The Big Bad Wolf ак-9

by James Patterson

  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 cou
ld 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