The Big Bad Wolf

anything to the science man. The brochure was printed on 81/2-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 catalogue. It sure didn’t look like the work of a man who lived in this shit hole.
    “I told you that girls number seven and seventeen were no longer with us. Dead, actually,” the Wolf finally said. “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 catalogue himself. Then he burned a CD and took it with him. Also several copies of
Novoye Russkoye Slovo
that he had missed. He would send a crew to dispose of the body and burn this shit hole later. Details, details.

Chapter 26
    I SKIPPED A CLASS 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 U.S., that might relate to the White Girl case.
    Most of the Bureau’s crime analysts were housed ten miles away at 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, looking 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 even 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 the one in Atlanta. Just reading the accounts got my blood boiling again, though. Marianne Norman, twenty, had disappeared in Houston on August 6, 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 had 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 December 30 of that year, Dennis Turcos had put a revolver to his head and killed himself. He said he couldn’t live without Marianne, that his life had 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 said to be involved in prostitution lived. 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 they might have been the girl’s