The Big Bad Wolf

He’d sniffed and sniveled since preschool.
Stop sniveling, Benjamin. Stop it! Stop it!
But he couldn’t stop.
    Then the trapdoor opened! Someone was coming down.
    Stop the crying, stop the crying, stop it! Stop it this instant! Potter will kill you.
    Then the most unbelievable thing happened, a turn of events that Benjamin would have never expected.
    He heard a deep voice—not Potter’s.
    “Benjamin Coffey? Benjamin? This is the FBI. Mr. Coffey, are you down there? This is the FBI.”
    He was shaking worse now, and sobbing so hard he thought he might choke behind the gag. Because of the gag, he couldn’t call out, couldn’t let the FBI somehow know that he was down here.
    The FBI found me! It’s a miracle. I have to signal them. But how? Don’t leave! I’m down here! I’m right here!
    A flashlight illuminated his face.
    He could see a person behind the light. A silhouette. Then the full face peered out of the shadows.
    Mr. Potter was frowning down at him from the trapdoor. Then he stuck out his tongue. “I told you what was going to happen. Didn’t I tell you, Benjamin? You did this to yourself. And you’re so
beautiful.
God, you’re perfect in every other way.”
    His tormentor came down the stairs. He saw a battered sledgehammer in Potter’s hand. A heavy farm tool. Waves of fear washed over Benjamin. “I’m a lot stronger than I look,” Potter said. “And you’ve been a very bad boy.”

Chapter 45
    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 4Runner was parked outside, and he could be there in an hour 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, 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.

Chapter 46
    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 four years before. They were suspected of bringing Russian and other Eastern European women here for the purpose of prostitution, and 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 Connolly abduction and to Audrey Meek’s children. They had 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 analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie pulled together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in