monnie said. Then she left me to my reading, lots and lots of reading. Too much.

I started off with a couple of abductions – both in Texas – that I thought could be related to those in Atlanta. Just reading the accounts got my blood boiling again, though. Marianne Norman, twenty, had disappeared in Houston on 6 August, 2001. She’d been staying with her college sweetheart in a condo owned by his grandparents. Marianne and Dennis Turcos were going to be seniors at Texas Christian that fall and planned to be married in the spring of ’02. Everybody said they were the nicest kids in the world. Marianne was never seen or heard from after that night in August. On 30 December of that year, Dennis Turcos put a revolver to his head and killed himself. He said he couldn’t live without Marianne, that his life ended when she disappeared.

The second case involved a fifteen-year-old runaway from Childress, Texas. Adrianne Tuletti had been snatched from an apartment in San Antonio where three girls involved in prostitution were said to live. Neighbors in the complex reported having seen two suspicious-looking people, a male and a female, entering the building on the day that Adrianne disappeared. One neighbor thought it might be the girls’ parents who had come to bring their daughter home, since the fifteen-year-old was never seen or heard from again.

I looked at her picture for a long moment – she was a pretty blonde and looked as if she could have been one of Elizabeth Connelly’s daughters. Her parents were elementary school teachers back in Childress.

Around one o’clock that afternoon, I got more bad news. The worst kind. A fashion designer named Audrey Meek had been abducted from the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Her two young children had witnessed the kidnapping. That piece of information stunned me. The children had told the police that the abductors were a man and a woman.

I started to get ready to travel to Pennsylvania. I called Nana and she was supportive for a change. Then I got a message from Nooney’s office. I wasn’t going to Pennsylvania. I was expected at my classes that afternoon.

The decision had obviously come from the top, and I didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.

Maybe all of this was a test?

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘Do you know what they say about you, Dr Cross? That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe even gifted. You can think like a killer.’ Those were Monnie Donnelley’s words to me that very morning. If that was true, why had I been taken off the case?

I went to my classes in the afternoon but I was distracted, maybe angry. I suffered a little angst: what was I doing in the FBI? What was I becoming? I didn’t want to fight the system in Quantico, but I’d been put in an impossible position. The next morning I had to be ready for my classes again: Law; White Collar Crime; Civil Rights Violations; Firearms Practice and a practical exercise.

I was sure that I’d find the subject ‘Civil Rights Violations’ interesting, but a couple of missing women named Elizabeth Connelly and Audrey Meek were out there somewhere. Maybe one or both of them were still alive. Maybe I could help find them – if I was so goddamn gifted.

I was finishing breakfast with Nana and Rosie the cat at the kitchen table when I heard the morning paper plop on the front porch.

‘Sit. You eat. I’ll get it,’ I told Nana as I pushed my chair away from the table.

‘No argument from this corner,’ Nana said and sipped her tea with great little-old-lady aplomb. ‘I have to conserve myself, you know.’

‘Right.’

Nana was still cleaning every square inch of the house, inside and out, and cooking most of the meals. A couple of weeks ago I’d caught her hanging on to an extension ladder, cleaning out the gutters on the roof. ‘It’s not a problem,’ she hollered down to me. ‘My balance is excellent and I’m light as a parachute.’ Come again?

The Washington Post hadn’t actually reached the porch. It lay open halfway up the sidewalk. I didn’t even have to stoop down to read the front page.

‘Awhh hell,’ I said. ‘Damn it.’

This wasn’t good. It was awful, actually. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The headline was a shocker: ABDUCTIONS OF TWO WOMEN MAY BE CONNECTED. Worst of all, the rest of the story contained very specific details that only a few people in the FBI knew. Unfortunately, I was one of them.

The story told about a couple – a man and woman – who had been seen at the most recent kidnapping in Pennsylvania was key. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. The eyewitness account given by Audrey Meek’s children was information that we didn’t want released to the press.

Somebody had leaked the story to the Post; somebody had also connected the dots for them. Other than maybe Bob Woodward, nobody at the newspaper could find it out by themselves. They weren’t that smart.

Who had leaked information to the Post?

Why?

It didn’t make sense. Was somebody trying to sabotage the murder investigation? Who?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I didn’t walk Jannie and Damon to school that morning. I sat out on the sunporch with the cat and played the piano – Mozart, Brahms. I had the guilty thought that I should have gotten up earlier and helped out at St Anthony’s soup kitchen. I usually pitch in a couple of mornings a week, often on Sundays. My church.

Traffic was terrible that morning and the frustrating ride down to Quantico took me a little over an hour and twenty minutes. I imagined Senior Agent Nooney standing at the front gates, waiting impatiently for me to arrive. At least the ride gave me time to think over my current situation. I decided the best course of action, for now anyway, was to go to my classes. Keep my head down. If Director Burns wanted me on White Girl, he’d get word to me. If not, then fine.

That morning the class centered on what the Bureau called a ‘practical application exercise’. We had to investigate a ‘fictitious’ bank robbery, including interviews with victims and tellers. The instructor was another very competent SSA named Marilyn May.

About half an hour into the exercise, Agent May notified the class of a fictitious automobile accident about a mile from the bank. We proceeded as a group to Hogans Alley to investigate the accident, and to see if it had any connection to the bank robbery. I was being conscientious, but I’d been involved in actual investigations like this for the past dozen years, and it was hard for me to take it too seriously, especially since some of my classmates conducted interviews according to the instructional manual. I thought maybe they’d watched cop shows on television too often. Agent May seemed amused at times herself.

As I stood around the accident scene with a new buddy who had been a captain in the army before going into the Bureau, I heard my name spoken. I turned to see Nooney’s administrative assistant. ‘Senior Agent Nooney wants to see you in his office,’ he said.

Oh Christ, what now? This guy is nuts! I was thinking as I walked quickly to Administration. I hurried upstairs to where Nooney was waiting.

‘Shut the door, please,’ he said. He was seated behind a scarred oak desk, looking as if someone close to him had died.

I was getting hot under the collar. ‘I’m in the middle of an exercise.’

‘I know what you’re doing. I wrote the program and the schedule,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you about the front page of today’s Washington Post,’ he went on. ‘You see it?’

‘I saw it.’

‘I spoke to your former chief of detectives this morning. He told me that you’ve used the Post before. He said you have friends there.’

I tried hard not to roll my eyes. ‘I used to have a good friend at the Post. He was murdered. I don’t have friends there anymore. Why would I leak information about the abductions? What would I gain?’

Nooney pointed a rigid finger my way. He raised his voice. ‘I know how you work. And I know what you’re after – you don’t want to be part of a team. Or to be controlled or influenced in any way. Well, it’s not going to happen that way. We don’t believe in golden boys, or special situations. We don’t think that you’re more imaginative or creative than anyone else in your class. So get back to your exercise, Dr Cross. And wise up.’

Without saying another word I left the office fuming. I returned to the fake accident scene which Agent Marilyn May soon neatly connected to the fake robbery that had been staged in Hogans Alley. Some program that Nooney had written. I could have done a better one in my sleep. And yeah, now I was mad. I just didn’t know whom I was supposed to be mad at. I didn’t know how to play this game.

But I wanted to win.

Chapter Thirty

Another purchase had been made – a large one.

That night, the Couple entered a bar called The Halyard, on the water in Newport, Rhode Island. The Halyard was different from most of the gay clubs in Newport’s so-called Pink District. There was the occasional glimpse of a bad-ass boot or spike-studded wristband, but most of the men who frequented the place sported tousled hairdos and boating dress, and the ever-popular Croakie-attached sunglasses.

The DJ had just selected a Strokes tune and several couples were dancing the night away. The Couple fit in, which is to say that they didn’t stand out. Slava wore a baby blue T-shirt and Dockers, and had gelled his longish black hair. Zoya had on a raffish sailing cap and made herself up to look like a pretty young male. She had succeeded beyond her own expectations for she had already been hit on.

She and Slava were looking for a certain physical ‘type’, and they had found a promising prospect soon after they arrived. His name, they would learn later, was Benjamin Coffey, and he was a senior at Providence College. Benjamin had first become aware that he was gay while serving as an altar boy at St Thomas in Barrington, Rhode Island. No priest ever touched or abused him while he was there, or even came on to him, but he discovered a like-minded altar server, and they became lovers when they were both fourteen. The two had continued to meet through high school, but then Benjamin moved on.

He was still keeping his sex life a secret at Providence College, but he could be himself in the Pink District. The Couple watched the very handsome boy as he chatted up a thirtysomething bartender, whose toned muscles were set off by the track lighting over his head.

‘The boy could be on the cover of GQ,’ said Slava. ‘He’s the one.’

A strapping man in his fifties approached the bar. Close behind him were four younger males and a woman. Everyone in the group was wearing white ducks and blue Lacoste shirts. The bartender turned away from Benjamin and shook hands with the older man, who then turned to introduce his companions. ‘David Skalah. Crew. Henry Galperin. Crew. Bill Lattanzi. Crew. Sam Hughes. Cook. Nora Hamerman. Crew.’

‘And this’, the bartender said, ‘is Ben.’

‘It’s Benjamin,’ the boy corrected, and smiled brilliantly.

Zoya snuck a look at Slava and the two of them couldn’t help grinning. ‘The boy is just what we want,’ she said. ‘He’s like a cleaned-up version of Brad Pitt.’

He was definitely the physical ‘type’ that the client had specified: slender, blond, boyish, still probably a teenager, luscious red lips, intelligent-looking. That was a must – intelligence. And the buyer wanted no part of ‘chicken hawks’, young boys who sold themselves on the street.

Ten minutes or so passed, then the Couple followed Benjamin to the bathroom, which was white on white and sparkling clean. Illustrations of nautical knots had been drawn on the walls. There was a table elaborately set with colognes, mouthwashes, a teak box filled with amyl nitrite poppers.

Benjamin headed into one of the stalls and the Couple pushed in after him. It was a tight squeeze.

He turned when he felt a hard shove. ‘Taken,’ he said. ‘I’m in here. Jesus, are you two stoned? Give me a break.’

‘Arm or leg?’ said Slava, and laughed at his own joke.

They forced him to his knees. ‘Hey, hey,’ he called out in alarm. ‘Somebody help me. Somebody!’

A gauzy cloth was pressed tightly against his nose and mouth, and he became unconscious. Then the Couple lifted Benjamin up and supported him on either side, carrying him from the bathroom as if they were buddies helping someone who’d passed out.

They took him out a back door to a parking lot filled with convertibles and SUVs. The Couple didn’t care if they were seen, but they were careful not to hurt the boy. No bruises. He was worth a lot of money. Somebody wanted him badly.

Another purchase.

Chapter Thirty-One

The buyer’s name was Mr Potter.

It was the code name he used when he wanted to make a purchase from Sterling, when he and the seller communicated for any reason. Potter was very happy with Benjamin and he’d told this to the Couple when they dropped the package at his farm in Webster, New Hampshire, which had a population of a little more than fourteen hundred – a place where no one bothered you. Ever. The farmhouse he owned there was partially restored, with white antique wood shingling, two stories, a new roof. About a hundred yards behind it sat a red barn, the ‘guest house’. This was where Benjamin would be kept, where the others before him had been stored as well.

The house and barn were surrounded by more than sixty acres of woods and farmland, which had belonged to Potter’s family, and now were his. He didn’t live on the farm, but in Hanover, fifty-two miles away, where he toiled as an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth.

God, he couldn’t take his eyes off Benjamin. Of course, the boy couldn’t see him. Couldn’t speak. Not yet. A hood made of burlap completely covered his face. He was gagged, and his hands and legs were bound by police handcuffs.

Other than that, Benjamin wore nothing but a sliver of silver thong, which looked precious on him. The sight of the very handsome young man took Potter’s breath away for the third or fourth or tenth time since he’d taken possession of him. The maddening thing about teaching at Dartmouth these past five years was: you could watch, but you could not touch the boys who went there. It was frustrating beyond belief to be that close to his heart’s desire, but now – it almost seemed worth it. Benjamin was his reward. For waiting. For being good.

He moved close to the boy, inches at a time. Finally, he slid his hand through the waves of thick blond hair. Benjamin jumped! He actually shivered and shook uncontrollably. That was nice.

‘It’s all right… to be afraid,’ Potter whispered. ‘There’s a strange joy to be found in fear. Trust me on that, Benjamin. I’ve been there. I know exactly what you’re feeling now.’

Potter could barely stand it! This was just too much of a great thing, a dream come true. He had been denied this forbidden pleasure – and now here was this absolutely perfect, beautiful, stunning young man.

What was this? Benjamin was trying to speak through his gag and hood. Potter wanted to hear the boy’s sweet voice, to see his luscious mouth move, to look into his eyes. He bent forward and kissed the place where the boy’s mouth ought to be. He actually felt Benjamin’s lips underneath, their softness.

Then Mr Potter couldn’t stand it for one second more. His fingers fumbling, incoherent whispers seeping from his mouth, his body shaking as if he had palsy, he lifted off the hood and looked at Benjamin’s face.

He also let the boy see him.

‘May I call you Benjy?’ he whispered.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Another of the captives – Audrey Meek – watched this obscene deviate, possibly an insane captor, as he calmly and coolly fixed her breakfast. She was bound by rope, loosely, but she couldn’t run. She couldn’t believe any of this was happening, had happened, and presumably would continue happening. She was being held in a nicely furnished cabin – somewhere, who knew where – and she was still flashing back to the incredible moment when she had been grabbed at the King of Prussia Mall, when they yanked her away from Sarah and Warren. Dear God, were the children all right?

‘My children?’ Audrey asked again. ‘I have to know for sure they’re all right. I want to talk to them. I won’t do anything you ask until I speak to them. Not even eat.’

Another uncomfortable silent moment passed, and then the Art Director chose to speak.

‘Your children are just fine. That’s all I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘You should eat.’

‘How could you know my children are all right?’ she sniffed. ‘You can’t.’

‘Audrey, you’re in no position to make demands. Not anymore. That life is behind you.’

He was tall, maybe six feet two and well-built, with a thick, bushy black beard and flashing blue eyes that seemed intelligent to her. She guessed that he was around fifty. He’d told her to call him Art Director. No rhyme or reason for the name, not yet anyway, nor any other explanation for what had happened so far.

‘I was concerned myself, so I called your house. The children are there with your nanny and husband. I promise. I wouldn’t lie to you, Audrey. I’m different from you in that respect.’

Audrey shook her head. ‘I’m supposed to trust you? Your word?’

‘I think it would be a good idea, yes. Why not? Who else can you trust out here? Yourself of course. And me. That’s all there is. You’re miles and miles away from anybody else. It’s just us two. Please get used to it. You like your scrambled eggs a little soft, right? Fluffy? Isn’t that the word you use?’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Audrey asked, getting braver since he hadn’t actually threatened her yet. ‘What are the two of us doing here?’

He sighed. ‘All in due time, Audrey. For now, let’s just say it’s an unhealthy obsession. It’s more complicated, actually, but let’s leave it at that for now.’ She was surprised by the answer – he knew he was a freaking nutcase, didn’t he? Was that good or bad, though, that he knew exactly what he was doing?

‘I’d like to keep you free like this as much as possible. I don’t want you kept in bondage, for God’s sake. Not even the ropes. Please don’t try to run away, or it won’t be possible. Okay?’

He seemed so reasonable at times. Seemed. Christ! Wasn’t this the most insane thing? Of course it was. But insane things happened all the time to people.

‘I want to be your friend,’ he said as he served her breakfast – the eggs cooked just so, twelve-grain toast, herbal tea, boysenberry jam. ‘I’ve cooked all the things you like. I want to treat you like you deserve. You can trust me, Audrey. Start by trusting me just a little bit… Try your eggs. Fluffy. They’re delish.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

I was marking time at Quantico and I didn’t like it much. I attended my classes the next morning, then an hour of fitness training. At noon, I went to the Dining Hall Building to see what Monnie Donnelley had collected so far on White Girl. She had a small, cramped cubicle on the third floor. On one wall was a collage of photos and photocopies of bits of evidence from brutally violent crimes arranged in an eye-catching cubist’s fantasy.

I rapped my knuckles against her metal nameplate before entering the cube.

Monnie turned and smiled when she saw me standing there. I noticed glossy photos of her sons and a funny portrait of Monnie, the sons, and also one of Pierce Brosnan as debonair, sexy James Bond. ‘Hey, look who’s back for more punishment. You can tell by the size of my digs that the Bureau doesn’t yet realize that this is the Information Age, what Bill Clinton used to call The Third Way. You know the joke – the Bureau supports yesterday’s technology tomorrow.’

‘Any information for me?’

Monnie swiveled back to her computer, an IBM. ‘Let me print up a few of these choice pieces for your burgeoning collection. I know you like hard copies. Dinosaur.’

‘It’s just the way I work.’

I had asked around about Monnie and heard the same thing everywhere: she was bright, an incredibly hard worker, woefully under-appreciated by the powers at Quantico. I’d also found out that Monnie was a single mother of two, and struggling to make ends meet. The only ‘complaint’ against her was that she worked too hard, brought stuff home just about every night and weekends.

Monnie shuffled together a thick batch of pages for me. I could tell she was obsessive by the way she evened out all the pages. They had to be just so.

‘Anything pop out at you?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘I’m just a researcher, right? More corroboration. Upscale, white women who’ve been reported missing in the last year or so. The numbers are out of whack, way too high. A lot of them are attractive blondes. Blondes do not have more fun in these instances. No particular regional skew, which I want to look into more. Geographic profiling? Sometimes it can pinpoint the exact locus of criminal activity.’

‘No obvious regional discrepancies so far. That’s too bad. Anything in terms of the victims’ appearances? Any patterns at all?’

Monnie clucked her tongue, shook her head. ‘Nothing sticks out. There are women missing in New England, the South, Far West. I’ll check into it more. The women are described as very attractive for the most part. And none of them have been found. They go missing, they stay missing.’

She looked at me for a few uncomfortable seconds. There was sadness in her eyes. I sensed that she wanted out of this cubicle.

I reached down for the pages. ‘We’re trying. I made a promise to the Connelly family.’

There was a flicker of humor in her light green eyes. ‘You keep your promises?’

‘Try,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the pages. Don’t work too hard. Go home and see your kids.’

‘You too, Alex. See your kids. You’re working too hard already.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Nana and the kids, not to mention Rosie the cat, were lying in wait for me on the front porch when I got home that night. Their cranky body language and the sullen looks on their faces weren’t good signs. I figured I knew why everybody was so happy to see me. You always keep your promises?

‘Seven-thirty. It’s getting later and later,’ Nana said and shook her head. ‘You mentioned we might go see Drumline at the movies. Damon was excited.’

‘It’s orientation,’ I told her.

‘Exactly,’ Nana said and the frown on her face deepened. ‘Wait until the real stuff starts up. You’ll be coming home at midnight again. If at all. You have no life. You have no love life. All those women who like you, Alex – though God knows why. Let one of them catch you. Let somebody in. Before it’s too late.’

‘Maybe it’s too late already.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘You’re tough,’ I said and plopped down on the porch steps next to the kids. ‘Your Nana is tough as nails. Still light out,’ I said to them. ‘Anybody want to play hoops?’

Damon frowned and shook his head. ‘Not with Jannie. No way that’s gonna happen.’

‘Not with the big superstar Damon!’ Jannie smirked. ‘Even though Diana Taurasi could kick his butt at O-U-T.’

I got up and headed inside. ‘I’ll get the ball. We’ll play O-U-T.’

When we returned from the park, Nana had already put little Alex to bed. She was back sitting on the porch. I’d brought a pint of Pralines and Cream and a pint of Oreos and Cream. We ate, then the kids wandered up to their rooms to sleep, or study, or mess around on the Internet.

‘You’re becoming hopeless, Alex,’ Nana pronounced as she sucked the last ice cream off her spoon. ‘That’s all I can say to you.’

‘You mean consistent. And dedicated. That’s getting harder to find. You like that Oreos and Cream, don’t you?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Maybe you ought to catch up with the times, son. Duty isn’t everything anymore.’

‘I’m here for the kids. And even for you, old woman.’

‘Never said you weren’t. Well, not lately anyway. How’s Jamilla?’

‘We’ve both been busy.’

Nana nodded her head, up and down, up and down, like one of those dolls that people keep on the dashboards of their automobiles. Then she pushed herself up and started to gather the ice-cream dishes the kids had left around the porch.

‘I’ll get those,’ I told her.

‘Kids should get them. They know better too.’

‘They take advantage when I’m around.’

‘Right. Because they know you feel guilty.’

‘For what?’ I asked. ‘What did I do? What am I missing here?’

‘Now that is the main question you have to answer, isn’t it? I’m going in to bed. Goodnight, Alex. I love you. And I do like Oreos and Cream.’

Then she muttered, ‘Hopeless.’

‘Am not,’ I said to her back.

‘Are too,’ she spoke without turning. She always gets the last word.

I eventually moseyed up to my office in the attic and made a phone call I’d been dreading. But I’d made a promise.

The phone rang and then I heard a man’s voice say, ‘Brendan Connelly.’

‘Hello, Judge Connelly, this is Alex Cross,’ I said. I heard him sigh, but he said nothing, so I continued. ‘I don’t have any specific good news about Mrs Connelly yet. We have over fifty agents active in the Atlanta area, though. I’m calling because I told you I’d keep in touch and to reassure you that we’re working.’

Because I made a promise.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Something about the abductions wasn’t tracking for me. The early kidnappings had been committed carefully, then suddenly the abductors began to get sloppy. The pattern was inconsistent. Why? What did it mean? What had changed about the abductions? If I could figure that out, we might have a break.

The next morning, I got to Quantico about five minutes before the Director touched down in a big, black Bell helicopter. The news that Burns was on the grounds circulated quickly. Maybe Monnie Donnelley was right about one thing, this was the Information Age, even inside the Bureau, even at Quantico.

Burns had ordered an emergency meeting, and I was informed that I was to come. Maybe I was back on the case? The Director acknowledged a couple of agents when he entered the conference room in the Admin. Building. His eyes never made contact with mine, and, once again, I wondered what he was doing here. Did he have news for us? What kind of news would warrant a visit from him?

He sat in the first row as the Behavioral Analysis Unit Chief, Dr Bill Thompson, walked to the front of the room. It was becoming clear that Burns was here as an observer. But why? What did he want to observe?

An administrative assistant to Dr Thompson passed out stapled documents. At the same time, the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation was projected on a wall screen. ‘There’s been another kidnapping,’ Thompson announced to the group. ‘It occurred Thursday night in Newport, Rhode Island. There’s been a sea change here. The victim was a male. To our knowledge, he’s the first male that they’ve taken.’

Dr Thompson gave us the details, which were also projected on the wall screen. An honor student at Providence College, Benjamin Coffey, had been abducted from a bar called The Halyard in Newport. It appeared that the abductors were both males.

A team.

And they had been spotted again.

‘Anyone?’ asked Thompson once he had given us the basics. ‘Reactions? Comments? Don’t be shy. We need input. We’re nowhere on this.’

‘Pattern’s definitely different,’ an analyst volunteered. ‘Abduction at a bar. Male taken.’

‘How can we be so sure of that at this point?’ Burns spoke up from the front of the room. ‘What is the pattern here?’ he asked.

Burns’s question was met with silence. Like most chief executives he had no idea of his own power. He turned and looked around at the group. His eyes finally settled on mine. ‘Alex? What is the pattern?’ he asked. ‘You have any ideas?’

The other agents were watching me. ‘Are we certain it was two males at the club?’ I asked. ‘That’s the first question I have.’

Burns nodded in agreement. ‘No, we are not sure, are we? One of them had on a sailor’s cap. Could have been the woman from King of Prussia. Do you agree with the opinion voiced about the disconnection between this abduction and the others? Has the pattern been broken?’

I considered the question, trying to get in touch with my gut reaction to what I’d heard so far.

‘No,’ I finally said. ‘There doesn’t even have to be a behavioral pattern. Not if the abduction team is working for money. I’m inclined to think they probably are. I don’t see these as crimes of passion. But what bothers me are the mistakes. Why are they making mistakes? That’s the key to everything.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

Lizzie Connelly had no sense of time anymore, except that it seemed to be moving very slowly, and that she was pretty sure she was going to die soon. She would never see Gwynne, Brigid, Merry or Brendan again and that made her incredibly sad. She was definitely going to die.

After she was locked away in the small closet-room, she’d spent no time feeling sorry for herself, or worse, feeling panic, letting it rule her for whatever time she had left. Certain things were obvious to her, but the most important was the reality that this horrible monster wasn’t going to let her go. Ever. So she had spent countless hours plotting her escape. But, realistically, she knew that it wasn’t likely to happen. She was bound with leather straps, and though she’d tried every possible maneuver, every twist and turn, she’d never be able to break loose. Even if she did, by some miracle, she could never overpower him. He was probably the strongest man she’d ever seen, twice as powerful as Brendan, who had played football in college.

So what could she do? Maybe try something during a bathroom or food break – but he was so attentive and careful. At the very least, Lizzie Connelly wanted to die with dignity. Would the monster let her? Or would he want her to suffer? She thought about her past history quite a lot, and took comfort in it. Her growing-up years in Potomac, Maryland, spending nearly every spare hour at a nearby stable. College at Vassar in New York. Then the Washington Post. Her marriage to Brendan, the good times, and the bad. The kids. All leading up to that fateful morning at Phipps Plaza. What a cruel joke life had played on her.

During her last few hours locked up in the dark, she’d been trying to remember how she had gotten through other terrifying experiences. She thought that she knew: with faith; with humor; and with a clear understanding that knowledge was power. Now, Lizzie tried to remember specific examples… anything that might help.

When she had been eight years old she’d needed surgery to correct a straying eye. Her parents were always ‘too busy’ so her grandparents had taken her to the hospital. As she watched them leave, tears had streamed from her eyes. When a nurse came in and saw the tears, Lizzie pretended that she’d bumped her head. And somehow she got past the lonely, terrifying incident. Lizzie survived.

Then when she was thirteen there was another terrifying incident. She was returning from a weekend with a friend’s family in Virginia, and had fallen asleep in the car. When she woke up she was groggy and confused and completely covered with blood. She remembered staring out into the gloomy darkness and slowly beginning to understand. There’d been an automobile accident while she was asleep. A man from another car involved in the accident lay in the street. He wasn’t moving – but Lizzie believed she heard him tell her ‘not to be afraid’. He said that she could stay on earth, or leave. It was her decision – no one else’s. She had chosen to live.

‘It’s my choice,’ Lizzie whispered in the blackness of the closet. ‘It’s my choice to live or die, not his. Not the Wolf’s. Not anybody else’s.

‘I choose to live.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The next morning, just about everybody attached to the White Girl task force had been assembled in the main conference hall at Quantico. We hadn’t been told much yet, just that there was breaking news, which was good; there had already been too much bureaucracy and wheel-spinning for me.

Senior Agent Ned Mahoney from HRT arrived when the room was already filled. He walked to the front, turned and faced us. His intense, gray-blue eyes went from row to row, and he seemed more pumped up than usual.

‘I have an announcement. Good news for a change,’ Mahoney said. ‘There’s been a significant break. Word just came down from Washington.’ Mahoney paused, then he continued. ‘Since this past Friday, agents from our office in Newark have been monitoring a suspect named Rafe Farley. The suspect is a repeat sex offender. He did four years in Rahway Prison for breaking into a woman’s apartment, beating and raping her. At the time, Farley claimed that the victim was a girlfriend from where he worked. What alerted us to Farley is that he went into an Internet chat room and had a lot to say about Mrs Audrey Meek. Too much. He knew details about Mrs Meek, including facts about her family in the Princeton area, her house there, even the physical layout inside.

‘The suspect also knew precisely how and when Mrs Meek was abducted at the King of Prussia Mall. He knew that her car was used, what kind of car it was, and that the children were left behind.

‘In a subsequent visit to the chat room, Farley provided specific details that even we don’t have. He claimed that she was knocked out with a specific drug and then taken to a wooded area in New Jersey. He left it vague as to whether Audrey Meek is alive or dead.

‘Unfortunately, the suspect hasn’t gone to visit Mrs Meek during the period we’ve been watching him. It’s been nearly two days. We believe it’s possible he may have spotted the surveillance. It is our decision, and the Director concurs, that we take Farley down.

‘HRT is already on the scene in North Vineland, New Jersey, assisting the local field office and the police. We’re going in this morning, probably within the hour. Score one for the good guys,’ said Mahoney. ‘Congratulations to everyone involved at this end.’

I sat at my seat and applauded with the others, but I had a funny feeling too. I hadn’t been involved, or even known about Farley or the surveillance on him. I was out of the loop, and I hadn’t felt like this for over a dozen years, not since I started with the police department in D.C.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

A phrase from the briefing kept playing in my head: the Director concurs… I wondered how long Director Burns had known about the suspect in Jersey, and why he decided not to tell me. I tried not to be disappointed, or paranoid, but still… I wasn’t feeling good as the meeting broke up to huzzahs from the group of agents.

The trouble was, something felt wrong to me and I had no idea what it was. I just didn’t like something about this bust.

I was filing out of the room with the others when Mahoney came ambling up to me. ‘The Director asked that you go to New Jersey,’ he said, then grinned. ‘Come with me to the helipad. I want you there too,’ he added. ‘If we don’t break Farley down immediately, I don’t think we’ll get Mrs Meek back alive.’

A little less than fifty-five minutes later a Bell helicopter set down at Big Sky Aviation in Millville, New Jersey. Two black SUVs were waiting, and Mahoney and I were rushed to North Vineland, about six miles to the north.

We parked in the lot of an International House of Pancakes restaurant. Farley’s house was one point two miles north on Garden Road. ‘We’re ready to roll on him,’ Mahoney told his group. ‘I have a pretty good feeling about this one.’

I accompanied Mahoney in one of the SUVs. We wouldn’t be part of the six-man HRT team that would go into the house first, but we’d have immediate access to Rafe Farley. Hopefully, we’d find Audrey Meek alive in the house.

In spite of my misgivings, I was starting to get pumped about the take-down. Mahoney’s enthusiasm was contagious and any kind of action beats sitting around. At least we were doing something. Maybe we’d get Audrey Meek back.

Just then, we passed by an unpainted, off-white bungalow. I saw broken porch boards and a rusty car and camping stove in the small front yard. ‘That’s it,’ said Mahoney. ‘Home sweet home. Let’s pull over up there.’

We stopped about a hundred yards up the road, near a stand of red oaks and pines. I knew that a couple of surveillance agents in ghillie suits were already nestled in close to the bungalow. These agents did nothing but surveillance, and wouldn’t be involved in the actual bust. There was also a closed-circuit camera aimed at the bungalow and the UNSUB’s car, a red Dodge Polaris.

‘We think he’s sleeping inside,’ Mahoney informed me as we jogged through the woods until we had the ramshackle house in view.

‘It’s almost eleven in the morning,’ I said.

‘Farley works a late-night shift. He got home at six this a.m. His girlfriend’s in there too.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘What? What are you thinking?’ Mahoney asked as we watched the house from a thick stand of woods less than fifty yards away.

‘You said he has a girlfriend in the house? That doesn’t sound right, does it?’

‘I don’t know, Alex. According to surveillance, the girlfriend’s been there all night. I guess they could be the couple. We’re here. My job is to take Rafe Farley down. Let’s do it… This is HRT One. I have control. Ready! Five, four, three, two, one. Go. Go!’

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Mahoney and I watched as the breech team moved quickly on the small, inconsequential-looking house. The six agents were outfitted in black-on-black flight suits and body armor. The side yard was littered with two more junked vehicles, a small car and a Dodge truck, and a lot of spare parts for appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners. There was a standing urinal out back that looked like it came from a tavern.

The house windows were darkened even though it was past eleven. Was Audrey Meek in there? Was she alive? I hoped that she was. It was a huge break if we got her back now. Especially since everybody thought she was probably dead.

But something about the raid bothered me.

Not that it mattered now.

There is no ‘knock and announce’ protocol when HRT is involved. No talking, no negotiating, no political correctness. I watched two agents breech the front door. They started to go inside the suspect’s house.

Suddenly, a muffled boom. The agents at the front door went down. One of them didn’t get up. The other got up and stumbled back from the house. It was awful to witness, a complete shock.

‘Bomb,’ said Mahoney in surprise and anger. ‘He musta booby-trapped the door.’

By then, the four other agents were inside the house. They had gone in through a back and side door. There were no more explosions so the doors hadn’t been booby-trapped. Two HRT agents approached the wounded pair at the front of the house. They pulled away the agent who hadn’t moved since the blast.

Mahoney and I ran as fast as we could toward the house. He kept repeating ‘fuck’ over and over. There were no gunshots coming from inside.

I was suddenly afraid Farley wasn’t even in the house. I prayed that Audrey Meek wasn’t already dead in there. Everything was feeling so wrong to me. This wasn’t how I would have done the raid. The FBI! I had always hated and distrusted these bastards, and now I was one of them.

Then I heard, ‘Secure! Secure!’ And ‘We have a suspect! We’ve got him! It’s Farley. There’s a woman here too!’

What woman? Mahoney and I barged in through the side door. I saw thick smoke everywhere. The house reeked of the explosive, but also marijuana and greasy cooking smells. We made our way back to a bedroom off a small living room.

A naked man and a woman were spread-eagled on the bare wooden floor of the bedroom. The woman on the floor wasn’t Audrey Meek. She was heavy, at least forty or fifty pounds overweight. Rafe Farley looked to be close to three hundred pounds, and had hideous clumps of red hair not only on his head but all over his body.

An old poster for the movie Cool Hand Luke was taped over a kingsize bed that had no sheets or covers. Nothing else caught my eye.

Farley was screaming at us, his face deeply crimson. ‘I have rights! I have goddamn legal rights! You bastards are in real trouble.’

I had a feeling that he might be right, and that if this screaming man had kidnapped Mrs Meek – she was already dead, and he knew he had nothing to worry about.

‘You’re the one in trouble, fat boy!’ an HRT agent barked in the suspect’s face. ‘You too, girlfriend!’

Could this possibly be the couple who had taken Audrey Meek and Elizabeth Connelly?

I didn’t see how.

So who in hell were they?

Chapter Forty

Ned Mahoney and I were stuck in a close, dark, pigsty of a bedroom with the suspect, Rafe Farley. The woman, who assured us she was his girlfriend, had put on a filthy bathrobe and been taken into the kitchen to be grilled.

We were all angry about what had happened outside. Two agents had been wounded by a booby trap. Rafe Farley was the closest thing we had to a break in the case, or a suspect.

Things kept getting weirder. For starters, Farley spit at Mahoney and me until his mouth went dry. It was so strange and crazy that, at one point, Ned and I just looked at each other and started to laugh.

‘Think this is fucking funny?’ Farley rasped from the edge of the bed where he was lodged like a beached whale. We’d made him put on clothes, blue jeans and a work shirt, mostly because we couldn’t stand the sight of his flaccid rolls of fat, tattoos of naked women, and a purple dragon that was eating a child.

‘You’re going down on kidnap and murder charges,’ Mahoney snarled at him. ‘You injured two of my men. One might lose an eye.’

‘You had no right comin’ in my house, middle of the night! I have enemies!’ Farley yelled and spit at Mahoney again. ‘You barge in here, ‘cause I sell some weed? Or I screw a married broad who likes me more than she likes her old man?’

‘Are you talking about Audrey Meek?’ I asked.

Suddenly he went quiet. He stared at me, and his face and neck turned bright red. What was this? He wasn’t a good actor, and he wasn’t real smart either.

‘What the hell’re you talking about? You been smoking my shit?’ Farley stammered. ‘Audrey Meek? That chick they kidnapped?’

Mahoney leaned forward. ‘Audrey Meek. We know you know all about her, Farley. Where is she?’

Farley’s piggy eyes seemed to be getting smaller. ‘How the hell would I know where she is?’

Mahoney kept at him. ‘You ever been in a chat room called Favorite Things Four?’

Farley shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘We have you on tape, asshole,’ Ned said. ‘You got a lot of ’splaining to do, Lucy.’

Farley looked confused. ‘Who the hell is Lucy? What are you talking about, man? You mean, like, I Love Lucy?’

Mahoney was good at keeping Farley off guard. I thought we were working okay together.

‘You’ve got her in the woods somewhere in Jersey. We have it on tape,’ Mahoney yelled, then stamped his foot hard.

‘Did you hurt her? Is she all right? Where is Audrey Meek?’

I picked up.

‘Take us to her, Farley!

‘You’re going back to prison. This time, you don’t get out again,’ I shouted in his face.

It was as if Farley were finally waking up. He squinted his eyes and stared hard at us. Lord, he smelled, especially now that he was scared.

‘Wait a fucking minute. Now I get it. That Internet place? I was just showin’ off.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Farley slumped down into himself as if we’d been beating him. ‘Favorite Four is for freaks to talk. Everybody makes shit up, man.’

‘But you didn’t make up the stuff about Audrey Meek. You know things about her. You got it all right,’ I said.

‘The bitch turns me on. She’s a fox. Hell, I collect catalogs from Meek, always have. All those skinny-ass models look like they need a good, unh, unh, uh!’

‘You knew things about the abduction, Farley,’ I said.

‘I read the newspapers, watch CNN. Who doesn’t? I told you, Audrey Meek turns me on. I wish I’d abducted her. You think I’d be sleeping with Cini if Audrey Meek was around here?’

I jabbed an index finger at Farley. ‘You knew things that weren’t in the newspapers.’

He shook his huge head from side to side. Then he said, ‘Got a scanner. Listen in on police radios and such. Shit, I didn’t kidnap Audrey Meek. I wouldn’t have the balls. I wouldn’t. I’m all talk, man.’

Mahoney cut in. ‘You had the balls to rape Carly Hope,’ he said.

Farley seemed to be shrinking inside himself again. ‘Nah, nah. It’s like I said in court. Carly was a girlfriend. I didn’t rape her none. I don’t have the balls. I didn’t do nothing to Audrey Meek. I’m nobody. I’m nothing.’

Rafe Farley stared at us for a long moment. His eyes were bloodshot, everything about him was pathetic. I didn’t want to, but I was starting to believe him. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. That was Rafe Farley, all right.

Chapter Forty-One

Sterling.

Mr Potter.

The Art Director.

Sphinx.

Marvel.

The Wolf.

The cover names sounded harmless, but the men behind them weren’t. During one session, Potter had nicknamed the group Monsters Inc. as a joke, and that was an accurate description. They were monsters, all of them; they were freaks; they were deviates, and worse.

And then there was the Wolf, who was in a whole other class.

The meeting was on a secure website that was inaccessible to outsiders. All messages were encrypted and required a pair of keys: one key garbled the information; a second key was needed to recover it. More important, a hand scan was necessary to get on to the site. They were considering using a retinal scan, or possibly an anal probe.

The subject under discussion was the Couple, and what to do about them.

‘What the hell does that mean – what to do about them?’ asked the Art Director, who was jokingly called Mr Softee because he could get very emotional, the only one of them who ever did.

‘It means just what it sounds like,’ answered Sterling. ‘There’s been a serious breach of security. Now we have to decide what to do about it. There’s been sloppiness, stupidity, and maybe worse than that. They were seen. It’s put us all in danger.’

‘What are our options?’ the Art Director continued. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’

Sterling responded instantly. ‘Have you read the newspapers lately? Do you have a TV? A team of two took a woman in a mall in Atlanta, Georgia. They were spotted. A team of two abducted a woman in Pennsylvania – and they were seen. Our options? Do absolutely nothing – or do something extreme. An object lesson is needed – for the other teams.’

‘So what are we doing about the problem?’ asked Marvel, who was usually spookily quiet, but who could be nasty and dangerous when he was aroused.

‘For one thing, I’ve shut down all deliveries for the moment,’ said Sterling.

‘Nobody told me about that!’ Sphinx erupted. ‘I’m expecting a delivery. As all of you know, I paid a price for it. Why wasn’t I informed before now?’

No one said anything to Sphinx for several seconds. No one liked him. Besides, each one of them was a sadist. They enjoyed torturing Sphinx, or anyone else in the group who showed weakness.

‘I expect my delivery!’ Sphinx insisted. ‘I deserve it. You bastards! Fuck you all.’ Then he went off-line. In a huff. Typical Sphinx. Laughable, really, except none of them was laughing right now.

‘The Sphinxter has left the building,’ Potter finally said.

Then Wolf took over. ‘I think that’s enough idle chat for tonight, enough fun and games. I’m concerned about the news stories. We need to deal with the Couple in some decisive manner that satisfies me. What I propose is that we have another team pay them a visit. Is there any disagreement?’

There was none, which wasn’t unusual when the Wolf had the floor. They were afraid of him; all of them were petrified of the Russian.

‘There is some good news, though,’ Potter said then. ‘This fuss and attention… it is exciting, isn’t it? Gets the blood boiling. It’s a hoot, right?’

The group shared a laugh. ‘You’re crazy, Potter. You’re mad.’

‘Don’t you just love it?’

The well-protected chat room was not protected enough.

Suddenly the Wolf said, ‘Don’t say another word. Not a word! I think someone else is on with us. Wait. They’re off now. Someone broke into the den, and now they’re gone. Who could have gotten in here? Who let them in? Whoever it is, they’re dead.’

Chapter Forty-Two

Lili Lynch was fourteen and a half years old, going on twenty-four, and she honestly believed she’d heard everything, until she hacked into the Wolf’s Den.

The sick bastards in the well-protected-but-not-protected-enough chat room were all older men, and they were gross and despicable. They liked to talk incessantly about women’s private parts, and having vile sex with anyone and everything that moved – any age, any gender, human or animal. The men were beyond disgusting, and they made her want to puke. Only then it got a lot worse, and Lili wished she had never even heard of the Wolf’s Den, never hacked into the highly protected chat room. They might be murderers!

And then the leader, Wolf, actually discovered Lili was on the site with them, listening to everything they’d said.

So now Lili knew about the murders, and the kidnappings, everything they fantasized about, and possibly did. Only she didn’t know if any of what she heard was real or not.

Was it real? Or were they making it all up? Maybe they were just nasty, sicko bullshitters. Lili almost didn’t want to know the truth, and she didn’t know what to do about the stuff she’d already overheard. She had hacked on to their site and that was illegal. If she went to the police, she’d be turning herself in. So she couldn’t do that. Could she? Especially if the stuff on the site was just fantasies.

So she sat in her room and pondered the unthinkable. Then pondered it again. She felt so bad, so sick to her stomach, so sad, but she was also afraid.

They knew she’d hacked on to the Wolf’s Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she was them, she’d know how. So were they already on their way to her house?

Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed.

When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. ‘Holy shit! Holy mother! It’s them!’

Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering.

Domino’s pizza! Jesus!

She’d forgotten all about it. It was a pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn’t going to die, after all.

She opened the front door.

Chapter Forty-Three

The Wolf had seldom been angrier and someone had to pay. The Russian had a longstanding hatred for New York City, and the smug and overrated metropolitan area. He found it filthy-dirty, foul beyond imagining, the people rude and uncivilized, even worse than in Moscow. But he had to be there today; it was where the Couple lived, and he had business with them. The Wolf also wanted to play some chess, one of his passions.

Long Island was the general address he had for Slava and Zoya.

Huntington was the specific one.

He arrived in the town just past three in the afternoon. Actually, he did remember the one other time he’d been here – two years after he had arrived in New York from Russia. Cousins of his owned the house and had helped set him up in America. He had committed four murders out here ‘on the Island’, as the locals called it. Well, at least Huntington was close to Kennedy Airport. He’d be out of New York as soon as possible.

The Couple lived in a typical suburban ranch house. The Wolf banged on the front door and a goateed bull of a man by the name of Lukanov opened it. Lukanov was part of another team, one that worked successfully in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Lukanov had once been a major in the KGB.

‘Where are the stupid fucks?’ the Wolf asked once he was inside the front door.

The bull Lukanov jerked a thumb toward a semi-darkened staircase behind him, and the Wolf trudged up. His right knee was aching today, and he remembered a time in the eighties when members of a rival gang had broken it. In Moscow that kind of thing was considered a warning. The Wolf wasn’t much for warnings himself. He had found the three men who’d tried to cripple him, and broken every bone in their bodies – one by one. In Russia this gruesome practice was called zamochit, but the Wolf and other gangsters called it mushing.

He entered a small, sloppily kept bedroom and immediately saw Slava and Zoya, his ex-wife’s cousins. The pair had grown up about thirty miles from Moscow. They had been in the army until the summer of ’98, then they emigrated to America. They’d been working for him for less than eight months, so he was just getting to know them.

‘You live in a garbage dump,’ he said. ‘I know you have plenty of money. What do you do with it?’

‘We have family at home,’ said Zoya. ‘Your relatives are there too.’

The Wolf tilted his head. ‘Awhh, so touching. I had no idea you had such a big heart of gold, Zoya.’ He motioned for the Bull to leave, and said, ‘Shut the door. I’ll be down when I’m finished in here. It might be a while.’

The Couple were tied up together on the floor. Both were in their underwear. Slava had on shorts patterned with little ducks. Zoya wore a black bra with a matching bikini thong.

The Wolf finally smiled. ‘What am I going to do with you two, huh?’

Then Slava began to laugh out loud, a nervous, high-pitched cackling. He had thought they were going to be killed, but this would just be a warning. He could see this in the Wolf’s eyes.

‘So what happened? Tell me quickly. You knew the rules of the game,’ he said.

‘Maybe it was getting too easy. We wanted a little more of a challenge. It’s our mistake, Pasha. We got sloppy.’

‘Never lie to me,’ the Wolf said. ‘I have my sources. They are everywhere!’

He sat on the arm of an easy chair that looked as if it had been in this hideously ugly bedroom for a hundred years. Dust puffed from the old chair as it took his weight.

‘You like him?’ he asked Zoya. ‘My ex-wife’s cousin?’

‘I love him,’ she said, and her brown eyes went soft. ‘Always. Since we were thirteen years old. Forever, I loved him.’

‘Slava, Slava,’ the Wolf said and walked over to the muscular man on the floor. He bent to give Slava a hug. ‘You are my ex-wife’s blood relative. And you betrayed me. You sold me out to my enemies, didn’t you? Sure you did. How much did you get? A lot, I hope.’

Then he twisted Slava’s head as if he were opening a big jar of pickles. Slava’s neck snapped, a sound that the Wolf had come to love over the years. His trademark in the Red Mafiya.

Zoya’s eyes widened to about twice their normal size. But she didn’t make a sound, and because of that the Wolf understood what tough customers she and Slava really were, how dangerous they had been to the safety of the organization. ‘I’m impressed, Zoya,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk some.’

He stared into those amazing eyes of hers. ‘Listen, I’m going to get the two of us some real vodka, Russian vodka. Then I want to hear your war stories,’ he said. ‘I want to hear what you’ve done with your life, Zoya. You have me curious now. Most of all, I want to play chess, Zoya. Nobody in America knows how to play chess. One game, then you go to heaven with your beloved Slava. But first vodka and chess, and, of course, I fuck you!’

Chapter Forty-Four

On account of secrets that Zoya had told him under significant duress, the Wolf had to make one more stop in New York. Unfortunate. This meant that he wouldn’t be able to catch his flight home out of Kennedy, and he would miss the professional hockey game that night. Regretful, but he knew this was the right thing to do. The betrayal by Slava and Zoya had jeopardized his life, and also made him look bad.

At a little past eleven, he entered a club called the Passage in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. The passage looked like a dump from the street, but inside it was beautiful, very ornate, almost as nice as the best places in Moscow.

He saw people he knew from the old days: Gosha Chernov, Lev Denisov, Yura Fomin and his mistress. Then he spotted his darling Yulya. His ex-wife was tall and slender, with large breasts he’d bought for her in Palm Beach, Florida. Yulya was still beautiful in the right light, not so much changed since Moscow, where she had been a dancer since she was fifteen.

She was sitting at the bar with Mikhail Biryukov, the latest king of Brighton Beach. They were directly in front of a mural of St Petersburg, which was very cinematic, thought the Wolf, a typical Hollywood visual cliché.

Yulya saw him coming, and she tapped Biryukov. The local pakhan turned and looked, and the Wolf closed on him fast. He slammed a black king down on the table. ‘Checkmate,’ he roared, then laughed and hugged Yulya.

‘You’re not even happy to see me?’ he asked the couple. ‘I should be hurt.’

Biryukov grunted. ‘You are a mystery man. I thought you were in California.’

‘Wrong again,’ said the Wolf. ‘By the way, Slava and Zoya say hello. I just saw them out on Long Island. They couldn’t make the trip here tonight.’

Yulya shrugged – such a cool little bitch. ‘They mean nothing to me,’ she said. ‘Distant cousins.’

‘Or me either, Yulya. Only the police care about them now.’

Suddenly he grabbed Yulya by the throat and lifted her out of her bar seat with one arm. ‘You told them to fuck me over, didn’t you? You must have paid them a lot!’ he screamed in her face. ‘It was you. And him!’

With dazzling speed, the Wolf pulled an ice pick from his sleeve and stuck it into Biryukov’s left eye. The gangster was blinded, and dead in an instant.

‘No… Please.’ Yulya struggled to get out a few words. ‘You can’t do this. Not even you!’

Then the Wolf addressed everyone in the nightclub. ‘You are all witnesses, are you not? What? Nobody helps her? You’re afraid of me? Good – you should be. Yulya tried to get revenge on me. She was always stupid as a cow. Biryukov – he was just a dumb, greedy bastard. Ambitious! The godfather of Brighton Beach! What is that? He wanted to be me!’

The Wolf lifted Yulya even higher in the air. Her long legs kicked violently and one of her red mules went flying, scooting under a nearby table. Nobody picked up the shoe. Not a person in the club moved to help her. Or to see if Mikhail Biryukov was still alive. Word had already circulated that the madman in the front of the passage was the Wolf.

‘You are witnesses to what happens – if anyone ever crosses me. You are witnesses! So you’ve had a warning. Same as in Russia. Same as now in America.’

The Wolf took his left hand out of her hair and wrapped it around her throat. He twisted hard and Yulya’s neck broke. ‘You are witnesses!’ he screamed in Russian. ‘I killed my ex-wife. And this rat Biryukov. You saw me do it! So go to hell.’

And then the Wolf stomped out of the nightclub. No one did a thing to stop him.

And no one talked to the New York police when they came.

Same as in Russia.

Same as now in America.

Chapter Forty-Five

Benjamin Coffey was being held in a dark root cellar under the barn where he’d been brought – what was it now – three, maybe four days ago? Benjamin couldn’t remember exactly, couldn’t keep track of the days.

The Providence College student had nearly lost his mind, until he made an amazing discovery in the solitary confinement of the cellar. He found God, or maybe God found him.

The first and most startling thing Benjamin felt was God’s presence. God accepted him, and maybe it was time for him to accept God. He learned that God understood him. But why couldn’t he understand the first thing about God? It didn’t make sense to Benjamin, who’d attended Catholic schools from kindergarten up to his senior year at Providence, where he studied philosophy and also art history. Benjamin had come to another conclusion in the darkness of his ‘prison cell’ under the barn. He’d always thought that he was basically a good person, but now he knew that he wasn’t; and it didn’t have anything to do with his sexuality, as his hypocritical Church would have him think. The way he figured it, a bad person was someone who habitually caused harm to others. Benjamin was guilty of that by his treatment of his parents and siblings, his classmates, his lovers, even his so-called best friends. He was mean-spirited, always acted superior, and continually inflicted unnecessary pain. He had acted like this ever since he could remember. He was cruel, a snob, a martinet, a sadist, a complete piece of shit. He’d always justified his bad behavior, because other people had caused him so much pain.

So was that why things had turned out like this? Maybe. But what was truly astonishing to Benjamin was the realization that if he ever got out of this alive – he probably wouldn’t change. In fact, he believed he would use this experience as an excuse to continue being a miserable bastard for the rest of his life. Cold, cold, I’m so cold, he thought. But God loves me unconditionally. That never changes either. Then Benjamin realized that he was incredibly confused, and crying, and had been for a long time, at least a day. He was shivering, babbling nonsense to himself, and he didn’t know what he really thought about anything. Not anymore, he didn’t.

His mind kept shifting back and forth. He did have good friends, great friends, and he’d been an okay son; so why were all these terrible thoughts shuttling through his head? Because he was in hell? Was that it? Hell was this foul-smelling, claustrophobic root cellar under a decaying barn somewhere in New England, probably New Hampshire or Vermont. Was that right?

Maybe he was supposed to repent and couldn’t be set free until he did? Or maybe this was it – for eternity.

Suddenly he remembered something from Catholic grade school in Great Barrington, Rhode Island. A parish priest had tried to explain an eternity in hell to Benjamin’s sixth-grade class. ‘Look across the river at that mountain,’ the priest had said. ‘Now imagine that every thousand years the tiniest sparrow transports what it can carry in its beak across the river from the mountain. When that tiny sparrow has transported the entire mountain to this side of the river, that, boys and girls, would just be the beginning of eternity.’ But Benjamin didn’t really believe the priest’s little fable, did he? Fire and brimstone forever? Somebody would find him soon. Somebody would guide him out.

Unfortunately, he didn’t completely believe that either. How could anyone find him here? They wouldn’t. God, the police had lucked out finding the Washington sniper, and Malvo and his uncle weren’t very smart. Mr Potter was.

He had to stop crying soon because Potter was angry with him already. He’d threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop, and, oh God, that was why he was crying so hard now. He didn’t want to die, not when he was just twenty-one and had his whole life ahead of him.

An hour later? Two hours? Three? He heard a loud noise above him, and began to cry again. Now Benjamin couldn’t stop sobbing, shaking all over. He was sniveling too. He’d sniffed and sniveled since preschool. Stop sniveling, Benjamin. Stop it! Stop it! But he couldn’t stop.

Then the trapdoor opened! Someone was coming down.

Stop the crying, stop the crying, stop it! Stop it this instant! Potter will kill you.

Then the most unbelievable thing happened, a turn of events that Benjamin would never have expected.

He heard a deep voice – not Potter’s.

‘Benjamin Coffey? Benjamin? This is the FBI. Mr Coffey, are you down there? This is the FBI.’

He was shaking worse now, and sobbing so hard he thought he might choke behind the gag. Because of the gag, he couldn’t call out, couldn’t let the FBI somehow know that he was down here.

The FBI found me! It’s a miracle. I have to signal them. But how? Don’t leave! I’m down here! I’m right here!

A flashlight illuminated his face.

He could see a person behind the light. A silhouette. Then the full face peered out of the shadows.

Mr Potter was frowning down at him from the trapdoor. Then he stuck out his tongue. ‘I told you what was going to happen. Didn’t I tell you, Benjamin? You did this to yourself. And you’re so beautiful. God, you’re perfect in every other way.’

His tormentor came down the stairs. He saw a battered sledgehammer in Potter’s hand. A heavy farm tool. Waves of fear washed over Benjamin. ‘I’m a lot stronger than I look,’ Potter said. ‘And you’ve been a very bad boy.’

Chapter Forty-Six

Mr Potter’s real name was Homer O. Taylor, and he was an assistant professor in the English department at Dartmouth. Brilliant to be sure, but still an assistant, a nobody. His office was a small but cozy one in the turret at the northwest corner of the Liberal Arts building. He called it his ‘garret’, the place where a nobody would labor in lonely solitude.

He had been up there most of the afternoon with the door locked, and he was fidgeting. He was also grieving for his beautiful dead boy, his latest tragic love – his third!

Part of Homer Taylor wanted to hurry back to the barn at the farm in Webster to be with Benjamin, just to watch over the body for a few more hours. His Toyota 4-Runner was parked outside, and he could be there in forty-five minutes if he pushed it. Benjamin, dear boy, why couldn’t you have been good? Why did you bring out the worst in me, when there was so much to love?

Benjamin had been such a beauty, and the loss that Taylor felt now was horrifying. And not only the physical and emotional drain – there was the great financial loss. Five years ago, he’d inherited a little over two million dollars. It was going too fast. Much too fast. He couldn’t afford to play like this – but how could he ever stop now?

He wanted another boy already. He needed to be loved. And to love someone. Another Benjamin, only not an emotional wreck as the poor boy had been.

So he stayed in his office for the entire day to avoid an excruciating hour-long tutorial at four o’clock. He pretended to be marking term papers for his Wednesday classes, in case someone knocked, but he never looked at a single page.

Instead, he obsessed.

He finally contacted Sterling around seven o’clock. ‘I want to make another purchase,’ he said.

Chapter Forty-Seven

I visited Sampson and Billie one night and had a great time with them, talking about babies and scaring big, bad John Sampson as much as I could. I tried to talk to Jamilla at least once a day. But White Girl was starting to heat up, and I knew what that meant. I was probably about to get lost in the case.

A married couple, Slava Vasilev and Zoya Petrov, had been found murdered in the house they rented on Long Island. We had learned that the husband and wife had come to the United States two years before. They were suspected of bringing Russian and other Eastern European women here for the purpose of prostitution, but also to bear children who would be sold to affluent couples.

Agents from our New York office were all over the murder scene on Long Island. Photographs of the two victims had been shown to the high school students who’d seen the Connelly abduction, as well as to Audrey Meek’s children, and eyewitnesses at The Halyard in Newport, Rhode Island. Several of them identified the couple as the kidnappers. I wondered why the bodies had been left there? As examples? For whom?

Monnie Donnelley and I regularly met at seven before I had to attend orientation classes for the day. We were still analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie was pulling together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in the US, the so-called Red Mafiya. She was hot-wired into the Organized Crime Section over at the Hoover Building, and also the Red Mafiya squad in the Bureau’s New York office.

‘I brought “everything” bagels from D.C.,’ I said as I entered her cube at ten minutes past seven that morning. ‘Best in the city. According to Zagat anyway. You don’t seem too excited.’

‘You’re late,’ Monnie said without looking up from her computer screen. She’d mastered the droll, deadpan-delivery style favored by hackers.

‘These bagels are worth it,’ I said. ‘Trust me.’

‘I don’t trust anybody,’ Monnie replied.

She finally glanced up at me and smiled. Nice smile, worth the wait. ‘You know that I’m kidding, right? It’s just a tough-girl act, Alex. Give with the bagels.’

I laughed. ‘I’m used to cop humor.’

‘Oh, I’m honored,’ she muttered, deadpan again, as she looked back at the glowing computer screen. ‘He thinks I’m a cop, not just a desk jockey. You know, they started me in fingerprinting. The absolute bottom.’

I liked Monnie, but I had the sense that she needed a lot of support. I knew she’d been divorced for about two years. She’d majored in Criminology at Maryland, where she had also pursued another interesting passion – studio arts. Monnie still took classes in drawing and painting, and, of course, there was the mural in her cube.

She yawned. ‘Sorry. I watched Alias with the boys last night. That will be grandma’s problem when she has to get them up this morning.’

Monnie’s home life was another thing we had in common. She was a single parent, with two young kids, and a doting grandmother who lived less than a block away. The grandmother was her ex-husband’s mother, which told the story of the marriage. Jack Donnelley had played basketball at Maryland, where he and Monnie met. He was a big drinker in college, and it got worse once he graduated. Monnie said he’d never recovered from being all-everything in a Pennsylvania high school, and then just another guard for the Maryland Terrapins. Monnie was five foot even, and joked that she hadn’t played any kind of ball at Maryland. She told me her nickname in high school was Spaz.

‘I’ve been reading all about women being traded and sold from Tokyo to Riyadh,’ she said as she chewed a bagel. ‘Breaks my heart and it pisses me off. Alex, we’re talking some of the worst slavery in history. What’s with you men?’

I looked at her. ‘I don’t buy and sell women, Monnie. Neither do any of my friends.’

‘Sorry. I’m carrying around a little extra baggage because of Jack the Rat and a few other husbands I know.’ She looked down at her computer screen. ‘Here’s a choice quote for today. Know what the Thai Premier said about the thousands of women from his country sold into prostitution? “Thai girls are just so pretty.” And here’s the Premier on ten-year-old girls being sold. “Come on, don’t you like young girls, too?” I swear to God, he said that.’

I sat down next to Monnie and peered at her computer screen. ‘So now somebody’s opened a lucrative market for suburban white women. Who? And where are they working out of? Europe? Asia? The US?’

‘The murdered couple could be a break for us. Russians. What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Could be a ring operating out of New York. Brighton Beach. Or maybe they’re headquartered in Europe? The Russian mob is set up just about everywhere these days. It’s not “The Russians are Coming” anymore. They’re here.’

‘I kind of like the Russians for this,’ Monnie went on. Then she started to spit out information. ‘The Solntsevo gang is the largest crime syndicate in the world right now. Did you know that? They’re big here too. Both coasts. The Mafia has basically collapsed in their country. They smuggled close to a hundred billion out of Russia and a lot of it came here. You know, we’ve got major task forces working in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, New York, D.C., Miami. The Reds bought banks in the Caribbean and Cyprus. Believe it or not, they’ve taken over prostitution, gambling, money laundering in Israel. In Israel!’

I finally got a few words in. ‘I spent a couple of hours last night reading the files from Anti-Slavery International. The Red Mafiya comes up there too.’

‘I’ll tell you one other thing.’ She looked at me. ‘That kid who was grabbed in Newport. I know it’s a different pattern, I get it, but I do believe he’s part of this. What do you think?’

I nodded. So did I. And I also thought that Monnie had great street smarts for somebody who rarely left the office. So far, she was the best person I’d met at the Bureau, and here we were in her tiny cube trying to solve White Girl.

Chapter Forty-Eight

I had never really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had served me well in the Washington P.D., even given me a certain mystique. Hopefully, it would be the same in the Bureau, though it hadn’t been so far. I set myself up with a supply of black coffee and started in on the Russian mob research. I needed to know everything about them, and Monnie Donnelley was a willing accomplice.

I made notes along the way, though I usually remember most of what is important enough and don’t need to write it down. According to the FBI files, the Russian mob was now more diverse and powerful in America than La Cosa Nostra. Unlike the Italian Mafia, the Russians were organized in loose networks which cooperated, but weren’t dependent on one another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided RICO Mafia prosecutions by the government. No conspiracies could be proved. There were two distinctly different types of Russian mobsters. The ‘knuckle draggers’ were into extortion, prostitution and racketeering, and their particular crime group was called the Solntsevo. The second type of Russian mobster operated at a more sophisticated level – often securities fraud and money laundering. These were the neocapitalist criminals, called the Izmailovo.

For the moment, I decided to concentrate on the first group, the low-lifes, especially the brigades involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s Organized Crime Section report, the prostitute business operated ‘a lot like major-league baseball’. A group of prostitutes could actually be ‘traded’ from an owner in one city to one in another. As a footnote, a survey conducted among seventh-grade girls in Russia listed prostitution as among their top-five choices for when they grew up. Several historical anecdotes in the file had been inserted to represent the mob mentality: smart and ruthless. According to one story, Ivan the Terrible had commissioned St Basil’s Cathedral to rival, even surpass, the great churches of Europe. He was pleased with the result, and invited the architect to the Kremlin. When the artist arrived, his blueprints were burned and his eyes poked out, thus ensuring that he could never create a finer cathedral for anyone else.

There were several more contemporary examples in the report, but that was how the Red Mafiya worked. It was what we were up against if the Russians were behind White Girl.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Something incredible was about to happen.

It was a gorgeous afternoon in eastern Pennsylvania, the leaves just beginning to turn bright shades of crimson and gold. The Art Director found himself lost in a storm of dazzling colors, and their reflections sliding back and forth across his windshield were mesmerizing. Am I doing the right thing now? he had asked himself several times during the ride. He thought that he was.

‘You have to admit that it’s beautiful,’ he said to the bound passenger in his Mercedes G Class SUV.

‘It is,’ said Audrey Meek. She was thinking that she’d believed she would never see the outdoors again, never smell fresh grass and flowers. So where was this madman taking her with her hands tied? They were driving away from his cabin. Going where? What did it mean?

She was terrified, but trying not to show it. Small talk, she told herself. Keep him talking.

‘You like this G Class?’ she asked, and immediately knew it was an insane question, just insane.

His tight smile, but especially his eyes, told her that he thought so too. And yet, he answered politely. ‘I do, actually. At first I thought it was the final proof that rich people are incredibly stupid. I mean, it’s kind of like putting a Mercedes logo on a wheelbarrow, and then paying triple for it. But I do like the oddness of the vehicle, the rigid lines of the design, the gizmos like lockable differentials. Of course, I’ll have to get rid of this one now, won’t I?’

Oh God, she was afraid to ask why, but maybe she knew already. She’d seen the car he drove. Maybe someone else had too. But she had also seen his face, so he wasn’t really making sense. Or was he?

Suddenly Audrey found that she couldn’t talk at all. No words would come out of her mouth, which was very dry. This self-professed nice guy, who said he wanted to be her friend but who had raped her half a dozen times, was going to kill her very soon. And then what? Bury her out here in the beautiful woods? Dump her body in a gorgeous lake with a heavy weight attached to it?

Tears formed in Audrey’s eyes, and her brain buzzed as if there were a short in the circuit. She didn’t want to die. Not now, not like this. She loved her children, her husband, Georges, and even her company. It had taken her so long, so much sacrifice and hard work, to get her life right. And now this had to happen, this fluke, this incredibly bad luck.

Suddenly the Art Director turned sharply on to a narrow dirt road, then sped down it much too fast. Where was he going? Why so fast? What was at the end of the road?

But apparently they weren’t going all the way to the end! He was braking.

‘My God, no!’ Audrey screamed. ‘No! Please! Don’t!’

He stopped the car but let the engine run.

‘Please,’ she pleaded. ‘Oh please… don’t do this. Please, please, please. You don’t have to kill me.’

The Art Director merely smiled. ‘Give us a hug, Audrey. Then get out of the car before I change my mind. You’re free. I’m not going to hurt you. You see, I love you too much.’

Chapter Fifty

There was a break in White Girl. One of the women had been found – alive.

I was rushed to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in one of the two Bell helicopters kept at Quantico for emergencies. A few senior agents had told me that they’d never been up in one of the helicopters. It didn’t sit too well with them. Now here I was becoming a regular during my orientation period. There were benefits to being on the Director’s fast track.

The sleek black Bell set down in a small field in Norristown, Pennsylvania. During the flight I found myself thinking of a recent orientation class. We’d burned fingernail clippings so that everybody would know what a DOA smelled like. I already knew, and I didn’t relish experiencing it again. I didn’t think there would be any DOAs on this trip to Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, that turned out to be wrong.

Agents from the field office in Philadelphia were there to meet the helicopter and accompany me to where Audrey Meek had been brought for questioning. So far there’d been no announcement to the press, though her husband had been notified and was on his way to Norristown.

‘I’m not exactly sure where we are right now,’ I said as we rode to a local state troopers’ barracks. ‘How far is this from where Mrs Meek was abducted?’

‘We’re five miles,’ said one of the agents from Philly. ‘It would take about ten minutes by car.’

‘Was she held captive near this area?’ I asked. ‘Do we know yet? What exactly do we know?’

‘She told the state police that the abductor brought her here early this morning. She’s not sure of the directions but thinks they rode for well over an hour. Her wristwatch had been taken away from her. He kept some of her clothing too. Even a small bottle of perfume called Meek One.’

I nodded. ‘Was she blindfolded during the ride? I assume that she was.’

‘No. That’s odd, isn’t it? She saw her captor several times. Also his vehicle. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other.’

That was a genuine surprise to me. It didn’t track, and I said so.

‘Stump the stars,’ said the agent. ‘Isn’t that what this case is about so far?’

The state trooper barracks occupied a redbrick building tucked back from the highway. There wasn’t any activity outside, and I took that as a good sign. At least I had beaten the press there. No one had leaked the story so far.

I hurried inside the barracks to meet Audrey Meek. I was eager to find out how she had survived against all odds, the first woman who had.

Chapter Fifty-One

My very first impression was that Audrey Meek didn’t look at all like herself, not as she did in any of her publicity. Not now anyway, not after her terrible ordeal. Mrs Meek was thinner, especially in the face. Her eyes were dark blue, but the sockets appeared hollowed-out. She had some color on both cheeks.

‘I’m FBI Agent Alex Cross. It’s good to see you safe,’ I said in a quiet voice. I didn’t want to interview her right now, but it had to be done.

Audrey Meek nodded and her eyes met mine. I had the sense that she knew how lucky she was.

‘You have some color in your cheeks. Did you get that today?’ I asked her. ‘While you were in the woods?’

‘I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. He took me outside for walks every day he held me captive. Considering the circumstances, he was often considerate. He made my meals, good ones for the most part. He told me he’d been a chef at one time in Richmond. We had long talks almost every day, really long talks. It was so strange, everything about it. There was one day in the middle when he wasn’t at the house at all. I was petrified he’d left me there to die in the woods. But I didn’t really believe he would.’

I didn’t interrupt her. I wanted to let Audrey Meek tell her story, without any pressure or steering from me. It was astonishing to me that she had been released. It didn’t happen very often in cases like this one.

‘Georges? My children?’ she asked. ‘Have they arrived yet? Will you let me see them if they’re here?’

‘They’re on their way,’ I said. ‘We’ll bring them in as soon as they arrive. I’d like to ask a few questions while everything is still fresh in your mind. I’m sorry about this. There may be other missing people, Mrs Meek. We think that there are.’

‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘Let me try to help then. If I can, I will. Ask your questions.’

She was a brave woman and she told me about the kidnapping, including a description of the man and woman who had grabbed her. It fit the late Slava Vasilev and Zoya Petrov. Then Audrey Meek took me through the ritual of the days that she was held captive by the man who called himself the Art Director.

‘He said he liked to wait on me, that he enjoyed it immensely. It was as if he was used to being subservient. But I sensed he also wanted to be my friend. It was so terribly weird. He’d seen me on TV and read articles about Meek, my company. He said he admired my sense of style and the way I didn’t seem to have too many airs about myself. He made me have sex with him.’ Audrey Meek was holding herself together so well. Her strength amazed me, and I wondered if that was what her captor had admired.

‘Can I get you water? Anything?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘I saw his face,’ she said. ‘I even tried to draw it for the police. I think it’s a good likeness. It’s him.’

This was getting stranger by the moment. Why would the Art Director let her see him, then release her? I’d never known anything like it, not in any other kidnapping case.

Audrey Meek sighed, and nervously clasped and unclasped her hands as she continued.

‘He admitted that he was obsessive-compulsive. About cleanliness, art, style, about loving another human being. He confessed several times that he adored me. He was often derogatory about himself. Did I tell you about the house?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sure what I said here – or to the officers who found me.’

‘You didn’t talk about the house yet,’ I said.

‘It was covered with some material, like a heavy-duty cellophane. It reminded me of event art. Like Christo. There were dozens of paintings inside. Very good ones. You ought to be able to find a house covered in cellophane.’

‘We’ll find it,’ I agreed. ‘We’re looking now.’

The door to the room where we were talking opened a crack. A trooper in a brimmed hat peeked in, then he opened the door wide and Audrey Meek’s husband, Georges, and her two children burst inside. It was such an unbelievably rare moment in abduction cases, especially one in which someone has been missing for nearly a week. The Meek children looked afraid at first. Their father gently urged them forward and unbelievable joy took over. Their faces were wreathed in smiles and tears, and there was an incredible group hug that seemed to last for ever.

‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!’ the smaller child shrieked and clung to her mother as if she’d never let go of her again.

My eyes filled, and then I went to the worktable. Audrey Meek had made two drawings. I looked at the face of the man who had held her captive for a week. He looked very ordinary, like anybody you’d meet on the street.

The Art Director.

Why did you let her go? I wondered.

Chapter Fifty-Two

We got another possible break around midnight. The police had information about a house covered with a plastic material in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. Ottsville was about sixty-five miles away, and we drove there in several cars in the middle of the night. It was tough duty at the end of a long day, but nobody was complaining too much.

Ottsville was about seven miles from Erwinna, Pennsylvania, where a covered bridge crossed the Delaware River to New Jersey. Unfortunately, the ride from the bridge was on narrow, winding roads and took over twenty minutes.

When we arrived, the scene reminded me of my past life in D.C. – officers used to wait for me there too. Three sedans and a couple of black vans were parked along the heavily wooded country road around a bend from a dirt lane that led to the house. Ned Mahoney and I met up with the local sheriff, Eddie Lyle.

‘Lights are all out in the house,’ Mahoney sniffed as we approached what was actually a renovated log cabin. The only access to the secluded property was the dirt road. His HRT teams were waiting on his command to ‘go’.

‘It’s nearly two,’ I said. ‘He might be waiting on us, though. I think there’s something desperate about this guy.’

‘Why’s that?’ Mahoney wanted to know. ‘I need to hear.’

‘He let her go. She saw his face, and the house, the car too. He must have known we’d find him here.’

‘My people know what they’re doing,’ the sheriff interrupted, and sounded offended that he was being ignored. I didn’t much care what he thought – I had seen a local, inexperienced rookie cop blown away in Virginia one time. ‘I know what I’m doing too,’ the sheriff added.

I stopped talking to Mahoney and stared at Lyle. ‘Hold it right there. We don’t know what’s waiting for us inside the house, but we do know this – he knew we’d find this place and come for him. Now you tell your men to stand down. FBI HRT goes in first! You’re backup for us. Do you have a problem with that?’

The sheriff’s face reddened and he thrust out his chin. ‘I sure as hell do, but it doesn’t mean fuck-all, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t matter at all. So tell your men to stand down. You stand down too. I don’t care how good you think you are.’

I started walking forward again with Mahoney, who was grinning, and not trying to hide it. ‘You’re a hot ticket, man,’ he said. A couple of his snipers had been watching the cabin from less than fifty yards away. I could see that it had a gabled roof with a dormer on the loft level. Everything was dark inside.

‘This is HRT One. Anything going on in there, Kilvert?’ Mahoney spoke into his mike to one of the snipers.

‘Not that I can see, sir. What’s the take on the UNSUB?’

Mahoney looked at me.

My eyes moved slowly across the cabin, and the front and side yards. Everything looked neat, well-maintained, and seemed to be in good repair. Power lines led to the roof.

‘He wanted us to come here, Ned. That can’t be good.’

‘Booby trap?’ he asked. ‘That’s how we plan to proceed.’

I nodded. ‘That’s how I would go. If we’re wrong it’ll give the locals some yuks!’

‘Fuck the local yokels,’ said Mahoney.

‘I agree with that. Now that I’m not a local anymore.’

‘Hotel and Charlie teams, this is HRT One,’ Mahoney spoke into his mike. ‘This is control. On the ready. Five, four, three, two, one, go!’

Two HRT teams of seven rose up from ‘phase line yellow,’ which is the final position for cover and concealment. They passed ‘phase line green’ on the way to the house. After that there was no turning back.

HRT’s motto for this kind of action is ‘speed, surprise and violence of action’. They are very good at it, better than anything the Washington P.D. has to offer. Within a matter of seconds, the Hotel and Charlie teams were inside the cottage where Audrey Meek had been kept captive for over a week. Then Mahoney and I burst in through the back door and into the kitchen. I saw stove, refrigerator, cabinets, table.

No Art Director.

No resistance of any kind.

Not yet.

Mahoney and I moved ahead cautiously. The living-room area had a wood-burning stove, a striped, contemporary-style couch in beige and brown, several club chairs. A big chest covered by a dark green afghan. Everything was tasteful and organized.

No Art Director.

Canvases were everywhere. Most had been finished. Whoever had done the paintings was talented.

‘Secure!’ I heard. Then a shout – ‘In here!’

Mahoney and I raced down a long hallway. Two of his men were already inside what looked to be the master bedroom. There were more painted canvases, lots of them, fifty or more.

A nude body lay sprawled across the wooden floor. The look on the face was grotesque, tortured. The dead man’s hands were tightly wrapped around his own throat – as if he were strangling himself.

It was the man Audrey Meek had drawn for us. He was dead, and his death had been horrible. Most likely poison of some kind.

Papers lay scattered on the bed. Alongside them, a fountain pen.

I bent and began to read one of several notes:

To whomever–

As you know by now, I am the one who held Audrey Meek captive. All I can say is that it is something I had to do. I believe I had no choice; no free will in the matter. I loved her since the first time I saw her at one of my exhibitions in Philadelphia. We talked that night, but of course she didn’t remember me. No one ever does (until now anyway). What is the rationale behind an obsession? I have no idea, not a clue, even though I obsessed on Audrey for over seven years of my life. I had all the money I would ever need, and yet it meant nothing to me. Not until I got the opportunity to take what I really wanted, what I needed. How could I resist – no matter the price? A half-million dollars seemed like nothing to be with Audrey, even for these few days. Then a strange thing. Maybe a miracle. Once we spent time together, I found that I loved Audrey too much to keep her like this. I never harmed her. Not in my own mind anyway. If I hurt you, Audrey, I’m sorry. I loved you very much, this much.

One sentence kept repeating inside my heard after I finished reading. Not until I got the opportunity to take what I really wanted, what I needed. How had that happened? Who was out there – fulfilling the fantasies of these madmen?

Who was behind this? It sure wasn’t the Art Director.