The Big Bad Wolf

warmth, and sexiness—even when she didn’t want to show it.
    She wasn’t really paying attention to anyone—thinking ahead to the fast-approaching birthday party—when a woman she passed suddenly grabbed her around the chest as if Lizzie were a running back for the Atlanta Falcons football team trying to pass through the “line of spinach,” as her daughter Gwynne had once called it. The woman’s grip was like a vise—she was strong as hell.
    “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Lizzie finally screamed her loudest, squirmed her hardest, dropped her shopping bags, heard something break. “Hey! Somebody, help!
Get off of me!”
    Then a second assailant, the BMW sweatshirt guy, grabbed her legs and held on tight, hurt her, actually, as he brought her down onto the filthy, greasy parking-lot concrete along with the woman. “Don’t kick me, bitch!” he yelled in her face. “Don’t you fucking dare kick me.”
    But Lizzie didn’t stop kicking—or screaming either. “Help me. Somebody, help! Somebody, please!”
    Then both of them lifted her up in the air as if she weighed next to nothing. The man mumbled something to the woman. Not English. Middle European, maybe. Lizzie had a housekeeper from Slovakia. Was there a connection?
    The woman attacker gripped her around the chest with one arm and used her free hand to push aside tennis and golf stuff, hurriedly clearing a space in the back of the station wagon.
    Then Lizzie was roughly shoved inside her own car. A gauzy, foul-smelling cloth was pushed hard against her nose and mouth, and held there so tightly it hurt her teeth. She tasted blood.
First blood,
she thought.
My blood.
Adrenaline surged through her body, and she began fighting back again with all her strength. Punching and kicking. She felt like a captured animal striking out for its freedom.
    “Easy,” the man said. “Easy-peasy-Japanesy . . . Elizabeth Connolly.”
    Elizabeth Connolly? They know me? How? Why? What is going on here
?
    “You’re a very sexy mom,” said the man. “I see why the Wolf likes you.”
    Wolf? Who’s the Wolf? What was happening to her? Who did she know named Wolf
?
    Then the thick, acrid fumes from the cloth overpowered Lizzie and she went lights out. She was driven away in the back of her station wagon.
    But only across the street to the Lenox Square Mall—where Lizzie Connolly was transferred into a blue Dodge van that then sped away.
    Purchase complete.

Chapter 3
    EARLY MONDAY MORNING, I was oblivious to the rest of the world and its problems. This was the way life was supposed to be, only it rarely seemed to turn out so well. At least not in my experience, which was limited when it came to anything that might be considered the “good life.”
    I was walking Jannie and Damon to the Sojourner Truth School that morning. Little Alex was merrily toddling along at my side. “Puppy,” I called him.
    The skies over D.C. were partly cloudy, but now and then the sun peeked through the clouds and warmed our heads and the backs of our necks. I’d already played the piano—Gershwin—for forty-five minutes. And eaten breakfast with Nana Mama. I had to be at Quantico by nine that morning for my orientation classes, but it left time for the walk to school at around seven-thirty. And that was what I’d been in search of lately, or so I believed. Time to be with my kids.
    Time to read a poet I’d discovered recently, Billy Collins. First I’d read his
Nine Horses,
and now it was
Sailing Alone Around the Room.
Billy Collins made the impossible seem so effortless, and so possible.
    Time to talk to Jamilla Hughes every day, often for hours at a time. And when I couldn’t, to correspond by e-mail and, occasionally, by long flowing letters. She was still working homicide in San Francisco, but I felt the distance between us was shrinking. I wanted it to and hoped she did too.
    Meanwhile, the kids were changing faster than I could keep up with them, especially Little Alex, who was morphing before my eyes. I needed to be around him more and now I could be. That was my deal. It was why I had joined the FBI, at least that was part of it.
    Little Alex was already over thirty-five inches and thirty pounds. That morning he had on pinstriped overalls and an Orioles cap. He moved along the street as if a leeward wind were propelling him. His ever-present stuffed animal, a cow named Moo, created ballast so that he listed slightly to the left at all times.
    Damon was lurching