James PATTERSON - The Big Bad Wolf

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.

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?’