The Big Bad Wolf Read online

  Chapter 34

  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? 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, though, 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 Saturday night in Newport, Rhode Island. There’s been a sea change here. The victim was male. To our knowledge, he’s the first male 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 asked from the front of the room. “What is the pattern here?”

  Burns’s questions were 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 bar?” 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 disconnect 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 35

  LIZZIE CONNOLLY 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 room/closet, 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 hadn’t been 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 Connolly 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 the past 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 was 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 moment. 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 told herself 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 36

  THE NEXT MORNING, just about everybody attached to the White Girl task force 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, the head of 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 Monday, 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 whether Audrey Meek is alive or dead.

  “Unfortunately the suspect hasn’t gone to visit Mrs. Meek durin
g the period we’ve been watching him. It’s been nearly three 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 in 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 37

  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 had 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 leaving 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 ten miles to the north.

  We parked in the lot of an IHOP restaurant. Farley’s house was 1.2 miles away. “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 takedown. Mahoney’s enthusiasm was contagious, and any kind of action beat sitting around. At least we were doing something. Maybe we’d get Audrey Meek back.

  Just then, we passed by an unpainted bungalow. I saw broken porch boards, and a rusty car and a 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 camouflage 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 noon,” 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 38

  MAHONEY AND I WATCHED as the breach 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 as if it had come from a tavern.

  The house windows were dark even though it was midday. 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 breach 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 away 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 the back and side doors. There were no more explosions, so the other 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 of marijuana and greasy cooking. We made our way back to a bedroom off a small living room.

  A naked man and 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 king-size bed that had no sheets or covers. Nothing else caught my eye.

  Farley was screaming at us, his face deep 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.

  “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 Connolly?

  I didn’t see how.

  So who in hell were they?

  Chapter 39

  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 questioned.

  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 and his tattoos of naked women and a purple dragon eating a child.

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

  “You had no right comin’ in my house while I’m sleeping! 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.

  All of a sudden 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 said finally. “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 a record of your conversation, 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,” 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.”