The Big Bad Wolf Read online

  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.

  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. “Picture a river with a mountain on the other side,” 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 Muhammad 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 have never 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 45

  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 4Runner was parked outside, and he could be there in an hour 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, 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 46

  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 four years before. They were suspected of bringing Russian and other Eastern European women here for the purpose of prostitution, and 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 Connolly abduction and to Audrey Meek’s children. They had 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 analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie pulled together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in the U.S., 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 Monday. “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 for undergrad, where she had also pursued another interesting passion—studio arts. Monnie still took classes in drawing and painting, and, of course, there was the collage 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 d
rinker in college, and it got worse once he graduated. Monnie said he’d never recovered from being all-everything in 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. “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 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 U.S.?”

  “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.”

  Monnie 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 Red Mafiya 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, and 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 47

  I HAD NEVER really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had served me well in the Washington PD, even given me a certain mystique. I hoped 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 into loose networks that cooperated with but weren’t dependent on one another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided RICO 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 lowlifes, especially the brigades involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s OC 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 among the top-five career choices of the girls when they grew up. Several historical anecdotes had been inserted in the file to represent the Russian criminal 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 48

  SOMETHING INCREDIBLE WAS about to happen.

  It was a gorgeous afternoon in eastern Pennsylvania. The Art Director found himself lost in the dazzling blue of the sky, and the reflections of the white clouds sliding 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 circuits. 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.

  The Art Director turned sharply onto 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 49

  THERE WAS A BREAK in Whit
e Girl. One of the women had been found—alive.

  I was rushed to Montgomery 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.”

  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.”