The Big Bad Wolf

parents coming to bring their daughter home, but the girl was never seen or heard from again.
    I looked at her picture for a long moment—she was a pretty blonde and looked as if she could have been one of Elizabeth Connolly’s daughters. Her parents were elementary school teachers back in Childress.
    That afternoon, I got more bad news. The worst kind. A fashion designer named Audrey Meek had been abducted from the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Her two young children had witnessed the kidnapping.
That
piece of information stunned me. The children had told the police that the abductors were a man and a woman.
    I started to get ready to travel to Pennsylvania. I called Nana and she was supportive for a change. Then I got a message from Nooney’s office. I wasn’t going to Pennsylvania. I was expected at my classes.
    The decision had obviously come from the top, and I didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
    Maybe all of this was a test?

Chapter 27
    “DO YOU KNOW
what they say about you, Dr. Cross? That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe even gifted. You can think like a killer.”
Those were Monnie Donnelley’s words to me that very morning. If that was true, why had I been taken off the case?
    I went to my classes in the afternoon, but I was distracted, maybe angry. I suffered a little angst: What was I doing in the FBI? What was I becoming? I didn’t want to fight the system in Quantico, but I’d been put in an impossible position.
    The next morning I had to be ready for my classes again: “Law,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Civil Rights Violations,” “Firearms Practice.”
    I was sure that I’d find “Civil Rights Violations” interesting, but a couple of missing women named Elizabeth Connolly and Audrey Meek were out there somewhere. Maybe one or both of them were still alive. Maybe I could help find them—if I was so goddamn gifted.
    I was finishing breakfast with Nana and Rosie the cat at the kitchen table when I heard the morning paper
plop
on the front porch.
    “Sit. You eat. I’ll get it,” I told Nana as I pushed my chair away from the table.
    “No argument from this corner,” Nana said, and sipped her tea with great little-old-lady aplomb. “I have to conserve myself, you know.”
    “Right.”
    Nana was still cleaning every square inch of the house, inside and out, and cooking most of the meals. A couple of weeks ago I’d caught her hanging on to an extension ladder, cleaning out the gutters on the roof. “It’s not a problem,” she hollered down to me. “My balance is excellent and I’m light as a parachute.” Come again?
    The
Washington Post
hadn’t actually reached the porch. It lay open halfway up the sidewalk. I didn’t even have to stoop to read the front page.
    “Awhh, hell,” I said. “Damn it.”
    This wasn’t good. It was awful, actually. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
    The headline was a shocker: ABDUCTIONS OF TWO WOMEN MAY BE CONNECTED. Worst of all, the rest of the story contained very specific details that only a few people in the FBI knew. Unfortunately, I was one of them.
    Key was the story told about a couple—a man and a woman—who had been seen at the most recent kidnapping in Pennsylvania. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. The eyewitness account given by Audrey Meek’s children was information that we hadn’t wanted released to the press.
    Somebody had leaked the story to the
Post;
somebody had also connected the dots for them. Other than maybe Bob Woodward, nobody at the newspaper could have done it by themselves. They weren’t that smart.
    Who had leaked information to the
Post
?
    Why?
    It didn’t make sense. Was somebody trying to sabotage the investigation? Who?

Chapter 28
    I DIDN’T WALK Jannie and Damon to school Monday morning. I sat out on the sunporch with the cat and played the piano—Mozart, Brahms. I had the guilty thought that I should have gotten up earlier and helped out at St. Anthony’s soup kitchen. I usually pitch in a couple mornings a week, often on Sundays.
My church.
    Traffic was terrible that morning and the frustrating drive down to Quantico took me almost an hour and a half. I imagined SSA Nooney standing at the front gates, waiting impatiently for me to arrive. At least the drive gave me time to think over my current situation. I decided the best course of action, for now, anyway, was to go to my classes. Keep my head down. If Director